How many women are named in the Torah?

If you were to count, one answer is 111. Sounds a lot, yet most are either unknown or ignored. Interestingly, the number of men varies between 1,700-3,000.

Joseph and his journey is the longest running single person narrative in the Hebrew bible.

And though, as so often happens, the women who drive the story forward, who are sometimes literally the ones who births the story, to the women who journeys with, who acts or who resists the male character are hardly ever in focus.

Sometimes they are just a name mentioned briefly, a part of the genealogical line, like the two handmaids Zilpah and Bilhah who give birth to two of Joseph’s brothers each.

What do we know about these two women? Sadly not a lot. They are slave-wives, handmaids to Rachel and Leah, given to Jacob to procreate with when the two main wives cannot conceive.

The midrashim, the ancient stories that explain these narratives but are not found in the Torah, only really concern themselves with who these two women belong to and how they came into the family.

Later rabbis worry about their status; were they outsiders and if so, were their children of lesser status than the others? Were they the result of what we today would call a mixed marriage? The Torah itself fastidiously mentions their names, but later tradition is more ambiguous about them.

The only story in the Torah where they are more than a name happens after the death of Rachel in childbirth. Rueben, the eldest son of Jacob and Leah, lies with Bilhah. How this came about, whether it was consensual, whether this was just an act of revenge by Reuben is not clear, and we never hear Bilhah’s side of the story.

She is silenced. She has a name but not a voice, she is acted upon, not an actor herself.

Her status is that of concubine/handmaid/slave-wife – categories that show her lack of parity with Rachel and Leah. How she and Zilpah ended up in these roles we do not know.

Was it due to financial hardship, were they were born into it, did they become slave-wives due to their outsider status or was it down to skin colour. We just do not know. What we do know is that they are silent.

We never hear their voices, their dreams or what they felt about being the lower caste wives of Jacob? How did they feel about the rivalry between the sisters and how that might have played out between all the children?

In the same full parasha there is, however, another woman who acts differently, who takes power and action into her own hands. We also don’t know her background, but her actions are very different to Bilhah and Zilpah’s.

Tamar married Er, son of Judah and after his death she is given to his brother Onan who subsequently also dies. Out of fear for his youngest son’s Shelah life, Judah refuses to let Tamar marry him.

Desperate to have a child and carry on the lineage, Tamar creates an elaborate ruse to get pregnant. By taking the situation into her own hands, she ends up sleeping with Judah, her father-in-law (who also happened to be the brother of Joseph), and conceives that way.

Here is a story of how a woman acts, who plans and speaks and her voice is heard. We should not forget that she has to use her sexuality to gain that power, rather than an inherent sense of value, by being a person in her own right or member of the family.

Her behaviour, though it challenged biblical morality and law, was nonetheless vindicated by the later rabbis, because she still played into the larger scheme of lineage and procreation. In that sense she was a ‘good girl’.

The question these stories raise is not just about their fairness or lack of them, but also about how we should read them.

For in reading these difficult stories it is easy to stumble upon the question of whether the Torah is good for women?

Should we read the stories of female characters or are they too unpalatable and misogynistic for modern readers? Are we taught to read stories of ‘good silent girls’ who do as they are told? And how can that affect us?

One answer is to be a resistant reader, to read with suspicion so that we pay attention to identity, power and gender relations.

The literary scholar Judith Fetterley suggests that: “A resistant reading is an active sceptical questioning of the text and not a passive reception. Reading against the grain does not imply a rejection of the text as a whole but a conscious attempt to break down the ideology within. It is a rejection of the narrator’s value judgments and interpretation of motives. A resistant reading critically evaluates the ideology in the text and ‘read the Bible against its patriarchal framework’.” (Davies 2003:45).

The cultural theorist Mieke Bal has created a strategy she calls “counter-coherence: the more something is repressed in the text, the more it needs to be brought to the surface” (Davies 2003:45).

And Stanley Fish, another author and theorist, points out that it is not enough to ask what the text means, reading against the grain means asking what does the text do? (Davies 2003:47).

Being a resistant reader, looking for what is repressed in the story and asking what a text does, rather than means, are methods we can use when reading these difficult ancient stories.

How we read them can help us open our eyes to what is beyond the text. Saying Bilhah and Zilpah’s names as part of the matriarchs reminds us that as much as our prayers can remove people from our consciousness, so too can their inclusion remind us of the women who are in the stories.

Reading against the grain, looking at what is not said and how we are affected is not only for literary theorists or texts in a book. There are ‘texts’ all around us, ideas and expectations that we absorb without even realising it, until something as horrendous as the murders of Sara Everard and Sabina Nessa confronts us.

Reading an article where a young woman explained how she put a key between her fingers when out at night or feeling unsafe was the moment I realised that this was not just something I did, or a few of my friends, but lots of women do.

Realising that this is a practice many many women have was earth shattering, for it showed that it is a common story that we do not feel safe in many spaces. It wasn’t ‘just’ a story a few of us live with, it is so very common.

And the uproar after these murders and the ripples that are still happening is real life resistance towards a narrative that tells us that being unsafe is ‘just the way it is’, and we need to live with it.

Yet another story that tells women that the world is dangerous if you step out independently is the story of Dina which could have been read last week, but many communities skip.

Dina, the daughter of Jacob and Leah, sister of Joseph, dares to be independent and goes out on her own to do her job, and in the process is attacked. If you do not read this story against the grain you easily end up with an understanding that Dina should not have been out on her own, for it is too dangerous for a woman to be outside of the safety of her home.

The rising awareness of violence against women in all its form, is a way of resisting a meta-narrative that tells all of us, whatever our gender that violence is just part of life, and we need to learn to live with it.

The stories of Zilpah, Bilhah, Tamar and Dina can help us to read the stories that surround us critically and help us ask questions of what is hidden from our eyes, what do these societal stories do to us, and how can we read them with resistance?