If God is the Daddy of them all, Abraham is
the patriarch of patriarchs, the acknowledged founding father of
Judaism, Christianity and Islam. After God tried and gave up on the
children of Adam and Eve, drowning all but Noah and his family, he
narrowed his sights to Abraham, a more manageable single individual
of whom he would make a nation. It could be argued that Sarah was a
necessary part of the package. She was already married to Abraham,
and is claimed by all three religions as their matriarch. But
there’s little point in pussy-footing about: the Scriptures –
prepare yourselves – do not promote feminism. You can change
Yahweh into a mid-gendered s/he, you can point to the odd strong
woman – the men-murdering Judith and Jael – you can admire the
wiliness of Rebekah in devising the plan for stealing the blessing
and birthright for her favourite younger son, but sit down and read
the actual text and you soon enough discover that Yahweh can only be
male, while the women merely further the ambitions of sons and
husbands. Even Eve’s original and splendid disobedience comes to
be regarded by the rabbis as useful in providing ammunition against
the threat posed by all future women and by the Christian Fathers as
the felix culpa that made necessary the passive and
virtuous Virgin, whose uterus nurtured the sacrificial remedy to
Eve’s faux pas. The relationship between the Scriptures and male
domination has been noted before, and it is clear that neither God
nor his chosen ones were signatories to the International Convention
on Human Rights. That’s a shame. It has made, as Delaney rightly
suggests, a difference to how we have gone about living on the
planet. But it is not a sufficient explanation for gender
discrepancy.
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