The Women of Scripture

Lists of biblical women tend to flatten them into a single virtue. They will not go. One is a judge and one is a slave, two were prostitutes, several are foreigners, and the first person to see the risen Christ was a woman with a history nobody would have chosen for a witness. This page takes them one at a time: what the text actually says, the verse it turns on, and where a commentator noticed something worth keeping.

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 (you are here)
2. A Woman of Valour — Proverbs 31 and 1 Peter 3, read whole
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

Before the kings

Eve

Two things are usually said about her and only one of them is in the text. She takes the fruit and gives it to her husband, who is described as "with her" (Genesis 3:6), standing there. Then God asks Adam what he has done, and Adam's answer is worth reading slowly:

Genesis 3:12

And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.

He blames her, and in the same breath he blames God for giving her to him. The first recorded reaction of a man to his own sin is to hand it to his wife and then upward. Whatever is said afterwards about Eve, that sentence is Adam's, and Scripture put it on the record rather than tidying it away.

She is called "an help meet for him" (Genesis 2:18), and modern English hears "helper" as junior staff. The Hebrew is ezer. This site does not hold a Hebrew lexicon, so rather than assert a word count we cannot check, here is what anyone can check in the King James Version: the same English word is what Scripture repeatedly calls God. "The God of my father, said he, was mine help" (Exodus 18:4). "Our soul waiteth for the LORD: he is our help and our shield" (Psalm 33:20). "Our help is in the name of the LORD" (Psalm 124:8). "O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself; but in me is thine help" (Hosea 13:9). Whatever else the word carries, it is not a word for an inferior, because it is a word Scripture is willing to use of God rescuing people who cannot manage alone.

Sarah

She laughs at the promise, is asked about it, and denies laughing because she was afraid (Genesis 18:15). God does not withdraw the promise. Decades later the New Testament puts her in the roll of faith without mentioning the laugh at all: "Through faith also Sara herself received strength to conceive seed" (Hebrews 11:11). Both accounts are true, and the second is how God tells the story afterwards.

Hagar

An Egyptian slave, pregnant, mistreated by her mistress, running into the desert. God finds her at a spring and speaks to her, and then this happens:

Genesis 16:13

And she called the name of the LORD that spake unto her, Thou God seest me: for she said, Have I also here looked after him that seeth me?

Read that again. She names God. Not a place, not an altar, God Himself, El Roi, the God who sees. In a book where naming runs from God downward, the one person recorded giving God a name is a foreign slave woman with no standing, no husband and no rights, at the lowest point of her life. Nobody else in Scripture does this.

Rahab

A prostitute in a doomed city who hides two spies and tells them why: "the LORD your God, he is God in heaven above, and in earth beneath" (Joshua 2:11). That is a fuller confession than most of Israel managed in the wilderness. She appears in the roll of faith (Hebrews 11:31), in James as an example of faith proved by works (James 2:25), and in the genealogy of Christ (Matthew 1:5). Scripture never softens what she was and never holds it against her.

Deborah

Four words carry it: "And Deborah, a prophetess, the wife of Lapidoth, she judged Israel at that time" (Judges 4:4). Not advised. Judged. Israel came up to her for judgment, and when she summoned the general to war he would not go without her:

Judges 4:8-9

And Barak said unto her, If thou wilt go with me, then I will go: but if thou wilt not go with me, then I will not go. And she said, I will surely go with thee: notwithstanding the journey that thou takest shall not be for thine honour; for the LORD shall sell Sisera into the hand of a woman.

She goes. She tells him plainly that the credit will not be his. And it is not: the enemy commander dies in a tent at the hand of Jael, another woman. The account is given twice, once as narrative and once as a song Deborah herself sings, which makes it one of the oldest passages in the Bible.

Ruth

A Moabite widow who refuses to go home: "whither thou goest, I will go… thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God" (Ruth 1:16). She keeps her mother-in-law alive by gleaning, which is the provision the Law made for the destitute. Boaz tells her the town already knows what she is: "thou art a virtuous woman" (Ruth 3:11), and she is the only named woman in Scripture called that. A Woman of Valour works out why that matters. She is King David's great-grandmother.

Hannah

She prays so hard without speaking aloud that the priest assumes she is drunk. Her answer is one of the most dignified sentences in the Old Testament:

1 Samuel 1:15

No, my lord, I am a woman of a sorrowful spirit: I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but have poured out my soul before the LORD.

She gets the son and gives him back. Her song in chapter 2, about the mighty broken and the hungry filled, is the pattern Mary's Magnificat follows a thousand years later.

The kingdom

Abigail

Her husband insults David, and David rides out with four hundred armed men to kill every male in the household. Abigail intercepts him, takes the blame herself, and argues him down. David's answer is not grudging:

1 Samuel 25:32-33

Blessed be the LORD God of Israel, which sent thee this day to meet me: And blessed be thy advice, and blessed be thou, which hast kept me this day from coming to shed blood, and from avenging myself with mine own hand.

The future king says a woman stopped him committing a massacre, and credits God with sending her.

Huldah

This one is rarely taught and it is remarkable. Workmen repairing the temple find a lost book of the law. The king tears his clothes and orders the matter taken to a prophet to find out whether the book is genuine and what it means. The high priest and the king's officials go to a woman.

2 Kings 22:14-15

So Hilkiah the priest, and Ahikam, and Achbor, and Shaphan, and Asahiah, went unto Huldah the prophetess… And she said unto them, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Tell the man that sent you to me…

Tell the man that sent you to me. She authenticates the scroll, and the reform of Josiah proceeds on her word. The Pulpit Commentary notices the oddity rather than passing over it:

The principal prophets at or very near the time were Jeremiah… and Zephaniah… It might have been expected that the matter would have been laid before one of these two persons. Possibly, however, neither of them was at Jerusalem… Huldah may thus have been the only possessor of the prophetic gift then in the city.

The Pulpit Commentary, on 2 Kings 22:14

That is an honest guess and the text does not confirm it. What the text says is that when the word of God itself needed verifying, the priesthood went to Huldah, and nobody in the account treats it as strange.

Esther

Her cousin puts the case bluntly: staying silent will not save her, and "who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?" (Esther 4:14). Her reply is the whole book:

Esther 4:16

Go, gather together all the Jews that are present in Shushan, and fast ye for me, and neither eat nor drink three days, night or day: I also and my maidens will fast likewise; and so will I go in unto the king, which is not according to the law: and if I perish, I perish.

She gives the orders. God is never named in the Hebrew of Esther, which is part of why the book was debated, and the absence is the point: it is a book about providence working through a woman's nerve when heaven says nothing out loud.

The Gospels

Mary of Nazareth

Told what will happen to her, at real cost to her reputation and possibly her life, she answers: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word" (Luke 1:38). Then she sings, and it is not gentle. "My soul doth magnify the Lord" opens a song about thrones pulled down and the hungry filled and the rich sent empty away (Luke 1:46-53). She is at the wedding where the first sign is given, and she is at the cross when almost everyone else has run.

The woman at the well

A Samaritan, five husbands behind her and living with a sixth man, alone at the well at noon because the other women drew water in the morning. Christ has the longest recorded conversation of his life with her, and tells her plainly who he is. Then:

John 4:28-29, 39

The woman then left her waterpot, and went her way into the city, and saith to the men, Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?… And many of the Samaritans of that city believed on him for the saying of the woman, which testified, He told me all that ever I did.

She goes to the men she had been avoiding, uses her own history as the evidence, and a town believes because of what she said. She is the first person in John's Gospel to bring anyone to Christ.

The woman with the issue of blood

Twelve years ill, ritually unclean the whole time, so that touching anyone made them unclean too. She reasons it out: "If I may touch but his clothes, I shall be whole" (Mark 5:28). She does, in a crowd, illegally. Christ stops the procession to find her, and she does not get away with it quietly: "But the woman fearing and trembling, knowing what was done in her, came and fell down before him, and told him all the truth" (Mark 5:33). She has to say the whole thing out loud, in front of everyone, including twelve years of it. And the word he answers her with is one he uses of no one else in the Gospels: "Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace" (Mark 5:34). The public confession was not to shame her. It was so the crowd that had watched her sneak up would hear him call her that.

Mary and Martha

"She had a sister called Mary, which also sat at Jesus' feet, and heard his word" (Luke 10:39). Sitting at a teacher's feet is the posture of a disciple, the phrase Paul uses of his own training under Gamaliel (Acts 22:3). Martha, "cumbered about much serving," asks him to send her back to it (Luke 10:40). Christ refuses: "Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her" (Luke 10:42). And it is Martha, not Peter, who makes the confession in John 11: "I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God" (John 11:27).

Mary Magdalene

Out of whom Christ had cast seven devils. She is at the cross, at the burial, and first at the tomb. The risen Christ speaks her name, and then gives her an errand:

John 20:17-18

Jesus saith unto her… go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God. Mary Magdalene came and told the disciples that she had seen the LORD.

The central fact of the Christian faith was entrusted first to a woman, and she was sent to tell the apostles. In a legal setting of that period her testimony would have counted for little, which is one reason the account reads as history rather than invention: nobody making the story up would have chosen her.

The church

Priscilla

Apollos is preaching, eloquent and mighty in the Scriptures, and getting something wrong. "Whom when Aquila and Priscilla had heard, they took him unto them, and expounded unto him the way of God more perfectly" (Acts 18:26). She is named before her husband in four of the six places the pair appear, which in that era is not nothing, and together they correct a public teacher in private rather than in front of a crowd.

Lydia

A dealer in purple cloth, a trader, at a riverside prayer meeting because Philippi had no synagogue. "Whose heart the Lord opened, that she attended unto the things which were spoken of Paul" (Acts 16:14). She is baptized, then makes Paul an offer he does not easily accept and she does not withdraw: "she constrained us." Her house becomes the first church in Europe.

What the early church did with them

These women were not rediscovered by modern readers. The church that came directly after the apostles knew them by name and reached for them.

Irenaeus, in the second century, taught in the line that runs back through Polycarp to the Apostle John, recounts the resurrection and says of Mary Magdalene, without argument or apology, that she was the first:

and on His rising again the third day, He said to Mary, who was the first to see and to worship Him, "Touch Me not, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to the disciples, and say unto them, I ascend unto My Father, and unto your Father."

Irenaeus, Against Heresies

And the Apostolic Constitutions, a fourth-century church order that presents itself as apostolic and is generally dated later, contains a prayer to be said by a bishop while ordaining a deaconess. Read who it names:

O Eternal God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Creator of man and of woman, who didst replenish with the Spirit Miriam, and Deborah, and Anna, and Huldah; who didst not disdain that Thy only begotten Son should be born of a woman… do Thou now also look down upon this Thy servant, who is to be ordained to the office of a deaconess, and grant her Thy Holy Spirit.

Apostolic Constitutions VIII, The Form of Prayer for the Ordination of a Deaconess

Miriam, Deborah, Anna and Huldah. A prophetess, a judge, a widow in the temple and the woman who authenticated the book of the law. When the ancient church laid hands on a woman for an office, it prayed the names of these women over her as the precedent for doing it.

What that does and does not establish. It is not a Scripture and this page does not treat it as one. The Apostolic Constitutions are later than they claim and were never received as canonical. What they are is evidence, and good evidence, of what a fourth-century church actually did and how it justified doing it. The argument about women in office is worked out from Scripture on the companion page, and the deaconesses of the early church are treated there. What belongs here is narrower and harder to argue with: the church that used these women as precedent was not a modern one.

Where this lands

Set them side by side and the thing they have in common is not a role. A slave names God. A prostitute confesses him better than Israel did. A judge sends a general to war. A prophetess certifies Scripture for the high priest. A queen risks execution. A ruined woman preaches to a town. A woman nobody would have called as a witness is the first witness of the resurrection.

What Scripture does with them is a thing on its own. It does not clean them up: Sarah laughs, Rahab's trade is stated, Mary Magdalene's seven devils are on the record, and the woman at the well's five husbands are the very thing she uses as evidence. And it does not make an argument out of them either. It just keeps handing them the moment.

Related: The Other Women, the ones who did damage and the ones Scripture refuses to sort, A Woman of Valour (Proverbs 31 and 1 Peter 3), Women in the Bible and the Early Church, The Genealogy, Marriage. The Pulpit Commentary quoted verbatim from the public-domain edition in our library. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub. Where a page states what a Hebrew or Greek word does elsewhere, the other occurrences are linked so the reader can check rather than take our word for it.