If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while you’ll probably have picked up on the fact that my PhD is on the widows of the Old Testament - so whenever one comes up in the lectionary I become very excited…
This week the story of Elijah and the Widow of Zarephath came up in the weekday lectionary (cast your mind back to morning prayer on Wednesday…), and it offers us something quite helpful as we think forward to this Sunday’s gospel reading: the parable of the persistent widow (Luke 18:-8)
William-Blake Naomi entreating Ruth and Orpah, 1795
Much of the way that widows have been received by biblical scholars can be seen in this painting by William Blake. Here, Blake depicts the beginning of the book of Ruth, which is admittedly quite depressing. I use this painting a lot when I’m teaching about the widow. Often when I ask people what words come to mind to describe the women in the scene they say things like ‘vulnerable, poor, destitute, desolate, marginalised..’ etc. Although this is a painting inspired by the book of Ruth, these words sum up how people have understood the widows of the Bible in general.
But what do our passages actually show about widows? Do they fit into the descriptions above, or is there more to be said about them? Let’s take a look at the texts.
1 Kings 17: The Widow of Zarephath
In morning prayer we’ve been plowing through the first book of Kings, and I wonder whether you noticed the appearance of the mysterious Widow of Zarephath?
She is quite a remarkable figure, and someone very different from the image of the widow we find in Blake and elsewhere.
1 Kings 17 is made up of three movements. In the first, Elijah has fled to the desert and is sustained by the Lord with food delivered by ravens. Eventually, God tells him to go to Zarephath where he will find a widow who will feed him. The second movement tells us about the encounter between Elijah and the widow, during which he promises her that if she feeds him her oil and flour will not run out. This is his first miracle. The third movement is a scene in which the son of the widow dies and is then resurrected by Elijah.
There is a lot going on here, and this chapter really matters because it recounts the beginning of Elijah’s prophetic career. For this reason, people often read straight past the widow, but there are some really interesting things to be said about here. Here are three which go some way to challenge the traditional understanding of the widow…
She is a good dialogue partner for Elijah (17:12, 18, 24) - we might even consider them to be sparring at times! She engages with him as an equal as they negotiate the terms of her offer of hospitality to him. Here the Widow demonstrates a surprising amount of social power.
She has a house, and further to this, a ‘household’ (17:15): this is important because it indicates that she inherited property from her dead husband and was therefore materially secure. She is only struggling when Elijah meets her because of the drought. Some scholars think that the use of the phrase ‘her household’ indicates that she had a domestic staff - so this is certainly different from the poor destitute widow we began with!1
She is described as ‘mistress of the house’ (17:17): this is a designation which is rare in the Hebrew Bible.2 It indicates that she was the head of her own household, which was rare in the patriarchal context of ancient Israel.
So, what we find in 1 Kings 17 is a widow who is not only relatively wealthy but is described as being in charge of her own household. The Widow of Zarephath is an important person for us to consider when looking at other widow texts in the Bible, including the parable in Luke 18.
Le prophète Elie ressuscitant le fils de la veuve de Sarephta Louise Mauduit-Hersent, 1819
Luke 18: The Persistent Widow
It might be easy for us to come to this passage in the gospel with an assumption that in the world of the bible, all widows were destitute and desolate with no ability to advocate for themselves. But as we have seen in the case of the Widow of Zarephath, this is not always the case.
The persistent widow is dogged in her pursuit of justice. The passage tells us that she has an adversary (v 3) and that she ‘keeps coming’ to the judge to ask him to formally deliver justice on her behalf. In v 5 the Greek uses two different words which are translated ‘bother’ parechein (παρέχειν) and kopon (κόπον). The first is a common word for presenting a cause, but the second has a sense of the weariness that results from battle. So we might imagine the widow physically beating the judge into submission which is quite a remarkable image! Again, here we do not find a passive and depressed woman bereaved of her husband but someone who is able to advocate strongly for herself.
So - when reading texts about widows or preaching on them, there is good reason to avoid stereotypes which paint widows as pathetic figures. When we look at these two passages, we find women who advocate for themselves in challenging situations and demonstrate surprising amounts of agency over their lives.
*Particular congratulations to all those who read the title of this newsletter to the theme of ‘trolls in the dungeon’ eg this film scene
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
It appears here, in 1 Sam 28:7 and Nahum 3:4. The first use is also. in the context of a narrative, and is used to refer to the Witch of Endor. This leads Wyatt to suggest that the word ‘relates to the identity of a woman who has leadership over something or authority in a particular area’ (Wyatt, S., ‘Jezebel, Elijah, and the Widow of Zarephath: A Ménage à Trois That Estranges the Holy and Makes the Holy the Strange’, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 36.4 (2012), 435–58, p 451)