Old Testament scholar Dr. Jo Vitale came to this question from inside it. She has spent her career studying the passages that make people wince — the purity codes, the gender rules, the texts that get screenshot and sent as proof that Christianity demeans women. Her answer is not a dismissal. It is a rereading, careful and rigorous, that starts exactly where the biblical text starts.
The direct answer: no. The Bible does not treat women as inferior. Getting there requires reading the hard passages in their context, holding the whole of Scripture in view, and refusing to let the loudest objection set the terms of the conversation.
The Jude 3 Project | Featuring Dr. Jo Vitale | Apologetics | ~8 min read
Where Do You Even Start with a Question Like This?
Vitale starts at the beginning — not with Leviticus, not with Paul, but with Genesis 1:27: "In the image of God he created them, male and female he created them." There is no hierarchy in that verse. No secondary status. The female is as fully image-bearer as the male, and that claim sits at the front door of the entire canon.
Vitale argues the inclusion was deliberate. "By the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they knew if that wasn't put in there clearly, people would find a way to write the women out." The Spirit anticipated the distortion and put the answer in writing first.
Dr. Carmen Imes, an Old Testament scholar at Talbot School of Theology, makes a related point about how Genesis 2 names the first woman. The woman is an ezer, a Hebrew word used elsewhere in the Old Testament for God himself and for military allies, and never for a servant under a master. It is not a word of subordination. The opening picture of the first woman, on Imes' reading, is partnership, not a position beneath the man.
So Why Do the Purity Laws Sound So Demeaning?
Leviticus 12 is one of the most cited texts in this argument. After the birth of a son, a woman is ritually unclean for 40 days. After a daughter, 80 days. Read cold, that looks like the Bible saying girls are worth less than boys.
Vitale says we are reading purity codes backwards. We assume a ritual attached to something means that thing is dirty or shameful. But the Hebrew framework worked the opposite way. Purity rituals in ancient Israel clustered around the most sacred things in life — blood, procreation, the thresholds where life began and ended. The ritual signals that you are near something holy, not something morally unclean.
"When there's something really good, really sacred, the way you honor it is by setting it apart," Vitale says. "So maybe there's double the purity around the birth of a girl because it's good, not because it's bad."
She adds a practical observation: newborn girls are sometimes born with a hormonal discharge that mimics menstruation. A blanket ritual around the mother may have served as a pragmatic way to honor purity on the infant daughter's behalf, a protection rather than a verdict.
Dr. Leo Percer, who teaches biblical interpretation and works with students on reading difficult texts, frames the broader issue: a text without its context is a pretext. The purity laws read in isolation look like a condemnation of women's bodies. Read inside the full theological framework of what Israel understood purity to mean, they function differently. The work of reading the Bible well is not skipping the hard passages — it is doing the cross-cultural labor to understand what they were actually saying in their own world.
Does God Actually Value Women?
Vitale does not just argue that the hard passages are misread. She argues that the Bible's positive statements about women are stronger than people realize.
God reaches for the image of a nursing mother to describe his own love. Isaiah 49:15: can a mother forget her nursing child? Even if she should, God says, I will not. I have engraved you on the palms of my hands. That is not a peripheral metaphor. That is God comparing the most intimate human bond imaginable — a nursing mother's love for her infant — to his own love for his people, and then saying his love exceeds even that.
"God says, even if a mother should forget the baby at her breast, I will never forget you. I've engraved you on the palms of my hands," Vitale says. Whatever you think about purity laws, you cannot read Isaiah 49 and conclude God has a problem with women.
What Does the Incarnation Have to Do with This?
Vitale's most powerful argument is the one that gets least attention in the debate: the incarnation. When the Son of God entered the world, he did not arrive through a man. He came through a woman, formed in female flesh, carried and nurtured by a mother's body. The early church called Mary Theotokos — God-bearer. That title is not an honorific invented by tradition. It is a theological statement about what actually happened.
"You cannot tell me that God has a problem with female bodies when that's where he chooses to come first," Vitale says. "What could be more dignifying of a woman's body? God is radically for them."
This is an argument with real weight. If the body the eternal Son took on was formed inside a woman, carried by a woman, fed by a woman — if female flesh is woven into the very humanity of the Savior — then the claim that the Bible demeans women requires explaining how that is compatible with God's decision to enter the world through one.
Peeler has made the annunciation a center of her scholarship, and she notes what the Gospel accounts emphasize. The conception was not sexual. It was not coercive. Mary was asked. She was given agency to respond. Her yes was honored. "Mary was given agency to decide," Peeler observes. "And it was also not a sexualized event. God respected her. God invited her." The ancient world was full of stories of gods forcing themselves on women. The Gospels tell the opposite story on purpose.
What About the Passages This Does Not Resolve?
Vitale is not arguing that the Bible is simple or that every hard passage dissolves once you read it in context. Real debates remain — about women and leadership, about specific texts in Paul's letters, about how to read certain narratives in Judges and Numbers. Those deserve honest engagement.
What she is arguing is that the starting point matters enormously. If you begin with Genesis 1 and the incarnation, the hard passages become passages to wrestle with, not proof that the whole book is against you.
Sherelle Ducksworth, who has written and taught on trusting Scripture in communities that have been wounded by it, draws a distinction worth holding onto: the Bible and bad interpretations of the Bible are not the same thing. "If we're honest about the way people have misused it, it makes not only the Bible more trustworthy, but we become more trustworthy Christians." The misuse of a text does not make the text wrong. It makes the misuse worth naming.
The question is not whether the Bible has been used against women. It has. Vitale's case is that the text itself, read whole and read carefully, is doing something else entirely.
Quick Answers
Does Leviticus 12 mean girls are worth less than boys? Vitale says no. She reads the doubled purity period as honoring something sacred, with a possible practical reason rooted in newborn biology, not a verdict on a daughter's worth.
Why are there purity laws around women's bodies at all? Because purity rituals in ancient Israel surrounded the most sacred, life-adjacent things — procreation, blood, birth. The ritual signals holiness, not shame.
Does the Bible see women as inferior? No. Genesis 1:27 names women as equal image-bearers, and that claim is the Bible's first word on the subject.
What does the incarnation say about women? That God honored the female body by choosing to enter the world through one. That choice is harder to explain if the Bible's God has a problem with women.
Listen to the Full Conversation
This answer comes from the Jude 3 Project's Problematic Passages event at the Museum of the Bible, where scholars took on the hardest questions in Scripture. Dr. Jo Vitale holds a PhD in Old Testament from the University of Oxford and has taught and written on Scripture's most difficult passages. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or at jude3project.com.