A Woman’s Place is in the Story

Sandra Glahn believes every woman has a place in God’s story. Do you know what yours is?

Elisa

A Woman’s Place is in the Story

By Sandra Glahn

My ancestors four generations back crossed North America in a Conestoga wagon. As a fifth-generation Oregonian, I started learning our state’s history in the third grade. My teacher told our class about Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and their forty-nine-hundred-mile journey to the Pacific.

When I was ten, my family of seven relocated to the DC area. On our journey the other way across the plains, we visited multiple historical sites. Once we settled in Virginia, we spent weekends touring museums. We drove the grounds of Gettysburg. We watched Civil War reenactments at Bull Run. In the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, we gawked at the Hope Diamond. Occasionally on these types of visits, I’d encounter women from history. I especially liked seeing gowns worn by Martha Washington, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Jackie O.

Gary and I married in Virginia and a few years later moved to Texas for further education. On a trip to Austin we wandered into the Bullock Texas State History Museum, where we saw artifacts that spanned four thousand years. I stood amazed at how the curators had woven women into the story line, because—after spending years in museums—I’d seen a lot of great men but only an occasional cameo of a woman. In the Bullock Museum, for the first time, I saw exhibits in which both men and women participated fully in the main story.

First, I’d learned men’s history. Then I saw women as walk-ons. But at the Bullock Museum, I saw how history included both.

I had a similar experience as I learned the Bible. First, I learned men’s history: Adam, Abraham, David, Jesus Paul. Later we filled in with Esther and Ruth. But when I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Bible, I had still never learned about the daughters of Zelophehad. Nor had I heard a sermon that included Tamar, daughter-in-law of Judah. Esther was presented as a love story, Bathsheba was a seductress, Mary Magdalene was a harlot, and the woman at the well was shacking up. When I read the first chapters of Exodus, the heading in my Bible said, “The Birth of Moses,” even though years later I noticed the narrative included heroic midwives and a brave sister and mother, along with Pharoah’s daughter. Only one line of the text we actually devoted to the baby boy, who was unnamed.

Even when we do see the need to include the biblical women in the exposition of the text, whether in sermons or Bible studies, we often pull them out of context to cameo them. In the same way that the gowns of presidents’ wives reminded me of women’s contributions in US history, publishers have released books and studies on women of the Bible. Pastors have preached on the books of Ruth and Esther. Don’t get me wrong. All this is a wonderful development. Women are indeed in the text.

Nevertheless, they often appear only as sidebars, starring in short bios. As a correction to missing the women altogether, we have focused on select women. And we need to know their stories. So we still need these cameos, because we have a lot of catching up to do. It’ll be a while before Shiphrah and Puah and those five daughters of Zelophehad are household names along with Huldah, Tryphena, and Tryphosa.

There’s a weakness in a cameo methodology. Rather than featuring women in segregated narratives, we need to encounter them as they appear in the text. Wouldn’t it be better to see how women appear in the story as the narrator tells it?

Our challenge, then, is to observe women function in Scripture’s grand sea of story and to make course corrections where we have ignored the women, distorted their place, and/or featured them in sidebars off the main text. In doing so we can better see how women function in the story, and thus we can arrive at more faithful interpretation.

My own experience solidified for me the importance of integrating women’s stories into the overarching narrative as we read and teach. Years ago, when my husband and I were going through infertility, I shared the desire of fellow Christian fertility patients for a survey of what the Bible has to say about infertility. As part of my seminary work, I did deep studies in the infertility narrative texts.

Yet I came away from that research with a settled conviction that the Bible is not an unabridged text on infertility. Hannah’s infertility story is not a message about how all women who pray for a baby get what they ask for. Nor does the Bible teach that only women are infertile, though we might never know it by the absence of male infertility stories. (We must read between the lines in levirate marriages such as Ruth’s to see the potential for male-factor infertility.]

Hannah’s infertility functions in a bigger story showing God’s faithfulness to Israel even when they are in such a dark place that they engage in a gang-rape followed by civil war that includes massive numbers of murders and kidnappings. The way the Hebrew canon is laid out, that horror story immediately precedes faithful Hannah’s cry to God for a child. And she conceives Samual. Considering the evil deeds God’s people are committing, one might expect the Almighty to storm off, announcing, “I’m done with you.” Yet God is faithful even to a horribly, violently unfaithful people.

First, we had men’s history. Then we included women as cameos. But now, as in the Bullock Museum, we seek to focus on integration, encountering women as they appear in the grand narrative of Scripture. Because a woman’s place is in the story.

Adapted from A Woman’s Place is In the Story by Sandra Glahn ©2026 by Sandra Glahn. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com

Sandra L. Glahn (PhD, University of Texas at Dallas) is professor of media arts and worship at Dallas Theological Seminary, where her emphases are first-century backgrounds related to women, culture, gender, and the arts. Her most recent book is A Woman’s Place is in the Story. She has also authored or edited more than twenty books, including Nobody's Mother, Vindicating the Vixens, and Sexual Intimacy in Marriage (coauthor).