The Stories We Were Never Told

Mar 13

On International Women's Day, History, and Giving Ancient Women Their Voices Back

International Women's Day has come and gone for another year. The posts have cycled through — the quotes, the tributes, the highlights of women who broke barriers and changed the world. And all of that matters. It really does.

But I've been sitting with a different kind of thought this year. Less about celebrating the women we know, and more about mourning the ones we don't.

Because here's the thing that keeps pulling at me: most of history was written by men. Not because women weren't there — they were always there — but because for most of recorded history, women weren't the ones holding the pen. They weren't in the rooms where stories got decided, preserved, canonized. They were in the other rooms. The ones doing the quieter, unglamorous, essential work of keeping everything alive while someone else got to narrate it.

And nowhere is that more true than in religious texts.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the women in the Bible. Not in a theological debate kind of way — more in a where are you, what were you actually thinking, what did this feel like from the inside kind of way.

Because they were there for everything. Eve in the garden, making the most consequential choice in human history. Noah's wife on the ark for forty days, managing chaos while her husband prayed. Mary — both of them — standing at the foot of a cross when almost everyone else had run. These women were present for every pivotal moment. And yet in most cases, we don't get their inner world. We get a sentence. Sometimes a name. Sometimes not even that.

What would it sound like if they got to speak?

That question led me down a rabbit hole this past little while, and honestly it's become one of the most meaningful creative projects I've stumbled into. I started reimagining some of these stories through a feminine lens — same events, same scripture, just told from the inside of a woman's experience rather than the outside of a male narrator's account.

I used AI as a writing tool to help me shape these pieces, the way you might use a really engaged writing partner who has read everything and never gets tired. But the questions were mine. The curiosity was mine. And what came back felt, every single time, like something that had been waiting to be said for a very long time.

The first story I explored was Noah's wife — a woman so thoroughly erased from Genesis that she doesn't even have a name in the text. (Ancient Jewish tradition calls her Emzara. I love that someone, somewhere, decided she deserved one.) I wanted to know what she was thinking when God told Noah to build the ark. What she felt when she heard the screaming outside the sealed door. How she survived forty days in the dark and then walked out onto a drowned world carrying every woman's name, every recipe, every lullaby that no longer had anyone else to remember it.

Then Eve. The woman history has used as shorthand for weakness and blame for thousands of years. What if her choice wasn't weakness? What if it was the first act of a mind that was simply built for questions — and a prohibition is the most irresistible question there is?

And then the two Marys. The mother and the Magdalene. Two women who loved the same man, in completely different ways, and who both stayed at the cross when the disciples fled. History called one of them a prostitute for a thousand years. The other one it left mostly nameless in her grief. But on the morning of the resurrection, it was a woman's voice that carried the news first.

The first sermon ever preached was preached by a woman, to a group of frightened men who didn't believe her.

She told it anyway.

I'm going to be sharing these stories here as a series — each one a reimagining of a biblical story through the eyes of the woman at the center of it. They're not meant to be theological arguments. They're not trying to rewrite doctrine or start a debate. They're just an attempt to do what good storytelling has always done: step inside someone else's experience and ask what was it like to be you?

Because I think there's something profound about the fact that these women's inner lives were never recorded. Not because they weren't rich and complex and worth knowing. But because no one thought to ask. Or if they asked, no one thought to write it down.

We can ask now.

We can write it down now.

That feels like its own kind of International Women's Day to me — not just celebrating the women history remembered, but reaching back for the ones it forgot, and saying: you were there. You mattered. Tell us what you saw.

The series begins below. I hope something in these words feels like a door opening.

Emzara's Flood

The Story of Noah's Ark, Told Through His Wife

In ancient Jewish tradition, Noah's wife is given the name Emzara. She is mentioned in the Book of Jubilees, an ancient Hebrew text. This is her story.

Before the Rain

I knew before he told me.

I had watched my husband walk differently for months — the way a man moves when he is carrying something too large for his body. When he finally spoke the words of God to me, I did not weep. I sat very still and looked at my hands, the hands that had kneaded bread in this town for forty years, the hands that had held my grandchildren, the hands that had touched the foreheads of the dying during the last fever season.

I thought of my neighbor Adah, who grew herbs along her eastern wall and always gave more than you asked for.

I thought: she will drown.

Noah spoke of righteousness. He spoke of God's grief over humanity. He spoke of a new beginning. These are the words of a man — clean, architectural words that build a theology around devastation.

I could only think of Adah's herbs.

Building the Ark

While Noah built, I mothered.

That is what women do in the face of apocalypse — we keep feeding people. I kept our sons fed through the years of building. I kept their wives calm when they wept at night, which they did, often, because they too were thinking of their mothers, their sisters, the friends they would never see again.

My daughter-in-law Sedeqetelebab asked me one evening, her voice barely above the sound of the fire: "Did God ask Noah if we wanted to be saved?"

I had no answer for her.

I have carried that question ever since.

Salvation, I learned, is not always a gentle thing. Sometimes it arrives like a command, not an invitation. And the ones who love the ones being saved — we simply follow. We board the ark not because we fully understand, but because love does not let you stay behind.

The Day the Rain Began

I will tell you what the scripture does not.

The screaming lasted longer than you would think.

We had sealed the door — or rather, the text says God sealed the door, and I have always found strange comfort in that. It was not Noah's hand. It was not mine. The choice of who was inside and who was outside was taken from us, and perhaps that is mercy in its own terrible way. Because I could not have held that door shut myself.

I put my hands over my ears on the first day. On the second day I stopped, because I understood that witnessing their death was the least I could do. To turn away felt like abandonment. So I listened. I prayed. I wept without making sound, the way mothers learn to weep so they do not frighten their children.

On the third day there was only rain.

Forty Days Inside

Nobody tells you about the smell.

Nobody tells you about the darkness, or the noise of frightened animals, or the way the world tilts and groans when the water beneath you is not the sea you knew but the drowned earth itself.

Noah prayed. I managed.

That is not a criticism of him. Prayer was his language with God. But someone had to make sure the animals were fed, that our sons did not lose their minds, that the women ate even when eating felt obscene. Survival is deeply unglamorous work. It is repetitive and exhausting and it asks nothing of your theology.

I found myself angry at God in a way I could not confess to my husband.

Not because we were on the ark — but because I kept thinking: was there truly no other way? The God I had known in small moments — in the birth of my sons, in the first rains of autumn, in the inexplicable kindness of strangers — that God felt very far away in the belly of that boat.

I did not stop believing. But I stopped being comfortable.

I think that is allowed.

The Dove

When the dove returned with the olive branch, Noah wept with joy.

I held the branch in my hands for a long time after.

A leaf. New growth. Life persisting beneath all that death. There is something in the feminine instinct that understands this — that resurrection is not loud, it is a leaf. It is small and green and it smells like the earth before everything went wrong.

I pressed it to my face and breathed it in. For the first time in months I felt God close again — not in the thunder, not in the flood, but in this tiny, impossible, ordinary thing.

After

We stepped out onto a world that had been washed clean.

Noah built an altar. God made a covenant. A rainbow appeared. These are the things that are written.

What is not written: I stood at the edge of what had once been a valley I knew, and I understood that I was the last woman alive who remembered it. Every recipe, every lullaby, every woman's name, every story told at every hearthside — all of it lived now only in me. I was a library of a drowned world.

That is a weight scripture does not name.

To survive is not only a gift. It is also a responsibility so heavy that some mornings you have to sit down before you can stand back up.

I planted a garden.

Not because God told me to. Because it was the only prayer I had left — the act of putting something small and alive into the ground and trusting, against all evidence, that the world was still worth tending.

I think that is what faith looks like from the inside. Not the rainbow. Not the covenant spoken in thunder. Just a woman on her knees in the mud, planting something she may not live to see bloom.

"And God remembered."

(Genesis 8:1)

He remembered Noah. I choose to believe He remembered us too.

The First Knowing

The Garden of Eden, Through Eve's Eyes

Before

There is no word for before, because before requires memory, and memory requires loss, and I had not yet lost anything.

I only understand before now, from the outside of it.

What I can tell you is this: the garden was not a paradise the way you have been taught to imagine paradise. It was not golden or still. It was loud with insects and wet with morning and the smell of it was almost too much — green and dark and alive in a way that felt like it was always just on the edge of saying something.

I was part of it. That was the nature of the before.

I did not observe the garden. I was the garden, the way your heartbeat is not something you listen to but something you simply are.

Adam named things. That was his occupation, his joy. He would hold a fruit in his hand or watch a creature move through the grass and a word would rise in him and he would speak it aloud and it would become true. I watched him do this and felt something I had no name for — something that was not quite longing, because longing requires knowing what you lack.

I did not know what I lacked.

That was the last mercy of the before.

The Tree

I want to tell you about the tree honestly, which means I have to tell you that it was not frightening.

That is the part the story leaves out.

It was beautiful. Not beautiful the way everything in the garden was beautiful — that deep, unconscious beauty of things that do not know they are being seen. This was different. This tree seemed to lean slightly toward you when you stood near it. The fruit held light inside it the way stained glass holds light — not reflecting it but transforming it into something warmer than it was.

God had said: do not eat.

I had heard this. I am not a woman who did not hear. I heard it fully, turned it over in my mind the way you turn a stone in your hand, feeling its weight.

But here is what no one tells you about a prohibition: it creates the thing it forbids.

Before God said do not, I had walked past that tree a hundred times and felt nothing particular. After God said do not — the tree was all I could see. Not because I was weak. Because I was awake. Because something in the architecture of my mind had been built for questions, and a prohibition is the most exquisite question there is.

Why not?

Two words. The entire history of human consciousness, compressed into two words.

The Serpent

I will not blame the serpent.

I have had a long time to think about this, and I will not do it. The serpent asked me questions I was already asking myself. If there had been no serpent, I think I would have arrived at the tree eventually on my own, in the quiet of some ordinary afternoon, and reached up, and chosen.

What the serpent gave me was not temptation.

It was permission.

And perhaps that is the more frightening thing — that I needed so little of it.

He said: you will not die. You will become like God, knowing good and evil.

I stood there in the slanted afternoon light and I thought about this. I thought about Adam, who was happy in a way that I increasingly understood was the happiness of a man who had never been asked a question he could not answer by simply looking around himself. His joy was real. I did not resent it. But it was a joy I could no longer fully share, because something in me had already begun to separate from the garden, to stand slightly apart from it, watching.

I was already, in some way, reaching. The fruit was simply the moment my hand caught up with where my mind had already gone.

The Eating

I want to be careful here, because what happened next is the most misunderstood moment in all of human history, and I was the only one there for the first part of it.

I ate.

I will not describe the taste except to say that it was not sweet. It was complex in the way that grief is complex — many things arriving at once, none of them simple, all of them true.

And then. And then.

I knew.

Not facts. Not information. What I knew was something older and stranger than facts — I knew that I was separate. That I had an inside. That there was a me who was distinct from the garden, distinct from Adam, distinct even from God, a me that could observe and question and ache and wonder. A self.

The theologians call this the fall.

I have never been able to call it only that.

Because yes — something was lost. The wholeness was lost, that seamless belonging, the not-knowing that is its own kind of grace. I felt it leave me like warmth leaving a room, and I want you to understand that I mourned it. I sat with the fruit still in my hand and I mourned it genuinely, the way you mourn a version of yourself you can never return to.

But I also — and this is the part that gets left out — woke up. The garden did not become less beautiful. It became beautiful to me, which is a different thing entirely. Before, beauty simply was. Now, beauty arrived — it could move me, surprise me, break something open in my chest. I could love it consciously. I could lose it and grieve it and therefore love it more fiercely than I ever had in the before. That is not nothing.

Adam

When I gave the fruit to Adam, I did not deceive him.

I want to say this clearly because the story has been used against women for a very long time.

I looked at my husband — this man I was bone of and flesh of, this man who had named every living thing except his own loneliness — and I held out my hand, and he looked at me, and he saw that I was different, and he chose.

He chose me over the garden.

I have thought about this for longer than you can imagine, and I believe it was an act of love. Perhaps the first act of love — conscious, costly, made with open eyes. We do not talk about that part either.

When God Came

We hid.

Of course we hid. We had just discovered the inside of ourselves and the inside is terrifying when it is new. We had discovered shame not because our bodies were shameful but because we had suddenly a self to protect, and the self when it is new is raw and soft as something just born.

God called out: Where are you?

And I have spent a lifetime understanding that question.

Not as anger. Not as accusation. But as the first heartbroken question of a parent whose child has just become, irrevocably, their own person. Where are you? — because you are somewhere now. You have a location. You are no longer simply here, simply present, simply mine.

You are somewhere, which means you can also be away. That is what God was grieving, I think. Not the rule broken. The distance opened.

What I Lost

The ease of it. The not-knowing. The mornings when I was simply in the world without the ache of being conscious of it.

The garden itself — its particular light, the way the animals moved through it without fear, the sense that everything was held and nothing could be permanently lost.

Innocence, yes. But I have come to think that innocence is not the same as goodness, and I am not sure it was ever meant to be permanent. It was a beginning. And beginnings, by their nature, end.

What I Gained

Everything that makes us human.

The capacity to love something because it is fragile. The ability to create — not just to exist within creation but to participate in it, to bring new things into being with my own hands and body. Art. Story. Children. Meaning.

The strange dignity of suffering consciously — of being able to say this hurts and I am here and it matters.

Prayer, even. Because you cannot pray from inside the garden. Prayer requires distance, requires longing, requires the particular ache of a self that knows it is not whole alone.

I gave the world its first exile. But I also gave the world its first homecoming — because you cannot come home to a place you never left.

What I Would Say to God Now

I think you knew.

I think the tree was always going to be reached. I think the question was always going to be asked. I think the capacity for that question was written into me before I ever drew breath, and a God who made that capacity cannot have been entirely surprised when it woke.

I think perhaps the garden was not where the story ended.

I think it was where the story began.

And I think — I have to think — that a God who is love did not abandon us to the wilderness entirely, but walked out of the garden behind us, quiet as a shadow, present as breath, waiting to be found by the creatures He had made complicated enough to search for Him.

That is my theology.

It is the only one I arrived at from the inside.

"And the Lord God called to the man and said: Where are you?"

(Genesis 3:9)

He was asking us both. He is asking still.

The Women Who Stayed

Mary, His Mother. Mary, His Beloved. One Story.

Two Annunciations

The mother heard it from an angel.

The light came into her room in Nazareth before she was fully awake, and the words were enormous, the kind of words that rearrange the furniture of your life permanently. You will conceive and bear a son. She asked one question — practical, grounded, the question of a woman who understood how bodies work — and then she said yes. She said yes before she understood what she was saying yes to, the way all the deepest yeses are given.

She was, the text says, highly favored.

She was also very young, and very alone with it.

The other Mary heard nothing from an angel.

She heard it the way the broken always hear things — gradually, through the accumulation of ordinary moments that refuse to stay ordinary. She had been, by most accounts, a woman in pieces before she met him. Seven demons, the scripture says, though no one has ever fully agreed on what that means. What it means is this: she had lived inside a darkness that had its own gravity, that pulled everything toward it, that made the world feel like something happening behind thick glass.

And then he spoke to her.

Not about her sins. Not about her demons. He simply spoke to her the way you speak to someone you can already see whole, and something in her — some locked and lightless room — opened.

She did not say yes to an angel.

She said yes to the first person who had looked at her and seen something worth looking at. That too is an annunciation. It simply wasn't written down that way.

What It Means to Follow

The mother followed from the beginning, which means she followed when following meant confusion and displacement and the particular grief of a child who belongs more to the world than to you.

She carried him in her body and then she spent thirty years learning how to let him go. The temple at twelve years old — three days she searched for him, three days of a mother's terror, and when she found him he looked up with those eyes that were somehow already ancient and said did you not know I would be about my Father's business? And she did not understand. But she kept all these things in her heart, as she always did, pressing them down into herself like flowers pressed into a book, preserved and aching.

She followed him into ministry and watched strangers love him. She watched him heal people she had never met and felt something that was not jealousy but was adjacent to it — the tenderness of a mother who made the vessel that the whole world now wanted to drink from.

The other Mary followed differently.

She followed the way the rescued follow — with everything, holding nothing back, because when you have been in the dark that long the light is not something you ration. She traveled with him. She sat at his feet while others stood. She used her own money to support his work, a detail so quietly radical that we have largely forgotten to notice it.

She was not his wife. The story does not say she was.

But she was something the language of that time did not have a clean word for — a woman who was fully known by him and fully herself in his presence, whose devotion was romantic in its intensity without being reducible to romance, whose love was the kind that does not ask anything back because the loving itself is enough.

The disciples did not always know what to do with her.

He always did.

The Anointing

She came to him with the alabaster jar and the room went quiet in the particular way rooms go quiet when a woman does something that makes men uncomfortable.

She broke the jar. She poured the oil over his head, or his feet — the accounts differ, and I think the difference doesn't matter as much as the breaking. That jar was expensive. That jar was, by any practical measure, her financial security, her future, the thing you keep against the possibility of an uncertain tomorrow.

She broke it anyway.

Why this waste? the disciples said.

He silenced them with a gentleness that had iron in it. She has done a beautiful thing. Wherever the gospel is told in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.

And then history did the thing history does to women who love too loudly and take up too much room — it swallowed her. It confused her with other women. It called her a prostitute for a thousand years. It told her story but forgot her name, and told her name but forgot her story, until the two were barely connected at all.

She broke the most valuable thing she owned for him.

We could not even be trusted to remember her correctly.

What the Mother Knew

There is a moment in John's gospel — just one verse, easy to pass over — where the mother of Jesus comes to him at a wedding in Cana and says, quietly, they have no wine.

That is all she says.

She does not say perform a miracle. She does not say I know who you are and what you can do. She simply names a lack and leaves the rest to him. And then she turns to the servants and says do whatever he tells you, and walks away.

That is not the action of a woman who is uncertain about her son. That is the action of a woman who has spent thirty years watching and waiting and pressing things into her heart, and who has finally understood that her role is not to direct him but to point others toward him and then get out of the way.

That is a particular kind of love. The love that has matured past needing to be needed. The love that finds its fulfillment in the beloved's flourishing, even when that flourishing carries him away from you. It is the hardest love to learn. She had thirty years to learn it.

The Cross

They were both there.

When the disciples had fled — the men who had walked with him and eaten with him and sworn they would die with him — the women stayed. This is not a minor detail. This is the detail. In the moment of greatest cost, when standing near him meant being seen, being associated, being potentially arrested, the women did not calculate. They simply did not leave.

The mother stood at the foot of the cross and watched her son die.

There is no theology that fully absorbs this. There is no framework that makes it clean. She had said yes in a lit room in Nazareth and the yes had led here, to this hill, to this specific unbearable afternoon, and she stood in it the way she had always stood in things she did not understand — present, open, not looking away.

He looked down and saw her. He looked down and saw the other Mary, the beloved one, and the beloved disciple beside her. And in his last coherent act of care he gave them to each other.

Woman, behold your son. Son, behold your mother.

Two people handed to each other across the unbridgeable distance of a cross.

I think about what it means that his last gift was not doctrine. Not instruction. Not theology. It was: do not be alone. Here is someone to belong to.

The Garden, Again

The other Mary came to the tomb before sunrise.

She came the way grief makes you come — not because you expect anything, but because you do not know what else to do with yourself. She came to finish the burial preparation, to do the last bodily thing she could do for a body she loved. She came because tending is what you do when there is nothing left to do.

The stone was moved. The tomb was empty.

She ran and told the disciples and they came and looked and left, because they did not understand, and perhaps because they were afraid of what not understanding meant.

But Mary stayed.

She stayed at the empty tomb weeping, and then she turned, and there was a man she took for the gardener, and she said, desperate, practical, grief-stripped: if you have taken him, tell me where you have laid him and I will carry him.

She would carry him. That is what she said. Whatever was left of him, whatever broken diminished version of the thing she loved, she would carry it herself if someone would just tell her where.

And then he said her name.

Just her name. One word. And she knew.

The mother received the news differently — quietly, in the upper room, surrounded by others, in the gathered body of the people who had loved him. Her resurrection was communal, held, cushioned by presence.

Both are true resurrections. Both are real.

Some of us meet the risen Christ alone in a garden, called by name in the dark. Some of us meet him in the company of those who have also loved and lost and stayed.

The grace is that he comes to us as we are, where we are, in the form we can receive him.

What They Share

Two women who said yes before they understood what they were saying yes to.

Two women who followed when following was costly.

Two women who stayed when staying meant standing in the open beneath a cross while the world decided what to do with a man it had just killed.

Two women who were given each other at the moment of greatest loss.

Two women who carried him — one in her body, one in her alabaster jar — and both in their hearts, where women carry everything that matters, quietly, without being asked.

History named one of them a prostitute.

History left the other one nameless in her widowhood.

But on the morning that changed everything, it was a woman's voice that carried the news.

He is risen.

The first sermon ever preached was preached by a woman in a garden, to a group of frightened men who did not believe her.