Long Hair and Long Skirts - an Analysis
Workers say that women aren't supposed to wear slacks (based on an inferior interpretation of Deuteronomy 22:5) and that they should not cut their hair (based on an inferior interpretation of 1 Corinthians 11:6,14,15)
The first verse actually reads this way: "A woman shall not wear an article proper to a man, nor shall a man put on a woman's dress; for anyone who does such things is an abomination to the Lord, your God." (Dt 22:5 NAB) The other verses say this: "For if a woman does not have her head veiled, she may as well have her hair cut off...Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears his hair long it is a disgrace to him, whereas if a woman has long hair it is her glory, because long hair has been given for a covering?" (1 Cor 11:6,14-15). Note that Deuteronomy 22:5 says nothing about slacks, dresses, suits, shorts, or any other kind of modern attire. It just says women are not to dress as men or men as women. That doesn't mean their clothing may not be similar in style. After all, if we were transported back to ancient times, we might think men and women did dress alike - even pious Jews following the Law. We might think that because there was, in fact, little difference in their clothing.
Henri Daniel-Rops, in Daily Life in the Time of Jesus, noted that "the same words, coat, cloak, and belt are used indifferently for male and for female garments; and yet there must have been a difference, since the Law utterly forbade men to wear women's clothes and women to wear men's, and since it is clear from the Talmud that doing so gave rise to the suspicion of homosexuality." Most probably the distinction would have been in the greater fineness of the stuff used for women's clothes, and their more ample cut. We learn from the tractate Shabbath, so valuable for information upon costume, that women also wore ribbons made of wool and silk, shawls tied over their clothes, plaited strands, and a variety of ornaments whose utility seems no more evident than that of some of the objects worn at present.
Some Catholic Bibles, in their notes, remark that Deuteronomy 22:5 may be an allusion to immoral practices in the Canaanite religions. What those practices were will be left to the imagination. Suffice it to say that the whole thrust of the verse is that there is a natural difference between men and women that should be manifested in their clothing, but no particular kind of clothing is mandated.
When people conclude that today's women may not wear slacks, they conclude far too much. They read far more into the passage than it warrants. First, it says nothing about what kinds of clothing are reserved (for all time?) fo rmen, what kinds are reserved for women. No Westerners today wear what the ancient Jews wore, so one could argue that all modern men and women, even those dressed conservatively, violate this biblical injunction. Maybe so, but no matter, since it was a disciplinary rule under the Old Law and simply doesn't apply today.
Similarly for hair length. Note the claim is that women aren't supposed to cut their hair at all. Even Paul didn't go that far. He merely wrote against long-haired men and short-haired women, but in that he was writing about a particular custom of his times. Hair length is itself indifferent. Most women in even the strictest Fundamentalist churches acknowledge this in practice, even if they don't in theory, because they do, in fact, cut their hair fairly short, at least by ancient standards.
These two issues demonstrate what happens when purely disciplinary rules are taken to absurd lengths and when rules meant for an earlier time are applied indiscriminately to a later one. This is private interpretation gone haywire, to the entire exclusion of common sense. There is a certain consistency to it, though. If a person concludes the Bible is to be taken at face value in all it says, interpretation becomes easy, so long as one verse is read at a time - and so long as some parts of the Bible are not read at all.
The common-sense application of a passage is usually the right one. Passages that seem not to apply to the modern world usually don't. Don't let your acquaintances convince you otherwise.
- excerpt from Karl Keating, What Catholics Really Believe, pp 127-130
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