AMENDING THE LEGISLATION

Scripture citations are to the King James Version

To every thing there is a season,

and a time to every purpose under the heaven.

– Ecclesiastes 3: 1 –

Throughout the history of the women’s suffrage movement, most politicians disdained the campaigning females. They thought them revolutionary and extremely annoying. Women belonged in the kitchen, the parlour and the bedroom, not the polling station. Accustomed to not being taken seriously, she felt obliged to assert herself, thus appearing less than feminine to the men she attempted to persuade, like the ‘brawling woman’ of Proverbs 21: 9 and 25: 24.

With reference to Emmeline Pankhurst, the well-known campaigner for women’s rights, Britannia magazine (1917) observed –

And so one wondered whether there was anything feminine left in this woman-rebel with a glorious revolutionary past, who tolerated imprisonment and great political persecution. But she did remain a woman. . . .

An ancient example of females who sought remedy from discrimination appears in the book of Numbers. Here we read how the five daughters of Zelophehad, a tribal leader, approached Moses with a grievance. Their deceased father had no son (that is, they had no brother), which meant that under the prevailing law of Israel his land would pass to the nearest male kin outside the immediate family, and they would be disinherited.

Perhaps they, too, were viewed by their male colleagues as speaking out of turn. Nonetheless, their grievance being a just one, Jehovah instructed Moses to amend the law (Ch. 27, vs. 7-9):

[7] . . . give them a possession of an inheritance among their father’s brethren; . . . [8] And thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel, saying, If a man die, and have no son, then ye shall cause his inheritance to pass unto his daughter. [9] And if he have no daughter, then ye shall give his inheritance unto his brethren [brothers].

Among the tribes of Israel, the laws by which property and land rights were handed down from one family to another were of paramount importance. As far back as Abraham, before Israel became a unified people, God offered him land to call his own as far as his eye could see, to every point on the compass, all buttressed with the iron-clad promise that it would become the inheritance of his children (Genesis 13):

[14] Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the place where thou art northward, and southward, and eastward, and westward: [15] For all the land that thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever. . . . [17] Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it; for I will give it unto thee.

To forfeit or disown one’s inheritance was considered a disgrace, as in the case of Esau, who on an impulse renounced his in exchange for a meal to satisfy a ravenous hunger (Genesis 25: 31-34 – ‘Esau despised his birthright’; see also Hebrews 12: 16, 17).

The continuity of possession implied God’s favour upon the nation. By contrast, during the occasional bouts of Israel’s captivity at the hands of Gentile powers, they lost their native land, living as exiles, cut off from the presence of God. This is why the repatriation of Israel to her homeland in 1948, after centuries of wandering, is such a powerful symbol. More than this: it is a guarantee of their eventual exaltation to the place of chief nation on earth.

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