When I started seminary in ninth grade, our teacher, a traditionalist, an earnest-but-uninspiring man, told us that the story of the Old Testament was about covenants and inheritance, about first sons and birthright and how the Lord’s chosen usually turned out not to be the first son anyway, because the first son sold his birthright or sinned it away or otherwise showed himself to be unworthy.
I wasn’t very interested. How could I be? I am not any kind of son, let alone a first or second or even twelfth. I’ve held that same distanced, valuable-as-a-historical/religious-record but not of much personal meaning to me in my daily life feeling for almost twenty years. Nothing I learned from a rather more-enlightening professor in college changed my mind about the Old Testament being primarily by men for men.
Then I started going to Sunday School for the first time in years. (I had been busy in other callings during that hour for most of my adult life.) And Tom started a new scripture study program in our home where he reads/skims until he finds a story, and then tells it to us, having Sally read a few important verses here and there. (He asks me if I want to do the preparatory reading some nights; so far I have been almost always passed out on the couch or still cleaning up dinner.)
But I started hearing the stories of the Old Testament. Tom is aware of his role as father to daughters exclusively, so maybe he has been emphasizing the female roles, but it turns out that the Old Testament is really all about women. About their spiritual and physical journey to become mothers. And about their role in nation-building, whether it’s Jael nailing Sisera or the judge and prophetess Deborah, or Delilah who Samson was an idiot to confide in, or the wise woman who saved her city from Joab’s wrath by offering him the head of Sheba (a traitor to King David) thrown over the wall of the city.
And don’t forget Eve (who the Mormon church revere as perhaps the wisest, bravest of them all), and Esther, and Rebekah, who went to the Lord herself about children, who conspired (it seems) with the Lord to bypass Esau for Jacob in the blessing from Isaac.
Some women in the Old Testament are never named, and yet their stories are as archetypal, as symbolic and pointing towards the coming and role of Christ as any of the revered patriarchs’ interactions with their sons. Mary, the mother of Jesus, wasn’t the first woman to know that her Son would be special, different, dedicated to God. What about Sarah, mother of Isaac, and Hannah, mother of Samuel?
What about Moses’s mother, mother of Moses? Actually we know her name, we just never talk about her by name. She was Yocheved — Jochebed in the KJV. Her story, to me, is as captivating, faith-affirming, electrifying as any, and yet we hardly give her a name and do little more than gloss over her story. We spend weeks agonizing in ecstasy over the obedience Abraham showed in his willingness to sacrifice his grown son, and yet mention in passing that, oh yeah, a mother in Israel had to send her infant son down the river. For the good of his people, for the mysterious ways of the Lord.
Perhaps this would all be old news to serious biblical scholars; I was appalled and delighted to realize I could have been calling Moses’s mother by her name all these years. And I wanted to explore her story. I submitted my first attempt to Rixa’s writing contest. You can read it here. I am unsatisfied by it, especially the ending. Someday I will try again. In the meantime, I’ll teach my daughters her name, and her story.
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Great job. I really enjoyed reading it.
The idea that women (anybody, really), no matter how famous, legendary, gifted, or capable, must sometimes make decisions with only scant information available, act decisively, succeed or fail, is a wise observation, I think. Sometimes safety is not possible, yet not to act is calamitous. It’s not acting on faith or luck, either. Rather, it is acting on the fly with one’s innate sense of what’s best, learned over the millennia maybe near the gene level. Mother wit.
Thanks for the insight on Jochebed.
Love your mind.
Jane Reply:
May 18th, 2010 at 8:15 am
I think religious leaders would usually have us believe that biblical figures, etc are acting on faith, but sometimes I wonder. So much of what we believe is shaped by our culture (rather than our personal relationship with God), that it’s hard to separate exactly why we do the things we do. Lately I’ve been realizing that I AM lucky when what I like to do, what I enjoy (breastfeeding, reading to my kids) also turns out to be what science AND God support. Too bad that’s not the case with other things I like to do.
I’ve always learned that Jochebed probably didn’t toss her son in the river, but put the basket in the reeds. But I’ve always wondered whether Jochebed told Moses who she really was.
Jane Reply:
May 18th, 2010 at 8:17 am
Yes, interesting — I can’t imagine her not ever revealing that to him. How could you not?
And even if she put him down in a secure-seeming place just minutes before someone would hopefully discover him, I still think it took great faith (or also desperation, bec. if she was discovered to still have him, he would’ve been killed forthwith).
Lately I have found myself almost paralyzed with fear for my kids’ safety. It’s prob. the pregnancy hormones, and usually it luckily doesn’t assail me until after I’ve sent them off by themselves to the bathroom at the far end of the playground, for example. But just thinking about a helpless infant being set down anywhere other than his mother’s or father’s arms/house/trusted friend terrifies me.
I think you did a great job with it. I have always loved that Eve is revered in our Church. Next time I read through the Old Testament (because, you know, I do that ALL the time), I’m going to look at it with a feminine lessons perspective. Thanks for the food for thought.
Jane Reply:
May 18th, 2010 at 8:19 am
Our understanding of Eve is honestly what usually gives me the most hope for the future, the greatest comfort against charges of male domination in our church, etc.
If you haven’t checked out the Women in the Scriptures blog I linked to a while back, I really recommend it. There are so many stories of women and fertility/infertility, faith and sacrifice, etc. http://womeninthescriptures.blogspot.com/
Jane! This is why I read you! You make me think SO HARD about stuff I really SHOULD be thinking about but never take the time to truly ponder. Thank you thank you! Am sitting down with my scriptures tonight to dig into these stories.
I love all of your posts, but these thought-provokers are the favorites of my favorites! Thank you for sharing your recorded ponderings!
You kno, I don’t think I’v eever really thought about that. I enjoy all the stories… but there are a lot of good ones for women that we don’t think of.
I have a lot of issues with how people percieve Eve.
Anyway, great blog!
One of my all-time favorite women of the Bible is Abigail. The story starts in 1 Samuel 25.
One of my favorites is the story of the midwives who spared the lives of babies around the time Moses was born. They would claim that the babies came before they could even get there. They feared God more than Pharoah.
Esther is another favorite–seriously, her life could be (and has been) made into an epic movie. It’s got the best plot that couldn’t have been better scripted with Hayman dying by his own noose that he made for Mordecai. Such poetic justice. And such faith on Esther’s part to listen to her uncle, to God, and to risk her life in great faith that she might spare her people. Good stuff. Yessiree, good stuff.
Jane Reply:
May 22nd, 2010 at 5:00 pm
In some midrash, Jochebed was one of those midwives. Other variants of her story are that she and Moses’ father were divorced after she got pregnant (for the third time) and then remarried a few months later so that she could hide before the birth and claim that she had given birth when Moses was actually 3-4 months old; ‘they’ dated the conception to the second marriage date, apparently.
It’s amazing to me the rich apocryphal traditions. I am also fascinated by Rahab — the harlot in Jericho who gets immunity for herself and her family from Joshua’s two spies who lodged at her house. So interesting, and there HAS to be a great story behind that.
Oh my goodness, you need to get “Women of the Old Testament,” by Camille Fronk Olson. I took a class from her at BYU on women in the scriptures which completely turned my life around. And now I’m reading this book and, WOW, it opens my eyes so much. I’m actually about to write a post about it.
And now I’m off to read your article!