QUESTION
Some girls I know were arguing that when the Bible says woman was made as a helper for man, that it is saying she is a strong warrior for him, because the Hebrew word the Bible uses, ezer, can mean a strong warrior-like helper when talking about God. How do you respond to this?
ANSWER
You can’t just take a Hebrew word that has a wide range of meaning and apply any of its meanings in any context. That’s bad exegesis. A quick Google search of ezer’s meaning returns things like this: “Discover the biblical truth that women are strong, rescuing warriors, just like God.” Well, Scripture also calls Jesus a lion and says Satan is like a lion. That doesn’t give me license to say, “Satan is just like Jesus!” Context matters.
Ezer means help, which in both Hebrew and English can be used in a variety of contexts. Just because it can be used to describe God’s salvific help of His people does not mean it has the same meaning when talking about woman’s help of man. Maybe if we didn’t have the rest of Scripture to teach us, we could be confused about when ezer means what, but Scripture makes it clear that woman’s help of man goes hand in hand with the fact the she was made for him. It would be blasphemy to say the same about God (that He was made for man), so we should immediately understand that we’re not talking about the same kind of “help.”
Woman-warrior theology is a worldly philosophy that we imbibe from Hollywood and then import into Scripture. We’re taught a sexual grammar in the entertainment we consume, and it’s always our temptation to read that back into God’s Word. The truth is, an understanding of women as warriors would have been laughable not just to Christians throughout the ages, but to most of mankind throughout the ages, because it is against nature itself. But with Scripture’s teaching added to nature’s teaching, it’s even more absurd. Deuteronomy commands that women not dress like warriors, as it is an abomination.1 Ephesians 5 says that the husband is to be like Christ, and the wife is to be like the church. To call the woman a rescuer-warrior would be to flip the Bible’s script; we don’t get to say that the church is Jesus’s strong, rescuing warrior, “just like God.”
Here are some helpful resources:
First of all, I think you should read Evangel Presbytery’s Declaration of Doctrine on Sexuality. All the pastors and churches in Evangel have agreed on this as a faithful summary of the Bible’s teaching on the goodness of male and female.
Second, there is a great essay by G. K. Chesterton called “The Emancipation of Domesticity.” Here’s one of the best parts:
But when people begin to talk about this domestic duty as not merely difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the question. For I cannot with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets cakes, and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.
The point is, God has actually given to women something men can’t do, namely, the bearing of children. And it’s absurd to think it’s somehow an elevation of women when we rob them of the glory of that divine calling by demanding that they act more like men. We should trust God’s wisdom in making us male and female, and trust that the inescapable natural realities of bodily differences between men and women correspond to God-given differences of roles and duties according to our sex. Those differences extend into every sphere of life, and men and women should maintain their distinct identity as male and female in every relationship, whether familial, ecclesiastical, professional, or civil. It will look different in different contexts, but there are basic principles and patterns of behavior we should seek to observe no matter what, even when we find ourselves in what we might consider less than ideal situations, like a man with a woman-boss, for instance.
John Piper seeks to distill some of those principles in his short book, What’s the Difference. I think he does a good job developing biblically based practical definitions of masculinity and femininity. By “practical,” I mean his definitions actually help me think about how to apply principles of masculinity and femininity in real-life situations.
Finally, here is a delightful song that helps us remember the Bible’s teaching that man is not the glory of the woman, but “the woman is the glory of man” (1 Cor. 11:7).
- See Deut. 22:5, where “a man’s clothing” refers to the clothing and weapons worn by men for combat. This is why I recently drove by a billboard for the Marines showing a woman in camo and—for the benefit of my son in the car—I said, “Gross”—because it’s shameful. ↩︎