Why a woman bearing the sword is an abomination to the Lord

Monday, March 2, 2026
first published May 2018

Being raised on a diet of superheroes, Power Rangers, Starfleet officers and—my shameful confession—Planeteers, this conclusion did not come naturally to me. Thanks to cultural conditioning, drawing on generations of feminism, my intuitions about women’s roles were, for many years, way off what scripture and nature say they should be. And because of my affinity with certain geek subcultures, I had strong affective reasons to turn a blind eye on the matter; who wants to be that guy who says Wonder Woman and Buffy and Peggy Carter and Supergirl are detestable to God?

Well, maybe Supergirl.

I used to like many of these shows and movies and characters—in fact, to some extent, I still do. I certainly didn’t want to give them up. Indeed, most conservative Christians see nothing wrong with kick-ass, bad-ass, and whatever-other-kinds-of-ass female characters in popular media. Nonetheless, I am afraid this says much more about our submission to the world than about our fidelity to revelation—because the evidence of both nature and scripture is pretty clear if you care to examine it.

Two paradigm cases of this would be soldiers and cops; but this prohibition extends to superheroes and slayers too.

1. The evidence of nature

Although we have to be careful with natural theology, since our intuitions are easily affected by cultural or personal factors, it remains that God expects us to recognize certain facts of creation as obvious (e.g., Romans 1:18ff). This is because he has built into us at least two intuitions which can be straightforwardly applied to mankind itself:

i. Form follows function

I would hope this is an uncontroversial principle for Christians. I would hope we’d all agree that the design of things reflects God’s purpose for them. And so I would hope we’d further agree that men are designed for protecting and providing, while women are designed for nurturing and caring—not just because the Bible says so, but because God made us to intuit our functions from our forms. Scripture itself assumes that we already know these things innately.

It isn’t terribly difficult to see how this works with regard to men and women’s roles; you just have to be willing to notice it. The fact that, generally speaking, God created men with strong muscles and agonistic instincts, while he created women with weaker muscles and conciliatory instincts, is neither an incidental curiosity, nor a hurdle for women to overcome in their struggle for equality. The fact that men respond to sudden stress with anger and aggression, while women respond with fear and flight, ❋ Daniel Dashnaw, “Startling Differences Between Men and Women” (February 2017). https://couplestherapyinc.com/startling-differences-men-and-women/. is not an odd quirk to be corrected; it is a central reason to believe that men were created for combative roles and women were not. God created Adam to exercise dominion by going out and subduing the world piece by piece. Adam needed a helper, not because he required backup in this agonistic task, but because the task itself was pointless if there was no one to then stay in each subdued area to fill it and make it home.

There is a reason that men are not generally attracted to forceful, aggressive women, and why women are not attracted to deferent, delicate men. Despite every effort of feminism, it is very hard to override our created natures to think that commanding women are capable rather than bossy; or that compliant men are respectful rather than feeble; because we instinctively know that what is virtuous in one sex is gross in the other. A manly woman has not added extra virtues to her femininity; she has destroyed her femininity by becoming butch. An effeminate man has not layered feminine virtues on top of his masculinity; he has defiled it by joining the ranks of the malakoi (cf. 1 Cor 6:9, NASB).

ii. It is wrong to make a thing serve the opposite of its natural function

This principle flows from the first. The Bible takes it for granted in many places, perhaps most explicitly in Romans 1:26–27; but it is revealed throughout the Torah as well.

Suffice to say that the defining function of a woman is to give life. This is obvious from her design, but cf. also Genesis 3:20; 1 Timothy 2:15. Her special place as homemaker (Pr 31; 1 Tim 5:14–15) is a natural extension of this. That is why God cursed Eve’s child-bearing, just as he cursed Adam’s defining functions: managing the earth and providing for his family. This being so, women carrying the sword as a matter of general principle inverts their natural function. Even if they did have the disposition and physique for it, their very nature is to create and nurture life, not to threaten and end it. For this reason also, it is a detestable thing for a woman to bear the sword.

2. The evidence of scripture

We should expect nature and scripture to teach the same things, and they do. Our second line of evidence is therefore exegetical. Although there are many passages we could examine and synthesize, one in particular is instructive for serving as a clear instance of our general principle. This is Deuteronomy 22:5:

The trappings of a man shall not be upon a woman, and a man shall not clothe himself in the garments of a woman; in that an abomination of Yahweh thy god are all that do these. Deuteronomy 22:5, my translation

Most Bibles ignore the distinct vocabulary used here, and try to explain the text rather than represent it. The NIV is tyical: “A woman must not wear men’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing…” The Hebrew vocabulary, however, is more specific than this. The second part, speaking of how a man is not to wear the garments of a woman, does indeed use the standard term silmat for clothes, and ishsha for woman. But the first part, speaking of what manly things a woman may not to wear, does not use silmat; neither is man ish. Rather, the terms keli and geber are used.

This lack of symmetry is conspicuous considering the Hebrew tendency to rhyme ideas. What is the difference of terminology intended to convey?

Geber

Geber appears only here in Deuteronomy, out of the hundreds of times men are mentioned; it derives from gabar, meaning strong or mighty. This root appears two other times in Deuteronomy—referring to God’s might (Dt 3:24; 10:17). Another common word you may have heard that derives from this root is gibborim; mighty-ones (Gen 6:4; Ex 12:37; Josh 10:2; 2 Sam 1:25 etc).

While geber is sometimes used as a synonym for ish, man, it carries a specific connotation: of “man as strong, distinguished from women, children, and non-combatants whom he is to defend.” ❋ Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon, Unabridged, “geber” (nd). http://biblehub.com/hebrew/1397.htm. Given its completely unique usage here in Deuteronomy 22:5, we certainly should expect that this specific connotation is intentional.

Keli

Geber is paired with keli rather than silmat—referring not to clothes, but to articles or equipment. Keli is a very general term, much like “thing” in English; its meaning must be inferred from context. In most cases it is a term for something like implements. For instance, in the context of picking fruit it refers to a basket or bag (Dt 23:24), while in the context of embarking to battle it refers to combat gear (Dt 1:41); indeed, it is the same word used in the phrase typically translated “armor-bearer” (e.g., Jdg 9:54), though armor-bearers ironically carried much more than armor. The best word to capture the full range of meaning, in my view, is “trappings”—an excellent general term for articles of equipment or dress.

Geber + keli

Coupling keli with geber therefore makes Deuteronomy 22:5 much more specific than mere garments. Some translations recognize this: the KJV, rather than saying “men’s clothing,” walks a decent neutral road with “that which pertaineth unto a man”—which at least makes clear that there are specific things a man wears that a woman should not. The ISV renders it similarly: “what is appropriate to a man.” Other translations like the LEB take a stab with “apparel of a man,” but this is rather too weak. To translate keli geber accurately, we should keep the generic nature of the words intact, but also recognize the contextual cues when selecting the best English rendering. What the passage is saying, in fact, is that it’s detestable for women to don the gear of men.

What would that refer to contextually? Obviously things like armor, helmets, swords and bucklers. When women’s apparel is rhymed conceptually with men’s, the difference in word choice is natural, because men’s apparel in a nation about to take the promised land by force included plenty of elements that women’s did not.

Older exegetes heed the significance of the vocabulary used (Gill for example, and rabbinical exegetes as well). ❋ While very poorly written, this paper competently marshals the relevant sources and arguments: Ovidiu Dascalu, “The rationale of the ban on cross-dressing in Deuteronomy 22,5” (2014). https://www.academia.edu/8991392/The_rationale_of_the_ban_on_cross-dressing_in_Deuteronomy_22_5. Many academic sources also note the lack of parallel vocabulary and speak to its import. For example, “Warfare, Ritual, and Symbol in Biblical and Modern Contexts” observes:

Interpreting כלי גבר as battle gear rather than “man’s apparel” (NRSV) was proposed by Cyrus H. Gordon (“A Note on the Tenth Commandment,” JAAR 31 [1963]: 208–209) and finds precedent in the Talmud (b. Nazir 59a) and Tg. Onkelos (see B. Grossfeld’s translation … “A woman should not wear a man’s armament”). The verse is situated in a chiasm that spans Deut 19:1–22:8 and is the structural counterpart of the warfare laws of 20:1–18 … Deuteronomy 19:1–22:8 applies the prohibition of murder (5:17) to various life-and-death situations, including warfare … ❋ Frank Ritchel Ames, “The Red-Stained Warrior in Ancient Israel,” Warfare, Ritual, and Symbol in Biblical and Modern Contexts (2014): 95, n. 35.

Although many less technical commentators (along with translators) gloss over the distinction between geber and ish, and between keli and silmat, keli is never used of clothes in the Old Testament, and geber is unique in Deuteronomy. Words mean things, their connotations mean things, and the choices God made about which of them to use mean things.

Application in the modern day

This is surely straightforward. Inasmuch as the same fundamental gear is still used for the same fundamental purposes, it is offensive, detestable, abominable to God that women should aspire to don it. Of course, it is not the apparel itself which concerns God—it is not as if a woman can’t even sling her husband’s sword over her shoulder to carry it from one place to another while tidying up! This would not be a transgression of gender norms. Neither, in the modern day, would a woman carrying a firearm for self-defense violate this passage. The issue is not any kind of wearing of these things; it is gendered piety. Men are not to behave as women; women are not to behave as men. As the CEV puts it, Women must not pretend to be men, and men must not pretend to be women. The LORD your God is disgusted with people who do that.

In other words, while popular culture shrieks in outrage at the very notion of a “man’s job,” God is outraged at the very notion of a woman doing a man’s job.

In fact, it is often disgusting even to acculturated men when it happens in real life, because without the gloss of a sexy actress dolled up in clothing designed to augment her attractiveness rather than her combat ability—and without her physical incapability for the task being hidden by stuntwork—it is simply ugly.

For those who are inured, or wont to deny that ugliness reflects anything deeper, or triggered at my mere use of that term, the only plausible option for disagreeing with the Bible on this point looks to be cultural relativism. “That was then and this is now.” Roles change depending on society. It’s progress baby.

But this obviously begs the question against the principles of natural function I have already adduced, while also having no hermeneutical principle to justify it. A feminist might be cool with that, but no Bible-believing Christian should be willing to dismiss this instance of gender roles as culturally-conditioned while simultaneously insisting that other gender roles in the family and church are not. What is the principle on which we can say that the role of carrying the sword was culturally relative, but the role of ruling a family or assembly was not? It’s so obviously ad hoc—especially when we realize that the sword is the key instrument of rulership in the civil domain.

Thus, Deuteronomy 22:5 is a useful case that proves the broad principles of men and women’s roles. There are created distinctions between us: we are meant for different roles, exemplified in different virtues. Masculine virtues are exemplified in things like being alert and courageous, to engage in conflict and exercise strength against opposition (e.g. 1 Cor 16:13; 1 Sam 4:9); feminine virtues are exemplified in deference, gentleness, and quietness (e.g. 1 Pet 3:3–4). And as Peter immediately goes on to illustrate in that passage, men and women are therefore subject to different vices also: e.g., men to being overbearing and contemptuous (v. 7); women to being vain and fearful (vv. 3, 6). Elsewhere, other tendencies are also addressed—for instance, men must resist being angry and contentious (1 Tim 2:8), and too hard on their children (Eph 6:4; Col 3:21); women are prone to deception (1 Tim 2:14; 2 Tim 3:6), and idle socialization as gossips and busybodies (1 Tim 5:13; cf. “old wives tales” in 1 Tim 4:7, ASV). The virtues and vices we are inclined to are different because they reflect the functions we are made for, which are different.

Mutual guilt

By way of closing, one final thought: if a man’s function is directed toward protecting women and exercising authority, then a woman bearing the sword is not merely detestable because she is violating her intended purpose; it is detestable because it cannot happen except by a man first violating his intended purpose. To bear the sword is by nature to put oneself in harm’s way. Therefore, it is not just women who sin when they do this, by rebelling against their created design; it is men also, by failing to prevent women putting themselves into the kind of danger that men were designed for. Western culture is thus subject to double condemnation. How shall we escape it?

The evangelical way of preaching the gospel has not succeeded here; indeed, it has adopted feminism enthusiastically. To restore God’s design for the sexes in the world, we must first restore God’s design for preaching his gospel as a message of the triumph of his chosen king over the world. We must start treating the great commission as a directive to conquer. ❋ See chapter 9 of my book: Dominic Bnonn Tennant, The Spine of Scripture: God's Kingdom from Eden to Eternity (2019). https://www.amazon.com.au/Spine-Scripture-Gods-Kingdom-Eternity/dp/0473479818.