A verse used against you does not stay where it was spoken. It comes back the next time you open a Bible, and the page can feel like the person who quoted it. The question here is whether a woman who has carried that can learn to read Scripture again without pretending the harm never happened. Dr. Carmen Imes, an Old Testament professor at Biola University, answers yes, and the way she gets there can be learned in stages.
The study builds four reading skills in order, each resting on the one before it. First, separating a passage from its misuse. Second, telling a story’s report from its recommendation, practiced in Judges. Third, reading a law as a response to a situation, practiced in Exodus. Fourth, reading the hard passages from the Bible’s starting point in Genesis 1. Work alone over several sittings or with a group over two or three meetings. If a passage named here is one you are not ready for, skip it. Nothing later depends on forcing yourself through a text that reopens an injury.
If you lead a group, name the hard passages before the first meeting, including Judges 19 and Exodus 21. Imes does this with her own students. Make it plain that anyone can pass on any question without explaining why. Disclosure is never the goal.
Stage one: a passage and its use
Aim: by the end of this stage, you can name which of two problems you are facing.
Hurt around the Bible usually comes from two sources that get tangled. One is people: a verse quoted to keep someone quiet, to keep her in a harmful situation, or to tell her she mattered less. The other is the text itself. Some passages describe terrible things happening to women and are painful even when no one misuses them.
Imes starts with the first. She says one barrier between women and Scripture is the way the Bible has been used to subjugate or silence women. The Bible has been misused in many ways throughout history, she says, “but that doesn’t make the Bible itself bad. That makes the interpretations and uses of the Bible problematic.”
A claim about a verse can be checked. Someone who used Scripture against you was making a claim about what it means, and that claim can turn out to be wrong. You are not required to accept a harmful reading as the Bible’s own voice because the reader had authority over you.
Imes grounds her trust in what Scripture says about itself, pointing to 2 Timothy 3:16, which the KJV renders “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” If the Bible is inspired, she reasons, it has to be for women as well as men. Notice what that step does and does not do. It supports the claim that the Bible is addressed to women. It does not settle what any particular passage means. That still has to be read, which is what the rest of this study practices.
Start a page. Draw a line down the middle of a sheet of paper. On the left, write a verse that has been used against you or women you know, and how it was used. Leave the right side blank. You will add to it at each stage. No one needs to see this page.
Stage two: what a story reports and what it recommends
Aim: by the end of this stage, you can look for a narrator’s point of view instead of assuming approval.
Separating text from misuse does nothing for the second problem. When a reader finds a father sacrificing his daughter in Judges, or a woman gang-raped and killed, no bad interpreter is to blame. The story is simply there.
Imes’s tool is a second distinction: “that’s where we need to separate between what it’s reporting and what it’s advocating for.” Narrative records much that it does not hold up as a model. When we watch a character’s choices, she says, “we’re not supposed to go thou and do likewise.” The reader measures what happens against God’s commands and notices what it produces.
A news report on a crime is not a recommendation. That comparison helps only so far, because biblical narrative is not neutral reporting. It has a point of view, and the reader has to find it.
Judges helps by repeating itself. Judges 17:6 says “In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” The book’s final verse, Judges 21:25, says “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”
Observe. These lines bracket the last five chapters. What does the near-repetition tell you about how the author wants chapters 17 to 21 read?
Imes reads chapters 17 and 18 as a setup many readers skip. A man named Micah hires his own priest, sets up idols, and expects Yahweh to bless him. To anyone who knows the Torah, every move is wrong, so by chapter 19 the reader should already be alarmed. She calls the ending of Judges “the photographic negative of how He wants us to be.”
On Jephthah, she argues that his vow is an attempt to bargain with God, which shows he does not know Yahweh well. Test that. Read Judges 11:29-40. Notice that the Spirit of the LORD comes on Jephthah in verse 29, before the vow in verse 30, and that the narrator never explicitly condemns him. Some interpreters take that silence as approval of his faithfulness to his word. Others argue the daughter was dedicated to lifelong virginity rather than killed. Ask what evidence in the chapter supports Imes’s reading, what cuts against it, and what the daughter’s own words in verses 36-38 add.
Then read Judges 4:4: “And Deborah, a prophetess, the wife of Lapidoth, she judged Israel at that time.” Imes notes Deborah is the one judge with nothing negative said about her. Judges, she says, also invites readers to “look at how women can lead when they’re empowered by God.”
Add to your page. If your verse comes from a story, write on the right side whether the story presents the action as a model or as a warning, and what in the text tells you.
Stage three: what a law assumes
Aim: by the end of this stage, you can ask what situation a law regulates before deciding what it approves.
Laws need a different skill. Imes begins with a principle: “reading the Bible is a cross-cultural experience.” The reader enters another language and another society.
Read Exodus 21:7-11. Verse 7 in the KJV reads “And if a man sell his daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not go out as the menservants do.” On its face, a woman is denied the freedom a man receives. Imes admits, “I wrestled with this text for weeks.”
She argues the arrangement is debt servitude, a way out of poverty, since stealing and selling people was forbidden. She also argues the daughter enters the household by marriage, from a family too poor to give a dowry. Verse 10 reads “If he take him another wife; her food, her raiment, and her duty of marriage, shall he not diminish.” On her reading, releasing the young woman after six years would mean using her and then putting her out. The law makes the bond permanent and protects her provision.
Observe. List what verses 8-11 forbid the man to do. Who does each provision protect?
Lisa Fields offered a comparison: “The law is not condoning murder or rape, but they know because we live in a fallen world that murder and rape and all of these heinous crimes will happen.” Imes agreed: “If we want the ideal, if we want God’s ideal for humanity, we’ve got to go back to Genesis 1 and 2.”
The comparison shows that a law regulating a situation is not a picture of God’s design. It has a limit. Criminal law forbids what it addresses, while Exodus 21 permits an arrangement and bounds it. So the comparison shows law is not the ideal, not that everything a law permits was good. Imes’s reading of Exodus 21 is her scholarly argument, and other careful readers weigh the evidence differently. She does not use context as an eraser either. She told Lisa Fields she disliked the Miriam passage in Numbers 12 for years, and she acknowledges that in the Ezekiel 16 parable some of the violence is attributed to God giving Jerusalem over to what she chose. Her claim is narrower: hard passages, read in their setting, fit the character God declares and do not teach that women are worth less. Some chapters will still call for lament, which the Bible itself practices.
When a passage hits your body first
For survivors of sexual abuse, a passage can trigger a reaction before interpretation begins. Imes speaks of honoring “the involuntary effects of trauma on the body.” On days her classes cover such texts, she lets students join online with cameras off. She passes on another suggestion: some women abused by a man in the church find a woman’s voice easier to hear, and audio Bibles read by women exist.
Facing a hard passage, Imes holds on to God’s self-description in Exodus 34:6, “merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth,” because, as she says, “I believe that the character of God is unchanging.”
Seeing a counselor is not a failure of faith. If someone is harming you now, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233. Hard chapters can wait until you are safe.
Stage four: reading from the beginning
Aim: by the end of this stage, you can read a hard passage in light of where Scripture starts.
Imes observes that discussions about women often rush to two verses in Paul, read apart from the rest of his letters. Her question: “why do we start with Paul? Why don’t we start with Genesis?”
Genesis 1:27 reads “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Of this chapter she says, “There’s no sense of hierarchy in chapter one.”
Observe. Read Genesis 1:26-28. Mark every word that applies to the man alone, the woman alone, and both together. To whom are the blessing and the task in verse 28 given?
In Genesis 2:18 the KJV says God will make “an help meet for him,” older English for a helper suited to him. Imes argues the Hebrew word, ezer, is used about half the time for God as Israel’s helper and otherwise for military allies, never for a servant serving a master. That is her word study, and a concordance lets you check it.
Faithful Christians who love Scripture still disagree about women in church leadership. Some believe certain teaching or leadership roles are reserved for men. Others believe women are called to every level of leadership. Genesis 1 does not settle that, and this study does not try to. The dignity it describes does not depend on how that debate is settled.
Questions for discussion or reflection
- Which problem weighs more for you right now: how the Bible has been used, or what some passages say? Does naming the difference change how you approach it?
- After working through Judges 11, how persuaded are you by Imes’s reading of Jephthah? What would change your mind?
- What would make you more or less convinced that Exodus 21:7-11 protects the young woman?
- What is the difference between staying with a difficult text and forcing yourself to feel fine about it?
- If every conversation about women began with Genesis 1:26-28, which later passages would read differently to you? Which would not?
- For leaders: how does your community handle passages involving sexual violence, and what would change if people knew ahead of time what was coming?
Finishing the page
Return to your sheet. Imes names three kinds of context: “we need to consider the historical context, the literary context, and the theological context.” You have practiced each.
- Historical. She asks, “Okay, what are the social circumstances that would lead to this happening?” Write what you can learn about the situation your verse addressed.
- Literary. In her words, “the literary context would be looking at what comes before and what comes after, what’s the purpose of this book?” Read the full chapter on each side.
- Theological. Ask “how does this fit in with the overall story of God’s self-revelation in scripture and his desire to save us?” Set the verse beside Genesis 1:27 and Exodus 34:6.
Then compare the right side with the left: what the verse says in its setting, as best you can tell, and how it was used. They may match or be far apart. You may not reach an answer this week. Write down what you still do not understand. A precise question is further along than a vague wound, and the next time someone quotes a verse at you, you will know how to ask what it said before it reached them.