LYDIA appears very briefly in the Bible, in Acts. The story occurs at a very important point in the account of Paul’s travels proclaiming the gospel. Paul and Silas travelled through Asia Minor, but were forbidden by the Holy Spirit from speaking in Phrygia, Galatia, or Bithynia and went instead to Troas (otherwise known as Troy). During the night, Paul had a vision in which a man from Macedonia (the region in which Philippi was located) begged him to come and help.
In response to the dream, Paul and Silas sailed from Troas, via Samothrace, to Neapolis, which was the nearest harbour to Philippi. It was there that they met Lydia, who not only listened eagerly to what Paul said, but was baptised by him. Lydia, therefore, was the first person to become Christian in what we would now call the West (though ironically she, herself, was from Thyatira, in the East).
What we know of Lydia is limited to a few phrases in Acts 16.13-15:
“On the Sabbath day, we went out of the gate beside the river, where we believed there was a place of prayer, and sitting down we spoke to the women who were gathered there. And a certain woman by the name of Lydia, a dealer in purple from the city of Thyatira, a worshipper of God, listened. The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to the words spoken by Paul. After she and her household were baptised, she urged us, saying ‘If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come and stay at my house.’ And she persuaded us.”
From this, a few phrases give us some key details about Lydia: she dealt in purple; she was from Thyatira; she was a worshipper of God; she could be found in a place of prayer on the sabbath, and had a house into which she could welcome Paul and Silas.
There is only one more mention of Lydia in Acts — or, more accurately, of her home, since Paul and Silas returned there after their imprisonment, before travelling onwards to Thessalonica. The only other detail worth noting is one of absence. Despite the central part she played in Paul’s visit to Philippi, recorded in Acts 16.13-15, Lydia is entirely absent from Paul’s letter to the Philippians.
We are left to guess whether this means she has simply moved from Philippi, or has lost her faith — or, indeed, her life. I chose to imagine that she moved away, but later found the need to return. It allowed me to re-include her in Philippi’s story, even though she is not mentioned in Paul’s epistle. These five key details from Acts 16 are so central to our story that they will be explored in detail here by way of setting the scene.
LYDIA is most famous, popularly, for being a dealer in purple, although even this small detail is not as straightforward as it might first appear. There are three key strands to this fact that intertwine and affect how we view Lydia as a whole: what kind of purple she traded in; whether she was just a dealer or a dyer as well; and, connected to this last point, how wealthy this meant she was.
We need to begin with purple itself. Purple was highly sought after in the ancient world — it was the colour of kings, and hence of high status. In the Roman Empire, purple trimming — or, in some instances, the entire garment dyed in purple — was a sign of status, and was worn by magistrates, military commanders, and other aristocrats.
Purple was such a symbol of wealth and power that, although it could only be worn by certain distinguished Romans on their togas, it could be — and was — used by others in other ways, such as house furnishings. Purple items were, therefore, expensive and much prized. In the early fourth century BC, a pound of purple silk was worth three times the equivalent amount of gold.
There were, however, different kinds of purple. The most famous is “Tyrian purple”, derived from murex shellfish found on the coast near Tyre (modern Lebanon), but also all along the eastern Mediterranean coast. The reddish-purple dye that the snails made was produced by boiling and grinding thousands of snails (research indicates that 12,000 snails produced around 1.4g of dye).
Although Tyrian (murex) purple was particularly sought after, archaeological evidence indicates that purple was made in other ways, too. One of those is by using the root of the madder plant. Indeed, Thyatira, which is said to be where Lydia came from, was known for its growth and production of dye from the madder root.
The shade produced is known today as “Turkey red”, but madder root has been found in many purple materials from the Roman world. D. E. Graves argues persuasively that a trader such as Lydia would probably have sold a variety of different purples: murex purple, madder purple, and probably others too, maybe even made by mixing different dyes together.
This brings us to the question whether Lydia produced the dye, or just sold it. Some scholars, notably Ivoni Richter Reimer and Luise Schottroff, argue that Lydia was involved in the production of dye, not just in selling it, and therefore should not be viewed as wealthy, but as someone who worked hard to make a living. It is very difficult to tell from the scant evidence available whether Lydia was an importer and retailer (and therefore probably more wealthy), or a producer and labourer (and therefore probably poorer).
One of the interesting features to observe is that the dyeing process was a messy and smelly business (murex dye was especially smelly, and there is evidence that producers struggled to disguise the smell of the dye on the finished product). Graves therefore supposes that she would have bought materials to sell from a dyeing plant located well away from any residential areas.
As a result, I have hypothesised that Lydia sold a variety of purples in Philippi, but had brought John to Philippi with her to oversee a dyeing workshop located outside the city. This brings us to the final point of Lydia’s wealth — or otherwise.
ARGUMENTS about this, in my opinion, stray too close to absolute categories: either she was rich, or she was poor. As a trader, Lydia would have been, in modern terms, middle-class: neither very rich nor very poor. She appears to have been wealthy enough to have had a “house” (Acts 16.15), but not so rich that she could give up trading.
While it is possible, as Reimer and Schottroff argue, that Lydia was much poorer and working directly in production as well as retail, this would not explain why Lydia was able to offer hospitality to two people with apparent ease.
It is worth noting that a few scholars consider Lydia to be unhistorical, or at the least to be more important as a “type” in the text than as an actual character. These approaches are thought-provoking, as they raise questions about what Luke was trying to achieve as he wrote Acts.
Ultimately, I was not persuaded by them, but to anyone who is interested in the question I would recommend reading A. Gruca-Macaulay, Lydia as a Rhetorical Construct in Acts (SBL Press, 2016), and S. Matthews, First Converts: Rich pagan women and the rhetoric of mission in early Judaism and Christianity (Stanford University Press, 2002).
One of the more curious facts that Acts reports about Lydia is that she was a “worshipper of God”. The phrase is frustratingly vague and uninformative, and could mean a range of different things. The word translated as “worshipper” comes from the verb sebo, and means to show reverence or devotion. It occurs eight times in Acts, and is used for those who have a connection to Judaism (Acts 13.43, and notice especially the reference in Acts 18.4 to Titius Justus,who was a worshipper of God), but also for those who worship other gods, like Artemis in Ephesus (Acts 19.27).
In this instance, however, it is unlikely that it means Lydia has a propensity for religious worship (not least as this would describe everyone in the ancient world), because the Greek says that Lydia was a worshipper of the God. This suggests that the reference is to Lydia’s relationship to Judaism.
The question is what that relationship was. Many scholars conclude that the phrase refers to Lydia being a “God-fearer”: the term used to describe those who have been attracted to Judaism, but have not converted. The problem is that we know frustratingly little about what this might mean.
The most common description of this kind of person comes from Acts, and there is a lively debate about exactly what it refers to — and, indeed, whether “God-fearers” is really a category at all. At the very least, the phrase “worshipper of God” appears to suggest someone who is attracted by the tenets of Judaism, and who gathers with others to reflect on them.
This is an edited extract from Lydia by Paula Gooder, published by Hodder & Stoughton at £16.99 (Church Times Bookshop £14.99); 978-1-44479-206-5.
Read a review of the book here