God Hired Grief Counselors…

Long Before the Profession Existed

By Jane Perkins, MS, LCPC, LPC-S

Let me introduce you to a group of women in Scripture that most people have never heard a sermon about.

They show up in Jeremiah 9:17-20, summoned by God Himself in one of the most striking moments in the entire Old Testament. God, through the prophet Jeremiah, looks out at a nation drowning in sin and about to face catastrophic judgment, and He does not call for silence. He does not tell the people to pull themselves together or keep moving forward.

He calls for the wailing women.

"Thus says the LORD of hosts: Consider, and call for the mourning women to come; send for the skillful women to come; let them make haste and raise a wailing over us, that our eyes may run down with tears and our eyelids flow with water." (Jeremiah 9:17 to 18, ESV)

I want you to sit with that for a moment. The God of the universe, in a moment of national crisis, specifically requests trained women whose entire professional skill rested in helping communities cry.

This tells us how God views grief, tears, and the human need to mourn together.

Who Were the Wailing Women?

The wailing women of ancient Israel were not simply emotional bystanders who happened to cry at funerals. They were professionals. Skilled craftswomen of lamentation. Wait, what?  What’s that word lamentation?  

Lamentation or to Lament.  It means the passionate expression of grief or sorrow.

The Hebrew text of Jeremiah 9:17 calls these women skillful, which also means wise and experienced. This description in the English translation omits the rich meaning of these skills.  Its original wording is the same root word used to describe the craftsmen who built the Tabernacle (Exodus 31:6) and the wise men whom Solomon surpassed in wisdom (1 Kings 4:31).

God did not summon amateurs. He called for women with expertise.

These women trained for their roles and deliberately passed that training down. Jeremiah 9:20 records God's direct instruction to them: "Hear, O women, the word of the LORD, and let your ear receive the word of his mouth; teach to your daughters a lament, and each to her neighbor a dirge." Lamentation was a discipline transmitted from mother to daughter across generations, a craft refined and preserved the way any skilled trade carries forward through intentional teaching.

In the social and economic structure of ancient Israel, women without a father, husband, or brother to provide for them faced genuine poverty and vulnerability. Professional mourning gave these women a recognized, compensated vocation within their community. As scholar Philip J. King and Lawrence E. Stager document in Life in Biblical Israel, hired mourners occupied an established social role throughout the ancient Near East, with evidence of the profession appearing in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and across the Levant (King and Stager, 2001).

God built this profession into the fabric of His people's communal life. He did not tolerate it. He called upon it.

Why Jeremiah 9 Needed Them

To understand why God summoned the wailing women in Jeremiah 9, you need to understand the weight of the moment.

Israel had sinned gravely and persistently. Idolatry, injustice, deception, and spiritual adultery had saturated the nation for generations. God had sent prophet after prophet with warnings that went largely unheeded. Now Babylon stood at the door, and the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of God's people were no longer warnings. They were approaching realities.

Jeremiah himself wept over his people so consistently that history remembers him as the weeping prophet. The book of Lamentations, attributed to Jeremiah, stands as one of the most raw and honest expressions of communal grief in all of Scripture. But Jeremiah understood something that we often miss.

The correct response to sin, loss, and coming judgment was not stoic endurance.

 It was an honest, communal lamentation.

The wailing women did not mourn arbitrarily. Their laments gave voice to something God wanted His people to feel at the deepest level. Grief over sin. Grief over what sin costs. Grief that could, if allowed to do its full work, lead to genuine repentance and a restored relationship with God.

Scholar Kathleen M. O'Connor, in her work on Jeremiah, describes the lament tradition in Israel as a theological act, not merely an emotional one. To lament was to acknowledge reality honestly before God rather than performing false peace (O'Connor, 2011). The wailing women gave that honest acknowledgment a communal voice.

Professional Mourning Throughout Scripture

Jeremiah 9 does not stand alone. Professional mourning appears throughout the biblical narrative in ways that most readers pass over without recognition.

When King Josiah died in battle at Megiddo, the grief was national. Second Chronicles 35:25 records that "Jeremiah also uttered a lament for Josiah, and all the singing men and women have spoken of Josiah in their laments to this day." Trained singers, both male and female, led the nation in structured grief.

Ecclesiastes 12:5 references mourning women going about in the streets as a familiar feature of ancient community life.

By the time of the New Testament, the tradition remained firmly embedded in Jewish culture. When Jesus arrived at the home of Jairus after his daughter died, Matthew 9:23 records flute players and a noisy crowd already present, the professional mourners engaged to lead the household's grief. Mark 5:38 describes the mourning and wailing that met Jesus at the door. Jesus interacted with these mourners directly, not dismissing their profession but entering into a scene they had been hired to create.

Scholar Saul Olyan, in his extensive study Biblical Mourning: Ritual and Social Dimensions, documents how mourning in ancient Israel served a structured social function with recognized rituals, timeframes, and participants (Olyan, 2004). The wailing women operated within that structure as its most visible and skilled practitioners.

What This Reveals About God's Design for Grief

Here is where this biblical history intersects directly with the work I do as a counselor and coach.

God did not design grief as a private, silent, individual experience. The wailing women made grief communal, audible, and visible. They created a structured space where an entire community could externalize pain that, left unexpressed, would have calcified into bitterness, denial, or spiritual deadness.

Modern neuroscience now confirms what Jeremiah 9 demonstrated thousands of years ago. Research published in Frontiers in Psychology by Gračanin and colleagues demonstrates that crying functions as a self-soothing biological mechanism that reduces physiological stress responses (Gračanin et al., 2014). Research by Bylsma, Robinson, and Vingerhoets documents how emotional tears carry stress hormones, including cortisol and adrenocorticotropic hormone, out of the body (Bylsma et al., 2018). Harvard Health and Verywell Mind both report that completed crying episodes lower blood pressure, reduce muscle tension, trigger endorphin release, and shift the nervous system from sympathetic activation into parasympathetic rest.

God designed a biological mechanism for emotional release. He then, in ancient Israel, created a professional class of women whose entire function centered on activating that mechanism within the community.

The wailing women were ancient grief counselors. And God not only approved of them. He called for them.

What the Modern Church Gets Backward

I want to say something direct here because I have watched this pattern cause real damage.

Much of modern Christian culture treats emotional restraint as a sign of spiritual maturity. We admire the person who holds it together at the funeral. We call composure under grief a sign of strong faith. We push people past their pain rather than through it, rushing toward resurrection language before anyone has honestly sat with the cross.

The wailing women stand as a direct biblical rebuke of that impulse.

God did not call for the people of Israel to compose themselves. He called for trained women to come quickly and lead the community into honest, loud, expressive grief. He commanded that the lament be taught to daughters, preserved across generations, passed forward as a spiritual and communal necessity.

Walter Brueggemann, one of the most respected Old Testament scholars of the last century, argues in his commentary on Jeremiah that the prophetic tradition consistently validates lament as an act of faith rather than its absence. To lament is to bring reality before God rather than pretending before God (Brueggemann, 1998). The wailing women gave Israel's grief a theological home.

Grief unexpressed does not disappear. 

It may go underground for a time, but it emerges later as depression, physical illness, relationship breakdown, and spiritual numbness. I see this every week in the women I counsel and coach. Years of stored grief that never found a safe communal container. Bodies carrying what souls were never allowed to release.

The wailing women addressed that problem at the community level with remarkable effectiveness.

What This Means for You Right Now

If you have been pushing through grief, telling yourself that trusting God means not falling apart, or carrying pain quietly because you don’t want to appear spiritually weak, I want you to hear something clearly.

God hired professionals to lead people to fall apart. He considered their work skilled, wise, and necessary enough to summon them in one of the most critical moments in Israel's history. He commanded their craft to transfer across generations so that no community would ever face catastrophic loss without someone trained to lead them through grief together.

Your tears do not contradict your faith. They honor the God who designed them, values them, collects them (Psalm 56:8), and once stood at a graveside and added His own (John 11:35).

Give your grief somewhere to go. Bring it to God honestly. Find a community willing to weep alongside you rather than rush you past your pain. And if the grief runs deep enough that you need professional support to help you through it, that impulse traces directly back to Jeremiah 9. God called for skilled help. So can you.

When You Need Someone to Walk Through It With You

At Are You Ready Counseling, I work with women carrying grief, trauma, anxiety, and the accumulated weight of pain they never found a safe place to release. Clinical counseling for Illinois and Missouri residents integrates nearly 30 years of professional experience with an open Bible in every session.

Through Anchored Woman Christian Coaching, women anywhere in the world access the same biblical depth, the same honest approach to grief and healing, and the same commitment to Scripture as the foundation of genuine transformation. No geographical limits. No insurance requirements. Available wherever you are.

Both services begin with a free 20-minute consultation. Bring the grief. Bring the questions. Bring the part of your story that has never found a safe space.

Come exactly as you are.

Are You Ready Counseling and Anchored Woman Christian CoachingJane Perkins, IL-LCPC, MO-LPC-S

Visit: www.Anchoredwoman.org or www.AreYouReadyCounseling.com

Email: jane@areyoureadycounseling.com

Book your free consultation: https://calendly.com/areyoureadycounseling

Open the Word. Trust His promises. And walk forward in His truth.

References

Brueggemann, W. (1998). A commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and homecoming. Eerdmans Publishing.

Bylsma, L. M., Robinson, M. D., & Vingerhoets, A. J. J. M. (2018). The neurobiology of human crying. Clinical Psychology Review. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6201288

Gračanin, A., Bylsma, L. M., & Vingerhoets, A. J. J. M. (2014). Is crying a self-soothing behavior? Frontiers in Psychology. frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00502/full

King, P. J., & Stager, L. E. (2001). Life in biblical Israel. Westminster John Knox Press.

O'Connor, K. M. (2011). Jeremiah: Pain and promise. Fortress Press.

Olyan, S. M. (2004). Biblical mourning: Ritual and social dimensions. Oxford University Press.

Holy Bible, English Standard Version. (2001). Crossway Bibles. Jeremiah 9:17 to 20; Psalm 56:8; John 11:35; Matthew 9:23; Mark 5:38; 2 Chronicles 35:25; Ecclesiastes 12:5.