The claim occasionally surfaces—sometimes earnestly, sometimes satirically—that women contributed nothing to the composition of the Bible. Such assertions trade on assumptions about ancient literacy and authorship that do not survive serious historical scrutiny. What follows is an examination of the evidence for female literacy in antiquity and the demonstrable contributions of women to the biblical corpus.
Many of the books in the Bible are anonymous and give no explicit indication of whether they were written by a male or female author. But what are the chances that an entire book—or even a substantial passage—was composed by a woman? William Harris’s research has perhaps been the most influential in the area of ancient literacy, and he was able to show that at the very best times and places—such as Athens in the fifth century B.C.E.—the levels of literacy were likely no higher than approximately ten to fifteen percent.1 Even if the levels of literacy between males and females are assumed to have been evenly distributed, we should still not expect a large contingent of female contributors to the biblical corpus. Evidence for female literacy in antiquity is scarce, so here I would like to give some examples of the type of evidence that establishes that some females were indeed literate.
Consider, for example, fifth-century Athenian vases that depict women—just as they do men—making use of book-rolls or writing tablets, reading from unrolled scrolls, and women reading to each other.2 While it is true that colophons were rarely used in Northwest Semitic texts—and keep in mind that the grammatical gender of a name does not always indicate the sex of its bearer, and iconography can reflect ideals, not necessarily everyday practice—in other places colophons and signatory formulas on cuneiform tablets have been discovered that indicate whether the author was male or female. The overwhelming majority of these indicate male authorship, though female authors are not unheard-of.3
It is worth pausing to note that ancient “authorship” involved a more complex process than modern assumptions about bylines would suggest. The path from composition to canonical text often passed through multiple stages—original composition or oral instruction, performance or dictation, scribal preservation, and later compilation into larger literary works.4 In many biblical texts, the final form reflects considerable editorial shaping while still preserving identifiable sources: songs, oracles, blessings, and teachings that can be traced to their originators even when the scribal hand that recorded them belonged to another.5 Thus the relevant question is not only “Who held the pen?” but also “Whose words are preserved and authorized as Scripture?” When we attend to this distinction, the evidence for female contribution to the biblical text becomes considerably more robust than a simplistic notion of authorship would allow.
So what can be said pertaining to the Bible? There is plenty of evidence that not only establishes that some women were as literate as men, but that they also—importantly—contributed materially to the biblical corpus, in the sense that their divinely-authorized words (whether first spoken, sung, or written) are incorporated into the canonical text.
Beginning with one example from Exodus 15: the Israelites had just crossed the Sea of Reeds, where their Egyptian pursuers had drowned. The text then records a triumph song (often called the šîrat hayyām (“Song of the Sea”); Hebrew: שִׁירַת הַיָּם) in Exodus 15:1–18, and immediately afterward describes Miriam—a prophetess and the sister of Aaron—taking a timbrel to lead the women in song and dance (Exod 15:20). In Israelite tradition it was common for women to perform victory song and dance after deliverance or battle,6 and Exodus preserves Miriam’s refrain. Whether first delivered as a spontaneous refrain or as part of a larger liturgy, Miriam’s words are presented as a genuine contribution to Israel’s worship and are preserved as Scripture. It is also worth noting that Exodus 15 as a whole is written in notably archaic Hebrew relative to surrounding prose, and many modern scholars date the poem early—often to the pre-monarchic period—making it among the oldest surviving poetic texts associated with the Exodus tradition.7
Another important example comes in the form of an admonition from a mother to her son recorded in Proverbs 31. The superscription is unusually explicit: “The words of King Lemuel. An oracle that his mother taught him” (Prov 31:1). This line already gives us two distinct levels of contribution. At the source level, the mother is identified as the origin of the instruction: it is what she “taught him,” which means the material is traced to her as its fountainhead—her counsel, her moral formation, her wisdom handed down. At the literary shaping level, Lemuel is the transmitter: he rehearses and republishes what he received, and the book of Proverbs (as an anthology compiled over time) incorporates that transmitted instruction into Israel’s canonical wisdom tradition. In other words, Proverbs 31:1 does not require the anachronistic claim that the mother personally produced the final manuscript copy to establish her contribution; it explicitly locates her as the teacher whose words and wisdom are being preserved. The text itself therefore embeds a woman’s instruction within Scripture, while also showing the ordinary means by which such instruction entered Israel’s textual tradition—through faithful transmission and providential preservation.8
Finally, from a confessional Reformed perspective, none of this depends on modern assumptions about “authorship credit”—as though Scripture were a stack of individually signed books in the contemporary sense. The church has long confessed that Scripture is God-breathed (2 Tim 3:16)—the product of divine inspiration—while also being genuinely human in its modes of composition and transmission. God ordinarily brings his word to his people through means: prophets and poets, preachers and scribes, oral proclamation and written preservation, selection and compilation, and the faithful handing down of received teaching. That is not an embarrassment; it is part of the doctrine of providence applied to the history of redemption.
On this view, it is neither strange nor surprising—indeed it is fitting—that God would preserve and authorize the words of women within the canonical text: the song of a prophetess, the counsel of a mother, the praise of worship leaders, the testimony of faithful saints. The point is not to score modern “representation” points, but to recognize what Scripture itself presents: the Spirit distributes gifts as he wills, and the Lord, in his wise providence, has seen fit to include women’s words among the very means by which he instructs, warns, comforts, and builds up his people. A Reformed account of inspiration, far from making women’s contributions implausible, actually renders them theologically coherent: God’s word is divine in origin, and yet—by design—human in delivery.
Given the diversity of contributors to the biblical corpus—and the considerable timespan over which it was composed—there is no reason to expect women would have been excluded from this providential process. The evidence for female contribution to Scripture is precisely what we should anticipate once we understand how God has always worked: through human instruments, in all their variety, to accomplish his redemptive purposes.
- William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). ↩︎
- See S. G. Cole, “Could Greek Women Read and Write?,” in Reflections of Women in Antiquity, ed. H. P. Foley (New York: Gordon and Breach Scientific Publishers, 1981); Ellen D. Reeder, Pandora: Women in Classical Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Gillian Clark, Women in the Ancient World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). ↩︎
- Matthew Rutz, Bodies of Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Diviners of Late Bronze Age Emar and Their Tablet Collection (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 23. ↩︎
- On the stages of textual production in the ancient Near East, see Karel van der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 9–49. ↩︎
- For the preservation of identifiable sources within edited biblical texts, see David M. Carr, The Formation of the Hebrew Bible: A New Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3–36. ↩︎
- See Judges 11:34; 1 Samuel 18:6–7. ↩︎
- Adele Berlin, Marc Z. Brettler, and Michael A. Fishbane, The Jewish Study Bible: Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 138; Thomas B. Dozeman, Exodus (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2009), 331. ↩︎
- דִּבְרֵי לְמוּאֵל (diḇrê lĕmûʾēl) is a construct-chain superscription meaning “Lemuel-associated sayings.” In context (31:1b), it signals that what follows comes to us through Lemuel—as a king transmitting instruction he himself received (“which his mother taught him”)—rather than requiring that Lemuel be the ultimate originator of the teaching. ↩︎