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

290 | WOMEN AT WORK IN THE DTRH
such an הנוז השׁא, like the שיא תשׁא of the other member of the parallelism,
be a lover on whom this man showers his richness. Although not every השׁא
הנוז would be an adulteress, in people’s imagination and in practice it is
possible that unattached women would accept some man/men’s favors and at
times his whole “wallet”—or at least that would be the family’s fear.
Prov 23:26–28 is a short teaching in which the “son” is warned against two
types of women, set in a parallel saying in v. 27: the הנוז and the הירכנ, over
against the speaker (apparently, Wisdom, see v. 22–25). Like the other short
saying of Prov 29:3, we could see this one as a “contrast of two loves,” that of
wisdom against danger, here expressed by two female terms and two terms with
underworld overtones:
My son, give me your heart,
and may your eyes delight in my ways.
For/that, a deep pit is the הנוז,
a narrow well a female outsider הירכנ.
Yes! She lies in wait like a thief
and increases the (number of) the treacherous.
Or, to take Phyllis Bird’s proposal,
A fornicator is a deep pit;
an “alien woman” is a narrow well.
She too lies in wait for prey. 58
The first thing that calls attention is that a prostitute would have so much
power, quasi-cosmic power. Several explanations are possible. One is that, in
view of the sages’ preoccupation with the fornicator-adulterous woman and not
the paid harlot (a preoccupation further stressed by mentioning here the הירכנ,
alien, outsider or “other” woman), the connotation of the term here would be
that of the “fornicator,” rather than the professional harlot. Another possible
explanation would be that the writer is actually thinking of the harlot, “a woman
without morals, who will rob a man, and eventually bankrupt him. The warning
is to stay away from such women, who may appear to offer easy pleasure,
without the legal censure, but turn out to be a ‘deep pit.’” 59 I had initially not
considered this possibility of a literal prostitute in this text, but it complements
well Solomon’s assumption, on which 1 Kgs 3 is built, that at least one of the
two zōnôt-women seeking his verdict on the child claimed by both is a liar.
Finally, a third possible explanation would be that the author used hyperbole
58 Bird, “Prostitution in the Social World,” 45.
59 Bird, private communication.