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by
Dan Kimball
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February 9 - February 11, 2022
But the people of Ephesus, and many others at that time, believed these practices were what it meant to worship a god. All
Some women in Ephesus were now part of the new faith, part of the worship gatherings of this new church, following Jesus, a man who died and returned from the dead.
Because this was the world they were living in and the culture of Ephesus.* We also read that these young widows, because they have nothing to do, become “busybodies” who talk “nonsense” (Paul’s word).
talking about both men and women (with no distinctions made) singing, praying, and sharing with each other in the church meetings.
In the same letter, Paul also writes about how God’s Spirit gives out spiritual gifts that are special skills the Holy Spirit provides, enabling people to serve the church and others.
Unless Paul is contradicting himself, the verse cannot mean for women to be totally silent.
Paul worked alongside women who had leadership roles of influence in churches. He also refers to a woman who is very likely an apostle. This passage cannot be saying women must be “silent” in church, as these tasks involved some speaking. It must mean something else.
Most likely, Paul’s commands refer to specific cultural practices we don’t know about in our contemporary
world.
Rabbi Akiba, a contemporary of Paul, and Philo, who was a first-century Jewish leader, also commended silence during teaching.
it likely means to adopt a “quiet demeanor” appropriate for students of that time period who wished to learn.
Paul may be giving some instruction to preserve order for learning. In that time and culture, men generally were more educated, so this helps us understand why Paul speaks to those with husbands.
Let me wrap up this section with a quote from Bible scholar guru and personal friend Scot McKnight. Scot writes about these two verses from 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy, taking into consideration the whole storyline of the Bible and looking at the full context of Paul’s treatment of women.
Women were encouraged at that time to learn in a respectful way so they could help others learn. To the women back then, this would have made sense.
In the churches Paul was writing to, however, I am sure they did know the situation. They were firsthand aware of what Paul was addressing to them. But it is not super clear to us, and I wish it was, but even the disciple Peter said that in Paul’s letters to outside readers, “some things . . . are hard to understand.”*
What we do know is that Paul could not have been asking women to remain totally silent or to submit to men like servants or people of lesser value.
Acts 2:17–18. Joel predicted a day when both men and women would be voices for God prophesying (which means they aren’t silent!):
Dr. Rodney Stark, a sociologist, writes in his book The Rise of Christianity that “Christianity was unusually appealing [to women] because within the Christian subculture women enjoyed far higher status than did women in the Greco-Roman world at large.” He notes that the early church “attracted an unusual number of high-status women.”4
We still have a long way to go in ending these kinds of cultural practices. There are still many churches where men and women are not valued equally. But if you happen to be driving around and see that fellow in the pickup truck with “Women be silent” and “Read Your Bible” painted on the back, I’d like you to pull up next to him, roll down your window, and shout, “We do read our Bibles! Those verses do not mean what you think they mean. They are not about women being silent! The Bible is an advocate for women!” Then wave and drive away happy. You have shared the good news about women and
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The Bible is filled with many things that make no sense when you compare them to what we know rationally and scientifically. So naturally we see criticism and humorous joking, such as a widely spread meme that Jesus was a zombie or that “a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.”
There is a book with the clever title In the Beginning We Misunderstood written by two conservative Bible scholars. They have their doctorates in theology and Bible from a well-known and respected evangelical seminary that is highly committed to the authority of the Scriptures.
But I had never asked the most important vital question of all: What
did Moses mean when he wrote this text? After all, “my Bible” was Moses’ “Bible” first. Was Moses acquainted with Charles Darwin?
This is really, really, important. We need to stop and look deeply at what they are telling us here. We can faithfully study, read, and intensely examine specific words from Bible verses, but the question “What did Genesis
We open the pages and want to have answers for all the things that consume our current debates between Christianity and science. However, these questions were not the concerns of the original audience that God was communicating to. They weren’t
the reason or purpose behind what he communicated.
Studying the Bible Doesn’t Mean You Mistrust the Bible All Scripture is 100 percent God-breathed, authoritative, trustworthy, and useful for many, many things.*
We want to grasp what God was communicating, what Genesis meant to the original author and the original readers.
The primary writer and editor of Genesis is believed to be a man named Moses, who was writing to the Israelites. (There may have been some inspired editing and some shaping that occurred later, but Moses is traditionally considered to be the primary author of what we read in Genesis.)
There is debate on the exact years, but scholars believe the Israelites were in Egypt for the approximately four hundred years in slavery either in the 1200s BC or the 1400s BC.
The plagues God chose were not random events—they were quite intentional. Each of the ten
plagues was a direct assault on one of the gods of the Egyptians. For example, Egyptians worshiped the god Hapi, the Egyptian God of the Nile River, and it was believed that the god Osiris had the Nile River as his bloodstream.
Questions Israel Likely Had That Genesis Was Written to Answer
We often separate Genesis from the other books, but it isn’t a stand-alone book. Genesis is the first of a five-part miniseries that is the first book in the library of the Bible.
In Genesis, God had Moses write what the Israelites needed to know about him to answer their questions about him. It was not written to answer many of the questions we have today.
Today, you and I may want to know the answers to these questions as we read Genesis through a modern lens, but the original audience would not have had these questions. God wanted to teach them other things that were equally important.
These are the reasons why God had Moses write what is written in the first five books of the Bible—to teach the Israelites these things. We need to begin our reading not with
the questions we may have today, but with the questions they had back at that time. God was communicating to them in a way that made sense to them based on the world in which they lived.
God speaks to the people using the worldview they had so they could understand what God wanted them to know.
For example, at the time Genesis was written, the ancient Israelites didn’t know that the brain was the part of the human body that was the source of thinking, learning, and controlling other parts of our body. They believed the control center
was the heart, since the heart muscle pumps masses of blood around our bodies. When you see the word “heart” in Genesis (Genesis 24:45; 34:3), you should know that it is referring to the source of our emotions and thinking.
Three thousand years ago, an Israelite’s understanding of the earth and heavens would have been consistent with their specific culture and how that culture saw the world.7
Today we still have records of some of these creation accounts, such as the well-known Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh and Enuma Elish, stories describing the creation of the earth (the land) and heavens (the sky) by other gods. These ancient peoples also had a story about a flood, similar in some ways to what we find in the book of Genesis chapters 7–8. First, we need to know that the preexistence of these stories does not mean Moses simply copied and adapted these other stories. God used what the people were familiar with to communicate the true creation story.
God was not trying to communicate modern science to an ancient people, he was trying to communicate to the Israelites that he alone is God, the true God who created everything.
The other creation stories portray the gods as violent deities, fighting each other and not caring at all for human beings. This is one of the unique aspects of the Genesis story. It tells of an amazingly wonderful God, who is entirely unlike the Egyptian or Babylonian gods and goddesses.
So when we read Genesis, we want to put ourselves into the Israelites’ world and view things the way they did—and it makes a world (view) of a difference!
God’s purpose in writing Genesis was not to give them a twenty-first-century science textbook to counter evolutionary teaching. God’s point in having Genesis written was to communicate the truth about himself and what he had done in creating the world to a people who were coming out of Egypt, a place that worshiped many different gods.
Looking at these Bible verses today, we understand that God was not speaking or communicating with scientific accuracy in these verses. God was not saying the earth stayed physically motionless and the sun orbited around it. This is an assumption that is being read into the interpretation of this verse, something added beyond what was implied in the original communication.
want to be clear that in what the Bible says about God, his power and his role as creator, there is no reason to believe God could not create the entire universe in six days if he wanted
The God of the Bible is all-powerful and all-knowing, and he has the power, ability, and freedom to do anything he wants to do.
