Who is a Virtuous Woman? -- By: Karen Mason
Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 04:1 (Winter 1990)
Article: Who is a Virtuous Woman?
Author: Karen Mason
PP 4:1 (Winter 1990) p. 5
Who is a Virtuous Woman?
Karen holds an M. A. in Old Testament from Denver Seminary, and at present is a missionary to Haiti.
There’s a burning desire within each of us women to be the best that we can be. That’s what pushes us to take tennis lessons, sign up for continuing education, or join a Bible study. We want to grow for the better.
The problem, these days, is knowing what is better, what is the ideal. Some of us grew up strongly influenced by a philosophy of Christian womanhood whose ideal was the passive, “womanly” woman who makes her man “feel like a man”. As we grew older, we may have been influenced by the feminist ideal, the bra-burning, self-actualizing woman. What is the ideal we should be striving for?
The Bible sets forth an ideal and calls the ideal woman an eshet-chayil, which is the Hebrew for a “virtuous woman” (KJ V) or a “wife of noble character” (NIV). This Hebrew expression occurs only three times in the Old Testament, but a study of these three passages is likely to reveal what the Bible supports as an ideal of Christian womanhood.
Eshet is the Hebrew word meaning “woman”. Chayil is a much more richly varied word which can mean “to be firm or to endure” (Job 20:21), physical strength (Ps 18:40), moral strength (Ps 18:32), army (Ex 14:4), or wealth (2 Ki 15:20). It seems that originally the sense of chayil was to stand firm, as would a soldier in battle. First standing for both the physical and moral strength required to stand firm, it then came to be applied to an army as a whole, and finally to the wealth owned by the so-called warrior class of Israelites. So we can suppose that an eshet-chayil is a person of strength (physical or moral) who stands firm. One primary quality of the Bible’s ideal is fortitude.
The first occurrence of eshet-chayil is Ruth 3:11. There Ruth is called an eshet-chayil byBoaz. The context is not army nor wealth: Ruth is an extremely poor, unmarried widow. The basis Boaz gives for her being an eshet-chayil is that she has done a great kindness (v 10). In fact, Ruth has just asked Boaz to marry her (of the expression “spread the corner of your garment over me” in Eze 16:8) and to raise up offspring to Naomi, for the line of Elimelech (cf Ru 4:5, Dt 25:5-6).
Boaz mentions that everyo...
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