Look below for details how you can win!

Last year is when I first heard about a strange project : a Ten­nessee blog­ger was embark­ing on a one-​​year com­mit­ment to live out the bib­li­cal direc­tives aimed at women as an effort to demon­strate “bib­li­cal wom­an­hood.” The result is Rachel Held Evans’ new book, A Year of Bib­li­cal
Wom­an­hood : How a Lib­er­ated Woman Found Her­self Sit­ting on Her Roof, Cov­er­ing Her Head, and Call­ing Her Hus­band Mas­ter. ( I love long titles! Seri­ously, I do!)

Rachel’s book is a record of dif­fer­ent antics she sub­mit­ted her­self to as she took the words of the Bible lit­er­ally. Pas­sages like Proverbs 31 where the vir­tu­ous woman is described as being the ulti­mate domes­tic god­dess who man­ages her house­hold with the skill of Martha Stew­art is one exam­ple. Rachel deter­mined that to try to emu­late the Proverbs 31 woman she would need to brush up on her domes­tic skills. Armed with a Martha Stew­art cook­book, she set out to learn how to cook meals that were far above her reper­toire. This may sound silly, but every good Chris­t­ian woman knows that home­mak­ing and kitchen tal­ent is cod­i­fied in the col­lec­tive con­scious of the faith­ful. Rachel notes this by quot­ing con­tribut­ing writer, Dorothy Pat­ter­son from the guide on tra­di­tional roles, Recov­er­ing Bib­li­cal Man­hood and Wom­an­hood.
She writes:

This photo from Rachel’s web­site shows her with a pan of freshly made “matza tof­fee.writes:

(Pat­ter­son) con­cludes from these two pas­sages that “keep­ing the house is God’s assign­ment to the wife – even down to chang­ing the sheets, doing the laun­dry, and scrub­bing the floors.” Ambi­tions that might lead a woman to work out­side the home, says Pat­ter­son, con­sti­tute the kind of “evil desires” that lead directly to sin. — A Year of Bib­li­cal Womanhood

It is this world­view that Rachel deter­mined to chal­lenge, and rather than stop with a few well-​​written blog posts, she thought of a cre­ative way to really get her point across while at the same time brush­ing up on her cook­ing skills, a bonus accord­ing to hus­band Dan.

Bib­li­cal Wom­an­hood, as I call this book to keep it short and sim­ple, is a smart and humor­ous jour­ney of a curi­ous writer who chooses to wres­tle out one of the most polar­iz­ing issues in the Amer­i­can church today : the role of women. Early in the book, Rachel describes her South­ern upbring­ing in a churched fam­ily that was not rigid about tra­di­tional roles. She men­tions her mom a few times through­out the book. “The only peo­ple who enjoy potlucks are men. Women do all the work,” says her mom writes Rachel.

These glimpses of Rachel’s grow­ing up years and later her col­lege years gives con­text to how the church shaped her per­spec­tive on the debate of women and roles and lead­er­ship and also to why this is such an impor­tant issue to Rachel. She is a cham­pion for women’s equality.

The book is funny. Rachel has some great one liner’s pep­pered through­out the book, sort of remind­ing me of humor writer, Erma Bombeck Rachel’s humor is inci­sive, yet not sharp. Like this quip:

We evan­gel­i­cals have a nasty habit of throw­ing the word bib­li­cal around like it’s Mar­tin Luther’s mid­dle name.

Bib­li­cal Wom­an­hood is a fast read. All through­out the sto­ry­telling and sur­prise zingers, Rachel shares her reflec­tions about the stereo­typ­i­cal Chris­t­ian woman. She dis­man­tles it, bit by frilly bit, show­ing that under­neath the rules and roles and pre­sump­tions about Bible com­mands, that there is no one-​​size fits all bib­li­cal woman tem­plate. For some read­ers, this is not a rush of rev­e­la­tion. But for a Ten­nessee blog­ger find­ing her way through the jun­gle of rhetoric as the war on women wages within (and out­side) the church, Rachel does many women a great ser­vice by show­cas­ing how absurd it is for all women (let alone any woman!) to try to live up to an ideal that we were never meant to live up to in the first place. This is a pow­er­house of a book writ­ten with can­dor, humor and just the right amount of the­ol­ogy to keep it from get­ting bogged down. I hap­pily rec­om­mend it.

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I was able to catch Rachel before her whirl­wind pro­mo­tion of her book kicked in. Here is a short email inter­view she kindly agreed to. Be sure to check out details at the end of the inter­view of how you can win a free copy of her book. We have three to give away!

Me: At the end of A Year of Bib­li­cal Wom­an­hood, you write that you were look­ing for a story when you embarked on your project and the story you found was a deep desire for per­mis­sion to be a woman. A Year of Bib­li­cal Wom­an­hood project helped free you from need­ing per­mis­sion to be a woman and to Just Be. What were some key moments that led to this realization?

Rachel : One of the most lib­er­at­ing parts of the exper­i­ment for me was redis­cov­er­ing the sto­ries of cel­e­brated women from Scrip­ture — and not just the ones we hear about grow­ing up in Sun­day school, but women like Deb­o­rah, Hul­dah, Jael, Miriam, Vashti, Ruth, Esther, Mary of Bethany, Mary Mag­da­lene, Junia, Priscilla, Tabitha and Phoebe. What I found was that each of these women hon­ored God in a dif­fer­ent way, that they showed incred­i­ble brav­ery and faith that tran­scended their cul­ture, their cir­cum­stances, and their sta­tus as women in a patri­ar­chal world.

Chris­t­ian women are often told that their lives should look like car­bon copies of the woman cel­e­brated in Proverbs 31, and too often, the focus is on the ele­ments of that acros­tic poem that fea­ture the domes­tic accom­plish­ments of an upper-​​class ancient Near East­ern wife (keep­ing the home, pro­vid­ing food for the fam­ily, weav­ing from dawn until dark). But that misses the point of the text entirely! Proverbs 31 is not a to-​​list describ­ing what a woman is sup­posed to get done in a given day; it’s a poem cel­e­brat­ing what a woman has already accom­plished! It’s meant to honor a woman’s daily acts of valor, which is why the poem begins, “a woman of valor who can find?” (The Hebrew is eshet chayil — woman of valor).

What’s inter­est­ing is that the bib­li­cal hero­ine Ruth too is iden­ti­fied as a “woman of valor” (eshet chayil). And she is iden­ti­fied as such before is mar­ried, before she has chil­dren, and before she had a pot to pee in. In fact, you could argue that Ruth had the oppo­site lifestyle of the Proverbs 31 woman, since she was poor, wid­owed, and childless….and yet she too is iden­ti­fied as a “woman of valor.”

So as my explo­ration of these women went on, I began to see that being a woman of valor isn’t about what you do, but how you do it. It’s not about squeez­ing into a mold or a par­tic­u­lar lifestyle; it’s about liv­ing your life with char­ac­ter and brav­ery. It’s about liv­ing your life as the woman God cre­ated you to be.

Me: In your intro and through­out your book, you refer to your mom who pro­vided you with a Chris­t­ian upbring­ing. All the sto­ries about your child­hood sug­gest that though the mes­sag­ing of ide­al­ized bib­li­cal wom­an­hood was absorbed in church and rein­forced in col­lege, this was not the case in your home. Did you have con­ver­sa­tions at home with your mother or sis­ter about these things dur­ing your grow­ing up years? What about now? What did your mom think of your bib­li­cal wom­an­hood project ?

Rachel: My mom is awe­some. She never really fit into the per­ceived mold of the South­ern Chris­t­ian woman, and I love her for that! (She used to com­plain about how men were the only ones who enjoyed church potlucks because the women were always stuck doing all the work.) So I think I got a lot of my…chutzpah…from her, and I’m grate­ful. She and my dad have shown unwa­ver­ing sup­port for me, even when my pas­sion for gen­der equal­ity in the Church has set me at odds with evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers who are respected in their cir­cles. Same goes for my sis­ter, who, even though she is younger than me, I look up to as a model of valor and grace. We Held women have always been opin­ion­ated and strong, and we’ve always sur­rounded our­selves with men who aren’t intim­i­dated by that. So I think gen­der equal­ity has hap­pened nat­u­rally in our homes. The trick is see­ing it played out in the church.

Me: Your book is some­what mem­oiresque con­cern­ing your mar­riage. Your hus­band Dan is fea­tured a lot in the book includ­ing excerpts from his jour­nal dur­ing the time of your wom­an­hood project. In some ways, your book is as much about mar­riage as it is about a woman’s iden­tity. Did you intend this or is that where the writ­ing took you?

Rachel: We knew from the begin­ning that the project would turn a spot­light on our mar­riage, and we were a lit­tle ner­vous about that at first. But what the project did, in the end, was remind us of how happy we are func­tion­ing as a team of equal part­ners rather than as a hier­ar­chy. When I took some of those “sub­mis­sion” pas­sages lit­er­ally and out of con­text (as com­ple­men­tar­i­ans tend to do), Dan was just as uncom­fort­able as I was impos­ing a gender-​​based hier­ar­chy onto our mar­riage, believe me. At one point he “ordered” me to stop sub­mit­ting! So we both emerged from the project more appre­cia­tive of our rela­tion­ships, and happy to get back to nor­mal and just be our­selves. Impos­ing hier­ar­chy onto a part­ner­ship is dis­ori­ent­ing and unnec­es­sary, and I ache or all the cou­ples who feel like they have to do that because some­one told them that the Bible requires it.

Me: Every writer I know har­bors hopes and fears for the books they write. What are some of the hopes and fear you have for this book?

Rachel: I hope that A Year of Bib­li­cal Wom­an­hood will make peo­ple laugh. It includes a bunch of funny sto­ries (and pic­tures!) from my adven­tures in fol­low­ing all the Bible’s instruc­tions for women as lit­er­ally as pos­si­ble for a year…so I hope it enter­tains! I also hope that it helps lib­er­ate women from this idea that there’s just one right way to be a woman of faith, that “bib­li­cal wom­an­hood” means keep­ing the home and sub­mit­ting to men.

My fear, of course, is that it will be mis­un­der­stood. I think every writer wor­ries about that. I fear that peo­ple will judge it with­out read­ing it, that they will think I’m mak­ing fun of the Bible, when noth­ing could be fur­ther from the truth. I took on this project pre­cisely because I love the Bible, and I was tired of see­ing it reduced to a list of rules and roles when it came to some­thing as impor­tant and beau­ti­ful as womanhood.

Many thanks to Rachel for offer­ing my blog read­ers some insights into her book. For more info about A Year of Bib­li­cal Wom­an­hood check out Rachel’s blog, and if you don’t already sub­scribe to it, Do It !!

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Rachel’s pub­lisher has offered to mail a book to three read­ers of this blog. So cool, right?!

Here’s what you need to do to try to score one of these copies:

• Leave a com­ment Tell me what you think of this idea of “bib­li­cal womanhood.”

• Sub­scribe to this blog If you aren’t already sub­scribed here’s a LINK to make that easy for you. Be sure you’re sub­scribed to the blog and not just my newslet­ter. Only sub­scribed read­ers are eli­gi­ble to win.

I will choose three com­men­tors based entirely on my sub­jec­tive pow­ers. Get your com­ment posted by Thurs­day, 12:00pm PST time. Click here to con­vert your time. Win­ners announced in Friday’s post. I will email win­ners for your mail­ing addresses to for­ward to the publisher.

Super excited. This is the first time I’ve offered a book give­away. I look for­ward to your com­ments. Who knew bib­li­cal wom­an­hood could be such a hot topic?

***POST UPDATE***

Here’s the LINK to see the winners!