For many women this is not an abstract question. A verse has been used to quiet them, to keep them out of a role, or to tell them to put up with treatment no one should put up with. An honest answer cannot skip that harm, and Dr. Carmen Imes does not skip it. Her answer is still yes. The misuse of Scripture is real, but it does not make Scripture the enemy of women. And the Bible’s first word about women comes before every hard story and every hard law: in Genesis 1, women and men are made together as God’s image. That starting place is the ground of her hope.
Two different wounds
Imes separates two problems that often get blurred. The first is what people have done with the Bible. One barrier between women and Scripture, she says, is the way it has been used to subjugate women, oppress them, or keep them silent. The second problem is harder. Some passages describe violence against women, or seem to treat women as less, with no abusive interpreter needed to make them painful.
Each needs a different response. If a pastor used a verse to keep a woman in an abusive home, the question is about the pastor’s reading. If a woman opens Judges 19 alone and is shaken by what she finds, the question is about the text itself. An answer that handles only the first will feel like a dodge to someone carrying the second.
Imes treats both as fair. She admits that after years of training in how to study the Bible, “it wasn’t until more recently that I was asked to read the Bible as a woman.” Her students now ask why they would want to follow a God who seems to view women the way some passages appear to.
On the first problem she is direct. The Bible has been misused throughout history, “but that doesn’t make the Bible itself bad.” What becomes questionable is the interpretation and the use. This puts the burden where it belongs. Someone who used Scripture to harm a woman made a claim about what the text means, and that claim can be tested and can fail. The failures of leaders are real and grievous, and they are not the same as the failure of Christ. A woman wounded by a reading does not have to accept that reading as the Bible’s own voice.
Her positive reason for trust is Scripture’s own claim, the language of 2 Timothy 3:16: “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 all people, women as well as men. A book given to train the whole people of God cannot belong only to those who have held power over others.
Starting where Scripture starts
Discussions about women usually rush to two verses in Paul that seem to require silence, read apart from everything else Paul says and does. Imes asks a simple question about that habit: “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.” Her reading of the chapter is plain: “in Genesis 1, both men and women are made as God’s image.” She adds, “There’s no sense of hierarchy in chapter one. There’s a sense of equal dignity and worth and partnership in the work that God gives them to do in the garden.”
This matters for the hard passages that follow, because order shapes reading. A woman who has been made to feel small can begin with a sentence that says she bears God’s image as fully as any man does. Later stories, laws and letters are read in light of that first word, not the other way around.
Genesis 2:18 is often used to reverse this, since the woman is called a helper. Imes argues that the Hebrew word, ezer, is used for God as Israel’s helper and for military allies who come alongside a unit that is losing a battle. In her words, “not a single time anywhere in the Bible is the word ezer used to describe what a servant does for a master or what an employee does for their boss.” She traces women acting with that kind of strength through Israel’s Scriptures: the women of Exodus who defy Pharaoh to save Moses, described with the same rescue verbs used for Yahweh soon after; Miriam; Deborah; and Huldah, a married prophet consulted in Josiah’s day even though male prophets were available, whose word helped spark reform.
Stories that report harm
Many women stop reading at Judges. Jephthah vows to sacrifice the first thing that comes out of his house and then sacrifices his daughter. The book ends with the gang rape and murder of a Levite’s concubine and the violence that follows. No change of interpreter makes these stories disappear.
Imes’s first move is to separate description from approval: “that’s where we need to separate between what it’s reporting and what it’s advocating for.” Most of what narrative records is not offered as a model. Jephthah tries to bargain with God, which shows he does not know Yahweh well. His vow is a picture of a people making things up as they go. Judges keeps telling the reader so, and its last verse, Judges 21:25, sums it up: “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”
She adds a literary point. Many readers begin with chapter 19. She goes back to chapters 17 and 18, where a man named Micah hires a private priest, sets up idols in his house, and then expects Yahweh to bless him. To anyone who knows the Torah, every line is shocking. The book is preparing its readers for a portrait of what happens when God’s instructions are thrown away. That is why she can say that “the ending of Judges is really good news for women because it’s designed to shock us into paying attention to what God requires and by showing us what happens when we don’t.” She calls it “the photographic negative of how He wants us to be.”
For a survivor, being told a story is meant to shock may bring little comfort. The shock is the very thing she already feels, and she did not need a book to teach it to her. Still, the distinction does real work. It means the horror she feels is the response the text is asking for, not a sign that she is reading it wrong or resisting God. The narrator stands with her outrage, not with the men in the story. That is different from a text that hides violence or calls it good.
Judges also holds a counterweight. In Imes’s reading, the one judge with nothing bad said about her is Deborah, a judge and prophet who speaks God’s word and helps win a battle. The book shows how women are harmed when people abandon God, and it also tells readers to “look at how women can lead when they’re empowered by God.”
Laws written for a broken world
The laws raise a different question. Imes begins with a principle: “reading the Bible is a cross-cultural experience.” It is still God’s word, but “we have to do the work of reading it in its own context, not imagining that it’s speaking in a void just to us to address our questions.”
On ritual purity, she notes that only a few bodily fluids made a person unclean, and they are the ones tied to producing life. None of this was sin. “It’s not wrong for a woman to have a period,” she says. Women were excluded for more total time than men, and she does not deny it, but she reads it this way: “I think it’s actually out of a deep sense of respect for a woman’s role in producing life.” She also sees protection in it, since a new mother was released from travelling to the festivals while she nursed and healed.
Exodus 21:7 is harder: “And if a man sell his daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not go out as the menservants do.” Imes says, “I wrestled with this text for weeks.” She argues the section describes debt servitude, not the stealing and selling of people, which was forbidden. She also argues the daughter enters the household by marriage, from a family too poor to give a dowry, and the passage protects her food, clothing and marital rights. Releasing her after six years would mean using her and throwing her out. Her conclusion: “the more I could see how it was good for women that there were actually boundaries being set up to protect the vulnerability of this young woman.”
Lisa Fields offers a modern comparison. Societies keep laws about violent crime, and “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.” A law that regulates a bad situation is not a picture of God’s design. Imes agrees, and her answer points back to the beginning: “If we want the ideal, if we want God’s ideal for humanity, we’ve got to go back to Genesis 1 and 2.”
When a passage reopens an injury
Lisa Fields asked about women who have survived sexual abuse and feel retraumatized by passages like Ezekiel 16, where Jerusalem is pictured as an unfaithful wife who suffers violence. Here Imes is most careful.
For teachers, her advice is practical. “I just warn them ahead of time,” she says of her students. On days her class covers such chapters, she lets students join online with cameras off, so no one watches them react, and she asks preachers to let listeners step outside if they need air. Her reason is “the involuntary effects of trauma on the body.” Honoring that does not soften Scripture. It recognizes that real people are hearing it.
For a woman reading alone, she offers an anchor: God’s self-description at Sinai in Exodus 34:6, “merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth.” Because “I believe that the character of God is unchanging,” a hard passage has to be read in a way that fits that character. Borrowing an image she credits to Esau McCaulley, she treats the text the way Jacob treated the one he wrestled in Genesis 32:26: “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.” Her words are “So I’m gonna need to wrestle with this passage until it blesses me,” and to get there “we need to consider the historical context, the literary context, and the theological context.”
She does not hide the hardest part of Ezekiel 16. Some of the violence in it is attributed to God giving Jerusalem over to what she chose. Her reading is that the chapter is a parable about Israel’s worship of other gods, pictured as adultery, and the self-destruction that follows. “This is not saying this is what God wants for women,” she says. The warning falls on anyone, male or female, who puts something else in God’s place.
She also passes on a small help. Some women abused by a man in the church, a pastor or youth leader, find a man’s voice reading Scripture triggering. Audio Bibles read by women can avoid that reaction.
None of this replaces real help. Seeing a trained counselor for the effects of abuse is not a failure of faith. If someone is hurting you now, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233. Reading Ezekiel slowly can wait until you are safe.
Can a book this hard to read be trusted?
The sharpest objection is not that scholars can explain anything away. It is this: if a wounded woman needs weeks of study, cultural background and Hebrew word studies before a passage stops sounding like it is against her, how is that book good news for her? Trust that depends on expert rescue seems fragile.
The objection deserves a real answer, and Imes’s own practice supplies several parts of it. First, the work she describes is the work any ancient text requires. Distance in time and culture is not a special defect of the Bible. Second, what a hurting reader most needs is not hidden. Genesis 1:27 and Exodus 34:6 are plain sentences. A woman can stand on those before she has resolved Exodus 21 or Ezekiel 16, and Imes’s own method assumes she will read the dark chapters in light of them rather than the reverse.
Third, Imes does not pretend the work always succeeds quickly. She admits she disliked the story of Miriam’s skin disease in Numbers 12 for years before finding a reading that made sense to her. She concedes God’s involvement in Ezekiel 16. Her claim is narrower than “nothing here is hard.” It is that the hard passages, read in their setting, fit the character God declares and do not teach that women are worth less. A reader may take years to test that claim. Taking years is not the same as being refused.
Last, leaving the text does not free a woman from the misreading. It leaves the misreading uncontested. Every reading Imes offers is an argument against someone who used Scripture to diminish women, and that argument is made from inside the book.
Her specific readings, of Exodus 21 and of ezer, are scholarly arguments that other careful readers weigh differently. Her case also touches a question on which faithful Christians who love Scripture still disagree: whether some church leadership or teaching roles are reserved for men, or whether women are called to every level of leadership. Her argument belongs to that conversation without closing it. What does not depend on how that debate ends is the dignity in the first chapter.
So trusting the Bible does not require trusting every person who has quoted it at you. It means letting the text speak in its own context, holding on to the God of Exodus 34 when a chapter is dark, and refusing to let anyone begin your story anywhere other than where Scripture begins it: with a woman made as God’s image. Some passages will call for lament long before they offer comfort. Staying with the text through that lament, rather than handing it over to the people who misused it, is how Imes has kept her trust.