Another Claim That Patriarchy is God's Plan Bites the Dust

plus, why women were not priests in ancient Israel

Feb 24, 2025

IN THIS ARTICLE: Some interpretations of the Genesis creation story support the subjugation of women. One is the idea that the Garden of Eden was the prototype of the Jerusalem Temple (and Adam, but not Eve, was its priest). This article proves otherwise, which is crucial for how we treat women today.

"They oughtn't never let a woman behind a wheel. Boy, if I was there, she wouldn't do it, if I had anything to say about it. ...Yet, she's set there and push her hair up. And she turn out like this, and make a left's right, and everything. But, oh, course, the police ain't going to say that …” William Branham.1

William Branham is the abusive false prophet behind The Message, the cult in which I spent my first three decades. His misogyny is well-noted, but his words and the underlying philosophical beliefs are not much different than those of many fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals. Their arguments are more sophisticated, and their language nicer than Branham’s, but wrong is wrong. This includes an argument that some pastors are now offering: the Garden of Eden was God’s first temple, and Adam was the only priest.

Many biblical scholars note the parallels between the Genesis creation stories and the Jerusalem Temple. Tim Mackie has discussed this on Bible Project podcasts, and Shara Drimalla laid out the evidence with the Bible Project team in a 2021 article.2 The crucial data for the argument I will counter in this article is the phrase the NIV translates as “work and take care” in Genesis 2:15 - The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.

Shara Drimalla notes that “to work” is translated from the Hebrew word ‘abad (עבד) and is used in texts describing the work of Levites in the Tabernacle (Num. 3:7-8; 4:23-24; 4:26). And the word translated “to keep” or “to take care of” is shamar (שמר), a common word describing priests serving in worship and texts about the observance of religious duties (Leviticus 18:5). It’s also the word for describing the responsibility of Levites to guard the tabernacle from unlawful entry (Numbers 1:53, 3:7-8). Further:

These two verbs ‘abad (עבד) and shamar (שמר) are used together as a phrase to refer either to Israelites serving and guarding/obeying God’s word, or, more frequently, of the priests and the Levites who serve God in the temple and who guard the temple (Numbers 3:7-8, 8:25-26, 18:5-6; 1 Chronicles 23:32; Ezekiel 44:14).3

However, where the Bible Project team sees Adam and Eve as priests in the Garden temple, some argue that only Adam fills this role.4 If Adam is the only priest in Eden, then patriarchy (man’s rule or preferential status over woman) could be seen as a creational ideal and not an effect of sin. Thus, men and women should forever relate in an authority-and-submission paradigm, with men as leaders.

How could anyone claim Adam was the only priest? The claim is that God “put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it” before God created Eve. Thus, this argument says it was Adam’s job, not Eve’s.

This is a different argument than more well-known reasons for seeing patriarchy pre-Fall. Advocates for the “only Adam was a priest” argument can say, “It doesn’t matter that primogeniture (preferential status for the first-born) doesn’t work since God overturns primogeniture every time it figures prominently in a story in Genesis.” They can say, “It doesn’t matter that the word we translate as “helper” (ezer) is used most often of God as “the helper” of his people, and so does not, by itself, denote an inferior relation” (and in fact could denote a superior if ezer wasn’t modified by kenegdo, often translated “suitable” and most literally meaning “as in front of him,” indicating an equal).5

However, this “Adam as the only priest” argument doesn’t work either. Here are the reasons why “work and take care/keep and guard” in Gen 2:15 applies to both sexes: First, the language of Genesis 1 has just as many textual links to the temple and priests as Genesis 2. And Genesis 1 puts both sexes in charge. This is clear in English and clearer in Hebrew.

So God created human beings in his own image.

In the image of God he created them;

male and female he created them.

Then God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it. Reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground.” — Genesis 1:27-28

The Hebrew verbs are plural. They all apply to male and female (including “govern” and “reign”). Governance, particularly, is tied to the image of God. All animals “multiply,” but God only asked male and female humans to govern.6

In the ancient Near East, kings placed images of gods in their temples. And some Egyptian and Mesopotamian kings were called “the image” of their gods. But in Genesis, God created his own temple and put his own image inside. In Genesis 1, the metaphorical temple is the world; in Gen 2, it is the Garden (and would turn into the whole world as humans filled it). Genesis 1 shows that all humans were to represent the true God. We see this in Psalm 8:5-6 too.

This involves both monarchical authority and the priestly work of mediating the divine presence. Genesis 1 implies that all creation is God’s temple, built in seven days (“seven stages” is associated with temple building in the ancient Near East - on the seventh day, the god would take up residence). Psalm 148 and Isaiah 66:1 confirm the cosmos as God’s sanctuary. The man and woman of Gen 1:27-28 are thus priests.

Second, the Genesis 2 creation account focuses on the Garden of Eden and tells us why God created one human before the other: to show that it is not good for the male to be alone. This is the reason stated in the text — any other reason is conjecture.

Adam was given two directives before Eve was created:

The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. (Genesis 2:15)
But the Lord God warned him, “You (second person masculine singular) may freely eat the fruit of every tree in the garden— except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If you eat its fruit, you are sure to die.” (Genesis 2:16-17)

Both the priestly task and the prohibition about the fruit apply to Eve. It is not logical to assume one of these applies but not the other when both occurred before her creation.

From our vantage, we know the command about the trees applies to Eve because of the third chapter. But how did the serpent know it applied to her since the text doesn’t say God told her? The text emphatically says that God told Adam before Eve was created. Every “you” is singular. “Adam, you can’t do this.”

It violates the literary structure of Genesis to say that “work and care for” wouldn’t apply to Eve even though “don’t eat the fruit” did. If Adam alone is to work/keep/guard/protect, then we would expect that the text would state that only the male would bother with this command, but both sexes would obey the second one.

We already see the opposite in Genesis 1, which indicates her equal authority. We could add that ancient sources such as Jubilees (2nd century B.C.) and Antiquities 1.38 by Josephus (first century A.D.) say that God gave both Adam and Eve this task. Jubilees 3:15 says, just before the Fall, “Adam and his wife had been in the garden of Eden for seven years tilling and guarding it.” If we can call the man a “priest in the garden temple,” we must apply it to the woman.

Whatever separate functions they fulfill will be natural to their design. Only women can bear and nurse children. Men are usually heavier, taller, and stronger, but not always. These basic facts will lead to various implications, but we don’t see a hierarchy, and we don’t see one created to use their mind at a higher level than the other.

Post-fall, the eschatological promise is that all of Israel – men and women – would be a kingdom of priests: Isaiah 61:1-2:

The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is upon me, for the Lord has anointed me to bring good news … He has sent me to tell those who mourn that the time of the Lord’s favor has come …You will be called priests of the Lord, ministers of our God.

This prophecy is picked up in the NT by Jesus in the synagogue (Luke 4:17-21), just as Joel’s prophecy about both men and women being prophets (Joel 2:28-29) is picked up by Peter in Acts 2:17-18. Our perfect, forever high priest Jesus Christ ended the Levitical priesthood and has made all of us – women and men – royal priests (1 Peter 2:9). This is a present reality because of the cross:

And you are living stones that God is building into his spiritual temple …. you are his holy priests. -- 1 Peter 2:5

All glory to him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by shedding his blood for us. He has made us a Kingdom of priests for God his Father. – Rev 1:5-6

This priesthood of all believers (men and women) includes the aspect of governance:

And you have caused them to become a Kingdom of priests for our God. And they will reign on the earth. – Rev 5:10

Then Why Weren’t Women Priests In Ancient Israel?

On February 16, 2025, SBTS President Al Mohler and Joe Rigney (a colleague of Doug Wilson) discussed their belief that empathy is sinful and a “feminine” trait that makes women unfit for church leadership. Then, they tied it to the ancient Israelite priesthood. Rigney explained to an approving Mohler that women were not permitted to be priests because priests (and now pastors) were “charged fundamentally with guarding the doctrine and worship of the church – of setting the perimeter for what is in and out. That’s the calling. And therefore, the sex that says, that is bent and wired towards care and nurture, compassion, and empathy is ill-suited to that role.”7

In this view, we are wrong if we expect leaders to be particularly full of the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22-23) or act like Paul and his ministry team toward the church: “But we were gentle among you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children. So, being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us” (1 Thess. 2:7-8).

However, there are two reasons women were not Israelite priests, even though they were prophets. The first is easy — because of the Fall. The plainly stated reason in the text for man’s rule over woman is Genesis 3:16. Patriarchy is listed with death, painful toil, thorns and thistle, and pain in childbirth as a result of the Fall. One may ask,
”Wouldn’t the Law have outlawed patriarchy if it were not God’s ideal”? Well, it didn’t outlaw slavery or polygamy. More about why in later posts. For now, the point suffices.

Second, we cannot equate physical situations with intellectual, emotional, and spiritual ones. To say that we must restrict women in society today because they weren’t priests at the Jerusalem Temple is to ignore context. Levitical priests had to do physical things that most women weren’t strong enough to do. When we think of priests, we think of Catholic, Orthodox, or Anglican priests doing things like serving communion and hearing confession. Robert Kugler points out that the priests in ancient Israel had different duties:

“The main task of priests was expert butchery: slaughtering animals, flaying them, cutting up the meat and distributing it, sprinkling and pouring blood on and around the altar, and putting fat and fatty pieces of meat on the altar.”8

N.T. Wright agrees that the Temple was the “main slaughterhouse and butcher’s guild: butchery was one of the main skills a priest had to possess.”9 This was without the benefit of mechanized equipment or other modern gadgetry. Women, in general, would not have been strong enough for the job.

Finally, we should be on guard when men start basing restrictions on the Torah’s laws concerning the priesthood. Leviticus 21:17-23 bars Levites with disabilities from making sacrificial offerings in the Holy Place (specifically, those who have a “defect,” defined as those who are “blind or lame, disfigured or deformed; no man with a crippled foot or hand, or who is a hunchback or a dwarf, or who has any eye defect, or who has festering or running sores or damaged testicles”) (Lev. 21:18-20). While there are disability-affirming ways of contextualizing this passage,10 the same “plain reading” often applied to prohibitions against women is clear in this case.

Adam was a priest. Eve was a priest. While they failed their priestly calling, Christ has redeemed the fallen human race. In our union with Christ, we are all (men and women alike, no matter how differently abled) priests before our God.

Your Sons and Daughters will Prophesy: New Creation Musings

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