Women in the Bible

Empowering Women Through Scripture

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Woman in Labor

Micah 5:3; Jeremiah 4:31; 6:24; 13:21; 22:23; 30:6; 31:8; 48:41; 49:22; 24; 50:43

List of Reading & Resources

Articles

“From Traumatic to Narrative Memories: The Rhetorical Function of Birth Metaphors in Micah 4-5” by L. J. Claassens (2018)
"Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Hebrew Bible" by Claudia D. Bergmann
“The Rhetorical Function of the Woman in Labor Metaphor in Jeremiah 30-31: Trauma, Gender and Postcolonial Perspectives” by L. Juliana Claassens (2014)

Books

Wisdom Commentary: Micah by Julia M. O’Brien (2015)
“Woman in Labor” (p. 352) in Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, and the New Testament by Carol Meyers (2001)
"Micah" by Judy Fentress-Williams in Women's Bible Commentary, edited by Carol A. Newsom, Sharon H. Ringe, and Jacqueline E. Lapsley (2012)
"Jeremiah" by Kathleen M. O'Connor in Women's Bible Commentary, edited by Carol A. Newsom, Sharon H. Ringe, and Jacqueline E. Lapsley (2012)

To correctly use the search bar, follow these guidelines:

Use proper capitalization (for example, capitalize “N” in “Naomi” instead of writing “naomi”)
Use proper spacing (“Mary of Bethany” as opposed to “MaryofBethany”)
Write out the full name of the woman you’re searching for, if you know it (for example, “The Samaritan Woman”). If writing out the full name does not work, simply type in “Samaritan” and see if “The Samaritan Woman” appears.
If the search bar is still not yielding your results, it might be because we have altered the woman’s name based on scholarship we found (for example, we have Naomi listed as “Naomi/Mara”). You can always find a specific woman by going to the navigation bar, clicking Old Testament or New Testament, and scrolling down to her appropriate genre and book.
To find a woman manually, note that the women listed on this site are listed in the order they appear in scripture (for example, women in Genesis chapter 1 are listed before women in Genesis chapter 2).

This project has been created by Founder and Executive Director Debbie McLeod alongside a team of Yale-educated researchers: Anna Grace Glaize, McKenzie Brummond, Moriah Asch, Brian Peterson, Laura Traverse, Phoebe Oler, and Sarah Ambrose