One of my children, a daughter, is named Tsofia. She was born just before Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israeli Independence Day, and also on Shabbat. The name Tsofia was not on our baby name short list at all. We had spent months considering all sorts of beautifully Biblical and Zionistic names, trying to make the choice feel meaningful. In the end, the timing of her birth made the decision for us. Hours before she arrived, we had been sitting at our Shabbat table singing Eishet Chayil, the woman of valor, the 22-line poem that closes the book of Proverbs, and the word tsofia was right there in verse 27:
Combined with the line from Israel’s national anthem, Hatikvah, “ayin letzion tsofia,” an eye turned toward Zion, the combination of Biblical and Modern was perfect. But there was more. We wanted our daughter’s life in Israel to carry both of those meanings: the one who tends to the details of her household with the same intentionality she brings to the grand gestures, and the one whose eyes are always turned toward home.
Every Friday night when we sing Eishet Chayil at our Shabbat table, we shout “Tsofia!” for our four year old when we reach that verse. And yet despite having her name woven into this poem, despite having sung it hundreds of times, when I sat down to study it carefully alongside my colleague Shira Schechter, Editor of The Israel Bible, for our Bible Month conversation on the book of Proverbs, I realized I did not know it nearly as well as I thought I did. Let me share one piece of what we uncovered, because it has changed the way I understand one of the most famous poems in all of The Bible.
Eishet Chayil is the final chapter of the book of Proverbs, a 22-line poem written by King Solomon in praise of a woman of valor. Every Friday night at the Shabbat table, Jewish families sing it together, most commonly understood as a husband’s tribute to his wife, a thank you for everything she has carried through the week to bring the family to this moment of rest and holiness. It is one of the most well-known texts in Jewish life. And most people singing it on Friday night do not know what is hiding inside it.
The words “eshet chayil,” woman of valor, appear only twice in the entire Tanach. Once here, at the end of Proverbs. And once in the book of Ruth, where Boaz says to Ruth:
That is not a coincidence. In Tanach, when a word or phrase appears in only two places, it is an invitation. The text is asking you to hold the two passages next to each other and see what they illuminate about each other.
So who was Ruth to King Solomon? She was his great-great-grandmother. The matriarch of the Davidic dynasty. The woman whose courage, loyalty, and quiet faithfulness set an entire royal line in motion. And when Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, sits down to write a tribute to the ideal woman, the word he reaches for is the exact word used to describe her.
He was writing about Ruth. He may also have been writing about his mother, as one tradition suggests, attributing his wisdom to her and closing his book of wisdom with a tribute to her life. But the linguistic thread running back to Ruth is unmistakable, and it changes how you read every line of the poem. This is not an idealized fantasy of womanhood. It is a portrait drawn from a real woman, a Moabite widow who chose faithfulness over comfort, who gleaned in the fields of Bethlehem, who built a life from nothing and became the grandmother of kings.
This is what Shira points out in our conversation: words in Tanach carry meaning far beyond their plain reading. A single phrase, appearing twice across two books, separated by generations, stitches together an entire portrait of what it means to be a woman of valor. Not born into royalty. Not performing greatness. Just showing up, every day, with intention. Tending to the household. Caring for the people around her. Never eating the bread of idleness.
Tsofia.
All of these conversations, Proverbs, Ruth, Kings, Jeremiah, Joshua, and every other book we have covered this Bible Month, are available on Bible Plus, Israel365’s in-depth Hebrew Bible learning platform. Bible Plus also has hundreds of hours of Bible study teachings from Israel-based rabbis and scholars, the same quality of conversation you just experienced, going deeper into every book, every story, every hidden thread.
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If today’s conversation opened something up for you, Bible Plus is where you keep going.
