Courageous Women of the Old Testament
Bible quotations are from the Revised Standard Version

A Sunday School teacher once asked her class if anyone knew the Bible story about the creation of men and women. She pointed to one little girl who put her hand up, and asked her to tell the story to the class. And the little girl said, “Well, first God made Adam; and then he looked at him and said, ‘That’s pretty good, but I can do better than that.’ So he created Eve!”

This little girl obviously had a positive outlook on God’s world and her place in it.

I came across a book in a second-hand book shop a few years ago, in which the writer claimed that it was specifically men that were directly made in the image of God, but that women had this image only in a secondary way, as something they derived from men. Just as the sun shines in its own nature, and the moon only reflects the sun’s light shining on it, so men have in their own nature the image of God, and women reflect this image only as they receive it from men.

Now the Genesis accounts actually do not link the image of God in women with the account of Eve’s creation in chapter 2 at all. Genesis states twice that we are created in the image of God. Genesis 1.26-27 says,

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

And then Genesis 5.1-2 says,

When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them Man when they were created.

In both these passages, the word translated “man” is the Hebrew word ’âdâm – Adam. It means “human being”.

In both passages, it is applied to the man and the woman.

In both passages there is a close link between the image of God and the creation of humanity as male and female.

So, biblically, man in his manhood and woman in her womanhood equally reflect the image of God.

Many of the images of God presented in the Old Testament are masculine ones. When the relationship between God and his people is compared to a marriage or a family, the appropriateness of representating God in the stronger rôle as husband, begetter and father, with his people as wife, conceiver and mother is obvious. As a man is normally stronger than his wife, so God is stronger than his people.

Yet here and there are some feminine images. Genesis 1.2 says the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. The Hebrew word translated “was moving” means “was hovering, moving gently, brooding, cherishing”. The same verb is used in Deuteronomy 32.11 of an eagle hovering over its young.

Isaiah 49.15:

“Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.”

The claim is sometimes made that the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament, is anti-women.

One of the passages quoted in support of this assumption is Leviticus 15.19-31, which contains regulations concerning a woman’s monthly period. A woman is stated here to be “in her impurity” at this time, and there are various practices of a hygienic nature to be observed by the woman and by those in contact with her. Modern writers have sometimes, understandably perhaps, seen this as degrading women. But this passage in fact follows a slightly longer and very similar set of regulations in the first half of the chapter concerning the bodily discharges of men, mostly the result of illness or infection, but also that of normal sexual activity. So that it cannot be said that this passage is written by men wanting to degrade women. It is even-handed in its treatment of both sexes.

It is important to realise too, that in these passages, there is no sense of moral rejection in the use of words like “unclean”; nor is there any squeamishness about bodily functions. It was more a matter of hygiene. People who were unclean in the sense meant here were debarred from participation in the ritual of the temple. If I come home from a day’s tramping with my clothes muddy and sweaty, as I usually do on a Saturday afternoon, there is no moral shame in the fact, and my family are not disgusted with me, but I don’t sit down at the tea-table until I have had a bath and put on clean clothes. The question of ritual uncleanness, though on a slightly different footing, is something like that. People who were ritually unclean did the necessary washing, waited the appropriate time, and were then able to return to worship along with everybody else. It was as matter-of-fact as that. No disgrace involved.

At first glance, the laws of inheritance may seem unfairly weighted in favour of men. In Numbers 27.8-11, a woman inherits land from her father only if she has no brothers. However, this system meant less fragmentation of the land. It is obviously more convenient for a family to have one largish piece of land to farm than two or possibly more little ones.

The idea that the Old Testament was anti-women doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny. We’ve already seen that woman, like man, was created in the image of God, and that each sex represents this divine image in its own way. In Genesis 3.16, the subordination of woman to man is the outcome of sin, not something that is part of God’s original created order. Woman is represented as the helper, not the slave, of her husband.

The rôles assigned to men and women, in Old Testament times as still today, is often determined by the difference in physical strength. The work that brought food and material goods into the household could generally be done more quickly, and therefore more profitably, by men than by women. Yet there is no doubt that the women did much of the same work that the men did.

We find women working in the fields (Ruth 2.21-23 – Ruth and Boaz’s handmaidens), fetching water (Gen 24.11,15 – Rebakah), looking after flocks (Gen 29.9 – Rachel, Ex 2.16,21 – Zipporah and her sisters) and acting as midwives (Gen 35.17 – Rachel’s midwife, Ex 1.15 – Hebrew midwives in Egypt). Samuel warned the Israelites that if they took a king, he would take their daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers (1 Sam 8.13). It appears that David had both men and women as singers in his household (2 Sam 19.35).

We find that women are far less prominent in public life than men. But it is important to understand that this is the way the society was. We cannot blame the Old Testament writers for the way we find things in their writings. With the recent making of the film version of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, people have drawn attention to the fact that women play a very small part overall in the story, as it appears in the book, though some of them are quite major characters in themselves – Eowyn and Galadriel. Now there is a definite element of judgment here on Tolkien, and the suggestion that he should have brought women more to the fore. Now this is unfair, in that Tolkien is being judged because fifty-odd years ago he did not write his story according to the politically correct standards of today, and give women equal time. But at least this point of view is based on the fact that Tolkien had the choice over the characters in his book. Had he thought of half-filling it with warrior women, he could have done so.

But it is ludicrous to blame the Old Testament writers for the way they depict the society of their time. Think of applying the same principles to the writing of subsequent history –

Hey, I was just looking at this chapter you wrote on the Battle of Hastings, 1066. Did you ever think of having the Saxons being led by a woman? You know, drop Harold out, or make him one of her subordinate captains or something. Queen Hilda defends England against the forces of Duchess Wilhelmina of Normandy. Whatever. Hey, historical accuracy is fine, I’m all for it, but you know, that’s the way the market is these days.

Or the Second World War – have a grand summit meeting with Elanor Roosevelt, Mrs Churchill and Mrs Stalin. Find out what their first names were. And their husbands just get the odd interview in the papers – you know, like Dennis Thatcher or Roydon Shipley today. (Is it Roydon? I’ve forgotten Helen Clark’s husband’s name – Peter something, I think)

There is a cry for giving prominence to women in history these days. Now there are a number of very prominent women we can focus on – the various reigning Queens of England; people like Marie Curie and Kate Shephard; Hilda, abbess of Whitby, one of the most important figures in the early history of the English church. But to give women equal time, we either focus on the achievements of women in a way that distorts the overall picture, because we give far greater space to women in minor rôles, in our attempt to create a balance of numbers, than we give to men in the same rôles; OR we turn our attention to the study of domestic history. Instead of studying the politics and warfare of a period, we focus on the lives of the ordinary people. How did ordinary people live in 17th century Scotland? What were the conditions experienced by settlers in 19th century New Zealand?

Now in fact we do get something of this second approach in the Old Testament. We know quite a bit about Sarah and Rebekah and Rachel. We have little snippets about Miriam and Zipporah and Michal. The Old Testament does give us an occasional peek at the lives of the women at a domestic level. The best picture in the Old Testament of women’s lives is in the Book of Ruth, where we follow the lives of two very ordinary and very special women as they struggle to sort their lives out after their husbands have died.

The modern fascination with domestic history reflects the conditions of our generation. Our lives have been affected far more by domestic and commercial factors than by military ones. It was very different for the older generation. Men now 75 or older went off to war, like many of their fathers before them. Their wives, and their children – at least those who are now in their sixties or older – lived in the shadow of a great fear – fear that a husband or father might never return, fear of invasion and tyranny. The Japanese printed their own New Zealand money, complete with pictures of palm-trees, to use when they took over the country.

And for much of the period covered by the Old Testament, military events made more difference to the lives of ordinary citizens than anything else. A loss to an enemy power meant years or even decades of misery and tyranny for everyone. If you want to understand what it did to people’s souls, read Psalm 137, with its last terrible verse:

Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!

This is the cry of a people who had seen their own children suffer this fate.

The point for us is that those who were most involved in these actions – invaders and defenders – were men. The decisions of kings, the strategies of generals, the heroism of brave soldiers – the focus is necessarily on the men.

And even in peace-time, it is the men who make the decisions that most radically change the lives of their families, and the focus of the Old Testament is naturally on them. But the women have their own views on the matters that affect them, and we are allowed at times to hear them as well.

But, as in all histories, women sometimes come to the fore – as rulers or as soldiers or as thinkers. In our own generation, there will be far more of balance between men and women in our history as women are able to have their part in the decision-making processes of government and commerce. In this series of lectures, I’ll be looking at women who made their mark on events in the Old Testament, as well as those whose struggle was in their own private sphere, and the many who sometimes seem to be left flapping in the wake of their wilful and often unpredictable husbands.