Girls of the Good Book

[steepholm]

Yesterday found me in the unwonted position of Assistant Stall Keeper, helping lady_schrapnell run the children's books stall at a church fete somewhere near Dalkey... In between committing denominational faux pas (just why is the plural of cent, 'cent'?) I kept being drawn back to a book entitled Boys and Girls of the Bible (1962). There are quite a few boys in the Bible. Some are people who grew up to be famous adults: Isaac, Moses, Samuel, Jesus. Others are walk-on parts - my own favourites being the group of 42 small boys who teased Elijah for his baldness and were ripped to shreds by a pair of she-bears (no 'naughty step' in those days.) Oddly enough, Boys and Girls of the Bible doesn't mention them.

But where are the girls? And by girls I mean 'not old enough to be married'- so, sorry, Boys and Girls of the Bible, Queen Esther will not do. This book was only able to come up with two: the slave who suggested Naaman the leper seek a cure from Elisha in 2 Kings 5 (helpful, but hardly centre-stage); and Jairus's daughter (resuscitated by Jesus in Mark's Gospel). To that we could at the daughter of the gentile woman in Matthew 15, at a pinch.


And that's it! Possibly the crowd of children who were shooed away by the disciples and invited back by Jesus included some girls, but that's speculative. Surely there must be more?

Comments

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

In Exodus 2, Moses's sister (presumably Miriam, though it isn't stated) watches Pharoah's daughter discovering the baby in the ark of bulrushes and then offers her mother's services as a wetnurse. Evidently she's old enough to play this part, but I've always imagined her as a youngster (we aren't told her age when her death is reported in Numbers 20). I will see if I can think of some more...

Daughters don't appear much, anyway, unless required by the plot (which usually means rape/seduction/marriage): Jacob's twelve sons are listed repeatedly, but Dinah is his only reported daughter; similarly David seems to have about twenty sons, but we don't hear of any daughters apart from Tamar. Obviously they exist, because when Moses arrives in Midian he immediately runs into the seven daughters of Jethro, but again that's because he's going to marry one of them.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

Oh, I remembered an explicitly pre-pubertal girl, though I'm not sure whether she counts as a character as such:

"We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts: what shall we do for our sister in the day when she shall be spoken for?" - Song of Solomon 8.8

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Oh, excellent! The bit before the colon sounds wonderfully like the beginning of a skipping rhyme, too.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

A lot of the Song does, really: "Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines..." (2.15)

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

There was also Ruth. and the Marys in Jesus' story.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

But none of them was a young girl. On the other hand, where does girlhood end in the world of the Bible - as shewhomust has also asked.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Given how very young 'not old enough to be married' was, can we at least reclaim some of these as YA?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

A fair question. I don't know when girls/women got married 'in those days', but I imagine it was fairly young. How old was the Virgin Mary when she gave birth, for example? I've always vaguely thought of her as being about 14 - but I may be mixing her up with Juliet. ("Because they were both played by Olivia Hussey," observes lady_schrapnell with some asperity.)

[(Anonymous)]

Well, there was Jepthah's daughter, (Book of Judges) who got sacrificed like Iphigenia. She was a virgin and unmarried, so probably a child by our standards. Not a good idea, really being a girl in the Bible.