A lot of people who do not regularly read the Bible have forwarded the notion that the Bible minimizes or discounts women. It is true there are places here and there were women were not named (such as the wife of Noah) but there are plenty of places where men are also nameless (the Good Samaritan, for instance, never is named).
Not only do women in the Bible get positions of prominence, even title roles sometimes, the way the Bible talks about women is actually progressive and rather out of step with the patriarchal times in which the stories were written.
Take Esther. It would be hard to find a more heroic figure, male or female. Uprooted as a young woman and carted off to a harem, Esther rose to become queen of a world power. Through no fault of her own, Esther quickly got involved in court politics at one of the most dangerous royal families in the world, namely the court of King Xerxes. (King Xerxes was allegedly so paranoid that only seven men could come into his presence without express permission. It turns out he was not so paranoid, after all; he actually did get murdered by one of the people at his own court.) A genocidal plot against the Jews of that era was foiled by the adept strategies of a young women.
Another Biblical book about an unlikely heroine is Ruth. This is a quick-read (it is just four chapters) that will impress you like a short story. Ruth refuses to abandon the care of her widowed mother-in-law, even when her mother-in-law gives her a gracious out. Ruth follows her mother-in-law back to Bethlehem where she works among the gleaners. This was a rough, rowdy group of mostly men who did backbreaking labor in the hopes of scraping up enough to feed their family. Through her many ordeals, Ruth remains a quiet, hard-working, dignified young woman who eventually catches the eye of a prominent man. Biblical authorities sometimes wrangle a bit with the manner in which Ruth was able to get Boaz to marry her. Some say she was quite forward, even daring, yet a study of the culture of her time reveals that she was only doing what she had to do to allow the man who admired her to know she was amenable to marriage.
Other Biblical women include Sarah (who followed her husband into the Promised Land and had a baby at the ripe old age of 100 which, the Bible points out, is old for that sort of thing!) and Miriam (the sister of Moses and herself a prophetess) and Abigail, one of the eight wives of King David.
More emphasis is placed on the so-called bad girls of the Bible, including Queen Jezebel (a murderous pagan woman who pushed her husband around, and he was a pretty rough character) and sometimes Bathsheba, another of the many wives of King David.
Bathsheba may be getting a bad rap. King David committed adultery with Bathsehba, that is certain; in fact, Bathsheba got pregnant by David while she was married to another man and he was not married to her. Yet it is unclear how much coercion the king exerted on this woman. We do know that David spied on her, peeking at her while she bathed, and that he then spent some time with her. It is not known if and to what extent she might have protested. The Bible is strangely silent on that point.
In the New Testament, the Bible says that there were women among the disciples of Jesus. Two prominent ones are Mary (a friend of Jesus, not his mother or the woman with the surname Magdalene) and Martha. When this Mary decided one day to sit among the men and listen to Jesus teach rather than work in the kitchen with her sister Martha, Jesus said that Mary had chosen the better part. This was no social faux-pas, but rather a revolutionary move, since women in that era were not considered worthy of educating and certainly never would be educated among a group of men.
When Jesus was tried, beaten, and sent to die on the cross, He had been long deserted by most of His followers and even His inner circle of apostles, but a few females, including his mother Mary, faithfully stayed with Him as He died. The early church was advanced in large part by women like Lydia, who helped fund Paul's missionary journeys and who, according to legend but not the Bible, may have helped support Luke as he wrote his gospel.
Priscilla is named as a daikonos of a church in Greece; the term can mean anything from a deacon or pastor to a helper and Paul credits her in Romans with having taught him a lot. Women in the Bible range from the mysterious Queen of Sheba to the plain-spoken Leah, from Dinah and Tamar, daughter of King David (both Dinah ad Tamar were abused) to Esther and Jezebel who ruled with greater and lesser degrees of godliness.
The Bible includes a warrior woman (Deborah led troops into battle) and working women (Ruth and the Proverbs 31 woman, who goes nameless), powerful women (Esther, Miriam) and simple women (the widow who befriended Elijah or the prophetess Anna who lived at the Temple in Jerusalem).
The Bible presents such a diversity of women in usual and not-so-very-usual situations that it creates for readers the notion that females throughout history have been involved in politics, war, religion, and greater and lesser causes. The fact that not every woman in the Bible is depicted as godly and honorable lends authenticity to the many women who appear in its pages. Just like in real life, women of the Bible come in all shapes, colors, sizes, and with a wide variety of abilities and intentions.
