“No people ever rise higher than the point to which they elevate their woman” Isabella Thoburn
Warm-up: Numbers 27:1-7; Joshua 17:3-4
Zelophehad had five daughters – Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah – but no sons. According to the law of hereditary possession in the Ancient Semitic world, a man’s property passed solely to his sons or to the male members of the clan. Thus, when Zelophehad died, his five daughters could not inherit his land.
They came, however, and “stood before Moses, Eleazar the priest, the leaders and the whole assembly,”, and asked for their father’s portion in the land. (Note that their request came before Israel had even gained possession of the Promised Land. These women, unlike the generation that perished in the wilderness, took God at His word! )
Moses took the matter before the Lord and the Lord took up the women’s cause: “What Zelophehad’s daughters are saying is right. You must certainly give them property as an inheritance among their father’s relatives and turn their father’s inheritance over to them.”
Twenty-five years later, when the land was in Israel’s hands, the daughters of Zelophehad appeared again before Eleazar the priest and the leaders of Israel, this time under the command of Joshua. “The Lord commanded Moses to give us an inheritance among our brothers,” they said. So these good men, acting against the convention and bias of their day, but in obedience to God, “gave them an inheritance along with the brothers of their father, according to the LORD’s command (Joshua 17:4).
Hurrah for these men, and hurrah for the man who has wisdom to set aside the prejudice of his day and give women their God-given inheritance. For, as Peter said, they are “heirs with you [men] of the gracious gift of life” (1 Peter 3:7)
No man should ever demean or belittle a woman, at least no man who claims the Name. For if we follow in the footsteps of Jesus, we follow a man who “never nagged at [women], never flattered, or coaxed, or patronized them; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything ‘funny’ about a woman’s nature” (Dorothy Sayers, Are Women Human?).
Women are heirs with me of the life of God, fully equal in their capacity to know God and to grow into the full stature of Christ. To think otherwise is unmanly and ungodly.