What the Bible teaches us about men and women – and the future of our planet
A new book by Jan Luiten van Zanden explains the rise and fall of gender inequality
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In 1 Samuel 8, the Israelites come to Samuel with a request: You are old, and your sons do not want to follow in your footsteps. Appoint a king for us. But Samuel warned them that this was a bad idea. He said:
This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers.
He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.
Economists do not usually read the Bible to test hypotheses. But sometimes one must be creative with sources, and what better than this ancient document?
The Israelites’ request for a king was not incidental. The Philistines were on their doorstep, and they wanted to unite the twelve tribes of Israel against the common enemy. This is a wonderful example of how war led to state formation, then and now. It was, after all, historian Charles Tilly’s main argument: War makes states.
But state formation has other consequences as well, writes the economic historian Jan Luiten van Zanden in his latest book Dochters van Lucy (Daughters of Lucy). One of these is inequality between men and women. As centralisation occurred, with (male) kings exerting more and more power, women’s positions in society became increasingly vulnerable.
Israel is also a good example here. Samuel indeed anointed a king. Saul was initially successful in his campaigns against the Philistines, but just as Samuel had predicted, Saul’s success would go to his head. The young David would succeed him, and then Solomon, with the centralised state growing ever larger.
Van Zanden points out a fact I had always overlooked:
As states grew in size and repressive power, gender inequality increased: Samuel had one wife, Saul had three (one primary wife and two concubines), his successor David had eight, including Bathsheba, whom he obtained unlawfully and through deceit, and their son Solomon had an extensive harem with hundreds of wives and concubines.
This is a striking example of how the formation of the state coincided with the decline in women's positions. Van Zanden writes: ‘It is almost “collateral damage” of the hierarchisation of society as a whole.’
But gender relations did not only worsen. Van Zanden refers to the inverted U-curve of gender relations: from relatively low inequality first under hunter-gatherers to the great inequality with the rise of the early state, followed by the gradual decline in inequality in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.
When exactly this reversal began is difficult to answer. The ancient Greeks and Romans were highly patriarchal. Most girls were very young when they married, some as young as 11. Abortion and even infanticide (of daughters) were common; it is estimated that the ratio of men to women was nearly 150 to 100. The more men there were, the larger the army, the larger the state, and the weaker the role of women.
Yet, slowly but surely, things began to change. Both the Greeks and the Romans were highly patriarchal. But unlike the Greeks, Roman women could own property. Polygamy was also considered barbaric.
Ironically, the fall of the Roman Empire in Western Europe gave women more agency. The veneration of Mary within the Christian tradition is a sign of this. Here, too, there are ancient roots: It is interesting that the first church to venerate Mary in Ephesus dates back to the fifth century. It is no coincidence that Ephesus was also the city of Artemis, the Greek ‘mother goddess’, with the Temple of Artemis being the largest in the ancient world.
While the position of women in Western Europe began to improve, the rise of Islam maintained the low status of women in large parts of the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia. With a few exceptions, there is still today a strong correlation between the agency women have in predominantly Christian countries and countries with predominantly Muslim or Hindu communities. Van Zanden makes an interesting point here: perhaps it is not religion that determines gender inequality, but rather existing gender inequalities that attract certain religions. Given how much women were historically valued in southern, central and eastern Africa, a phenomenon I analysed with Fran Marco Gracia, it is no surprise that Christianity is today the dominant religion.
In Western Europe, there was a particular acceleration in women’s agency after the Black Death, when the wages women could earn relative to men suddenly increased significantly. During the Dutch Golden Age, greater differences would reappear, as men’s wages increased so much that women could afford to stay at home and focus on childcare. Yet, there was a shift: women no longer had as many children as possible, but due to the Reformation and the increasingly industrial nature of work, there was a need to invest in children. Economists call this the quantity-quality tradeoff, a decline in the number of children but an improvement in their human capital. Thus, the Bible and women’s eagerness to teach their children to read it played an important role in the rise of the market system, a system that today gives us incredibly high standards of living.
Van Zanden ends his book with a prediction: the extent to which women have agency will determine whether we can shield ourselves from further environmental degradation. In countries where women have very little agency, fertility rates will remain high, and pressure on the environment will increase; women will also be less inclined to invest in the human capital of their children. In countries where women have much agency, ‘the balance between two different impulses will likely tilt in favour of women, and population growth will slow down or even halt’, something that has happened in large parts of the world already.
The Bible, of course, begins with the story of Adam and Eve. The serpent tempts Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, and she convinces Adam to take a bite as well, and so they lose paradise. The only way we can protect Mother Earth, according to Van Zanden, is to give Eve the chance to take the lead.
An edited version of this post appeared (in Afrikaans) in Rapport on 13 October 2024. The images were created using Midjourney v6.