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

INTRODUCTION: ON FEMALE LABOR IN THE HEBREW BIBLE | 3
sexual purity, avoidance of males other than their family members, and
seclusion. 5
I found in most scholarly (and popular) descriptions of ancient Israelite
women too much uniformity; they looked too much as today’s middle class. 6 As
I read for my dissertation on women in ancient Israel and these expectations on
their “shame,” I could think of many situations in which that was just not
possible. Would the slave, the courier, or the midwife, to name only a few, have
been able to stay “inside” their own domestic, secluded space? Would they have
been able to, or allowed to, observe even the taboos related to menstruation?
A model cannot take in every exception or it would no longer be a model.
One could, of course, explain this silence by stating that those women would not
have been able to keep their shame (shame understood in the preventive sense of
guarded sexual behavior) and therefore would be “out of the game.” That would
certainly be possible in a system in which so much emphasis is set on control of
bodies. Yet, even that answer leaves many open questions. Suppose the biblical
writers would have answered me by stating there was no positive shame but
staying securely inside, protected by their males. Would that be it? Would that
be all there is to say in assessing or evaluating each of these women? Could it be
possible that the biblical texts would assess those women with other standards
than those upheld by what we usually call “honor-shame in the Mediterranean
world”?
It is my contention that, together with this dominant view of the male urban
elite, there are also sub-cultures of the peasants and other poor who uphold other
values, such as working hard, being upright, cooperative with other poor, and
shrewd with those in power and, in the case of women, taking as much control
of their reproductive capability as possible. 7 This I will try to lay bare to my
readers, so that a more nuanced model can be achieved.
5 On virginity see Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “Virginity in the Bible,” in Gender and Law in the Hebrew
Bible (ed. Victor H. Matthews, Bernard M. Levinson & Tikva Frymer-Kensky; Sheffield: Sheffield
Academic Press, 1998), 79–96; as an economic asset, see Victor Matthews and Don C. Benjamin,
Social World of Ancient Israel, 1250–587 BCE (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1993), 176–86; Karen
Engelken, Frauen im Alten Israel: Eine begriffsgeschichtliche und sozialrechtliche Studie zur
Stellung der Frau im Alten Testament (BWANT, 7th series, 10; Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1990), 5–16.
6 Other scholars have also raised their concern on this pairing, perhaps more so in what pertains to
the Hebrew Bible and its milieu than to the Greco-Roman world. Susan Brayford, “To Shame or Not
to Shame: Sexuality in the Mediterranean Diaspora,” Semeia 87 (1999): 164, contends that
“although honor is almost always an important criterion in assessing the male characters, shame, in
its positive sense, is not always a major factor in female characterization. Pentateuchal texts, in
particular, do not represent consistently the value accorded to positive female shame in the
Mediterranean [the cultural milieu that most closely corresponds with the values of the dominant
Hellenistic culture in the later centuries B.C.E. and early centuries C.E.] model of the honor/shame
code.”
7 Previous work with lower-class, hard-working women, mostly coming from the countryside, had
taught me how different their shared values were from those of the middle class with which I was