“The mother of all living,” a slave-mother who despairs of saving her son, a mother who unapologetically favors one son over the other, a mother-in-law more beloved than her daughter-in-law’s own people, old mothers, young mothers, and a mother who conceives by the Holy Spirit — for as little as we know about them, the Bible’s mothers are not of a single type. One consistent characteristic of the diverse biblical literatures’ historical and social contexts is patriarchy. 
As a result, there’s precious little attention to some things that may especially interest us today about those women’s lives, loves, challenges, and joys. Being a mother in such conditions was crucial to social worth, even survival itself. Nevertheless, the corpus of biblical texts gives us an intriguing variety of mothers. This Mothers’ Day, I’m thinking about some of them and how the Bible portrays their circumstances, motivations, machinations, desires, and sacrifices in light of the simple fact of their motherhood. And I’m grateful to my own mother not only for all the things that people typically celebrate on this day but also for her whole humanity — no two-dimensional cliche, but a woman I love and admire for all that she has been, is, and is becoming. I’m also lucky to have a mother-in-law who not only wrote a book on parenting but also raised the amazing man with whom I have the great good fortune to share a life. Happy Mothers’ Day to all the complicated, beautiful, kind, gentle, and powerful moms out there!
