Women in the Bible

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Basemath/Bashemath (Wife of Esau, Daughter of either Elon the Hittite or Ishmael)

Genesis 26:34; 36:3-4, 10, 13-17

List of Reading & Resources:

Articles

“Esau, Wives of: Midrash and Aggadah” by Tamar Kadari

Books

“Basemath 1/Basemath” (pp.56-57) by Naomi Steinberg in Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, The Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, and the New Testament edited by Carol Meyers (2001)
“Basemath” (p.623) by Ernst Axel Knauf in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 1 (1992)

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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