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

CHAPTER 7
PROSTITUTES AND OTHER SEX WORKERS
CONCEPTUAL DIFFICULTIES
At least these main conceptual difficulties may be identified when seeking the
sex workers of the ANE (including Israel):one difficulty lies in the wide range
of meanings of the stem הנז, from the exercise of prostitution to idolatry.
Secondly, there is the added difficulty of centuries-long biased translations and
interpretations, which have found secular and sacred prostitutes in every
reference to women unaccounted for. Thus, it is one of the feminist scholar’s
tasks to undo some well-established trends. A third difficulty lies in the fact that
even marriage involved the exchange of gifts for sex! In societies in which there
are dowries involved, and in which money was not the main means of exchange,
there is a very thin line between different situations in which women would have
received some kind of sex for pay. Finally, even if taking only those texts which
arguably speak of “an organized form of sexual extramarital commerce,” there
would be disagreement among us as to which of today’s categories would best
apply, being sex tourism, exploitation of girls and boys for pornography, traffic
of women and girls for “accompaniment” during events such as the soccer world
championship, and an international web of brothels in which abducted girls and
women are kept captive for prostitution, some of the darkest modes of this trade.
Modes of which we do not hear in our sources, although it is not hard to imagine
that some of them would have been already part of a captive’s fate, for instance.
At any rate, it is important to determine if and when an accusation of “playing
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