A Freedom That Should Never Have Been Taken Away
The Torah Exalted Women. The Fence Buried Them. Christianity Kept Them Buried.
They were not wounded by the cross. They were wounded by the fence.
What the Torah Actually Said About Women
Before the fence. Before the Talmud. Before the rabbinical tradition built its walls. Before Christianity inherited those walls and rebuilt them in Latin and Greek and every language the gospel traveled. Before any of that, there was the Torah of Moshe (Moses). And the Torah of Moshe did not oppress women.
It exalted them.
Miriam, the sister of Moshe and Aharon (Aaron), the woman who stood at the edge of the Nile and watched over the infant who would deliver Israel, the woman who led the women of Israel in song and dance at the sea after the exodus, is named in the Torah as a prophet. Not a helper. Not a supporter of a male prophet. A prophet. Exodus 15:20, Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a tambourine in her hand, and all the women went out after her with tambourines and dancing. She led. Israel followed.
Devorah (Deborah), judge of Israel. Not the wife of a judge. Not the assistant to a judge. The judge. Sitting under her palm tree between Ramah and Bethel, with all Israel coming to her for judgment. When the general Barak was summoned to war he refused to go without her. Not because she was decorative. Because she was the authority. Judges 4, if you will go with me I will go, but if you will not go with me I will not go. And she went. And Israel prevailed.
Ruth, a Moabite woman. A foreigner. A widow. A member of one of the nations the Torah specifically named as excluded from the assembly to the tenth generation. And the Torah gave her an entire book. Named after her. Centering her loyalty, her courage, her declaration — where you go I will go, where you die I will die, as the portrait of covenant faithfulness. Her great-grandson was David. Her lineage ran directly to Yeshua (Jesus).
Rahab, a prostitute in Jericho. A Canaanite woman. By every category the tradition would later construct she was the outermost outsider, the least qualified, the most excluded. And the Torah records her as the one who hid the spies, who made the covenant with the scarlet thread, who was brought into Israel and whose lineage also ran directly to Yeshua. She is named in the genealogy of the Messiah.
Seven of the fifty-five prophets recorded in the Hebrew scriptures were women. The Ten Commandments required honor for both mother and father, and the mother comes first in Leviticus 19:3. The daughters of Zelophehad came to Moshe and demanded their inheritance rights when there were no sons, and YHWH told Moshe they were right. The covenant was amended in their favor. YHWH sided with the women.
This is the Torah. This is Moshe. This is the covenant that carried the name of YHWH 6,828 times across every generation, including the generations of women who led, prophesied, judged, and carried the covenant forward when the men around them failed.
The Torah gave women Miriam, prophet and liberator. Devorah, judge of nations. Ruth, portrait of covenant faithfulness. Rahab, ancestor of the Messiah. Seven prophets out of fifty-five. The covenant amended in favor of the daughters of Zelophehad. This was not a system that oppressed women. This was a system that exalted them.
What the Fence Did
The fence arrived gradually. It did not announce itself as the replacement of Moses. It presented itself as the protection of Moses. As the safeguard of the covenant. As the necessary hedge around the holy things.
And it was built by men who had been shaped by something Moses never authorized, Hellenism. The Greek philosophical world with its profound and systematic contempt for women. The same Gentile influence the fence laws claimed to be protecting Israel against had entered through the back door and shaped the thinking of the very rabbis who were building the fence.
The Babylonian Talmud states it plainly, women are a separate people. Not a misquote. Not a fringe position. The foundational rabbinic document of post-Temple Judaism declares women a separate people. Despite the Torah’s first chapter of Genesis, in which both male and female are created equally in the image of YHWH, the rabbinical tradition was far more comfortable with the secondary creation narrative of Genesis 2, reading woman as a secondary conception, at a further remove from the divine.
This is not Moses. Genesis 1:27, so YHWH created humanity in his image, in the image of YHWH he created them, male and female he created them. Both. Together. In the image. The Torah said it clearly. The fence said otherwise.
And then the fence began to build its specific walls around women. Women were exempted from time-bound commandments, which sounds like a kindness but functioned as exclusion. Because exemption from the commandments meant exemption from communal religious life. Women could not be counted in the minyan, the ten required for public prayer. Women could not read from the Torah in the assembly. Women could not lead services. Women were eventually barred from Torah study entirely, first exempted, then discouraged, then prohibited.
The Mishnah records Rabbi Eliezer’s statement without apology, whoever teaches his daughter Torah teaches her lasciviousness. The daughter of Moshe’s covenant. The inheritor of Miriam’s prophetic tradition. Told by the fence that learning the Torah her ancestor delivered was equivalent to immorality.
And then the eruv.
The Eruv
The Fence Made Visible
Most people outside observant Jewish communities have never heard the word eruv. Inside those communities it is a practical necessity, a symbolic boundary, a wire strung between poles around a neighborhood, that makes Sabbath life manageable for families.
Here is what it is and why it exists.
The Torah says do not work on the Sabbath. The fence law system, the oral Torah, the rabbinical elaboration of Sabbath restrictions into thirty-nine specific categories of prohibited activity, defined carrying any object outside your home as work. Not Moses. The fence. The Torah’s Sabbath command said rest. The fence said carrying a key, pushing a stroller, holding a child outside your front door, work. Prohibited. A violation.
The consequence for women with young children was total. Without a solution, a mother with an infant could not leave her home on the Sabbath. Could not carry the child to the assembly. Could not push the stroller to the park. Could not walk to a neighbor’s home with the baby in her arms. The fence that claimed to protect the Sabbath had made the Sabbath a sentence of confinement for the women most responsible for the next generation of the covenant community.
So the rabbis built another fence to solve the first fence. A physical boundary, wire strung around poles, enclosing a neighborhood, that symbolically declared the public space private. Inside the eruv, carrying was permitted. Because inside the eruv, by legal fiction, you were still at home.
This is the eruv. A physical fence built around Jewish homes and neighborhoods so that mothers could carry their children. Because the first fence had made that impossible.
The fence built a problem. Then built a fence to solve it. The solution was a fence. And it is still in use today, in Manhattan, Jerusalem, Brooklyn, London, and hundreds of communities worldwide. Wires on poles. The fence law system made visible. A wire boundary declaring the world manageable, because without it, the fence had made the world a prison for women and children on the one day the Torah declared holy.
The Torah said rest on the Sabbath. The fence said carrying a child outside your door is work, prohibited. The eruv is a wire fence strung around neighborhoods so that mothers could carry their children on the Sabbath. A fence built to solve the problem the fence created. The solution was always another fence.
Not the Cross. The Fence.
Every woman who has ever been told her voice is not authorized in the assembly, she was not wounded by the cross. She was wounded by the fence.
Every woman who was told that teaching men was outside her permitted role, not wounded by the cross. Wounded by the fence. The Mishnah’s conviction that women are a separate people, inherited by Christianity through Jerome’s Latin Bible, through the councils that shaped doctrine, through two thousand years of institutional religion built on the rabbinical framework it claimed to have superseded while rebuilding it in different language.
Every woman told she could not lead, could not preach, could not prophesy, could not judge, could not speak with authority in the assembly of the covenant people, she was told this not by Moses, not by the Torah, not by YHWH who sided with the daughters of Zelophehad and named seven women among the prophets and put Devorah on the judge’s seat and Miriam at the head of the procession at the sea.
She was told this by the fence. The fence that entered Christianity as the first and most fundamental social structure the tradition imported from the system the cross had demolished. The fence that oppressed women in the name of holiness. The fence that confined mothers to their homes in the name of Sabbath rest. The fence that barred daughters from Torah in the name of piety.
Not Moses. Not YHWH. Not the Torah. Not the cross.
The fence.
The Wound That Keeps Being Given
Matthew Shepard was beaten and left tied to a fence post in Wyoming in 1998. The men who did it did not claim to be acting in the name of Moses. They were shaped by a tradition of exclusion, of insider and outsider, clean and unclean, authorized and unauthorized, that traced its roots not to the cross but to the fence law system that the cross had demolished and Christianity had rebuilt.
His wound was the fence.
Every person told by an institution that their love is outside the boundary, the fence. Every person told their gender disqualifies them from the presence, the fence. Every person told their history, their background, their family, their nation, their sexuality, their failure places them on the wrong side of the line, the fence. Every person who walked away from Christianity’s institutions carrying the weight of rejection and condemnation and exclusion, carrying the wound of the fence while believing they had been rejected by the cross.
They were not rejected by the cross. The cross has no rejection in it. The cross tore the veil from the top. The cross opened the way for all flesh. The cross is where the one who was all flesh, YHWH fully present in a human body, absorbed the entire weight of every system of exclusion and condemnation and gave it nowhere left to stand.
The fence is where the wounds come from. Not the cross.
And the fence has been rebuilt so many times, in so many languages, by so many institutions claiming to speak for the cross, that millions of people carry wounds they believe the cross gave them. Wounds that the cross never gave. Wounds that the fence gave. In the name of the one who demolished the fence.
Millions of people carry wounds they believe the cross gave them. The cross gave them nothing of the kind. The cross tore the veil from the top. It opened the way for all flesh. Every wound of exclusion, condemnation, rejection, and confinement, the fence gave those wounds. In the name of the one who demolished the fence.
Miriam’s Freedom
What Was Always True
Miriam never lost her freedom in the Torah. The Torah gave it to her fully. Prophet. Leader. Liberator. The woman who watched over Moshe at the Nile. The woman who led Israel’s women in song at the sea. The woman YHWH named alongside her brothers as the ones who brought Israel out of Egypt, Micah 6:4, I sent before you Moshe, Aharon, and Miriam.
Three liberators. YHWH named them. One was a woman. She was not secondary. She was not exempted. She was not confined. She was named. By YHWH. As a liberator of the covenant people.
The fence took that freedom away. The fence built a wire boundary around her daughters’ homes so they could carry their children on the day YHWH declared holy. The fence told her daughters that learning the Torah she helped deliver was equivalent to immorality. The fence told her daughters that their voices were indecent in the assembly. The fence told her daughters they were a separate people.
And Christianity inherited the fence. And rebuilt it. And called it holy. And wounded every woman who felt the call that Miriam answered, the call to lead, to prophesy, to speak, to go out from her home and stand at the edge of the sea and declare what YHWH had done.
The freedom Miriam had was never the fence’s to take. It was given by YHWH. Declared in the Torah. Confirmed by Devorah on the judge’s seat, by Ruth in the field, by Rahab at the window with the scarlet thread, by the daughters of Zelophehad standing before Moshe and being told by YHWH, they are right.
The cross did not take that freedom. The cross restored it. The cross demolished every wall, including the wall that had been built around women in the name of holiness and covenant and Torah and Sabbath, and declared all flesh equally held in the one in whom all the fullness of the divine presence dwelt.
All flesh. Including every daughter of Miriam who was ever told the fence was the will of YHWH.
It was not. It never was. It was always just the fence.
The Torah gave women Miriam. The fence gave women a wire boundary around their homes so they could carry their children.
The Torah gave women Devorah on the judge’s seat. The fence gave women exemption from the assembly, exclusion from Torah study, and confinement to the private realm.
The Torah gave women Ruth and Rahab in the genealogy of the Messiah. The fence gave women a tradition that called their voices indecent and their learning immorality.
The cross gave women all flesh. No categories. No walls. No confinement. No wire boundary defining how far a mother could walk with her child before she was in violation.
The wounds did not come from the cross. They came from the fence. And the fence has no authority.
It never did. It was always just the fence.
The Gospel Revolution • Mike Williams Ministries
William Ethan Massengill • Michael Lilborn Williams • Daniel Thomas Rouse
Published by Audrey Williams