A Woman of Valour

Proverbs 31 has been read aloud to women and used as a measuring stick more than almost any chapter in the Bible, and most of what makes it remarkable is invisible in English. This page works through it slowly: what kind of writing it is, who may have written it, what the key word actually means, and who else in Scripture gets called it. The commentators do most of the work, and they are more interesting on this than they are given credit for.

Four letters, and this is the order they are meant to be read in. They are not parts of one letter; each stands alone. But they build, from the women themselves to the text most quoted about them, then to the hard cases, then to the argument.
1. The Women of Scripture — seventeen of them, one at a time
2. A Woman of Valour — Proverbs 31 and 1 Peter 3, read whole (you are here)
3. The Other Women — the ones who did damage, and the ones Scripture will not sort
4. Women in the Bible and the Early Church — the ministry question and the restriction passages

1. It is a poem, and it is built like one

What you are looking at. Proverbs 31:10BH-31 is twenty-two verses long, and Hebrew has twenty-two letters. Each verse begins with the next letter of the alphabet in order, the same device used in several psalms and in Lamentations. Matthew Henry states it plainly and draws a conclusion from it:

it consists of twenty-two verses, each beginning with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet in order, as some of the Psalms, which makes some think it was no part of the lesson which Lemuel's mother taught him, but a poem by itself… and perhaps had been commonly repeated among the pious Jews, for the ease of which it was made alphabetical.

Matthew Henry, on Proverbs 31

What changes. An acrostic is a memory aid and a piece of craft. It is not a job description, and it was almost certainly not composed as one woman's daily schedule. It is closer to a hymn than to a performance review, and it was built to be recited.

2. The artist may have been a woman

The chapter opens: "The words of king Lemuel, the prophecy that his mother taught him" (Proverbs 31:1). Alexander Maclaren draws the inference and does not shy from it:

If we take the "oracle which his mother taught" King Lemuel to include this picture, the artist is a woman, and her motive may be to sketch the sort of wife her son should choose.

Alexander Maclaren, on Proverbs 31:10-31

Henry, as above, thinks the acrostic argues the poem was separate and older. Both readings sit in the commentators and neither is certain. What can be said is that on one serious reading the most quoted passage about women in the Bible was written by a woman, and addressed to a man about the kind of wife to look for. That is a different thing from a standard held over a woman's head.

3. The word: chayil

The verse as you have always read it. "Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies" (Proverbs 31:10). "Virtuous" in modern English suggests chastity and gentleness.

The word underneath it. The Hebrew is eshet chayil. The Pulpit Commentary translates it flatly and gives the older renderings:

The expression, ishshah chayil, "woman of force"… Mulierem fortem, St. Jerome terms her… The expression combines the ideas of moral goodness and bodily vigour and activity.

The Pulpit Commentary, on Proverbs 31:10

Jerome's Latin is mulierem fortem, a strong woman. The Septuagint's Greek, as the same commentary reports, is built from the word for a man and means something like courageous or brave. Keil and Delitzsch make the point from the other direction, noting that chayil begins in bodily vigour and is "spiritualized to that of capacity, ability," exactly as the Latin virtus travels from manliness to excellence.

What that word does elsewhere in Scripture. It is a soldier's word. The angel greets Gideon with it: "thou mighty man of valour" (Judges 6:12). It is used of armies, of strength, of wealth. And Proverbs has already used it of a wife once: "A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband" (Proverbs 12:4).

What changes. The chapter does not open by asking who can find a nice woman. It asks who can find a woman of valour, in the vocabulary of soldiers, and then spends twenty-two verses saying what her valour consists of. Read verse 17 with that in view and the imagery is deliberate: "She girdeth her loins with strength, and strengtheneth her arms" (Proverbs 31:17). Girding the loins is what a man does before a battle or a run.

4. The only other person Scripture calls one

This is the detail that most corrects how the chapter gets used. The phrase is applied to exactly one named woman in the Bible, and she is not a wealthy estate manager.

Ruth 3:11

And now, my daughter, fear not; I will do to thee all that thou requirest: for all the city of my people doth know that thou art a virtuous woman.

Ruth. A Moabite widow with no husband, no children, no property and no standing, who had been picking up leftover grain behind other people's harvesters to keep her mother-in-law alive. Boaz tells her the whole town already knows what she is.

So whatever the phrase means, it cannot require an estate, servants, a vineyard, a trading business or a husband. Ruth had none of them, and she is the one Scripture actually names. In the Leningrad Codex, the manuscript behind modern printed Hebrew Bibles, Ruth stands immediately after Proverbs, so the woman of valour is described in one book and then walks into the next one destitute. The order of the Writings was never fixed and other Hebrew manuscripts arrange them differently, so this is a strong tradition rather than a settled fact. Where it does stand that way it is unlikely to be an accident, and it is the strongest argument in Scripture against reading Proverbs 31 as an inventory of achievements.

5. What she actually does

Read the verses without the sermon and the range is striking, especially given when and where it was written. She evaluates property and buys it, and plants a vineyard out of her own earnings (verse 16). She manufactures, sells, and deals with merchants (verse 24). She gives to the poor with both hands (verse 20). She teaches: "She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness" (verse 26). And her verdict comes from her work, in public: "let her own works praise her in the gates" (verse 31).

The Pulpit Commentary registers how unusual this is:

It is very remarkable to meet with such a delineation of woman in the East, where the female generally occupies a most degraded position, and is cut off from all sphere of activity and administration. To paint such a portrait needed inspiration of some sort.

The Pulpit Commentary, on Proverbs 31:10

Maclaren, writing in the same era, is careful in both directions, and is worth quoting as he wrote rather than trimmed:

This description of a good "house-mother" attests the honourable position of woman in Israel. It would have been impossible in Eastern countries, where she was regarded only as a plaything and a better sort of slave. The picture is about equally far removed from old-world and from modern ideas of her place… There is plenty of room for modern ideals by the side of this old one, but they are very incomplete without it.

Alexander Maclaren, on Proverbs 31:10-31

He is a Victorian and it shows; in the same passage he says her kingdom is the home, and this page will not pretend he said otherwise. But notice what he grants: room for other ideals beside this one. He does not treat the chapter as a ceiling.

6. Where the poem puts the weight, in its own last words

After twenty-one verses of activity, the poem says what it was measuring:

Proverbs 31:30

Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the LORD, she shall be praised.

Not her productivity. Not her marriage. Not the vineyard. The chapter ends by dismissing two things the world measures women by, charm and looks, and naming one thing that appears on none of the checklists people build from this passage. A woman who fears the LORD and owns nothing has the thing the poem is actually about. Which is Ruth again.

7. The New Testament version, and the word it turns on

Matthew Henry, in the same comment quoted above, says where this chapter reappears in the New Testament: "We have the abridgment of it… 1 Peter 3:1BH-6." He is right, and the passage carries a word that has changed meaning underneath us.

1 Peter 3:1-2

Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands; that, if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the conversation of the wives; While they behold your chaste conversation coupled with fear.

The word. "Conversation" in 1611 English does not mean talking. Albert Barnes spells it out:

By the conversation of the wives — By the conduct or deportment of their wives… The word conversation, in the Scriptures, is never confined, as it is now with us, to oral discourse, but denotes conduct in general. It includes indeed "conversation" as the word is now used, but it embraces also much more — including everything that we do.

Albert Barnes, on 1 Peter 3:1

What changes. The verse is not telling a wife to keep quiet and hope. It is telling her that a husband who will not listen to preaching may still be won by a life he cannot argue with. Barnes is careful that this is not conversion without truth: "won without the word" means, he says, "in some other way than by preaching," since truth is always the instrument. The husband here is not being managed. He is watching something over years that no sermon reached him with.

And it runs straight back into Proverbs 31. Peter goes on: let the adorning "not be that outward adorning of plaiting the hair, and of wearing of gold… But let it be the hidden man of the heart… even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price" (1 Peter 3:3-4). Set that beside "Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain" and it is the same verdict from the other end of the Bible: the two things the world weighs a woman by are set aside, and something it cannot see is called of great price, which is the language Proverbs used of rubies.

What the passage does not leave one-sided. Six verses later Peter turns to the men, and the instruction is heavier than it looks: "Likewise, ye husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honour unto the wife… as being heirs together of the grace of life; that your prayers be not hindered" (1 Peter 3:7). Heirs together. And a man who will not do it finds his own prayers obstructed, which is a sanction Scripture attaches to almost nothing else.

The Pulpit Commentary is worth hearing on the setting, because it does not pretend the first century was gentle: Christianity, it says, "was to be the means of abolishing slavery, and of raising woman to her proper place in society; but as yet slaves were cruelly oppressed, and women were ill treated." That is a nineteenth-century commentator saying the New Testament instructions were given inside a world it had not yet changed.

8. The women themselves

Scripture is not short of women, and they are not a category. A short walk. Sarah laughs at God, is corrected, and is still the mother of the promise. Hagar, a slave with no rights, is the only person in the Bible who gives God a name: "Thou God seest me" (Genesis 16:13). Deborah judges Israel and Barak will not go to war without her. Rahab hides the spies and lands in the genealogy of Christ. Abigail talks David out of murder and he blesses her for it. Esther risks her life on a plan. Hannah prays so hard the priest thinks she is drunk. Mary is told what will happen and answers, "be it unto me according to thy word" (Luke 1:38). Mary Magdalene is the first witness of the resurrection and is sent to tell the men. Priscilla, named before her husband, takes Apollos aside and expounds the way of God to him more perfectly (Acts 18:26). Lydia's house becomes the first church in Europe.

They are not all wives. Several are foreigners. Two are prostitutes. One is a judge, one a queen, one a slave. What they hold in common is not a role, and the attempt to extract one from them flattens every one of them.

Where this lands

Proverbs 31 is not a standard to fail. It is an acrostic poem, possibly written by a woman, praising a woman of valour in the vocabulary of soldiers, and it is answered in the next book of the Hebrew Bible by a penniless foreign widow whom an entire town already calls by that name.

Used as a checklist it does the opposite of what it says, because a checklist measures a woman by the very things verse 30 sets aside. Used as it stands, it says that strength in a woman is worth more than rubies, that the work of her hands should be praised out loud and in public, and that what finally makes her what she is cannot be bought, married into, or inherited.

Related: The Other Women, The Women of Scripture, seventeen of them one at a time, Women in the Bible and the Early Church, Marriage, Words That Carry the Freight, The Genealogy. The Pulpit Commentary, Matthew Henry, Alexander Maclaren, and Keil and Delitzsch quoted verbatim from the public-domain editions in our library; Jerome's mulierem fortem and the Septuagint rendering as the Pulpit Commentary reports them. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub. C.S. Lewis and Kierkegaard are not quoted here: we hold nothing of Lewis on this subject, and the Kierkegaard in our library is the aesthetic writing from Either/Or, which would have to be bent to fit. Better to leave a man out than to press him into service.