Caleb holds a competition. The winner gets his daughter. I don’t think it’s as bad as it sounds. It in part leaves it up to God and in part leaves it up to the man who is desiring her to step up.

The daughter is awarded to her cousin, which is typical of the time. Keep it in the family.

She seems to immediately play the part of manipulative wife. It’s been said that man is the head of the family, but the wife is the neck and can turn the head wherever she wants it to go. That’s not from the Bible.

Caleb’s daughter has it in her head that she and her husband should get a field with a spring in it. Here are some of the words used in different translations: she urges, persuades, incites her husband to go ask her father for a field.

In the same verse, there is a switch. She then asks Caleb, not her husband. That sent me to the original Hebrew to look into what was going on here. That word translated as urge, persuade, or incite seems to be only translated as persuaded in this story. Other times it’s translated as entice and most commonly as mislead. There it is, what I was wondering about. She was misleading. I could say mis-leading, or ha, even “miss”-leading.

This can ruffle our feminist feathers, even if we say we’re not feminists. Can’t a woman lead? But it’s not about a woman leading. It’s about a woman submitting to authority.

Paul didn’t permit a woman to teach. But other authorities can permit them. They aren’t doing wrong. The woman isn’t doing wrong if she’s submitting to her authority who is asking her to teach.

It wasn’t Caleb’s daughter’s place to lead; she was mis-leading, leading where it wasn’t her place.  She was trying to turn the head, which is that same sin, wanting to be in control, wanting to play at God. Not that husbands are gods, but they are the authority and their wives are to submit.  It’s the same old sin of the garden when a wife wants to mis-lead, take control and direct the head, the family.

But then things get worse. She doesn’t seem to trust that her husband would do it; it seems she worried she wouldn’t get what she wanted, so she went and got it for herself.

She gets the field with springs. She left feeling like she won. Did she?