I’ll continue my series on The New Testament in Color next month, but let’s turn to the Old Testament for a few weeks…
What does it mean to be a woman? As I’ve started to research the women’s history of Bethel, I find myself wondering about the expectations that are placed on those students, faculty, and staff. Where did they get their ideas — their ideals — of the identity, traits, and roles that they associate with their gender?
I remember realizing how oblivious I’d been to these questions when I first read Rachel Held Evans. “In the evangelical Christian subculture,” she started the January chapter of her Year of Biblical Womanhood, “there are three people a girl’s got to know before she gets her period: (1) Jesus, (2) Ronald Reagan, and (3) the Proverbs 31 woman.”
The first two I got to know in my own evangelical upbringing, but I realized that I’d never even read the last chapter in Proverbs, let alone idealized the woman described in vv 10-31. For “while the first two are thought to embody God’s ideal for all mankind,” Evans continued, “the third is thought to represent God’s ideal for women.” As a young man, I was a stranger to the Proverbs 31 woman-filled world that Evans described:
Wander into any Christian woman’s conference, and you will hear her name whispered around the coffee bar and lauded from the speaker’s podium. Visit a Christian bookstore, and you will find entire women’s sections devoted to books that extol her virtues and make them applicable to modern wives. At my Christian college, guys described their ideal date as a “P31 girl,” and young women looking to please them held a “P31 Bible Study” in my dormitory lounge at 11 p.m. on Mondays. She’s like the evangelical’s Mary—venerated, idealized, glorified to the level of demigoddess, and yet expected to show up in every man’s kitchen at dinnertime. Only unlike Mary, there is no indication that the Proverbs 31 woman actually existed.
Evans opened my eyes to an ideal that had been there all along. I started to notice Proverbs 31 showing up in a few student papers, invariably those written by young women describing the good life as one of quiet domestic work under the headship of a godly husband. While biblical scholar Ellen F. Davis warns modern readers not to rip out of context a passage meant “to underscore the central significance of women’s skilled work in a household-based economy” of the Ancient Near East, Evans found that “many Christians interpret this passage prescriptively, as a command to women rather than an ode to women, with the home-based endeavors of the Proverbs 31 woman cast as the ideal lifestyle for all women of faith.”
In the end, Evans “decided it was time for Christian women to take back Proverbs 31.” The eshet chayil of v 10 was not just the “excellent wife” of the ESV’s complementarian translation, but a “woman of valor” (or “woman of strength” or “woman of noble character”). She is “not some ideal that exists out there; she is present in each one of us when we do even the smallest things with valor” — whether those things are done within the home or at a workplace.
Amen. But I wonder if Christians might get a fuller understanding of what it means to be a “woman of valor” if they remember that the Book of Proverbs both ends and begins with model women. Proverbs 31 shows up next week in the lectionary, but today we encounter Lady Wisdom, whom we might call the “Proverbs 1 Woman.”
Wisdom cries out in the street;
in the squares she raises her voice.
At the busiest corner she cries out;
at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:
“How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?
How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing
and fools hate knowledge?”Proverbs 1:20-22 (italics mine)
Lady Wisdom is not God herself — “The Lord created me,” she adds later, “the first of his acts of long ago” (8:22) — but she is the personification of God’s wisdom. Or perhaps we might think of her as embodying obedience to God’s will and ways, the antithesis of the fools who “hate knowledge” (1:22) and the scoffers who “did not choose the fear of the Lord” (v 29). To heed Lady Wisdom is to “understand righteousness and justice and equity, every good path” (2:9).
That’s good counsel for all people. But the fact that Scripture puts those words in the mouth of a woman seems important to me, suggesting a different kind of “biblical womanhood” than what that phrase often entails in evangelical circles.
The Proverbs 31 woman “opens her mouth with wisdom,” but if she speaks at all, it’s with “the teaching of kindness… on her tongue” (31:26). Though “her works praise her in the city gates” (v 31), it’s the husband of the Proverbs 31 woman who actually “is known in the city gates, taking his seat among the elders of the land” (v 23).
She inhabits a mostly private sphere, but the Proverbs 1 woman is a public figure. Lady Wisdom cries out “in the street” and “at the busiest corner,” raising her voice “in the squares,” and delivering her first monologue on the turf of the Proverbs 31 husband, “at the entrance of the city gates” (1:20-21). Solomon later advises patience and “a soft tongue” as keys to persuasion (25:15), but the Proverbs 1 woman is done waiting and whispering: Lady Wisdom “will pour out my thoughts to” people who “have ignored all my counsel” (1:23, 25), promising calamity to those who don’t heed her — but security to those who do (vv 27, 33).
Lady Wisdom seems like a template for the vocal women of faith who have reproved the unheedful throughout Christian history, calling fools from their complacency and the simple from their waywardness (v 32). Women, that is, like the abolitionists, suffragists, and other social reformers — Sojourner Truth, the Grimké sisters, Catherine Booth, Frances Willard — who helped Don Dayton recover a 19th century evangelical faith in the 20th century. Women like many of the professors and administrators I’ve known at Bethel, who have never hesitated to speak truth as teachers and scholars or wisdom as institutional leaders.1
One final thought: the existence of a Proverbs 1 woman implies that of a Proverbs 1 man.
A man, that is, who’s accustomed to inhabiting the street or square, but willing to cede that space to another… accustomed to being heard, but willing to listen… accustomed to making decisions, but willing to consider that he’s been rash and imprudent. A man who attends his ear to wisdom and his heart to understanding (2:2), knowing that when “the LORD gives wisdom” (2:6), he often speaks through the words of women like Lady Wisdom — as much as through the actions of her quietly virtuous sister at the other end of Proverbs.
Next week’s lectionary readings: Psalm 54; Jeremiah 11:18-20; Mark 9:30-37; James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a.
Women like Beth Allison Barr and Kristin Du Mez, with whom I wrote a tribute to Rachel Held Evans after she died in 2019.
Thank for this! And for the link to your longer column about Evangelicalism. I went to seminary in my 40s - Don Dayton was my faculty advisor at Drew. I became a believer in 1972 as a teen who didn't grow up in the church. I was told that what I'd entered was "Evangelical Christianity" but I had no idea until much much later that I'd also beenn "baptized" into an Evangelicalism that created "segregation academies" that it called Christian schools, in the wake of the Civil Rights Act. I think the "Jesus Movement " brought a lot of us into a church whose history we remained ignorant of, and in many ways functionally repudiated as we grew up. I certainly did not know racism was part of "our" faith until we moved to California and met a lot more people who grew up in Southern churches. For this reason I think there is another Evangelicalism that is now trying to find its own new name. We still love Jesus, trust the scriptures, think others should come to Christ and also want to do justice, love mercy and walk humble with God, in society, even politically. Even structurally in society. Certainly as we vote.