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

322 | WOMEN AT WORK IN THE DTRH
the more so anybody else. Yet, it seems to be an issue worth bringing to the fore
and further exploring.
To make issues worse, most women named either הנוז השׁא or הנוז do not
appear in situations that permit us easily to identify them as harlots and this
becomes clear once we are alert to the weight traditional translations still bear
on our minds as we read those texts. And most of the scant examples in which
ןנתא, “fee, wage” appears are metaphoric. 141 And when a dialogue indicates a
transaction (Gen 38), the term “wage” does not appear and the woman is not a
prostitute! These “anomalies make it very hard to come to conclusions; why,
then, is so strong the association in people’s minds between these terms (or these
women) and harlotry as the only possibility? One of the best examples to try
these biases is Rahab: Why do we assume she is a prostitute, when the only
thing the text says is that the spies, sent to observe the land and the city, came in
to the house of an הנוז השׁא called Rahab and they lodged/lay there. Why is she
immediately associated to a harlot? Is it because the only woman who would
accept foreign men at her place would be a prostitute? Is this not a bias? Could
she not run a “bed and breakfast” or a tavern? In the story she does not offer
herself up nor ask for payment for sex. Instead, she asks for retribution for her
kindness in hiding them and lying to the soldiers. 142
If we try to order the terms graphically according to their degree of certainty
as to their meaning, a few can be located at the safer sides of this spectrum and
others fall in between. I propose here some points to be considered. 143
Legal Material
Starting on the safer side, I set the law in Deut 23 as one of the cases in which
הנז means a prostitute. The law establishes a parallel between two types of
“dirty money” not to be brought to the sanctuary in payment of vows. Laws
avoid polysemy and are literal in their intention in order to be applied—although
this law itself is evidence that today we cannot agree on its terms’ meaning any
more. Furthermore, the association of הנוז + ןנתא, as well as the financial
dimension of several other laws in this chapter, calls for a prostitute.
The only other legislation that concerns us is Lev 21:1-15, about purity
concerns for the priesthood. Among these varied laws, a few are concerned with
types of women a priest is allowed or forbidden to marry. On the positive side,
141 As noted by Assante, “What Makes a Prostitute,” 129, when she wonders why there is so little
written evidence about prostitutes in antiquity, many women beside prostitutes received gifts from
prospective husbands (or their families) and perhaps lovers; this would have made it very hard even
to those who observed them, to distinguish them from professional sex workers.
142 It is true that she is also called הנזה בחר in 6:17,25; however, her identification with a harlot
occurs much earlier than those verses in the readers’ mind. Is this not due to traditional
interpretations?
143 Most of these texts will be further studied below, so not all arguments are offered here.