Real Biblical Womanhood: What was it like being an Old Testament woman?
Facing the misogyny of the Bible honestly: Part Four
The laws that we looked at in part three of this series give us some insight into the way that women were viewed and the powerlessness that they suffered.
Despite the fact that women are relatively absent from the pages of the Bible, we glimpse enough of their lives to get a pretty honest portrayal of the challenges faced by women, and we can make some guesses about what life was like for them.
Wives and concubines
Women did not get much say in who they married. They were generally forced into polygamous marriages organised by the men in their families. If they were lucky. Sex slaves, concubines and trafficked women also frequent the pages of the Old Testament. These polygamous unions frequently caused social collateral damage.
Rachel and Leah
Take Jacob — and Rachel and Leah. Rachel’s marriage to Jacob is decided in a bargain between Jacob and his uncle Laban.
Jacob is at Laban’s home because he fled there after a conflict with his brother. After he has been there for a month working, Laban says that Jacob should not work for him for nothing and asks him what he wants to be paid. We are told that Jacob is in love with his younger daughter Rachel, and in a grand romantic gesture, he tells Laban that he will work for seven years in return for Rachel’s hand in marriage.
What Rachel thinks about this, we, of course, don’t know. She might have been delighted. She could have been appalled. The story in Genesis tells us that Jacob has an unshakeable love for Rachel that continues throughout his life. Given the choice, he would perhaps have preferred a simple, lifelong, monogamous union. But that wasn’t what his society offered.
After the seven years were up, Laban tricks Jacob into marrying Leah instead. She was the older, less attractive daughter, but Laban claims that custom dictates that the older daughter needs to be married before the younger. In a further bargain, he tells Jacob that so long as he finishes his bridal week with Leah and promises to stay and work for another seven years, he can have Rachel too.
Jacob didn’t want to be wed to Leah and we can only guess how awful it would have been for her. In one of the rare Biblical moments of hearing a woman’s perspective, we hear that she is miserable. But she turns out to be more fertile than Rachel:
Leah became pregnant and gave birth to a son. She named him Reuben for she said, “It is because the Lord has seen my misery. Surely my husband will love me now”. (Genesis 29:32)
Bilhah and Zilpah
Leah has three more sons, and the rivalry between Leah and Rachel ramps up. Desperate to provide Jacob with a son in some way, Rachel hands over her servant, Bilhah, who then has no choice but to provide sexual favours to Jacob in order that, hopefully, she can become pregnant and provide Rachel with a surrogate son for Jacob. Leah, who has temporarily stopped getting pregnant, then gets in on the act and does the same with Zilpah, her own servant.
Rachel, the favoured wife, eventually bears Jacob's two sons. She dies giving birth to Benjamin, her second son. Perhaps because of his grief, Jacob lavishes love and attention on Rachel’s sons, who are favoured because they are the children of the favoured wife.
The levels of rivalry and dysfunction present in this complicated household come to the fore when the brothers plot to kill Joseph and then sell him to some Egyptian slave traders as a way of both getting him out of the way and also making a profit into the bargain. Joseph is often seen as sealing his own fate by being mouthy and possibly arrogant about his prophetic dreams.
But at the bottom of it all is a family where women are bargained with and used as breeding machines. Bilhah and Zilpah are particularly powerless and vulnerable.
So the ancestors of the celebrated twelve tribes of Israel were the twelve sons of this particularly dysfunctional family, full of strife and rivalry.
Dinah and Tamar
There were daughters too. We know of only one of them, Leah’s daughter Dinah because she was raped and her brothers sought revenge in a particularly brutal way, but it’s pretty unlikely that she was the only one.
If you’re the daughter of a king or a patriarch, it seems that the way to get a mention in the biblical narrative is to be raped and for your rape to be avenged in a way that has political repercussions. We know that David had daughters as well as sons (2 Samuel 5:14–15), but most of his daughters remain unnamed. A notable exception to this anonymity is Tamar. We know about Tamar because her half-brother, Amnon, rapes her, setting off a whole revenge saga between Amnon and her brother Absalom that destabilised David’s kingdom.
David’s reign is generally marred by the fact that he has multiple wives and many sons, who are evidently in conflict with one another. We don’t know exactly how many wives David had. Eight of his wives are named, and at one point, we are told that he took more concubines and wives (2 Samuel 5:13).
Abishag
Even when David’s an elderly, infirm man, women are still finding themselves obliged to meet his needs:
When King David was old and well-advanced in years, he could not keep warm even when they put covers over him. So his servants said to him, “Let us look for a young virgin to attend the king and take care of him. She can lie beside him so that our lord the king may keep warm.”
Then they searched throughout Israel for a beautiful girl and found Abishag, a Shunammite, and brought her to the king. (I Kings 1:1)
Yuk. Poor Abishag. There’s a job you really wouldn’t want. Lying next to a wizened old man with wandering hands.
Bathsheba
Perhaps the most famous incident involving David’s acquisition of women is when he sees Bathsheba, wife of one of his best soldiers, bathing on a roof and summons her to the palace so he can have sex with her, whether she wants it or not. When Bathsheba sends a message to tell David that she is pregnant, David attempts to get Uriah to go home and sleep with his wife, so that he will believe that the child is his. When this ploy fails, he arranges for her husband to accidentally on purpose die in battle and then marries the widowed Bathsheba.
Of all David’s questionable sexual exploits, it is notable that the only incident that gets him into trouble is his liaison with Bathsheba.
Nathan, the prophet, famously challenges David about this. He tells David the parable of a rich man with many sheep and cattle who lived next to a poor man with one little ewe lamb. When the rich man plays host to a traveller, instead of slaughtering one of his own sheep to feed his visitor, the rich man takes and kills the ewe that the poor man owns and loves. David is incensed by the behaviour of the rich man and stricken to discover that in Nathan’s parable, he himself is the rich man.
Interesting, isn’t it, that the victim in Nathan’s story is not the ewe that gets slaughtered but the man from whom she is stolen? The wounded party is not Bathsheba but Uriah. David is free to collect as many women as he likes so long as he’s not stealing them from someone else.
You will not be surprised to hear that over the centuries, many commentators and theologians have cast Bathsheba as jointly culpable with David. An adulterous temptress, who captured David’s heart by deliberately bathing naked on the roof, pretended to mourn her dead husband, enjoyed her upgraded status as wife of a king rather than wife of a general and went on to manipulate her position as David’s wife in order to secure the crown for her son Solomon.
While Bathsheba is a complex character, it is undeniable that she was not autonomous. Responding to David’s summons and his sexual advances were not things about which she had a choice. She did not lead him on. He had her brought to his palace, and he raped her.
Blaming women for the sexual behaviour of men has a long tradition. The idea that men would be able to keep it in their pants if women weren’t such temptresses is depressingly familiar. It has been the excuse for all kinds of oppressive laws and traditions across millennia. One of the justifications often given for purdah in its various forms has been that it stops men from becoming aroused and protects women from unwanted sexual advances. In more modern times, many a defence lawyer has implied that women were ‘asking for it’ because of the way they were dressed or behaved.
Shifting the blame from the perpetrator to the victim is not something we would accept in other areas of criminal behaviour. You wouldn’t expect to get away with robbing a jewellery store because it had an attractive window display.
Beware the Temptress
It is slightly depressing to discover that this trope finds its way into the Book of Proverbs, which is liberally scattered with warnings against women who are just waiting to lead men astray. It tells us that wisdom:
will save you also from the adulteress,
from the wayward wife with her seductive words,
who has left the partner of her youth
and ignored the covenant she made before God.
For her house leads down to death… (Proverbs 2:16–18)
Be warned:
For the lips of an adulteress drip honey,
and her speech is smoother than oil;
but in the end she is bitter as gall,
sharp as a double edged sword.
Her feet go down to death;
her steps lead straight to the grave (Proverbs 5:3–5)this teaching is a light…
keeping you from the immoral woman,
from the smooth tongue of the wayward wife
Do not lust in your heart after her beauty
or let her captivate you with her eyes,
for the prostitute reduces you to a loaf of bread,
and the adulteress preys upon your very life. (Proverbs 6:23–26)She is loud and defiant,
her feet never stay at home;
now in the street, now in the squares,
at every corner she lurks… (Proverbs 7:11–12)Many are the victims she has brought down;
her slain are a mighty throng.
Her house is a highway to the grave,
leading down to the chambers of death. (Proverbs 7:26–27)The mouth of an adulteress is a deep pit (Proverbs 22:14)
a prostitute is a deep pit
and a wayward wife is a narrow well.
Like a bandit she lies in wait
and multiplies the unfaithful among men. (Proverbs 23:27–28)
How can a man possibly be expected to behave himself when there are evil women walking down the street and lurking at every corner? If you’re wondering if there might be equivalent warnings for women about badly behaved men, needless to say, there is not.
Ironically the book of Proverbs is traditionally attributed to Solomon. Him of the vast harem of seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. Who all led him astray, presumably, lurking in corners and lying in wait like bandits.
Sorry. I’m forgetting. As we discovered in the previous article in this series, you don’t get led astray by unmarried women. You ‘happen to meet’ them. Unsurprisingly, the biblical narrative does make Solomon’s wives responsible for his spiritual demise in later life (1 Kings 11).
Laid out clearly in the book of Proverbs but running under the surface throughout the Old Testament narrative is this idea that women are dangerous. Their bodies are often unclean and might pollute you if you touch them. They will tempt you and lead you astray.
And, of course, over the centuries, figures like Eve and Jezebel have come to represent the general wickedness of all womankind in ways that go way beyond what is actually written in the Bible.
And so the Old Testament successfully joins in the conjuring trick of patriarchal societies everywhere. It portrays women as the guilty ones, the ones who are to blame, when actually they are far more often powerless, oppressed and the victims of unspeakable evil.
This series continues here:
To start this series at the beginning:
If you enjoyed this, you might be interested in my series exploring the femininity of God, which starts with this article:
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