Women in the Old Testament: Twenty Psychological Portraits

by Norah Lofts

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178 pages

First published January 1, 1949

About the author

Norah Ethel Robinson Lofts Jorisch (27 August 1904–10 September 1983) was a 20th century best-selling British author. She wrote over fifty books specialising in historical fiction, but she also wrote non-fiction and short stories. Many of her novels, including her Suffolk Trilogy, follow the history of a specific house and the residents that lived in it.

Lofts was born in Shipdham, Norfolk in England. She also published using the pseudonyms Juliet Astley and Peter Curtis. Norah Lofts chose to release her murder-mystery novels under the pen name Peter Curtis because she did not want the readers of her historic fiction to pick up a murder-mystery novel and expect classic Norah Lofts historical fiction. However, the murders still show characteristic Norah Lofts elements. Most of her historical novels fall into two general categories: biographical novels about queens, among them Anne Boleyn, Isabella of Castile, and Catherine of Aragon; and novels set in East Anglia centered around the fictitious town of Baildon (patterned largely on Bury St. Edmunds). Her creation of this fictitious area of England is reminiscent of Thomas Hardy's creation of "Wessex"; and her use of recurring characters such that the protagonist of one novel appears as a secondary character in others is even more reminiscent of William Faulkner's work set in "Yoknapatawpha County," Mississippi. Norah Lofts' work set in East Anglia in the 1930s and 1940s shows great concern with the very poor in society and their inability to change their conditions. Her approach suggests an interest in the social reformism that became a feature of British post-war society.

Several of her novels were turned into films. Jassy was filmed as Jassy (1947) starring Margaret Lockwood and Dennis Price. You're Best Alone was filmed as Guilt is My Shadow (1950). The Devil's Own (also known as The Little Wax Doll and Catch As Catch Can) was filmed as The Witches (1966). The film 7 Women was directed by John Ford and based on the story Chinese Finale by Norah Lofts.

Reviews

[Werner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Note, Jan. 4, 2025: I've just edited this review to delete a typo (a "'s" that shouldn't be there).

This is a short, but pithy, book which offers precisely what its title indicates: attempts to reconstruct the very human psychology of some 20 representative female figures from the Old Testament, along with a short introductory chapter on "General Background." As her novel How Far to Bethlehem? makes clear, Lofts wrote from a basically Christian stance; she takes the biblical text seriously, respects the possibility of the miraculous and of divine-human interaction, and understands the Old Testament story as a divinely-guided movement from a pagan concept of an anthropomorphic god to a transcendent spiritual God with transcendent moral demands, who cannot be bribed or cajoled. (She also has a profound appreciation for the Bible as literature, grounded in a familiarity with it from childhood that she speaks of in her preface.) Her approach to the Bible as an adult, however, was not one of strict Fundamentalism; she was not an absolute inerrantist (her contemporary, C. S. Lewis, wasn't one either) and she indicates that she did not always take every story, such as the six-day creation, literally. (When she distinguishes her approach from that of "sickening piety," she doesn't precisely define the latter; but what I think she has in mind is an approach so misguidedly reverential that it cannot let the text speak for itself, or the people in the narrative be their imperfect human selves.) She was also no Bible scholar; she was an amateur in the subject, a "lay" reader of the Bible who neither had any special scholarly knowledge nor assumed any in her readers. All of her writing here is based on a pretty much face-value reading of the Biblical texts themselves, supplemented only by general knowledge and a few references to the 1st century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews. However, she was also a masterful historical novelist, with a keen knowledge of human psychology, a kind willingness to sympathetically understand the motivations that can underlie even the worst behavior (while not condoning the behavior), and a basic feel for the social dynamics and life patterns of pre-modern communities.

As the author herself recognizes, the biblical writers were primarily interested in the great Story, the story of God's dealing with humanity to which the small stories of individual people were only incidental, recorded only insofar as they advanced the big Story --not as conscious grist for later "psychological portraits." Often what she writes is a matter of reading between the lines, or guessing at possible reactions based on her conviction (which I think is true) that human nature is essentially unchanged from Old Testament times to the present. Even so, in reconstructing the personality and thought of these women, she has set herself a large task in which I'm not sure she always succeeds, or that it's even possible for anyone to succeed in. Arguments from silence are particularly dangerous; that words or feelings aren't mentioned is no proof that they weren't said or felt. We can, at this late date, know very little of the thoughts or motivations of a woman like Bathsheba, IMO, with what little we're given to go on. And there are several places where the interpretation of the text a certain way is not self-evidently correct, but Lofts assumes that it is. She also makes just a few chronological or factual errors: Jehu's slaughter of the Baal priests and killing of the males of Ahab's line took place after Jezebel was killed, not before, and Esther's husband did not "cancel" the order for the massacre of the Jews --Persian laws couldn't be canceled. (He did give a new edict allowing the Jews to defend themselves.) Lofts' discussion of Rahab could have benefited from the brilliant and convincing re-interpretation of the conquest of Canaan by G. E. Mendenhall in The Tenth Generation; but that was of course written long after 1949. (I'm not familiar with any rabbinic legend that Rahab later married Joshua --though I take Lofts' word that such a legend existed-- but I do know that, as Lofts doesn't mention here, both Testaments record that she did marry Salmon of the tribe of Judah, whom another perhaps apocraphal legend identifies as one of the two spies she protected, and that the couple were direct ancestors of Jesus.)

That said, though, I think a great many of Lofts' insights are both credible and illuminating! She also writes with the lyricism and flair of a great novelist, with an eye for significant moments and telling details, and the gift of language to infuse bare nonfiction with the emotional power of true literature. And --very importantly, in a work of this type-- she recognizes that though Hebrew society (like all the societies of the world, in that day) was male-dominated and sexist, the message of the Old Testament itself is not sexist; it presents women as active participants in God's story, as humans capable of making consequential decisions and doing significant things. (Indeed, she suggests that the roots of modern-day equality for women may well lie in the innovative attitude of the Old Testament Hebrews in that respect, compared to the attitudes and practices of surrounding cultures.) One of my Goodreads friends, when I marked the book as to-read, opined (in a personal message) that for one who's already read the Old Testament stories, it would be repetitious. In terms of strict narrative, that's true; but what draws the reader to these re-tellings of the stories isn't the plot per se, but the author's interpretations. It's also important to realize that she was writing less for readers familiar with the Bible, and more for those NOT familiar with it, in the hope of motivating the latter, as she suggests in the preface, to actually read it. Even over 60 years later, I like to think that for some readers, her hope might still be realized!