Reviewing: Dynamic Women of the Bible

Dynamic Women of the Bible: What We Can Learn from Their Surprising Stories
by Ruth A. Tucker

They were wives, mothers, daughters, and friends.  They were faithful and faithless.  They were benevolent and they were brutal.

But always, they were real.

This text from the back cover is intriguing to me.  Because I think that's what is lost about the women in the Bible.  I grew up in the church, and when I wasn't there or at Sunday School I was playing church, baptizing my dolls, wearing my grandmother's fur collars over my play clothes, having fake conversations with the ladies while our imaginary children ran around sneaking cookies.  I know the stories.  Eve brought sin into the world.  Rahab sneaked the spies out of town over the wall.  Esther saved her people.  Bathsheba was an unwitting victim of King David's lust while Potipher's wife, Delilah, and Jezebel made victims of their own.  And then the new testament.  Mary is the sweet, innocent mother of Jesus.  The other Mary followed him around, learning from him and believing in him, even when his other friends didn't.  As I grew up and heard the stories I began to understand they were a bit more complicated than I originally thought--Adam is just as guilty, right?  Rahab was a what?!  Couldn't (shouldn't?) Bathsheba turned down the king's advances?  And how did Mary actually love Jesus (hey, I adore "Jesus Christ Superstar" and can sing nearly every word)?

But how real have these women ever really been to me?

Obviously Sunday School needs to quiet things down and make its subjects rather one-dimensional.  I mean, five year olds can barely sit still and listen, let alone understand who Rahab was when she wasn't aiding and abetting spies.  And then, when you get a little older, and you start sitting through sermons and your own readings of the text, the writers of both testaments give too little time or space to these women to make them any more than two-dimensional characters.

Tucker takes those two-dimensional women who lived and died so long ago and breathes life into them.  Yes, it's conjecture.  It has to be.  There is no one living today who sat with Bathsheba and talked with her about the pros and cons of getting involved with the king while her husband was away at war (but wouldn't that be an interesting conversation?!).  So Tucker looks at what the Bible does give us about fifty Biblical women--both the commonly known and the obscure--and asks the "what if" questions.  In the introduction, she wisely notes that this book isn't about the hows or the whys of the decisions they made and the lives they lived.  There are no real answers here.  Like 17th-century philosopher Spinoza writes (and Tucker quotes in her introduction), "the purpose of the Bible 'is not to convince the reason, but to attract and lay hold of the imagination.'"  So there are a lot of questions about what makes these women real--and how that relates to us as women today.

Dynamic Women isn't perfect.  I found the sidebars confusing and disruptive to my reading.  Tucker includes those and questions--fluffy and more intentional--that can guide a small discussion group.  There were several chapters I found myself wishing I could talk about with my friends, if only to ask the "what if" questions with them.  But many of the chapters have stuck with me, and I look forward to rereading these women's stories in the Bible with new eyes that long to see beyond the few verses they are given and imagine what depth those women have.

As Tucker writes, "The Bible is a big book, but brevity is too often the rule . . . [these women] are far more . . . than what the Bible tells us."  And, Tucker would have us believe that by considering what more they are, by allowing the wonderings to lay hold of our imaginations, we can learn more about their stories, about ourselves, and about God.  I think she's right.


{I received this book free from Baker Books through the Baker Book Bloggers program.  I have expressed my own opinions, and I was not required to write a positive review.  I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255.}