Women and Men in Scripture and the Church

helpful rule of thumb is to ask three key questions whenever we read the Bible:
What can we know about the historical situation of the time and what might this tell us about what the authors meant and why they said it?
What does the text actually say (sometimes this requires looking at more than one translation so that you can hear the words afresh in a slightly different form)?
What am I bringing to this text? What hopes, expectations, fears and so on are going to affect the way I am reading this particular text?