A roller-coaster ride of exploitation and abuse.
What are you to make of a book that capitalizes the word lord (LORD) when referring to God but just uses plain old lowercase Lord when referring to men’s relationship over women? Where even male animals seem to own the female ones? Upon embarking on this exercise, I thought it would not surprise me to find some sexism and anachronistic representations of women in the bible. What surprised me was the pervasiveness of it. The book that contains perhaps the wisest thing ever said also contains tons of ritualized sexism and misogyny from start to finish. Here, I simply summarise and present the 1000+ passages from the bible (30,000+) that refer to women in some way. From the second-class status and scapegoating of women in the Book of Genesis to the personification of evil as a ‘whore’ riding a seven-headed beast in Revelation. It’s a roller-coaster ride of exploitation and abuse. The Female Bible reveals itself to be the misogynistic rantings of a priest class who, in lieu of their absentee patriarch, set arbitrary and violent rules for men to impose on women, with the warning that if they don’t, there will be consequences. A sort of ‘wait till your father gets home’ approach to organizing society. The difficulties the people have in following these rules are periodically forgiven and the rules updated to be more in keeping with the times. Except for the rules about women, they stay pretty much the same throughout. If there is a God, and he’s thinking of sending another emissary, he might do worse than send a woman this time.
This book will resonate with readers who are ready to question traditional religious narratives and engage with texts critically. Whether you’re a skeptic, a believer seeking reform, or someone interested in how ancient scriptures shape modern gender roles, The Female Bible offers an essential, thought-provoking lens on faith, power, and equality.
This book is part of a series of attempts to rewrite the Bible. Other works in the series include the Good Book – an edited version of the King James Bible with all the injustice, intolerance, cruelty, violence, absurdity, misogyny, bad science, inaccurate history, ambiguity, contradictions, lewdness, poor grammar, homophobia and false prophecy taken out – and the Random Bible – where every word of the KJV has been replaced by a random work drawn from a list of over 100,000, resulting in a secular bible mostly containing beautiful but unfamiliar words. Best read out loud in a bombastic voice.
The Female Bible is available from all bookstores.