The Woman's Bible

by Elizabeth Cady Stanton

We need not go back four thousand years for heroines. The world is filled with them to-day. They do not belong to any nation, nor any religion, nor exclusively to any race. Wherever woman is found, they are found. There are no women portrayed in the Bible who equal thousands and thousands of known to-day. The women of the Bible fall almost infinitely below, not simply those in real life, but the creations of the imagination found in the world of fiction. They will not compare with the women born of Shakespeare's brain. You will find none like Isabella, in whose spotless life, love and reason blended into perfect truth; nor Juliet, within whose heart, passion and purity met like white and red within the bosom of a rose; nor Cordelia, who chose to suffer loss rather than show her wealth of love with those who gilded dross with golden words in hope of gain; nor Miranda, who told her love as freely as a flower gives its blossom to the kisses of the sun; nor Imogene, who asked, "What is it to be false?" nor Hermione, who bore with perfect faith and hope the cross of shame, and who at last forgave with all her heart; nor Desdemona, her innocence so perfect and her love so pure that she was incapable of suspecting that another could suspect, and sought with dying words to hide her lover's crime.

If we wish to find what the Bible thinks of woman, all that is necessary to do is to read it. We shall find that everywhere she is spoken of simply as property—as belonging absolutely to the man. We shall find that, whenever a man got tired of his wife, all he had to do was to give her a writing of divorcement, and that then the mother of his children became a houseless and homeless wanderer. We shall find that men were allowed to have as many wives as they could get, either by courtship, purchase, or conquest. The Jewish people in the olden time were, in many respects, like their barbarian neighbors.

Anon.

The Bible, viewed by men as the infallible "Word of God," and translated and explained for ages by men only, tends to the subjection and degradation of woman. Historical facts to prove this are abundant. In the dark days of "witchcraft"—through centuries—alleged witches were arrested, tried in ecclesiastical courts, tortured and hung or burned at the stake by men under priestly direction, and the great majority of the victims were women. Eve's alleged transgression, and the Bible edict in the days of the reputed Witch of Endor, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," being the warrant and Divine authority for this awful slaughter of women.

In the days of chattel-slavery in our country, the slave-laws, framed by men only, degraded woman by making her the defenseless victim of her slave-master's passions, and then inflicting a cruel stab, reaching the heart of motherhood, by laws which made her children follow the condition of the mother, as slaves; never that of the father, as free women or men. The clergy became slaveholders and defenders of slavery without loss of priestly position or influence, and quoted "Cursed be Canaan" as their justification.

The Lord gave the Word, great was the company of those that published it.—Old version of the Bible, 68th Psalm.

The Lord giveth the Word, and great is the multitude of women who publish it.—Revised version of the Bible, 68th Psalm.

Here is "a reform" not "against Nature," nor the facts of history, but is true to the Mother of the Race, to her knowledge of "the Word," to her desire to promulgate it, to her actual participation in declaring and proclaiming it. And true to a present and continuous inspiration and influx of the Spirit, it is giveth, and not "gave," in the past. And this one recognition of woman as preacher and Apostle forbids the assertion that woman is degraded from Genesis to Revelation.

The light of a more generous religious thought, a growth out of the old beliefs, impelled the learned "Committee on Revision" to speak the truth in regard to the religious character and work of women, and they have exalted her where before she was "degraded."

This revision is also prophetic of this era, for never were women doing so excellently the world's work, or, like Tryphena and Tryphosa, prophesying the light still to come.