Yes. The case does not rest on one comforting verse. It rests on a habit the Bible keeps returning to: it notices women whom the people around them have stopped noticing. That habit runs from the first chapter of Genesis to a dinner table in Luke. Dr. Jo Vitale did her doctoral research at Oxford on how women are presented in Israel’s Scriptures, and she reads the Bible this way. The reading holds up best when you trace the thread passage by passage and include the hard stories along with the pleasant ones.
Vitale came to the question honestly. She describes meeting many women outside the church who told her they could never become Christians because the Bible is sexist and God hates them, and she admits part of her wondered whether they were right. Across these books you meet rape, polygamy, incest and violence against women. Any answer worth giving has to account for those stories too.
The thread starts in Genesis 1
Vitale recalls a radio discussion that ranked the Bible as the most oppressive book in history toward women. The discussion began with Genesis 2. It skipped the chapter before it.
That skip matters, because Genesis 1 is the Bible’s opening statement about what human beings are. It reads: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27). The word “man” here names humanity as a whole, and the verse defines that humanity as male and female together. Both receive the image in the same act, in the same sentence. Neither holds it on loan from the other.
Vitale sets this against the ideas around it. She points to Plato, who, as she summarizes him, held that only males were created directly by the gods and given souls, and that a cowardly man would be reborn as a woman. That summary is her description of one ancient source, not a survey of every ancient culture. The biblical point stands on its own: Genesis 1 makes equal image-bearing the starting condition of the human story.
The verse also says something about God. If women bear his image as fully as men do, the assumption that God is male, or that his heart leans toward men, loses its footing. Vitale turns this back on the Bible’s critics. The equality many of them long for, she argues, “is first established by the God that you are rejecting or seeing as the root of your oppression.”
Starting here is a matter of method. Genesis 2 and every later story are told against the backdrop of Genesis 1. When later chapters show men treating women as less than human, the reader already knows the standard they are falling short of.
God hears and sees Hagar
The thread becomes explicit in Genesis 16. Hagar is an Egyptian slave in Abraham’s household. Sarai gives her to Abraham to bear a child, then mistreats her once she conceives, and Hagar runs into the wilderness. Vitale lists her disadvantages in a single breath: “She’s female, she’s a slave, she’s a foreigner.” She is also pregnant and alone. In Vitale’s words, “it doesn’t get more underprivileged than Hagar.”
Two verbs carry the passage. The angel of the LORD tells Hagar to name her son Ishmael, “because the LORD hath heard thy affliction” (Genesis 16:11). Then Hagar answers with a name of her own: “And she called the name of the LORD that spake unto her, Thou God seest me” (Genesis 16:13). God hears; God sees. The child’s name preserves the first fact and Hagar’s name for God preserves the second. Vitale describes the God Hagar meets as “the God who sees her, who sees her in her despair, in her hurt, in her pain.”
The text shows something striking about who gets this encounter. The person at the bottom of every social ladder in the story receives a divine visit and answers by naming God. Naming carries intimacy and standing, and here the slave woman is the one who does it.
The story of Sarah works the same way from another direction. Twice, in Genesis 12 and Genesis 20, Abraham tells a powerful ruler that his wife is his sister. He protects himself by making her look available, and so she is taken. Vitale reads Abraham as treating God’s promise as his alone: “He just discounts her and he sees her as dispensable.” The text does not follow his lead. In Genesis 12 the LORD strikes Pharaoh’s house; in Genesis 20 God confronts Abimelech in a dream. God, as Vitale puts it, “intervenes dramatically to rescue her.” In Genesis 17 God also renames Sarai as Sarah and names her as the mother through whom the promise will come. Hagar names God; God names Sarah. “So in different ways, God honors these women even when Abraham has completely messed them around.”
Seeing also means recognizing what women do. Israel’s Scriptures, written in a deeply patriarchal world, keep presenting women as people who act. The Hebrew midwives in Exodus 1 defy Pharaoh at the risk of their lives. Abigail is the wise one married to a fool. Proverbs 31 praises a woman for her business sense. Of Deborah the text says, “And Deborah, a prophetess, the wife of Lapidoth, she judged Israel at that time” (Judges 4:4). Vitale’s description of such women is that “they are agents of change and power and they’re amazing and they’re fierce.” What these narratives describe is one question. How they apply to church leadership today is a separate one, and faithful Christians answer it differently.
The test case: Judges 19
Hagar and Sarah are rescued. The harder test is a woman who is not. Lisa Fields calls Judges 19 one of the most horrific passages in Scripture.
The woman in that chapter has no name. She is called the Levite’s concubine. When men of Gibeah surround the house where they are staying, the men inside push her out the door to save themselves. She is abused all night and collapses at the threshold. In the morning the Levite tells her to get up. When she does not, he cuts her body into twelve pieces and sends them through Israel. Vitale’s verdict on the Levite is short: “She’s not even human to him.”
Nothing in the chapter shows God stepping in. That makes genre decisive. Narrative describes; it does not automatically command or endorse. Before concluding that a story appears because God approves of it, Vitale asks why it was included at all: “could it be that they’re not there to commend the behavior, but actually to condemn it in the strongest possible terms?”
Judges answers that question itself. The book closes with a sentence it has used before: “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25). The concubine’s story is the low point of a book about things getting steadily worse. The tribes go to war over the crime, yet no one asks the Levite why he threw her out or what he did to her body. Even their justice misses her. Lisa Fields draws a lesson from that collapse about moral truth itself: the passage “helps us to know the importance of not having truth be self-determined.”
Vitale then makes her most distinctive move. Many readers treat this woman as a footnote to the civil war that follows. Reading her that way, she argues, means “we become complicit in the very thing that goes wrong in this passage of actually not seeing this woman.” On her reading, the story’s presence in Scripture is itself a form of divine seeing. Everyone in the narrative overlooks her, but the text has kept her before readers for thousands of years. Vitale voices it as God’s stance: “I won’t allow her story to go unheard.”
That is an interpretation, and it should be held as one. The chapter does not say God preserved it for her sake. Still, it fits the evidence better than a reading that finds approval in the story. Judges frames the episode with a verdict on Israel’s moral collapse, shows every male character failing, and leaves the reader horrified.
If sexual violence or abuse is part of your own story, these passages can land hard, and you deserve real support as well as good reading. In the US, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233.
The strongest objection: God’s own law and speech
A story can describe evil without approving it. Laws and prophecies are harder, because they come to readers as God’s words. Vitale says plainly that these, more than the stories, are what she now finds hardest.
Her main example is Deuteronomy 21:10-14, the law about marrying a woman captured in war. She admits it never sits quite easily with her. Read in context, it limits damage in a disastrous situation. The captor cannot simply take the woman. He must give her a month to mourn her father and mother, may approach her only as a husband, and if he later sends her away, may not sell her or treat her as a slave. Within that setting, Vitale sees God intending women to be “protected and honored and given as much dignity as possible in a nightmarish situation.” She compares such laws to provisional rules for a people in a mess, and notes that Jesus speaks of a concession made because hearts were hardened.
The prophets raise a second difficulty. Passages in Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea and Isaiah picture unfaithful Israel as an unfaithful wife and describe her judgment in images of violent exposure. If Vitale listed the verses she finds hardest, these would be at the top. Her partial responses are worth weighing. She holds that “the Bible is actually really clear and explicit in its condemnation of rape,” that metaphors in prophetic judgment are not legal codes, and that the prophets may be using shock deliberately on a people who would not listen. Of the language’s horror she asks, “isn’t the point that they’re supposed to be deeply shocking and troubling?”
She stops short of claiming she has solved it. “It’s not a complete answer, but that’s where I find my hope.” That restraint strengthens the case. The claim that God sees overlooked women does not require every text to feel comfortable to a modern reader. It requires a pattern strong enough to set the direction for reading the hard places. Vitale’s own conclusion is about direction: “So I think I see the trajectory, even if the details sometimes are difficult.”
The question Jesus puts to Simon
The thread reaches its sharpest point in Luke 7:36-50. Jesus is eating at the house of Simon, a Pharisee. A woman known in the town as a sinner comes in, weeps on his feet, wipes them with her hair, kisses them and anoints them. Simon says nothing aloud, but he reasons that a real prophet would know what kind of woman was touching him.
Jesus answers with a story about two debtors, then turns. Luke records: “And he turned to the woman, and said unto Simon, Seest thou this woman?” (Luke 7:44). Taken literally the question is odd, since she is weeping at Simon’s own table. Luke’s framing shows the real problem. Simon sees a label and a threat to Jesus’s reputation, and misses the person. Jesus then lists what she did that Simon, the host, failed to do: water for his feet, a kiss, oil for his head. The one the room has written off is the one who has acted rightly.
Set beside Genesis 16 and Judges 19, the question gathers weight. God sees Hagar when no one else does. Judges keeps the unnamed woman in view after everyone in the story forgets her. Now Jesus, in person, asks a religious man to look at the woman he has dismissed. Vitale thinks the question reaches past Simon: “I think it’s the same question that he’s asking us in our culture today.” Her summary of the whole pattern is that there are moments “we may not see, but God sees and you better bet He cares.”
What the pattern settles and what it leaves open
When men in these stories discount women, God repeatedly hears, sees, names, rescues or preserves them, and Jesus turns that seeing into a direct challenge to the people at the table.
The pattern leaves several things unsettled, and Vitale never pretends otherwise. Some passages about women stay hard. The church’s history often points the other way from the text. Modern debates about women’s roles are not resolved by these stories. And the Bible’s darkest narratives remain indictments of the men in them.
What the pattern changes is the question a reader brings to the hard texts. It is no longer whether this book cares about women at all. It is which way the whole story is moving, and whether the reader looks at the women in it the way its God does.