The Women of Scripture

An Egyptian slave woman is the first person in Scripture to give God a name.

Twice she is in the wilderness with nothing, and twice the angel of the LORD finds her there and speaks to her by name. She is also the first person in the Bible to receive an annunciation: a promise of a son, with his name given in advance, a scene the Bible otherwise reserves for the covenant line.

Honest noteThe text does not present the Hagar arrangement as a model. It is Sarai's plan (16:2), Abram's compliance, and a long injury. Genesis records providence toward Hagar without endorsing what was done to her.

The angel comes to her twice and reaches her husband only because she runs and fetches him.

Unnamed, barren, and the only one in the chapter who is thinking clearly. She receives the annunciation of Samson, reports it accurately, and when Manoah panics that they will die for having seen God, she reasons him down from it with an argument from the offering God had just accepted.

She does exactly what Naomi twice tells her to do, and the book does not condemn her for it.

Orpah kisses her mother-in-law and goes back, which is the reasonable, dutiful, Naomi-sanctioned choice. She exists in the narrative as the control case: her ordinary obedience is the measure of how extraordinary Ruth's clinging is.

One woman's months-long vigil over unburied bodies shames a king into a burial.

Saul's concubine, whose two sons are among the seven handed over and executed. She spreads sackcloth on the rock and keeps the birds and beasts off from harvest until the rains, and when David is told what she has done, he gathers the bones of Saul and Jonathan and buries them all properly.

A Sidonian widow is the one Jesus names when he wants to say that Israel is not the limit of God's mercy.

She is down to a handful of meal when the prophet asks for the last cake first. The jar does not fail; then the son dies and is raised; and her closing line is the recognition formula of the whole Elijah cycle, now I know that the word of the LORD from your mouth is truth. Jesus preaches her in Nazareth and the town tries to throw him off a cliff.

She builds the prophet a room, is given a son, loses him, and refuses to leave the prophet's feet until it is undone.

Called a great woman in 4:8, the initiative in the chapter is entirely hers. When the boy dies she says nothing to her husband, rides to Carmel, and holds on. Elisha's servant cannot do it; Elisha must come himself. Years later Gehazi is telling the king her story at the exact moment she walks in to petition for her land.

A marriage is commanded as a sign, and the sign is aimed at Israel, not at her.

Hosea is told to take a wife of whoredom; the children's names are oracles; and in chapter 3 he is sent to love her again, “Love her as the LORD loves the Israelites”. The whole prophecy runs on the analogy, and the reader is meant to identify not with Hosea but with Gomer.

The longest recorded conversation Jesus has with anyone in the Gospels is with her.

She argues theology with him: the well, the mountain, the Messiah, and it is to her, not to the Twelve, that he first says plainly who he is. She leaves the waterpot, goes to the city, and many of the Samaritans believed because of her word.

John gives her the confession he gives Peter in Matthew: the Christ, the Son of God.

Remembered for being cumbered about much serving, which is in Luke and is real; but in John she meets Jesus on the road before he reaches the tomb, argues with him, and makes the full christological confession of the Fourth Gospel. Both scenes are her.

The only act by any disciple that Jesus attaches to the preaching of the gospel everywhere.

She sits at his feet to learn, which is the posture of a disciple and not of a hostess, and is told she has chosen the good part. At the supper she breaks the alabaster over him, is criticised for the waste, and is defended in the strongest terms he ever uses about anyone's action.

First at the tomb, first to see him, first sent with the message, to the apostles.

Luke 8:2 says seven demons had gone out of her; that is the whole of what Scripture says about her past. She is at the cross, at the burial, and at the tomb, and John 20 gives her the commission: go unto my brethren, and say to them. The word carried is the resurrection itself.

Honest noteThe identification of her with the sinful woman of Luke 7 is a later Western conflation with no textual basis. Scripture nowhere joins the two.

The wife of Herod's steward was funding the itinerant ministry of a Galilean preacher.

Luke names her with Mary Magdalene and Susanna among the women who ministered unto them of their substance: the financial base of the Galilean ministry, named. She is also named again at the tomb in Luke 24:10.

The only person in Acts called by the feminine of “disciple.”

Acts 9:36 uses the feminine form mathetria of her and of no one else in the New Testament. The widows stand around Peter showing the coats and garments she made while she was with them, and she is raised, and the report of it turns Joppa.

The prayer meeting praying for Peter's release tells the servant girl announcing it that she is mad.

She recognises his voice at the gate, is so glad she forgets to open it, and runs in to tell them. They say she is mad, then that it is his angel. Peter keeps knocking. Luke includes the whole comic sequence, and it is one of the small internal marks of a reporter who was not tidying.

The first named convert in Europe, and the church at Philippi meets in her house.

A dealer in purple from Thyatira, a serious trade, worshipping God at a riverside place of prayer. Luke's phrasing gives the initiative to God (“whose heart the Lord opened”) and the hospitality to her: she is baptised with her household and then argues Paul's party into staying. At the end of the chapter, released from prison, they go straight back to her house.

Named among the tiny Athenian harvest, alongside a member of the council.

Acts 17 is usually read as Paul's least successful sermon. Luke names two of the converts anyway: Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris. Naming her at all, in that setting, is the historian's way of saying she mattered.

She and Aquila take the most eloquent preacher in Ephesus aside and correct his doctrine.

Six New Testament mentions, and in four of them she is named first: Acts 18:18, Acts 18:26, Romans 16:3, 2 Timothy 4:19: against two where Aquila leads (Acts 18:2, 1 Corinthians 16:19). In Acts 18:26 the pair expound the way of God more accurately to Apollos. A church meets in their house in Rome and another in Ephesus.

Honest noteThe name-order count is verifiable and worth noting; what it proves is disputed. Ancient name order can indicate prominence, but it is not a formal rule, and no one should hang an ecclesiology on it.

Paul's commendation letter for the person almost certainly carrying Romans to Rome.

Two words carry the entry. The ASV renders the first “servant”: diakonos, the same word Paul uses of himself and of Timothy, which is why Wesley and the JFB commentary both gloss it deaconess. The second, translated “helper,” is prostatis, a term with patron and protector in its range. Paul asks the Roman church to receive her and to assist her in whatever matter she may have need.

Honest noteWhether diakonos here is a formal office or a general description is a real debate with real scholars on both sides. What the verse does say is that a woman was commended by name, by letter, to a church that did not know her.

One accusative ending, two centuries of argument, and no link on this page because no page exists to link to.

The ASV of 1901 prints “Junias,” a masculine form. The Greek accusative behind it is unaccented in the earliest manuscripts and is ambiguous as it stands; the feminine name Junia is abundantly attested in Greek and Latin sources, while the masculine Junias is otherwise unattested as a personal name. Chrysostom, preaching on this verse, read the person as a woman and marvelled at the honour. The second question is independent of the first: “of note among the apostles” can mean outstanding within that group or well known to it, and both are defensible Greek.

Honest noteTwo contested points, both genuinely open. MannaFest's own reading takes Junia as a woman, notes that “apostle” in Paul is wider than the Twelve, and declines to build a doctrine of office on a single ambiguous accusative. Compare Colossians 4:15, where the ASV likewise prints the masculine “Nymphas” for a name many editions read as the feminine Nympha: the same class of decision, made the same way, by the same translators.

Four women in one greeting list, and the verb attached to each of them is labour.

Paul's word for what they did is the strenuous one he uses of his own apostolic work. Romans 16 carries his longest list of personal greetings, a substantial share of them women, and the commendations they receive are for labour, not for hospitality alone.

Two women whose quarrel was serious enough to be named in a letter read aloud to the whole church.

Paul beseeches each of them by name to be of the same mind, and then tells the congregation to help them: because, he says, they laboured with him in the gospel. Whatever the dispute was, they were not bystanders to the Philippian mission; they were part of its front line.

Timothy's theological education is traced through two generations of women.

Paul names the grandmother and the mother as the channel of the unfeigned faith, and two chapters later reminds Timothy that he has known the sacred writings from a babe, which, given Acts 16:1, means he learned them from a Jewish mother in a mixed household. Lois has her own /person page and Eunice hers.

Named in the address line of a letter about a runaway slave, before the church that met in the house.

Philemon is addressed to Philemon, to Apphia our sister, to Archippus, and to the church in thy house. She is not an afterthought in the greeting; she is in the address, which means the appeal is being made to her too.

The whole of 1 Corinthians exists because her household reported the trouble.

Paul says the contentions at Corinth were signified to him by them that are of the household of Chloe. That she is named at all, as the head of a household whose people travel and report, is the sort of incidental detail that tells you more than a paragraph would.

An entire New Testament letter is addressed to her, and we do not know who she is.

John writes to “the elect lady and her children” and closes with greetings from “the children of thine elect sister”. The oldest debate is whether this is an individual woman with a house church or a personification of a congregation. Nothing in the letter settles it.

Honest noteListed with its uncertainty intact. If it is an individual, it is the only New Testament letter addressed to a named woman's household in her own right; if it is a congregation, the figure chosen for a church is still feminine and still the addressee.