Women and Prophecy in Biblical Israel

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Attempts to define the biblical prophets often start with the etymology most scholars accept for the Hebrew word for “prophet”: nabi (a male prophet) and nebi’a (a female prophet) are both passive participles of the Hebrew root nb’, “to call.” A prophet, then, is “one who is called” or, by inference, “one who is called by God,” more specifically, “one who is called by God to deliver God’s message.” Sometimes, these prophets deliver God’s message through dramatic acts: In Jeremiah 19, for example, God commands the prophet to break a pottery vessel into pieces in order to symbolize that God […]

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Footnotes

1. William E. Phipps, “A Woman Was the First to Declare Scripture Holy,” Bible Review, April 1990.

2. Karen Britt and Ra‘anan Boustan, “Warrior Women: Deborah and Yael Found at Huqoq,” BAR, Winter 2023.

3. Hanna Tervanotko, “Biblical Profile: Miriam Through the Ages,” BAR, Fall 2023.

Endnotes

1. See, for example, Esther J. Hamori, Women’s Divination in Biblical Literature: Prophecy, Necromancy and Other Arts of Knowledge (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2015), pp. 167–183; Marjo C.A. Korpel, “Avian Spirits in Ugarit and Ezekiel 13,” in Nicolas Wyatt et al., eds., Ugarit, Religion, and Culture: Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Ugarit, Religion and Culture, Edinburgh, July 1994 (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 1996), pp. 99–113; and Jonathan Stökl, “The mtnb’wt in Ezekiel 13 Reconsidered,” Journal of Biblical Literature 132 (2013), pp. 61–76.

2. Nancy R. Bowen, “The Daughters of Your People: Female Prophets in Ezek 13:17–23,” Journal of Biblical Literature 118 (1999), pp. 417–433.