Echoes of women's voices in the poetry of the Bible

When biblical women found power in poetry, their voices still speak to us today. [iStockphoto]

There are books I read because I must, and there are books I read because they make me think differently about life. The Bible has become the latter for me. I was first encouraged to read it afresh by the Rev Joseph Kisoi of Africa Nazarene University. As part of my LLB studies, I took a course in Biblical Studies. One of the requirements was for each student to choose a book of the Bible and study it closely, making daily reflections on the text. I chose Acts.

For an entire semester, I lived with the Acts of the Apostles. I read it and kept a journal in which I recorded my daily encounters with the text. Every week, I submitted the journal as part of the requirements of the course. But something happened to me that I think was hidden in the goals of the syllabus. By the end of the semester, I was hooked. I had become addicted to the Bible. Acts only provided the gateway to the Bible. It was not just another book I had to study for a university course. It had become something I wanted to return to. So, I decided to do something rather ambitious. I decided to read the whole Bible again, from Genesis to Revelation.

This time, however, I wanted to read it differently. I would read it as a believer and a literary scholar. That change of perspective opened another Bible to me. I began noticing things I had previously passed over: the plots of stories, the economy of language, the use of metaphor, irony, repetition, symbolism, and dramatic dialogue. I noticed how characters are introduced, how their voices are constructed, and how seemingly minor moments acquire enormous significance.

In the process, I stumbled upon something that intrigued me. I realised that women in the Bible often find their most powerful voices in poetry. I first noticed this with Hannah. Hannah's story is one of humiliation and longing. She is a woman whose deepest desire had remained unfulfilled. Her barrenness had become a private sorrow and a source of public humiliation. Yet when her circumstances changed, Hannah did something literary. She spontaneously composed and sang a song.

Her song, recorded in 1 Samuel 2, begins with her personal experience but quickly becomes much larger than Hannah herself. She speaks of the proud and the humble, the mighty and the weak, the hungry and the well-fed. She sings of a God who reverses the fortunes of human beings. This transformation fascinated me. Why? It helped me better illustrate the Narrative Transformation Model (NTM) that I have been advancing. Hannah's private pain becomes public poetry. The woman who had been humiliated becomes the woman who speaks about power. Her personal story becomes a meditation on how the world is ordered, or, more precisely, on how God overturns the world's order. Once I noticed Hannah, I began seeing other women.

There is Miriam, standing on the other side of the Red Sea. Israel has escaped from Egypt. The waters have closed over Pharaoh's army. The people have crossed from slavery into freedom. Miriam takes a tambourine and leads the women in song. “Sing to the Lord,” she says. Again, a great historical event becomes poetry. Miriam does not merely witness liberation. She gives liberation a voice.

Then there is Deborah. In Judges 5, Deborah and Barak sing after Israel's victory. Deborah's song is equally fascinating because it does more than celebrate victory. It names the tribes that came to battle and those that remained behind. Besides, it celebrates courage and exposes cowardice. Here, poetry becomes a form of history. The historian might record who fought, but the poet remembers who was brave. And then there is Jael, another woman who enters that song in a moment of extraordinary violence and courage.

I started to believe that there was something about poetry that allowed biblical women to occupy a space they did not always occupy in the ordinary social order. This became more intriguing when I reached the Song of Songs. I cannot confidently say that a woman wrote the Song of Songs. Its authorship remains uncertain, notwithstanding its traditional association with Solomon. But the woman whose voice dominates much of the poem is unmistakable. She speaks of desire, her body and her longings. She searches for her beloved and praises him. She remembers him and tells us what she wants. Is this not strange in a holy book?

Look, folks. The woman is not merely the object of desire. She is also a desiring subject. The Bible, a book so often imagined as a repository of commandments, prohibitions and theological propositions, has preserved an extraordinarily sensuous female voice. Imagine! That voice does not apologise for desire. It turns it into poetry.

From this, I have come to appreciate an enduring aspect of poetry. It allows human beings to say what ordinary prose finds difficult to contain. Pain becomes lament, and joy becomes song. Desire becomes lyric, and hope becomes prophecy. Biblical women repeatedly enter that space. In the New Testament, we meet Mary. Mary's Magnificat immediately reminded me of Hannah. Mary sings of the proud being scattered, the mighty being brought down from their thrones and the lowly being lifted. It is difficult to read the two songs side by side without hearing an echo. Centuries separate them, but their poems seem to speak to one another. This, I think, is one of the discoveries that has made my rereading of the Bible so rewarding.

Biblical women do not merely appear at crucial moments to interpret those stories. They sing when they have suffered, when they have been delivered, and when they have conquered. This is why I have come to think that poetry occupies such an important place in the Bible. Poetry is not merely decorative language. It is a way of knowing and gives form to experiences that resist ordinary explanation.

Interestingly, biblical women speak to the Kenya I know. Hannah's anguish reminds me of the Kenyan woman whose worth is still measured by whether she has borne children. Deborah makes me think of the woman in leadership who must prove her authority twice, first by what she does, and then by defending the fact that she is a woman doing it. The woman in the Song of Songs reminds me that Kenyan women, too, have desires, ambitions and bodies that are their own, even when society would rather prescribe what they should want. Abigail leads me to the countless women who quietly negotiate the consequences of conflicts they did not create. Mary, young and vulnerable yet audacious in her speech, reminds me of a new generation of Kenyan women. They have refused to inherit silence. The Bible's women remain contemporary. The centuries have changed, but the struggle to be heard has not.

Prof Egara Kabaji is a writer, educationist, and researcher based at Masinde Muliro University. He is also the Vice President of the Pan African Writers Association (PAWA) and the Chancellor of Mt. Kigali University, Rwanda.