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

46 | WOMEN AT WORK IN THE DTRH
Cole’s contribution for us consists in demonstrating that when research
focuses on women themselves, interviewing and observing them instead of
having them interpreted by men, their own perception of themselves, of their
value and values, comes out much more nuanced. They reveal a whole world in
which they see themselves as active participants and contributors. This is only
fair, since they are active participants and they do contribute to society at least
equally with men. This is an important consequence, because it does not deny
the typically patriarchal double standard in sexual matters, but at the same time
it does not perpetuate the valuation of woman only or primarily in terms of her
roles of mother and wife.
Cole’s research coincides in many aspects with those of Wikan and Lever
discussed earlier in showing other trends in anthropological studies, and
especially showing once again how much results depend on the scholar’s
approach and biases. Together with contributions coming from the application
of feminist questions to disciplines related to the ANE (reviewed in the
following chapter) these studies support and affect the work undertaken in these
pages.
IDEOLOGICAL CRITICISM
One other method of biblical criticism—ideological criticism—is incorporated
into this work, but not to its full potential, as that would have enlarged
considerably the scope of this research. According to Yee, ideological criticism
“entails ... an extrinsic analysis that uncovers the circumstances under which the
text was produced and an intrinsic analysis that investigates the text’s
reproduction of ideology in the text’s rhetoric.” 66 Ideological criticism implies
reading between the lines, or against the grain, trying to get to the writer’s point
of view and possible reasons for his/her way of depicting a situation, and at the
same time it also questions how the history of scholarship and how particular
traditions of scholarship have understood and used a text and its ideological
message to serve their own interests. This is not to blame one group over
another. As stated earlier in reference to the use of models, no one is free from
ideological positions and biases, which, unless checked, are just transferred into
the text.
Briggs traces the origin of ideological criticism to the very beginnings of
historical criticism, to nineteenth-century Germany, because biblical criticism
66 Gale A. Yee, “Ideological Criticism: Judges 17–21 and the Dismembered Body,” in Judges and
Method (ed. Gale A. Yee; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 150. She adds in n. 9, “In addition to
investigating the text’s production and reproduction of ideology, ideological criticism can also study
how the text is received/read in the consumption of that ideology.”