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The Handmaid's Tale — "Blessed be the fruit" and the text behind Gilead

Adapted Television 1985

Real texts, selectively repurposed. Genesis 30 narrates the surrogacy of Bilhah and Zilpah as events; the text does not present these events as a normative model. Luke 1:42 is a greeting; Gilead converts it into a ritual formula.

What the work does

Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel — adapted into the Hulu series beginning 2017 — describes the fictional theocratic state of Gilead, in which a class of women (Handmaids) are assigned to elite households for the purpose of bearing children for the wives. Atwood has stated that no element of the novel's practices was invented from nothing; each had a historical or textual antecedent. Gilead's ideology builds explicitly on Genesis 30 and on adapted Gospel formulae.

Biblical source

Genesis 30:1–13 (Bilhah and Zilpah); Luke 1:42 (Elizabeth's greeting to Mary). Both texts are repurposed within the fictional regime's ideology.

What the text actually says

Genesis 30:3 (BSB): "Then she said, 'Here is my maidservant Bilhah. Sleep with her, that she may bear children for me, so that through her I too can build a family.'" Luke 1:42 (BSB): "And she exclaimed with a loud voice, 'Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!'"

Verdict

The texts Gilead invokes are real but used selectively. Genesis 30 records the events of Rachel and Leah giving their maidservants to Jacob without presenting these events as a command or normative pattern (the narrative complications that follow suggest the opposite). Luke 1:42 is Elizabeth's greeting to Mary, not a ritual liturgical formula. The fiction's manipulation of the texts is part of the novel's argument about how power uses scripture.

What the work does

Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985. Hulu’s adaptation began in 2017 and ran across multiple seasons. Atwood has stated, in essays and interviews collected in Burning Questions (2022) and elsewhere, that no element of the novel’s practices was invented from nothing: each had a historical, legal, or textual antecedent somewhere in human history. The fictional theocratic state of Gilead, set in a post-United States territory, builds its ideology and rituals on materials it presents as biblically sanctioned.

Two biblical materials are foregrounded in the work’s surface vocabulary:

  • Genesis 30 — the narrative of Rachel and Leah giving their maidservants Bilhah and Zilpah to Jacob to bear children on their behalf.
  • Adapted Gospel formulae — most prominently the ritualised greeting Blessed be the fruit / May the Lord open, which adapts Luke 1:42.

This entry examines what each source text actually says.

Genesis 30 — narrative, not command

The Bilhah and Zilpah episodes are narrated in Genesis 30:1-13. Rachel, unable to conceive, gives her maidservant Bilhah to Jacob:

“Then she said, ‘Here is my maidservant Bilhah. Sleep with her, that she may bear children for me, so that through her I too can build a family.’” (Genesis 30:3, BSB)

Leah then gives her maidservant Zilpah for the same purpose (30:9). Both maidservants bear sons; the sons are counted to Rachel and Leah respectively, becoming founders of four of the tribes of Israel (Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher).

Several features of the Genesis narrative are worth noting:

  • The text describes events; it does not command them. The narrative voice records what happened; it does not present the action as a divine instruction or as a model to be replicated.
  • The internal dynamics are conflicted. The chapter opens with Rachel’s envy of Leah; it continues with Rachel’s complaint to Jacob (“Give me children, or I will die”); Jacob’s response is angry, not pastoral. The narrative voice does not present the situation as harmonious or as evidently right.
  • The consequences are mixed. The lineages that descend from the maidservants enter the tribal map of Israel without further textual commentary, but the Joseph-narrative complications that follow (Genesis 37 onward) are inseparable from the half-sibling dynamics this chapter sets up.

The Genesis text presents the Bilhah and Zilpah episodes as events in the narrative of Jacob’s family, not as a pattern for surrogate motherhood. Reading them as command-text — as Gilead’s ideologues do in the fiction — requires a selection that the text does not warrant.

Luke 1:42 — greeting, not formula

The Gilead ritual greeting Blessed be the fruit, with the standard reply May the Lord open (in the show) adapts Luke 1:42, Elizabeth’s greeting to Mary at the Visitation:

“And she exclaimed with a loud voice, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why am I so honored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?’” (Luke 1:42-43, BSB)

The Lukan passage is a personal exclamation, one woman’s response on meeting another. It is filled with the Holy Spirit (the previous verse, 1:41) and represents a specific recognition between Elizabeth and Mary in their respective pregnancies. The greeting is not a formula — it appears once in the Gospel and has no other liturgical use in the New Testament.

The Catholic tradition has incorporated language from Luke 1:42 into the Hail Mary prayer (Ave Maria), but as a meditative repetition of the Lukan moment, not as a state-imposed greeting between socially unequal parties.

Gilead’s adaptation converts a personal Spirit-prompted greeting into a state ritual. This conversion is what the fiction is interested in — how language used in one register can be moved to another and made to mean something quite different. The fact that the source text does not warrant the ritual use is the point.

What the fiction is arguing

The Handmaid’s Tale (the novel and series both) does not argue that the Bible is responsible for Gilead. It argues that totalitarian power, when it wants religious legitimacy, will selectively quote any available scripture. The texts the fiction’s Gilead invokes are real. The interpretation Gilead places on them is not warranted by the texts themselves.

Atwood has been explicit about this in interviews: her project is to track how power uses scripture, not to indict scripture. The selectivity of Gilead’s use is part of the novel’s argument.

For other entries on how cultural works use biblical material, see Mary Magdalene — what the canonical Gospels record. For the wider theological vocabulary of conversion that some Christian traditions place against the Marian texts, see What does the Bible mean by “born again”?.

To read the relevant passages in other translations: