The Women Who Spoke for God

Three Prophets the Pulpit Forgot

“I brought you up out of Egypt and redeemed you from the land of slavery. I sent Moses to lead you, also Aaron and Miriam.” Micah 6:4 (NIV); see also Exodus 15:20–21; 2 Kings 22:14–20; Luke 2:36–38

Think about how we decide who gets to speak for God. Usually it is the person with the title. The one with the degree on the wall, the ordination paper, the reserved spot behind the pulpit. We hand them the microphone because the system says they earned it.

God has a habit of doing it differently. Over and over in Scripture, when God wants something said, He puts His words in the mouth of somebody the system would have skipped. A shepherd boy. A foreigner. A teenager. And yes, more than once, a woman. Let me introduce you to three of them.

Miriam. Huldah. Anna. You may never have heard a sermon on any of them. But each one carried the actual word of God to God’s people, and one of them did something so important that the Bible you hold today might look different without her.

Miriam, Named by God Himself

Start with Miriam, the sister of Moses. After God split the sea and Israel walked out of slavery, Scripture calls Miriam a prophet and shows her leading the people in worship on the far shore (Exodus 15:20-21). That alone is worth noticing. But the bigger moment comes later, and it comes straight from God’s own mouth.

In the book of Micah, God reminds Israel how He rescued them, and He names the leaders He sent to do it. Listen to the list. I sent Moses to lead you, also Aaron and Miriam (Micah 6:4). That is God talking. And God puts Miriam right there alongside Moses and Aaron as one of the three leaders He sent to bring a nation out of bondage. Not an assistant to the leaders. One of them.

It is worth slowing down on Miriam, because her story rhymes with Deborah’s in a way that is hard to miss. On the far side of the Red Sea, with Egypt’s army drowned behind them, Miriam picks up a tambourine and leads all the women out in song and dance, singing back to them, Sing to the LORD, for he is highly exalted (Exodus 15:20-21). Many scholars think those words are among the oldest lines preserved anywhere in the Bible. A woman’s song, sung at the very birth of the nation, kept and handed down for thousands of years. Israel did not merely tolerate Miriam’s voice. They wrote it into Scripture and never took it out.

Huldah, Who Vouched for the Word

Now Huldah, and this one should stop you in your tracks. King Josiah was a young king trying to bring his nation back to God. During a temple repair, workers found a lost scroll of God’s law that had been forgotten for years. The king heard it read aloud and tore his robes in fear, because the nation had not been keeping it. So he sent his highest officials with one assignment. Find a prophet who can tell us if this is really the word of God (2 Kings 22:8-13).

Here is the part nobody told you. There were famous male prophets active at that very moment. Jeremiah was prophesying. Zephaniah was prophesying. The king’s men walked right past both of them. They went to a woman named Huldah. And she answered with the full weight of a prophet. This is what the LORD says (2 Kings 22:15-20). She confirmed the scroll was God’s word, and her word set off the biggest religious reform in the nation’s history.

And think about the nerve it took to be Huldah in that moment. The king’s most powerful men show up at her door holding a scroll that could shake the whole kingdom, and they want to know if it is really from God. The safe play is to soften it, flatter the king, give them what they want to hear. Huldah did none of that. She told them judgment was coming, plain and unvarnished, and she told the king the hard truth about his own nation without blinking (2 Kings 22:15-20). It takes a particular kind of courage to speak that kind of truth to that kind of power. God found it in a woman, and the most powerful men in the land carried her words back to the throne without changing a syllable.

Some scholars say Huldah is the first person in the Bible to take a written text and declare it to be Holy Scripture. Sit with that. When God needed somebody to authenticate His own word, the men in charge sent for a woman, and they did not argue with her answer. They carried it back to the king and changed the course of a nation.

Anna, Who Saw the Messiah First

Then Anna, at the very start of the New Testament. She was old, a widow for decades, a prophet who all but lived in the temple, worshiping and praying day and night. When Mary and Joseph carried the baby Jesus in, Anna recognized Him for who He was. And Luke tells us she began to speak about Him to everyone who was waiting for God to rescue Jerusalem (Luke 2:36-38). One of the very first people to announce Jesus as the promised one was an old woman who had spent her whole life waiting in the temple.

Sit with that picture for a second. Decades of fasting and praying in that temple, most of it unseen, almost none of it thanked. And when the long awaited moment finally arrived, God did not route the announcement around the old woman in the corner. He let the one who had waited the longest be among the very first to tell it.

When God needed someone to vouch for His own word, the king’s men were sent to a woman. They did not debate her. They listened, and a nation turned back to God.

What a Prophet Was

It helps to be clear about what a prophet actually was, because the word throws people. A prophet was not mainly a fortune teller predicting next year’s headlines. A prophet was God’s mouthpiece, the person who spoke God’s word to God’s people, sometimes to comfort them, often to confront kings and call a whole nation back. That is the role Miriam, Huldah, and Anna held. Speaking for God. Out loud. With authority.

What This Means for Where You Are

Now, someone holding the line on the church office will point out, fairly, that prophesying is not the same thing as the settled teaching role Paul writes about, and that these women were not priests. That is a real distinction and I am not going to flatten it. But it does not erase the headline. Centuries before anyone argued about pulpits, God was already putting His word in women’s mouths and sending them to deliver it, even to kings.

And these three women are not the whole list. Isaiah’s wife is called a prophet (Isaiah 8:3). When the Spirit fell at Pentecost and the church was born, Peter stood up and said it was the fulfillment of God’s promise that daughters as well as sons would prophesy (Acts 2:17-18). Years later the evangelist Philip had four unmarried daughters, and all four of them prophesied (Acts 21:9). From the front of the Old Testament to the birth of the church, women carrying God’s word is not some rare exception God grudgingly allowed. It is a thread He ran through the whole story on purpose.

So if the question is, can a woman carry God’s message, the Old Testament answered it a long time ago. Yes. God did it Himself, on purpose, more than once, and never once acted like He had made a mistake.

The Black church has lived inside this truth even when it would not say so out loud. The prophetic voice in our tradition, the truth-telling to power that runs from the plantation to the pulpit to the protest line, has always had women in it. Sojourner Truth. Jarena Lee. Prathia Hall, whose preaching helped shape a dream a more famous man would later make famous. Huldah told a king the hard truth straight to his face, and he listened. That is a sound the Black church has always known by heart.

REFLECT & RESPOND

• How do we usually decide who gets to speak for God? How is that different from how God seems to decide?

• The king’s men walked past Jeremiah and went to Huldah. What does it mean to you that God let a woman authenticate His own word?

• Can you name a woman whose words carried God to you, a teacher, a grandmother, a friend? Have you ever told her?

• Where is the line, if there is one, between a woman prophesying and a woman leading? Is that line in the text, or in us?

SOURCES

[1] “Huldah: A Prophet and Teacher (2 Kings 22).” Theology of Work Project. https://www.theologyofwork.org/key-topics/women-and-work-in-the-old-testament/huldah-a-prophet-and-teacher-2-kings-22/.

[2] Phipps, William E. Assertive Biblical Women. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992. On Huldah as the first to declare a writing to be Holy Scripture.

[3] Mowczko, Marg. “Huldah’s Public Prophetic Ministry.” https://margmowczko.com/huldah-prophetess/.

[4] Gafney, Wilda C. Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2017. On Miriam and the women prophets.

[5] “Who Is the Prophet Huldah in the Bible?” Christianity.com. https://www.christianity.com/wiki/people/prophet-huldah-bible.html.

[6] New International Version. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011.

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