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The Five Not-So-Scandalous Women in Jesus’s Genealogy
The Gospels include two genealogies of Jesus (Luke 3:23–38 and Matthew 1:1–17). Luke’s version traces our Lord back to Adam, placing him over the family of mankind. Matthew’s list establishes Jesus as heir to the Davidic dynasty. But another key difference between the two is that Matthew’s list, unlike most such lists in the first century, includes five women. Why? Sadly, if we do a quick Google search on the females in Jesus’s genealogy, we find that many, if not most, people conclude, “To show what great sinners God incorporated into the family tree.” We see words such as “scandalous” and “immoral” that point to the past sex lives of…
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Vindicating Hagar
Of all the studies on Bible women I’ve ever done, only one included a look at Hagar. I imagine that’s because romance-driven Hollywood influences us to see Hagar as an “extra” in the Sarah-and-Abraham love story. If we even study Hagar, we tend to view her as Sarah’s failure in the baby department. And in viewing Hagar this way we miss a lot. As Sarah’s Egyptian slave, Hagar started out with both race and class against her. Yet once she conceived her master’s child, Hagar’s status changed. That led her to despise Sarah—or perhaps gave her freedom to express what she already felt. (If someone forced me to bear a…
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The Most-Hated Woman in the Bible
I have a hunch that the most-hated woman in the Bible is not bad-girl Jezebel. It’s the “woman of noble character” in Proverbs 31. One friend whined to me, “I can’t stand that Proverbs 31 lady. I feel tired just thinking about her.” Who can blame us? P-31 is so competent—so intelligent, industrious, and strong—that she intimidates your garden-variety believer. (That’s all of us, right?) She certainly challenges anyone suggesting that the ideal wife has no independent thoughts, or that she’s unintelligent, dainty, and fearful. It’s easy to shy away from P-31 because we identify so little with that kind of perfection. Yet perhaps a few observations can help us…
