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

INTRODUCTION: ON FEMALE LABOR IN THE HEBREW BIBLE | 5
scenarios, from the countryside to the city, from the foundational moment of the
settlement/conquest to the exile, from the private home or family to the court;
from the heroes and heroines to the worst actions human beings can do to each
other.
My interest is also not philological, so I have tried not to get jammed by the
terms themselves, although that is where I have started to look for women.
Discussion of harlots will make this tension especially evident, as in the last
years several scholars have contested this traditional meaning of the participle
הנוז. Since my study is the worker and not the term, I selected those instances of
the term that seemed to apply to such a study.
A SHORT GUIDE TO THIS ROAD: THE BOOK’S ORGANIZATION
The noted Assyriologist Ignace Gelb begins his article by saying, “The term
‘slave’ can be discussed, but not defined.” 9 Definitions of slavery and of several
other social categories are tied to methodological and conceptual problems,
which are discussed below. To ideological positions and differences in training
among modern scholars one has to add the fact that the sources themselves use
the same words (המא, החפשׁ, and דבע) to refer to several different types of
legal conditions of people. I have tended to translate them with the term “slave,”
although sometimes a difference with the “indentured servant/slave,” the one
under temporary debt-slavery, is made. That biblical Hebrew does not make this
difference (as far as we know) should be kept in mind, for it would thus save us
from some missteps and it would remind us that their social and legal perception
of their contemporaries is, at best, different from ours. Since indentured slaves
were from the same society as their creditors and were meant to work only for
some years, they held some rights, particularly if society foresaw that after the
period of servitude they would again be fellow Israelites in good standing. So, in
theory at least this social difference cannot be philologically perceived.
“Dependent” is used here to generally describe a person who is under the
authority of another in economic terms; a person who is economically or
socially dependent on another and thus not his/her own master. Dependency
does not have to do with the legal aspect (free, hired, or enslaved person), but
with the relation between the one who offers the service and the one who pays
for it, be that a person or an institution, and whatever type of payment is
implied. Dependent is used to translate הרענ (or רענ), when in service in a
household other than her own, because her status is not clear in the text, while
her economic and social dependency are.
Chapter 1 lays bare the main assumptions and choices made in this study in
terms of the body of research, methodology, and the lens through which I read.
9
Ignace Gelb, “Definition and Discussion of Slavery and Serfdom,” UF 11 (1979): 283. His
description is more fully quoted in chapter 3.