The Proverbs 31 in the Persian Period
Here is a chapter from my book, “A Woman of Substance.”
The Proverbs 31 Woman in the Persian Period
Understanding the context of our favorite and most beloved scriptures is imperative, primarily if we refer to them for instruction and training. The Bible was written thousands of years ago, and the culture from one book to the other can be entirely different and drastic in change. We need to understand the audience and the writer’s perspective and place scripture in the cultural background of when it was written. Then, it will bring truth and light to the passage.
Christine Roy Yoder, a professor at Colombia Theological Seminary, wrote a book called Wisdom as a Woman of Substance: A Socioeconomic Reading of Proverbs 1-9 and Proverbs 31:10-31.
Her book details how Proverbs 1-9 and 31 have the same linguistic features as Late Biblical Hebrew (LBH). This would bring the writing of these sayings to a date between the beginning of the sixth century BCE (before the common/current era) and the end of the third century BCE in the Persian period. Her scholarly findings come from studying the vocabulary and vernacular that appear exclusively or predominately in exilic or postexilic text. And also, the lexical Aramaisms in Proverbs 1-9 point to the fifth century BCE.[1]
This finding is significant to understanding the woman in Proverbs 31. For one, she is not a figment of a man’s imagination but a real person living in the Persian period. According to John W. Fadden of St. John Fisher University, the woman of Proverbs 31:10-31 represented an elite masculine perspective among the Golah community centered in Jerusalem during the Persian period. He noted, “The golah community refers to the returnees (from among the Judahites exiled by the Babylonians) to Yehud during the early Persian period. The Persian period is the era from 538-332 BCE, during which the Achaemenid Empire was in control of Southeast Asia, where the former kingdoms of Judah and Israel were located. The Persian province of Yehud roughly corresponds to the territory of Judah.[AH1] ”[2]
In that period, women in Persia were of high rank and honor. They were wealthy and held high government positions in the military, state, courthouse, and treasury departments. Although noble Persian women had to act within a defined framework set by the king, they also enjoyed economic independence and had control over their wealth. One of the most exciting archaeological finds about this was the discovery of a large number of seals in women’s graves. Seals in antiquity were often symbols of power and authority. Royal women owned land and estates in Persia and outside the Persian heartland, such as Babylonia, Syria, Egypt, and Media. They employed their workforce, and it also appears that certain administrative officials were assigned to them. The fortification tablets at the ruins of Persepolis also reveal that men and women were represented in identical professions, received equal payments as skilled laborers, and that gender was not a criterion at all, unlike our modern world.[3][AH2]
On the island of Elephantine, opposite Aswan and just below the first cataract in Egypt, several hundred Aramaic papyri and ostraca were discovered between 1893 and 1910. The Elephantine documents reveal the presence of a Jewish military colony serving Persian interests on the island of Elephantine and the mainland (Aswan). They illustrate life on this southern border of the Persian Empire, which ruled “from India to Nubia.” One of the most striking features of the Elephantine papyri is the prominent role that women play, and it is no exaggeration to say that they are everywhere.[4] [AH3] The papyri that were discovered show how the business of marriage and divorce was arranged. Women were given equal rights and privileges; many owned houses, lands, vineyards, and businesses.
Proverbs 31:14, 18, and 24 in the NIV refer to merchant ships, profitable trading, and merchants.
v She is like the merchant ships.
v She sees that her trading is profitable.
v And supplies the merchants with sashes.
According to Christine Roy Yoder, this socioeconomic context is analogous to that of the Persian-period Palestine. This concentration of terms in Proverbs 31 suggests a cosmopolitan marketplace. In verse 24, the word is “Canaanites,” a term that has come to mean “traders.” In the Persian period, this term was synonymous with the Phoenicians, maritime traders who densely populated the coast and traded throughout the Mediterranean. They traded coins, jewelry, pendants of colored glass, and figurines. The Phoenicians were also well-known as manufacturers and traders of textiles. The hallmark of this industry was the production and export of purple dye, an expensive, fast-color[AH4], non-fading dye extracted from marine snails. The red-purple in verse 22 that the Proverbs 31 woman wears is one of two known varieties they produced.
v She is clothed in fine linen and purple.
In this socioeconomic context, the Proverbs 31 woman makes her “loot” as a savvy businesswoman who refuses to eat “bread of idleness.” Her primary industry is the spinning and weaving of textiles, work symbolic of women’s skill throughout the ancient Near East. Even queens and wealthy women are described or depicted holding a spindle.[5] In Proverbs 31:13 and 19, the woman engages in making textiles.
v She selects wool and flax and works with eager hands.
v In her hand, she holds the distaff and grasps the spindle with her fingers.
The woman in Proverbs 31 is not just active in making her household’s garments but also is involved in the marketplace, selling and trading garments and sashes, according to verse 24.
v She makes linen garments and sells them and supplies the merchants with sashes.
Yehud enjoined “unprecedented growth in international commerce” during the Persian period.[6] As managers of the family business and agents of their husbands, women might engage in such activities as purchasing and leasing land. They could purchase land from their own wealth. For royal women, land grants were an additional way they could acquire property. These lands could be used to generate profit from their cultivation or from rent when land was leased out. Proverbs 31:16 describes the woman purchasing a field and planting a vineyard; this means she had sufficient wealth on her own to purchase and develop a vineyard.[7]
v She considers a field and buys it; out of her earnings, she plants a vineyard.
Elite women required sizeable workforces for their estates. Among the places and activities, Yoder finds women working in the Persian empire, including marketplaces and textile industries, royal stockyards and treasuries, and work as scribes. The Proverbs 31 woman in Persia was part of the elite and wealthy. She managed the household, employed servants, educated her children, and enlarged her family’s wealth.
She worked hard with her skillful hands and had a profitable business. With the earnings of her business, she purchased lands and vineyards. The Proverbs 31 woman in the historical setting was very wealthy, so she was hard to find.
The other component of the woman in Proverbs 31 alludes to her heroism. We know Proverbs 31:10-31 is a poem, and some scholars refer to it as the Song of the Valiant Woman.[AH5]
Heroic poetry is a type of literature that is found in many cultures. Examples are the Homeric epics of ancient Greece, the Old Norse poetry of the Vikings, and the heroic songs of contemporary Yugoslavia. They are characterized by the recounting of the mighty deeds of heroes, usually the military exploits of noble warriors. Associated with the longer heroic narrative poem of an epic are shorter forms such as the panegyric ode in praise of a victorious champion or the lament, celebrating the great feats of a fallen warrior.[8]
It has been pointed out that the literature of ancient Israel also contains poetry of this type. The Song of Deborah is a notable example. We also hear of the song that the women sang when Saul and David came home victorious from battle against the Philistines.[9]
According to A. Wolters, Proverbs 31 is poetry of the heroic type and the Proverbs 31 woman is to be compared to a military champion and heroine. Here is some of his research.
1. The subject of the song is called an eset hayil, a term which has been translated in many different ways, but which in this context should probably be understood as the female counterpart of the gibbor hayil, the title given to the “mighty men of valour” which are often named in David’s age. The person who is celebrated in this song is a “mighty woman of valour.”
2. That this is the meaning intended emerges also from the recurrence of the word hayil in verse 29 near the end of the song, forming a kind of inclusion with eset hayil at the beginning. It there occurs in the idiom asa hayil, which regularly means “to do valiantly” in a military context.
3. Beside these two occurrences of hayil, a word meaning basically “power” or “prowess,” it is remarkable how often the woman’s strength is mentioned in the song. “She girds her loins with strength” (verse 17) and “she is clothed with strength and honor” (verse 25), where the Hebrew word is oz in both cases. The second line of verse 17 adds: “She strengthens her arms.”
4. A number of words and phrases beside asa hayil seem to have a specific military connotation. In the expression “you surpass them all” (verse 29) the phrase ala al is often used elsewhere in the sense of going out to do battle against an enemy. (In fact, the meaning “surpass” is assigned to it only here).
5. Heroic poetry typically describes the exploits of men belonging to an aristocratic class, a class in which honor and individual initiative rank high on the scale of values. The hero is typically a nobleman. So too the valiant woman of Proverbs 31 is clearly a wealthy lady of the upper classes. She is clearly an aristocrat and heroine in the full sense of the word and is meant to be perceived as such.[10][AH6]
The question remains: Who is this woman? Historically, she is a woman (or women) who did great exploits for her husband, family, and community. It seems that the women during this time in history were highly respected and of great renown. They were observed for their work, strength, and faith. Perhaps one woman in particular arose as a champion among her peers at that time. The person writing Proverbs 31: 10-31 observed her works and instructed the young men at the time to choose a wife like her: wealthy, industrious, noble, and of the same religion.
[1] Roy Yoder, Wisdom
[2] John W. Fadden, “The Proverbs 31 Woman, Then,” Verbum 15, no. 1 (May 1, 2018), https://fisherpub.sjf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1465&context=verbum.
[3] “‘Persian Women’ & Their Glorious Past,” Persians Are Not Arabs, accessed September 26, 2023, https://www.persiansarenotarabs.com/persian-women/.
[4]Bezalel Porten, "Elephantine," Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, (December 31, 1999: Jewish Women's Archive), accessed September 20, 2023, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/elephantine.
[5] Roy Yoder, Wisdom.
[6] Roy Yoder, Wisdom.
[7] Roy Yoder, Wisdom,
[8] H. Munro Chadwick, “The Heroic Age,” The Classical Review 19, no. 2 (June 1969), 236, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0009840X00329596.
A.L. Wolters, “Proverbs XXXI 10-31 as Heroic Hymn: A Form-Critical Analysis,” Vetus Testamentum 38, no. 4 (1988): 446–57, https://doi.org/10.2307/1519288.