As we read this chapter in the Bible, the spotlight rests on Elijah. The widow, meanwhile, remains nameless, though we learn that she has at least one child and that she lives in Zarephath, a coastal town in Phoenicia mid-way between Tyre and Sidon.

With the images in this exhibition, I read the encounter from her point of view, a woman’s and an outsider’s, foregrounding her experience of man-less motherhood to which Elijah added the extreme hardship of famine. Elijah lives the contradiction of suffering from a drought he himself has created (1 Kings 17:1) but his divinely appointed encounter with this woman at the edge of death serves to move him to relent from his anger against the idolaters, together with whom he had condemned other innocent people to suffer. According to both Jewish midrash and the pseudo-Chrysostom, Elijah’s power was re-negotiated with God according to his human response to the widow’s grief (Kraeling 1956:145; Ginzburg 1909: 196f.; Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 113a; Barone 2008).

The designation of ‘widow’ in the Graeco-Roman world in which the Dura Europos synagogue paintings were executed did not simply mean a woman whose husband had died, but rather picked out any woman living on her own (Maier 2020; Galpaz-Feller 2008). The unusual singleness of women with respect to male figures could include cases where the husband had left temporarily, on business, for war, or to jail, but also denote a father who had never acknowledged responsibility in the first place.

While the ring in Leandro Bassano’s widow portrait excludes these possible scenarios, that the Sareptian may have been a single mother can be contemplated in her referring to her child as her ‘sin’ (v.18). The emarginated status and stigma attached to single motherhood compounds her difficulties through the hardship of famine as well as her alien condition as a non-Israelite. When Jesus, after reading in the synagogue at Nazareth, mentions her as an example of prophetic openness, the inhabitants react strongly against him (Luke 4:26). Yet, it is her attachment to life that one admires more than Elijah’s superpowers, as the story unfolds from one miracle to the next. The enchanted world of the prophet only makes sense when anchored in the real emotional experiences of the widow.

The Bible confers dignity and protection to widows (e.g. Exodus 22:22; Deuteronomy 10:18; 24:19), who were vulnerable even when they were wealthy. But it also confirms their marginalization (together with profane women and harlots) since the High Priest could not marry women from these groups (Galpaz-Feller 2008: 235).

At Dura Europos, free women could benefit from the ‘law of the three children’ (ius trium liberorum; see Sommer 2016: 64–65; Boatwright 2021: 24) and take charge of administering their own possessions. The matronly lead of the fresco panel in the synagogue reflects such agency. As in some Syriac dialogues that were likely performed as para-liturgical entertainment, this widow appears as verbal and vocal—her voice heard through her painted gestures. Her depiction attests to an oral tradition through which hearers and spectators of the word of God were given an alternative point of entry to the fraught encounter between Elijah and the widow.

This tradition of churning biblical episodes into further significant narratives is attested by the use of the imagery of the widow’s encounter with Elijah on medieval enamel crosses as part of a larger discourse about the inheritance of salvation. The marginal status of this woman is reversed in such iconography, as her own prophetic powers are materialized by her holding the cross—a sign of salvation—or in her proclamation of Elijah as true prophet after the resurrection of her son (1 Kings 17:24).

French archaeologist Robert du Mesnil du Buisson pointed out a similarity between the pose of the widow of Zarephath holding her resurrected child in the Dura panel and Gothic statues of Mary. In contrast to images where virginity is foregrounded, the portrayal of womanhood through widows presents knowledge acquired from experience of the concrete life-events of death and of birth. Bassano’s Portrait of a Widow at her Devotions, with its muted tones and contrasts, introduces another comparison with Mary through the meta-reference to a painting that might be of the Birth of Mary, and through the Marian devotion of the rosary chaplet which this anonymous woman holds in her hand. The loneliness of her stance contrasts with the crowded scene of birth where the bedroom is bustling with helpers and midwives. The pursed lips of this widow show how silence has descended on her as she meditates on women’s role in shouldering the key responsibilities of life.

References

Barone, Francesca Prometea. 2008. ‘The Image of the Prophet Elijah in Ps. Chrysostom. The Greek Homilies’, ARAM Periodical, 20: 111–24

Boatwright, Mary T. 2021. The Imperial Women of Rome: Power, Gender, Context (Oxford: OUP) 

Brock, Sebastian Paul. 1989. ‘A Syriac Verse Homily on Elijah and the Widow of Sarepta’, Le Muséon, 102: 93–113 

_______. 2020. ‘Elijah and the Widow of Sarepta: A Fragmentary Dialogue’, ARAM Periodical, 32: 1–7

Galpaz-Feller, Pnina. 2008. ‘The Widow in the Bible and in Ancient Egypt’, Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, 120.2: 231–53

Ginzburg, Louis. 1909. Legends of the Jews, vol. 4, trans. by Henrietta Szold (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America), available at https://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/loj/index.htm

Maier, Harry O. ‘The Entrepreneurial Widows of 1 Timothy’, in Patterns of Women’s Leadership in Early Christianity, ed. by Joan E. Taylor and Ilaria L.E. Ramelli (Oxford: OUP), pp. 59–73 

Sommer, Michael. 2016. ‘Acculturation, Hybridity, Créolité: Mapping Cultural Diversity in Dura-Europos’, in Religion, Society and Culture at Dura-Europos, ed. by Ted Kaizer (Cambridge: CUP), pp. 57–67