How women and men read the Bible differently.

Women and men see things differently. This is difficult to explain, or rather it is difficult to explain to men. There is even a term for this: The Male Gaze. The world is designed around this male gaze. Everything, believe it or not, is male oriented. Women understand this a lot better, and a lot sooner, than men do. Trying to explain the male gaze to men is like trying to explain water to a fish, it's just always been there and that's the way things are.

The male gaze also affects how we read and understand the Bible. And I have a great example to show just how this works, and it comes from the art world.

There is a scene which has been depicted frequently in art, and it's from the Bible (sort of, if you count the Apocrypha as the Bible, look I am just trying to make a point here.

It is the scene of Judith beheading Holofernes.

In the story, Holofernes is the leader of the invading army, looking to kill a whole load of God's chosen people. And the men are afraid of him, and they aren't trusting in God for help. Then there's Judith. She does trust God, she' realised that the men are next to useless (not much has changed here), so she gains the trust of the camp guards, gets Holofernes drunk, and lops his head off.

Judith is one of the original sisters doing it for themselves. She is a widow who has already lost enough and has had enough of men just taking her stuff. She puts her foot down and decides how history is going to play out. And good on her.

Of course, with a great story like this Judith is going to be depicted in art. And this is where we can see how women and men view things differently. Let's take two examples, just for convenience.

Caravaggio, depicts a most serene, almost unsure Judith. She is clothed in white, pure and untouched. Even the blood gushing from Holofernes throat has the decency to leave her unspoiled. Caravaggio's Judith holds both knife and foe at arms length. Her face is innocent and childlike even in this decisive moment. She is depicted as genteel, set apart from the world around her, a vision of beauty in an otherwise ugly world. It is a beautiful painting.

And then there's Artemisia Gentileschi. She painted the same scene maybe forty years later. And a women depicting the act is quite different.

Gentileschi's Judith is involved. She is draped in the same darkness that occupies her victim. Her hands are bloody, she is confident, she is decisive. There is no way Holofernes is coming out of this painting alive. Gentileschi's Judith is unafraid. She is bloodied, she is committed to the act, she becomes vengeance itself. There's a job to be done and she is the right woman for it.

This Judith doesn't appear to take any pleasure from the act, rather it is a formality, just another duty to perform.

One is depicted as pure and separate, the other as willing and active. And it is no surprise that we have two such stark depictions of the same scene. Women and men see things differently.

Maybe Caravaggio relates with Holofernes more than Judith and that is why she is distant and other, the focus and yet set apart. And who knows, maybe at another time the bad boy of Rome would have painted the whole thing very different.

So what does any of this have to do with Bible reading? Well women and men can read the same passage and understand it differently. I don't mean in the same way that people from different Christian traditions will read a passage with a different emphasis, but I do mean that women and men bring a different perspective, we have different experiences and expectations. The male gaze has, until recently, been the only eyes through which we can read the Bible.

Men still dominate published commentaries. Women are catching up but unfortunately they are still mainly reduced to writing women's commentaries. It is as if the women's view is separate to the 'normal' view, another example of the male gaze. If you need evidence of this just Google 'Bible commentaries by men': You'll get a whole list of commentaries which are used in churches and universities. Google 'Bible commentaries by women' and you'll get a link to some very specific works dealing exclusively with women in the Bible. Are we to say that women cannot contribute to the church as a whole? I don't know if you've checked recently, but women still make up the majority of congregations. And they do see things differently.

Now this is only a blog. I am not an arch bishop or a pope, and this isn't a great academic work. This is just a conversation that you and I are having. And it's a good conversation to have. Hopefully this will give people a chance to talk about how we read the Bible differently, and maybe what the church teaches can start to change the male gaze and listen to the women who have always been at the forefront.