gengwall

Chirs said:

But consider Numbers 30:4-5 in the LXX (the Greek OT):
“4 And if *a woman* shall vow a vow to the Lord, or bind herself with an obligation in her youth in her father’s house; and her father should hear her vows and her obligations, wherewith *she* has bound her soul, and her father should hold his peace at her, then all her vows shall stand, 5 and all the obligations with which she has bound her soul, shall remain to her.”

Here a command is given to the congregation. The pronoun ‘she’ refers to ‘a woman’, but the command isn’t just for one specific woman, it is for all women. Apparently, the pronoun ‘she’ does not necessarily restrict the number of the antecedent to only one specific individual.

And yet, the word “they” is never used within this passage…thanks for proving the point that “they” and “she” cannot be analagous.

So, in context, Paul is giving instructions for women. He switches from plural to generic singular but is still giving instructions for women. The switch to generic singular anticipates his argument from the creation order. Adam and Eve stand as representatives of all men and all women in Paul’s argument. The woman in verse 14 is Eve. So, the woman is representative of all women. ‘She’ in verse 15 refers back to ‘the woman’ in verse 14. All women are still in view here. ‘[T]hey’, in verse 15, can have an inferred antecedent that refers distributively to all of the women in the church because the topic continues to be instruction to women and ‘the woman’ to which ‘she’ refers stands for all women.

Chris – If the entire passage continues to refer to all women, then explain this contradiction:

Verse 1 is addressed to all of the congregation and involves inter-church activities which inherently includes verbalization. As the group of posts and comments have also pointed out with due second witnesses from scripture, that activity also encompassed “teaching”. Verse 8 gives special instruction to the men of the congregation related to these activities, as do verses 9-10 for women. Conversely, the “command” in verses 11-12 requires, in your interpretation, all women, to remain silent in church and tend to strickly to their “role” of homemakers (a role never ever declared in scripture and specifically refuted in Proverbs 31 as well as Genesis 1) by remaining virtually on house arrest.

So, how can the “women” who are included in verses 1 and 9-10 engage in the activities that Paul “exhorts” (v. 1) them to engage in, if verses 11-12 are “commanding” all of them to alternately lock themselves in their home or remain silent and cowed in church? It makes no sense at all unless verses 11-12 are completely disconected from verses 1 and 9-10. Although in theory, they certainly might both pertain to “women”, they can’t both possibly pertain to the same group of women. The admonission in verses 11-12 has to refer to some other woman or women than those already exhorted by Paul in vs. 1 to raise their voices in “supplications, prayers, intercessions, [and] giving of thanks”. Since Paul dramatically switched to the singular, as even recognized in the KJV (“the woman” in verse 11), and confirmed in verse 14b (“but the woman, being deceived, has fallen into disobedience – HNV, also equiv in ASV, YNG) it seems pretty clear he was not referring to another group of women but to a single soul. As has been pointed out repeatedly, that is the only conclusion that makes sense from Paul’s grammer.

Humans, of course, can make whatever sense they want out of a passage. I have seen the wildest explanations for Genesis 2 that are based not one wit on what is actually written there and the people who promote those fantasies are quite convinced they are being very holy and “bible based”. But, I have never seen anyone try to make a “she” into “they” before this. That is quite the, pardon the gender bias, “ballsy” leap to be sure.