Several years ago our little church in NM was searching for a new pastor. When I met the man who eventually became our pastor in 2009 he shared with me a little about his experience in candidating at several churches around that time. He said that the number one question he was asked by pastoral search committees was to describe his stance on women wearing pants. I was shocked that this would be the issue of first importance to many churches. Boy was I naïve!
Fast forward to this week, and I have been studying one of the most controversial passages in the NT, 1 Timothy 2:8-15. This passage includes Paul’s instructions concerning women in the church that they are to “adorn themselves in well-ordered apparel” and “not in braids, gold, pearls, and costly clothing” [My translation]. He tells them to learn “in all submissiveness,” and not “to teach nor have authority over a man,” and concludes with that most enigmatic verse 15, “But she will be saved through childbearing if they remain in faith and love and purity with modesty.” Needless to say, my reading this week has been interesting as different authors weigh in on these verses with a wide array of interpretations.
While doing some casual scrolling across social media, however, I came across a ladies’ Bible study in which the teacher referred to one word from 1 Timothy 2:9 and offered a definition in passing that caught my attention. Referring to the word that I translated apparel, she said, “Modest apparel, katastole, from I Timothy 2:9 is a ‘let-down, long-flowing’ robe, just like that translates out.” She then went on to use this definition to imply that Paul was prohibiting women from wearing pants by making reference to a long-flowing robe.
Now two things jumped out at me right away when I heard her make this statement. First, I had just finished my own study of the passage in Greek and had not come across any definition of katastole that included the idea of a “let-down, long-flowing robe.” And second, I had never heard of an English Bible which used that definition in its translation, as her statement clearly implied.
This got me thinking about how this woman came up with this particular definition of a Greek word that appears nowhere else in the Bible but in 1 Timothy 2:9. I suspected that this definition was derived from the fact that the Greek word in question is a compound word – a preposition, kata, attached to a noun, st?le – since the preposition can mean “down,” and the noun means “a robe.” These thoughts began to trigger a few alarm bells.
One common mistake that we can make when interpreting the Bible has to do with trying to determine the meaning of a word based on its etymology. As Roy Zuck helpfully explains in his book, Basic Bible Interpretation, “Etymology refers to the root derivation and development of words. In etymology the aims are (a) to get back to the root meaning of the word and (b) to see how the word developed.” For example, our English word “hippopotamus” comes from combining the Greek words for horse and river to describe an animal that is something like a river horse.
So a word’s root meaning and how it came to be can be helpful in giving us insight into its meaning in a particular passage. But we must be careful when applying this kind of study technique, because sometimes it can lead us wrong. Sometimes a word comes to mean something totally different over time, like the English word “nice” which comes from the Latin meaning “simple” or “ignorant.” That is certainly not what we mean today when we call someone nice!
Another danger, and the one that this lady and other interpreters of 1 Timothy 2:9 have fallen into is that a compound word cannot always be defined as the sum of its parts. For instance, we all know that a butterfly is not very closely related to the ideas of “butter” and “fly,” nor does a pineapple look much like a pine tree or taste like an apple. The point is that we cannot always define a compound word just by looking at how each part is defined and then putting them together. But that is exactly what is done when the Greek word katastole is defined as “let-down, long-flowing robe.”
But this brings up another question. If a word’s etymology can be helpful in understanding its meaning, how do we use it without coming up with an incorrect definition? The answer is that words mean what their author intended them to mean when he wrote. So although the etymology of katastole might make us think of long, flowing robes, the word itself meant “clothing” or “apparel” as Paul is using it. He is not describing a particular kind of garment, but the right attitude (corresponding to the holy hands and non-combative spirit of the men in v.8) and clothing to match (in contrast with flashy outfits and jewelry intended to draw attention to oneself).
So does this mean that women should or should not wear pants to church? Well, there really isn’t anything in the meaning of Paul’s words here to tell us what specific clothing women should wear, or what is off limits. What we can say for sure is that he’s not defining women’s clothing as “let-down, long-flowing robes” over against a pair of pants.
To be fair to the woman leading the Bible study, I have found some commentaries which make mention of the etymology of katastole. For instance, in John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible he says, “that women adorn themselves in modest apparel: the word rendered ‘apparel’ signifies a long robe, which reaches down to the feet.” However, Gill goes on to explain, “that he would not have them come to public worship in rags, and in dirty and filthy garments, but that their bodies should be covered with clean and decent raiment.”
A much more recent example is found in John Kitchen’s The Pastoral Epistles for Pastors in which he notes the etymology of the word but then explains that it came to denote the inward demeanor especially as it is expressed in clothing. He concludes that “Paul has both clothing (v.9) and conduct (v.10) in mind here. The word reminds us that, regardless of our gender, the outward says something about the inward.”
As always, our goal should be to rightly understand God’s word, not to use it to support any particular position we take on an issue.