Faithful Women in the Bible

Sarah left her home with Abraham and waited decades for the son God had promised. When she overheard that she would have a child in her old age, she laughed to herself (Genesis 18:12), and God answered, “Is any thing too hard for the LORD?” (Genesis 18:14, KJV). A year later Isaac was born, and Sarah said, “God hath made me to laugh, so that all that hear will laugh with me” (Genesis 21:6, KJV).

Her faith had cracks. She gave her servant Hagar to Abraham to hurry the promise along (Genesis 16), and she laughed in disbelief. Yet Hebrews remembers her for trusting God, “because she judged him faithful who had promised” (Hebrews 11:11, KJV). Her story is good news for anyone whose faith has wobbled.

Numbers 26:59 names Miriam as the sister of Aaron and Moses, so the sister who watched over baby Moses among the reeds (Exodus 2:4-8) is usually taken to be her. Years later, on the far shore of the Red Sea, she led the women in praise.

Her story also has a hard chapter. In Numbers 12 she and Aaron spoke against Moses, and she was struck with leprosy. Moses cried, “Heal her now, O God, I beseech thee” (Numbers 12:13, KJV), and after seven days she was brought back into the camp. Centuries later God still named her among Israel's leaders: “I sent before thee Moses, Aaron, and Miriam” (Micah 6:4, KJV).

“And Deborah, a prophetess, the wife of Lapidoth, she judged Israel at that time” (Judges 4:4, KJV). People came to her for judgment as she sat under a palm tree in the hill country of Ephraim. When Israel was oppressed by Jabin, a Canaanite king, she sent for Barak and gave him God's command to fight. Barak would not go without her, so she went, and told him the honor would go to a woman (Judges 4:9). It went to Jael, who killed the enemy commander, Sisera.

Judges 5 keeps Deborah's song of victory, in which she calls herself “a mother in Israel” (Judges 5:7, KJV). Her authority came from listening to God and acting on what she heard. She is one of several prophets in the Bible who never wrote a book.

Ruth was a Moabite who married into an Israelite family living in Moab. When her husband, his brother and his father had all died, her mother-in-law Naomi set out for home and urged Ruth to stay with her own people. Ruth refused.

In Bethlehem she gleaned in the fields of Boaz, a relative of Naomi's husband, who had heard of her kindness to Naomi and blessed her: “a full reward be given thee of the LORD God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come to trust” (Ruth 2:12, KJV). Boaz married her, and their son Obed became the grandfather of King David (Ruth 4:17). Matthew names Ruth in the family line of Jesus (Matthew 1:5). Her story is one of the Bible's great pictures of friendship and of a God who welcomes outsiders.

Hannah could not have children, and her husband's other wife provoked her year after year. At the house of the LORD in Shiloh she prayed so intensely, her lips moving without a sound, that the priest Eli thought she was drunk. She told him, “I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but have poured out my soul before the LORD” (1 Samuel 1:15, KJV).

She promised that if God gave her a son, she would give him back to the LORD. When Samuel was born and weaned, she brought him to Eli: “For this child I prayed; and the LORD hath given me my petition which I asked of him” (1 Samuel 1:27, KJV). Her song in 1 Samuel 2 sounds much like Mary's song in Luke 1: both praise God for lifting up the lowly. Hannah teaches us to bring our deepest longing honestly to God.

Esther was a Jewish orphan raised by her cousin Mordecai in Shushan, the Persian capital. She became queen to King Ahasuerus, known to historians as Xerxes I, who reigned 486-464 BC. When the royal official Haman plotted to destroy the Jews, Mordecai urged her to go to the king, though anyone who came to him uninvited could be put to death (Esther 4:11). He asked her, “who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” (Esther 4:14, KJV).

She asked her people to fast with her for three days and answered, “if I perish, I perish” (Esther 4:16, KJV). The king received her, Haman's plot was turned back, and Jews still keep the feast of Purim in memory of that deliverance (Esther 9:28). In the King James Version the book of Esther never once uses the word God, yet his care runs through every turn of the story. For more, see these Bible verses about courage.

Mary was a young woman of Nazareth, engaged to Joseph, when the angel Gabriel told her she would bear the Son of God (Luke 1:26-35). Her answer is one of the great sentences of faith.

She praised God in a song of her own (Luke 1:46-55), “kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2:19, KJV), told the servants at Cana, “Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it” (John 2:5, KJV), stood by the cross (John 19:25-27) and prayed with the disciples after the resurrection (Acts 1:14). She said that “all generations shall call me blessed” (Luke 1:48, KJV), and Christians of every tradition honor her, in different ways.

Luke introduces Mary Magdalene as one of the women who traveled with Jesus and supported him, “out of whom went seven devils” (Luke 8:2, KJV). She stood near the cross (John 19:25), saw where he was buried (Mark 15:47), and came to the tomb early on the first day of the week. In John's Gospel she is the first to see the risen Jesus, who calls her by name.

Scripture never says she was a prostitute. In the West, especially since Pope Gregory the Great, tradition treated her as the same person as the sinful woman who anointed Jesus' feet (Luke 7:36-50) and as Mary of Bethany, though the Gospels do not make that link. In 2016 the Catholic Church raised her July 22 celebration to a feast, the rank given to the apostles, recalling an old title for her: apostle of the apostles.

Lydia was “a seller of purple, of the city of Thyatira, which worshipped God” (Acts 16:14, KJV). Paul met her on the Sabbath at a riverside place of prayer outside Philippi. Luke says the Lord opened her heart. She was baptized with her household and insisted that Paul and his companions stay in her home (Acts 16:15).

Later, after Paul and Silas had been beaten and jailed, it was to Lydia's house that they went to encourage the believers before leaving the city (Acts 16:40). Her faith turned straight into hospitality. Read more about the apostle Paul and the people who worked with him.

Priscilla and her husband Aquila, a Jew from Pontus, were tentmakers who had left Rome when the emperor Claudius ordered all Jews to leave (Acts 18:2-3). Paul lived and worked with them in Corinth, and they traveled with him to Ephesus. There they heard Apollos, a gifted preacher who knew only the baptism of John, and they took him aside and “expounded unto him the way of God more perfectly” (Acts 18:26, KJV).

Paul calls them “my helpers in Christ Jesus” (Romans 16:3, KJV), says they risked their lives for him, and greets the church that met in their house (Romans 16:4-5). In every one of the six places the New Testament mentions her, she is named with her husband: a couple who served Christ together, at work, at home and in the church.