Out of The Shadows Part I: what the Hebrew Bible says about women
Out of the Shadows
Last time, we looked at our origin story and walked through the first four chapters of the Bible. The picture there is pretty clear. Male and female together, made in God's image, set in the garden as co-rulers — kings and queens partnering with God over creation. Then Genesis 3 and 4 trace the catastrophe: sin warps the partnership, the man rules over the woman, brother kills brother, and the curse keeps spreading outward.
Which raises the obvious next question. If that's the picture Genesis lays down at the start, what happens after that? What does the Bible do with actual men and women, from Genesis 12 forward, as it tells the long story of Israel?
Here's where I want to start with an honest posture. The cultures of the Ancient Near East were male-dominated. Women are often peripheral in these stories. Sometimes they only show up when their presence affects the main story about men. I've heard the critique many times from people I respect: how can you say the Bible is good news for women when it's full of polygamy and patriarchy and stories that treat women as property? It's a fair question. And we shouldn't pretend the Bible is utopian about women. It isn't.
But the more carefully I read these stories, the more I notice something else going on. The authors are not always endorsing what they describe. Often they're critiquing it from within. There's an undercurrent that keeps tugging against the surface of the text — small narrative choices, pointed asides, theological speeches put in unexpected mouths — that quietly says, this is not how it was supposed to be. Mary Evans, an Old Testament scholar I've leaned on for years, calls this an undercurrent of hope in the Bible's treatment of women. The writers seem to know that what their society does with women is not what God intended.
Take polygamy. The first polygamist in the Bible is Lamech, in Genesis 4, and the narrator gives us several clues that something is very wrong with this arrangement. He's a descendant of Cain, in the genealogy that's actively spreading sin further into the world. He composes a song bragging about killing a young man for wounding him. And then he takes two wives, and the names of his wives — I love this — are Adah and Zillah. In Hebrew those names literally translate as Ornament and Shadow. The first polygamist in the Bible; the women he marries are Ornament and Shadow. The writer is putting up big flashing lights: this is not the way it's supposed to be. This is not an equal partnership.
The pattern keeps going. Centuries later, one of the first commands God gives Israel concerning their king is “he shall not acquire many wives for himself, lest his heart turn away” (Deuteronomy 17:17). And then Solomon, the most famous king of Israel, acquires seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. The text in 1 Kings 11 doesn't applaud. It mourns: “his wives turned away his heart.” The Bible is not endorsing this. The Bible is naming it — and pointing back, again and again, toward the original design.
So here's the posture I want to take for the rest of this article. I'm not going to argue that the Hebrew Bible is utopian about women. What I do want to show you is something more interesting: how often, when women show up in the Hebrew Bible, they show up against the grain of the surrounding culture, in ways that the writers seem to be deliberately highlighting. It's an undercurrent rather than a flood. But it's there. And once you see it, you can't really unsee it.
We're going to walk through a handful of the stories and moments that have impacted my understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures, and end with a look at how the first New Testament writer draws the whole story together by beginning with a genealogy that breaks the mold. Some of these stories you know well. Some you may have never heard preached. Either way, my hope is that by the time we're done, you'll see the undercurrent yourself.
Sarah — the promise needs her
Once Adam and Eve fail in the garden, God's response is not to abandon humanity. The whole rest of Genesis is the slow, patient work of God starting over — calling out a new family through Abraham. And by the time we get to Genesis 17, that family is starting to look a lot like Eden is getting a restart.
In Genesis 17 God comes to Abram and changes his name. He's been called Abram, which means something like exalted father. From now on he'll be Abraham — father of many, or father of nations. And then, in the same conversation, God does something that often gets overlooked. He changes Sarah's name too. Sarai becomes Sarah. The exact meaning of Sarai is debated, but Sarah is much clearer — it means something like princess or queen.
That name change is doing real theological work. God could have just said to Abraham, “I'm going to give you a son.” Instead He calls Sarah into the same kind of identity shift He's giving Abraham. Abraham, father of nations. Sarah, princess from whom kings will come. Listen to how the verse reads: “I will bless her, and moreover, I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall become nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.” The royal name given to Sarah comes with an incredible promise. Not only one nation, but many nations and kings will come from her.
Abraham, looking at his ninety-year-old wife, makes the very reasonable suggestion that maybe God could just use Ishmael, the son he's already produced through Sarah's servant Hagar. And God says no. Not because Ishmael is unloved — God explicitly promises to bless Ishmael as well, to make him into a great nation. But the son of the covenant has to come through Sarah specifically. The plan requires her.
I think this passage takes us all the way back to Genesis 1. There, the image of God was male plus female, together, partnering to rule over creation. Abraham alone is not enough; the promise needs both of them. Adam and Eve failed in the garden; now, maybe, Abraham and Sarah together will succeed. The choice of Sarah also looks forward to the rest of the story. God keeps finding barren women who will become the conduit of God’s choice and God’s grace. There’s even a direct line from the barren womb of Sarah to the virgin womb of Mary. It’s as if the whole time God wants to underline how His choice of election is an act of sheer grace, out of nothing.
Rahab — faith from outside the camp
The next stop is the book of Joshua. Israel has wandered through the wilderness and is about to enter the promised land. Joshua sends two spies into Jericho, and the first place they end up is the house of a woman named Rahab.
She's typically called Rahab the prostitute, and that's how she's been remembered for thousands of years. The Hebrew word in the text is zōnâ, which usually does mean prostitute, but there's at least a scholarly conversation about whether the word here could just as easily be translated “innkeeper.” In the story itself she behaves much more like a landlady — she has a house in the wall, lets travelers stay there, talks her way through the king's officials. If you read it as innkeeper rather than prostitute, the story actually holds together better. Either way, the title that's stuck to her — Rahab the prostitute — has tended to distract readers from what's happening in her scene.
Because what's actually happening is one of the boldest declarations of faith in the entire Hebrew Bible. Out of the mouth of an outsider. Out of the mouth of a Canaanite. Out of the mouth of a woman.
She hides the spies. She lies to the king of Jericho to protect them. And then, after dark, she goes up to the roof where she's hidden them, and she gives this speech:
“I know that the LORD has given you the land, and that the dread of you has fallen on us, and that all the inhabitants of the land melt in fear before you. For we have heard how the LORD dried up the water of the Red Sea before you when you came out of Egypt… As soon as we heard it, our hearts melted, and there was no courage left in any of us because of you. The LORD your God is indeed God in heaven above and on earth below.”
That last line — the LORD your God is indeed God in heaven above and on earth below — is one of the sharpest statements about God in the entire book of Joshua. Maybe in the whole of the Hebrew Bible. And it's coming from a Canaanite woman whose city is about to be destroyed.
There's a key word in the book of Joshua that I think Rahab unlocks: the word heard. Over and over, when Joshua tells the story of the conquest, he tells us that the other kings of Canaan heard what God had done in Egypt and at the Red Sea and at the defeat of Sihon and Og. They heard the same news Rahab heard. And their response was to fortify their cities, prepare for war, and try to stop the Israelites. Rahab hears what God has done, and she wants to be a part of what the LORD is doing.
That's the heart of her story. She becomes the first of the Canaanites to bind herself to Israel's covenant. The spies pledge their loyalty to her family. When Jericho falls, her household is spared. And then she doesn't disappear into history. She gets grafted into the line of Israel so deeply that she becomes one of the great-great-grandmothers of King David — and, as we'll see in a few pages, of Jesus Himself.
At no point in the story is Rahab's gender ever a factor. Not in the spies' decision to trust her. Not in Joshua's decision to honor the agreement. Not in the narrative's framing of her as a hero of faith. Hebrews 11, the New Testament's great gallery of the faithful, names her alongside Abraham and Moses. She's there because of her faith, not in spite of her gender.
Other people may write her off by calling her Rahab the prostitute, but Matthew’s Gospel writes her directly into the most important rescue plan in history.
Deborah and Jael — the snake-crusher echo
When the question of women in leadership comes up, one of the very first stories to turn to is Deborah's. She's a judge over Israel, full stop. She sits under her palm tree between Ramah and Bethel, and people come to her to settle their disputes. She holds the same office Samson held, the same office Gideon held. And she holds it better than most of them.
The book of Judges, if you've read it, starts at a high point and slides downhill. Most of the judges throughout the book are not people you'd want to emulate. Samson, near the end, is a famously dysfunctional guy. But Deborah is right near the beginning, and she's one of the most righteous judges in the entire book — fully trusting in the Lord, listening to His voice, leading His people.
There's an exchange in Judges 4 between Deborah and her general Barak that I find fascinating every time I come back to it. Deborah tells Barak that the LORD is commanding him to go to battle. Barak says, “If you'll go with me, I'll go. If not, I won't.” Deborah agrees to go with him. And here's what I want you to notice: there is no moment in this story where Barak is upset that he's being led by a woman. There's no commentary in the narrative about how strange or scandalous it is. Deborah's authority is just there. Barak, who certainly knew the cultural script of his day, has no problem at all following her.
The song after the victory (Judges 5) sings of Deborah as a mother in Israel, rising up in a time of oppression and crisis. The same song then turns its attention to another woman — Jael, the unlikely hero who lured the enemy general Sisera into her tent and killed him in his sleep. The language is graphic and a little uncomfortable, but read it slowly, because there's a phrase here that should ring a bell:
“She struck Sisera; she crushed his head, she shattered and pierced his skull.”
Crushed his head.
Where have we heard that before?
In my last article, we looked at Genesis 3:15 — the very first gospel prophecy in the Bible. “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall crush your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” From the very beginning, God promised that one day someone born of a woman would crush the head of the serpent — humanity's ancient enemy. That promise hangs over the whole rest of the Hebrew Bible. Every genealogy, every birth narrative, every mother is implicitly asking: is this the one? Is this the snake-crusher?
I don't think the song in Judges 5 is saying that Jael was the snake-crusher. The full fulfillment of Genesis 3:15 was still centuries away. But the language is so specific that I think the writer is making a deliberate echo. Jael, a woman, crushes the head of the enemy of God's people. She's a foretaste — a small, particular moment when God lets a woman do exactly what He promised back in the garden — a signpost pointing forward to the future child who will crush the head of the snake.
Manoah’s wife — in parallel with the messenger
A few chapters later in Judges, we come to one of my favorite stories in the Hebrew Bible. The story of Samson's birth. Or, more accurately — the story of Samson's mother.
The setup in Judges 13 is straightforward. Israel is again under Philistine oppression. There's a man named Manoah, from the tribe of Dan, and his wife — and I want you to notice already what the text does — his wife is never given a name. Throughout the entire chapter, she is referred to only as “the woman” or “Manoah's wife.” It's the cultural pattern. Women in this kind of narrative often slip into the background unnamed.
The angel of the LORD shows up. He doesn't show up to Manoah. He shows up to Manoah's wife to tell her she's going to bear a son who will begin Israel's rescue. And he gives her specific instructions about how to prepare for the pregnancy. She goes and tells her husband what happened.
Manoah's reaction is one of the funniest and most devastating moments in the Hebrew Bible. He hears his wife describe what the angel of the LORD told her — and instead of believing her, he prays. “Please, LORD, let the man of God whom you sent come back to us once more so he can teach us how we should treat the boy.” Translation: I need to hear this from a man.
God listens to Manoah's prayer — and sends the angel back to the woman again, without her husband present. The text doesn't even try to hide what's going on. “And the angel of God came once more to the woman as she was sitting in the field, but her husband Manoah was not with her.” She runs to get Manoah, he comes, he finally meets the angel face-to-face, and he asks the same question — what should we do with the boy?
And the angel essentially looks at him and says: I already told her. Just listen to your wife.
When Manoah finally realizes he's been speaking with the LORD's messenger, he panics. “We are certainly going to die, for we have seen God.” And his wife — still unnamed — replies with calm theological reasoning: “If the LORD had meant to kill us, He would not have accepted a burnt offering and a grain offering at our hands, or shown us all these things, or now announced to us such things as these.” Manoah is afraid. His wife is the theologian.
Now back to the question of her name.
The cultural critique is the obvious read: the woman doesn't get a name; her husband does. That surely reflects how the surrounding society treated women — or does it? Earlier in the same chapter, when Manoah asks the angel his name, the angel refuses to give it: “Why do you ask my name, seeing it is wonderful?”
Two characters in this story don't get a name. Manoah's wife. And the angel of the LORD.
Manoah gets a name. But Manoah is the fool throughout — slow to believe his wife, slow to recognize the messenger, misreading the signs. The two unnamed characters — the woman and the messenger — are the ones the narrative elevates. Manoah's wife stands in parallel with the very messenger of Yahweh. She hears God's word directly, recognizes who He is, and demonstrates greater faith than her husband at every turn.
That's a deliberate authorial move. I can imagine the narrator asking, why doesn’t she get a name? Is it too wonderful? A nameless, faithful woman, mirroring the nameless, faithful messenger of God. The undercurrent is doing its work, even in a culture that would not have named her on its own.
Huldah — God passes over Jeremiah
One of the most striking stories about women in the Hebrew Bible is one that most modern readers have never heard preached. Let me tell you about Huldah.
Fast-forward several centuries from Deborah and Samson, to the very end of the kingdom of Judah, just a generation or so before the Babylonian exile. The king is Josiah, who took the throne at the age of eight and turned out to be one of the most righteous kings since David himself. Israel had drifted so far from God that the Torah scroll itself had been lost — actually lost, gathering dust somewhere in the temple, while child sacrifice and idol worship spread across Jerusalem.
In the middle of a temple restoration project, a priest named Hilkiah finds the lost scroll. He brings it to the king's secretary, who reads it aloud to Josiah. Josiah rips his clothes. He realizes that Judah has been violating the very covenant they were supposed to be living. And he gives an immediate order to his priests and officials: “Go and ask the LORD on my behalf, and on behalf of the people, and on behalf of all Judah, concerning the contents of this scroll that has been found.” Translation: find me someone who can speak God's word to me. Find me a prophet.
Now stop here for a moment. The historical detail matters. We know from elsewhere in the Bible that this is somewhere around 622 BC. Jeremiah was alive at this very moment, prophesying in Jerusalem. Zephaniah was alive at this very moment, also prophesying in or near Jerusalem. Both of these men have books named after them in our Bibles. Either one of them, presumably, could have been sent for.
The priest goes to Huldah.
She lives in Jerusalem, in the second district. She's the wife of Shallum. She's a prophetess. And of every available option, of every named or unnamed male prophet God could have raised up out of the dust or the rocks, Huldah is the one God ordains for this moment.
She delivers a hard word. She tells Josiah that judgment is coming — exile is on the horizon, and the curses written in the scroll are about to land. But she also delivers a word of mercy: because Josiah humbled himself and tore his clothes, he will be gathered to his ancestors in peace. He will not see the destruction.
And what Josiah does with Huldah's word kicks off one of the greatest revivals in the entire history of Israel. He doesn't just take the personal “you'll go to your grave in peace” and ride out the rest of his reign. He gathers all the elders and priests and people of Jerusalem and Judah together, reads the entire scroll aloud, makes a covenant with the LORD in front of them all, tears down the asherah poles, ends the child sacrifice, and turns the whole nation back to God. Even if just for a generation.
And the word that ignited that revival came through a woman.
Some readers have tried to explain Huldah away. Maybe she was just the prophet who happened to be most available; maybe the men were all busy. The text doesn't say any of that. God doesn't lack for male prophets in 622 BC — He has at least two of His big-name prophets standing by, both of them in Jerusalem. He appoints Huldah. If you want to argue that God simply will not raise up a woman to a position of spiritual authority over men, you have to reckon with the fact that He explicitly sent a woman prophet to the king of Israel and used her word to launch one of the great revivals in His people's history. That's a hard fact to argue around.
The dark passages, and what the narrators do with them
I don't want to skip past the parts of the Hebrew Bible that are genuinely hard. Some of the stories we read about women in these pages are difficult — sometimes appalling. We need to be honest about them. We shouldn't soften them. And we shouldn't try to argue that the Bible endorses them.
The worst of all of them, I think, is the story of the Levite and his concubine in Judges 19. I want to walk through it for a few minutes, because it shows exactly what the narrators of the Hebrew Bible do with these passages — they don't approve, they don't whitewash, and they don't shrink from labeling what they see.
Here's the setup. By the time we reach Judges 19, the trajectory of the book has gone from good to bad to awful. We started with exemplary leaders like Othniel and Deborah. We slid through Gideon, who was fickle and lacked faith, all the way down to Samson, the most narcissistic, rash, and vengeful of the lot. And after Samson, no leader emerges at all. The nation is on the brink of anarchy.
The chapter opens with what could have been a beautiful reconciliation story. A Levite from the priestly tribe has a concubine — a kind of secondary wife with fewer legal rights — who has run away to her father's house. The text is slightly ambiguous as to why: either she was sexually unfaithful, or she was angry. Four months later, the Levite goes to her father's house to “speak to her heart” and woo her back. If we stopped right there, this could be the beginning of something like the book of Hosea — a faithful man pursuing a wayward bride, a picture of how God relentlessly pursues His own wandering people.
It could be. But it isn't.
On the way home, the Levite and his concubine stop for the night in the city of Gibeah, in the tribal territory of Benjamin. And they end up sleeping in the public square — because no one in the city invites them in.
This detail is going to sound minor to us. It wasn't. Hospitality in the ancient Near East was one of the foundational virtues of life. I saw this myself a few years ago when I traveled to Israel for my Master's program and was invited to dinner at the home of a Bedouin chief. The Bedouins are the nomadic people of that land, and to this day they maintain customs that go back to the time of the Bible. The chief showed us how his meeting room was built — three walls and a roof covered in embroidered cloth, but no fourth wall. “We construct our meeting rooms like this so travelers know they are always welcome here.” He told us that when a stranger came in and rested on the cushions, the family would slaughter a goat and prepare a feast, and the stranger could sleep and eat their food for up to three days. Only on the third day was it considered proper to ask, “What is your name?” and “What are you doing here?”
That is the world Judges 19 is set in. So when the Levite and his concubine end up in the public square of Gibeah with no one offering them a roof, the text is already saying something terrible about the city. Hospitality is gone. Decency is gone. And it’s about to get much worse.
Eventually an old man takes them in. Then the men of the city surround the house, demanding the old man hand over the Levite to be raped. The old man offers his own virgin daughter and the concubine instead. The Levite — the priest, the man supposedly representing God's holiness — grabs his concubine and forces her outside. She is raped and abused all night until morning. She crawls back to the doorstep and falls there.
Here is one of the most quietly devastating things the narrator does in the whole chapter. Up to this point in the story, the Levite has been called by his title — Levite. But in this single line, as the light is breaking and his concubine is dead on the threshold, the narrator inserts a different word: “her master had remained inside until the light dawned.” The Hebrew word is adonai — the same word used elsewhere as a title of honor for the Lord Himself, and for noble men of standing. The narrator drops it in here exactly once, at the moment the man has failed every duty that word implies. It's a pointed, ironic indictment. This is the kind of “master” her master turned out to be.
And the Levite's response, when he wakes up and finds her on the threshold, is to load her body onto his donkey, take her home, and cut her into twelve pieces, sending one to each of the tribes of Israel as a rallying cry for war.
On a deeper level, what we are watching in Judges 19 is the unmaking of creation itself. In Genesis 1, God made light out of darkness and order out of chaos; here, the light dawns and brings only chaos and death. In Genesis 2, God created man and woman to be united as one flesh; here, the woman's body is cut up and sent in twelve directions. This is a moment of de-creation. Genesis 1 and 2 rewound. The undercurrent of dignity inverted in the most obscene way the writer can possibly show us.
The tribes rally. The ensuing war between Israel and Benjamin escalates into something close to genocide; the Israelites burn every Benjaminite town to the ground. When the dust settles, only six hundred Benjaminite men are left alive, and the rest of Israel has sworn an oath not to give any of their daughters in marriage to them. The tribe is on the brink of extinction. So the leaders devise a fix that drives the story even further down: they tell the surviving Benjaminites to hide in the vineyards at the next festival and abduct the dancing girls of Shiloh as wives.
Notice the language the elders use to justify all of this. When they describe the near-extinction of an entire tribe, they say: “Yahweh had made this breach.” When they describe the killing of all the Benjaminite women, they use the passive voice: “Benjamin's women were erased.” These men are responsible for what happened, and they are working overtime to make it sound as though it just somehow happened to them. The narrator is exposing the evasion as he describes it. He's letting these leaders condemn themselves out of their own mouths.
And then he closes the book with one final line. “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” That line should hyperlink in our minds straight back to Genesis 3. There, the first humans take the fruit because it was “pleasing to the eye.” From the very beginning of the Bible, the question has been: will people do what is right in their own eyes, or what is right in God's? The end of Judges is a horror movie that shows you, in graphic detail, what happens when humanity insists on the first.
Why does the Hebrew Bible keep a story like this alive? I can think of really only one reason. To warn every generation that follows how far we've come and how close we still might be to repeating it. Centuries later, the prophet Hosea will rebuke his own generation for acting like the men of Gibeah (Hosea 9:9; 10:9). The point of preserving the story is not to celebrate it. The point is to make sure no one ever does it again.
And here's the move I find most extraordinary. We turn the page from that truly awful scene, to the book of Ruth and its first line, “In the time when the judges ruled….” Same historical moment as Judges 19. After all of that horror — anarchy, rape, dismemberment, genocide, abduction — you turn the page and find a Moabite woman binding her life to a grieving Israelite widow with the words, “Where you go I will go… your people will be my people, and your God will be my God.” Ruth, a foreigner who, according to Deuteronomy, had no rights or standing in Israel, becomes the literary answer to Judges 19. A small seed of hope and redemption springs from the dry, cracked earth of Judges through the faithfulness of a woman society would have shunned.
She'll show up in the genealogy in just a few pages.
Judges 19 is the most extreme example, but it's not the only dark passage about a woman in the Hebrew Bible. Jephthah's rash vow ends in the loss of his daughter's life. The Bathsheba episode begins with David taking the woman in the same way that Eve took the fruit, and the narrator labels the act exactly that. Hagar is used and then abandoned by Abraham and Sarah, and only God comes to find her in the wilderness. And in each of these stories, the writer is doing the same kind of work he does in Judges 19 by naming the brokenness, exposing the culpable, refusing to call evil good. Mary Evans, the OT scholar I leaned on earlier, sums it up well: “the writers at least recognize that this was not how things were meant to be.”
Even some of the strangest laws in the Torah that deal with women — the ordeal of the suspected wife in Numbers 5, the captive bride in Deuteronomy 21 — are, read in context, quietly pulling Israel forward. To 21st-century ears these laws sound backward and oppressive, and parts of them remain genuinely hard to read. But look at what they do against the world around them. Consider the suspected-wife ordeal of Numbers 5 beside its closest ancient parallel, law 132 of the Code of Hammurabi — the same scenario, a wife accused but never caught, the "finger pointed" at her. Under Hammurabi, she was thrown into the Euphrates: if she drowned she was guilty, and if she surfaced she was innocent. Her life was the test. Numbers 5 keeps the ritual framework her culture expected but drains the lethal danger out of it — the suspected wife drinks water mixed with dust from the tabernacle floor and a little ink. Whatever else that ordeal is, it cannot drown her. And in an age when warfare treated captured women as plunder, Deuteronomy 21 restrains the soldier: he cannot simply take a captive he desires, but must give her a month to mourn, marry her formally, and — if he later rejects her — set her free rather than sell her. Compare the Iliad's Briseis, passed between Achilles and Agamemnon as a prize, to feel the contrast. These laws are not modern, and we shouldn't pretend they are. But by the metrics of their own world, the Hebrew Bible's treatment of women is meaningfully ahead of its day.
One small, precious detail from Hagar's story. In Genesis 16, mistreated by Sarah and pregnant with Abraham's child, Hagar flees into the wilderness — and there, by a spring of water, the angel of the LORD finds her. She is the first person in the Bible to be met by the angel of the LORD. And in that encounter she does something no one before her has done: she gives God a name. El Roi — the God who sees me. A mistreated, runaway, foreign slave-woman is one of the first theologians — giving God a new name.
Other moments of dignity, briefly. Hannah's prayer in 1 Samuel 1 becomes the template Mary will later use for her own song in Luke 1. Esther saves the whole nation through the courage to walk into the king's presence uninvited. The daughters of Zelophehad, in Numbers 27, win a legal case at the foot of Mount Sinai and have the inheritance law of Israel rewritten because of them. Abigail, in 1 Samuel 25, talks David out of murdering an entire household and becomes the voice of wisdom in a story where David is losing his grip. The women keep showing up: out of the shadows, right into the hinge of the story.
The bridge — five women in Matthew’s genealogy
If you want one passage in the Bible that pulls this whole undercurrent into the open, I'd point to the very first chapter of the New Testament. Matthew’s Gospel begins with forty-two names.
Most modern readers find the genealogy in Matthew 1 boring. We skim it. It's a list of names, most of which we can't pronounce. But for a first-century Jew, this would read like an exciting movie trailer. Why? Because this was the genealogy you'd been waiting for.
Remember Genesis 3:15. The seed of a woman would one day crush the head of the serpent. Every genealogy in the Hebrew Bible was implicitly asking: which one of these sons born of woman is the snake-crusher? Matthew opens his Gospel by giving you the answer. Forty-two generations, three sets of fourteen, from Abraham to David to the exile to the Messiah — and the entire structure is telling you: this is the one we've been waiting for.
But in the middle of this list of fathers and sons — and in any first-century Jewish genealogy, you'd normally see only fathers and sons — Matthew does something extraordinary. He names five women.
There were obviously hundreds of women to choose from, but Matthew picks out five — Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary — and weaves them into a genealogy that was traditionally father-to-son-to-son-to-son. Why these five?
The more I sit with this, the more I'm convinced Matthew is making a theological statement. Three things jump out at me about these five women.
First, they're all either Gentile or implied Gentile, except for Mary. Tamar is almost certainly a Canaanite. Rahab is from Jericho. Ruth is a Moabite. Bathsheba was married to Uriah the Hittite — the text doesn't directly say she was Gentile, but it heavily implies it. Mary, of course, was Jewish — but she was a poor peasant girl from Galilee, the lowest social rung in Israel. Matthew is signaling, in the very first paragraph of the New Testament, that the story of Jesus is going to be a story about God grafting in outsiders.
Second, they all carry some kind of tainted reputation. Tamar was condemned as immoral. Rahab was labeled a prostitute. Ruth was a foreigner in a culture that resisted foreign wives. Bathsheba — Matthew refuses even to use her name here. He calls her “the wife of Uriah,” because he is not going to sugarcoat what David did to her. And Mary will spend the rest of her life answering questions about how exactly she got pregnant. These are not the women you'd choose if you were curating a respectable ancestral line. Which is exactly the point. God is showing mercy to the disreputed and grafting them into His covenant story.
Third — and this one is the thread I find most striking — all five women fight to be a part of God's story. Tamar takes drastic, costly action to remain in the line of Israel; Judah, the man who wronged her, ends up saying, “She is more righteous than I.” Rahab hears what God has done and devotes her life to Him. Ruth says to Naomi the line we still quote at weddings: “Where you go I will go… your people will be my people, and your God will be my God.” Bathsheba, at the end of her life, fights to make sure her son Solomon takes the throne his father David had promised him. And Mary, when an angel tells her the impossible, replies: “I am the Lord's servant. Let it be with me just as you have said.”
What these women have in common — Gentile, marginalized, often dismissed — is a tenacity about God's covenant story that puts most of the men around them to shame. They grab hold of what God is doing and refuse to let go.
I think this is why Matthew names them. He's opening his Gospel by telling us, in advance, what kind of story this is going to be. It's going to be a story where outsiders get grafted in. Where the marginalized end up at the center. Where God's people are not just the ones with the right bloodline, but the ones who hear what God is doing and reach out to be a part of it.
And the last name on that list is Mary. Galilean peasant girl. Newly engaged. About to find out that the entire weight of human redemption is going to come through her.
That's where we pick up next time. From the Gospels through the letters, women are no longer in the shadows — they're at the center of what Jesus and His apostles are doing.
Where this leaves us, for now
So what do we do with the Hebrew Bible’s portrayal of women?
The honest realistic posture matters. The cultures the Bible describes were male-dominated. Many women in those stories are unnamed; many are mistreated; many slip past us in the genealogies and the legal codes without a word. We don't have to pretend otherwise, and the Bible doesn't pretend otherwise either.
But underneath the surface, an undercurrent is running. The writers keep doing small but pointed things. They let Sarah's name carry the weight of the covenant alongside Abraham's. They let Rahab give one of the great confessions of faith in the entire Hebrew Bible. They put Deborah at the top of the judges, with no one batting an eye. They make Manoah's wife stand in narrative parallel with the angel of the LORD Himself. They let Huldah, not Jeremiah, ignite Josiah's revival. They label their own dark passages as dark. And when one of Israel's own writers, centuries later, opens his book about the long-promised Messiah, he writes five women into the genealogy — Gentile, marginalized, tenacious — to make sure we don't miss what God has been doing all along.
God refuses to let the brokenness have the last word. The story is a slow restoration of the image-bearer dignity set out in Genesis 1 and fractured in Genesis 3. It is never fully restored in the rest of the Hebrew Bible — but never quite extinguished either.
Next time, we'll watch what happens when Jesus arrives. The undercurrent we've been watching across the Hebrew Scriptures becomes, in the early church, a rushing river. The shadows recede, and the women step into the light.
