The charge is serious. The Old Testament comes out of a patriarchal society. Its laws route inheritance through sons, its households are organized around fathers and husbands, and its narratives include women who are abused, traded and silenced. For many readers that settles it: the book oppresses women.
Quonekuia Day’s answer is no, and her reasons deserve attention. She does not deny the hard passages. She argues that many readers arrive with a verdict already in hand, and the verdict hides the texts where God sides openly with women against injustice. A fair reading puts both kinds of passage on the table. Done honestly, it finds a God who acts for women inside an ancient social order. That is not a God who endorses their oppression.
What would it take for the charge to be true?
The word “oppressive” can mean at least three different things, and the argument depends on which one is meant.
It could mean the Old Testament depicts a society that treated women unequally. That is plainly true, and no careful Christian reader needs to deny it. It could mean the Old Testament records abuses against women. That is also true. Judges 19 tells of a concubine handed over to a mob and killed. 2 Samuel 13 tells of Tamar, raped by her half-brother.
Neither of those facts proves the charge. A history of a war is not an argument for the war. The charge only holds if the third meaning is true: that the text presents the oppression of women as God’s will, so that a faithful reader would be bound to approve of it.
That is the claim worth testing. Lisa Fields put the strongest version of it to Day directly. Some readers say Scripture gives men the right to treat women as second-class citizens, especially in matters of inheritance and property. In Fields’s words, “They’re kind of at the mercy of their father or their husband.” That objection does not rest on a few lurid stories. It points to the structure of the law itself, and it has to be answered on that ground.
The premise that decides the case before the reading starts
Day begins somewhere unexpected. She does not begin with a verse. She begins with the reader. She does not exempt herself, either. She describes her own first encounter with the Bible this way: “I remember when I sort of first opened the text and did not know God, and I was really sort of trying to figure it all out. Like this doesn’t seem very women friendly.”
So the reaction is familiar to her from the inside. Her diagnosis is that much of it flows from a prior belief about what kind of book this is. If the Old Testament is only a record written by men about a world men ran, then Day says “we sort of come to the text already biased, already expecting not to see much.” Then she adds the claim that sets up the rest of her case: “But if we read a text carefully, we’ll see a whole lot that God’s saying about women and how he feels about them.”
Notice what kind of argument this is. The belief that the text is merely male-authored is not usually a conclusion drawn from reading the passages. It works more like a filter applied beforehand. A filter is not automatically wrong. But it should not be allowed to function as evidence. If a reader assumes the book will say little in favor of women, then every passage that does will look like an exception, a slip, or an editorial accident. The hypothesis becomes impossible to test, because nothing could count against it.
A skeptic can fairly push back here. Doesn’t the Christian reader bring a filter too, expecting a good God and finding one? Yes. That is why Day’s remedy is not to swap one bias for another. Her remedy is a discipline both readers can check: slow, careful attention to what the words actually say. She warns against “being careful with the text, not being in such a hurry to say, oh, I know this.” Her own example is a church teacher who said the name Caleb means “dog.” Day checked it, and the translation held up. Whether his sermon application followed from it was a separate question. That gap between what a word means and what a reader does with it is the same gap the “oppressive” charge often jumps over.
What does “helper” actually carry?
The first test case is the first description of woman. Genesis 2:18 reads: “And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.” In the KJV, “help meet” means a help suited to him or corresponding to him. Later English turned this into the single word “helpmate.” To many modern ears, “helper” suggests an assistant, someone ranked below the person being helped.
Day argues that this connotation does not come from the Hebrew. The word is ezer. In her reading it describes help given in distress, the kind of rescue needed when a person is in desperate trouble or a nation is at war. And the word is not reserved for subordinates. As Day puts it, “That’s an attribute that God uses to describe himself, that he is man’s helper.” Psalm 121:2 is one example of that usage: “My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth.”
From there she draws her conclusion about the woman’s purpose: “What it means is her role is supposed to provide life changing, critical assistance to man”. She also names the picture she is correcting. In her view, being created as a helper does not reduce a woman to cooking and cleaning.
Precision matters about what this shows. A word study cannot settle every later question about roles in the home or the church. Faithful Christians still disagree about those questions, and Jude 3 Project treats women in church leadership as an open-handed question. But the word study does refute one specific inference. The claim that Genesis 2 defines woman as inferior because she is called a “helper” fails. The same word describes God. If the word implied inferiority, it would make God inferior to the people he rescues. Whatever else the passage teaches, its first description of woman is not a description of a servant.
A test case from the law itself: five daughters and a just cause
The objection Fields raised was about inheritance, so Day answers it with an inheritance case. Numbers 27 tells of the daughters of Zelophehad. Their father died in the wilderness. He left no sons, and the daughters were unmarried. They came before Moses and the leaders of Israel and asked why their father’s name should disappear just because he had no son. They asked for his inheritance.
Day points out that Moses himself does not decide the case. He takes it to God. In her words, “He goes to God and outta God’s mouth, he says that the women are right.” The KJV records the ruling in Numbers 27:7: “The daughters of Zelophehad speak right: thou shalt surely give them a possession of an inheritance among their father’s brethren; and thou shalt cause the inheritance of their father to pass unto them.”
The logic is what matters here. In this story, the women are not rescued from the law by some later, more enlightened tradition. Their petition reaches God, and God’s own verdict sides with them and changes the law. The new rule follows in Numbers 27:8: “If a man die, and have no son, then ye shall cause his inheritance to pass unto his daughter.” Day’s summary is that “they don’t have to be married to receive land.”
She then makes a further claim, and it should be read as her historical judgment. She believes that Israel later drifted back into keeping land from women, even though the law had changed. “So I think if we look carefully at the text, we’ll see that women had the right, but somehow along the way that it was taken from them, but God wanted them to be able to inherit”. If she is right, this matters for the whole debate. When Israel’s practice and God’s ruling came apart, the practice was the problem, and the reader should not blame the ruling for it.
Day sees the same boldness elsewhere. She points to a woman who appeals to the king to get her land back, the mother whose son had been raised from the dead. That account appears in 2 Kings 8:1-6. In both stories, a woman makes a claim on property, and the narrative honors her for it.
The strongest objection: isn’t this a patch on a patriarchal system?
A thoughtful skeptic will not be satisfied yet, and should not be. Look closely at Numbers 27:8. Daughters inherit when there is no son. The system still assumes the male line. Numbers 36 adds a condition: the daughters may marry whom they choose, but only within their father’s tribe, so the land stays where it was assigned. That is not modern equality.
This objection is correct about the facts. The question is what follows from them.
It does follow that the Old Testament law does not lay out a modern egalitarian legal code. A Christian reader should say so plainly. Pretending otherwise would be the same mistake Day criticizes in reverse: reading the text to confirm a conclusion chosen in advance.
It does not follow that the text is oppressive in the sense the charge requires. To show that, the critic would need to show that the law pushes in the direction of harm, granting men power over women and approving its abuse. The evidence Day gathers points the other way. Within a patriarchal order, the law repeatedly limits what men may do and opens doors that custom had closed.
Her next example shows this. Day describes a provision that lets a concubine who is being mistreated leave her husband. A law of this kind appears in Exodus 21:10-11. A man who takes another wife must not reduce the first woman’s food, clothing or marital rights, “And if he do not these three unto her, then shall she go out free without money.” Day herself notes that a concubine held a lower standing than a wife. That is exactly why the provision matters. The law’s protection reaches the woman with the least social power.
The narratives point the same way. Day draws attention to how the account of David and Bathsheba ends. After a king takes another man’s wife and arranges the husband’s death, the narrator gives God’s verdict: “But the thing that David had done displeased the LORD” (2 Samuel 11:27). The most powerful man in Israel does what he wants. The text refuses to call it acceptable.
This is where the difference between description and endorsement does real work. The horrors of Judges 19 are recorded, and the book frames that era as one of moral collapse. Recording a crime is not commanding it. The objection gains force only when the reader treats every event in the narrative as a model the text approves.
Some questions do remain unsettled. Christians disagree about how the Old Testament law applies to believers today, and about how far its civil rules accommodated an ancient society instead of expressing an ideal. A fair reader can hold those questions open. What a fair reader cannot do is count only one column of evidence.
The texts readers walk past
Part of Day’s case is simply the number of passages that seldom get mentioned. Exodus 38:8 refers to the bronze mirrors of “the women assembling, which assembled at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation.” Many modern translations render the verb as women who served at the entrance. Day reads it that way, as women active at the center of Israel’s worship. Nehemiah 3:12 names a ruler who repaired a section of the Jerusalem wall “he and his daughters.” Day reads that scene in light of the threat Nehemiah faced, when builders worked with a weapon close at hand. In her view, those women were taking part in dangerous work.
None of these passages proves much on its own. Together they test the original premise. If the book had nothing good to say about women, these texts should not be there. They are there, and they keep turning up.
Fields adds a wider point. Readers often confine grace to the New Testament and miss how often God shows it in the Old. “Even in the law there’s grace,” she says. Day agrees and goes back to the beginning, to Cain, who should have died and was allowed to live. A reader who expects only harshness from the Old Testament will miss its mercy toward women for the same reason they miss its mercy toward everyone else.
Where the burden actually falls
The question “Is the Old Testament oppressive to women?” sounds like it asks for a verdict on a book. Day shows that it also asks about a method. Her warning about application applies here: “people want to fit the text into their life.” She contrasts that with letting the text do the steering: “Rather than letting the text guide their life.”
The charge of oppression often begins with a fit chosen in advance. The text must be a male artifact, so its protections must be accidents and its hard stories must be endorsements. Remove that assumption and the evidence is harder to dismiss. A God who calls a rescuer by his own name. A God who rules for five daughters against the custom of their day. A God who protects the concubine and condemns the king. These texts do not answer every question about the ancient world. They do shift the burden. Anyone who calls this book an enemy of women now has to explain why its God so often stands with them.
Quick answers
Does the Old Testament describe a patriarchal society?
Yes. Its laws and households are organized around men, and a fair reader should admit that. The disputed question is whether the text presents the mistreatment of women as God’s will. On that question the evidence points against the charge.
What does “help meet” mean in Genesis 2:18?
It means a help suited to the man. Day argues that the Hebrew word ezer describes help in distress. Scripture also uses it of God, as in Psalm 121:2, so it does not mark the woman as inferior.
Who were the daughters of Zelophehad?
They were five sisters in Numbers 27 whose father died without sons. They asked for his inheritance. God declared that they “speak right,” and the law changed so that daughters could inherit.
Doesn’t recording rape and violence mean the Bible approves of it?
No. Narrative often describes what it does not commend. In the case of David and Bathsheba, the text states plainly that what David did displeased the LORD.
Why do readers miss these passages?
Day’s answer is expectation and speed. Readers who assume the book is only male-written expect to find little in favor of women. Careful reading, with good tools for the original language, changes what they see.
