We open the Bible looking for comfort. But some passages don’t comfort. They unsettle. Some of them hurt.
For me, it was one verse. It made me walk away from my faith and my Bible for years. And it’s the reason Ezer Bible exists.
My voice
I had a hearing loss as a young child, and I was in speech therapy for most of grade school. For years, I worked just to be understood. So the idea that my voice works, that it can be heard, isn’t small for me. It goes deep.
Maybe that’s why one verse landed on me the way it did.
The verse
My church taught that a woman could dishonor her husband by talking too much in church. She should be submissive, not ask a lot of questions, and focus on her roles as a wife and mother, while the men led and did theology.
The verse behind it was 1 Corinthians 14:34–35:
“Women should remain silent in the churches… If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.”
I thought: that cannot be right.
The word study that made it worse
So I studied it. I looked up the Greek word behind “disgraceful”: aischros.
It was worse than anything a pastor or Bible teacher had told me. The King James Version translates that same word “filthy” in Titus 1:11. Shameful. Base. Filthy.
If Paul, who wrote most of the New Testament, said that a woman’s voice in church was shameful no matter what she said, I wanted nothing to do with it. For someone who had worked her whole childhood to be heard, it felt like God was telling me my voice was the problem.
Walking away
So I walked away from my love of Jesus and the Bible for a few years. It was done quietly. I didn’t tell anyone, but my love of the Bible and God grew cold. I began to question of Christianity was a good moral framework and if I could even trust the Bible.
But I couldn’t stop asking. For years, I asked God to explain that verse to me.
Leaning in
When I came back to it, I stopped pulling away from the hard part. I leaned into it. I read the whole chapter, not just the verse. I compared translations. I used an interlinear to see the Greek under the English. I looked for patterns across Paul’s letters.
And I started noticing things I’d read past a hundred times.
What I’d missed
“As the law says.” Verse 34 says women should be in submission “as the law says.” So I went looking for that law. I haven’t found a single Old Testament law that tells women to be silent. Not one. Thirteen verses earlier, Paul quotes Isaiah and tells you he’s quoting it. Here, he quotes nothing.
Then I read Katharine Bushnell. A hundred years ago, she asked whether men had let prejudice color Bible translation, and she answered with the Greek and Hebrew. She showed me that the rabbis’ oral law said almost exactly what verses 34–35 say: that a woman shouldn’t read the law in the congregation, and that a woman’s voice was ervah, nakedness. Paul had been a Pharisee. He knew those traditions from the inside.
When I saw those quotations, I knew. That was the confirmation I needed and I’ve always felt like it was an answer to prayer. I really did want to understand what this passage meant and it left me deeply unsettled to just except what many people believe it says.
Then verse 36. I had read right past it for years: “Or did the word of God originate with you? Or are you the only people it has reached?” That’s not Paul agreeing with the rule. That’s Paul rebuking the people trying to enforce it. The word of God didn’t come from them, and it wasn’t theirs to control.
The verse that told me my voice was shameful turned out to be Paul standing up for women’s voices. I came back to Jesus and the Bible. Now, I consider Paul to be the greatest advocate for women in ministry. He partnered with women like Prisca, Pheobe and Junia. He didn’t think that the voice of woman was shameful, but he knew people who believed that it was their job to be the receivers and transmitters of an Oral law. In fact that was a part of his background before he met Jesus on the road to Damascus. Sometimes the very things that we rebuke the strongest are also the things we have experience with.
How it became Ezer Bible
Around the same time that I discovered Bushnell her book God’s Word for Women, I also discovered amazing Bible scholars like Carolyn Custis James and Marg Mowczko. I began learning about how to actually read and understand Scripture.
At some point I realized that many places where the Bible says “men” the verses actually include everyone. I opened an interlinear next to my NKJV and checked every “men” against the Greek. Whenever the word actually included women, I highlighted it pink. There was a lot of pink. I put sticky notes on the seven verses I’d heard used most often to limit women, including this one.
Those notes became Ezer Bible: a wiki that puts the Hebrew and Greek words back on the page, without the headings and verse numbers that can tell you how to read it, so you can see the text for yourself.
Why discomfort matters
A hard passage isn’t a sign to look away. It’s an invitation to ask better questions:
- Why does this bother me?
- What was I taught it means?
- Does the text actually say that?
“The word of God is alive and active… it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12). Sometimes it judges our assumptions too.
Not every hard passage resolves the way 1 Corinthians 14 did for me. Some questions take years. But I’ve learned that a lot of my discomfort wasn’t with the text. It was with the translation and the framing I’d been handed.
You don’t have to look away
Discomfort doesn’t mean your faith is weak. It may mean you’re paying attention.
God didn’t meet me when I avoided that verse. God met me in the questions.
If there’s a passage you’ve been avoiding, lean in. Read the whole chapter. Look at the original words. And bring your questions with you.
Start with the sigaō page on the wiki, or read my series on 1 Corinthians 14. Then bring the passage you’ve been avoiding to the free Ezer Bible Study Community. You don’t have to wrestle with it alone.
