Sunday Lectionary: The Widow of Zarephath
Greetings! Thanks so much to everyone who responses positively to the lent course. Just a small notice if you’re using it - there was a typo in the materials which I have now corrected and the Psalm for week 1 is Psalm 136 not 137. If you haven’t looked at the materials yet, you can find them here.
If you’re keeping the Forth Sunday of Epiphany this weekend, then the Old Testament lectionary reading is 1 Kings 17:8-16. This is a portion of one of my favourite stories: the narrative of Elijah’s stay with the Widow of Zarephath.
I say a little about widows and this widow in particular in a newsletter from back in October, which you might want to look at if you missed it:
The thing that I want to focus on in this newsletter in relation to both the passage from Kings and the gospel reading which is the story of Jesus at the wedding at Cana from John 2, is the question ‘who is in the background?’.
Giovanni Lanfranco, Elijah Receiving Bread from the Widow of Zarephath, 1621
If you asked a group of school children ‘who is the main character in 1 Kings 17’ it is likely that the answer would be Elijah.
This is fair enough since this passage is right at the beginning of his prophetic career and features both his first miracle and the first resurrection in the Bible if you read on past verse 16.
But what happens if we shift focus to the other person in the narrative? What do we notice about the Widow of Zarephath if she is at the center of the story? There are two things that I want to draw your attention to which emphasise why she is an interesting figure: her foreignness and her wealth.
Foreignness
It is notable that Widow of Zarephath is foreign, she lives in the region of Sidon which is outside of the territory of Israel. Within the wider scheme of the Old Testament foreign women are often causes of concern (see King Solomon…). This is an especially important point at this stage in 1 Kings, because at this moment Elijah has locked horns with the king and his wife Jezebel who is also a Sidonian. Here we see something of the good foreigner/bad foreigner dichotomy that we find elsewhere in the Old Testament. Good foreigners, like the Widow of Zarephath and Ruth, recognise YHWH as their god, whereas bad foreigners like Jezebel turn people away from him.
Wealth
When we find encounter the Widow of Zarephath, we might assume that she is poor because she is starving. It is, however, the case that the cause of her suffering is the famine which was having a universal effect on the region. When we look at the detail of the text we find good grounds on which to argue that the Widow of Zarephath is an independent and materially secure woman.
There are two indicators for this. The first is that she seems to be in possession of a house in which she lives with her son. We can only assume that she inherited it from her husband when he died. This is notable because it is not clear from Biblical law whether Israelite widows could inherit from their husbands. It seems that this was the case, however, for Sidonian widows.
Also, the text says in v16 that ‘she and her household ate for many days’ as a result of Elijah’s miracle. This too is notable because it suggests that her household might have been more extensive than just herself and her son. She might have had more children, or, according to some scholars, a household staff.1
Here, then, in the background of this story, we find a woman who has a surprising amount of social and economic agency. She is also a foreign woman who acts as an important parallel for Jezebel, showing how those outside of Israel can participate in the salvation story.
You might be reading this text alongside the story of Jesus at the wedding at Cana (John 2). Surprisingly, in this story, Jesus is somewhat in the background. He is merely a guest at the wedding, in attendance with his mother. Even when he performs the miracle of turning water into wine, it isn’t clear to most of the people in the room what had happened. Here, Jesus places himself in the background, aligning himself with those who were already there.
A good question to ask about these two texts is, who is in the background of our communities? What about them might we be overlooking? How can we be more attentive and perhaps more thankful to those whose work is out of sight?
See Van der Toorn, 'Torn Between Vice and Virtue: Stereotypes of the Widow in Israel and Mesopotamia', in Kloppenborg, Ria, and Wouter J. Hanegraaff, eds., Female Stereotypes in Religious Traditions (Leiden: Brill, 1995) P 5