Women in the Bible
Women in the Bible were patrons, deacons, an apostle Paul names, and the first witnesses to the empty tomb, and the Jewish world around them had women synagogue heads and philosophers too. Five scholars on The Dig In Podcast went back to the texts, the inscriptions and the ground itself to put their names back in the story.
Twelve stories
back in the record.
Each card comes from an episode and names the scholar who made the case. Filter by setting: the Hebrew Bible, the Jesus movement, the early church, or the Jewish world of the Second Temple period.
God as mourner, mother, midwife
Jeremiah 9, Isaiah 66, Psalm 22Prof. Juliana Claassens traces three feminine pictures of God in the Hebrew Bible: the mourning woman who leads the lament, the mother who comforts, and the midwife who draws a child safely from the womb. She reads them as images for people carrying trauma and injustice.
Hear it with Prof. ClaassensThe women who resisted
Old Testament narrativesClaassens also reads the Old Testament stories of women who pushed back against the powers over them, and asks what their resistance reveals about liberation, human dignity and where God is present in a story of injustice.
Hear it with Prof. ClaassensMary of Nazareth
Mark 6:3, Matthew 1:25, John 19Dr. James Tabor calls her the best known, least known woman in history. He argues she raised a large family four miles from Sepphoris, watched Rome burn that city in 4 BC, and shaped Jesus's reading of Isaiah 11.
Hear it with Dr. TaborMary Magdalene
Luke 8:2-3, John 20Luke names her among the women who funded Jesus from their own means. Dr. Lynn Cohick reads her as a woman of independent resources. Prof. Tal Ilan goes further and argues that Mary Magdalene, the first to announce the risen Jesus in John, founded Christianity.
Hear it with Prof. IlanJoanna, Susanna and many others
Luke 8:1-3Luke lists three women by name, then adds "many others" who traveled with Jesus and paid for the work. Tabor calls them the band of sisters and thinks "many" meant dozens. At the cross, he notes, the women were the ones who stayed.
Hear it with Dr. TaborPhoebe
Romans 16:1-2Paul calls her a deacon of the church at Cenchreae, the eastern port of Corinth, and his prostatis. Cohick says the usual English "helper" is a weak rendering of a word that named a patron, someone who supplied money, introductions and protection.
Hear it with Dr. CohickJunia
Romans 16:7Paul greets her and Andronicus as outstanding among the apostles. Cohick points to about 250 inscriptions in Rome alone carrying the female name Junia, while the male "Junias" appears nowhere. Ilan agrees the name reads best as a woman's.
Hear it with Dr. CohickLydia of Philippi
Acts 16:14-15, 40A dealer in purple cloth who ran her own household. When she was baptized, her household was baptized with her, and her home became the base for Paul's work in Philippi, the church Cohick calls the first in Europe.
Hear it with Dr. CohickPriscilla, Euodia and Syntyche
Acts 18:26, Philippians 4:2-3Priscilla and Aquila took Apollos aside and taught him the way of God more accurately. Paul calls Euodia and Syntyche coworkers who struggled beside him. Cohick reads his practice with these women as the best guide to his harder sentences.
Hear it with Dr. CohickHeads of the synagogue
Greek and Latin inscriptionsIlan and Dr. Bernadette Brooten documented about 25 to 26 women carrying official titles: head of the synagogue (archisynagogos), mother of the synagogue, and leader (archon), in Asia Minor, Rome and North Africa.
Hear it with Prof. IlanWomen at the Temple
Jerusalem, before AD 70Women were not confined to the Court of Women, Ilan says. A woman bringing a sacrifice entered the inner court to lay her hands on the animal, and women made the festival pilgrimages. After AD 70 the study houses that replaced the Temple were male spaces.
Hear it with Prof. IlanThe Therapeutrides
Philo, On the Contemplative LifePhilo of Alexandria described Jewish contemplatives living near Lake Mareotis in Egypt. Dr. Joan Taylor shows the women among them were educated philosophers and full participants, and she went to Egypt to find where they lived.
Hear it with Dr. TaylorWhy they were
hard to see.
The women were there all along. Record keepers, translators and later preachers made them harder to find. Here is how the guests dig them back out.
Start with the 70/30 picture
Prof. Tal Ilan does not pretend the ancient world was fair to women. She puts the traditional picture of women pushed to the margins at roughly 70 percent accurate, and true of nearly every ancient culture, Jewish or not. The other 30 percent is where the surprises sit, and it is large enough to change how the New Testament reads.
Part of the problem is how the records were made. In Ilan's count, women account for only about one in five names in ancient Jewish inscriptions and texts, because men held the money to be commemorated and naming formulas ran through fathers. Magical texts and incantation bowls flip the ratio to three women for every man, because a spell had to name the one parent anyone could be sure of: the mother.
Read the stones, not only the sermons
Inscriptions keep breaking the stereotype. Synagogue titles carved in stone name women as leaders, and in Pompeii a statue honors Eumachia as patron of the fullers' guild. Dr. Lynn Cohick's point is that philosophers like Aristotle wrote ideals about what women should be, and those ideals had little to do with how many women actually lived, ran households and funded movements.
Watch the translation choices
Some of the erasure happened on the page. Phoebe's title prostatis became "helper." Junia became Junias, a man's name nobody in Rome seems to have carried, a change Cohick traces to a thirteenth-century Latin translation. And in AD 591 a sermon by Pope Gregory the Great merged Mary Magdalene with other women in the Gospels, which is where the prostitute legend began.
Read Paul by what he did
Paul's line that women should keep silent in the churches gets quoted far more than his greetings do. Cohick reads it as an answer to disorder in particular congregations, then sets it beside his practice: he commends Phoebe as a deacon, calls Euodia and Syntyche coworkers, and praises Priscilla, who with Aquila taught Apollos. For more on Paul and the Gospels in their first-century setting, see Jesus, Paul and the New Testament.
Five episodes,
one record.
Tap a thumbnail to watch right here, or open the show notes and full transcript. Each conversation runs about an hour and gives the guest room to make the whole case.
The Female Apostles Your Pastor Never Told You About
with Dr. Lynn Cohick Distinguished Professor of New Testament, Houston Christian University. President, Institute for Biblical Research.Cohick works from inscriptions, business records and Paul's own letters to rebuild the women around the first churches: Phoebe the patron, Lydia the head of household, Junia the apostle and Mary Magdalene the benefactor. She also takes on the passages about silence.
The Ancient Women Mystics Your Bible Never Told You About
with Dr. Joan TaylorPhilo's Therapeutae, the Alexandria conflict behind his account, and the women philosophers among them.
Women Leaders, Synagogue Heads, and the Founder of Christianity
with Prof. Tal IlanSynagogue titles, Temple practice, and her case for Mary Magdalene as the founder.
The Lost Mary: How the Church Erased Christianity's First Founder
with Dr. James TaborMary of Nazareth among Herods, Roman legions and Davidic hope.
Mourner, Mother, Midwife: Re-imagining God's Feminine Presence
with Prof. Juliana ClaassensFeminine metaphors for God, and what they offer people living with trauma.
What people
ask first.
Short answers drawn from the episodes. The full case for each one, with the evidence, is in the conversation.
Was Mary Magdalene a prostitute?
No text in the New Testament says so. Luke 8:2-3 names her among the women who supported Jesus out of their own means, and all four Gospels place her at the cross or the empty tomb. The prostitute label comes from a sermon Pope Gregory the Great preached in AD 591, which merged her with other women in the Gospels. Dr. Lynn Cohick reads the evidence as pointing to a woman of independent resources, possibly a businesswoman, who helped fund the movement.
Was Junia a woman apostle?
In Romans 16:7 Paul greets Andronicus and Junia as outstanding among the apostles. Dr. Lynn Cohick notes about 250 inscriptions in Rome alone carrying the female name Junia, while the male form Junias is not found at all, and she traces the masculine spelling to a thirteenth-century Latin translation. Prof. Tal Ilan agrees the name makes more sense as a woman's. Most modern English translations print Junia, though translators still debate whether the phrase means she was an apostle or was well known to the apostles.
Did women lead ancient synagogues?
Inscriptions say some held the titles. Prof. Tal Ilan and Dr. Bernadette Brooten documented about 25 to 26 women carrying official synagogue titles, including head of the synagogue (archisynagogos), mother of the synagogue and leader (archon), in places like Asia Minor, Rome and North Africa. Dr. Lynn Cohick notes the first archaeologists assumed the titles were honorary, until later scholars asked why. What these women did day to day is still debated, and Ilan takes up that question in the episode.
What does Paul say about women leading?
Paul writes that women should keep silent in the churches (1 Corinthians 14:34). He also commends Phoebe as a deacon, calls Euodia and Syntyche coworkers, and praises Priscilla, who with her husband Aquila taught Apollos. Dr. Lynn Cohick reads the restrictive lines as responses to disorder in particular congregations, and treats Paul's practice with these women as the clearest window into what he believed.
Does the Bible use feminine images for God?
Yes. The Hebrew Bible pictures God as a mother who comforts her child (Isaiah 66:13) and as the one who drew the psalmist from the womb (Psalm 22:9), the work of a midwife. Prof. Juliana Claassens gathers these images under three names, mourner, mother and midwife, and argues they widen a picture of God narrowed by patriarchal theology and speak to people living with trauma and injustice.
Who were the Therapeutae?
A community of Jewish men and women described by Philo of Alexandria in the first century, living lives of contemplation, fasting and Scripture study near Lake Mareotis outside Alexandria, Egypt. Dr. Joan Taylor argues they were distinct from the Essenes and the Dead Sea Scrolls community, that the women among them, the Therapeutrides, were educated philosophers and full participants, and she traveled to Egypt to identify where they lived.
Hear them
in full.
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