Five women of the Old Testament

It’s hard to imagine, in this modern world where women enjoy so many freedoms, what hardships women endured a mere century ago. Almost impossible, to imagine a woman’s life in the millennia before the advent of the Women’s Rights Movement. So, how can a modern woman identify with women who lived in an age where even riding a donkey was a privilege not to be taken lightly? Courage in the face of overwhelming odds hold women of all eras and ages together. Women throughout time and the world around have possessed the intuitive ability to overcome the odds, or to accept what they cannot change. For five women in ancient Israel, acceptance and change of fortune shaped their futures and saved their lives.

If even one Canaanite historian had survived the ruins of the ancient city of Jericho, it’s likely that he would have only one name by which to call a traitor: Rahab. However, Hebrew historians have recorded, with words of reverence, the part this heroic woman of questionable reputation had in the destruction of Jericho. She is often and bluntly referred to as a harlot, though the tactful historian Josephus named her as an inn-keeper, a profession which could easily have garnered a woman a defamation such as whore. Later historians have hypothesised that the dyed wool drying on her roof, and the scarlet cord she lowered from her window, might have been proof enough of her profession - a dyer and merchant. However, since many women of the day often dyed their own wool, this hypothesis is inconclusive.

Against odds of her own survival, and trusting faithfully in a god she didn’t even know, Rahab sheltered two Israelite spies, even lying to her own king and his men when she was questioned about the whereabouts of the two men, saying, “There came men unto me, but I wist not whence they were.” (Josh. 2:4, KJV)

While it could be argued that Rahab’s silence might have been easily bought, if she truly was a whore, that theory would not explain her survival. At the order of God, every Canaanite man, woman, and child, and even the livestock, was put to Israelite sword after Jericho fell, yet Rahab and her family survived. If she had merely been paid for her silence and co-operation, the Israelites would surely have felt no obligation to disobey their god on her behalf. But Rahab the Harlot and her family were the only Canaanites to survive the destruction of Jericho, and Rahab herself lived to take an honoured place in Israel. Legend even whispers that she married the Israelite leader, Joshua. However, other tradition says she married Salmon, one of the spies she aided. If this latter theory is true, then Rahab was truly honoured among women for her courage, for she would have been the mother of Boaz, whose son, by Ruth, was Obed, who was father of Jesse, father of David, through whose line came Jesus Christ. But, regardless of whose blood she might share, Rahab’s deep devotion to her family, and her faith in a foreign god, led her to one of the most courageous betrayals in history.

Rahab might have been the helpful harlot, but when one speaks of a mother in Israel, Biblical historians unanimously agree on one woman : Deborah, a Judge respected and followed by men in a time when women were subservient. Truly an oddity in her own time. She was given her place as a Judge because she had the gift of prophesy. Little else is known about her, personally, except that she was married, and that she lived in a pleasant spot surrounded by palm trees, perhaps suggesting life at an oasis. Deborah was not just a prophetess, however. She was a poet, as well, and has often been compared favourably with King David himself. But it is as none of these that Deborah gains her true fame and reverence. Rather, it is as the woman who instigated and organised a battle which ended twenty years of tyranny by the Canaanites. Deborah was the Biblical Joan of Arc, leading her army to victory against an oppressive people. However, unlike Joan, Deborah was the vision of propriety, turning her gaze from the carnage she had initiated. Neither did she join the troops as they pursued the fleeing Canaanite army.

In recent years, detractors have brought these last points to the fore, claiming that she was a voice, rather than an active part in the battle. What few of these critics understand is that, even before she began her plans to free Israel, Deborah knew that there would come a time when she would have to step back and let another have the centre stage. She knew, through her gift of prophesy, that her fate would be to share the victory of the day with another woman, for she had prophesied to her generals that Yahweh would deliver the enemy “into the hand of a woman.”

That woman’s name was Jael, and her fate was to be Deborah’s antithesis. Where Deborah judged men, Jael was to be forever judged by men for her actions when Deborah ceased to act.

Jael, unlike Deborah, possessed no squeamish sense of demure femininity. She was a nomadic woman, believed to be a Kenite, rather than a Hebrew, and used to the balder facts of life. Her people, if not her own husband, were friendly to the Jews, and Jael shared that kinship. However, her husband, Heber, was a supporter of the Canaanite king, Jabin, and his general, Sisera. Because of her husband’s support for these enemies of the Hebrews, Jael was able to lure Sisera, unsuspecting, into her home and convince him that he was safe enough to rest. While Sisera trustingly slept, Jael took the only action she felt she could, knowing that he planned to return with more men and annihilate the Jews, and drove a tent stake through his skull at the temples. For that action, prophesied by Deborah, Jael has earned only ridicule, though her actions spared Israel as surely as Rahab’s spared the Israelite spies.

Where Rahab used her lack of virtue to hide spies and change the course of history, and Jael sacrificed hers to spare Israel from destruction, there was a woman who forfeited her own virtue for less respectable reasons. For all that she, by her beauty, inspired base thoughts and even baser deeds, Bathsheba did little, herself, to prove herself a heroine rather than a harlot.

Bathsheba was the wife of Uriah the Hittite, one of King David’s most loyal soldiers. When, while her husband was away fighting, she was commanded to present herself to the king, Bathsheba did nothing to prove her faithfulness to her husband, returning time and again to the king.

Historical records don’t even hint at her protesting this course of action, even when she became pregnant with David’s child. In fact, she made no effort to aid David in the reunion he planned for her and her husband. She barely shed tears, by records, when David’s deviousness contrived to place Uriah in the front lines of battle, where he was killed. Instead, she soon after married the king.

After the death of her first child, and then, later, the birth of Solomon, Bathsheba faded into the obscurity of the palace harem, not to re-emerge until David’s deathbed. It was at this point that Bathsheba rose to action, even if that action was instigated by David’s prophet friend, Nathan. When David’s son, Adonijah, set himself up as king in David’s place, Nathan sought out Bathsheba and convinced her to go to David’s side and there reproach him for promising the throne to her son, Solomon, but doing nothing to keep that oath.

Thus, the blood of two men soon stained Bathsheba’s hands, that of her first husband, Uriah, and of her royal husband’s son, Adonijah. And all of this because Bathsheba allowed herself to become a puppet and a harlot.

The history of Israel is littered with Queens much like Bathsheba, weak and cold to human suffering. But there was one queen who was anything but weak or uncaring. Her Hebrew name was Hadassah, but was changed during her captivity in Babylon to the Persian name Esther.

Esther wasn’t always royalty. In fact, for much of her life, this Hebrew girl was an orphan, raised by a priestly cousin. But when the Persian king Ahasuerus began searching for a new wife, Esther’s cousin, Mordecai, contrived to send Esther, who was truly beautiful, to the palace, though he cautioned her to tell no one that she was a Jewess. Esther found favour with Ahasuerus, and was soon his queen. But Esther’s position as queen was a fragile one at best, and when Ahasuerus’ right hand, Haman, contrived to have all the Jews executed, Mordecai pressed Esther to do something to save them all. So, disobeying tradition in a manner that could have spelled her death, Esther went before the king, unsummoned, and requested that he and Haman come to eat a meal she would prepare for them. Twice more, when Ahasuerus asked what, in all the kingdom, she would ask of him, she invited the two men to eat of food she would prepare. Then, on the third occasion, when asked the same question, she threw herself at the mercy of her husband, and begged for the lives of her people, admitting that she was a Jew. Angry that Haman had sought to kill his wife, Ahasuerus instructed that Haman be hung from the very gallows he had built to hang Mordecai, who had refused to bow to Haman. And so the Jews in Persia were spared, and Esther took on an honoured place as one of the most

courageous queens in history.

With such profiles of courage and commitment as displayed by Rahab, Jael, Deborah and Esther, there come great lessons in courage and honesty, in love and community. In stories of weakness and deceit such as Bathsheba’s, there are even greater lessons in overcoming social restrictions to do what is right, and the consequences of allowing oneself to be mired down in social tradition. It is from these five women, both the courageous and the cowardly, that all women can learn to find the common bond they

share, and overcome even the most difficult of trials.