Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, Tirzah

[zeborah]

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. The sisters Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah and Tirzah (Joshua 17:3-6) aren't waiting around in hopes of finding five such men, however. Their father doesn't have any sons, and so when Joshua is parcelling out among the Israelite tribes the land which they have rightfully stolen, the five sisters front up to him for a share in their own right alongside their uncles. They say that God told Moses to give it to them, and Joshua figures he'd best not gainsay authority like that: so they get their inheritance.

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

<g>

Why is nobody ever talking about these people? Add them all up, and the feminist bible would read quite differently from the patriarchial version...

[julesjones]

That's why people don't like to talk about them...

[zeborah]

I suspect there's a good mix of reasons, including (particularly in past centuries) that the people doing the talking about the Bible didn't quite know what to make of women. And that, after all, most of these women aren't doing 'important' things, where the (male) people doing most of the talking get to define what's important. (And when they are killing people, they're not doing it exactly honourably. Mostly because they weren't allowed but that's surely beside the point, no?...)

But these days, I'm pretty sure the main reason is that people don't know about them. And they don't know about them because no-one's talking about them. To which there's an easy solution, plus kind of fun.