Exodus 33-38

The Facts (Chapter number: Verse)

Exodus 33 - No mention of any women.

34:16 - God tells Moses to not take wives for his people's sons out of conquered lands, since those daughters prostitute themselves to their gods and would make his people's sons also prostitute themselves to their gods.

35:22 - Both men and women brought materials for the tabernacle.
35:25-26 - All the skillful women spun with their hands, and brought what they spun in blue and purple and crimson, both yarns and fine linen. All the women who's hearts moved them to use their skill spun the goats' hair.
35:29 - Everything the men and women brought brought it as a freewill offering to the Lord.

36:6 - When there was more than enough material for the tabernacle Moses told all the men and women to make no more offerings.

Exodus 37 - No mention of any women.

Exodus 38 - No mention of any women.

My Comments

Ha! Even my version of the Bible calls the second tablets Moses makes the Ten Commandments. Which have NOTHING to do with the Ten Commandments that we generally know. There is no "you shall not murder" or "you shall not steal." Nope, none of that. It's all ritual and practice. And YET, the book itself calls them the Ten Commandments. How did this get so mixed up in our culture? I mean, I thought when I first heard it maybe it was a translation thing, like just specific to the KJV, but nope. This seems to be the same in all the versions, which makes it even weirder. What I don't get, is that when God is riffing to Moses with the well known "Love me your God, don't take God's name in vain, honor your mom and dad, don't kill, don't steal, etc. etc." the heading for that section is The Ten Commandments, but in that section it never calls those the Ten Commandments. They weren't even written on stone tablets, and even if they were, Moses smashed them and then later received a completely different set of commandments. The second set were written on stone tablets, there were only ten listed, and these are actually referred to in the Bible itself (not a heading I can only assume was added in by translators and editors) as the Ten Commandments. Soooooo... if the Bible says it right there in black and white, and in multiple translations of it, is it wrong then? Is the Bible wrong or are we, as a culture, just picking the list of ten rules that we like best? Is it because we would like to think our all loving and all powerful God would think to put "Thou shall not kill" in a list of top ten rules to live by before "Thou shall not cook a kid in it's mother's milk." Whatever the reason it doesn't much matter since it boils down to either the Bible not being the divinely inspired word (or if it is God isn't all powerful enough to fix something that I would think is one of the more important bits of the Bible) or God doesn't care about morals or life or people being good to each other, he just cares that you worship him and you do it correctly.

And this lack of women is getting pretty darn boring. Doesn't really give me much to talk about when the subject of my blog is women in the Bible. Hopefully I'll stop filling up post space with rants about contradictions and weird amoral God antics. But we just finished reading all the horribly boring details about building the tabernacle and we're gonna move into making the priestly vestments. I don't think we'll see much more women for a while. And really, God thought the specifics of the tabernacle and priestly vestments were something so important he had to put it in the Good Book? It just HAD to be included in the final draft when he could have been, I dunno, actually teaching morals and giving people rules to live by (maybe that was just Jesus' job). Boring. I hope it starts getting interesting again.

Monday: Exodus 39-40 & Leviticus 1-4