Gender Roles In The Bible

To imagine a future without gender, a system of individuals has to disregard all that is known, taught, and forced upon them to adhere to when it comes to defining such. A drastic change has to occur, an epiphany of some sort, to realize that gender is a socially constructed theory that is not innate, yet changeable. The deeply entrenched system of the gender binary is embedded and intertwined into every aspect of one’s culture. To eradicate the systems in which we live by we must first investigate and criticize the foundations in which they were built upon: religion, tradition, and politics. With the existence of these systems, the creation and the reinforcement of a gender binary has remained steady in the society in which we inhabit. The
Accepting that the Bible is the original constructor of gender and that the word “man” has been since the beginning of time a word to describe one with male genitalia, leads no one to question the story of our very creation. However, Christine Delphy noted that” the concept of sex roles was critically developed from the 1940s to the 1960s” (59) and that “the concept of gender derived directly from it” (60). So, if the Bible predates the development of gender roles, is it necessary to say that society’s self-interpretation constructed it to be gendered? If you continue reading in that excerpt, the use of the pronoun “them,” which is plural compared to the word “man.” Who is the “them” God had spoken of? Genesis 1:27 continues, “And God went on to create the man in his image, in God’s image he created him; male and female he created them.” With this excerpt, we see the use of the word “mankind” which is a generalization, rather than a direct translation to sex or gender of individuals; one can suggest this is elaborated with the addition of the line “male and female he created them.” God created humanity in his
Moreover, God built the rib that he had taken from the man into a woman, and he brought her to the man. Then the man said: “This is at last bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. This one will be called Woman, because from man she was taken.” In Genesis 1:27, humanity is produced as “male and female,” the difference in the story of Genesis 2: 21-23 is that the focus of creation in represented by the sex of man and woman being in relationship to each other. As Monique Wittig says in her essay, One is Not Born