The Barren Matriarchs of Israel Part 1 Real Women by Donna Diorio
I’ve had that phrase “the barren matriarchs of Israel” in my browser since at least February 7th, 2026. I think it was a phrase Mark Chironna used, and as soon as I heard it I knew it was something I had to explore and write about. A mystery of God was singing out loudly to me from the phrase.
I’ve kept that browser page open all these months as I did other things knowing I as going to come back to it for a major exploration. Friday I decided The Barren Matriarchs of Israel would be my Mother’s Day article and so research began. What I found in the original Hebrew words just about Rebekah and Leah let me know I had hit the ‘mother lode’ of gold.
Overnight all my research disappeared from my computer.
I like writing first takes, but if the enemy dares to steal my own writing from me, I know that whatever I write in reconstruction God is going to bless, anoint and multiply my efforts.
That’s what happened on Saturday when I started over again. I took a new run at it because I still know what I found so important in the details researched before. My starting place in writing this time has taken a different route with an overview of major points in the accounts of the four primary matriarchs of Israel: Sarah, Rebekah, Leah, and Rachel.
This is not going to be an exhaustive accounting of the 4 barren matriarchs of Israel, but there are some specific details in each of their stories that tells me something about God. It is significant that all four of the women who were to produce a specific familial line towards a people who would become a nation representing God, all had a period of infertility. They were a "peculiar people" who would be known for worshipping the particular God who called them, chose them and placed His name on them.
In Deuteronomy 14:2 God calls them a peculiar people, or sᵊḡullâ, a valued possession. That's the same phrase both the Apostle Paul and the Apostle Peter call those who are believers in Yeshua/Jesus.
Called, chosen and a valued possession of God's.
Strange isn't it for God to make promises of bringing forth a great nation out of certain persons, then for those people to each face an inability to get pregnant. Why the hardship? and why did God finally open their wombs to conceive? With each one, the details are different.
These four women - Sarah, Rebekah, Leah and Rachel - each had different stories of personal hardships that come even with the promises of God. There are many prophetic truths in their stories that tell us about our own journey with God. It also speaks of God’s dealings with Israel today after a long period of spiritual barrenness in the exile and the hardships of God's modern day restoration of the State of Israel.
Every Christian who loves God must come to grips with the reality that is expressed in the stories of the barren matriarchs of Israel. This is both on a personal basis and accepting God's continued value of Israel. After a long period of spiritual barrenness in exile, Israel is not only a restored State, it is a people who are going to be restored BY FAITH in Yeshua.
There several other significant accounts of barren women in God's Word. In some of them, when God opened their wombs, they bore sons who be significant in fulfilling God’s plans.
The story of Hannah who was the mother of Samuel and she is the one I strongly related to. According to Acts 3:24 and 13:20, Hannah’s son Samuel was the first of the prophets since Moses, marking the beginning of the era of Israel's national prophets. AI notes that “Moses, Abraham, and Enoch are described as having prophetic roles or speaking for God, but Samuel is distinct as the first to lead an order of prophets and address the entire nation in that capacity.”
AI also identifies other biblical barren women including the mother of Samson, the unnamed wife of Manoah, “and in Jewish tradition, is personified Zion (Jerusalem) based on Isaiah 54:1.
“Shout for joy, O barren woman,
who bears no children;
break forth in song and cry aloud,
you who have never travailed;
because more are the children of the desolate woman
than of her who has a husband,’ says the LORD.”
Zion is also personified in Galatians 4:26, “But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all.”
Zion is a well known name for Jerusalem. In this statement by Paul, he is indicating that the Zion that is coming down from Heaven is free/eleutheros – “freeborn, one who ceases to be a slave, released from slavery." This Zion will include people from every tribe, tongue and nation – including Israel.
Despite her years of barrenness for almost 2,000 years, God has opened the womb of Israel and her children will come forth.
In each of the Matriarchs of Israel, it seems God is working through the hardships to bring forth trust in Him and also freedom to the things each woman was a slave to. That is the journey both men and women embark upon when we place our faith in the salvation offered to us by faith. It is a free gift, but we will wrestle with God just as Jacob did to enter into the fulness of our inheritance.
In my own physically barren life, I have looked at the ministry God called me to in 2001 as my starting point of being pregnant with Zion. My heart has been set on making Christians aware of the body of Messiah in Israel. They are important to us and we are important to them.
I wrote about that on July 3, 2021, Hope Deferred: Pregnant with Zion. Hope deferred was also the state of each and every one of the barren matriarchs of Israel before God opened their wombs.
Currently it is also the state of Christians like myself who are aiding and interceding for the Messianic Jewish body of believers in Israel. Our desire is that other Christians would join us in supporting the Israeli believer ministries so more and more in Israel will be spiritually birthed into the kingdom.
In this study one thing is abundantly clear to me: It is God who opens the womb of every woman to conceive. Unless God opens the womb, no woman could bear children. This is as true as the fact that God gives us all our next breath. If He did not, we would surely drop dead unable to breathe.
This is why we cannot turn our backs on God's will for us. We can struggle against God, but we cannot prevail over His will.
It used to be considered a shame to any woman who could not bear children, but there is no shame attached to barrenness in modern Western society. People today call it "infertility" which takes some of the sting out of the word barren.
Today women have been most thoroughly indoctrinated to the point that many shamelessly use abortion as their personal choice of birth control. They take precious life in their womb and rid their bodies of it as if it were nothing, not regarding it in the reality that the baby being formed within them is a whole new human being of their own flesh and blood. The reality of carrying a baby in a woman's womb is replaced by words like fetus. There is no need to feel compassion for a fetus like there is for the baby growing inside you.
As a Christian unable to bear children, it has grieved me to watch how far we have fallen in the respect of life. There are still women who want to bear children but can't. I always wondered why I couldn't. Was I being punished, or what?
Of the 9 examples of women in the Bible who were barren, only one of them could possibly have been punished by God, and that was Michel. the daughter of Saul and wife of David, when she mocked David for worshipping in dance as he return the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem. 2 Samuel 6:16-20 and 1 Chronicles 15:29 Clearly this is not a form of punishment for the majority of women who were barren.
I can already see from this study that if God does not open a woman's womb, it does NOT mean she is being punished.
She may be, but the point is that it is God's will. Seek His will in everything, He may yet open your womb and if He doesn't seek His will anyway.
I am not ashamed and no longer sorrowful because I have never been pregnant, but I can tell you this, I am very pregnant with Zion. It is a spiritual pregnancy desiring to see the spiritual children brought forth to life.
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