The Matriarchs as Models

In the Israelite hill country, toward the beginning of the eleventh century BCE, there lived a woman named Hannah. Though her name meant "grace" or "favor," she hardly considered herself either graced or favored. Her husband Elkanah loved her, to be sure, but she was childless. To make matters worse, Elkanah had another wife, common enough in those days: a woman named Peninnah, who had given birth to many children, sons and daughters. Living under one roof with her husband, her husband's other wife, and her husband's other wife's children, Hannah would have been reminded of her unhappy situation almost every moment of every day. But it was particularly evident during the family's annual pilgrimage to the great sanctuary of Shiloh, the home of the revered Ark of the Covenant, the place where Israel could communicate most directly with its God.

Every year, Elkanah would take his household to Shiloh to offer thanks for their mutual well-being, by sacrificing an animal from his herd or his flock, burning its innards on the altar, donating some of its meat to the local priests, and consuming the remainder of the animal with his family in a rare bountiful feast. Hannah may well have wondered what well-being she had to be thankful for, given her daily misery. Her feelings would only have been compounded by the traditional practice at the feast itself: as Elkanah divided up the meat among his household, Hannah's childless solitude was made tangibly manifest, as Peninnah received multiple portions for herself and her children while Hannah was given one lonely portion, to be shared with no one.

The mere objective facts of her life were no doubt hard enough. But, adding insult to injury, Peninnah could not refrain from taunting Hannah over the fact that Hannah's barren state was God's doing. Said in God's holiest sanctuary, this accusation had real force behind it. Elkanah attempted to soothe Hannah: "Why are you so sad? Am I not dearer to you than ten sons?" (1 Sam 1:8). Yet for Hannah, even this question must have cut deeply — after all, her rival Peninnah had both Elkanah and children; she wasn't forced to choose. And with Peninnah's taunt ringing in her ears, Hannah had every right to wonder if there wasn't some truth to it: what good would Elkanah's love be — what good is anything — if God himself had turned against her?

Of the five narratives of barren women in the Hebrew Bible — the others being the matriarchs Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel and the unnamed mother of Samson — the story of Hannah is by far the most fully rendered. And yet it is told in a mere eight verses at the beginning of 1 Samuel. We know of Hannah's internal torments only from later in the chapter, from the story of her heartfelt prayer, where we are told that she is "wretched," that she lives in "suffering," that she is "a very unhappy woman," that she experiences "anguish and distress" (1 Sam 1:10–16). We know, then, how Hannah feels about her infertility, all of which is eminently understandable. But the description at the beginning of the chapter leaves much unsaid, and many questions unanswered.

The narrator gives us virtually no information about Hannah: where she comes from, what she looks like, who she is as a person — the only description we are given is that she has no children. When we turn to the other barren women in the Hebrew Bible, we find the same descriptive brevity at work, with only minor variations. In Genesis 11, we learn that Abraham has taken a wife named Sarah, of whom we are told immediately and without any further introduction that she "was barren; she had no child" (Gen 11:30). Rebekah enters the scene in Genesis 24, where she proves herself to be generous and worthy; but in the next chapter, with little warning and less detail, we hear that Isaac has to plead with God on her behalf "because she was barren" (Gen 25:21), her infertile state being relegated to a mere subordinate clause. As with Hannah, we know that Rachel is loved by her husband Jacob, who spent fourteen years working to marry her; yet she speaks not a single word in the narrative of those years. Instead, immediately after she has finally married Jacob, we learn from the narrator that "Rachel was barren" (Gen 29:31). And the poor mother of Samson — she is not even given a name, but is known to us only as the wife of Manoah, introduced in the text thusly: "His wife was barren and had borne no children" (Judg 13:2).

The exclusive quality of infertility — the sense that it is the only aspect of these women that is worth mentioning — is not limited only to the narratorial voice. Not only is infertility Hannah's defining descriptive feature, it also seems to be all anyone can speak to her about. Before she bears Samuel, every word Hannah speaks, in her prayer and her dialogue with the priest Eli, is related to her distress. Her rival, Peninnah, taunts her about her infertility. The only words Elkanah speaks to her are an attempt to relieve her sorrow over having no offspring. So too with Sarah: though almost entirely silent in the biblical text before giving birth to Isaac, when she does speak it is either to Abraham, to complain about her infertile status when compared to her handmaid Hagar, or to herself, doubting God's ability to make her pregnant (and then to God, trying to deny her doubts). Rachel's first words, addressed to Jacob, are "Give me children, or I shall die" (Gen 30:1). When she next speaks it is to her sister Leah, requesting some of the mandrakes that Leah's son Reuben had found (30:14). The mandrake is no ordinary plant. It was considered to have potent aphrodisiacal properties — the Hebrew word for mandrake comes from the same root as the word for "beloved," and the plant appears only twice in the Hebrew Bible, here in Genesis and in the highly sexually charged Song of Songs. When Rachel requests the mandrakes, she is requesting them as a means of increasing her fertility; having perhaps exhausted other options, she is turning in desperation to the world of dietary medicine. The laser-like focus on each woman's infertility, to the exclusion of nearly every other aspect of her identity, means that infertility is effectively her identity. If women in the ancient world were reduced to vessels for childbearing, barren women were just fragile shells, empty of consequence.

All of these stories, all of these lives, zero in on one salient characteristic, then leave us grasping for explanations. No explicit interpretation of this infertility is provided. By leaving unspoken the full meaning of this bald description — "she was barren" — the text allows, even invites, its readers to project onto and into the story their own understandings. In many ways, this...