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In this episode, we uncover the real stories of women in the Bible who have been misunderstood, silenced, or abused—and discover the God who saw them. From Bathsheba to Tamar to the woman at the well, we revisit stories where we have blamed or shamed women, when in fact scripture points to God’s compassion, justice, and redemption.
⚠️ This episode mentions rape. Please take care when listening.
Juli (00:00.108)
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Sandra
She’s a woman. She’s probably multiply widowed, which is the most vulnerable person in the world in this culture. And Jesus has gone out of his way to talk to her. When he reveals he knows something about her he shouldn’t know. We have wrongly interpreted that as changing the subject. No! She interprets correctly. You’re a, you must be a prophet. This woman is waiting for a Messiah. And Jesus says, I am.
Juli (01:15.266)
Hi friend, welcome to Java with Juli. I am your host, Juli Slattery, and this podcast is an outreach of Authentic Intimacy, a ministry dedicated to helping you make sense of God and sexuality. My guest today is Dr. Sandra Glahn. And in this conversation, we’re going to dip our toes into an area that she’s been researching for years. And we’re going to revisit some of the stories in the Bible where women have been vilified or sexualized or marginalized.
And we’re going to challenge the way these stories have been told and even distorted in church culture, especially the Western church culture. From Bathsheba and Tamar, to the women at the well, Dr. Sandra Glahn is going to share how cultural assumptions and some of the interpretations we’ve inherited over the years have shaped the way we view women in the Bible and not always accurately. Now, friend, this is not just a conversation for those of us who like to nerd out on theology.
Juli
The truth is, I’ve heard from so many of you who feel ashamed, unloved, and unseen because of the things that have been done to you. And you’ve been in situations where you felt powerless because frankly, you are a woman. What I want you to walk away with today is a richer, truer picture of God’s heart for women. One that affirms their value and their place in His story.
Dr. G, as most of her students call her, is a professor at Dallas Theological Seminary. She has a Master of Theology from Dallas Theological Seminary and a PhD from the University of Texas. So with that, let’s dive into my conversation with Dr. Sandra Glahn.
Juli (03:00.984)
Well, Dr. G, thanks so much for joining me for Java with Juli. I understand that you are a fellow coffee lover.
Sandra
Oh absolutely. I only do one cup a day, but it’s got to be good.
Juli
Yeah, I’m with you on that, or it’s not worth it, right? And you even have like a Bible study series all around coffee names, so I feel like, you know, we’ve got that in common.
Sandra
I have a coffee cup series, I sometimes have to explain to people who come right up to me and say, I despise coffee. It’s like, look, it’s a metaphor. It’s a coffee break. You can drink iced tea if you want.
Juli
Yes, there you go. Yeah. So we are here to talk about a book that you compiled and edited called Vindicating the Vixens. The subtitle is Revisiting Sexualized, Vilified and Marginalized Women of the Bible. So I got to start with where did this book come from? This sounds like a passion project.
Sandra (03:56.91)
It is. Yeah, this is my baby of all the books I have done. So I used to work as editor-in-chief for Dallas Theological Seminary’s magazine. I’m professional writer and that’s how I sort of got in the door and ended up going to seminary. I had no aspirations to get a degree initially. I was just, you know, freelancing and taking classes here and there. And what I began to notice, I was coming out of an incredibly traditionalist conservative, I don’t want to say background. I came to faith when I was 14 in a Bible church, and my parents supported me going there, but it was not where they attended. And I got some very traditionalist, hardcore teaching that they weren’t there to mitigate going. So some of it related to women. And I am the fourth of five children.
My mother, if you’ve seen Sound of Music, whether the Julie Andrews version or the Carrie Underwood version, my mom was just so fun. She was like that Juli, she was a great mom and there were lots of kids and I’m the fourth of five so I wanted nothing more than to have that life. And I aspired to be a mom of a large family. I married my high school sweetheart and so we were ready to have at least four kids but I put him through seminary and then when it was, you know, when he was about ready to graduate, we figured it’s time to start a family and to our utter shock, we hit the brick wall of infertility and pregnancy loss and that spanned a decade for us. There was three years of no success, then there were seven early pregnancy losses, and we had three failed adoptions, and then finally a successful adoption followed by an ectopic pregnancy, which is part of my training in sexuality, by the way, because I had to revisit my theology of sexuality, what were women made for? What does it mean to be fruitful and multiply? Is that a command? All of that was undergirding then what became more of my ministry.
But as I was the editor of this publication, I started noticing that there were complementarians and egalitarians, men and women, who were taking an alternative view of some of the women in the Bible compared to what I had learned. For example, I had learned that the woman of the well was seductive, even though there’s not only nothing in the text to suggest that, but also I learned that the Orthodox Church with a capital O never had seen her that way, and there’s even a feast day celebrating her.
Sandra (06:23.566)
The reference to her having a husband, a man now who’s not her own, was probably a reference to either her having to be a concubine because she’s older and widowed, or to a levirate marriage, which is similar to what Ruth did with Boaz, where the older brother takes you under his care if you’re widowed, and you’re supposed to produce a son to carry on the name of the husband you’ve lost. And so there’s every likelihood that she was widowed multiple times and now in a position where she couldn’t even claim the man as her own. And I encountered an Arab scholar who was teaching at a very conservative seminary, but he was looking at Hagar saying, do you know God made incredible promises to her? And the idea that her son will be a wild donkey, Americans read that as, excuse my French, a wild jackass. And he said, in my culture, think about what is Solomon riding on his coronation day?
What is Jesus riding into Jerusalem? A donkey is the Mercedes Benz of the Middle East. And we should be translating that a free stallion if we want to think about it in our terms. So all of this to say one by one, I just started collecting these takes on women that were more international, that were more, often they had women at the table as opposed to just men being at the table. So it men and women, but it was Americans and Arab scholars, was an Australian, and I just collected this file of women. And eventually I had enough chapters for almost a book. So then I went back and found some other scholars that I knew had done work in some of these areas. Bathsheba is another example of someone who’s been wrongly vilified. And we came together and decided that since it was gonna be difficult to pay us all, because there are a lot, I think there are 17, 20 contributors, we would all donate our profits to the International Justice Mission. We’re scholars, we can’t be on the front lines of injustice, we can’t be on the front lines of fighting human trafficking, but we can put our scholarship to work to raise funds for people who are. And so that was how Vindicating the Vixens came about.
Juli (08:35.918)
Yeah, boy, what a story. And thank you for sharing how it kind of connects with your own journey, your own story. For some background, why is this significant for us to understand what was going on in the ancient cultures that we read the Bible from? What do we miss when we just read it with Western 2025 kind of eyes?
Sandra
An important question. I think the first thing that I’m sure you see in your own ministry is women think God doesn’t like them. Because if the very few heroines we have or the very few women that really get cameos were all seductive or people were vilifying, then where do we get role models? Who are we supposed to look to? And then when you have voices that are telling women that you were just made for baby making, well, that leaves out an enormous percentage of the population, people who want to marry and never have, people who cannot have children, people who, know, lots of different scenarios in God’s multiplied pattern book for people that are not going to have children and kind of receiving the messages I had received that there’s really no place for you if you’re not married with a household of kids. And then also, you know, women are living longer.
When the kids are gone by the time you’re 48 and there’s no vision in the church for what you can do with the next 40 years of your life or more, all of this says, that doesn’t sound like Paul’s view of spiritual gifts where we all need each other and there’s a hand and an eye and a foot and one can’t say to the other, you don’t matter. So I would say a key thing to communicate to both men and women is that men and women need to partner together to serve God. And so we have burned out brothers who are surrounded with gifted sisters and thinking that they have to do it, you know, the men have to do it all. So, I mean, it’s not good for men and it’s not good for women. And this is part of why I wanted both ends of the spectrum on people with views about what women in ministry are called to do, because I didn’t want this to just be labeled as an egalitarian project. It’s not.
Sandra (10:56.748)
It’s a project for people who have a high view of scripture, that are saying, we have not had all eyes on the text and it has hurt us. So let’s revisit some of the text. Another example would be Bathsheba. The Hebrew word there for what she is doing is she’s bathing or washing and it could be a reference to washing her hand. It hands, does not mean that you’re taking a bath in a bathtub like a westerner would do. There is not enough water in the Middle East at the time of David for a bathtub.
You know, even when our soldiers had to do a baptism in the middle of the desert, they would take a garbage bag and line a huge pit of sand and bring in water from all over to do it. You just don’t bathe every day. It’s an incredible exception to daily life when water is that scarce, and it is in the desert. Another detail is people get told that the woman at the well comes alone at noon because she’s an outcast. Nothing in the text says she’s alone.
If you travel to the developing world today, people are at the well all day, and it has much more to do with how much water you can carry at one time. There’s nothing in the text that said she’s an outcast. So I did a little search to see when that idea came up, and it’s like 200 years old. It’s not even an ancient understanding of that. There are these stories that we have added to the stories that we don’t even realize that the details we’re bringing out aren’t even there.
Juli
Yeah, I love how the writers go through so many of these women, Old Testament women, New Testament women, and perhaps we’ll talk about a few. But I wanted to ask you a question about some of the themes that we see in scripture, particularly in the Old Testament that seem very confusing for women trying to make sense of this. One of them is the very high kind of stake that is put on their virginity, that a virgin is worth way more than somebody who is not a virgin, and that you could even be killed for not being a virgin. So that would be a question. And then also along with that, when a woman was infertile in the Old Testament, it being such a heavy shame for her. I think of Hannah, I think of Rachel, these women that are struggling with infertility; Sarah.
Juli (13:16.376)
Can you give some context that we might not understand in our current day about those two themes?
Sandra
That is a great question. So it’s difficult for us as Westerners in a world with contraception to imagine a world where you usually know who the father was. And so in a world where inheritance is so important, in much more than it is today, it’s important to know who the baby’s father is. And here’s part of why.
The land in Israel takes on almost a quality of a person itself. The land is an indication of the character of God and the faithfulness of God. And we see a story like the daughters of Zalepahad, he’s had five daughters and there are no sons to inherit, their dad dies. What are we gonna do with the land? Because we need land to live on, but also land has to stay in the family. So God says yes, they can own land, but they need to marry within their own tribe, which they’re happy to do. It just means telling the matchmaker to choose from your own tribe. It’s not like they’ve fallen in love with some guy from the tribe of Asher and you’re going to have to break her heart. You know, just tell the matchmaker to only connect me with people in my own tribe. Done. And the reason that was so important was because there was a concern that the land that would be dedicated to their people would go to a different tribe and the land had to stay in the tribe.
So if you have women that are having sex outside of marriage and then you don’t know that they’re pregnant and you marry them, that land inheritance could go to someone that actually isn’t even in that tribe, which is hard for us to imagine, but it’s really important in the mind of ancient Israel.
Sandra (15:13.506)
And it’s the land and the infertility, the fertility promises that are connected with the land and God’s promise, we err greatly when we take those promises given to Israel about land and make them about us. So that means if the people are faithful to God, the land’s gonna flourish, the people are gonna flourish, the animals are gonna flourish, and if they don’t keep the covenant, we’re going to see a different outcome. And so it’s, have to try to imagine ourselves back to a land where the promises are connected to the land, but also where poverty is a big deal. They don’t have social security. So if a woman is widowed, she has to glean on the edge of the field. And if the people are not leaving a little extra weed on the edge of the field, she might starve. And that is an indictment on their culture. That is an indictment on their character. You’re supposed to care for the widow. You don’t go pick it for her.
She has to work for it, but still you have to leave it for her out of mercy. So this is part of why Boaz and the story of Ruth and Boaz is so incredible in that he sees a woman who is gleaning for her mother-in-law, her widowed mother-in-law, and showing mercy on her, giving up her ability to go back home and get married and have kids and your kids are your 401k plan, they’re your meals on wheels, they’re your social security, they’re much more than the people that you love in your family. So again, it’s hard for us to imagine a culture where there’s so much poverty and your children are so connected with your ability to not starve to death. And all of that plays into the promises of fertility, it plays into the virginity and the importance of virginity because you are being asked to feed this woman for the rest of her life and you would hope that the kid is yours.
Juli (17:14.862)
Yeah. Okay, so given that, when we jump to New Testament, our time, particularly in the Western world where we don’t have those poverty and land issues, is virginity still something that biblically we see both men and women are called to, or is it different between men and women?
Sandra
Yeah, well, we certainly still see that. And this is where it helps us to have a little church history. in the early church, in Corinth, were, you know, over sexualized. In Ephesus, they’re probably under sexualized. And that may explain why in Corinth, Paul says, hey, think about staying celibate for the rest of your life, like me. And over in Ephesus, he’s like, I want the widows to marry and have kids. You’re like, that’s the same guy giving opposite advice. Well, probably because his context is different. He’s saying live counterculturally.
But the early church really, really embraced virginity. And I think there are two things we need to look at there. One is we look at the Virgin Martyrs and see in that purity culture a lot of times. And it was actually the opposite. Same outcome, same action, but for very different reason. Purity culture says a woman has no value. We can burn her to death if she loses her virginity. The early Christians said, look, the number one cause of death for men is war. And the emperors are demanding that we have lots of babies, that that’s all we’re good for, because he is trying to build his army. And a woman had to have four or five kids just to keep at zero population growth or so many boys dying. And the early Christians said, you know what? God’s kingdom is not in this world. We are not going to provide soldiers for this. We are going to dedicate our lives to Christ.
We think Jesus is coming soon, and if we look in the coming kingdom, there’s no marriage or people given in marriage, because there’s no death. And where there’s no death, there’s no need for reproduction. So that’s, again, a very different way of looking at the text than your average Western American. But we certainly still see the same ideal of one man, one woman.
Sandra (19:31.576)
Two shall become one, two shall become one, two shall become one is actually the ideal all the way through the Old and New Testament. The goal of marriage is not actually reproduction. That’s one side possibility in marriage, but the goal is oneness. And for a New Testament believer is a picture of the unity between Christ and the church, and the love that they have together. So yes, virginity is still important, but it doesn’t mean that if you repent or if you are made new that you’re damaged goods, some of the purity culture messages of you’re chewed gum, you’re a smushed rose, like all of that is just not true.
Juli
So what you’re saying is it’s more of an issue of integrity and following Christ. It’s not an issue of value.
Sandra
Bingo. Well said. But we have a double standard. We say that it’s true for women. We’ll often look at the genealogy of Jesus and the women there, and we’ll say those women are there to show sinners that God redeems. And God absolutely does redeem sinners. But also, we could be saying that about Abraham, who traded his wife off as his sister, or let’s see, you know, there were some kings in there that are mentioned that actually worshiped false gods and sacrificed their children. There’s Solomon who had a gazillion wives. We don’t need to add the women or vilify the women in those stories to show that God forgives sin. We got plenty of men and women that show that.
Juli (21:10.092)
Yeah, that makes me think when we read the Gospels, there’s several situations where Jesus is interacting with a woman. Sometimes it’s even said she was a known sinner or she was caught in adultery. It was a sexual kind of sin. In my recollection, we don’t see that same obvious confrontation with sexual sin with a man, with Jesus. And I’m just wondering, is that a cultural thing or what are we to, what are we to take from that?
Sandra
Well, the two stories where we usually see that are the woman at the well, which we are wrongly understanding because she actually isn’t an immoral person at all, unless we read that into the text. The other text where we see that is in John 8 with the woman caught in adultery. But if you’ll look at the fine print, it’s probably actually a story that was true, and that circulated with the scripture, but it wasn’t in the earliest manuscripts. And I know that’s another whole thing. But I think what’s important in that story is that it looks like the woman is being vilified for her sin, but actually Jesus is writing something in the sand and they leave, the men leave from the oldest to the youngest.
So I think there is something equalizing happening in that story. I suspect it’s the fact that, well, if she’s caught in the act, where’s the guy? That suggests to me that it was the people in the context that were dragging the woman out as more sinful. But the Lord Himself does not go after her. And it’s very likely, I think, that what He wrote might have been that Him without sin cast the first stone. Where’s the guy? Something along those lines.
Juli (23:01.23)
And then we see, I think it’s Luke 7, where there’s a woman who crashes a party at Simon the Pharisee’s house. And it keeps saying in that text, like, she was probably, I guess, a temple prostitute, maybe, or, but the Pharisee’s like, if Jesus knew who was touching him, you know, like, he wouldn’t let this happen.
Sandra
So here’s a fun fact. We actually don’t find any evidence of temple prostitution in the New Testament. Old Testament, the gods, they are whacked out and sex fiends. But the only connection we have to possible prostitution connected to the Greco-Roman world at this time is possibly in Corinth. But that is coming from the lips of a historian who’s referencing the ancient past. His name is Strabo.
And he talks about the temple of Eros, or Aphrodite on the top of the hill. But it’s actually not a reference to something contemporary with his time. so we, in an emphasis, Artemis is a goddess of virginity. If you watch Wonder Woman, she’s not far off Artemis, except Artemis is not necessarily just a friend of women. She’s just as willing to kill women and children as she is to go after men. She’s a hunter and she’s easily offended.
Sandra
But you’re right, that story, they know she’s a prostitute. And you’re also right in observing that what Jesus goes after, he says to you know sin no more, but he also says that to the man born blind. And so I think that if we read between the lines, we actually do find both men and women. It’s just the text maybe isn’t as overt, but it’s more the culture that is bringing these women, then it’s certainly not the Lord himself.
In fact, I have a t-shirt, one of my students made, that says, leave her alone, Jesus. And it’s this story where a woman, you know, do they know, does Jesus know? And Jesus actually says, leave her alone. She’s doing a good thing. You have misunderstood. You have sexualized this situation and actually she’s preparing me for burial. She’s doing a good thing.
Juli (25:15.68)
Yeah, yeah, I can see the passion and hear the passion and what you’re describing. You are a warrior in and of yourself just in digging in the scripture and defending women from some of the things that not only have impacted them in biblical times, but some of that that has been carried into today’s day and age. So Dr. G, one question I have for you, a story in the Old Testament that just bothers me so much.
There’s several stories in Old Testament that bother me every time I read them, but one that I’ve been thinking about lately is the story of Tamar. And I know there are two Tamars in the Old Testament that we could talk about, but specifically, I’d love for you to help us walk through the story of Tamar, who was David’s daughter and was raped by Amnon. And I think one of the things that really troubles me about that is there’s no resolution there. It just, from what we read in the scripture, she’s just kind of secluded, Absalom is her defender, looks after her, but it’s like her life is over. And I think there are so many, yeah, there’s so many women who have experienced sexual trauma and rape who feel that and they read the scripture and they don’t see a resolution to that narrative.
Sandra
Well and I think we’re supposed to read that lack of resolution as an indictment on the men in her life. I do not think we’re supposed to read that as the point of view of God. And this is one of our challenges in Bible reading is to see that the culture is not inspired. The words are inspired and they’re from God, but that doesn’t mean we’re supposed to look at the polygamy of Abraham or the polygamy of David or Solomon and think, well, God didn’t discipline him for it, so it must be OK. No, God made very clear, kings are going to do this, and I’m not good with it and oh by the way, two shall become one. That’s the ideal. It’s reiterated more strongly in Paul. I think another example, well, let’s talk about Dinah. Dinah goes, she is, I’m sorry, Tamar.
Juli (27:22.022)
Dinah is, no that’s okay, she’s another one. Yeah, she’s another one that was raped and there’s a similar kind of revenge.
Sandra
There is a similar revenge story. So in Dinah’s story, so she’s the daughter of, you know, the 12 tribes of Israel come from Israel or Jacob, and she’s his daughter. And she is in a town called Shechem. Also the name of the prince is Shechem, which can be little confusing, but he’s in love with her, he’s in love with her, and then he violates her. And then, you know, she is shamed because she’s in an honor-shame culture.
That is not God’s view of how things ought to be. It is a messed up culture. Just because those are the children of Israel does not mean that their actions are in line with God at all. And so the brothers, seeing their father say nothing– which is an indictment of their father, and we see something similar happening with David and his daughter later– this is not what is supposed to be. A good example of a father with a daughter is Caleb in the beginning of Judges where his daughter gets land and we read that as he says, I’ll give my daughter to the best warrior and we’re mortified. But again, in his culture, he’s giving his daughter the best protection he can give her. And she comes and says, hey, you gave him land, but I want some water. And Caleb’s like, okay, have some springs. And that’s the beginning of the book of Judges. And the end of the book of Judges, we have the gang violation of a woman.
And we’re supposed to see that as the downward, spiral of everybody doing what is right in their own eyes. This is not the way it’s supposed to be. But anyway, back to these rape stories, it’s really important for us to see them not as God’s view of how things are supposed to be, but of how desperately we need the King of Kings.
Sandra (29:18.542)
And even kings when God says, David, you know, you can be, well, he says it just about Saul. Okay, people, you’ve begged for a king, fine, but he’s gonna multiply wives, he’s gonna multiply horses, there are gonna be slaves involved, and no, no, no, it’s what we want. And we’re supposed to be longing for the king of kings, the government will be on his shoulders, may that day happen soon, right? We’re still longing for that because no government ever in the history of humanity has been a righteous government.
Sandra
Some have been better than others, but the king of kings is the only one who is not affected badly by power. So I think it’s really important. Another example, Juli, Dr. S, where we see sometimes a misunderstanding of the difference between the culture and God’s point of view is if you read the story of the midwives in Exodus, and they are going up against this evil king who’s killing boys.
And these women are named in a context where women are not usually named. And you can look at that and go, see, women aren’t named. They don’t even get named. Yeah, they’re in a culture where women’s names are not considered important. And yet, that should make us, we should be naming our kids after those two women because they are named. Because these two women whose only vocation is to deliver babies, which you would think would be fairly helpless, still stand up to do what is right.
And they saved Israel before Moses. And if we believe Moses is writing it, which the text says he is, he begins the story of Exodus with six women who save his life before he saves Israel. You have the two midwives who are named. Then you have three unnamed women, which is really unusual. His sister and his mother and the princess are never named in that context. But what happens is when the new king arose who knew not Joseph, all the Hebrew names disappear and nobody gets a name.
This is a literary thing that’s happening. This is not God erasing women. And then you have that weird story where his wife saves his life with something to do with his foreskin and God is going to kill him and she saves him. We focus a lot of ink on what in the world is happening. Doesn’t matter. She knew what was happening. The point is Moses is saying, this woman saved my life, so did this one and this one and six women saved me. Okay, now I’m going to go and I’m going to save Israel. But you have to know the saviors of Israel weren’t just me. They were women who in their daily work were righteous, stood up for something that they probably had no idea was going to have these ramifications, which is, I think, a very encouraging message for us today, but I digress.
Juli
Boy, I never thought about that. You’re making me want to go back and dig into some of these stories. If you don’t mind, I’m going to go back to the Tamar story. How should it have been resolved in that day, but also in today when you have a woman who is violated and feels like my life is over, I’m never going to be whole again? Is there scripture even in the life of Jesus that helps a woman in that situation to know this is not what God has for you?
Sandra
It absolutely is not what God has for you. I want to start in an odd place, and that’s with the book of Job. And it’s not where people usually go in the book of Job. I want to look at the beginning and the end. We call it, fancy word for it, is the epilogue and the prologue. So you have the epilogue and the prologue that are written in prose. They’re written in just everyday language. But then everything else in that entire book is poetry. The friends come up, they argue about why God allows suffering all the way in the poetry section.
But in the prose sections, it begins with saying Job is righteous. Here’s how many slaves he has. He has seven sons, the perfect number, three daughters, and all these sheep and cows and, you know, mules, donkeys. Okay, fast forward to the end of the book. When God has restored Joseph, I think it shows us that Job, God has restored Job and made him flourish more. He is a more ethical human being.
Sandra (33:30.498)
The first thing we see is he didn’t have slaves anymore. No mention whatsoever of slaves. And then all of his animals have doubled, but the number of his children have stayed the same and it’s showing, it’s saying God blessed him twice as much. I think that tells us maybe something about God’s math and human life and you just don’t replace one loss with another. But then also it says he had three daughters and they are named and the seven sons are not.
In the prologue, the sons had houses and they were so nice they invited their sisters. In the epilogue, they own property. He gives them property. And they’re beautiful, which suggests they could be married if they want to be, but they don’t have to be because their father has named them and given them property. And this is a sign of a change in Job that tells us that giving property to women was a good thing, that this shows he has grown in empathy, that he has used his imagination because he suffered and when he called out to his family for mercy and he begs them pity, pity, pity, and they don’t show mercy, Job has seen, that does not feel good. That does not feel good. This is not fair. And he’s a much more fair person at the end of his life. I’m not gonna say God causes suffering to make us fair.
Sandra
I’m gonna say it’s a ramification of suffering that we have more empathy if we’re paying attention to God. We have more empathy for those who have suffered in ways that we maybe have never appreciated before. And I think we see these traces throughout the Old Testament that whether it’s the women saving Moses, whether it’s actually the woman who’s supposed to drink bitter waters if she’s being accused of adultery, that again reads crazy to us in our culture.
But my friends who come to the seminary where I teach from the Middle East say, no, that is good news. Otherwise, a man spends his entire life accusing you and you have no recourse. You just have to put up with him saying it. And this scripture says she’s either guilty or not. And it’s a way of publicly vindicating her. So then you get to Jesus and he, when we get to the story of Nicodemus, which comes right before the woman at the well, Nicodemus is, he’s a Jewish leader.
Sandra (35:56.96)
He is supposed to know the scriptures really well. He’s a man. He comes to Jesus at night and Jesus hears him ask questions like, you’re a scholar and you don’t know? And then in the very next chapter, we have a foil, which is this, she’s a woman. She’s probably multiply widowed, which is the most vulnerable person in the world in this culture. And Jesus has gone out of his way to talk to her.
She is waiting for a Messiah when he reveals he knows something about her he shouldn’t know. We have wrongly interpreted that as changing the subject. No, she interprets it correctly. You must be a prophet. This woman is waiting for a Messiah. And Jesus says, I am. He doesn’t say, I am he, I’m the one talking to you. It’s just I am the very same name that God gave for himself when he’s talking to Moses.
When other listeners hear him call himself I Am in other contexts, they try to stone him because they see it as blasphemy. So Jesus tells this woman I Am when you don’t see that anywhere else that he tells a person one-on-one. You even see the disciples running after, wait, wait, wait, wait, Lord, wait, are you saying XYZ? And he’s like, well, you said it. Like he’s very mysterious. And sometimes he’ll heal somebody and say, don’t even tell anybody because he just doesn’t want the crowds coming after healings. But here’s a, a vulnerable woman that Jesus sees. And I think that is a key takeaway for any person. Jesus sees you, and he sees your pain. And I don’t think he’s approaching her on the basis of her sin. He has seen how many losses she’s been through, and she’s still hoping. So he needs to go through Samaria to talk to her, because there’s this vulnerable woman there. And the next thing he says to his disciples is, hey, the harvest is plentiful. You know, they’re asking, why is he even talking to a woman?
And he’s like, the harvest is plentiful. Get past gender, get past socioeconomic status, get past ethnicity here, people, and the whole village comes to faith.
Juli (38:04.202)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Let me ask you, because you’ve mentioned the woman at the well several times now, when you say that she was likely widowed five times, is that the kind of thing that we know or is it like, could be this or it could be that, and we’ve just chosen to always read in, this was kind of a loose woman who got divorced many times or like, how are we to hold that kind of thing in tension?
Sandra
Great question. So if you think about when Easter comes, what do we say about the testimony of women? We say it’s really unusual that Jesus would tell Mary Magdalene to be the one to go and tell because you’re not going to have a woman testifying in this culture because legally, guess what women can’t do on their own behalf? So this idea that in the same culture a woman is going to walk into divorce court seven times, no, she has to have a male sponsor to do that.
Juli
She may have gotten divorced by a man, written a certificate of divorce. She was rejected, so either she was widowed or rejected, so it wasn’t her choice.
Sandra
From Paul’s words in 1st Corinthians that it’s possible for a woman to get a divorce, but highly unlikely. For sure she’s not going to get seven. For sure she’s not going to get seven. So we have to read that some other way.
Juli
Yeah. Okay. Last question, Dr. G, who is the one woman in the Bible that you resonate with the most?
Sandra (39:34.466)
Well, it used to be Hannah because she was infertile. And I’ll say why I need to say that. Because I used to read the infertility stories as an unabridged, I read the Bible as an unabridged text on infertility. And while the stories of infertile women are meaningful and they teach us a lot, they are not an unabridged text on infertility. They show that God sees infertility and he’s merciful, but there’s much more going on with the nation of Israel, promises of God, the promises of flourishing through reproduction. We see a very different, we see hints of it when he says to the eunuchs in Isaiah, the eunuchs who dedicate themselves to me, I’ll give a name that’s better than children that will last forever. So it’s not just an Old Testament, New Testament thing, there are whispers of it, but you see a clear shift with Jesus and the disciples. They are single, they are celibate. Again, that doesn’t mean all people have to be marriage is a holy estate, but you see the reproduction of disciples as a bigger emphasis.
So then we go back to Genesis and realize God didn’t just want us to reproduce. He wanted us to fill the earth with worshipers. You see in the Psalms that the whole earth will be filled with the glory of God. It was a means to an end.
So my favorite now, it’s Rahab. And I think it’s Rahab because you are, she says, we’ve heard about your God. We heard what he did at the Red Sea. That happened 40 years earlier. Then you have Joshua going, right before they’re getting ready to take over her city, and he goes to the angel who appears and says, so whose side are you on? Because you know he’s expecting to say, your side, Joshua, you’re going to kill it. And the angel says, I’m on God’s side. And it’s like God doesn’t pick sides. God is for God. And I love that Rahab shows us that if God could save one person who was a God-fearer, there were probably many others.
And we tend to just think that God killed everybody. I think that she and the combination of her story with the angel, says, God is about sparing the person who believes, the person who wasn’t committing child sacrifice, or the person who wasn’t committing rape, or all the horrible things that these nations were doing that were considered okay. That offended God.
Juli (42:00.11)
My friend, thanks for joining me for this conversation. I’m grateful for Dr. Glahn and the way that she has helped us take a second look at women in the Bible and see how God consistently dignified them. He invited them into his mission and showed that their value comes from knowing him and doing his will, not from cultural expectations. If you want to dive deeper into this conversation, we’ll put a link to the book, “Vindicating the Vixens: Revisiting Sexualized, Vilified and Marginalized Women of the Bible” in our show notes. And time is running out to take our Java with Juli survey. Would you please just take 10 minutes and let me know the topics you want to hear more of on this podcast and how we can make this an even better resource for you. mean, friends, this podcast is for you and I so want to be tailoring it around what is going to be the greatest blessing for you.
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