“And lo, Jacob did work all the way to upper middle management of the insurance company”

Some years ago I used to occasionally repost comments from my comment sections that I found particularly insightful. I’d like to revive that. We’ll start with a comment by reader Froglet, on a post I wrote about one of Lori Alexander’s many posts urging women (in no uncertain terms) to eschew careers. In her post, Lori said that there’s nothing in the Bible about God bringing blessings on women’s careers. This bothered Froglet.

Froglet wrote as follows:

Maybe not the thing to zero in on, but the thing about the Bible being silent on blessings for women’s careers bugs me. First of all, there’s definitely examples of women being entrepreneurs in the Bible (not just the hypothetical Proverbs 31 woman, but Lydia and her purple cloth business, and those are just two off the top of my head), as well as Judges, prophetesses, etc. Now, I know that when these are acknowledged among really conservative types, they’re contorted to mean an acceptable side-business in the home, or just really good with the family grocery budget, or some other hand wave, and people say that that shouldn’t be considered a “career” the way we mean it today. But in that case, the Bible doesn’t have much to say on *anyone’s* career today. Pretty much every early “career” was a home career, and was shared in some way across the entire family. There’s no “and lo, Jacob did work all the way to upper middle management of the insurance company, and said that all in his must have a Jesus Fish on their business cards, and God saw that it was good, and gave Jed the VP a heart attack so he would retire early and leave Hacob that sweet corner office…”

Froglet’s point is an important one—the Bible doesn’t talk about women having careers outside of the home because, at the time, virtually no one had careers outside of the home. With some exceptions—sailors, soldiers, and merchants, for instance—people at the time tended to labor in and around the house, running farms, shops based in the home, etc.

So yes, the Bible is silent on blessings for women’s careers. But as Froglet so aptly points out, it’s also silent on upper middle management insurance jobs.

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