Oriental Women

by Edward B. Pollard

Israel holds a high place among the people of the earth because of the prevalence of piety among its women. Religion is deeply grounded in the intuitions and feelings of the race, and derives force, at least, from the sense of dependence upon higher powers, as Schliermacher has taught. Since women are far truer in their intuitions and feelings than men and the sense of dependence is more highly developed, it is not strange that women everywhere are more religious than men. Among the holy women of old none can be accorded higher place than Hannah, the mother of Samuel.

One may at first be astonished that childlessness is so frequently mentioned as characteristic of women in the Scriptures. Among them, Sarah, Rebekah, Rachael, the unnamed wife of Manoah, Hannah, and Elisabeth,--mother of John the Forerunner,--are all familiar examples. But barrenness was probably not more common among the Hebrews than among other peoples. Only, in Israel, childlessness was accounted a calamity, if not a direct visitation of the Almighty. Hence, every pious woman wished to be released from the curse. The women themselves ridiculed and ever despised those who were not blessed with offspring. Besides, every man among the Hebrews wished to live in his descendants. To die without children was to be "cut off" from the face of the earth, and to be forgotten. There was a yearning to live forever in the land.

The contrast between the great emphasis which the Egyptian laid upon immortality, the large place it held not only in their religious teachings, but in the development of their civilization, as modern excavations have revealed it, and the lack of such emphasis in the writings of the Hebrew Scriptures has frequently been noticed, and by many greatly wondered at. But the Hebrews gave little thought to immortality in the next world. Their prophets spent most of their time stressing the importance of righteousness in this life, and the people emphasized the earthward side of immortality--that is, one's power to live forever in one's posterity.

The writer in the one hundred and twenty-eighth Psalm expressed the common Hebrew conception, as, in recounting the blessings of a truly happy man, he said: "Thou shalt eat the labour of thine hands: happy shalt thou be, and it shall be well with thee. Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of thine house: thy children like olive plants round about thy table." Or as another psalmist, in the same spirit, prays: "That our sons may be as plants grown up in their youth; that our daughters may be as cornerstones, polished after the similitude of a palace." Many a time in the Hebrew Scriptures is this ideal prominent. For a psalmist again writes: "As arrows in the hand of a mighty man, so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them. They shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate." And when the prophet Zachariah foretells the coming glory of Jerusalem, which should supersede the then present distress, he gives as one item of blessing: "And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls, playing in the streets thereof."

It may therefore be readily surmised how a woman of Hannah's piety might feel in the thought of her condition of childlessness. And while the hardships of the barren woman in Israel could in no way compare with those of some other peoples, as in Australia, where the childless woman of the aborigines is driven out to a dire struggle for existence, yet the feeling that her God was, for some cause, against her and that her husband might in his secret heart despise her, must have been agony indeed. "The brain-woman," says Oliver Wendell Holmes, "never interests us like the heart-woman; white roses please us less than red." Hannah was preëminently a heart woman; the red blood of warm devotion coursed through her veins. When at length her prayers, made in bitterness of suffering, were answered, and heaven gave her a son, she named him Samuel, for, she said, "God hath heard," and dedicated him wholly to Jehovah, placing him at the service of the tabernacle. When the time came to wean the lad, she journeyed with him to Shiloh, the place of the sanctuary, with her offering, as the custom was, and "lent him" forever to Jehovah, her God.

"I think it must somewhere be written that the virtues of the mothers are occasionally visited upon their children, as well as the sins of the fathers." These words of Dickens suggest one of the occasions in which motherly virtues seem to have been visited upon the child, for Samuel became the earliest representative of a long line of prophets who, for many centuries, were the spiritual leaders of Israel. He was the father and founder of a "school of the prophets," the earliest theological seminary of which we have any record. The prayer of thanksgiving which the records say Hannah uttered when God blessed her with this precious gift of a son, influenced not only the famous Magnificat of Mary, when she was told of the birth of her greater Son, but also that of Zacharias when the birth of John the Baptist was predicted by the angel who talked with him in the temple.

History records several famous cases of friendship between men; that between David and Jonathan, and that between Damon and Pythias of Syracuse, have become proverbial. Fewer have been the friendship among women. Indeed, some have argued the impossibility of such friendships. But there is probably no more attractive story of womanly devotion in all the range of literature than that which tells of the love between Ruth and Naomi. The Book of Ruth is a beautiful idyll of early Hebrew life, and the heroine here stands the test. The scene is laid in the time when judges ruled in Israel; and in this, as in many instances in the early days of Palestine, an epoch was born out of a famine. Elimelech, with his wife, Naomi, and their two sons, Mahlon and Chilion, hunger-driven, set out for the land of Moab. Death lays its claim to the husband and father, and Naomi, with her boys, is left widowed in a strange land. Mahlon and Chilion, now grown to manhood, marry two daughters of Moab, by name Orpah and Ruth. A decade passes, and the sons themselves die. Bereaved and broken in spirit, Naomi at length turns her heart toward her native Judean hills. Finding her daughters-in-law inclined to follow her into the uncertainty of her future subsistence in her former home, Naomi counsels their return, each to her mother's house. "And they lifted up their voice and wept." Orpah reluctantly obeys, but Ruth cleaves to her mother-in-law, with those unsurpassed and memorable words, which the author of the book of Ruth throws into Hebrew measure:

"Intreat me not to leave thee,

Or to return from following after thee;

For whither thou goest, I will go;