We know Elizabeth’s story and her husband Zechariah’s, from Luke 1, starting at verse 5:
“…there was a priest named Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly order of Abijah. His wife was a descendant of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. (6)Both of them were righteous before God, living blamelessly according to all the commandments and regulations of the Lord. (7) But they had no children, because Elizabeth was barren, and both were getting on in years”.
This introduction to their story brought up many questions for me. First, if they were righteous, why couldn’t they have children? In the Old Testament there were women who seemed to be cursed with being barren. As far as right-ness, the tradition started with Sarah and Abraham. It is always reflective, in their culture, on the woman. Why hearken back to Sarah and Abraham? Families of the time focused on Old Testament and the importance of genealogy to the ancient world, especially in Judaism. Their heritage also gives us that clue, as both people’s lineage shows they were part of the ancient priestly caste. Their lineage is figured back to Levites and their competitors, the Aaronites. In a world of oral history, their geneaology is not as important as Jesus’ and yet here it is deemed necessary in the first chapter to narrate this priestly heritage.
My mind also goes back to women’s roles in the Ancient Israel—it was they who did the work of raising children and caring for the household. In Women in Scripture, a Dictionary, edited by Carol Meyers, under the entry about barren women it says that “Ancient Israel’s agrarian economy depended largely upon families….the continued life of the community as well as the survival of individual families depended upon female fertility”(199). If for some reason the woman could not bear children, she could be divorced by her husband and left at the mercy of her father’s family. The entry about Elizabeth explains more background: “Despite her upright life, her childlessness is a sign of God’s punishment for sin or his ‘forgetting’ of a woman(1 Samuel 1:11). Socially, failure to bear children had grave consequences for women: disfavor with the husband and his family, possible occasion for divorce, embarrassment to the woman’s father, contempt, shame, humiliation, and on the barren woman’s part, envy”(73). Even as a woman from a priestly family, this must have meant a painful life. What strikes me also is that this is a woman of towering faith because the story does not tell us that she doubted, asking ‘why me, God’ as even women who are barren today would ask.
Personally I want to say that I feel her shame as only a woman who has gone through infertility can. At first even my family and friends wanted me to have some knowledge of ‘how to get pregnant’ that somehow I’d missed, so every woman I knew wanted to give me too much personal information on how to fix myself. These stories were all well-meaning, but the information just made me feel even less adequate. I did not get sent back to my father’s house; however, I offered to let my husband leave to find a woman who could bear children. Because of this history I do see the passage about Elizabeth with the eyes of a culture that continues to blame women for childlessness. No one approached me asking what sin I had committed to make God angry at me and curse me with barrenness, but some of them may have thought about the old stories of barren women in the Bible. In Elizabeth's time, the reality of life could have been lonely and isolating, but if I layer over that what belonging to a priestly caste must do, there must have been double the pressure. So I begin to understand how she must have kept her faith and let herself be among the young women as someone who made cloth for the temple. That last bit I gleaned from the Infancy Gospel of James and though it is extra-canonical, it was heartening to me to picture Mary spinning red and purple thread and Elizabeth taking part with her in weaving for the Temple.
Certainly we were encouraged by our Christian brothers and sisters to have the attitudes of Abraham and Sarah in the hopes that boldly asking we would receive an answer. In researching this portrait I found another New Testament parallel to Elizabeth’s barrenness in Mary’s mother Anna. Also in the Infancy Gospel of James 3:5 Anna also laments-- “Poor me! What am I like? I am not like the wild animals of the earth, because even the animals of the earth reproduce in your presence, O Lord”(37). Her husband Joachim’s prayer for a child is answered and they conceive Mary. Mary is then brought to the temple for dedication and later marries Joseph who is not only a carpenter but also a priest. Later, when we hear Luke mention Anna, she is a widow and prophetess. After reading the extracanonical work I had to wonder if she had become Joachim’s widow and then married Simeon who was also in his old age. Of course there could be more than one Anna and there is no way to tell if Luke wrote both manuscripts or the stories intertwine because of a pseudographic writer. However, what strikes me is how powerful the barrenness is and how these women feel very similar to Christian women struggling with fertility today. Also it seems to be the answered prayers of the men in most of these stories that brings an end to the barrenness. If there was a type of story dedicated to just these couples’ struggles to conceive it must have been common enough to have been noticed by storytellers at the time.
Even in our culture, these stories of barrenness are lauded as examples of faithfulness to the larger plan in God’s will. Maybe even at that time, other people told Elizabeth “trust and wait, God will answer.” Until the couple got older and had to accept that maybe God’s answer was ‘no children for you.’ It is a tough answer to swallow. The brunt of no children is a punishment that haunts couples for years of childlessness, putting pressure on the couple and possibly leading to feelings of being shunned from the community. Just as the pressure is towards not being single, even in our culture, there is a kind of gathering of people of a certain age with children. Other people constantly tell you how they stayed faithful and eventually God let them get pregnant. What could that have felt like 2000 years ago? Did they accept her and let her play with their children?
Whatever Elizabeth’s life was like before the blessing of a child, we do have the rest of the story. The angel “Gabriel announces that Elizabeth will conceive a son in her old age, as God’s response to Zechariah’s prayer. Awestruck, Zechariah responds with doubt. Impatient, Gabriel censures the old priest, declaring he will be mute until the child’s birth. Zechariah’s shameful display of doubt only highlights Elizabeth’s strong faith”(73). He is punished while she is in seclusion in happiness at her blessed conception. In Luke 1:25 Elizabeth says “this is what the Lord has done for me when he looked favorably on me and took away the disgrace I have endured among my people”. There must have been years of disgrace during which her friends and family of the same age were pregnant and sharing birth narratives with each other. These words speak of the culture that brings disgrace on a barren woman and sadly, even with Elizabeth’s example, we are not far from that today. Whether we mean for it to or not, the stigma still exists. Mother’s day, even at church, takes on a painful remembrance of the fecundity that for barren women does not exist. So while we might say ‘childless’ or ‘she has fertility issues’ what our minds still remember is the witness of people long ago who felt that only God blessed women with fertility.
The conclusion of Elizabeth’s story is at the “scene of the visitation with Mary, when Elizabeth, though not given the title, functions as a prophet. ‘Filled with the Holy Spirit’ she praises Mary as blessed among women for her belief.(1:42) Elizabeth makes the first and only Christological confession by a woman in (Luke’s) gospel: ‘Why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me’”(502)? Elizabeth’s experience, including the leaping of the child in her womb, is the stuff of priests and gives some hope that the tradition of barrenness is now broken with the new covenant. At least it gives some hope to the women beyond bearing a child in that she speaks the truth of Jesus as Lord and recognizes this before he has ever been born, making her a true prophet. She is given the realization of the divine plan in her very mouth in the first chapter of Luke.
It seems when we looked through Luke we noticed that often the women did not say anything or had a minor role in a parallel parable, but here was Elizabeth, named and having a speaking part and being given the role of prophet if not the name. Of course we could say she is not a leader in the movement like we would like to see; however, in her time she had a voice and is an example not squelched, for other women to follow. We cannot all be theotokos after all. Maybe all Luke intended was for us to have a parallel story to go with Mary’s and to hearken to John. Possibly Luke knew more of the women’s stories and was influenced by women who were barren and were not ever able to have children. After all, Elizabeth’s story is not all happy because John’s story is one a mother would grieve over, especially after having his head cut off. I would have liked to see Elizabeth again because I can almost picture her at the Baptism of our Lord being overjoyed to see Jesus and know that John has fulfilled his destiny. She must have continued working with the women of the Temple as she was a daughter of a long line of priests.
I had expected to read the text of Elizabeth’s story with resistance, knowing that Luke often portrayed women scantily as characters or not at all as they have some peripheral function in the plot. However, I was surprised to find myself liking the portrayal of Elizabeth better than Luke’s portrayal of Mary. As much as I love the Magnificat, it is much easier to identify with Elizabeth as someone who felt she was a disgrace and is now in old age feeling giddy and full of faith after becoming a mother later in life. Of course I admit that my own modern characterization is in part due to my own experiences of barrenness. As many women have had either their own experience or that of a friend or loved one with fertility issues, I expect many if not all women are familiar with the crisis of barrenness. If anything, I expect they too noticed Mary and forgot all about Elizabeth in the haste to get through the long first chapter of Luke. What surprised me even more was that she is given a voice and a confession of faith that no men are speaking. This exonerates Luke, or at least puts him as a man before his time in my estimation, though I think we are given the culture of the first century arguments about women in the following century and all that was done to suppress women’s stories in the canon of the New Testament. (the extra-canonical works mostly focused on women more often for example...and some of them are poorly written) There is some sense through reading this story of Elizabeth that women may have had more freedom to speak and act than we know, maybe especially women associated with the work of the Temple and the priestly orders of families.
My mind also goes back to women’s roles in the Ancient Israel—it was they who did the work of raising children and caring for the household. In Women in Scripture, a Dictionary, edited by Carol Meyers, under the entry about barren women it says that “Ancient Israel’s agrarian economy depended largely upon families….the continued life of the community as well as the survival of individual families depended upon female fertility”(199). If for some reason the woman could not bear children, she could be divorced by her husband and left at the mercy of her father’s family. The entry about Elizabeth explains more background: “Despite her upright life, her childlessness is a sign of God’s punishment for sin or his ‘forgetting’ of a woman(1 Samuel 1:11). Socially, failure to bear children had grave consequences for women: disfavor with the husband and his family, possible occasion for divorce, embarrassment to the woman’s father, contempt, shame, humiliation, and on the barren woman’s part, envy”(73). Even as a woman from a priestly family, this must have meant a painful life. What strikes me also is that this is a woman of towering faith because the story does not tell us that she doubted, asking ‘why me, God’ as even women who are barren today would ask.
Personally I want to say that I feel her shame as only a woman who has gone through infertility can. At first even my family and friends wanted me to have some knowledge of ‘how to get pregnant’ that somehow I’d missed, so every woman I knew wanted to give me too much personal information on how to fix myself. These stories were all well-meaning, but the information just made me feel even less adequate. I did not get sent back to my father’s house; however, I offered to let my husband leave to find a woman who could bear children. Because of this history I do see the passage about Elizabeth with the eyes of a culture that continues to blame women for childlessness. No one approached me asking what sin I had committed to make God angry at me and curse me with barrenness, but some of them may have thought about the old stories of barren women in the Bible. In Elizabeth's time, the reality of life could have been lonely and isolating, but if I layer over that what belonging to a priestly caste must do, there must have been double the pressure. So I begin to understand how she must have kept her faith and let herself be among the young women as someone who made cloth for the temple. That last bit I gleaned from the Infancy Gospel of James and though it is extra-canonical, it was heartening to me to picture Mary spinning red and purple thread and Elizabeth taking part with her in weaving for the Temple.
Certainly we were encouraged by our Christian brothers and sisters to have the attitudes of Abraham and Sarah in the hopes that boldly asking we would receive an answer. In researching this portrait I found another New Testament parallel to Elizabeth’s barrenness in Mary’s mother Anna. Also in the Infancy Gospel of James 3:5 Anna also laments-- “Poor me! What am I like? I am not like the wild animals of the earth, because even the animals of the earth reproduce in your presence, O Lord”(37). Her husband Joachim’s prayer for a child is answered and they conceive Mary. Mary is then brought to the temple for dedication and later marries Joseph who is not only a carpenter but also a priest. Later, when we hear Luke mention Anna, she is a widow and prophetess. After reading the extracanonical work I had to wonder if she had become Joachim’s widow and then married Simeon who was also in his old age. Of course there could be more than one Anna and there is no way to tell if Luke wrote both manuscripts or the stories intertwine because of a pseudographic writer. However, what strikes me is how powerful the barrenness is and how these women feel very similar to Christian women struggling with fertility today. Also it seems to be the answered prayers of the men in most of these stories that brings an end to the barrenness. If there was a type of story dedicated to just these couples’ struggles to conceive it must have been common enough to have been noticed by storytellers at the time.
Even in our culture, these stories of barrenness are lauded as examples of faithfulness to the larger plan in God’s will. Maybe even at that time, other people told Elizabeth “trust and wait, God will answer.” Until the couple got older and had to accept that maybe God’s answer was ‘no children for you.’ It is a tough answer to swallow. The brunt of no children is a punishment that haunts couples for years of childlessness, putting pressure on the couple and possibly leading to feelings of being shunned from the community. Just as the pressure is towards not being single, even in our culture, there is a kind of gathering of people of a certain age with children. Other people constantly tell you how they stayed faithful and eventually God let them get pregnant. What could that have felt like 2000 years ago? Did they accept her and let her play with their children?
Whatever Elizabeth’s life was like before the blessing of a child, we do have the rest of the story. The angel “Gabriel announces that Elizabeth will conceive a son in her old age, as God’s response to Zechariah’s prayer. Awestruck, Zechariah responds with doubt. Impatient, Gabriel censures the old priest, declaring he will be mute until the child’s birth. Zechariah’s shameful display of doubt only highlights Elizabeth’s strong faith”(73). He is punished while she is in seclusion in happiness at her blessed conception. In Luke 1:25 Elizabeth says “this is what the Lord has done for me when he looked favorably on me and took away the disgrace I have endured among my people”. There must have been years of disgrace during which her friends and family of the same age were pregnant and sharing birth narratives with each other. These words speak of the culture that brings disgrace on a barren woman and sadly, even with Elizabeth’s example, we are not far from that today. Whether we mean for it to or not, the stigma still exists. Mother’s day, even at church, takes on a painful remembrance of the fecundity that for barren women does not exist. So while we might say ‘childless’ or ‘she has fertility issues’ what our minds still remember is the witness of people long ago who felt that only God blessed women with fertility.
The conclusion of Elizabeth’s story is at the “scene of the visitation with Mary, when Elizabeth, though not given the title, functions as a prophet. ‘Filled with the Holy Spirit’ she praises Mary as blessed among women for her belief.(1:42) Elizabeth makes the first and only Christological confession by a woman in (Luke’s) gospel: ‘Why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me’”(502)? Elizabeth’s experience, including the leaping of the child in her womb, is the stuff of priests and gives some hope that the tradition of barrenness is now broken with the new covenant. At least it gives some hope to the women beyond bearing a child in that she speaks the truth of Jesus as Lord and recognizes this before he has ever been born, making her a true prophet. She is given the realization of the divine plan in her very mouth in the first chapter of Luke.
It seems when we looked through Luke we noticed that often the women did not say anything or had a minor role in a parallel parable, but here was Elizabeth, named and having a speaking part and being given the role of prophet if not the name. Of course we could say she is not a leader in the movement like we would like to see; however, in her time she had a voice and is an example not squelched, for other women to follow. We cannot all be theotokos after all. Maybe all Luke intended was for us to have a parallel story to go with Mary’s and to hearken to John. Possibly Luke knew more of the women’s stories and was influenced by women who were barren and were not ever able to have children. After all, Elizabeth’s story is not all happy because John’s story is one a mother would grieve over, especially after having his head cut off. I would have liked to see Elizabeth again because I can almost picture her at the Baptism of our Lord being overjoyed to see Jesus and know that John has fulfilled his destiny. She must have continued working with the women of the Temple as she was a daughter of a long line of priests.
I had expected to read the text of Elizabeth’s story with resistance, knowing that Luke often portrayed women scantily as characters or not at all as they have some peripheral function in the plot. However, I was surprised to find myself liking the portrayal of Elizabeth better than Luke’s portrayal of Mary. As much as I love the Magnificat, it is much easier to identify with Elizabeth as someone who felt she was a disgrace and is now in old age feeling giddy and full of faith after becoming a mother later in life. Of course I admit that my own modern characterization is in part due to my own experiences of barrenness. As many women have had either their own experience or that of a friend or loved one with fertility issues, I expect many if not all women are familiar with the crisis of barrenness. If anything, I expect they too noticed Mary and forgot all about Elizabeth in the haste to get through the long first chapter of Luke. What surprised me even more was that she is given a voice and a confession of faith that no men are speaking. This exonerates Luke, or at least puts him as a man before his time in my estimation, though I think we are given the culture of the first century arguments about women in the following century and all that was done to suppress women’s stories in the canon of the New Testament. (the extra-canonical works mostly focused on women more often for example...and some of them are poorly written) There is some sense through reading this story of Elizabeth that women may have had more freedom to speak and act than we know, maybe especially women associated with the work of the Temple and the priestly orders of families.
Sources:
Hansen,
K.C., and Douglas E. Oakman. Palestine in the Time of Jesus: Social Structures and Social Conflicts. Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1998.
Hock,
Ronald F.
The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas.
Santa Rosa, California:Polebridge Press, 1995.
Women’s Bible Commentary: Revised
and Updated. Carol A. Newsom, Sharon
H. Ringe, and Jacqueline E. Lapsley, ed.
Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster
John Knox Press, 2012.
Women in Scripture: A Dictionary. Carol Meyers, ed. Boston, New York: Houghton Miffline Company, 2000.
Thank you for being one of the first followers of my blog... I recently received the Leibster award and wanted to pass it along to you. Have fun with it! http://carpelanam.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-liebster-award.html
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