Women’s Agrarian Agency: A Rural-Theological Reading of Proverbs 31:16 in Maluku

This article reads Proverbs 31:16 through rural theology to foreground women’s agrarian agency as economically productive and theologically significant. It repositions the ‘wise woman’ from a domestic moral ideal to a figure of strategic land management and household sustainability. While scholarship has emphasised ethical virtues or feminist readings confined to domesticity, the verse’s agrarian and rural-theological dimensions remain underexplored. Methodologically, the study integrates wisdom-literature hermeneutics, socio-historical analysis of agrarian economies, and dialogue with feminist rural theology. The study demonstrates three principal findings: first, women are portrayed as deliberate economic agents who acquire and manage land; second, domestic space is reframed as productive leadership rather than dependence; and third, this agency carries theological significance for livelihood, sustainability, and moral economy. Read in conversation with Maluku – where women farmers, fishers, and garden managers are often marginalised – this article offers an emancipatory reading that affirms women’s productive agency for transforming rural household economies.