Daughters in the Hebrew Bible

Female characters are essential to biblical stories. The Creation Story is incomplete without the woman, Eve. The patriarchs, Abraham and Isaac, are paired with Sarah and Rebekah. Readers remember Laban’s daughters, Leah and Rachel, as Jacob’s wives and the matriarchs of the Tribes of Israel. Alongside King David, Bathsheba figures prominently into the monarchical narrative of crime, punishment, and family dysfunction, and Jezebel stands as the alluring and seductive cause of group dissention, disorder, and chaos during the reign of her husband, King Ahab. As these examples demonstrate, female characters oftentimes function as foils to powerful, marquee males, but such is usually the case only when the women are wives or mothers. In a patriarchal world like that depicted in the biblical text, fathers, male offspring, wives, and mothers enjoy status unavailable to other kinds of women, like daughters.