For all her wisdom, charm, and hard work, Ruth’s fate was left to a group of men. Fortunately, Boaz skillfully negotiated the terms of the redemption with his relatives and acquired Ruth, along with some property left to the family, for his own. The townspeople rejoiced, blessing Ruth and Boaz with high hopes, saying, “May the Lord make the woman who is coming into your home like Rachel and Leah, who together built up the family of Israel” (4:11 UPDATED NIV). Their praise welcomed Ruth, the Moabite, fully into the family of Abraham. She was called eshet chayil—a woman of valor!
The two married and had a son named Obed. But Obed is referred to as Naomi’s son, for Ruth had successfully negotiated her own version of the law of levirate, allowing her mother-in-law to live in hope of leaving a distinguished family legacy once again.
The book of Ruth, one of only two books of the Bible named after a woman, concludes with a genealogy that reveals Ruth and Boaz’s son Obed to be the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of King David. In Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus, Ruth is one of the five women mentioned, four of whom, the keen reader might notice, were foreigners.
March: Modesty
* * *
Hula-Hooping with the Amish
I also want the women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, adorning themselves, not with elaborate hairstyles or gold or pearls or expensive clothes, but with good deeds, appropriate
for women who profess to worship God.
—1 TIMOTHY 2:9–10 UPDATED NIV
TO DO THIS MONTH:
□ Dress modestly (1 Timothy 2:9)
□ Wear a head covering (1 Corinthians 11:6)
□ Wear only dresses and skirts; no slacks or jeans (Deuteronomy 22:5)
□ Abstain from wearing jewelry (1 Timothy 2:9)
□ Hang out with the Amish
“You look like a hippie,” Dan said, “But it’s not that bad. I promise.” I stood in front of the bedroom mirror in a billowing brown peasant skirt, matching brown tights and flats, a simple lavender cardigan buttoned all the way to my collarbone, and a white, looseknit beret on my head. No makeup. No jewelry. No product in my nest of hair.
“I look like a religious freak,” I wailed. “I can’t go out like this. People will think I’m—I don’t know—homeschooled.”
Dan sighed. (Have I mentioned that he was homeschooled?) “Hon, this was your idea, remember.”
“How can I forget when you bring it up every time I get discouraged?” I grumbled back. “It’s all MY fault. The project was MY idea. I am responsible for my own misery. I GET IT, OKAY?”
We would engage in this same exact argument approximately seventeen times before the end of the year. It usually began with me in the fetal position on the floor somewhere, crying about how much I had to do and how desperately I hated housework and how insufferable I found the apostle Paul’s rambling prose. I’d trawl around for pity until Dan, exasperated and powerless to help, reminded me that my affliction was the result of a contract I willingly signed with a publisher, rather than the mysterious scourge of God—a pretty unsympathetic way to look at it, if you ask me. A cold distance would fall between us until a good night’s rest or a couple episodes of The Twilight Zone extracted me from my stupor.
We were right smack-dab in the middle of the project. And it felt like it.
The arrival of March put me in a special kind of funk because it forced me to confront a subject of particular sensitivity to women of religious breeding—modesty. Drop the m-word around the wrong girl and she’ll be environed by ugly flashbacks—rulers against bare legs, turtlenecks under homemade jumpers, swimsuits hidden beneath T-shirts and shorts, and red-faced pastors blaming the fall of Western civilization on the exposure of cleavage.
On my blog I posed the question, “What first comes to mind when you hear the word ‘modesty’?”
My readers had some opinions about that:
• “Selfish Hypersexuality. The word ‘modesty’ to me rarely implies anything about actual clothes but more about the sexuality (availability, intention, allusion) of the wearer as seen by those who look.”—Sandra
• “’Modesty’ rings a whole lot of negative bells in my mind to do with ‘controlling how women dress and behave’ and ‘blame the victim’ attitudes. Something about the word ‘modest’ just yanks my chain. It smacks of imposed restrictions and judgmental tastes, and making women take responsibility for the thoughts of men.”—Elizabeth
• “Humility. That’s the first word to come to mind.”—Verity
• “When I hear ‘modesty,’ I flash back to my childhood and shorts that came to my knees and a list of things that ‘good girls don’t wear.’ And I think of the freedom of choosing my own swimsuit my freshman year in college and the lecture I got because it was immodest (French cut legs), with my mother insisting I purchased it to get men to look and me insisting that I got it because it was beautiful with black and turquoise flowers and I felt good in it.”—Rea
In Judaism, the term used for modesty is tzniut, and it refers to both the inward traits of humility and the outward observance of laws pertaining to dress. I asked Ahava about this and she said, “Tzniut is more than just a list of rules about how to dress. It’s a state of mind. The idea is to avoid dressing in a way that draws attention to your outer self, but instead to dress so that your inner self is allowed to shine through. You should try to be pretty, but not alluring. You do a huge disservice to modest dress if you wear the same outfit over and over again, particularly if it’s frumpy. Nobody wants to be around a schlumpy dresser.”
Schlumpy. I love these useful Jewish words.
“Tzniut is also about how you act,” Ahava added. “You don’t want to try to make people notice you or force yourself to the forefront for attention. Having the newest and nicest things is a way that many people try to get attention, but that is not the way of tzniut.”
The apostle Paul seemed to be getting at the same idea when he wrote to young Timothy, “I also want the women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, adorning themselves, not with elaborate hairstyles or gold or pearls or expensive clothes, but with good deeds, appropriate for women who profess to worship God” (1 Timothy 2:9–10 UPDATED NIV).
The Greek word translated “modesty” here is kosmios. Derived from kosmos (the universe), it signified orderliness, self-control, and appropriateness, with its closest antonyms being disorder or chaos. It appears only twice in the New Testament, and interestingly, its second usage refers specifically to a godly man, who is expected to be “above reproach, faithful to his wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach” (1 Timothy 3:2 UPDATED NIV). In that context, kosmios is typically translated as “self-controlled.”
The King James Version for 1 Timothy 2:9 says that women are to wear “modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety.” These instructions closely resemble those given by Peter in his first epistle, where he also warned against “gold jewelry” and “elaborate hairstyles,” which were apparently the Ancient Near Eastern equivalent of diamond-encrusted teeth grilles. Similarly, the Amish speak of modesty in terms of the contrast between Hochmut (pride), and Demut (humility), citing Proverbs 11:2, which says, “When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom.”
Given the sensitive nature of this whole modesty issue, I knew that the dress code I chose for the month would be highly controversial. From the Amish to evangelicals, cloistered nuns to Hasidic Jews, women from a variety of religious groups claim biblical modesty as their standard of dress, and yet none of them dress exactly the same.
What the Bible says about what (not) to wear is clearly open to interpretation. I figured my best bet was to borrow from a variety of traditions to make my own dress code. So beginning on March 9, the first day of Lent, I resolved to observe six new rules of dress for my month of modesty:
1. Wear a head covering at all times.
By far the most ubiquitous item in the world’s religious wardrobe
is the head covering. We recognize Sikhs by their dastars, the Amish by their white bonnets, Jewish men by their kippas, and Muslim women by the hijab. Although the Bible often mentions women’s veils (Genesis 24:65; Song of Songs 4:1), there are no explicit Old Testament commandments requiring women to wear them.1 However, it has long been a Jewish custom for married women to cover their hair, and in rabbinic literature, the veil functions as an important symbol of modesty, for it signifies that a woman is married and unavailable to all except her husband.
Like most Orthodox Jews, Ahava usually wears a simple headscarf over her hair. “It’s a mystical thing,” Ahava explained to me. “Since the time of my kiddushin [marriage] my hair has become as much a private part as my breasts.”
The importance of the head covering in ancient Jewish and Christian worship is underscored in the apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, where he declares that “every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head—it is the same as having her head shaved. For if a woman does not cover her head, she might as well have her hair cut off; but if it is a disgrace for a woman to have her hair cut off or her head shaved, then she should cover her head” (11:5–6 UPDATED NIV).
Modern manifestations of the biblical veil take many different forms. Traditional Catholics often wear the mantilla, a lacy black veil that falls over the head and shoulders. Orthodox Jewish women may wear a tichel (headscarf), sheitel (wig), or mimkhatah. Amish and Old Order Mennonite women refer to their trademark white bonnets simply as “coverings,” with styles varying from region to region. Orthodox nuns wear a long head covering called an apostolnik that covers the head, neck, and shoulders, while Catholic nuns typically wear a black veil over a white coif, (unless, of course, they intend to fly and instead opt for a cornette).
I’d been tossing scarves and bandannas over my head during prayer for six months, but for Lent I resolved to wear a head covering at all times. Fortunately for me, slouchy, loose-knit berets were all the rage that winter, so I found a cute, cream-colored beret at Target that wasn’t too warm and that looked good with both casual and business attire. I’d wear it so often that, before the year was finished, it looked more beige than cream.
2. Wear only full-length dresses and skirts; no slacks or jeans.
Deuteronomy 22:5 says that “a woman must not wear men’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing, for the LORD your God detests anyone who does this.”
While some Jewish scholars see this commandment as a prohibition against cross-dressing, others interpret it to mean that women should not carry weapons of war, a view sometimes cited in debates about exempting women from military conscription in modern Israel. Growing up in an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist Church, my mom was forbidden to wear pants to church because of this verse, and St. Padre Pio famously refused to hear the confessions of women wearing anything other than skirts that fell at least eight inches below the knee.
In the 1960s, Cardinal Giuseppe Siri warned that the increasing popularity of women’s trousers threatened “feminine psychology proper to women” and signaled “the flattening out of all mankind.”
“When we see a woman in trousers,” he declared, “we should think not so much of her as of all mankind, of what it will be when women will have masculinized themselves for good. Nobody stands to gain by helping to bring about a future age of vagueness, ambiguity, imperfection and, in a word, monstrosities.”
That’s right. Monstrosities.
So for Lent I gave up my dress pants, sweatpants, khakis, and jeans in exchange for the three cotton peasant skirts I’d been holding on to since 2003. This wasn’t much of a sacrifice because I love peasant skirts; they’re like wearing air. The only problem was that skirts are a bit cool for early March, which meant I had to wear tights underneath them. Also, someone who loves the Cracker Barrel as much as I do generally requires a more constrictive waistband material than elastic for the purposes of self-control in the face of breakfast-all-day specials. I must have gained five pounds during the month of March.
3. No short skirts, short sleeves, or V-necks.
The Catholic Church took the concept of modesty to a new level of specificity in 1944 when Fr. Bernard A. Kunkel launched the “Marylike Modesty Crusade,” an effort to codify Pope Pius XI’s instructions regarding immodest dress. In addition to producing the perfect name for an indie garage band, the Marylike Modesty Crusade issued the following seven standards of dress for Catholic women2:
1. Marylike is modest without compromise, “like Mary,” Christ’s Mother.
2. Marylike dresses have sleeves extending at least to the elbows; and skirts reaching below the knees . . .
3. Marylike dresses require full coverage for the bodice, chest, shoulders and back; except for a cut-out about the neck not exceeding two inches below the neckline in front and in the back, and a corresponding two inches on the shoulders.
4. Marylike dresses do not admit as modest coverage transparent fabrics, laces, nets, organdy, nylons, etc. unless sufficient backing is added. However, their moderate use as trimmings is acceptable.
5. Marylike dresses avoid the improper use of flesh-colored fabrics.
6. Marylike dresses conceal rather than reveal the figure of the wearer; they do not emphasize, unduly, parts of the body.
7. Marylike dresses provide full coverage, even after jacket, cape or stole are removed and after assuming a sitting position.
I figured my own dress should be as Marylike as possible, at least for the month. This meant topping off my peasant skirts with long-sleeved, loose-fitting sweaters and sticking with high jewel necklines—not the most flattering look for my figure, especially with a veritable tent around my waist.
4. No jewelry.
In his list of God’s grievances against Israel and his warnings of Jerusalem’s imminent destruction, the prophet Isaiah wrote:
The women of Zion are haughty,
walking along with outstretched necks,
flirting with their eyes,
strutting along with swaying hips,
with ornaments jingling on their ankles.
Therefore the Lord will bring sores on the heads of the women of Zion;
the Lord will make their scalps bald.
In that day the Lord will snatch away their finery: the bangles and headbands and crescent necklaces, the earrings and bracelets and veils, the headdresses and anklets and sashes, the perfume bottles and charms, the signet rings and nose rings, the fine robes and the capes and cloaks, the purses and mirrors, and the linen garments and tiaras and shawls.
(ISAIAH 3:16–23 UPDATED NIV).
At first glance, this passage would suggest that Westboro Baptist Church has it wrong: what God really hates is accessories. But the larger context reveals that what so troubled Isaiah and his fellow prophets was the blatant materialism among Israel’s rich to the neglect and disenfranchisement of its poor.
In biblical times, gold jewelry signified wealth, and although several of the Bible’s heroines wore it (Genesis 24:22–31; Song of Songs 1:10–11), jewelry was far more commonly associated with excess and idol worship (Genesis 35:2–4; Exodus 32; 33:4; Jeremiah 4:30; Ezekiel 7:18–20; 16:9–15; Hosea 2:13). This sentiment carries over into the New Testament, where both Paul in his letter to Timothy and Peter in his letter to the churches of Asia Minor discouraged women from wearing gold jewelry and pearls in the context of a Christian community that prioritized simplicity and charity.
In fact, it seems that most of the Bible’s instructions regarding modesty find their context in warnings about materialism, not sexuality . . . a pattern that has gone largely unnoticed by the red-faced preacher population. I’ve heard dozens of sermons about keeping my legs and my cleavage out of sight, but not one about ensuring that my jewelry was not acquired through unjust or exploitive trade practices.
Some conservative religious communities, such as the Amish and Old Order Mennonites, continue to forbid women to wear any sort of je
welry at all. Others simply discourage excess. I’m a bit of a jewelry fanatic—not so much of the gold and pearl variety, but of the beads and hemp variety—so I figured it would be a healthy exercise in self-discipline to ditch my necklaces, bracelets, and rings for Lent. I wore only my wedding band, not my engagement ring, and I avoided the items in Isaiah’s list: bangles, headbands, earrings, bracelets, anklets, sashes, perfume, charms, rings, nose rings, fine robes, capes, shawls, and, of course, tiaras.
5. Dress and speak plainly.
The Amish prefer the word “plain” to “modest,” and a spirit of plainness informs not only their style of dress, but also their customs, lifestyle, relationships, and way of looking at the world. Adopting a plain lifestyle, according to many Amish, Mennonite, and Quaker traditions, means placing a higher value on the inward traits than on outward appearance. It means living simply, without excess, and prioritizing the good of the community over the good of oneself. For those of the Old Order traditions, plainness may require forgoing cars, electricity, modern farming equipment, and modern clothing. For those in more progressive denominations, plainness may simply mean reducing carbon footprints, rejecting designer labels, and not posting a bunch of mirror self-portraits to Instagram.
I resolved to prioritize plainness in my dress and manners, which meant sticking to muted, solid colors and unembellished fabrics, speaking as honestly and plainly as possible, and resisting the urge to flaunt status symbols, like my second-generation Kindle and my Acclaim.
A Year of Biblical Womanhood Page 14