Women in the Bible: A Survey of Who They Were and What God Did Through Them
"So she named the Lord who spoke to her: 'You are El-roi,' for she said, 'Have I really seen here the one who sees me?'" — Genesis 16:13 CSB
"There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female; since you are all one in Christ Jesus." — Galatians 3:28 CSB
Women appear at nearly every major turning point in the biblical narrative, from Sarah at the beginning of the covenant with Abraham to Lydia at the opening of the movement of the Gospel in Europe. The variety of women honored in Scripture is striking: a barren matriarch who laughed at the promise, an enslaved woman cast out in the wilderness who gave God a name, a foreign prostitute woven into the lineage of Jesus, a Moabite widow, a teenage girl in a backwater town, a wealthy merchant who became one of the first church planters in Europe. That is by no means an exhaustive list. God's pattern of working through women has never followed the patterns that human institutions would recognize as predictable, and these women are not peripheral to the story He was telling. They are present at its turning points…
What the Variety of Women in Scripture Tells Us
The women whose stories Scripture tells in any depth do not share a common profile. They span centuries and cultures and social positions that have almost nothing in common. What connects them is not personality type or circumstance but something more specific: they encountered God in their particular situation and responded to what they found. Sometimes with courage. Sometimes with laughter. Sometimes with grief brought honestly into the open. Sometimes with a declaration that no one else was present to hear. Reading their stories as primarily moral examples misses what makes them most impactful — they are accounts of a God who works in ways that defy expectation, through people that the world around them was not necessarily paying attention to.
Women at the Turning Points of the Old Testament
Sarah is the mother of the covenant people, and her story begins with something the Bible is honest about: she laughed. When God told Abraham that his elderly, barren wife would have a son, Sarah laughed from behind the tent door. God heard it. He asked why she laughed, and Sarah denied it. It is an intensely human moment — full of doubt and embarrassment — and it is how the narrative of the covenant people begins, not with triumphant faith but with disbelieving laughter that God was patient with. Her son was named Isaac, which means laughter. The promise came to a woman who laughed at it, and God fulfilled it anyway.
Hagar is an often overlooked figure in Genesis, but her story is so important, and God makes it beautiful. She was an Egyptian slave given to Abraham by Sarah, used and then cast out into the wilderness with her son when Sarah no longer wanted her there. Alone, out of water, certain her son was about to die, she set him under a bush and walked away so she would not have to watch. God spoke to her. He showed her water. He made a promise about her son's future. And then Hagar did something remarkable: she gave God a name. "El-roi," she called Him — the God who sees me. She asked, "Have I really seen here the one who sees me?" The God who meets people in the middle of their worst circumstances has a name, and a forgotten enslaved woman in the wilderness gave it to Him.
Miriam was Moses's older sister, a prophet who led the women of Israel in worship after the crossing of the Red Sea — one of the first corporate worship events in the narrative of God's people. She was also the woman who, decades later, challenged Moses's authority alongside Aaron and was struck with leprosy as a result. Both parts of her story are in the text. The Bible is not interested in presenting these women as flawless models. It tells true stories about people God used, including their failures, and that is one of the many reasons we know these accounts are trustworthy.
Rahab was a Canaanite prostitute in Jericho who hid the Israelite spies, protected them with a lie, and negotiated the safety of her family before the city fell. She married into the Israelite community. She became the mother of Boaz. (It’s interesting to think how that might have impacted Boaz’s treatment of Ruth, another non-Israelite woman.) And Rahab is named in Matthew's genealogy of Jesus, one of five women listed in a genealogy that traditionally would not have included women at all. An unlikely person from an unlikely place, and God wove her into the lineage of the One through Whom all nations would be blessed.
Ruth and Esther — Two Books Named for Women
Two of the sixty-six books of the Bible are named for women. Ruth and Esther tell stories of women who moved faithfully in circumstances they could not control — a Moabite widow who chose to follow her mother-in-law into a foreign land rather than return to the safety of her own family, and a Jewish queen who risked her life to approach a king on behalf of her people without being summoned. Both women operated in situations of genuine powerlessness and produced outcomes they could not have engineered on their own. You can read more about a few things that specifically made each of them remarkable and the theological thread that connects their faithfulness to every woman in this survey.
Women in the Gospels and the Early Church
Women were present at the crucifixion when most of the male disciples had fled. Mary Magdalene was the first person to see the risen Jesus and the first person sent to carry the news of the resurrection. John 20:17-18 records Jesus specifically commissioning her to go and tell the disciples, which makes her the first person in history sent to proclaim the resurrection. The gospel of the risen Christ was first entrusted to a woman.
Lydia was a wealthy merchant from Thyatira who heard Paul speak by the river in Philippi, believed, was baptized with her household, and immediately opened her home to the church. The first church in Europe met in the house of a businesswoman who had been a believer for perhaps a few hours. She is not presented in the text as exceptional in any dramatic way except in her responsiveness and her generosity with what she had. God worked through Rahab's hiding of spies and through Lydia's opening of a door. There is no trivial obedience. Any time we say yes to God, it’s significant.
What These Stories Are Doing Together
Paul's declaration in Galatians 3:28 — that in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female — did not introduce a new principle into the story of God's people. It named something that had been visible throughout the story all along, in the patterns of who God chose to work through and whose encounters with Him Scripture preserved. A slave woman in the wilderness. A foreign prostitute. A widow crossing into an uncertain country. A merchant opening her home. These are not minor characters in the margins of the story. They are the story at its turning points.
The God who accepts His people completely and forever has always worked that way, and the women of Scripture are among the clearest evidence of it. El-roi, the God who sees, has always been seeing. And He has always been working through the people others were not watching, toward purposes that the people He worked through could not have anticipated and did not fully understand until they were already inside them.