Could There Have Been Women Shepherds Watching Those Flocks By Night?

A Shepherdess with her flock, Cornelius van Leemputten, 1841-1902

So I've been thinking about whether there were any female shepherds at the nativity.

The thought arose because a female friend recently asked a question I had never considered before: Why are all the shepherds in Christmas creches men?

A quick look at our own creche showed she was right; both shepherds are male.

My friend went on to suggest that, back in Jesus’ day, women also watched the flocks; it wasn't just men. So why don't women appear in our holiday creches or Christmas pageants?

After all, Luke doesn't say whether the shepherds were men or women; he ascribes no gender to them.

Faced with the question, I did what everyone does in a situation like this: I Googled it.

The first website that came up was Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE), an organization that believes the Bible, properly interpreted, teaches the equality of women and men.

In an article titled The Way of a Shepherd, author Beulah Wood—who grew up on a sheep farm and looked after them herself—says that “possibly half the shepherds in Jesus’ day were women, and probably half the shepherds of the world today.”

She goes on to note that we first meet Rachel as a shepherd in Genesis 29:6-9. (“Rachel came with her father’s sheep for she was their shepherd.”)

We are also introduced to Zipporah as a shepherd in Exodus 2:16: “Now a priest of Midian had seven daughters and they came to draw water and fill the troughs to water their father’s flock.” 

Says Wood: “These matriarchs of Israel both met their husbands at wells where they led their flocks to drink. During the course of their daily work, the contact occurred that led to their marriages and many more years of caring for flocks.”

Next up was Women From the Book blog, by Karen Meeker. He goal is to bring to life the “scores of women who appear within the pages of the Bible.”

In a post titled Life as a Shepherdess, Meeker says “in ancient Israel it was not unusual for women to work outside the home, young women at least. When a girl was eight to ten years old, she began leading the family herd out to nearby pasture.”

At the end of the day, she says, “the shepherdess brought her sheep back home. At night the animals were housed in stone-walled pens attached to buildings or compounds, or on the ground floor of houses in the cities, or corralled in thorny, fence-like enclosures typical of nomadic enclosures.”

Tending the family herd “was reserved primarily for girls, and they continued this work until married at age fifteen or sixteen,” she adds.

When local grass was insufficient, she says that “men took the herds further afield . . . women worked close to home.”

In another blog post titled Could the Shepherds Who Visited Jesus Been Women?, Tracy J. Robbins poses an interesting question: 

Considering Jesus’s revolutionary way (for his time) of including women, why not have women be the first to see the arrival of God on earth, just as they were the first to see the resurrected Jesus?

Admittedly, there isn’t a lot of evidence to say women were present at the birth of Jesus. But there also isn’t any way to say conclusively they weren’t. 

The Bible doesn't say anything about it, one way or the other.

But what we can say for sure is that, over the centuries, women have been marginalized women in the Christian religion—their roles in the Gospels and the New Testament downplayed, prevented from being leaders, and forced into stereotypical gender roles.

So even if it can’t be proved women were there, maybe it’s time to promote a little gender balance in the Christmas story.

Perhaps at future Christmas pageants we will see some female shepherds. 

And in the spirit of goodwill, some female magi wouldn’t hurt, either.