Hard Working Mom

Proverbs 31:31 KJV

Give her of the fruit of her hands; and let her own works praise her in the gates.

I am always amazed at how this passage is misrepresented in our current Christian culture.

• We prize the man who is industrious and hard working, who rises early and makes hay while the sun is shining
• We nearly denigrate the woman who does the same

Our current picture of wives being "keepers at home"[1] requires that we re-write the Proverbs 31 woman and wrest the Scriptures in ways that are terrible to God's Word and burdensome to families.

This woman, if she is anything, is a hard working mom. She does not spend all of her time at home, but does business in

• Real estate
• Factories of manufacture
• Merchandising and
• Personnel management

In the culture difference her time she made the household income and thereby freed her husband to occupy his time in influencing the

• Thought
• Politics and
• Government

of his day; no doubt a very important occupation.

Ours is a different culture, but to insist that the woman must stay at home is an abuse of the Bible and panders to our male egos, desiring to be the bread winners, and the flesh (of the wife) not wishing to rise up early, stay up late, and care for both home and business.

---

[1] Titus 2:5, the teaching of the Bible must reconcile both passages. To insist that keepers at home means that the wife is only a house wife and to make an interpretation of Proverbs 31 that keeps her in the home is abusive of the Bible and of the truth. It is interpreting the Bible according to our preference rather than understanding the Bible and letting it teach us.