Why Couldn Women Offer Sacrifices?
The theological reason the second author gives for the exclusion of women from the priesthood is “because of the sacrificial function, the only priestly act denied to women.” 49 Women could not offer priestly sacrifices, he writes, because of “the incompatibility of the sacrifice, normally associated with death and sin, and the physiological nature of the woman traditionally associated in the Bible with life and messianic pregnancy.” 50 The notion that women were precluded from the sacrificial function of the priesthood because physiologically their nature is “associated in the Bible with life and messianic pregnancy,” sounds more like an ingenious rabbinical speculation than a biblical reason. Nowhere does the Bible suggest such a reason. Our second author seeks support for his view in the command, “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk” (Ex 23:19), but it doesn’t fit. First, the primary reason for this injunction is generally recognized to be God’s concern to prevent the Isra
