A Woman of Valor

Well, well, well. If I had just went so far as to open my Blogger account, I would have seen that I had some half written posts already in my queue. I wrote this months and months ago, and I really needed to read it again. So Imma gonna go ahead and post it so I can find it again the next time I need it.

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My friend Melody posted an article on Facebook that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

There's a lot of other stuff going on in the article and it takes a while to get to the point, so here's what I'm talking about:

Why You Don't Need Pinterest to be a Proverbs 31 Woman

Okay, I’ll admit it.  I never loved the Proverbs 31 Woman.

Actually, that may be an understatement. Truth be told, I secretly hated her.

The subject of a twenty-two line acrostic poem found in the last chapter of the book of Proverbs, the “wife of noble character” is cited at nearly every Christian women’s conference as the ideal to which all godly women must strive. The bad news for the domestically challenged among us is that the life of the Proverbs 31 woman is like a Pinterest board come to life: She rises before dawn each day, provides exotic food for her children, runs a profitable textile business, invests in real estate, cares for the poor, spends hours at the loom making clothes and coverings for her bed, and crafts holiday wreaths out of coffee filters. (Okay, so that last one was straight from Pinterest, but you get the idea.)

Growing up in the Church, I sat through many a sermon explaining how domestic exploits like these represented the essence of true womanhood, and over time, I began to see myself as less-than, falling short of God’s ideal each time I turned to Sara Lee for dessert or called my mom to help me hem my own slacks.

So when I decided to commit one year of my life to studying (and at times, practicing) everything the Bible says about women as part of my “Year of Biblical Womanhood,” I knew I’d have to come face-to-face with the Proverbs 31 Woman in a way I hadn’t before.

I started by attempting to turn the poem into a to-do list, which resulted in a 16-item list that included everything from lifting weights each morning (“she girds herself with strength and makes her arms strong”), to making a purple dress to wear (“she makes coverings for herself; her clothing is fine linen and purple”), to knitting scarves for my husband (“when it snows, she has no fear for her household, for all of them are clothed in scarlet”), to making a homemade sign and literally praising my husband at the city gate (“her husband is respected at the city gate, where he takes his seat among the elders of the land”).

I had a bit of fun with that last one, but the rest proved exhausting. Within a few weeks, I’d started and unraveled at least two scarves, broken the old second-hand sewing machine I’d dug out of my closet, cursed at the picture of Martha Stewart smiling glibly from the cover of my cookbook, and embarrassed myself at Hobby Lobby by crying in the fabric aisle.

Finally, I consulted Ahava, an Orthodox Jewish woman I had befriended during the project.

“So do Jewish women struggle with this passage as much as Christian women?” I asked.

Ahava seemed a bit bewildered.

“Not at all!” she said. “In my culture, Proverbs 31 is a blessing.”

Ahava repeated a finding I’d discovered in my research, that the first line of the Proverbs 31 poem—“a virtuous woman who can find?”—is best translated, “a woman of valor who can find?” In fact, the structure and diction employed in the poem closely resembles that of a heroic poem celebrating the exploits of a warrior.

“I get called an eshet chayil (woman of valor) all the time,” Ahava explained. “Make your own challah instead of buying? Eshet chayil! Work to earn some extra money for the family? Eshet chayil! Get promoted at your work?  Eshet chayil! Make balloon animals for the kids at a party? Eshet chayil! Every week at the Sabbath table, my husband sings the Proverbs 31 poem to me. It’s special because I know that no matter what I do or don’t do, he praises me for blessing the family with my energy and creativity. All women can do that in their own way. I bet you do as well.”

I looked into this, and sure enough, in Jewish culture it is not the women who memorize Proverbs 31, but the men. Husband commit each line of the poem to memory, so they can recite it to their wives at the Sabbath meal, usually in a song. (The astute reader will notice that the only actual instruction found in the entire poem is that a husband celebrate his wife for “all her hands have done.”) The praise is meant to be unconditional.

But the blessing goes beyond the family. Ahava explained that her Jewish friends cheer one another on with the blessing, celebrating everything from promotions, to pregnancies, to acts of mercy and justice, to battles with cancer with a hearty “eshet chayil!”—woman of valor.

The biblical heroine Ruth is called an “eshet chayil,” in fact. And she is called that at a time when her life looked nothing like the life of the Proverbs 31 woman, when she was a poor, childless, widow, who, far from exchanging fine linens with the merchants, spent her days gleaning leftover grain from the fields.

“All the people of my town know that you are a woman of noble character (eshet chayil),” Boaz says to her.

I liked it.

No, I loved it.

So I set aside my to-do list and began using Proverbs 31 as it was meant to be used—not as yet another impossible standard by which to measure our failures, but as a celebration of what we’ve already accomplished as women of valor.  When my friend Tiffany’s pharmacy aced its accreditation, I congratulated her with “eshet chayil!” When my sister beat out about a million applicants for the job she wanted in North Carolina, I called her up and shouted “woman of valor!” When my mom overcame breast cancer, I made a card that said “eshet chayil” on the front.  When I learned that three women had won the Nobel Peace Prize, I shared the new with my readers in a blog post entitled, “Meet Three Women of Valor.”

As I saw how powerful and affirming this ancient blessing could be, I decided it was time for Christian women to take back Proverbs 31. Somewhere along the way, we surrendered it to the same people who invented airbrushing and Auto-Tune. We abandoned the meaning of the poem by focusing on the specifics, and it became just another impossible standard by which to measure our failures. We turned an anthem into an assignment, a poem into a job description.

But according to Ahava, the woman described in Proverbs 31 is not some ideal that exists out there; she is present in each one of us when we do even the smallest things with valor.

And that’s worth celebrating…with or without a Pinterest board.

Seriously, this totally made my week and has changed my perspective so much. I've always hated the Proverbs 31 woman too. And I've hated myself for hating her. I can't tell you how many times I've mentally castigated myself with the Proverbs 31 Woman.

And while I'm sure that at some point I was reminded that Christ has already saved me from having to fulfill the law, I'm pretty sure all I've really heard was that through Christ, I should have the strength to do all of this. Probably some of my more mature sisters have had a better perspective, but I must admit, it has always made me feel guilty for all of my shortcomings.

After telling all of my friends about this article, I started poking around to find out if it is actually true that Jewish women have this take on the passage. Heh. Yep, looks like they do.

In my readings, I learned that one tradition holds that Solomon based the acrostic on Abraham's eulogy for Sarah. And I realized, I've always pictured the Proverbs 31 woman as doing everything in the poem in one day...you know, one of those Type As who needs five hours of sleep and seems to be talented at everything and can't sit still.

When I think of it as a eulogy, it seems a little more palatable. For a while, my husband wasn't working, and I brought home the bacon (while telling myself that I should be frying it up in a pan more often). I now cook, clean, and make sure my family is well clothed (but I often think that the Prov 31 woman would also be running a home business).

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Okay, this is present-day me again. That was as far as I got. But I can tell you that I went around for weeks patting myself on the back for being a woman of valor, which is about 180 degrees from my usual self judgment.

As I read this again, part of what her Jewish friend said to her really jumped out at me:

"I know that no matter what I do or don’t do, he praises me for blessing the family with my energy and creativity. All women can do that in their own way. I bet you do as well."

I was recently on a Myers Brigg personality type research binge trying to answer the question of why I'm not the wife and mother that I (want to be? think I should be? feel like my husband wants me to be?), and there is something so soul soothing about thinking that you are in fact blessing your family with your own type of energy and creativity. But more on that in another post.