For the most part, women in the Bible appear in subsidiary roles, for the action often takes place in the public square, the domain of men. But not “always.” The biblical story does not flow in an unbroken stream but bumps along and in critical moments turns in new directions. In several points, women, surprisingly, were leaders. 

In three turning points in biblical history, male leadership was absent and women took over, employing wit and courage to lead the community forward: (1) the transition from a family (Abraham’s) to a nation (Israel) in Exodus 1-2; (2) the transition from failed Judges to Davidic kingship in 1 Samuel 1-3; and (3) the climactic transition, from Jesus’s crucifixion to his resurrection as Lord.

1. From a Family to a Nation (Exodus 1-2)

Abraham’s family of seventy members fled famine in Canaan and found relief in grain-rich Egypt under a welcoming pharaoh. When that pharaoh died, a new king adopted a policy that both exploited and decimated the Hebrews. The Hebrews did not pray to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but instead “groaned” as they slaved in state projects and watched their male children thrown into the Nile. 

In this political and moral vacuum, the only adult leaders were five women–the two Hebrew midwives Shiprah and Puah, the mother and sister of the infant Moses, and the pharaoh’s daughter. The midwives, unwilling to obey the pharaoh’s orders to kill the Hebrew infants, used the excuse that Hebrew women were so vigorous that they gave birth before the midwives arrived. Another pair, Moses’s mother and sister, obeyed literally the pharaoh’s order to throw every boy into the Nile while subverting it by “throwing” the infant into a waterproof basket and floating it by the pharaoh’s daughter as she bathed in the Nile. And Pharaoh’s daughter, though knowing the child was a Hebrew, defied her father by arranging Moses’s upbringing as an Egyptian in the pharaoh’s household. Each of the five women stepped up in the crisis and enabled Abraham’s family to survive and become a mighty people.

2. From Failed Judges to Davidic King (1 Samuel 1-3 and Luke 1-2)

1 Samuel 1-3 comes immediately after vivid depictions of chieftains’ chaotic misrule. The agent of change was a woman, Hannah, childless in a culture that revered motherhood. Weeping over her plight at the shrine at Shiloh, she interpreted the priest Eli’s conventional response to her prayer as an ironclad promise: “May the God of Israel grant the petition you have made to him.” Becoming pregnant, she uttered her Song (1 Sam 2:1-10, foreshadowing Mary’s Magnificat) and gave birth to Samuel who would later anoint David as king, the first of an everlasting dynasty.

Luke’s Gospel alludes this transition to underline Jesus’s rise to kingship. Women play a prominent role here too. The parallels between the coming of David’s kingship and the coming of Jesus’s kingship are hard to miss: the miraculous birth of Samuel to the barren Hannah and the miraculous birth of Jesus to the virgin Mary; Hannah’s Song in 1 Samuel 2:1-10 (“My heart exults in the Lord”) and Mary’s Magnificat in Luke 1:46-55 (“My soul magnifies the Lord”). Further, the priest Zechariah’s deficient response to the angel’s birth announcement in Luke 1:5-20 calls to mind the deficient leadership of the priest Eli. Finally, one should note that in both Samuel and Luke it is the wives, not the husbands, who act and speak: Hannah, not her husband Elkanah, Elizabeth, not her husband Zechariah, and Mary, not her husband Joseph. The author of Luke’s Gospel, searching the ancient Scriptures to validate Jesus’s claims to kingship, found confirmation in the transition from tribal chieftains to Davidic king in Judges and Samuel. 

3. From the Crucifixion of Jesus to His Resurrection

The most momentous transition in the Christian Bible is Jesus’s passage from death to resurrected life, described in the gospels, announced in the Acts of the Apostles, and preached by Paul. During this three-day crisis, women, not men, exercised leadership. Of the women, one was extraordinary during the entire period when men fled. All four gospels tell the same story: Mary of Magdala (identified by her hometown rather than by the name of her husband or son) accompanied Jesus through his suffering and crucifixion (Matt 27:56; Mark 15:40; Luke 23:27-31; John 19:25) and was the first witness to Jesus’s resurrection (Matt 28:1; Mark 16:1; Luke 24:10; John 20:1, 11-18). When Jesus was arrested and tortured, Mary accompanied him at every step. At the resurrection, she say Jesus before anyone else and he chose her (apostola apostolorum) to announce the news to the disciples (John 20:11-18). For centuries, she was mistakenly identified with the unnamed sinful woman in Luke 7:36-50 and her extraordinary faithfulness went unnoticed. In recent years, however, Mary has been recognized as a model disciple, embracing the task of announcing that Jesus has been raised from the dead. Mary’s greatness consists not only in her presence at the Jesus’s passage from death to life, but in defining Christian discipleship as witnessing both to Jesus’s death and his resurrection and in announcing the gospel to others. 

These three instances are not simply a nod to biblical women. Rather, the women were indispensably instrumental in moving the history of Israel forward; what they did had an enormous influence upon subsequent events. In these crises, a different kind of leadership was needed, and it was done by women. As Edith Stein notes: “The greatest figures of prophecy and sanctity step forth out of the darkest night. . . . Certainly the most decisive turning points in world history are substantially co-determined by souls whom no history book ever mentions. And we will only find out about those souls to whom we owe the decisive turning points in our personal lives on the day when all that is hidden is revealed.” (The Hidden Life: Essays, Meditations, Spiritual Texts).