Women at Work in the Deuteronomistic History - International Voices ...

FEMALE SLAVES AND DEPENDENTS | 129
Servants of Important Characters. This sub-section includes, within the DtrH,
only one case: the unnamed החפשׁ in 2 Sam 17:17, who helped pass on
information to David’s troops during Absalom’s revolt. This woman would
leave the palace unnoticed and report events to David’s men. The most
interesting aspect of this woman is that she is given the characteristics of a
הרענ; she is unnamed and immediately disappears from the story; she trespasses
boundaries and is depicted outside rather than in the household. Conversely, in
this text the החפשׁ is not said to have been given as dowry, is not used to give
the master offspring, and is not a possession in general. She might have been all
of these things, but Dtr only uses her ability to trespass the threshold, an ability
which is typical of םירענ and תורענ, as Leeb has shown. 36
Outside of DtrH other servants of important characters—aside from the
תורענ—appear in the Genesis narratives. In narratives which focus on surrogate
mothers they retain both their status of slave and inclusion into the family.
Hagar, Zilpah, and Bilhah are servants to the mistress and slave-wives to the
master. 37 The treatment of Hagar by Sarah and Abraham poignantly reflects this
double status and it is far more developed in the narratives than the stories of
Zilpah and Bilhah.
Hagar. Hagar appears in two different chapters: Gen 16 (attributed to the J
tradition) calls her Sarah’s החפשׁ; Gen 21 (E) calls her Abraham’s המא. There
have appeared several good studies on Hagar, restoring her to her deserved
position of matriarch. The following notes look at what her story tells about
slavery.
Hagar’s story embodies the ambivalence in the slave between her being a
person and her use as a commodity, as well as the ambivalence between her role
of slave to Sarah and secondary wife to Abraham (המא), although her status of
secondary wife (or slave-wife) was not enough to ensure his generosity toward
the mother of his child, even if by law he was not bound to give her anything. 38
J. Waters struggles with some of the very questions that motivated our
study, namely, why is there no feminine noun from the verb דבע “serve” to talk
about women? Why two nouns and what is the difference between them? In his
book, he looks at Hagar’s story from an African American perspective, using
36 Leeb, Away from the Father’s House, 126–128.
37 When Rebekah travels to marry Isaac her wet nurse (תקנימ), Deborah, travels with her. There
seem to have been many situations like this, when the services of a slave changed in kind.
38 “The dual status of the slave given as a wife is well expressed by the Old Babylonian contractual
formula: ‘A is a slave to B (first wife); a wife to C (husband).’” Westbrook, Property, 153–4, and
154 n.1: “CT 4 39a.9–11; CT 8 22b.5–6; CT 48.6–8. In none of these contracts, however, does the
slave appear to have been acquired by way of dowry.”