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

ON THE SHOULDERS OF OUR PREDECESSORS | 61
a prostitute, has come into a situation of prostitution. It is not her “essence,” so
to speak, but her status due to the straits the family is suffering. In fact, she
claims, it is the elite men, the priests, who exercise prostitution against the land
and its people. The main reasons for that situation are social unrest, increasing
concentration of land in fewer hands, and farmers’ impoverishment due to war,
luxury, and other expenses from the state, which exhaust them and constrain
them to seek other ways of surviving.
Finally, Avaren Ipsen has just published her dissertation on texts about sex
workers in the Bible. 12 The most interesting and moving aspect of her book is
the fact that her insights come from working in the San Francisco (USA) area
with sex workers and having herself been brought up in a suspected family. The
hermeneutical principle that reality colors our reading is well proven as they
read these stories through their own experiences of suffering, violence, poverty,
and discrimination in a way others are unable to see. Yet, both the readers and
the read-about sex workers engage in their society, seek to escape the hardship
which burdens them, and devise ways to trick the system. They are victims of a
perverse social structure, but they are more than victims; they are at the same
time subjects of many of their decisions, to a higher or lesser degree, just like we
are.
ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN STUDIES FOCUSING ON WOMEN
Coming from the ANE studies that are not about the Bible, there are some
collections of articles and some very important books. The series Rencontre
Assyriologique Internationale has a few issues specifically on women and on
gender from different international meetings. 13 From the 1980s there are already
some very useful books by Barbara Lesko on Egypt, and by Sarah Pomeroy on
Hellenistic Egypt and on Greek women. Like their biblical colleagues, they
opened up the way for further discussion and exploration of issues of gender. In
1993, Gay Robins published her Women in Ancient Egypt. Her conclusion is that
“the main roles of Egyptian women were to bear children, to run the household
and manage its economy, to help accumulate wealth through the exchange of
surplus goods (often of their own production), to weave textiles which were
fundamental for clothing, and to produce flour and bread basic to the Egyptian
diet.” 14
12
See below, bibliography on Vieira Sampaio and Avaren.
13
J.-M. Durand, ed., La Femme Dans le Proche-Orient Antique (1987) and Sex and Gender in the
Ancient Near East (2001).
14
Robins, Women in Ancient Egypt (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 190–191; idem,
“Some Images of Women in New Kingdom Art and Literature,” in Women’s Earliest Records, 116.