Deborah Sampson was born in 1760 in Massachusetts. Her family was so poor that she and her 6 brothers and sisters were given to friends and relatives to raise. She bounced from home to home, teaching herself how to read. When she was 18, she taught school, did basket weaving, sold items door to door, did light carpentry, and created tools from wood.
In an era where the average woman was 5 feet tall and the average man was 5 feet 5, Deborah was around 5 feet 7 or 5 feet 8 inches. She wasn’t thin, but she wasn’t curvy either. People considered her plain. The thing about Deborah, though, is that she was inspired by the cause of the Patriots – she was 16 when the Declaration of Independence was adopted. Being such a formidable woman, she wanted to help; she wanted to fight.
Like a character ripped from a Shakespearean play, she tried to join the army early on in 1782 as Timothy Thayer, but a neighbor saw through her disguise. When her church back home found out about it, they kicked her out. Undaunted, she tried again in May, further from home so she wouldn’t be discovered. As Robert Shurtleff, she joined the Light Infantry Company of the 4th Massachusetts Regiment. Now, this was an elite regiment – the special forces, the Navy seals. You wouldn’t be assigned there unless you were taller, stronger, better than the average soldier. Who would ever think a woman would be in a unit like that?
They marched in battle and did reconnaissance. In about June or July of that same year, she was one of dozens of members of her unit who got shot. She tried to keep her comrades in arms from taking her to the doctor, but they took her anyway. After a cut on her forehead was treated, she ran off. She removed the pistol ball from her thigh – herself with a penknife and a sewing needle. Her leg never did heal all the way. In April 1783, she was sent to serve as a waiter to a General. That summer, she got sick and lost consciousness from a fever. As he treated her, the doctor realized she was a woman, but he didn’t reveal her secret. He took her home where his family took care of her.
When she healed, she was sure she would be punished, but the doctor didn’t tell the army she was a woman. She got an honorable discharge and some money to travel. She had served for a year and a half. After the war, she got married and petitioned for a soldier’s pension from the government. Bolstered with the support of Paul Revere and John Hancock(!), she got her pension in 1805. Beyond this, though, she settled back into a pretty normal life as a farmer’s wife.
If you could go back in time and ask that church why they kicked her out or ask other folks what was so outrageous about a woman serving in the military, you would’ve gotten an earful. A lot of it may well have sounded like our reading from 2 Timothy. Deborah was self-centered, arrogant, disobedient, unholy, brutal, treacherous – she willfully rejected God’s power and wisdom. She turned her back on her place in society. She was dangerous.
But there’s this tension in the Bible, right? Women are supposed to be submissive, except biblical Deborah is a judge – a ruler over the tribes of Israel. Women are supposed to keep silent, except that Mary Magdalene was the first witness to the Risen Christ and she told everybody. Women, as our passage today puts it, can be “captivated…[and] overwhelmed by their sins and swayed by all kinds of desires…always studying yet never able to recognize truth.”
Except…Proverbs 8 takes us to a time before time. Before there ever was an earth, there was Woman Wisdom. When Deborah Sampson was alive, most would’ve called her anything but wise. But she saw people getting hurt all around her. She saw people who needed help to be free. She knew what she had to offer and she made a way to offer it even though it ruffled people’s feathers. She became someone new because that’s what her moment in history demanded. Today, we can so easily call her a hero who fought to bring about the potential of a new land. With all that she was and all that she had, she imagined a new world and gave herself to make it so.
Resources:
-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah_Sampson
-https://www.mentalfloss.com/history/american-revolution-forgotten-figures
-https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/deborah-sampson
