Women of the Bible: Her Perspective —  Remarkable Women and What Scripture Really Says About Them

*Por Stephen Cartledge | Write Minded Books*

History has a habit of flattening women into a single note.

The devoted mother. The fallen woman. The loyal wife. The tragic widow. Pick one, and stay in your lane.

The women of the Bible have suffered this particularly badly. Centuries of commentary, sermon, and Sunday school flannel boards have taken some of the most complex, courageous, and theologically significant figures in all of Scripture and reduced them to supporting roles in someone else’s story.

This series is an attempt to correct that.

*Her Perspective* is an ongoing exploration of the women of the Bible — not as background characters, but as the central figures they actually were. In their own words. From their own vantage point. With all the complexity that the text itself gives them, if you’re willing to look.

Here are ten women to start with. Ten voices history got wrong, or simply forgot to ask.

1. Mary Magdalene — Witness at the Tomb

*”They called me many things. None of them were the truth.”*

Let’s begin with perhaps the most misrepresented woman in the entire New Testament.

Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute. That particular conflation — merging her with the unnamed sinful woman of Luke 7 — was the invention of a sixth-century papal sermon and was not officially corrected by the Catholic Church until 1969. By then, the damage was done. Centuries of art, literature, and theology had already painted her into a corner she never occupied in the text.

What Scripture actually tells us: Jesus cast seven demons from her (Luke 8:2). She was among the women who supported his ministry financially. She stood at the foot of the cross when the male disciples had fled. She was the first person to witness the resurrection. The first to speak with the risen Christ. The first to be commissioned to carry the news.

The early church called her *Apostle to the Apostles.* Somewhere along the way, that title got quietly retired.

Her story is one of the most important threads in the Hidden in Plain Sight series — because what happened to her reputation is exactly what happened to so much of Scripture’s hidden history.

2. Martha of Bethany — The Sister Who Believed

*”I was so busy serving, I almost missed Him standing in my kitchen.”*

Martha gets a rough deal in popular Christianity. She is perpetually cast as the anxious overachiever, bustling around the kitchen while her sister Mary sits at Jesus’ feet absorbing wisdom. The moral of the story, as typically told: be more like Mary.

But read the text more carefully.

It is Martha — not Mary, not Peter, not any of the twelve — who delivers one of the most theologically significant declarations in all four gospels. When Jesus arrives after Lazarus has died, it is Martha who goes out to meet him. And when he says *”I am the resurrection and the life,”* it is Martha who responds: *”I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who is to come into the world.”*

That is, word for word, the confession of faith that Peter gives at Caesarea Philippi — the moment that theologians have debated for centuries. Martha gets there too. She just doesn’t get the same airtime.

The woman was not too busy to understand. She understood everything.

3. Mary of Nazareth — The Mother Who Trusted

*”I kept these things, and pondered them in my heart.”*

Mary’s response to the angel Gabriel is perhaps the most quietly extraordinary moment in the New Testament.

She is told she will conceive a child by the Holy Spirit. She will be an unmarried mother in a culture where that carried severe social and legal consequences. And her response — after one entirely reasonable question about the logistics — is simply: *”Let it be to me according to your word.”*

What we sometimes miss is what comes next. The Magnificat — her song in Luke 1 — is a declaration of radical reversal. The hungry fed. The proud scattered. The mighty brought low. It is not a gentle lullaby. It is a theological proclamation from a teenage girl who understood exactly what she had said yes to.

She kept all these things and pondered them in her heart. That pondering was not passive. It was the deepest kind of faith.

4. Ruth — The Loyalty That Changed a Bloodline

*”Whither thou goest, I will go.”*

Ruth’s famous declaration to her mother-in-law Naomi is one of the most quoted lines in the entire Bible. It turns up at weddings with remarkable frequency, despite being spoken between two widows standing in a field somewhere on the Moab border, facing destitution.

Ruth was a Moabite — a foreigner, an outsider to Israel’s covenant. By rights, her story should have ended with Naomi’s departure. Instead she chooses to stay, to leave her homeland, her people, and her gods for a woman who has just told her there is nothing left to offer.

That decision places Ruth in the genealogy of Jesus Christ. Matthew 1:5 names her explicitly, one of only five women in a lineage of forty-two generations. A foreign widow who chose loyalty over security ends up in the direct line of the Messiah.

If that is not a statement about who God counts as part of the story, it is hard to know what would be.

5. Esther — The Queen Who Risked Everything

*”Who knoweth whether I have come for such a time as this?”*

The Book of Esther is one of only two books in the Bible named after a woman. It is also one of only two books that never mentions God by name.

God’s absence from the text is, most scholars believe, entirely deliberate. The whole book is an exercise in hiddenness — the hand behind events that are never announced, only recognised in retrospect.

Esther is a Jewish woman in the Persian court, hidden in plain sight as queen. When Haman’s plot to exterminate her people is revealed, her cousin Mordecai tells her: *”If you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place.”* The deliverance is coming either way. The question is whether Esther will be part of it.

She chooses to be. She goes to the king unsummoned — an act punishable by death — and the people are saved.

Courage, in Esther’s case, looked like a woman walking down a corridor she wasn’t supposed to enter.

6. Deborah — The Judge Who Led an Army

*”I arose, a mother in Israel.”*

Deborah presents something of a challenge to any theology that insists women cannot lead.

She was a prophetess. She was a judge — one of the primary leaders of Israel in the period between Joshua and the monarchy. She held court under a palm tree and the people came to her for judgment (Judges 4:5). She received military intelligence from God and summoned the general Barak to lead an army. When Barak refused to go without her, she went.

The victory that followed was attributed to a woman — though not to Deborah. To Jael, a Kenite woman who drove a tent peg through the enemy commander’s head. It is that sort of book.

Deborah’s song in Judges 5 is considered one of the oldest texts in the Hebrew Bible. She calls herself “a mother in Israel” — not a general, not a judge, not a prophet. A mother. Draw your own conclusions about what that means.

7. Rahab — The Outsider God Called Faithful

*”I hid them. And in hiding them, I was found.”*

Rahab is introduced as a prostitute who lives in the wall of Jericho. She is, by every social, ethnic, and moral measure that the ancient world would have applied, an unlikely candidate for divine favour.

She hides the Israelite spies, negotiates a deal involving a scarlet cord in her window, and when the walls of Jericho fall, her household is the only one spared.

What happens next is quietly staggering. Rahab appears in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus. She is listed in Hebrews 11 — the great hall of faith — alongside Abraham, Moses, and Noah. James 2 uses her as the primary example of faith expressed through works.

A Canaanite prostitute from a condemned city becomes one of the Bible’s defining examples of what genuine faith looks like in practice. If the text is making a point, it is not being subtle about it.

8. The Woman at the Well — The First Evangelist

*”Come, see a man which told me all things that ever I did.”*

She doesn’t have a name in the text. She is simply *the woman* — a Samaritan, at a well, at noon, when decent women were not typically drawing water. The midday hour is almost certainly a detail about her social status: she came when no one else would be there.

Jesus speaks to her across three separate cultural prohibitions — she is a woman, a Samaritan, and a social outcast. He asks for water. She challenges him. He offers her living water. She debates him on the finer points of Samaritan and Jewish theology. It is one of the longest recorded conversations Jesus has with any individual in the gospels.

When he reveals that he is the Messiah, she becomes the first person in John’s gospel to hear that declaration. She goes immediately back to her village and tells everyone. Many Samaritans believe because of her testimony.

She is, by any reasonable definition, the first evangelist in John’s account. She never gets a name. She gets a mission instead.

9. Hannah — The Prayer That Built a Prophet

*”For this child I prayed, and the Lord hath given me my petition.”*

Hannah’s story opens the book of Samuel in quiet agony. She is barren in a culture where a woman’s worth was measured almost entirely by her ability to produce children. Her husband’s other wife taunts her about it annually. Her husband, meaning well, asks the question that husbands throughout history have asked in similar situations: *”Am I not better to you than ten sons?”*

He is not. Hannah knows what she wants and she prays for it with such intensity that the priest Eli thinks she is drunk.

The child she receives — Samuel — will anoint the first two kings of Israel, hear the voice of God as a boy, and reshape the entire religious and political landscape of a nation.

Hannah’s prayer of thanksgiving in 1 Samuel 2 is widely recognised as the direct template for Mary’s Magnificat. Two women, centuries apart, praying the same revolution into being.

10. Abigail — The Wisdom That Prevented a War

*”I went without my husband’s knowledge, and I changed the outcome.”*

Abigail is described as both intelligent and beautiful — a rare combination in a text that tends to note one or the other. Her husband Nabal is described as harsh and badly behaved. David and his men have been protecting Nabal’s flocks and have now asked for provisions in return. Nabal refuses, insults David, and David responds by riding out with four hundred armed men.

Abigail hears what has happened, makes no mention of it to her husband, loads up donkeys with food and wine, rides out to intercept David, and talks him down from a massacre with one of the most diplomatically precise speeches in the Hebrew Bible.

David, who will be king, tells her: *”Blessed is your discernment, and blessed are you.”*

When Nabal dies shortly after, David sends for Abigail and she becomes his wife. She is one of the very few people in the Old Testament who talks David out of something he was absolutely determined to do. That is, by any measure, an extraordinary achievement.

Her Perspective — An Ongoing Series

These ten women are the beginning, not the end.

The women of Scripture are numerous, complex, and frequently overlooked — by tradition, by commentary, and by the tendency of every era to read the Bible through the assumptions it already holds.

*Her Perspective* is an ongoing pin series and content strand from Write Minded Books, dedicated to exploring their stories with the attention they deserve.

If you want to follow the series as it grows — new women, new perspectives, new pins added regularly — the best way is to join the Write Minded Books newsletter below. You’ll get new posts and pins delivered directly, plus early access to new releases in the Hidden in Plain Sight series.

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And if the Hidden in Plain Sight series is new to you — it’s biblical nonfiction that does exactly what this post does: takes the overlooked, the misread, and the hidden in plain sight, and looks at it properly. Start with Book 1. 

Stephen Cartledge is a British author and publisher based in northern Thailand, writing under the Write Minded Books imprint. His Hidden in Plain Sight series explores overlooked biblical history and narrative. His upcoming release, available now.

The Watchers: The Book of Enoch,→

publishes August 14, 2026