that ask going around about the Bible somehow “inventing” misogyny is driving me crazy, like does no one do their own research? ever? it’s not that old!!
the earliest any credible scholar would date the composition of the old testament is to the 13th century BCE (maybe the 14th), towards the end of the Bronze Age and literal millennia after Mesopotamia and Egypt popped up.
Hammurabi lived in the 18th century BCE and his surviving laws codify female oppression in ways recognisable to a modern audience. Babylonian women even in the 19th century BCE were taught domestic skills instead of receiving the education of their male peers, were allocated domestic, reproductive, and/or sexual roles (aside from a few religious positions), excluded from politics, and routinely provably punished for disobeying male entitlement with physical violence.
By the time of the Qijia Culture in pre-dynastic China (23rd century BCE) a woman was buried alive along with the other grave good objects in a man’s tomb.
despite Neithhotep holding some power as queen-consort (and possibly as pharaoh in her own right) in Egypt’s First Dynasty (roughly 32nd-30th centuries BCE) and women having relatively more rights in some time periods of Egypt’s long history, it was still definitively a patriarchal society in which women could not be state officials or administrators other than the exceptionally few women who became pharaohs over the course of more than 3000years of dynastic rule.
In ancient Mesopotamian Uruk society— 4000-3100 BCE! that’s between 1,900 and 2,800 years before the earliest part of the Bible was written!— women are shown in art and the earliest snippets of written language in terms of their fertility service to men and excluded from even consideration in depiction of the worldly hierarchy (read “And They Said Let Us Make Gods in Our Image: Gendered Ideologies in Ancient Mesopotamia” by Pollock and Bernbeck for evidence from late Uruk)
I’m just giving passing examples, this isn’t even 1% of the evidence for misogyny and ingrained patriarchy that predates the Bible!
so yes! the Bible codified sexism! duh! but invented it?? or even ‘perfected’ it?? do some fucking reading before talking out of your ass! if you’re a feminist, then the evidence is on your side! there’s no reason to say dumb shit!
like do you really think 2000 years into Bronze Age history when established civilisations were already as old as the Bible is now, someone woke up and thought ‘hey what if women were inferior?’ get your shit together! there’s been a longer history of misogyny before the Bible than after simply by virtue of the fact that it isn’t even that old in the scheme of things.
Misogyny isn’t that young!!
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