In an age where the dialectics of morality and culture intersect violently with the commercialization of chastity, the claim that a woman’s virginity justifies her monetary worth within matrimonial negotiations reveals both a theological distortion and a socio-cultural regression. Public figures like Reno Omokri, by anchoring the bride price on the hymenal state of a woman, unconsciously revive archaic constructs that Christ Himself came to overturn. Such positions are not merely antiquated—they are affronts to divine dignity and a desecration of the image of God in womankind.
To predicate a woman’s value on her virginity is to reduce her celestial identity to a carnal checkpoint, an ideology that fractures the kingdom vision of equality in redemption. The Scriptures declare in Galatians 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” How then do we segregate and commodify what Christ has united in worth? Her virtue, her wisdom, her contribution to generational transformation—these are the true currencies of worth, not the state of her anatomy. Proverbs 31:30 underscores, “Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the LORD, she shall be praised.”
In Igbo cosmology, a woman is an altar of continuity, not a commodity to be bargained. As the Obi of Onitsha once said, “A woman is the womb of the land; to dishonour her is to curse the soil that feeds you.” Yoruba philosophy similarly upholds the sanctity of womanhood, encapsulated in the adage, “Obinrin ni ile aye_— woman is the foundation of the earth.” These traditional affirmations are in harmony with the Holy biblical truths. Proverbs 31:10 proclaims, “Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies.”
Yet society remains complicit in enthroning men as self righteous and unrepentant defilers while crucifying women for their perceived impurities. Jesus, when confronted with the woman caught in adultery, knelt down and wrote on the ground, saying in John 8:7, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” This divine posture rebukes the selective morality still prevalent in our systems.
1 Corinthians 6:20 reminds us, “For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.” The body is a temple, whether male or female, and any culture that treats the temple of one gender as merchandise while excusing the desecration of another’s undermines God’s justice.
The commodification of female virginity must bow to the cruciform economy of grace, where worth is not weighed by biology but by the blood of Jesus Christ. Romans 5:8 declares, “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Let the redeemed value what God values—not the hymen, but the heart. And may the church arise to proclaim Isaiah 61:1 over every shamed daughter of Zion: “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me… to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.”
– Inah Boniface Ocholi writes from Ayah – Igalamela/Odolu LGA, Kogi state.
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