God's Word to Women (Annotated) (Unabridged) by Katharine C. Bushnell

God's Word to Women (Annotated) (Unabridged) by Katharine C. Bushnell

Author:Katharine C. Bushnell [Bushnell, Katharine C.]
Format: azw
Publisher: God's Word to Women, Inc.
Published: 2013-02-07T00:00:00+00:00


LESSON 58.

FURTHER PROOF OF WOMAN’S EARLY DIGNITY.

448. It is but a meager account which we have in the Bible of the ages between Noah and Abraham. The distance in time is spanned by the tenth and eleventh chapters of Genesis. But we have light on this period in archaeological discoveries. The Tel el Amarna tablets, the Code of Hammurabi (King Amraphel of Genesis 14:1), and the numerous discoveries about Nineveh, in Babylonia, Egypt and other places, have combined in enabling scholars to reconstruct the manners and customs, to a considerable extent, of these peoples of early ages.

449. First in time, we had information that in Egypt, of old, women occupied every dignified position, in public as well as in private affairs; but this was supposed to be a quite exceptional fact. But after Bachofen’s book appeared, and others, particularly McLennan’s well-reasoned work, in which he traced the signs of that early dignity of women, and gave investigators new clues to follow out into past facts, historians and others have interested themselves increasingly in this newly-discovered chapter in woman’s ancient history.

450. We are not turning aside from legitimate Bible study, as regards woman’s place in the divine economy, in bringing these facts to the front, for they help us the better to understand numerous incidents in the Bible as regards women. Nothing is of more importance to the Christian woman today than to understand that God did not Himself subordinate woman to man. He merely prophesied that such subordination would follow as the fruit of sin in this world. The subordination of woman to man is not the result of God’s ordinance; it is the fruit of wrong-doing; and, as such, the fruit can be no more God’s doing than the bad tree.

451. Ancient history proves that woman, in earth’s earliest ages, was not subordinate. As to Egypt, we shall never forget the profound impression made on our own mind by a review of the long line of ancient monarchs in stone, to be seen in the Gizeh Museum, a few miles from Cairo, near the pyramid of Cheops. Beginning at the end where the most ancient were placed, we noticed that the queen sat by the side of the king, of equal size and importance. A few centuries down the line, the queen had become smaller than the king. The representations were all rudely true to life, and we could not but conclude that for some reason the man had taken to marrying a wife not as mature as himself; and beginning to bear children in her immaturity, the development of woman’s stature had been arrested. Further on towards our own days, the queen--now more properly only the king’s wife--sat on a lower level than his eminence; the queen had become the subject of the king also. Lastly, the queen was no longer carved out of a stone block; she was merely scratched in portraiture upon the pedestal of the stool upon which he sat, or upon the arm of his chair or throne.



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