Women in the Bible

Empowering Women Through Scripture

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Woman Stranger (Loose Woman/Adulteress)

Proverbs 2:16-19, 5:3-8, 20, 6:24-26, 29, 32, 7:5-27, 22:14, 23:27-28, 30:20, 31:3

List of Reading & Resources:

Articles

“The Women in the Book of Proverbs: Woman Wisdom Versus Woman Folly” by Scott Ventureyra
"The Strange Woman of Proverbs" by Gale A. Yee

Books

“Woman Stranger (Loose Woman/Adulteress)” (pp. 546-547) in Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, and the New Testament by Carol Meyers (2001)
“Potiphar’s Wife (Genesis 39) and the zārâ Woman (Proverbs 1-9)” and “The Negative Side: Potiphar’s Wife, Samson’s Women, and the zārâ Woman of Proverbs” (pp. 111-113, 121-122) in The Israelite Woman: Social Role and Literary Type in Biblical Narrative by Athalya Brenner-Idan (2014)
“Wise and Strange: An Interpretation of the Female Imagery in Proverbs in Light of Trickster Mythology” by Claudia V. Camp, (pp. 131-156) in A Feminist Companion to Wisdom Literature, ed. Athalya Brenner (1995)
“Who Would Blame Her? The ‘Strange Woman’ of Proverbs 7” by Mieke Heijerman, (pp. 100-109) in A Feminist Companion to Wisdom Literature, ed. Athalya Brenner (1995)
"Proverbs" by Christine Roy Yoder in Women's Bible Commentary, edited by Carol A. Newsom, Sharon H. Ringe, and Jacqueline E. Lapsley (2012)

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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