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

INTRODUCTION: ON FEMALE LABOR IN THE HEBREW BIBLE | 15
their memory alive. These people are taken for granted rather than recognized,
because the writers’ interests lie elsewhere, and because the elite class was
accustomed to being served. These mostly anonymous women (there were, of
course, many men in similar situations) who worked for others, who are
sometimes mentioned only in one verse, and who have gone unrecognized in
DtrH and in modern scholarship, despite their contribution to the socioeconomic
system (and as secondary characters to narratives): these women
constitute our focus.
At a time when society starts to recognize that women carry a heavier
economic and social burden than men do, that women do not share equally in
decision making, and that women are all too often subject to violence and
humiliation, theology is called to take up those it has so far forgotten, and to
enlarge the picture of what service and faithfulness mean. Perhaps then there
will be no more “little women.” 40
40 That was part of the title of my dissertation, taken from Louisa M. Alcott’s famous novel (“‘Little
Women’: Female Labor in the Deuteronomistic History” [Ph.D. diss., The Lutheran School of
Theology at Chicago, 1999]).