We don’t know what she said. But we can guess what she felt.

One of the strangest parts of writing historical perspectives on women is realizing how often the record goes quiet. Their lineage, their husband, and the families they belonged to are well-recorded, but almost nothing is preserved about their emotions, thoughts, and dreams. It is almost like their voices didn’t matter as much as their lineage.

So what do we do with that as writers?

We can’t resurrect what was never written. But we can look into the silence and ask: What is responsible to imagine here? What is grounded in historical and religious context? And what crosses a line into projecting our own worldview onto a woman who lived in different cultural boundaries?

That’s where the ethics of imagination come in.

When the record is silent, the temptation is to fill the space with whatever feels empowering or emotionally satisfying. But responsible speculation works differently. You anchor yourself in the culture, the time period, the social norms, the belief systems, the economic constraints — many of which supported the exploitation of women – and then you ask, “Within these boundaries, what might a woman like her have felt?” You’re not trying to write wish fulfillment. You’re trying to write truth that could plausibly have lived beneath the surface of her world.

The line is usually crossed the moment a character starts sounding like she just came out of therapy, a TED Talk, or a feminist theory class. That’s not imagination — that’s intervention. It’s you stepping into her story with your own values instead of hers. And while that might be a good idea but it erases the complexity of the world she existed in.

This is why our stories must be read by people who have mastery over history and theology. People who can correct us on how that particular character must have talked, desired, expressed, or moved in the community. It’s about grounding your imagination in something solid enough that the story rings true.

But at the end of the day, you’re still a storyteller. You’re going to have to make choices the record cannot confirm or deny. That’s the creative freedom side of the equation — the part where you picture the moment the scribe didn’t see, the conversation no one wrote down, the private feeling that never made it into the annals. The key is doing it with humility and strength instead of projection, with respect instead of revisionism.

Because even when we don’t know what she said, we can still make an educated guess about what she felt — not with modern hindsight, but with historical imagination. And that is where some of the most powerful writing comes from: the space where evidence ends, empathy begins, and imagination steps carefully into the silence without trying to overwrite the truth that’s already there.

A good example from Beyond the Well is Photine’s private emotional world around Ezra and her son. The Bible doesn’t elaborate on Photine’s life at length. Nowhere in the Scripture are we told about her pain, loss, or her experiences. In Scripture, her story appears in a few verses. She speaks briefly to Jesus. We’re given the outline of her life, not the texture like many other Biblical women.

That silence gives a writer room to explore — but it also comes with responsibility.

Take the moment Photine reflects on losing Ezra and their child. There is no record of how Biblical women processed the loss of a spouse or child. But there are certain records of lamentation, silence, ritual, and communal mourning as the way of grieving a loss. We know how honor and shame shaped identity. We know survival for women depended on households, alliances, and male protection. We know attachment was real, even if it was rarely written about from a woman’s perspective.

So when Photine presses an olive shard into her palm until it hurts — that’s imagination grounded in anthropology. When she lashes out about safety and cages, that’s speculation shaped by cultural reality rather than modern emotional healing. And when she thinks of Ezra with longing and fury mixed together, that’s a universal emotion expressed through ancient logic; she doesn’t frame it as “unfinished grief” or “abandonment trauma”; she frames it as the collapse of the household she built and the threat it poses to her survival.

Nothing about that moment contradicts history, and nothing imposes a modern mindset onto her. It fills in the silence with human truth rather than modern ideology.