A Year of Biblical Womanhood

by Rachel Held Evans

  We started with the daughter of Jephthah, whose legacy inspired me to honor her the way Israel’s daughters once did. I read her story from Judges 11, followed by a short poem by Phyllis Trible recounting the young girl’s tragic end. Kristine lit a tall, white taper candle on the coffee table, and together we said, “We remember the daughter of Jephthah.”

  Then Kristine read the story of the concubine from Judges 19 who was thrown to a mob by her husband, gang-raped, killed, and dismembered. I lit a tiny tea candle, and together we said, “We remember the unnamed concubine.”

  Next we honored Hagar, whose banishment from the house of Abraham nearly cost her life. I read her story from Genesis 21 and a poem by Tamam Kahn titled “No Less Than the Prophets, Hagar Speaks.” For Hagar, we set aside a damask votive, which we lit before saying together, “We remember Hagar.”

  Finally, we remembered the Tamar of the Davidic narrative, whose rape in the king’s house left her desolate and without a future. A heartbreaking poem from Nicola Slee pulled each of the stories together and connected them to the silent victims of misogyny from around the world. We resolved as Slee to “listen, however painful the hearing . . . until there is not one last woman remaining who is a victim of violence.”6 We lit a white pillar candle and said together, “We remember Tamar.”

  Then Kristine unveiled her diorama. Constructed of a small pinewood box turned on its side, the diorama featured five faceless wooden figures, huddled together beneath a ring of barbed wire. Nails jutted out from all sides, with bloodred paint splattered across the scene. Glued to the backboard was a perfect reflection of the five feminine silhouettes cut from the pages of a book. Around this Kristine had painted a red crown of thorns to correspond with the circle of barbed wire. Across the top were printed the words of Christ—“As you have done unto the least of these, so you have done to me.” Kristine and I talked for a while after the ceremony was over—about our doubts, about our fears, and about how sometimes taking the Bible seriously means confronting the parts we don’t like or understand and sitting with them for a while . . . perhaps even a lifetime. Ours was a simple ceremony, but I think it honored these women well.

  Those who seek to glorify biblical womanhood have forgotten the dark stories. They have forgotten that the concubine of Bethlehem, the raped princess of David’s house, the daughter of Jephthah, and the countless unnamed women who lived and died between the lines of Scripture exploited, neglected, ravaged, and crushed at the hand of patriarchy are as much a part of our shared narrative as Deborah, Esther, Rebekah, and Ruth. We may not have a ceremony through which to grieve them, but it is our responsibility as women of faith to guard the dark stories for our own daughters, and when they are old enough, to hold their faces between our hands and make them promise to remember.

  What, Sir, would the people of earth be without woman?

  They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

  —MARK TWAIN

  Okay, I’m just going to come right out and say it: A lot of women secretly hate Christmas.

  Now, don’t get me wrong. We love that picturesque moment in which the tree is lit, the fire is crackling, and children outfitted in matching candy-cane pajamas dance around the living room to Tchaikovsky, showing off armfuls of new toys while a twenty-pound ham bakes in the oven; we just hate the anxiety disorder we developed while attempting to produce it.

  There seems to be some kind of universal agreement that the advances achieved through women’s liberation need not apply during the holidays. It’s as though the first trumpet peals of “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” sent blasting over the PA at Bed Bath & Beyond are designed to trigger an internal short that shocks us all into Stepford mode, donning aprons and strained smiles and sweaters that have no business surviving another decade.

  From the baking aisle to the post office line to the wrapping paper bin in the attic, women populate every forgotten corner of Christmas. Who got up at 4 a.m. to put the ham in the oven? A woman. Who elbowed you out of the last reindeer Pillow Pet left on the shelf? A woman. Who sent the Christmas card describing her eighteen-year-old son’s incarceration as “a short break before college”? A woman. Who remembered to include batteries at the bottom of each stocking? A woman. And who gets the credit for pulling it all off?

  Santa.

  That’s right. A man.

  Oh, we would be a lot angrier about all of this if we weren’t so tired. But by the time the 25th rolls around, we’re all out of fight. Drained of our humanity, we have more important things to attend to—dishes, returns, disappointed in-laws, and a mild addiction to whatever holiday-themed Starbucks product we were pumping through our systems that year.

  Christmas 2010 was no different for me, only this time I’d managed to add to my schedule a list of rabbis to contact, two more interviews to conduct, a writing deadline to meet, and a crisis of faith to worry about, thanks to Neil deGrasse Tyson and all those late-night sessions with the Bible’s “texts of terror.”

  The year ended in a flurry of disjointed activities and fattening foods. Dayton saw its first white Christmas in twenty-one years. Under the tree was wrapped a present that said “To Master, from Rachel.” We saw old friends and ate out a lot. Dan and I went to bed as soon as the ball dropped on New Year’s Eve, like a couple of old fogies.

  Somewhere in the midst of it all, I got an interesting e-mail:

  Hello. I’m an Orthodox Jew who is interested in your “living biblical womanhood” project. For the record, in Bereshit (Genesis by you) where it talks about the “helpmeet,” the Hebrew is not just Ezer, but Ezer k’gnedo, which means “the help that opposes.” The Rabbis explain this term like two posts of equal weight leaned against one another. They stand because of equal force. My husband is a rabbi and he actually debated a complementarian evangelical once. The guy totally expected to have him on his side, but he was wrong! Anyway, thanks for taking on such an interesting project. I think Christians and Jews would get along a lot better if everyone paid more attention to what the Bible actually teaches. Let me know if you want to talk more! Blessings from Jerusalem.

  —Ahava.

  I’d finally found a Jewish source . . . and she was even better than a rabbi.

  MARY, THE MOTHER OF GOD

  There’s a misconception among some Protestants that Catholic and Orthodox Christians worship the Virgin Mary. The icons, the rosary, the crowning, the Marian hymns—it’s all a bit much, and so they dismiss out of hand any language of veneration that might elevate the mother of Jesus to a place of special esteem and call it idolatry.

  It’s a shame, really, because Mary has so much to teach us.

  Like Eve, the mother of Jesus has been subjected to countless embellishments of the religious imagination—some of them fair, some of them more reflective of the prejudices and projections of the societies from which they came. Often she appears as a foil to Eve: the redemption of womankind and the standard of female virtue. Standing triumphantly atop the temptation scene on Notre Dame Cathedral’s western facade is the statue of the crowned Mary, her royal robes grazing the top of the Eve’s head. “What had been laid to waste in ruin by this sex,” Tertullian wrote, “was by the same sex re-established in salvation. Eve had believed the serpent; Mary believed Gabriel. That which the one destroyed by believing, the other, by believing, set straight.”

  That a woman who managed to be both a virgin and a mother is often presented as God’s standard for womanhood and can be frustrating for those of us who have to work within the constraints of physical law. Indeed, visions of Mary’s virtue have been amplified though the centuries, far beyond what we find in the biblical text. The apocryphal Protoevangelium of James presents Mary as sinless, a perpetual virgin who spent the first three years of her life living in the temple and being fed by angels, and who somehow managed to give birth in a first-century Palestinian barn without feeling an ounce of pain. In 1854 the Catholic Church formally embraced as dogma the Immaculate Conception—t
he belief that Mary was born without the stain of original sin. It’s as though, over time, Mary’s feet have gotten farther and farther off the ground.

  Much could be said in contrast about the “real Mary” of the biblical narrative: the teenage girl from Nazareth who gave birth on a dirty stable floor; the terrified mom who scurried frantically through the streets of Jerusalem, looking for her lost little boy; the woman who had enough influence over Jesus to convince him to liven up a wedding with his first miracle of turning water into wine; the grieved mother who wept in the shadow of the cross. But perhaps the most revealing glimpse into Mary’s true character can be found in the Magnificat—a prayer beloved by saints and Southern Baptists alike.

  According to Luke’s gospel, when Mary was betrothed to Joseph, God sent the angel Gabriel to deliver an important message. His presence and his words frightened the young girl.

  “Do not be afraid, Mary,” said Gabriel. “You have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”

  “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”

  Gabriel told Mary that the Holy Spirit would come over her: the “power of the Most High will overshadow you.”

  “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary said resolutely. “May your word to me be fulfilled” (1:30–38 UPDATED NIV).

  Fully yielded to the will of God, this young, peasant girl offered a bold and subversive prayer that reveals her own hopes for this special child and the future of Israel:

  My soul glorifies the Lord

  and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

  for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant.

  From now on all generations will call me blessed,

  for the Mighty One has done great things for me—

  holy is his name.

  His mercy extends to those who fear him,

  from generation to generation.

  He has performed mighty deeds with his arm;

  he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts.

  He has brought down rulers from their thrones

  but has lifted up the humble.

  He has filled the hungry with good things

  but has sent the rich away empty.

  He has helped his servant Israel,

  remembering to be merciful

  to Abraham and his descendants forever,

  just as he promised our ancestors.

  (VV. 46–55)

  With this prayer, we encounter Mary as Theotokos—the Mother of God, a Greek term that sends many Protestants running for their commentaries, but which beautifully connects the humanity of Mary with her divine call. It comes from the Orthodox Church, and more accurately means “God-bearer” or, “the one who gives birth to God.” Theotokos refers not to Mary as the mother of God from all eternity, but as the mother of God incarnate. She is what made Jesus both fully God and fully man, her womb the place where heaven and earth meld into one.

  At the heart of Mary’s worthiness is her obedience, not to a man, not to a culture, not even to a cause or a religion, but to the creative work of a God who lifts up the humble and fills the hungry with good things.

  Madeleine L’Engle connects this type of obedience to our own everyday acts of creation. “Obedience is an unpopular word nowadays,” she wrote, “but the artist must be obedient to the work, whether it be a symphony, a painting, or a story for a small child. I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, ‘Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me.’ And the artist can either say, ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord,’ and willingly become the bearer of the work, or refuses; but the obedient response is not necessarily a conscious one, and not everyone has the humble, courageous obedience of Mary.”7

  The same applies to faith. One need not be a saint, or even a mother, to become a bearer of God. One needs only to obey. The divine resides in all of us, but it is our choice to magnify it or diminish it, to ignore it or to surrender to its lead.

  “Mary did not always understand,” wrote L’Engle, “but one does not have to understand to be obedient. Instead of understanding—that intellectual understanding which we are so fond of—there is a feeling of rightness, of knowing, knowing things which you are not yet able to understand.”8

  Like a good Protestant should, I think Mary’s act of radical obedience means more when she is one of us. Imperfect. Afraid. Capable of feeling all the pain and doubt and fear that come with delivering God into the world. But I suspect I may also be a bit of a Catholic, for on the rare occasion that I yield myself fully to the will of God, when I write or speak or do the dishes to magnify the Lord, I start to see Mary everywhere.

  January: Valor

  * * *

  Will the Real Proverbs 31 Woman Please Stand Up?

  A wife of noble character who can find?

  —PROVERBS 31:10

  IN THE EVANGELICAL CHRISTIAN SUBCULTURE, THERE ARE three people a girl’s got to know about before she gets her period: (1) Jesus, (2) Ronald Reagan, and (3) the Proverbs 31 woman.

  While the first two are thought to embody God’s ideal for all mankind, the third is thought to represent God’s ideal for women. Wander into any Christian women’s conference, and you will hear her name whispered around the coffee bar and lauded from the speaker’s podium. Visit a Christian bookstore, and you will find entire women’s sections devoted to books that extol her virtues and make them applicable to modern wives. At my Christian college, guys described their ideal date as a “P31 girl,” and young women looking to please them held a “P31 Bible Study” in my dormitory lounge at 11 p.m. on Mondays. She’s like the evangelical’s Mary—venerated, idealized, glorified to the level of demigoddess, and yet expected to show up in every man’s kitchen at dinnertime. Only unlike Mary, there is no indication that the Proverbs 31 woman actually existed.

  The subject of a twenty-two-line poem found in the last chapter of the book of Proverbs, the “wife of noble character” is a tangible expression of the book’s celebrated virtue of wisdom. She appears in an oracle attributed to the mysterious King Lemuel that the text says was taught to him by his mother. Although the genre of royal instruction is a familiar one in ancient Near Eastern literature, this poem stands out in its representation of the queen mother as the source of wisdom and remains the longest, most flattering tribute to women of its time. Packed with hyperbolic imagery, the poem is an acrostic, so the first word of each verse begins with the next consecutive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. This communicates a sense of totality as the poet praises the everyday achievements of an upperclass Jewish wife, a woman who keeps her household functioning day and night by buying, trading, investing, planting, sewing, weaving, managing servants, extending charity, providing food for the family, and preparing for each season. She is so accomplished, in fact, that translators can’t seem to agree on an adjective to describe her. Depending on who you ask, a lucky man will find (V. 10):

  • “a good wife” (New Century Version)

  • “an excellent wife” (New American Standard)

  • “a competent wife” (Common English Bible)

  • “a capable wife” (Good News Translation)

  • “a virtuous and capable wife” (New Living Translation)

  • “a wife of noble character” (New International Version)

  • “a virtuous woman” (King James Version)

  • “a worthy woman” (American Standard Version)

  • “a valiant woman” (Douay-Rheims American Edition)

  • “a capable, intelligent, and virtuous woman” (Amplified Bible)

  However, most scholars seem to think that the Hebrew eshet chayil is best translated “valorous woman,” for the structure
and diction employed in the poem closely resembles that of a heroic poem celebrating the exploits of a warrior. Lost to English readers are the militaristic nuances found in the original language (emphasis added): “she provides food for her family” (literally, “prey,” V. 15); “her husband . . . lacks nothing of value” (literally, “booty,” V. 11); “she watches over the affairs of the household” (literally, “spies,” V. 27); “she girds herself with strength” (literally, “she girds her loins,” V. 17 KJV); “she can laugh at the days to come” (literally, “laugh in victory,” V. 15). According to Erika Moore, “the valorous wife is a heroic figure used by God to do good for His people, just as the ancient judges and kings did good for God’s people by their martial exploits.”1

  Like any good poem, the purpose of this one is to draw attention to the often-overlooked glory of the everyday. The only instructive language it contains is directed toward men, with the admonition that a thankful husband honor his wife “for all that her hands have done” (Proverbs 31:31). Old Testament scholar Ellen F. Davis notes that the poem was intended “not to honor one particularly praiseworthy woman, but rather to underscore the central significance of women’s skilled work in a household-based economy.” She concludes that “it will not do to make facile comparisons between the biblical figure and the suburban housewife, or alternately between her and the modern career woman.”2

  And yet many Christians interpret this passage prescriptively, as a command to women rather than an ode to women, with the home-based endeavors of the Proverbs 31 woman cast as the ideal lifestyle for all women of faith. An empire of books, conferences, products, and media has evolved from a subtle repositioning of the poem’s intended audience from that of men to that of women. One of the more popular books is titled Becoming the Woman God Wants Me to Be: A 90 Day Guide to Living the Proverbs 31 Life. No longer presented as a song through which a man offers his wife praise, Proverbs 31 is presented as a task list through which a woman earns it.