Have you ever played the game where people sit in a circle and a story is whispered in someone’s ear, then passed on by whispering to the next person, then the next? If so, then you understand the challenges of biblical translation. By the time the story reaches the end of the circle, the details have usually changed. Sometimes, even the meaning of the story has changed, too.
Translating any language is a tricky job, particularly when it comes to the ancient languages that make up the Bible: Hebrew, Greek, and some Aramaic. Details are often lost in in the great circle of time that spans almost two thousand years of biblical translation. Oddly, the details that seem to get lost the most in the Bible have to do with the stories of women.
In all fairness, when you’re tackling something as monumental as the Bible, you can expect that some stories will just get lost, or rather, hidden in plain sight. After all, the original stories have been whispered from two thousand years plus! It just so happens that many of the stories that have been lost in biblical translation are about women, especially powerful women. Women who were called by God to lead God’s people. The good news for us is that they haven’t been lost forever. These days, women’s stories are being excavated like buried treasure, which helps us locate some of the lost pieces of women’s history. Including some of the hidden fragments of our own stories that have been missing for a very long time.
How did the stories of powerful women, warriors, prophets, and heroes, become so buried in the Bible? Wouldn’t we want to celebrate and honor these women of renown?
One of the main theories that has been developed by biblical scholars such as Wil Gafney, Elizabeth A. Clark, Tikva Frymer-Kinsky, Esther Fuchs and many others, is that gender bias played a huge role in the process of the hiding.
Since most biblical translation throughout history has been done primarily by men, and most often through the lens of a patriarchal culture, women’s stories were largely out of focus, in the background, hidden or completely buried. Nothing against men, but, when a good portion of Christian theology was formed, there were a few influential men who had some pretty twisted theories about women.
Some of these men were responsible for creating the foundational concepts of biblical theology as we know it today. Our beloved church fathers from the fourth and fifth centuries: Augustine, Ambrose of Milan and John Chrysostom,1 among others. They were men of their time, a time in which women were viewed as utilitarian – producing babies and serving men. What they saw in Genesis chapters 1 and 2 oddly enough, looked a lot like the world around them. A world in which women had very few rights.
For example, Ambrose of Milan wrote in his treatise, On Paradise, “even though man was created outside Paradise (an inferior place), he is found to be superior, while woman, though created in a better place (inside Paradise) is found inferior. For the woman was the first to be deceived and she deceived the man.”2 It’s odd logic, but somehow we bought it. The belief that women were inferior to men and should be viewed with suspicion due to their so called “deceptive” nature colored the lens through which our church fathers interpreted the Bible. This belief then colored the interpretations following them, and ultimately many of the belief systems that were foundational for how we’ve practiced Christianity for a very long time.
Some scholars think that the church fathers just didn’t understand Hebrew all that well. It makes sense, it’s a complex and fluid language. Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney, Hebrew scholar, believes that there are many female prophets (and women warriors) hidden in the masculine grammar. 3 What else did they happen to miss?
Through insisting on male dominance as God’s design for humanity and hiding the women who were in leadership roles in Hebrew culture, former biblical interpretations have often created an imbalanced and unfair view of God and people.
On top of that, the insistence of these interpretations as “right” has made for a lot of human suffering for women. But today, all of these things are under the microscope, so to speak, of biblical studies. What they overlooked is changing the way we read the Bible, which is good news not just for women, but for everyone.
Explore more lost stories of women of the Bible in this free resource, download your free PDF here.
Elizabeth A. Clark, Women In the Early Church, (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, Inc. 1983) p 27-76. [↩]
Elizabeth A. Clark, Women In the Early Church, (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, Inc. 1983) p 30. [↩]
Wilda C. Gafney, Daughters of Miriam, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2018) Preface. [↩]
“Nobody escapes being wounded, we are all wounded people. When our wounds cease to be a source of shame and become a source of healing, we have become wounded healers.” – Henri Nouwen, “The Wounded Healer”
The Wounded Healer is a human archetype that’s been around for thousands of years. In native culture, the wounded healer is the shaman or holy man/holy woman who heals themselves and others through becoming a channel for the Creator’s power to flow through them. They often use their wounds as a source of information for healing others. Jesus became the great Wounded Healer (the topic of Nouwen’s book) as his wounds became a source of healing for the wounded of the world.
It’s a beautiful idea, that our wounds could become a source of healing. But if you’re like me, you might initially balk at the thought of placing your wounds in the service of others. After all, if you’ve been on the earth very long, you soon learn from the school of hard knocks that you have to heal yourself before you can help anyone else, right? But here is what Nouwen is getting at and it’s also the real genius behind Jesus’ core teaching of “love one another.” The way to unleashing the wounded healer within isn’t in the fixing of our wounds or the wounds of others, it’s in the loving.
We so often confuse fixing and loving, and it’s easy to do.
When Jesus told his followers that the most important thing was that they love one another and love God, he knew they were broken people in a broken world. The thing is, he wasn’t telling them to fix the world or fix each other, he was telling them to love each other. It is somehow very important as we find solutions to the problems of the world like hunger, homelessness, climate change, violence and oppression that love leads the way.
Loving is different than fixing. We can’t fix each other but we can love each other, and this is where the magic happens, this is where the healing begins. In fact, Jesus was clear on this point too, that we need not get involved in trying to fix each other, but loving, loving one another is necessary for our own healing. Because it is love that connects us as human beings. People tend to suffer from loneliness, isolation and abandonment without love. Without love, we are just doomed to live out the nature of our wounds.
Healing our wounds is really important to human thriving. The field of psychology informs us that if we don’t heal our wounds, then they become the pain that we inflict on others. We project the dark attributes of our wounds onto others because we are trying to find some kind of method to cope with them. When we are not able to go through the healing process, we tend to project our pain outwardly, it’s how we manage the emotions we can’t process. Because we’re projecting the material of our wounds such as hurt, fear, mistrust, jealousy, it makes it difficult to connect with people, to love and have intimate relationships. Without healing our wounds, we are controlled by our pain.
But, as it turns out, the opposite is also true. That when we project love onto others, we go in the direction of love, in ourselves as well as outwardly. Love begins to give us messages about who we really are, because love is inside of us, the most powerful force in the universe. Love leads us to healing. We begin to crave more love as we get to know love, as we seek to love without conditions, we want more of that in our own lives. It leads us to seek our own healing. If we get into a program of healing, then our wounds can give us the information we need to move forward into friendships, love relationships, intimacy and a sane, manageable life. We become wounded healers.
Healing happens as we learn to give and receive love, as we share our brokenness with other human beings who are also broken. It took me a long time to really accept this. Because I always felt that I had to fix things, situations, problems; that in my ability to fix impossible situations, I could be spectacular and finally be worthy of love. I found out, in ten years of being the pastor at one of those churches Pope Francis has called “the frontlines of the world’s pain” that I was wrong. I couldn’t fix anyone or anything, all I could do was love broken people and eventually, learn to love myself. I learned that if I let love lead, solutions to problems would arise and I could see the way clearly.
Check out Sherry’s latest book: reflections from a pastor on homelessness and her spiritual journey.
The act of loving one another actually gives us access to our wounds. Because often, they are buried so deeply within us, we can’t reach them by ourselves. We need others to become mirrors for us so that we can locate them, have language for them. Sometimes our wounds are buried beneath layers of a false self that we’ve developed to survive because the pain of these wounds has been too overwhelming for us to process. Our real self or true self goes into hiding to survive. But the genius of Jesus’ teaching, “love one another,” is that as we risk loving instead of fixing, something deep within us begins to vibrate, God’s love, hidden inside of us all. It wakes up like a sleeping giant and begins to shake these layers of the false self as we connect with others through love. We begin to realize there is a truth inside of us that is much more powerful than our pain, that is Divine love. It shines out from inside as we risk loving, as we realize we are broken. Somehow our hearts need to break so we can believe that love is inside of us, love rescues us from within because it is innate in us all. We were all created with the image of God within, we just have a hard time believing it. Love holds us steady, loving others stabilizes us as we take the healing journey.
There is a wounded healer inside of us all. As counterintuitive as it might seem, we find our healing by putting our own wounds in the service of a greater love. God begins to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.
As the poet Rumi said, “the wound is the place where the light enters you.”
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Occasionally I meet a holy family. This is my term for a homeless family with a baby. I call them holy because I always think of the traveling Mary and Joseph, rejected and forced outside, exposed to the elements, with the task of doing something Divine.
Such a family walked into the community meal with a baby boy, not quite a year old, with blue eyes and blonde, curly ringlets. The couple had become newly homeless and were living in their car. I tried many different techniques to help them get into housing, working with other agencies, helping them with paper work, but nothing stuck. Even with all my best efforts, it seemed I was unable to find a solution for this family. The layers of their predicament were thick and seemingly impenetrable. They would appear and disappear with great irregularity.
Randomly, they would come into the meal, covered in grease, dirt, and the fatigue of the streets. I would hold the baby, give them supplies, sometimes put them up in a hotel—and my heart would break again. The church did as much as we could financially to help them but after a year of coming and going, they just couldn’t get on their feet. It was so discouraging.
One Thursday night, one of my new mothers from the church came to the meal and noticed that the baby, now almost two years old, had blackened feet. She took a wash cloth and some soap from the kitchen and washed his feet. I had bought two gallons of milk for the meal that night, and she filled a bottle with fresh milk and fed him. The baby laughed at her, feeling safe in her arms. She noticed the dark circles under his eyes, and how tired the baby seemed. She called me that night after the meal, crying.
“I don’t know what to do, I can’t stop thinking about this baby,” she said through tears. “He just looked at me with his eyes, it was like he was crying for help and I just feel like I have to do something.”
I tried to console her. I knew she had made a connection with the baby boy and that he reminded her so much of her own little boy. Her heart was genuinely breaking over the situation.I assured her I would check further into what some of the options might be, though there didn’t seem to be any great ones presenting themselves immediately.
There was the Department of Children’s Services that we could call to come and investigate options for the baby’s safety. I explained to her that I’d done everything in my power to try and get them to commit themselves to the family shelter, but they would have to split up and they refused to do so.
She wouldn’t let it go, her heart had become involved. “I have some money if you think it would help, I can get together some supplies for them, whatever you think.”
“I’ll look into it this week,” I said, and thanked her for her generous offer.
The next day I made some phone calls, tried to track down the couple, but they were nowhere to be found. They had no address other than their car, no one seemed to know them, they were part of a hidden population and they were hidden well.
After church on Sunday the young mother lingered, sitting in the back of the church crying.
Now there are few women in my church from Africa, they are refugees of war-torn countries like Sierra Leone and Sudan. They knew something about the dangers of being homeless with children in tow. One of the mothers, Sarah, from Sierra Leone was forced from her home during a rebel invasion. Sarah’s baby was ripped from her arms and murdered in front of her. The atrocities they have lived through put our problems in perspective.
These two African now American mothers, Josephine and Sarah, began to comfort her and talk with her about this baby’s condition and what might be done.
“In Africa, we would never let a baby live on the streets,” Sarah said. “He would be taken to an auntie or a cousin. Someone would take him in. I don’t understand how we let this happen here in America. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”
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The three of us were standing around the young mother who was sitting in the pew, trying to comfort her and come up with a solution. I shook my head. “I guess in America, we are a different kind of village. We have to have the system step in, if we call DCS, the baby will be taken into state custody and then put into the foster care system, it’s not guaranteed that the baby will have one home, it may have many in that system, it’s not perfect, it’s just the system we have, but it does often work out in favor of the child’s safety.”
“I just want to take him home,” the young mother said. “I want to feed him and bathe him and make sure he feels safe. It’s killing me that he’s not.”
“We have to do something,” Josephine said. “We can’t just let these babies live on the streets, we have to intervene.”
The women reasoned through the situation and decided that we should, as a church, call DCS. The only problem: there was no way to locate the couple, and she was expecting another child, due in two weeks.
The next community meal, the couple did not show up. Perhaps they intuitively knew something was going to happen. I haven’t seen them since, and as I asked around—no one knew where they went. I had no words of comfort for the young mother. Only, that these are just the kinds of situations we encounter when we do this type of work. It’s hard, but sometimes all we can really do is pray and keep searching for some kind of miraculous solution, giving what we can give, doing what we can do while we wait. Sometimes, even I have a hard time heeding this advice because my heart breaks, too.
I grew up in a very small town. In a small town, there is a culture of remembrance. People remember your personality—the things that made you unique—and your family. There is a deep well of recognition. Even in this day and age, there are no homeless people in my hometown.
But in the city, people fall through the cracks. I don’t know where they go. There are places to hide, even in plain sight, where no one will ever find you. It haunts me just like it haunted this young mother that a baby did not have what it needed to survive, that a little one so tender could be at risk in a great big world. This precious, new life, in danger of slipping through the cracks.
As an urban pastor, I’ve tried to create a culture of remembrance, but it’s hard because sometimes I feel as if my one, precious life is slipping through the cracks, too. There is something exciting about being in a city with its opportunities, but if you are from a culture of remembrance, it’s difficult to stay in that forgotten place.
I often admire the African refugees in my church because they stick together. They are surrounded by their culture here in the city. Even though they joke with me that they have “left the village behind” to fit into the urban culture, this is not really true. The village lives inside of them like my hometown lives inside of me. It guides them to take care of their neighbors’ children, to look out for one another, to be kind, and to protect the vulnerable. They have always carried the village in their hearts and as long as they do, they will never feel lonely.
I’ve learned so much from them and they have become the very heart beat of my church and ministry here, they have so much to teach us about how to love. They are so grateful to be living in what they call a “great country,” free from the kind of violence that drove them from their homeland. Here, they can use their gifts, pursue their humble dreams, educate their children, and make a life for themselves. And yet, they do not understand why we have so many holy, homeless families.
I’m not sure what will happen to the holy, homeless family but I pray for their safety and for the well-being of the babies. I pray for a new world in which we cherish all the sacred, holy families in our communities. I have learned that the only home we truly have is the one that is carried in the hearts of others.
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Thank you, Adele! Appreciate your words, hope you and family are well. Take care!
Thank you, Carol, for your sweet words. Miss you both!
This is lovely and helpful, Sherry, both the thoughts and the song – thanks for sharing.
Recently, the remains of an elite Viking Warrior were
discovered in Southeastern Sweden after being buried for 1000 years. It was
assumed that the warrior was a man, considering the lore of Viking Warriors.
But the DNA of the warrior’s bones confirmed a shocking truth. This elite
Viking Warrior, buried in an elaborate grave with two sacrificed horses,
swords, arrows and other weaponry, was a woman.
A similar process of uncovering buried secrets about women’s roles in ancient history is occurring in the landscape of biblical studies. In her book, Daughters of Miriam: Women Prophets in Ancient Israel, Hebrew Scholar Wil Gafney writes about several female warriors who have been hidden in plain sight in the Bible.
Beginning in Exodus 38:8, and appearing again throughout the Bible, Gafney interprets the Hebrew language and context to define these women as warrior guardians stationed at the entrances to the sanctuary.1 Gafney is convinced that these women served in a military capacity.
In their appearance in Exodus 38:8, their mirrors, a part of their armor, were used in some way to form the bronze basin for the traveling sanctuary. Gafney explores the concept that perhaps the women were equipped with mirrors as military signaling devices while some scholars suggest that their mirrors were used as devices for prophetic oracles.2
Whatever the case may be, these warrior women appear several times throughout the Bible, including the woman who guards the entrance to the temple in John 18:16. In this case, one of the disciples with temple clout must gain permission from her in order for Peter to enter into Jesus’ trial.
Gafney’s interpretations, among the work of other female biblical scholars, reveal for us what has been hidden in plain sight. Just like Viking lore, biblical lore has led us to believe that only males could fulfill the roles of warrior and prophet. Even though there are Bible stories that clearly speak a different reality.
Some better known female warriors in the Bible include Deborah (Judges 4 and 5), the great judge, prophet and military leader who led the Israelites out of oppression through a victorious battle. Jael (Judges 4 and 5), Deborah’s accomplice, who slayed Sisera, the general of the opposing army and received the glory for the battle. There are the women mentioned above who guarded the gates of the sanctuary and also those mentioned in 1 Samuel 2:22.
There are likely countless unnamed women, Gafney believes, who
served YHWH Tzva’ot, God of Hosts or God of Armies (one of the many
names attributed to the God of the Israelites) as Divine warriors, whose names
we will never know. Their presence haunts the biblical landscape.
As their stories appear, we may feel that new ground is being broken within the pages of the Bible itself. We may feel our own hearts awaken a little bit to new possibilities. If this is true, then what else have we been settling for in our lives that are only half truths? Whenever we tell the lost stories of women, something wonderful happens in our lives, too. Our story becomes a little stronger, a little clearer. The haze is lifted from the pathways we’ve been struggling to see.
As we discover these warrior women of the Bible, we can embrace their courageous spirit, the women of God who let nothing come between them and their Divine path. Not even being buried alive.
Would you like to explore more things you never knew about women of the Bible? Check out my free resource below. You’ll discover women who were prophets, military leaders, women who ran businesses and even a woman who became a king! I’ve also included resources about the women who are discovering these things, female bible scholars and authors. Download it for free!
We always thought the role of the prophet was a “for males only” club in the Bible. That’s likely because if you’ve ever read any books on the prophets of the Bible you will often find the usual list: Moses, Aaron, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Hosea and other men. We’ve often been told that while women were allowed to speak prophetically such as Miriam, Hannah, Mary and others, they’re not usually considered candidates for the traditional role of the prophet. But things are changing, God is always doing a new thing, even in the pages of the Bible.
Prophets were the greatest authority on God in ancient Israel, that is, if their prophecy came true. If it was untrue, then they were branded a “false” prophet, and well, their career was pretty much over. It was a risky job. Prophets had a wide array of duties in the ancient Israelite world. From interpreting Divine oracles (proclaiming God’s Word), to recruiting disciples, appointing monarchs, military leadership, singing songs, gathering the community, and much more. Their voice was central to the community, a kind of oral, spiritual navigation device before sacred words were written down to guide humanity. So, it stands to reason that if we see the Bible from the perspective of all things patriarchal, women would not be granted such an important role. But we would be wrong if we made this assumption. As scholars are discovering, there were many women prophets in the Bible, named and unnamed. Women who were not just prophetic, but full fledged prophets.1
There are some legitimate female prophets who stand out in the Bible, whose stories are not so hidden, such as the prophet, judge, and military leader, Deborah, found in Judges 4,5. There is also Huldah who is mentioned in 2 Kings 22:14-20 and 2 Chronicles 34:22-28, a prophet who taught rabbi’s and priests in matters of holy law at the temple gates. In fact, to this day, there are gates at the Temple mount known as The Huldah Gates.
In Isaiah 8:3, there is the female prophet with whom Isaiah conceived a child. There are the female prophets, plural, of Israel that Ezekiel condemns in 13:15-17. There is also Noadiah, a very powerful Israelite female prophet who opposes Nehemiah in 6:14. Other women who are identified as women who prophesy are Miriam, Hannah, Abigail, Sarah, Rachel, Esther, and Mary, the mother of Jesus. I’m sure there are still others that could be added to this list as their stories are excavated from the unexplored regions of Bible. We have so much more to learn about women’s roles in the ancient world of the Bible. But the real work lies ahead of us and belongs to the people of faith. We have much work to do to teach our young girls (and boys) about these heroic women in the Bible. The women who led armies, preached God’s prophetic words, ordered faith communities and fought the giants of the land. The question is not about whether or not female leaders existed in the Bible, rather, what do we do with their stories now that they have arrived in our world?
Learn about the female leaders of the Bible and much more in this free resource. Click this linkto download.
Rev. Sherry Cothran serves as Lead Pastor at St. Mark’s UMC, Chattanooga. She has been a senior pastor in the United Methodist Church since 2010, she is also a singer/songwriter and author. Her last project, “Tending Angels: Stories From the Frontlines of Heaven and Earth” combines a music video with a book to bring awareness to the plight of the homeless in the U.S. You can learn more about her work at www.sherrycothran.com.
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Wilda C. Gafney, Daughters of Miriam: Women Prophets in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2018 [↩]
Thank you, Adele! Appreciate your words, hope you and family are well. Take care!