We Who Thirst
Delve into the captivating tales of women from the Bible, exploring their lives within ancient cultures and historical contexts. These narratives reveal not only their stories but also the profound love and beauty of the God we worship.
................................................
For a complete bibliography for each episode visit: https://rb.gy/xx0no6
If you'd like more in-depth show-notes for each woman of the Bible, join my Patreon: www.patreon.com/wewhothirst
We Who Thirst
016 Proverbs 31: Her Businesses
The episode delves into the life of the Proverbs 31 woman, emphasizing her dual successes in textile production and vineyard management, showcasing the importance of women's creativity and labor in both domestic and economic spheres. By challenging traditional gender roles, the discussion highlights that God delights in women utilizing their passions, skills, and independence for the glory of their families and communities.
• Cultural teachings on women's roles in society
• The unique economic ventures of the Proverbs 31 woman
• Differences between her work and that of average women
• The skill and privilege involved in her business success
• Importance of social connections in her economic activities
• Further exploration of her vineyard business
•1 Challenges traditional notions of woman's roles in the household
• God’s encouragement for women to embrace their talents
......................................................
Follow We Who Thirst on Instagram, Threads, or Tiktok ! Visit www.wewhothirst.com
If you are interested in the research and sources behind this episode visit - https://rb.gy/xx0no6 - for a full Bibliography. For full shownotes including ancient sources, join my Patreon.
If you'd like more in-depth show-notes for each woman of the Bible, or a safe place to discuss the contents in greater detail - we have a private Discard channel through the We Who Thirst Patreon.
Thank you for supporting the We Who Thirst podcast! Patreon members get exclusive access to discord discussions, polls for future podcast episodes, full episode show notes, and more.
Welcome back to the we who Thirst podcast. I am so glad that you are here. One quick note before we get started. I have been recovering from being sick, so my voice may sound a little different today, but I thank you so much for listening and bearing with me in this process. With me today is my good friend, elise Kilko. She is a foreign worker, volunteer, mother and homemaker, and today we are going to be continuing our mini-series on Proverbs 31 to discover how God delights in women. Specifically, we will be talking about the Proverbs 31 woman, the woman of valor and her two separate businesses.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Now, Elise, many in our audience have been taught one of the following, and let me know if any of these teachings are ones that you have heard or have impacted you personally. Many have been told a woman should not have a job outside the home and that having that kind of job would be sinful or borderline sinful if she couldn't verify a good enough reason. They may have been told a woman could have a side hustle as long as it never took away from her homemaking duties. Anything she does that is not homemaking related. She can only do after her homemaking has been adequately completed. Many have been taught that homemaking for a woman was the best, most holiest thing she could do, that it is God's will for her, and we've also been told, in conjunction with all of this, on the kind of the opposite side, that it's the man's job to provide, not the woman's. Have any of these things impacted you?
Elice Kilko:Yes, absolutely. I think I have heard all of those things as teachings, being from the Bible which, as we get into the text, we're going to have to reevaluate each one of those, and I'm excited to do that today. I think the ones that I probably heard the most was that homemaking is the best, holiest thing, Like you might do something else, but if you're not doing this, then there is probably something wrong. They wouldn't necessarily say it's sinful, but they're like this is the holiest, most important thing and anything else is less than um. And then that it's the man's job to provide and the woman's job to support, like I think would be the dichotomy that I was given.
Jessica LM Jenkins:And that man's job to provide thing. In every single complementarian book I pick up and even complementarian people I talk to the man providing comes up every single time and these could be like slightly softer complementarians, these could be like the really hard patriarchalist complementarians, Wherever they're at in the spectrum. The idea that it's the man's job to provide. I think it's also a cultural norm here in America that the man has to be the provider. So you're dealing with both a cultural as well as a theological norm. But I think the episode today is going to shake that up a little bit.
Jessica LM Jenkins:I'm really excited to talk about the verses in this passage that talk about the woman of valor's businesses, because they are full of insight. So I want to talk about kind of each of her businesses in turn. We'll start with her home because I want to remind us that in the ancient world the home was the economic center, so running her home was akin to running a business. Because of this, in the ancient world there is no differentiation between the woman of valor's work inside the home and her work outside the home. So whereas I'm using business to describe her economic endeavors, they would not have considered them as businesses. We consider the home and business to be separate entities. In our culture, In the woman of valor's culture, they don't consider those separate businesses. So I just want to acknowledge at the start of this episode that I'm using our language to describe something that they didn't necessarily view that way, if that makes sense, Elise.
Elice Kilko:Yes, that makes so much sense, and it's good that you make that differentiation, because I think that that'll help us understand the text a lot better as we look back to the historical context.
Jessica LM Jenkins:So she has business ventures, but they're also not like the stay-at-home mom's side hustle. I see that, oh, she has a side hustle like other stay-at-home moms. None of our economic structures fit what is going on in the text. So I just want to start with that, that we are dealing with something that doesn't fit the way our economy works today. But because today we would consider these things separate, I wanted to kind of discuss them separately because there's also a chronological order in her tackling these different economic ventures or businesses. Okay, so the first one is her textile export business and this is the one the text talks about the most and we have the most details. So, elise, would you read Proverbs 31, verse 13, 18, 19, 21, 22, and 24?
Elice Kilko:All right, let's start with Proverbs 31, 13. She selects wool and flax and works with willing hands. And then verses 18 and 19, she sees that her profits are good and her lamp never goes out at night. She extends her hands to the spinning staff and her hands hold the spindle. And then 21 and 22,. Right, she is not afraid for her household when it snows, for all of her household are doubly clothed. She makes her own bed coverings. Her clothing is fine, linen and purple, purple. And then 24, she makes and sells linen garments and delivers belts to the merchants. And that is in CSB, perfect, thank you. Yes, so you're calling this a business, but it wasn't like a factory. Weaving and making clothing, typical, normal women's work Wasn't this like regular work? So you're saying it's regular work but it wasn't a factory. Can you talk to us about that?
Jessica LM Jenkins:Yes, Her weaving and making clothing here isn't exactly the same as the normal woman's work in the ancient world. There's overlap here because every woman was weaving and making clothes or things for her house. Every woman in the ancient world was engaged in this kind of activity. So we have to consider how does the woman of valor's activity doing these things? How is that different than the average woman's activity? Why do I call this a business and not what they are doing?
Elice Kilko:So how does this differ, then, from the average peasant woman's textile work? Why is this a business different than what the average Jane was doing?
Jessica LM Jenkins:I mean, the biggest, most obvious difference is that the woman of valor is selling her wares to merchants, so that's going to create a big difference. The average peasant woman isn't making textiles to sell. She is simply making enough to clothe her family and that is all the time she that is all she has time or resources to do. She is scraping by to get another tunic made for her five-year-old because he keeps outgrowing the last one, and that is all she has bandwidth for. But the woman of valor is making an excess of textiles to sell and then bring in income, whether coinage or goods, for her family, and it even talks about the kind of textiles.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Mm-hmm. Yes, and the average woman typically would make very simple garments from one type of material, often wool that was usually grown by their own flocks. It's a very internalized process. So the husband and the kids would take care of the sheep, they would shear the sheep. The women and the daughters would then card the wool and spin the wool and weave the wool into clothes, and they're not going outside to get this wool.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Usually they are raising the sheep, sheep to garment. It's an internalized process to their own household. They're doing all of that. They would do this in conjunction with other women in their communities so they can all sit around weaving and talking while they're doing this. They would bring you know, you would bring your wool and I would bring my wool and we'd sit together and spin. But we get our wool from our own sheep. So it's an internalized process for most peasant homes and they may have had some access to flax to make linen, but that was usually a higher level commodity and may not have been as regularly available as wool. Because wool you shear sheep on a regular schedule and as long as your sheep is alive, it's going to be producing wool Whereas linen. You have to have the right ground. You have to have water, you have to have all of these things flax to grow, and so it's a little more difficult to get a hold of than wool.
Elice Kilko:That makes sense. So why is this a business and what do we see here?
Jessica LM Jenkins:What we see going on with a woman of valor in her business differs from the peasant woman, because whereas the peasant woman is getting wool from her own sheep to make clothes from her family, the woman of valor is purchasing the raw materials for her textile business. She's not growing the flax herself and she's not shearing the sheep herself, or her husband isn't shearing the sheep. The word select in the NIV, in verse 13, indicates to seek out or ask information about, so she is having to find sources for the raw materials for this business. So that already sets a different economic kind of presence that what she's doing has. She's not using what her family has readily available because they produced it themselves. She's sourcing the raw goods of two different types, both wool and flax. Okay, she is doing the spinning and the weaving in-house. That's important and we'll come back to that later on. She's doing the spinning and the weaving in-house. That's important and we'll come back to that later on. She's doing the spinning and the weaving. But what the woman of valor is creating is not simple like homespun garments for her family, though her family does wear some of what she makes. She is creating luxury goods, um, and the text is very clear that these are luxury goods she's creating, not your average wear.
Jessica LM Jenkins:She is dealing in dyed fabrics, whether she's dyeing in-house or buying wool that is dyed. Linen does not carry dye well at all. That's why it's normally white. So she would be dealing in white linen. But she could be buying dyed wool already. She could be sending the wool she purchased out to have dyed. She could be dyeing it in-house. We don't know how she's working the dyeing process, but she's dealing in dyed fabrics which a lot of peasants may not have time for dyeing. Sometimes they would use plants or other things to dye. Sometimes they're just using undyed wool because they got to get this done. So she's dealing in dyed fabrics and she's dealing in very finely woven and fancy linens not a rougher, homespun woolen clothing, but very, very fine, intricate sorts of garments and textiles.
Elice Kilko:The reference to her family being clothed in purple, then would be showing that it's luxury, because that was a hard color to dye right.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Yes, yeah. So in verse 21, when it talks about her family being clothed in scarlet. That word in Hebrew is of uncertain origin. It is also similar to the Hebrew word for two, so some people think it's the word for like red scarlet clothes. The other people think it's the word for like double clothed, like they have two outfits or they have extra clothes going on, because your average person in the ancient world only has one change of clothes. I have a closet full of 15 to 20 outfits and that's normal in our consumeristic society. But back then you had one change of clothes, maybe two if you were doing well, three if you're really rich.
Elice Kilko:The fact that her family is in dyed garments, or they have extra clothes is showcasing the wealth that she's able to create from her handiwork.
Jessica LM Jenkins:That's interesting. She's also creating a wide variety of projects and every woman who needs to make different things for her family, like towels and bed linens and tunics and mantles. But the woman of valor is creating extra mantles in verse 21. She's creating bed coverings in 22. She's creating linen clothing, so you're dealing with both wool and linen. She's dealing with sashes and the linen clothing and the sashes are part of what she's selling to the merchants.
Elice Kilko:Okay.
Jessica LM Jenkins:So, whereas a peasant woman would need to make many of these end products, the quality of the peasant woman's work wouldn't have been the same as the woman of valor. So this business is multifaceted, dealing with multiple mediums for her end products, and it's dealing with luxury goods.
Elice Kilko:So what would be needed for the woman of valor to run a business like this? What entails?
Jessica LM Jenkins:what all does that entail? It would include she needs a lot of social connections. She needs connections with the producers of raw materials. She needs connections with the merchants, potentially with people who die. There is no Etsy or Amazon for her to just like throw I made a scarf. Who wants to buy? There's none of that Like. She has to have serious social connections to make this happen. And some of the words for merchants in these texts are talking about international merchants. They're not the guy from one village over who comes over to your village to sell his pots or whatever. You're talking about wandering traders who are going from place to place or even, potentially, ships that are coming into port. And so she has some serious connections with international merchants that she is working with to export her luxury textiles. The other things that are needed to run this sort of business that she is doing that the text reveals to us is a lot of wealth, skill and some help. You have to have privilege to do what she is doing. This is not something the average peasant woman could accomplish.
Elice Kilko:Yeah, she would have to be important enough to be able to talk to the right people to get the sort of trade to be, done.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Yeah, that's interesting and I really want to mention the wealth and the skill together because of everything that goes into creating fine linens or woolen garments. Elise, do you do any sort of like needlework, crochet, knitting, any of that?
Elice Kilko:I do not have the patience for it, but I deeply appreciate it, so I don't do it myself. I've tried to learn different things. I could maybe do some cross stitch if it were like about, you know, two by two inches.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Well, in the world of crocheting, knitting, all of that and I'm going to try to make it as simple as possible because I'm sure we have some listeners who are have no idea there's different yarn weights. If you were to go to a store and, let's say, your friend's crocheting, they're like, go buy me yarn. There's different yarn weights and these weights have names which can get really confusing. I'm going to go with the numbers and so you have a number one yarn which is really thin and tiny, and then you have a number six yarn which is much thicker and fatter and chunkier. So if I'm making a throw blanket that is 40 inches by 60 inches, if I'm using number one yarn which is really thin, it's going to take me five times as long to make that throw blanket as if I'm using the number six yarn which is really thick, Because the thicker yarn works up a lot faster. I mean, this kind of just makes sense. It's bigger.
Elice Kilko:So it's good.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Yeah.
Jessica LM Jenkins:So when we're thinking about the woman of valor making fine fabrics, she is creating the thread or the yarn for these fabrics herself, in-house.
Jessica LM Jenkins:She is participating in this labor In order to take the raw wool or flax and twist it into a very fine string piece of yarn.
Jessica LM Jenkins:That takes some serious skill and it takes time because you have to make a lot of it and then the time to weave that fine yarn into a fine fabric is going to take much longer than the time the average peasant woman might take on a regular homespun garment. So this is showcasing the fact that she has the skill to create that fine of a product. That is serious talent and skill that she has and that she's training others in her household to do. But also she has enough wealth that she can take the time to create that kind of product, because she's not needing to get this done right now so that I can go help with the harvest done right now so that I can go help with the harvest. She has the time to spend excesses amount of time on making very, very fine clothing. So the fact that she has wealth and skill allows her to run this business that those in that culture without the same level of privilege she has could not accomplish.
Elice Kilko:That's so interesting, that's a really interesting.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Because, as we think about the saying, time is money. Time was always of the essence for the peasant family who's dealing in a sustenance agricultural context. They are simply trying to preserve food, get winter clothing made so they do not freeze. They're trying to make sure they can survive. They're not sitting around seeing how teeny tiny they can spin this linen. Can I get it smaller? Let's see if I can get it smaller. They don't have time for that nonsense and it's not nonsense, but they just they don't have time, they have to get it done nonsense.
Elice Kilko:And it's not nonsense, but they just they don't have time. They have to get it done, the time that the woman of valor would have invested in her business alone shows her privilege.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Exactly yeah, Because your peasant woman may have the same level of skill, but if she doesn't have the time to invest in it because her family needs her to help with the harvest and her family needs that winter wrapped in two weeks because winter is coming um, she doesn't have the time to invest in creating a dyed, finely woven purple bedspread. They need something warm and they need it now and we're doing it. So the time and the fact that the woman of valor has help to do this, that can cut down on some of the time. But in a peasant household everybody's going to be working together, but on similar projects for, again, survival. You don't have several people in a wealthy environment who can all spend their day working on a fine linen bedspread. In a peasant home you have people who are working on getting this coat done because winter is coming, and so the privilege of time and skill and help really come to play with her business here.
Elice Kilko:That's so interesting. What else would she have needed to run a business like this?
Jessica LM Jenkins:She would have needed business savvy. She has to not only be skilled in creating these luxury textiles, she needs to have enough business savvy to deal with the merchants to haggle, to maintain those relationships with throughout the haggling process, to get the good deals on the raw materials to sell her wares at a price that they are worth. So she needs business savvy. She's smart, she knows how to do this, she can run the finances, she can deal with the complex social relationships needed. She has to have access and her husband, potentially being a king or very high nobility, could have given her a lot of this access. And she also just needed a superior product, because why should they take your sashes to another country? Why not Fred's down the street? So there's all of those things that go into this business.
Elice Kilko:What other things would you say are significant, then, about her textile business?
Jessica LM Jenkins:I think one thing that this passage shows that I really love and it's back in verse 13,. It says she selects wool and flax and she works with eager hands. Her poems work with delight is how you could translate the Hebrew there. She is excited about this work, she is passionate about this work and she's hands on in the process.
Elice Kilko:That's so cool. It shows that she really loved what she was doing, or she was at least interested in it. Yeah, yeah. So how do we know that this is a passion of hers? How would you prove that from the text?
Jessica LM Jenkins:That's a really good question, because I've heard this verse used a lot, especially when it's Proverbs 31 is taught as a checklist and it's used to say oh, look, the Proverbs 31 woman chooses to be excited about her homemaking. She's choosing a good attitude. Since she works with eager hands, you should work with eager hands. Attitude Since she works with eager hands, you should work with eager hands. And can we make good choices to be excited about whatever work God hands us? Absolutely. But one of the ways we know this is a passion of hers and not just as she chooses a good attitude about mundane things, is that doing this work is beneath her station.
Elice Kilko:That's really interesting.
Jessica LM Jenkins:She doesn't have to do this. She is the matriarch of a very wealthy household. She has servants for this. She doesn't have to, she wants to, she is passionate about it. She likes this. We also can tell because they devoted like five or six verses to talking about her business. Six verses are talking about her textile endeavors and yes, that is kind of women's work, but, as we've talked, she's not doing what the average woman does. She has made this into something truly spectacular and she's following her passions. It is something that excites her. Her palms work with delight. She participates in the labor, even though it's beneath her stations. She could be doing other things, but she chooses to do this.
Elice Kilko:That's so cool. I love that note.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Yeah, she's choosing to focus on what she's good at, because we talked about skill. She's good at this, and she's choosing to focus on what she's good at and what she's passionate about, where she has talent. There's lots of household activities in the ancient world that this passage doesn't describe her being involved with at all, but that which she is skilled enough and passionate enough to be very successful at, that is what Proverbs 31 focuses on.
Elice Kilko:Yeah, I don't think it talks about food. It doesn't talk about her like making food or drying water.
Jessica LM Jenkins:No, it doesn't, I mean. It says she brings in her bread and she provides portions for her family. So she brings her food from afar. So she's like queen of takeout, because the average peasant woman not only is spinning and weaving, she's also grinding grain for two to four hours a day, which is crazy the Hebrew word for bread which is the main thing that the peasant woman is creating at home every day. The woman of valor outsources that labor. She gets it from somewhere else, she brings her bread in from afar, she gives portions to her maidservants and that's not the picture of her necessarily standing over the stove like here's your soup, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is more of the. The storeroom manager, um, rationing out the large storeroom that works for the house, um that's certainly different.
Jessica LM Jenkins:It could even be like you need to go grind grain for bread, you need to deal with the fatted calf. You you know it could be assigning these maidens parts of the food preparation, but we never see the woman of valor actually hands-on doing food preparation anywhere.
Elice Kilko:In Proverbs that's such an interesting contrast. I mean, as far as how it talks about her weaving, I mean it definitely shows that it's a passion which is really cool. Yeah, absolutely so. Sometimes it seems like the stay at home trad wife culture teaches that the woman has to be good and passionate about everything. Have you ever felt like that? What did that, what? How did that go down in your growing up years and as an adult.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Definitely like, especially when you're taught you God, especially when you come from circles where you're taught God created you as a woman to be a stay at home mom and you're supposed to do it with eager hands. So if you don't like it, you better start liking it, you better get passionate about it. And authors like Rebecca Merkel in her book Even Exile she goes on and on about how you have to find something in homemaking that you're passionate about if you want to honor God. That could be baking, it could be sewing clothes for your kids, it could be creating elaborate meals, it could be decorating. But you have to find something homemaking involved, not side hustle, not business, not career. You have to find something traditional homemaking to become passionate about, even if you're not passionate about everything you house, and teaching us how to be hospitable.
Elice Kilko:And teaching us how to cook, not really my mom, but but just like I don't remember growing up under the pressure of you have to be good at everything, but I definitely saw this like this poison being taught when I went to college and was kind of in the fundamentalist adjacent things. As in like, growing up, there were two of us girls that loved being in the kitchen more and there were two of us girls that liked cleaning more, and so like on Saturdays, when we had the weekends, my sister and I would work more on the kitchen and my other two sisters would work more on the cleaning. So we were allowed to know do what we did best. And that's not to say that we were never taught to like switch, you know, but we were allowed to to choose our passions, you know. So, yeah, that's interesting.
Jessica LM Jenkins:And when I went to seminary because Dorothy Patterson was the president's wife during the time I was at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary she had a huge homemaking push because she felt that Dorothy Patterson especially if you listen to other episodes I've read quotes from her but she believes a woman is in sin if she's not being a homemaker and she believed that women are often not trained to be homemakers. So she was trying to get this homemaking education into the seminary and they even had what they called the Horner Homemaking House with a giant kitchen and women could go to learn to do all of the domestic homemaking things there and there was this huge push that this is a woman's calling from God to do all this homemaking stuff, which felt really weird because I'm like I'm here to learn Hebrew and Greek, I'm not here to learn how to bake a pie. My womanhood class in college told me I had to bake a pie. I've already been here, done that.
Elice Kilko:And that's not to say that there isn't worth in learning how to do all those things. Oh, I'm glad I know how to do them.
Jessica LM Jenkins:But there's a difference in being taught how to do a skill and being told it is God's will for your life that you have to know these skills.
Elice Kilko:Yes, that is a very big difference.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Like, homemaking skills are good for every single human to know. Yes, everyone should know how to sew on a button and make basic food, but to be told it is God's will for your life because you have certain internal organs, that's where things get really shame-inducing, especially for women who their passions and what they're good at lie outside the frame of the normal activities. Yeah, that makes so much sense. Homemaking culture focuses very much on cooking, cleaning and child care. Those are kind of the three big C's that my experience of homemaking culture really emphasize, would you say those are probably three of the main areas complementarian homemaking culture emphasizes.
Jessica LM Jenkins:I would agree with that. I would agree with that. And what I find fascinating about Proverbs 31 is you never see her in this passage do any of those. We never see her cook herself, we never see her clean anything and we don't see her do a lick of childcare. In the entire passage, the three big Cs that evangelical complementarian homemaking culture emphasizes to the nth degree, to the point that seminaries are putting in entire buildings to teach women to do these things, and then they hold up Proverbs 31 as a standard for homemaking. She doesn't actually do any of those things in that passage. What she does do is focus on her passions and make significant money by making it really finely crafted and well done.
Elice Kilko:That's so interesting.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Finally crafted and well done. That's so interesting. No-transcript, even though that means she isn't doing other sorts of labor for her family. We don't see her doing cleaning or cooking. Is she running her household and making sure everybody has what they need? Absolutely, but we don't see her doing it. And when you come out of the complementarian culture where you, as the stay-at-home mom, have to do it all, because God created you to do all the cleaning, do all the cooking, do all the things, the Proverbs 31 woman gets takeout. The Proverbs 31 woman outsources the cooking. The Proverbs 31 woman focuses on her skills and her passions for the benefit of her family. She's not ignoring them or not ministering to them, but she doesn't have to do everything.
Elice Kilko:And that's such an important note to note that you know to take that to our day-to-day, we don't have to be good at everything. We can be passable on some areas and be really great in others. Should we be taking good care of our homes? Yes, absolutely, but we don't have to be excellent in every single area.
Jessica LM Jenkins:And it's not all on us. The three C's in scripture are never just the woman's job. Every human in our household, if they're old enough, every adult in our household, let me just say it that way every adult in our household is responsible for the three Cs cooking, cleaning, child care. We may negotiate with the adults in our household that one person does more of this, one person does more of that because of skill, time, et cetera. But everyone is responsible to know these things and to help out. It's not just woman's labor. Because the woman of valor was so skillful and was so successful at making money with her passions, she's better able to increase her business ventures. Elise, would you read verse 18 for us?
Elice Kilko:Yes, Verse 18 says she sees that her profits are good and her lamp never goes out at night.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Actually, let me back up. I want to lead into that differently. So we see that the Proverbs 31 woman has been extremely successful in her export textile business. Elise, will you read verse 18 for us?
Elice Kilko:Proverbs 31, verse 18, says she sees that her profits are good and her lamp never goes out at night.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Now Elise, the second half of this verse. Her lamp does not go out at night. What have you heard? This means?
Elice Kilko:um, I always heard it, um, when, this verse, when, when we read this verse and like we're trying to figure out what it means, a lot of times people would bring up the parable of the 10 virgins, um, waiting for the bridegroom, with some of them had oil, some of them didn't, and how it was, did they squander their oil or did they, you know, have enough? So that was always kind of talked about it in conjunction. So it was. It wasn't always necessarily said that like she was rich and you can see, because her lamp went out the whole night, but it was more like maybe a planning thing, like she planned well, she planned ahead. Yeah, she planned ahead.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Yeah, I've usually heard this verse and when I was doing research I saw this in blogs as well. People take this verse that her lamp does not go out at night and that she rises early to give portions to her maidens. They take those verses as this woman works all the time. She's up late working dangerous, and we're going to do a whole episode on her resting, so I'm not going to camp out here long. But typically these verses are interpreted as she works all the time. She gets up early and she's working. She's up working late at night.
Elice Kilko:She stays up late.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Yeah, but when you look at verse 18 and you take into consideration the Hebraic parallelism that's going on in the Hebrew poetry, it says that she sees that her trading is profitable. The point of the first half of the verse is the profit from her trading. And then her lamp does not go out at night. There are ancient Proverbs that only a poor person's lamp goes out at night. Oh, interesting. So this is, yes, planning, because light is in a woman's domain. She has control of light for the household. But it also is a it is a cultural way of saying she, she can pay for the enough he's produced, enough to make sure her lamps don't go out. Y'all's lamps might go out because you're poor. Her lamp does not because she's rich. Um, the lamps at night are a sign of wealth. Sleeping in darkness is a sign that you're poor.
Elice Kilko:Why would they burn lamps at night?
Jessica LM Jenkins:in historical context, yeah, I get this question all the time because we turn off all our lights at night. We want to sleep in the dark, but we are also not superstitious people like the ancient people were. They were afraid of spirits and things that go bump in the night. So they would often light lamps as a safety precaution against those sorts of things. And it also helps. You can see if you need to get up with a child because you can't just flip on a light switch. But I think the big reason was to protect the family from spirits or beings they believed could be around to hurt people in the dark at nighttime. So that's part of the significance she's able to protect her family because she has made money to keep lamps burning and she's able to plan ahead how much oil is needed and manage this aspect well.
Elice Kilko:Okay, that's so interesting. Now you said that there were two businesses mentioned here, what is the second?
Jessica LM Jenkins:one. The second one the text does not spend nearly as much time on, but there's a lot in this one little verse, in the context that we don't necessarily think through. So, elise, her second business is a vineyard and winery. So, elise, would you read verse 16?
Elice Kilko:Okay, it says she evaluates a field and buys it. She plants a vineyard with her earning.
Jessica LM Jenkins:So once again we see that the woman of valor is doing things outside the usual scope of her gender, and if you want to hear more about her acting outside the usual scope of her gender, go read the full discussion or listen to the full. You can either read the transcript or listen to full episode of episode seven of my podcast, where we talk about that in detail. But we see her here. She is buying land and creating a new business and again her husband, who's at the city gates, is likely leveraging his position to help her with her business goals. Some people argue and I just saw this comment on a reel, somebody else's reel, yesterday People immediately look at this verse and argue that women couldn't own land in the Old Testament. So therefore she must be just. Her husband must have bought the land. She didn't really buy it, it was somebody else and they denigrate this for her. But, Elise, who else do you remember in the Old Testament that owned land?
Elice Kilko:Well, rahab owned a house. Naomi was getting her land back when Boaz married Ruth and then the daughters of Zelopha had inherited their land from their father. They went to Moses and spoke. Since they had no brothers, they asked for their own inheritance. Did I get the ones you were thinking of?
Jessica LM Jenkins:Yes, and so, though it's not normal for women to own land, in the Old Testament it does happen. So her owning land is not outside the realm of possibility. Especially when you're dealing with, potentially, a very privileged, aristocratic woman or a queen, normal rules don't always apply to them. It's also possible that Proverbs 31 could have been a later addition to the book of Proverbs. During the Persian age, after the return, and during the Persian age, women owning land and businesses was a lot more common than previously, until the Greeks took over, but that's a discussion for another time. Oh the Greeks, oh the Greeks Ruining women constantly. Weeks Ruining women constantly. So there's a lot in verse 16 that the original hearer of this verse would understand what's happening, but we miss Elise. What are some of the things you can think of from other passages of scriptures that go into having or creating a vineyard?
Elice Kilko:So you have to have the vines, and in a lot of passages it talks about having a wall around the vineyard to protect it. I don't know what else Land I mean you have to have the land. You have to have the vine.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Here there's walls. Almost every passage that talks about vineyards talks about walls, especially in the New Testament. Sometimes there's towers. You have to have trellises for the grapevines. I don't know what they were always made of. Now they're made out of wood, which was kind of expensive back then. Now wood's much cheaper, but back then wood was much more expensive. You have to have again the seeds for the vines. You have to have time to wait for the grape vines to develop and you have to have access to a wine press. So she buys a field. This could be a terraced field that was previously used for a different sort of crop. It could just be a plain piece of ground. We're not sure what kind of field it is that she's buying. The Hebrew word here is very general. It could be like the plains way out there, or it could be like wheat field, we don't know. But she buys some land and so in order to make plant a vineyard she has to likely get a wall built, perhaps a tower and trellises for the vines to grow on.
Elice Kilko:So this is a lot of labor.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Is she doing this labor or is she hiring it out? What do we think?
Elice Kilko:I'm guessing she's not the one rolling up her sleeves and doing it as a queen. She's definitely not the one rolling up her sleeves and doing it as a queen. She's definitely not the one doing it. I think she's probably in a managerial role, making sure things are getting done.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Yes, I would agree, especially since she's passionate about her textile business. I can't imagine her if they're going on simultaneously, which they may not be, but I imagine if they were going on simultaneously she's going to want to spend the bulk of her time there. So she's much more in a managerial role of this vineyard which brings up. So who is her hired labor? Which means it's likely peasant men in the community that she's hiring to do all of these things for her, which gets really interesting when you think about how hard complementarians say women shouldn't ever be the boss of men.
Elice Kilko:Yippee.
Jessica LM Jenkins:So, like John Piper, has specific guidelines that a woman should never be these are his words never be personally directive towards a man, like giving them driving directions. A woman could be non-personally directive, meaning she wrote a book that the man read, or she wrote the map that the man needs to find his directions, or maybe she's the one, the city planner, who made all the streets so he can only drive on the street, so she's kind of directing him because that's where the street is, but that's non-personal because she's not like face to face with him. So a woman who's face to face with a man cannot tell him what to do. Her john piper and hard complementarians of his ilk.
Elice Kilko:There's absolutely no way the woman of valor is following this rule by John Piper. There just is not.
Jessica LM Jenkins:She didn't hear his sermon on this, did she? She didn't. She didn't get the memo? No, no, she is. I doubt she's being the foreman for the work crew, but she is at least giving directions to the foreman or the contractor, like here's where I want the wall, here's what you need to do, um, and she's financing it. So she has a directive role in this way at the very least it's a conversation.
Elice Kilko:At the very, I bought this land. At the very least it's a conversation. I bought this land. Where's the best place for the wall? At the very least it's a conversation, yes.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Yes, and then, because it's a vineyard, she needs to use her social skills to negotiate time at the community wine press. Or it doesn't say this, but potentially, as a queen, I could see her building a wine press for her community, which is then benefiting the entire community, not just herself. So she's providing jobs for her community. She's potentially providing resources. This wine she might be selling back to her community or selling to merchants. We don't know the end result of this vineyard, but this could be a big payoff for her community at large.
Elice Kilko:That's so interesting? Yeah, because a lot of villages in Israel, archaeologically from this time period, had both a wine press and a milling threshing floor for community use.
Jessica LM Jenkins:They generally had one for the village or the community that was shared and typically the men were in charge of figuring out who got to use the threshing floor, the wine press, like, which family got to use it first and all of that. So now she's the one managing a vineyard. She's again stepping into these kind of masculine spaces to figure out how the produce from her vineyard or she's hiring a man to do that for her, but she's still kind of stepping into these sorts of areas that were typically male run.
Elice Kilko:So let's clear things up. Is the Proverbs 31 woman supposed to be a stay-at-home mom, or should she be working outside the home according to Proverbs 31? What is the woman of valor supposed to be doing?
Jessica LM Jenkins:Actually, this passage isn't indicating either way. Actually, this passage isn't indicating either way. Firstly, a woman should do, or where she should be performing, the tasks. This passage is showcasing how one woman, or a type of woman, brought honor to her family and God through hard work and creativity in her particular culture.
Jessica LM Jenkins:That's so good so it's an example of hey, a typological woman or a real woman back in the Old Testament used her creativity in this way, and God delights in women who use their creativity to benefit their families and communities and follow their passions, which he gave them, and their skills, which God gave them. God likes this. This is the type of music that is to be praised. God likes it when women use their passions and their skills to benefit their families and communities, even when they don't do all the other mundane work.
Elice Kilko:That's so important. All the other mundane work that's so important, jessica, it's my favorite time.
Jessica LM Jenkins:What can we learn about God's heart for women from this passage? God delights in strong, creative women. God delights when women work hard for the good of herself, her family and her community. God delights when women follow their passions, even when that means they outsource or reconfigure normal household dynamics in a way that helps her family thrive. The Proverbs 31 woman's doing all sorts of things that are not normal in that culture and God says that's cool. Look at her. She's super creative. She figured out how to make this export textile business by buying bread for her family rather than grinding, because she's not spending time grinding grain so she can spend time making really, really, really fine linen. She made a trade-off there. That's cool. Look at her being smart. I like that. God gets excited about women using their wisdom and intelligence to find creative ways to bless their family while following the passions and skills that he gave them.
Elice Kilko:It's not the case where.
Jessica LM Jenkins:God's like. I desire all women to be homemakers, and if you are not passionate and skilled in that area, you just better buck up to choose to like it and learn the skills. God's okay. Saying okay, I mean we all need to be investing in our homes men, women, children. That's beside the point, that's just basics. But if you're not passionate about being a stay-at-home mom, but you're passionate about speech therapy, go be a speech therapist and love on little babies who need to learn how to talk, or stroke victims or whoever.
Jessica LM Jenkins:What you're passionate about. God delights in women, following the passions and skills he gave them to benefit their families and communities in creative, novel ways.
Elice Kilko:Yeah, the division of labor that you see in Proverbs 31 between her and her husband, for the historical context is very different than the norm from that time, which gives us freedom, then, in our time, to reevaluate the division of labor between spouses in this day and age, to say you know who does each task best, and it might be a forever thing, or it might be a season of life thing, which is really interesting too. What else can we learn about God's heart for women from this passage?
Jessica LM Jenkins:God is not afraid of women making money. Amen. God is not looking for women to be financially dependent upon a man. The man does not have to be the sole provider for the family. Her husband probably was doing some sort of economic work on his own passage, isn't talking about him, but she's doing quite well for herself and her family. Her husband's not giving her the wool and the flax from his shepherding endeavors. Of course he's probably a lord or a king, not a shepherd, but neither of them are what we would consider traditional breadwinner for the family. Provision was everybody's job Young, old, male, female everybody in the ancient economy is responsible for provision. So God is not looking for women to be financially dependent upon men. A woman making money God is cool with that, he likes that. And God is not looking for women to be financially dependent upon men. A woman making money God is cool with that, he likes that. And God is not worried about women being appropriately directive to men. She had the means, the job, the necessity to be directive to the men helping her with the vineyard.
Jessica LM Jenkins:I heard one hard complementarian blogger. I read her article on this. I think it was the Transformed Wife and she was like it must have been teenage girls who are helping her make the vineyard, because it couldn't have been adult women because they would have been being keepers of the home, like the Proverbs 31 woman, and it couldn't have been men because she couldn't be the boss of men. So she probably had teenage girls helping her with the vineyard. But what do you think? Probably not, probably, not. No. What do you think about who's doing the manual labor of making walls? No, that's teenage girls are not. Who's making walls in the ancient world? That is what the men in that culture did, is they made terraced fields and walls for vineyard. So God is not worried about women being appropriately directive to men. If God was truly worried about women being appropriately feminine by not being directive to men, he wouldn't have praised Deborah JL, the woman of valor, and Mary Magdalene in the Bible.
Elice Kilko:That's such an important note. Those were all very strong women.
Jessica LM Jenkins:We can talk later about the husband-wife submission passages in the New Testament and I think we'll do a podcast on that at some point. But when we look at how Old Testament family structures work, the Old Testament family structures work. The Old Testament family structures do not match complementarian family hierarchy ideals and I think that if God really wanted complementarian style hierarchy to be central to the godly family, he would have put some of those hierarchical commands in the Old Testament, not just the New Testament, which was written under the misogynistic Greco-Roman philosophical system.
Jessica LM Jenkins:And we're back to those Greeks again, again. Instead we have the Proverbs 31 woman who is constantly walking in male spaces doing typically masculine activities, being directive towards men and earning significant amount of money doing things that were not your typical day-to-day for women, mostly because she had the privilege, wealth and means to not have to do the typical day-to-day things for women. That's really good.
Jessica LM Jenkins:So the big thing I would just love our audience to take away from this episode is that god delights in women being who he created them to be. And, yes, sometimes that means we sacrifice for our families and we do something that's not. We do a job that we don't love. We do activities we don't like the most for the good of our families and communities. That happens, but as we are able, god also delights in women following the skills he gave them and the passions he gave them to do life in creative ways to bless their families and communities, even when it doesn't look like the norm.
Jessica LM Jenkins:I love that God likes that. That's so encouraging and that's what I want to leave all of you listeners with. Whether you're male or female, god delights in his people using the wisdom, passions and skills he gives us to find creative ways to do life and bless other people. Thank you so much, elise, for your time. Thank you all for tuning in and listening. May the Lord bless you and keep you. May his face shine upon you and give you peace. Have a great day.
.png)
.png)
