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

THE CHALLENGE OF STUDYING WORKING WOMEN | 29
Thus, there seems to be no rule here, except that the introductory remark uses
the complex form.
Yet another case is that of the adjective המכח “wise (woman)” which
sometimes works syntactically as noun (for instance, in Jer 9:16, where it comes
as a parallel term to תוננוקמ, the mourners) and which indicates a professional
counselor, a mediator, or some other political office. 24 However, I bring it up
here because in the two stories in which a counselor or mediator is a main
character in a narrative, she is presented as “a wise woman from” (Tekoa or
Abel-Meholah): the adjective is accompanied by the noun השׁא (2 Sam 14:2;
20:16). This is exactly the opposite trend to what I observed in the texts of the
הנוז (השׁא)! Is that due to the nature of the adjective as opposed to that of the
participle? Is there a reason or is it only happenstance? Does that mean that they
acted on an ad hoc basis, as needed, and did not hold a permanent office under a
tree?
SUMMING UP
I see a problem here but cannot solve the puzzle alone. Most of these participles
appear both functioning alone as nouns and in compound formulas functioning
as adjectives or appositions to those nouns. It must be recognized also that this is
not a thorough analysis of all participles in biblical Hebrew; the ones noted here
(by myself) are traced as companions to the nouns השׁא and םישׁנ, and reflected
upon. Other terms or other combinations might still be further noticed.
The relatively small number of examples and their erratic behavior make it
too difficult to systematize them with any degree of reasonability, for there is
practically an exception to every rule one attempts to set. The terms הנוז and
הנוז השׁא appear often enough to allow for some observations, even though
there remains much to be confirmed or rejected. There is a tendency to use הנוז
with a more technical sense than הנוז השׁא; the reasons are never stated and
there are also—as discussed in chapter 7—numerous borderline cases, such as
Rahab in Josh 2.
In some stories, the construction “person + participle” seems to be
somehow related to the liminal status of the person on the verge of becoming
that which the participle denotes (wet nurse, prophetess or something else) or
24 Claudia Camp, “The Wise Women of 2 Samuel: A Role Model for Women in Early Israel?,” CBQ
43 (1981): 14–29; Wisdom and the Feminine in the Book of Proverbs (Decatur: Almond, 1985),
120–123; Adele Reinhartz, "Anonymity and Character in the Books of Samuel," Semeia 63 (1993):
117–41; Katheryn Pfisterer Darr, “Asking at Abel: A Wise Woman's Proverb Performance in 2
Samuel 20,” in Women of the Hebrew Bible and Their Afterlives (ed. Peter S. Hawkins and Lesleigh
Cushing Stahlberg; vol. 1 of From the Margins; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2009), 102–21.