Kate Keefe

Women’s voices in the Bible : few but worth listening to

Women’s words and women’s voices

We have two big Marian feasts coming up as we move into the second week of Advent : the Immaculate Conception on December 8th and Our Lady of Guadalupe on December 12th. Then on the Third Sunday of Advent in Year B (this year) we have Our Lady’s song, the Magnificat, instead of a Responsorial Psalm. So I’m thinking about women’s voices, and their prayer and singing.

Women’s words are a tiny proportion of Scripture. We have lots of chants, songs and canticles (which simply means ‘little songs’) in the Bible, but they are nearly all by men. I read a fascinating account of the case for considering the author of at least part of the Song of Solomon to be female, a few years ago, but I don’t think it has met with widespread acceptance.

Women’s songs and prayers

There are a few precious references to women’s songs in the Bible. When I was considering lullabies, I said that because they are seen as ‘women’s work’, they don’t have the same esteem as poems by men, and oral literature is not taken as seriously as written. This impacts directly on the preservation of women’s words as far fewer women traditionally have been literate than men (and schools set up ‘for the children of the poor’ have usually been kept only for the male version). Women don’t even talk much in the narratives of the Old Testament, which presumably pleased St Paul, when he was studying it as a young Pharisee; but this does mean that we treasure what we have.

Miriam, a prophet with no prophecies

Miriam the prophetess is allowed to lead the women singing the chorus in the song of victory after the Red Sea roars back and swallows up Pharaoh and his horses and his chariots, but although the male prophets declaim at length (a whole book of the Bible each), we don’t hear any of Miriam’s words. It is only through her label that we know she is a prophetess at all.

There are very few books of the Bible named after women (and they are so short, it is easy to overlook them while leafing through). We have Ruth, Esther and Judith (personally I would add Wisdom, as she is so often personified, and I called my daughter Sophia after her, but I do know she is an abstraction).

Ruth’s words : a tender poem

Ruth is a refugee with all the cards stacked against her : a childless, foreign widow, with a dependent mother-in-law. The Book of Ruth tells how by hard work, patience, obedience and love, she ends up married to Boaz, and is the mother of kings. She has one piece of speech written out in verse, and it is the lovely invocation to her mother-in-law, ‘wherever you go, I shall go’. It was adapted and given a tune a while ago (I remember singing it as a student), but the words have been changed and the tune has so many long pauses that it’s difficult to sing. I think it’s interesting that it’s been used as a hymn, when it does not occur in any Sunday reading. People would clearly like to use it. Maybe I should do a more upbeat setting.

Esther’s prayer for courage before the lion king

The Book of Esther is in a bit of a mess; there is a Greek version which contains many parts not present in the Hebrew version, including not only Mordecai’s prayer, but also one by Esther.

Esther is a member of the king’s harem, but no-one knows that she is a Jew, except her uncle Mordecai, who is an astute civil servant. The king’s right hand man, Haman, takes against the Jews because they are a stiff-necked people, and Mordecai won’t bow to him.

Women's voices - Keep calm and be like Queen Esther — purple for the queen

Esther’s influence with the King is the only way to save the whole Jewish nation. She adorns herself beautifully for the King and finds favour in his eye, which she uses to save her people (after three banquets, in the best story tradition). It’s a wonderful, dramatic story, which has been turned into novels and plays, and I remember a haunting little poem by Eleanor Farjeon which starts, ‘Put on your purple, Esther, Esther’. Most of us know the bones of the story. But Esther’s own words are unfamiliar.

Judith, a great heroine, but don’t quote her

Judith is a corking story, longer than the other two, but I recommend it as a good read. She is another widow (very low down in the pecking order, that’s why God has to look out for them especially), very virtuous, very sensible and forthright, and (critically) extremely beautiful.

Another kind of women's voices - Judith holding a sword — Giorgione’s Judith

Both her prose (when she’s giving advice to the elders and generals, which astonishingly they accept) and her prayers are worth reading. And we have a really authentic voice here. ‘You must not ask what I intend to do; I will not tell you until I have done it’ (Judith 8 33). She is the only person I can think of in the Bible who says please : ‘Please, please, God of my father, God of the heritage of Israel, Master of heaven and earth, Creator of the waters, King of your whole creation, hear my prayer’ (Jud 9 12). It would take too long to tell the story but (spoiler alert) she beheads the enemy’s general and saves the day with her virtue intact. Her words are powerful (she has a couple of other short prayers and a great victory song) but the only song out of the book of Judith that we use in the liturgy (for the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe) is actually the words of the High Priest as he blesses her for saving Israel.

I should mention at this point that Esther and Judith don’t even appear in many Bibles, as their pedigree and style are different from the other canonical books.

Are any psalms by women?

What else have we got? Of course we don’t know who wrote almost any of the psalms, but I would be surprised if many of them were women’s prayers, though some of the yearning psalms might be. As I said when I was looking at inclusive language, the Psalms are more inclusive than other bits of the Bible because so much of them is direct conversation between two interlocutors, and ‘I’ and ‘you’ are gender-neutral on the page. This is possibly one reason why the Psalms are so widely beloved: because they feel relevant to each reader and he or she can pray them as his or her own words.

Hannah the mother of Samuel

I’m sure there are some other examples of women’s words that I have omitted, because the Bible is too long for me to be able to do a quick check through. I make no claim for this list being exhaustive. There is a great prayer by Hannah, the noble mother of Samuel, after she gives her son, her only son, to God (I Samuel 2).

Women's voices - Hannah hands over Samuel — Hannah’s heroic sacrifice

In it she quotes the psalms, and she also uses many of the ideas that we find in the Magnificat. God humbles and he exalts (v7). He raises the poor from the dust, he lifts the needy from the dunghill to give them a place with princes, and to assign them a seat of honour (v 8ff). These are ideas that we often find in the psalms, but they have peculiar force when the person talking about God’s turning the established order upside down, is someone who is right at the bottom. Like Judith, she reminds God that men do not win by their own strength, but by his. The inference is clear : with his help ‘women can do much’, as Mary Ward says.

Deborah, a prophetess with more of a voice

Another prophetess is Deborah, in the book of Judges, and she is another strong and sensible woman whose advice is heeded. Like Joan of Arc, she puts fire into the belly of the soldiers. Barak refuses to go and fight Sisera if she does not go with him, and again I think we hear a real person speaking in her answer :’I will go with you then, but the way you are going about it, the glory will not be yours; for God will deliver Sisera into the hands of a woman’ (Judges 4 9, Jerusalem version). They march out to battle together. Later, Sisera is horribly staked by Jael, and then there is the triumph song described as being by Deborah and Barak. I hope it’s mostly by Deborah; to me, it certainly reads that way (there is even a little joke in it about men holding long debates by the stream while others are rushing into battle with Barak and Deborah). It has some wonderful lines: ‘From high in heaven fought the stars, fought from their orbits against Sisera……Through her window she leans and looks, Sisera’s mother, through the lattice: ‘Why is his chariot long in coming? Why are the harnessed horses slow?” (Judges 5 2off). It is really exciting, a fine piece of writing.

The New Testament

Although there’s not much in the Old Testament, there is surprisingly even less in the New. There are many women about in the narrative (Jesus seems to have felt comfortable in their company), but their words are rarely recorded, and never at length. When they speak, it tends to be brief questions, requests, comments – not prayers or songs, with the exception of Elizabeth’s greeting to Mary incorporated into the Hail Mary, and of course, Mary’s own Magnificat.

Anna and the song we don’t have

There is a sad but very telling moment in Luke’s Gospel, when Jesus is presented in the temple. Simeon, an old and very holy man is there, and we have the words of what he said. The first part is the Nunc Dimittis, another beautiful prayer which the Church uses every day. He also prophesies Mary’s future sorrow. Then the narrative describes the arrival of Anna, an elderly and very holy widow. ‘And coming up at that very hour she gave thanks to God, and spoke of him to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem’ (Luke 2 38, RSV). And that’s it. The narrative moves on, and we do not have Anna’s words. This upsets me every time I read it.

Suppressing women’s voices

Christianity and the Catholic Church in particular has a real problem with letting women’s voices be heard. Adult women are the one group still barred from Catholic Cathedral choirs. During the Middle Ages, nuns were not even allowed to sing Gregorian chant in convents, they were restricted to intoning on a single note, in case people might come and listen to the beauty of their singing. This seems to me to be a fine example of both missing the point and blaming the victim : if you are singing beautifully, you are doing it for God, not for an audience, which is usually not there anyway.

Nowadays we can read poems and prayers by women (not ‘for’, those are often less helpful) and they are often very useful and beautiful. I have heard calls for a separate ‘theology of women’, but I don’t think we need one. What we need is for the men who run the Church to realise that women are human too, and that their experience and its expression are equally valid with men’s.

‘Awake, awake, Deborah! Awake, awake, declaim a song!’ (Judges 5 12). ‘Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout with gladness, daughter of Jerusalem!’ (Zechariah 9 9). Alas, there are no New Testament equivalents of this encouragement. We have been waiting too long to hear women’s voices.

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Sheep are cute, but why are we ‘sheep’?

The Lord is my shepherd (again)

The twenty-third psalm is up again for next Sunday, another slightly different version. I’ve mentioned before how our idea of the Shepherd is different from Jesus’ (and from any Jewish reading of the psalm, and it was theirs long before it was also ours), but this time I want to look at the sheep. In the Psalms, God is the shepherd and we are the sheep.

Illumination of sheep and shepherds — orderly sheep for once

Sheep are cute, sheep are beaut

My title is from a children’s song by the Australian musician Don Spencer. We were given a cassette when the children were little and we were doing a lot of car journeys. I think the whole family can still sing it word-perfect. In fact, the real title of the song is Bob the Kelpie, because it’s actually about the sheepdog, and if we’d had YouTube in those days, I’m sure the children would have adored the film, although I find it slightly surreal with the singer lounging in a doorway with his guitar while the hard work of shearing goes on inside the shed.

We call it ‘Sheep are cute sheep are beaut’, not just because it’s the first line, has a catchy tune or because it’s an audacious rhyme (we love those). Mainly I think it sticks in the mind because those aren’t the obvious adjectives anyone would use about sheep. Lambs are cute and cuddly (in cartoons and at a distance). I particularly like the way their tails rotate when they feed (babies can only grunt and knead with their fists in similar circumstances). Adult sheep however are not the most attractive of animals.

Features of adult sheep

There are more human sheep than real mountain sheep in the psalms, by a small margin. Why are we so often described as sheep? In the rest of the Old Testament, it’s the standard image to describe the relationship between God and his people. Sheep aren’t stupid, by any means; you only have to look at one to see the crafty intelligence in its eyes; but they are wilful and wayward. They need a shepherd to give them any sort of higher purpose and to make them worthwhile. They can’t even shed their own skin, as a snake can do. A neglected sheep just gets woolier and woolier, not good for the sheep or for anyone else. The parallels are easy to draw!

Music demonstrating sheep qualities

All we like sheep have gone astray is one of the best choruses to sing in the whole Messiah, with all the exciting dodging about; and in He shall feed his flock, the difference between unlimited careering around and the order brought by the shepherd is demonstrated clearly by the music in its peaceful linear progression. As they say to aspiring film directors, show, don’t tell, and Handel is brilliant at this.

No poems about sheep

There are plenty of poems about horses (e.g. The Arab’s farewell to his steed), dogs (e.g. To Flush, my dog), and even cats (e.g. My cat Jeoffry). There are poems about lambs (Blake springing immediately to mind), but though there are lots of poems where sheep figure as part of the landscape, I can’t think of any where they star, apart from nursery rhymes (Baa baa black sheep, incidentally the first song to be played on a computer) or joke poems. Sentiment seems to be the usual driver for animal poems, apart from some rare exceptions, and sheep are not sentimental. Chesterton could maybe have written one as a companion piece to his donkey poem, but he didn’t as far as I know.

When we talk about people being like sheep in a modern context, it is not usually complimentary. But I think this is because we are no longer an agricultural society. If you read about what shepherds or farmers think about sheep, a different picture emerges. For them, they are important and precious, of worth not only monetary.

Sheep virtues

Sheep are patient, tenacious, vegetarian, pacifist and sociable. They co-operate with each other. They are so collective that the singular noun is the same as the plural, like fish. They have some intelligence. Welsh mountain sheep are bred to learn their own mountain area and do not stray even without walls or fences. They are defenceless against predators. They recognise their own shepherd, and they leave the job of fighting to him. This is one reason why they figure in landscapes : because they demonstrate peace and tranquillity. If there were a threat, they would all be running away, like the herbivorous dinosaurs in Jurassic Park when a carnivore arrives.

There is a famous and popular picture by Shishkin, entitled Morning in a Pine Forest. When he painted it, his friend added young bears to it, and it instantly became one of the favourite pictures in the gallery. The bears give scale and a sort of human touch (they also make the picture more chocolate-boxy). My point here is that sheep turn up in so many landscapes for similar reasons, even if they were painted from the beginning rather than added later, and even if they were real sheep that the artist was looking at. Sheep may safely graze and the scene is all set. And it’s not just pictures. The Staffordshire potters are using the same shorthand.

Spode Blue Italian dish — I don’t know what the people are doing, but the sheep are safely grazing

Sheep in the mists of time

Animals don’t alter as much and as fast as people do, so I think we can reckon that a flock of sheep in the days of Abel, Jacob, Moses, David and indeed in Jesus’ own time, would have operated in very similar ways. Even nowadays, the sheep and the people are similar, even if the modern shepherd has access to new technology.

Doodled sheep — This sheep doodle is mediaeval, but could have been drawn yesterday

Sheepdogs vary only by breed around the world, and Welsh collies tend to be gentler than the Georgian shepherd’s dogs, but then the latter might have to cope with wolves and lynxes instead of foxes. Some shepherds nowadays use quad bikes, but most will still be walking, and the dog is there to save their legs and keep the flock together.

This gives a shepherd a lot of time to think and plenty of fresh air (I’m sure too much sometimes). He or she is usually working in beautiful surroundings, hills and mountains, because sheep flourish there where the grass is not rich enough for cattle. (But there’s also a flock of sheep that grazes the perimeter at Heathrow, which I find unexpected but delightful.) There’s one British Member of Parliament who is a part-time shepherd, and you can see the attraction of the contrast between herding sheep and the House of Commons. More than one shepherd has been a poet. And David of course, King and psalm writer and composer, was a shepherd in his youth.

Shepherd piping to his flock; angels in the sky — Playing to a captive audience and the dog joining in

The link between shepherds and music is very strong. Many shepherd crib figures for Christmas will have a pipe of some kind. Often they have two they can play at once (I’ve seen this in Georgia and Serbia, and it’s very impressive).

Shepherd playing double pipe, another dancing — the sheep aren’t paying much attention, but the shepherds are making music and dancing too

Sometimes it’s a version of bagpipes. The illustrations of shepherds in manuscripts often show them playing and dancing. Much more unlikely, but great fun, are the pictures of sheep playing musical instruments, and the psalmist has singing sheep in Ps 99/100.

Sheep playing the bagpipes — What tunes would he be playing?

Jesus does it too

Why does Jesus talk about sheep? Mostly because of the OT references, but also through observation, I think. When he spends time alone in the desert, when he walks the mountains with the disciples, when he goes off on his own, he would often have come across flocks and their shepherds.

He uses sheep in parables because everyone would have known what he was talking about. It is interesting that one psalm (118/119) contains in close proximity a reference to God’s word as a treasure (‘I take delight in your promise like one who finds a treasure’) and an appeal for help ‘I am lost like a sheep; seek your servant’. In the New Testament, we have the parables of the pearl of great price, the treasure found in a field (Matthew 13) and later of the lost single sheep in the flock of ninety-nine (Mtt 18).

In the Old Testament, the great Shepherd is God. This would have been Jesus’ understanding of Ps 22/23 too. So when Jesus says, I am the Good Shepherd’, it is indeed a mindblowing claim for the Jews who are listening to him. It means that he is leader, protector, defender….and God. But in case we find this too intimidating, he says, ‘I know my own, and my own know me’. Sheep don’t worry about, or argue with their shepherd. They trust him, because they know him. Sometimes they even run off and get themselves lost; but he will find them again, and bring them home. It’s a very comforting image.