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

FEMALE WORKERS RELATED TO THE ROYAL HOUSEHOLD | 257
construct does not matter here, because within the text-world it is taken for
granted that a Hebrew woman should breast-feed a Hebrew baby. 63
It is estimated the nursing period lasted about three years. While in the
Bible the only reference is the one just mentioned with unspecified “wages,”
several contracts as well as laws have been discovered from ancient
Mesopotamia. These regulate both parties’ responsibilities and costs, including
payment of food, barley, oil, wood, or clothing (three of these items at a time are
mentioned) to the wet nurse; prohibition to take on another suckling without
express consent from the first child’s parents; and prohibition to engage in
sexual intercourse, lest the milk turns bitter and thinner. Often, wet nurses were
slaves or free poor women, who could in this way make ends meet. Apparently,
they raised the child in their own home (this is also implied in the story of
Moses’ upbringing, where his mother takes him to his adoptive mother,
Pharaoh’s daughter, when she weans him). Other documents speak of wet nurses
who receive rations from the palace; these ones would probably have lived also
in the palace, taken care of sucklings and later educated these children or taken
up other tasks, caring for the women—one can also imagine that, if their “milk
son” became king, they would hold a special position and would perhaps enjoy
leisure, rather than performing other domestic tasks. 64 S. Dalley asserts that,
because of Shibtu, King Zimri-Lim’s wife’s many responsibilities and children,
“[t]he wet-nurse mušēniqtum for infants and the nanny or governess tārītum for
weaned children were established in society.” 65 One should imagine, also, that
even in the palace everybody worked, either administering or gardening or in
whatever capacity. Perhaps the major difference would be in the kind of work
they did and in the honor ascribed to it. 66
According to Archi, in the Ebla court, wet nurses retained this title long
after their function as such had finished.
Two monthly documents relating to rations of cereals (ARET IX 41, 42), to be
dated to the very last years of Ebla, list: a) 11 “women of the king,” dam en; b)
63 See M. Lefkowitz & M. Fant, Women's Life in Greece and Rome. A Source Book in Translation
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.) 28 §54, 29 §59 (epitaph and tomb inscription),
29 §58(i), (wet-nurses in inscriptions of manumission), and 110–11 §111 (letter on how to hire a
wet-nurse). On breast-feeding in antiquity and in rural societies today, see Mayer I. Gruber, “Breast-
Feeding Practices in Biblical Israel and in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia,” JANES 19 (1989): 61–83.
64 So Stol, Birth, 188 on Mari women.
65 Stephanie Dalley, Mari and Karana (Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias, 2002 2 [1984]), 98–9.
66 Dalley, Mary and Karana, 73, mentions the following occupations in the ration lists: “the drawers
of water, at Mari two girls …; and two men who ‘carried wood’. There was a doorkeeper (women
were doorkeepers at Chagar Bazar), a barber, a throne bearer and a reed worker who would have
made baskets, mats and fencing. There were gardeners … Two potters are found in the ration lists of
Chagar Bazar.”