Will the Real Proverbs 31 Woman Please Stand Up?
A wife of noble character who can find?
—PROVERBS 31:10
IN THE EVANGELICAL CHRISTIAN SUBCULTURE, THERE ARE three people a girl’s got to know about before she gets her period: (1) Jesus, (2) Ronald Reagan, and (3) the Proverbs 31 woman.
While the first two are thought to embody God’s ideal for all mankind, the third is thought to represent God’s ideal for women. Wander into any Christian women’s conference, and you will hear her name whispered around the coffee bar and lauded from the speaker’s podium. Visit a Christian bookstore, and you will find entire women’s sections devoted to books that extol her virtues and make them applicable to modern wives. At my Christian college, guys described their ideal date as a “P31 girl,” and young women looking to please them held a “P31 Bible Study” in my dormitory lounge at 11 p.m. on Mondays. She’s like the evangelical’s Mary—venerated, idealized, glorified to the level of demigoddess, and yet expected to show up in every man’s kitchen at dinnertime. Only unlike Mary, there is no indication that the Proverbs 31 woman actually existed.
The subject of a twenty-two-line poem found in the last chapter of the book of Proverbs, the “wife of noble character” is a tangible expression of the book’s celebrated virtue of wisdom. She appears in an oracle attributed to the mysterious King Lemuel that the text says was taught to him by his mother. Although the genre of royal instruction is a familiar one in ancient Near Eastern literature, this poem stands out in its representation of the queen mother as the source of wisdom and remains the longest, most flattering tribute to women of its time. Packed with hyperbolic imagery, the poem is an acrostic, so the first word of each verse begins with the next consecutive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. This communicates a sense of totality as the poet praises the everyday achievements of an upperclass Jewish wife, a woman who keeps her household functioning day and night by buying, trading, investing, planting, sewing, weaving, managing servants, extending charity, providing food for the family, and preparing for each season. She is so accomplished, in fact, that translators can’t seem to agree on an adjective to describe her. Depending on who you ask, a lucky man will find (V. 10):
• “a good wife” (New Century Version)
• “an excellent wife” (New American Standard)
• “a competent wife” (Common English Bible)
• “a capable wife” (Good News Translation)
• “a virtuous and capable wife” (New Living Translation)
• “a wife of noble character” (New International Version)
• “a virtuous woman” (King James Version)
• “a worthy woman” (American Standard Version)
• “a valiant woman” (Douay-Rheims American Edition)
• “a capable, intelligent, and virtuous woman” (Amplified Bible)
However, most scholars seem to think that the Hebrew eshet chayil is best translated “valorous woman,” for the structure and diction employed in the poem closely resembles that of a heroic poem celebrating the exploits of a warrior. Lost to English readers are the militaristic nuances found in the original language (emphasis added): “she provides food for her family” (literally, “prey,” V. 15); “her husband . . . lacks nothing of value” (literally, “booty,” V. 11); “she watches over the affairs of the household” (literally, “spies,” V. 27); “she girds herself with strength” (literally, “she girds her loins,” V. 17 KJV); “she can laugh at the days to come” (literally, “laugh in victory,” V. 15). According to Erika Moore, “the valorous wife is a heroic figure used by God to do good for His people, just as the ancient judges and kings did good for God’s people by their martial exploits.”1
Like any good poem, the purpose of this one is to draw attention to the often-overlooked glory of the everyday. The only instructive language it contains is directed toward men, with the admonition that a thankful husband honor his wife “for all that her hands have done” (Proverbs 31:31). Old Testament scholar Ellen F. Davis notes that the poem was intended “not to honor one particularly praiseworthy woman, but rather to underscore the central significance of women’s skilled work in a household-based economy.” She concludes that “it will not do to make facile comparisons between the biblical figure and the suburban housewife, or alternately between her and the modern career woman.”2
And yet many Christians interpret this passage prescriptively, as a command to women rather than an ode to women, with the home-based endeavors of the Proverbs 31 woman cast as the ideal lifestyle for all women of faith. An empire of books, conferences, products, and media has evolved from a subtle repositioning of the poem’s intended audience from that of men to that of women. One of the more popular books is titled Becoming the Woman God Wants Me to Be: A 90 Day Guide to Living the Proverbs 31 Life. No longer presented as a song through which a man offers his wife praise, Proverbs 31 is presented as a task list through which a woman earns it.
The Proverbs 31 woman looms so large over the biblical womanhood ethos that I knew I had to work her into my project somehow. So I decided to take a page from the literalists and turn the whole chapter into a to-do list, based on various Bible translations, divided into daily tasks and tasks to be accomplished by the end of the month. I combed through every line of the poem and went through several drafts before generating the final list, which I stuck on the refrigerator:
EVERY DAY
□ Get up before dawn—“She gets up while it is still dark” (V. 15).
□ Practice contemplative prayer—“A woman who fears the Lord should be praised” (V. 30)
□ Work out those arms—“She girds herself with strength and makes her arms strong” (V. 17)
□ Make every meal and keep the house clean—“She provides food for her family” (V. 15); “She watches over the affairs of the home” (V. 27)
□ Do something nice for Dan—“She does him good and not evil” (V. 12); “Her husband has full confidence in her” (V. 11)
□ Avoid TV, Facebook, and Twitter—“[She] does not eat the bread of idleness” (V. 27)
□ Keep working until 9 p.m.—“Her lamp does not go out at night” (V. 18)
TO DO THIS MONTH:
□ Learn to sew—In her hand she holds the distaff and grasps the spindle with her fingers (V. 19); She selects wool and flax and works with eager hands (V. 13)
□ Make a purple dress to wear—She makes coverings for herself; her clothing is fine linen and purple (V. 22)
□ Knit a red scarf and/or hat for Dan—“When it snows, she has no fear for her household, for all of them are clothed in scarlet” (V. 21)
□ Make pillows for the bedroom—“She makes coverings for her bed” (V. 22)
□ Create a Proverbs 31 beauty queen sash to auction on eBay for charity—“She makes linen garments and sells them, and supplies the merchants with sashes” (V. 24); “She opens her arms to the poor and extends her hands to the needy” (V. 20)
□ Make Martha Stewart’s chicken curry—“She is like merchant ships, bringing her food from afar” (V. 14)
□ Invest in real estate or community-supported agriculture—“She considers a field and buys it; out of her earnings, she plants a vineyard” (V. 16)
□ Praise Dan at the city gate—“Her husband is respected at the city gate, where he takes his seat among the elders of the land” (V. 23)
□ Work once a week at the health clinic—“She opens her arms to the poor and extends her hands to the needy” (V. 20)
You will notice that sewing projects occupy a disproportionate space on the list. This was cause for considerable concern, seeing as I didn’t know how to sew . . . at all. I couldn’t attach a button to a blouse if my life depended on it, and I’d never hemmed a pair of pants with anything besides duct tape. I owned very few sewing supplies. I’d never read a pattern. I thought thimbles only existed in fairy tales.
My mother took one look at the list and declared matter-of-factly, “You can’t do this.”
Which I took as my cue to gird up my loins and give it a go.
She selects wool and flax and works with eager hands.
—PROVERBS 31:13
Page 14 of Sewing for Dummies warns that when it comes to selecting a machine, novice sewers have an unfortunate tendency to “drag out Aunt Millie’s 75 year old clunker from the garage or basement thinking it’s good enough for a beginner,” which according to Jan Saunders is a huge mistake, because “just like your car, you want your sewing machine to be dependable.”3
Well, I’ll have you know I did no such thing.
Instead we dragged out my sister-in-law Debbie’s twenty-five-year-old Simplicity 8130 from the attic, knowing perfectly well that it was good enough for a beginner, especially one who can’t afford a dependable car, much less a sewing machine that costs about as much. The instruction manual was nowhere to be found, but an orange pouch containing a tiny screwdriver, three spools of thread, and a pin cushion had been taped to the side. I heaved the machine onto the dining room table, consulted the diagram in my Dummies book, and plugged it in. The little lightbulb glowed brightly. When I stepped on the pedal, the machine issued a gentle humming noise, and the needle started hopping up and down like a jackhammer. It worked.
Well, now. That seems like enough sewing for one day, I thought.
My aversion to crafting goes way back to an incident in kindergarten during which, upon gluing something like the fortieth Cheerio to the inside of a giant O-shaped construction paper cutout, I was suddenly struck by the futility of human existence. I must have cried about it because I was sent home with a note saying that I’d misbehaved during craft time. Mom should not have been surprised. I think I inherited my resistance to all glue-related activities from her. She rarely crafted, except for a short period of time in the late ’80s when she earned extra money making giant hair bows that have rendered every photo taken of me between the years 1988 and 1992 too mortifying to frame. Mom had been forced to cut out patterns on many a Saturday afternoon as a kid, so she never pushed Amanda or me into sewing or knitting, and in fact spoke rather darkly about the old days of fabric and needles and seams, the way veterans speak of ’Nam.
This was fine by me. Precision has never been my strong suit, and the skills required for sewing just happen to include four things I habitually stink at—patience, cutting a straight line, working with machinery, and fractions.
I’m especially insecure about fractions. Fractions make me feel scattered and panicked, like I’m about to forget something important. Add a couple of fractions together incorrectly and you’ll end up with an 800 on your SAT or too much onion powder in your casserole. Either way, you’re just a few decimal points away from disaster.
Sure enough, taunting me from the inscrutable pattern for my Simplicity Misses Lounge Dress was a call for 3 1/8 yards of fabric, 2 5/8 yards of 3/8-inch-wide flat lace, and 5/8 yards of fusible interfacing. I chose the pattern because it promised to be easy, “sew easy,” according to the package, that I could make it in a few hours. The fact that the dress made the wisp of a model in the photo on the front look like an overstuffed piñata in floral didn’t bother me. At the time I was more concerned about making the dress than wearing it.
I purchased the dress pattern and a pillow-making kit at Wal-Mart, but the rest of my materials required a trip to Chattanooga and the nearest Hobby Lobby. If ever one should wish to see a modern incarnation of the Proverbs 31 woman in her natural habitat, Hobby Lobby would be the place to start. Jazzy worship music played over the PA, while petite, white-haired ladies carrying homemade totes glided through the fabric rolls, humming along and smiling politely at the raccoon-eyed crafting hipsters who darted across their paths.
When Dan first came to Tennessee, he’d never heard of Hobby Lobby and was in for an epic letdown when he saw for himself that the big-box store contained seven aisles of scrapbooking materials but not an RC plane in sight. I left him behind for this trip, on account of the sheer magnitude of my shopping list: dressmaker’s shears, needles, thread, a tape measure, double-sided fabric tape, size 17 knitting needles, bulky red yarn, two 6 x 26-inch pieces of bridal satin, iron-on letters, 72-inch trim ribbon, a decorative pin, an 18-inch square pillow form, 3 1/8 yards of purple fabric, 2 5/8 yards of 3/8-inch-wide flat lace, and 5/8 yard of fusible interfacing, whatever the heck that was.
I drove out to Hobby Lobby on a cold January morning, one of those days when the sky is low and gray, and you feel like the whole world’s stuck in a Tupperware container. I asked Jesus to give me a sweet, grandmotherly clerk at the fabric counter, but apparently Jesus had more important things to do because when I approached the table with a crumpled list in my hands and a jaunty grin on my face, a stern woman in her sixties looked back at me with a frown and asked, “How can I help you?”
Now, my mother may have skipped the sewing lessons, but she passed along to Amanda and me an uncanny ability to schmooze our way through customer service encounters until we get exactly what we want, with no hurt feelings on either side. Mom’s exploits in this arena are legendary. She recently convinced Lowe’s to replace all the blinds in her house for free, with an upgrade, because she was concerned that the cords on her old blinds could be a choking hazard for grandkids. (She doesn’t even have any grandkids yet . . . and she told them so!)
So I took a deep breath, glanced at the lady’s name tag, and turned on the Held charm.
“Hi . . . Maude . . . How’s it going?”
No response.
“Well, you are not going to believe this,” I said, leaning in closer, as if I had a secret, “but I have never sewed a thing in my life. Never even picked up a needle and thread.”
Nothing.
“So anyway, I have three significant sewing projects to finish by the end of the month for a book I’m working on—I’m an author, by the way—and a list of supplies that I don’t even understand, so I’m really glad you’re here, because I desperately need an expert—”
“Did you have a question?” she interrupted.
So maybe I wasn’t as good at this as my mom. I probably should have stuck with basic self-deprecation without veering into desperation.
“Yeah. What the heck is fusible interfacing?”
Turns out Maude is more of a get-down-to-business kind of girl. I handed her my list, and she helped me select and measure my fabric and thread (both plum purple to fulfill Proverbs 31, and both 100 percent cotton to fulfill Leviticus 19:19), pick out the right-sized knitting needles and yarn, find a package of iron-on letters for my Proverbs 31 sash, choose better material for the aforementioned sash, stock up on supplies, and gather 5/8 of a yard of fusible interfacing, which according to Maude would give my “lounge dress” a little more body and shape. We weren’t exactly best friends at the end of it, and I didn’t get anything for free, but I think I saw a smile creep across the corner of Maude’s mouth when I asked where they kept the duct tape, just in case.
She gets up while it is still dark . . . She sees that her trading is profitable, and her lamp does not go out at night.
—PROVERBS 31:15, 18
By the second week of January, the Proverbs 31 woman and I were not on the best of terms.
Our friendship was doomed from the start, really, because the two of us have nothing in common. The Proverbs 31 woman has children; I don’t. She is rich; I drive a ’94 Plymouth Acclaim. She loves to work with her hands; I can’t make a row of stitches without dropping one. And worst of all, the Proverbs 31 woman is a morning person, and I am most assuredly not.
As a writer, my body’s been conditioned to mimic the sleep cycle of artists, evening news anchors, and potheads. I may be on Eastern Standard Time, but my muse is on Pacific. Dan, on the other hand, leaps out of bed every morning with a smile on his face and a song in his heart, a habit that would probably destroy our marriage if I didn’t normally sleep through it. On the rare occasions that I join him, it takes four rounds of screeches from the alarm clock, three cups of coffee, and one hour of wandering the house in my bathrobe to get my bearings . . . which is why, in hindsight, my resolution to combine my early mornings with twenty minutes of contemplative prayer was ill-advised. If I can’t have a civil conversation with my husband before 8 a.m., why should I expect to have a civil conversation with God?
There seems to be a universal consensus among people of faith that God is a morning person. The Dalai Lama rises at 3:30 a.m. to meditate. Pope Benedict begins his day around 5. I don’t know what time Oprah gets up, but I bet it’s before 7. Even as a kid, I remember hearing stories about our pastor’s “morning quiet time,” that magical space between dawn and breakfast when God told him exactly what the Bible meant and what to say about it on Sunday morning. But I didn’t experience any magic or inspiration when I rose with the sun to meet God. Instead my Proverbs 31 morning routine went something like this: wake up, make coffee, choose a centering word for meditation, fall back asleep, wake up again, feel guilty, drink coffee, lift my five-pound weights for three minutes, practice knitting, give up, write. After just a few days, I ditched the centering prayer altogether to revert to the old standby—a hurried, half-awake Lord’s Prayer while I washed my hair.
The five-pound weights represented yet another difference between the valorous wife and me. While the Proverbs 31 woman “girds herself with strength and makes her arms strong” (V. 17 NASB), I’m more of a cardio girl. I run three miles a day, five days a week, but the generic Bowflex in our garage hasn’t seen any action since the third season of Lost. I tried doing just fifteen minutes of strength training three days a week, but soon enough my third resolution went the way of centered prayer . . . as did my resolution to stay off Facebook to avoid eating the “bread of idleness” (V. 27).
The big projects weren’t going much better. Before my friend Tiffany mercifully loaned me her copy of a helpful how-to book titled Stitch ’n Bitch (which supplied both a much-needed laugh and the useful suggestion that I start my first knitting project with extra-big needles and extra-bulky yarn so as to avoid tying my fingers in knots), I’d been fumbling around with my grandma’s old size 8 needles, super-thin yarn, and a YouTube instructional video that featured a creepy nursery rhyme about a guy named Jack peeking through a window. The tedium of this exercise nearly drove me mad. Let’s just say I dropped more than a stitch.
“Hon, do you really think that kind of language reflects Proverbs 31?” Dan asked as gently as possible when he came upstairs to find me sitting upright on the edge of the couch, elbows out like a penguin attempting flight, wrestling a row of stitches from one needle to the other—and cussing.
“I can’t do this,” I said, throwing the mangled heap of yarn to the floor. “How am I supposed to make an entire scarf and hat if I can’t make three rows of stitches without it getting all . . . scrunched? I’m doing such a slap-bang job with this whole month.”
“Slap-bang” is a phrase long employed by my mother. Slap-bang is when you pull a comforter over a disheveled wad of blankets and sheets and call it making the bed. Slap-bang is when you stick a plate caked with mashed potatoes into the dishwasher, or write a book report based on the illustrations. Slap-bang is when you promise to knit your husband a scarf and hat and then ask if he’d be okay with a pot holder instead. I have no idea if any of us are using this expression correctly, but everyone in the Held family knows just how guilty to feel when we’re confronted with it.
Each time I let a writing project take priority over a sewing project or ordered pizza instead of making an exotic meal, the shame of my slap-bang tendencies overtook me. I hated that all my carefully chosen fabric sat in its Hobby Lobby bag untouched and that I’d already skipped a week at the local health clinic where our church volunteered. On days that I remembered to work out, I neglected to do something nice for Dan. Weeks in which I volunteered, I let the house get dirty. When my knitting improved, the sewing machine sat idle. When I got up early, I crashed at night. I wasn’t conquering Proverbs 31; I was piddling around with it.
On top of all that, I’d run into a little snafu regarding my Proverbs 31–inspired real estate venture: mainly that I couldn’t afford it. The downside to having the one job in America that lets you sleep late and work in your pajamas is that you don’t get paid a lot for it. And since Dan and I are both self-employed, we tend to get big checks spaced far apart. The next big check would come in late February, but we needed that to stretch through April, so my prospects for buying a field and planting a vineyard within the next thirty days dwindled with every visit to the mailbox that didn’t yield a sudden windfall. Even my alternate plan, to invest in community-supported agriculture, cost a whopping five hundred dollars. Apparently, locally grown radishes are worth as much as an iPad. I hated that the most liberated qualities of the valorous wife—her business savvy and financial prowess—proved as out of my reach as the domestic ones.
I had to hand it to her. In less than 14 days, the Proverbs 31 woman had made me feel guilty, inadequate, and poor.
The whole exercise had brought to the surface one of my most persistent insecurities—the fact that, despite having breasts and ovaries, I can’t multitask to save my life. I’ve always hated this about myself because the prevailing theory is that nature created all women everywhere to be accomplished multitaskers, so they can care for their young while simultaneously fighting off predators, searching for water, and talking on their cell phones. Well, somebody forgot to let me in on this one. When confronted with a long and varied to-do list, I react more like a squirrel in the path of a car, frantically darting one direction and then another without actually getting anywhere besides the backside of a tire.
I knew from my research that Proverbs 31 was never meant to be turned into a to-do list, but there was something about the spectacularity with which I was blowing this that beleaguered my confidence. Most women walk around with the sense that they are disappointing someone. This year, I imagined that Someone to be God. Though Proverbs 31 represented a poetic ideal, I couldn’t shake the feeling that if these were indeed the accomplishments of a competent, capable, virtuous, valiant, and worthy wife, then I must be none of those things.
Her children arise and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her: “Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all.”
—PROVERBS 31:28–29
Seeing as how the Jews have several thousand years on us when it comes to interpreting Scripture, Christians might consider listening to them more often. I arrived at this conclusion shortly after I began corresponding regularly with Ahava, the rabbi’s wife from Israel, whom God sent to me through the Internet. Witty, candid, and surprisingly chatty, Ahava grew up in the U.S. and knew a lot more about Christianity than I knew about Judaism. When I asked her what salutations would be most appropriate in an e-mail, she suggested Kol Tuv, which means “all the best.”
“But please, whatever you do,” she said, “don’t start off with Shalom. It sounds like a serious affectation from a non-Jew. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve been ‘shalomed’ by a well-meaning Christian tourist. It mostly makes us laugh and roll our eyes a little.”
This little insight helped explain why the rest of the rabbis weren’t returning my messages. I needed to keep this lady around.
With a spiritual seeker for a mother and a devout atheist for a grandmother, Ahava was unaware of her Jewish heritage until her teens, when research revealed that her great-grandmother was an observant Jew. According to Orthodox law, which determines Jewish identity through matrilineal descent, this made Ahava a Jew too. And it’s a good thing. As Ahava embraced her heritage and became more observant, friends connected her to a Jewish dating service, through which she met Michael, whose priestly descent required that he marry a Jewish-born virgin.
“He also wanted a redhead,” she confessed. “So I fit the bill on all accounts.”
Michael and Ahava married, had three children, and emigrated to Israel in 2007.
I asked Ahava what she considered to be the most common misconceptions about Orthodox Jews.
“When we travel, people seem to think we are Amish,” she said. (Orthodox women typically cover their heads and wear modest clothing.) “There is this assumption that Jews are into a throwback/ Hutterite/granola-type lifestyle, but most of us own cell phones and use computers. Last winter, while visiting friends in Ohio, I finally got to go gawk at the Amish, and you know what? They gawked right back!”
Another big misconception, according to Ahava, is that eating kosher is healthy.
“WRONG!” she said. “Ever heard of schmaltz? Well, Jews invented it.”
After a few e-mails back and forth, I asked Ahava if Jewish women struggle as much as Christian women to live up to the Proverbs 31 ideal. For the first time in our correspondence, Ahava seemed a bit perplexed:
Here’s the thing. Christians seem to think that because the Bible is inspired, all of it should be taken literally. Jews don’t do this. Even though we take the Torah literally (all 613 commandments!), the rest is seen differently, as a way of understanding our Creator, rather than direct commands. Take Proverbs 31, for example. I get called an eshet chayil (a valorous woman) all the time. Make your own challah instead of buying? Eshet chayil! Work to earn some extra money for the family? Eshet chayil! Make balloon animals for the kids at Shul? Eshet chayil! Every week at the Shabbat 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. Husbands commit each line of the poem to memory, so they can recite it to their wives at the Sabbath meal, usually in a song.
“Eshet chayil mi yimtza v’rachok mip’ninim michrah,” they sing in the presence of their children and guests. “A valorous woman, who can find? Her value is far beyond pearls.”
Eshet chayil is at its core a blessing—one that was never meant to be earned, but to be given, unconditionally.
“It’s like their version of ‘You go, girl!’” I explained to Dan at the dinner table that night, glowing from the nerdy high of learning a foreign-sounding phrase.
“How do you say it again?” he asked.
“E-shet-hi-yil,” I responded with my stubborn Southern accent and all the confidence of someone who has no idea what she’s talking about. “You say the h from the back of your throat.”
“Yeah, I’m not going to remember that,” he said. “What does it mean exactly?”
“It means ‘woman of valor.’”
“Well, that’s what you are to me,” Dan said. “You’re a woman of valor!”
My heart swelled in my chest, as it would again and again in the months to come as Dan found ways to invoke the new blessing in the midst of our daily routines. When my blog sold enough ads to become profitable, he looked up from the computer, smiled, and declared, “Woman of valor!” When I finally got around to cleaning out the guest room closet, he high-fived me and shouted, “Woman of valor!” When I stumbled through the front door after a long day with nothing but takeout pizza to show for dinner, he stretched out his arms in absolute delight and cried, “Pizza? Woman of valor!”
It’s amazing what a little poetry can do for a marriage.
Ahava said that women use the blessing to encourage one another as well, so I started trying it out with friends, family, and readers. Sure enough, it caught on. When Tiffany’s pharmacy aced its accreditation, I congratulated her with a hearty Eshet chayil! When Amanda beat out about a million applicants for the job she wanted in North Carolina, I called her up and shouted, “Woman of valor!” When a fellow blogger went on national television to speak boldly against child abuse in fundamentalist churches, I sent her an e-mail with the subject line Eshet chayil! When I learned that three women had won the Nobel Peace Prize, I shared the news with my readers in a blog post entitled “Meet Three Women of Valor.”
Before long, I overheard friends repeating the blessing to one another in response to news of pregnancy, promotions, finished projects, and final cancer treatments. I saw it exchanged in tweets and on Facebook walls. Readers sent me links to dozens of articles about women of valor from around the world who had built hospitals in Africa, launched successful micro-financing initiatives in India, been elected to public office in Afghanistan, and staged protests in Egypt. Never before had I considered how many acts of raw bravery occur every day in the lives of women. One friend told me she was thinking of getting an Eshet chayil tattoo!
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 and Rachel Ray. 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.
She gets up while it is still dark; she provides food for her family and portions for her female servants.
—PROVERBS 31:15
I hoped it wouldn’t come to this.
But when the third week of January arrived and I still had no dress, no pillow, no sash, and no scarf, I was forced to succumb to the last resort, to subject myself to that which is most dreaded and despised among women, an act we suffer to avoid and fear above all else:
I had to ask for help.
Even the Proverbs 31 woman didn’t do it all on her own. According to verse 15, the valorous wife provided food for her family and portions for her “female servants.” So instead I sought help in the form of a “Proverbs 31 Sewing/Knitting Party,” with the promise that it was “in exchange for food as well as my eternal thanks and some good old-fashioned fellowship.” Participants could stop by my house anytime between 10 a.m. and 9 p.m. on Saturday to help me with “my unfinished Proverbs 31 sewing projects.” Missing from the invitation was any mention of servitude or the fact that in most cases “unfinished” was just an optimistic way of saying not started yet. Within forty-eight hours, I received fifteen RSVPs from an assortment of good-hearted souls ranging from neighbors to blog readers to church ladies with legendary reputations as seamstresses. It suddenly occurred to me that some people might actually consider this fun.
I rose early that morning to make yellow cupcakes with strawberry icing for my guests, who began arriving at 9:30 a.m., many with their own sewing machines, fabric, and supplies in tow. Darlene, an artistic sixty-something with more sewing expertise than the rest of us combined, lugged through the front door an emerald green restored Singer Featherweight, which even to the untrained eye was a beautiful piece of machinery. She was followed by Betty, a matriarch in the church and the sort of person you feel naturally inclined to spill your guts to on account of the fact that she is slow to judge, quick to listen, and quick to offer help. I suspect everyone in Dayton has been blessed by Betty at some point—(she basically coordinated my sister’s wedding free of charge)—and yet no one seems to feel that they owe her anything.
Mom, who, in a true act of sacrificial love, had come over the night before to help me cut out the pattern for my purple dress, arrived at the house shortly after Betty, along with Jan, Dayna, Kristine, my friend Robin, and Robin’s grandmother. I felt a little out of my element playing host when most of these ladies were my mom’s age or older. But soon enough, a system emerged, and the dining room bustled with chatter, laughter, and the incessant hum of multiple sewing machines. Mom and Betty worked on the dress at the main table while Darlene and Dayna worked on the pillow on the foldout. Kristine knitted, Jan did some hand sewing, and Robin and her grandmother ironed. I mostly hid in the kitchen.
By lunchtime, both the decorative pillow and Dan’s scarf were finished. I managed to sew but one crooked seam on the pillow and knit a grand total of three rows of stitches on the scarf. At some point Mom and Betty called me over to carefully pull a pinned-together version of my lounge dress over my head.
The room got quiet and everyone cocked their heads.
“Maybe if we make it shorter . . .” Betty offered tentatively, reaching for the hem with a fistful of pins.
“Or took off the sleeves,” Robin added.
I looked down at the billowing tent of purple fabric hanging like a droopy bell from my shoulders. I may as well have been wearing a potato sack.
“I look pregnant, don’t I?”
The silence was broken by uproarious laughter. We grabbed the pillow and stuffed it under the dress just in time for Dan to come home from wherever he’d escaped to find his pregnant-looking wife surrounded by giggling women, fabric, and half-eaten cupcakes.
“Looks like a lot happened while I was gone,” he said with eyebrows raised.
Folks began trickling out after noon, but Saint Betty wouldn’t leave until that dress was finished, which happened around four o’clock. It still looked like an oversized smock on account of the homely pattern and cheap fabric, but I hugged Betty’s neck and promised I’d wear it out at least once.
“Was it cheating to delegate the majority of my sewing projects to other people?” I asked Dan as we surveyed the day’s booty: the dress, pillow, and scarf from my list, along with four homemade car seat covers, a rice-filled therapy sack, and two knit scarves for the auction.
I was like Tom grinning at his whitewashed fence.
“I didn’t marry a woman who knew how to sew,” Dan replied with a mix of amusement and incredulity. “I married a woman who knew how to get things done.”
Her husband is respected at the city gate, where he takes his seat among the elders of the land.
—PROVERBS 31:23
Spurred by the support of my friends and the encouragement of progress, I set about crossing the final items on my January to-do list . . . two weeks into February. The tasks that remained included:
□ Make Martha Stewart’s chicken curry—”She is like merchant ships, bringing her food from afar” (V. 14).
□ Create a proverbs 31 beauty queen sash to auction on eBay for charity—”She makes linen garments and sells them, and supplies the merchants with sashes” (V. 24); “She opens her arms to the poor and extends her hands to the needy” (V. 20).
□ Invest in real estate or community-supported agriculture—”She considers a field and buys it; out of her earnings, she plants a vineyard” (V. 16).
□ Praise Dan at the city gate—”Her husband is respected at the city gate, where he takes his seat among the elders of the land” (V. 23).
The easiest of these was the chicken curry. I nixed it the minute Dan informed me he didn’t like chicken curry and would prefer that our regular ole Thursday-night taco salad count as the “food from afar” instead. Can’t argue with Commandment #1.
The sash took all of 45 minutes to finish. I took a wide white ribbon, ironed onto one side sparkly pink letters that read “PROVERBS 31 WOMAN,” and then added a hot-pink decorative pin that could attach the two pieces like a beauty queen sash. It was pretty fabulous actually. I auctioned it off on eBay along with the scarves, therapy sack, and car seat covers for $75 to benefit World Vision, thereby “supplying the merchants with sashes” and “extending my hand to the poor” all in one task. Before I shipped everything off, Dan took a picture of me holding my homemade pillow and wearing the dress, scarf, and Proverbs 31 sash. I made it my profile picture on Facebook.
We decided to put off an investment in community supported agriculture until we were independently wealthy and could afford luxuries like babies, iPads, and locally grown radishes.
I never made a knit hat or a second pillow. Most days I only accomplished three or four of my seven daily tasks, but I shoveled snow out of the driveway and bought the right kind of lightbulbs at Lowe’s to ensure that Dan had “full confidence” in me as a wife. Halfway into February, I had just one more task between myself and unmitigated valor: to praise Dan at the city gate.
And so on a cold Friday afternoon, right at Dayton’s four o’clock “rush hour,” Dan took me to the giant Welcome to Dayton sign off Highway 27, where I stood for thirty minutes holding a poster that declared DAN IS AWESOME! to all thirty-five people who drove by. No one honked or waved or crashed their car in surprise. I suspect that most of them thought I’d simply lost a bet. It was a bit anticlimactic, but we had a good time with it, and the month from hell was finally over. We laughed victoriously all the way home.
I suppose that the moral of this story is that trying to copy another woman, even a woman from the Bible, is almost always a bad idea. As Judy Garland liked to say, “Be a first rate version of yourself, not a second rate version of someone else.” When I tried to conform my lifestyle to that of an ancient Near Eastern royal Jewish wife, I was a second-rate version of the Proverbs 31 woman, which misses the entire point of the passage.
The Proverbs 31 woman is a star not because of what she does but how she does it—with valor. So do your thing. If it’s refurbishing old furniture—do it with valor. If it’s keeping up with your two-year-old—do it with valor. If it’s fighting against human trafficking . . . leading a company . . . or getting other people to do your work for you—do it with valor.
Take risks. Work hard. Make mistakes. Get up the next morning.
And surround yourself with people who will cheer you on.
READ MORE AT ONLINE:
“Dear President Obama . . .”— http://rachelheldevans.com/dear-president