INTRODUCTION
The Old Testament depicts the widow as under God’s protection, and it admonishes God’s people to care for the widow, which is indicative of the widow’s vulnerable status in ancient Israel and early Judaism. In the book of Judith, we see a widow who is vulnerable as she confronts the enemy Holofernes, but who exhibits moral and religious authority within her community and also demonstrates strength that she attributes to the Lord. The Judith narrative is indicative of a possible change in the perception of widows and widowhood, but the status of widows in the New Testament era did not lose all of its negative attributes. There was still a stigma associated with being a widow in Judaism, and this stigma carried over into the first century of our era, when as Jan Bremmer notes, “women were in many ways not highly regarded by the Jewish males of Palestine, and widows least of all.”1 Bremmer affirms that widows were
still objects of care in the New Testament, as evidenced by admonitions there to care for the widow.2 James 1:27 states, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the
Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world,” which is reminiscent of Isa. 1:16-18, which implies God’s favor for those who care for the widow, stating that sins become “like wool” for one who
1 Bremmer, “Pauper,” 32.
2 Jesus tells his disciples to beware of the scribes, who “devour widows’ houses” and incur condemnation for that and other transgressions. See Matt. 23:14; Mark 12:38-40; and Luke 20:47. H. Kraft, “χήρα,” in Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament vol. 3, eds. Horst Balz and Gerhard Schneider (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1990), 466, points out that “Rev 18:7 juxtaposes ‘queen and widow’ as opposing possibilities for the fate of a woman—extreme power or helplessness.”
cares for the widow. Boris Repschinski, S.J., comments on the connection between pure worship and charity towards widows in the Epistle of James:
He puts this kind of behavior into the context of worship. James now contrasts the worthless worship of the hearers with the pure and unblemished worship of the doers. Thus what the whole chapter has been leading up to is now made explicit. At the heart of the metaphors used in Jas 1 is the exhortation to a worship what is pure and undefiled and that renders a person undefiled as well.
The astonishing feature of James is, however, that the idea of pure worship is not a mere cultic procedure of ablutions, or even faithfulness to the Law. Purity of worship is achieved in acts of charity to widows and orphans. Charity is
circumscribed with the word ἐπισκέπτεσθαι. In LXX usage this word refers almost
exclusively to God visiting or saving his people. Widows and orphans are the “classic recipients”3 of God’s and Israel’s care and take up the theme of the
reversal of rich and poor alluded to in Jas 1:9–11. Thus the assistance of the needy becomes the singular way of achieving a worship that fulfills the demands of purity. James replaces rites of purification with ethical demands and puts them into the context of ritual purity.4
However, the Epistle of James does not introduce an innovation regarding the relationship between purification rites and ethical demands, as Repschinski suggests. In fact, as Milgrom asserts, “the bonding of ethics and ritual is not unique to Israel,” and cites ancient Near Eastern inscriptions as evidence.5 Ritual purity and ethical demands went hand in hand in ancient Israel. Isa. 1:12-18, for example, emphasizes the
connection between worship of God and expressing that worship through charity towards the widow and other oppressed peoples. Lev. 19:18-19 commands the people to love
3 Repschinski, “Purity in Matthew, James, and the Didache,” in Matthew, James, and Didache:
Three Related Documents in their Jewish and Christian Settings, eds. Huub van de Sandt and Jürgen K.
Zangenberg (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2008), 391, cites here Luke Timothy Johnson, Letter of
James (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 212.
4 Repschinski, “Purity,” 391; see also Margaret Y. MacDonald, Early Christian Women and
Pagan Opinion: The Power of the Hysterical Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
226.
5 Milgrom, Leviticus, 215, “It abounds in Mesopotamia—for example, Šurpu tablet II; the
Bilingual Hymn to Nanurta, II.3-7; the Nanshe Hymn, 136-71—and is exemplified in Egypt’s sacral sphere by an inscription on a door of the temple of Edfu. Unique to Israel…is the subsumption of rituals and
their neighbor as themselves and to keep the Lord’s statutes. Lev. 19:34-37 commands the people to love the stranger as they love themselves, and to observe all of the Lord’s statutes and ordinances. Loving one’s neighbor and loving the stranger are linked with keeping the Lord’s laws, and are commanded in the context of ritual purity. Thus, ritual purity and keeping God’s laws were only part of what it meant to keep God’s commands. God also commands one to extend charity towards one’s neighbor and to strangers, encompassing all people one encounters. Lev. 19:2 summarizes its contents saying, “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” Milgrom writes about the dietary laws in Leviticus, that these laws are “the Torah’s prerequisite for the ethical life. Only through a daily regimen of disciplines that reminds that reminds humans that life is sacred can humans aspire to a way of life fully informed by other ethical virtues. The dietary laws are rungs on the ladder of holiness, leading to a life of pure thought and deed, characteristic of the nature of God.”6 Even though Leviticus contains many legal prescriptions, it is primarily about God’s holiness, his people’s access to him through rituals and sacrifice, and about his desire for his people to become holy like him.
Bremmer also observes that Greco-Roman culture more generally did not
embrace Christianity’s evolving elevation and veneration of the widow, citing the satirist Lucian as an example of how many still looked down upon the widow. Lucian writes (c. A.D. 165) about the Cynic philosopher Peregrinus, who while he was in prison as a Christian was “visited by ‘old crones, widows, and orphans,’ categories typical of the most vulnerable in ancient society. Lucian clearly satirizes their prominent position
among the Christians, but he did not realize that he was witnessing a slow revolution in the ancient value system, which would soon develop into a tidal wave.”7
I start this chapter with a review of widows in Greco-Roman antiquity, followed by a brief survey of Lukan widows, and then I will focus particularly on Anna the prophetess in Luke 2:36-38, on Tabitha and the widows in Acts 9:36-43, and on 1 Tim. 5.8 I will concentrate on Luke’s gospel because “Luke has more episodes about widows than any other evangelist”; in addition to the Anna and Tabitha narratives, these episodes include, among others, Luke 2: 36-38 (Anna the prophetess), Luke 4:25-26 (the widow at Zarephath), Luke 7:11-17 (the resuscitation of the widow’s son at Nain), Luke 18:1-8 (the widow and the unrighteous judge), Luke 20:47 (admonition to the scribes who “devour widows’ houses”), Luke 21:1-4 (the widow’s mite), and Acts 6:1-6 (the Hellenists complained that their widows were being neglected in the daily food distribution).9