Essay Week 2

   

Image information: Queen Esther seeking out the King: Source: Bible Story Theatre

            I knew going into this week that reading the Unit about Bible Women was not really going to be a super simple one. There is much about the way that women lived and were treated in Bible times that is hard to acknowledge or accept nowadays. It was hard reading about women and their lives in a context where their will was not their own and instead they were merely seen as property or possessions to be passed from one male to another. Love was common in the stories, but not the central factor, and having it did little to change their lives.

            Most of the stories that I read this week were very rooted in the familial setting. It was very clear who was family to whom and exactly how they were related. But an even larger part of the stories focused on the relationships between brothers and sisters. The main story I chose to focus on this week was on Rachel and Leah, who were in fact sisters. Both born from an authoritarian father, Rachel and Leah would forever be grouped together in their stories because of men. Their husband, Jacob, who fell in love with Rachel but married Leah first because she had not yet been wed and then later went on to marry Rachel, and Laban, their father who made the switch of the daughters on the wedding night.  If I remember correctly, Jacob also ended up wedding two of Laban’s slave-women.

            The relationship between the two sisters was forced into a relationship among wives sharing a husband. I think it is very interesting that Jacob was sent to Laban’s tribe to find a wife that was not too far removed from his own family, and managed to marry two of Laban’s daughters and two of his slaves. In an effort to not overly dilute his bloodline her manages to convolute it even more and in the process takes over Laban’s tribe. The bible stories tell of the importance of family ties and bloodlines throughout generations and all different places.

            In these stories that focused on women specifically I found it extremely interesting the light that almost all women were painted in. Always within the context of a relationship as a man, the women were seen almost as objects by which children were born through. In some of the stories love was involved, but in those cases the loved women were always barren and the husband found favor in another wife because of her fertility. It seemed to be that none of the women could win. Regardless of their state, they were never good enough. Those who bore many children were still not given as much favor as the most loved woman. But the most loved woman had to share her husband with others and watch him have a family with them instead. The interesting theme of love vs. fertility was present in a number of the stories in the Bible Women Unit.

            There was only one story about a woman who did anything beyond what occurred in her uterus. Esther—the woman who saved the Jewish people—and even then she was directed by her uncle and only won her people’s lives by begging her husband the king. Women in these stories were not given clear-cut, dynamic personalities or life stories. Instead they were only avenues to tell stories about the Jewish people and the blights that so often befell them.