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

THE CHALLENGE OF STUDYING WORKING WOMEN | 31
and change eroded away stability.” 27 The same struggle between stability and
change happened in cross-cultural encounters. To this fact, one has to add the
chronological and cultural distance between the cultures reflected in the biblical
texts and our own.
While the ANE as a region had several states, each with its particularities,
they shared basic aspects. 28 This allows the scholar to compare societies which
are close by in time and in characteristics and to show that, given cross-cultural
evidence, this or that fact could very well have also occurred in the society
studied, although it may not be proved. To take one example, there is no definite
evidence for temple slavery in Israel, since no contracts or ration lists have been
found so far; thus, the several םידבע and the םיניתנ, who are mentioned, could
be anything from ministers or priests to chattel slaves. The most one can say is
that, considering the amount of work needed in a huge organization like the
Jerusalem temple, considering biblical evidence supporting increasing
impoverishment of the peasantry, and the role temples and slavery played in
similar, neighboring societies, it is very possible that the same system applied to
the Jerusalem temple. 29 Whether slaves or not, people’s living and working
conditions in the ANE did not solely depend on their legal status of free, semifree,
or slave. 30
SOCIAL-SCIENTIFIC CRITICISM
Use of social models drawn from present-day rural Mediterranean cultures has
been welcomed by some and rejected by other scholars. Models are perceived as
an external imposition on the texts, and distant in time. This is true and it has to
be weighed in the argument. On the other hand, all exegesis done today is
equally distant in time, and for most of us foreign in culture as well, but that has
27 Norman K. Gottwald, “Sociological Method in the Study of Ancient Israel,” in The Bible and
Liberation: Political and Social Hermeneutics (ed. N. Gottwald. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1983), 27.
28 For instance, their basic socio-political organization with a state organized around a walled city,
which was the political, military, and religious center; surrounded by farming land, which was the
main source of income and of wealth; a deity as patron or patroness, with his or her temple, which
was both a religious and an economic institution; slaves and dependents owned by the palace, the
temple, and families, who were in charge of agriculture, building projects, daily errands, household
tasks, and other duties according to their number, location, and the particular needs of that society.
29 Dandamaev, Slavery in Babylonia from Nabopolassar to Alexander the Great (626–331 BC) (rev.
ed. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press,1984), 547–57; Isaac Mendelsohn, Slavery in the
Ancient Near East (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), 99–106.
30 This argument does not invalidate the concern on the side of ANE scholars for how scholars from
other fields use their findings. See Julia Asher-Greve, “Feminist Research and Ancient
Mesopotamia: Problems and Prospects,” in A Feminist Companion to Reading the Bible (ed. Athalya
Brenner & Carol Fontaine; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 222–24.