SOME MANAGING WOMEN.
SOME MANAGING WOMEN.
The women of the Old Testament always wanted something, and it is a noticeable fact that they always asked for it—and got it too.
So the daughters of Zelophehad had a grievance, and they didn't go among the neighbors bewailing their hard lot, they didn't sit and wish from morning till night that something would turn up to help them, or sigh their lives away in secret, but they put on their most radiant attire and jauntiest veils and "stood before Moses, and before Eleazar the priest, and before the princes and all the congregation," and demanded their father's possessions, and even argued the question reasonably and logically. There was not any of the St. Paul-women-should-not-speak-in-meeting doctrine about the Biblical women of those elder days.
They didn't endeavor to persuade Moses' wife to influence her husband to use his power in their behalf. They did not retain the services of Aaron, the finest orator of the day, to plead their cause, but they did their own talking, and they got what they asked for—their father's possessions—and husbands thrown in without extra charge. Being clever as well as ambitious women, they probably foresaw that husbands would follow after the inheritance, and although they would not ask for lords and masters of course, they had their eyes on them just the same. As there were several of them, all unmarried, they were no doubt not "fair to look upon," so they laid a little plot to secure husbands. And they succeeded and were happy, for marriage was the aim and end of a woman's existence then, and there was a better market and more of a demand for husbands than in these modern days.
We only catch a glimpse of one woman named Achsah, but that is enough to show us that she possessed the prevailing and prominent characteristic of all the other "holy women."—she wanted something.
After she had married her warrior lover, who conquered Kirpathsepher for her sweet sake, the very first thing we find is that "she moved him to ask of her father a field." Now naturally a young man would dislike to approach his father-in-law upon such a delicate subject, and so soon too, but she asked him and he obeyed—like all the men of the Old Testament.