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Last night I received an email from a good friend of mine.  He asked:

“I was wondering what one is to do with passages like 1 Peter 3:7, which doesn’t simply say that wives should submit to their husbands, but that they are the “weaker vessel.” I don’t know what to think of this.”

I love honest questions like this; they show that the person is wanting to wrestle with the text in the wild.  While I have not done any work on the passage, or 1st Peter for that matter, after looking at the passage briefly, these are my off-the-cuff thoughts.

Two Views:

There are a couple of ways to view this.  First, you can read the verse in a straightforward manner.  After all, the text does not leave a lot of room here.  Women are ἀσθενεστέρῳ σκεύει – a weaker vessel.  It sure seems as though Peter is stating that women are of a category that are below men.  This seems to be the most straight-forward reading of the text and is hard for us to escape.   [1]

Option One – Actually Weaker/lessor: Using this first interpretation, you can take two further courses of action:

A) You can say that since this teaching is straight from the horse’s (God’s) mouth, we therefore must view all other writings on gender in this light.  This must be are primary filter through which we interpret other passages of scripture.

B) You can say – look, from reading Genesis, the Gospels and early Paul, women are placed on an equal footing with men.  Also, we know that Roman culture gradually seeped into the Church.  Perhaps this is what is happening here.  Perhaps Roman ideology has seeped into Peter’s mind.  Or perhaps, it has not fully left his mind.  We know that he needed a changing of the mind when it came to the status of the gentiles.  We would be following the mindset of well over 99.9999999% of all humans before him (and after) – that women were lesser versions of men. [2]   Can we really blame Peter for letting some of his enculturation leak out?  This would explain the differences nicely – but at the cost of having theological errors in our sacred text.  So, with that said, lets take a look at another way to view this section of 1st Peter.

Reading Two – Subverting Domination: The other base interpretation you can take is that while an isolated reading of the verse seems to indicate the lesser status of women, and that it seems to go against what Jesus and Paul taught, perhaps this is a wrong reading.  After all, all of this is after a discussion of women converting unbelieving husbands.  In their society, women were seen in every way to be the lesser sex – financially, authority, brainpower, physically, etc.  Women could do nothing except act through men.  They did not have honor.  Peter actually seems to be reversing this.  He says for the husbands to honor them.

As a matter of fact, if you don’t honor these people as joint heirs of Christ, then your prayers will be hindered!  With this reading, we have Peter acknowledging the way people traditionally viewed women – and then challenges it.  Or, conversely, you can say that the primary meaning of ἀσθενής is physically weak, with a strong secondary meaning of being marginalized (e.g. poor, oppressed). [3]   This further supports this reading.

Conclusion: Ultimately, I go with this second view.  Peter is demanding that men give honor to their wives even though it would go against everything they have been taught and what everyone around them would be saying.  Thus, Peter is arguing against the marginalization of women that was so very common in Antiquity!

((Now, this is only 20 minutes worth of thought up there.  I am sure some of the complementarians around here will disagree – I am eager to hear your comments. ))

1. With us being good biblical literalists and all [↩]
2. see D’Ambra, Eve. Roman Women. Cambridge University Press, 2006.; Fiorenza, Elisabeth. In Memory of Her. 10th. Herder & Herder, 1994.; Kraemer, Ross Shepard. Women’s Religions in the Greco-Roman World: A Sourcebook. Oxford University Press, USA, 2004.; Lefkowitz, Mary R. Women in Greek Myth. 2nd. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.; Robins, Gay. Women in Ancient Egypt. Harvard University Press, 1993. [↩]
3. see Friberg, Analytical Greek Lexicon; Barclay Newman, Greek-English Dictionary; Louw-Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the NT; Liddell-Scott, Greek Lexicon; Thayer, Greek-English Lexicon of the NT [↩]