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

ON THE SHOULDERS OF OUR PREDECESSORS | 77
slave proper was the decisive figure (to the virtual exclusion of the others) in
the economically and politically advanced communities 60
These scholars see as typical of slavery the owner’s exercise of the powers
attached to ownership, and conversely the bound person’s inability to exercise
his (and her?) free will. As happens also with some students of slave conditions
in the ANE reviewed earlier, stress is not laid on the legal aspect of slavery but
on the exercise of power. This is a very important point for this study, because,
as will be repeatedly seen, the quest for the legal aspect of the problem only
answers part of the question of the social status of women. These scholars’
political, social, and economic positions, including gender, age, race, training,
and other biases affect their perception of the sources; it happens to anybody, the
difference being made by our degree of consciousness or blindness to our own
biases.
In summary, comparing material from different areas and epochs it is clear
that, starting already from the institution of slavery, certain phenomena appear
repeatedly while they might have had local idiosyncrasies as well. All these
societies shared certain common features, such as being agrarian societies,
traditional in their beliefs, polytheistic by conviction or by practice (Israel),
ready to conquer their neighbors and if possible, avoid being conquered, and
patriarchal in their structure. On the other hand, geographical, historical, ethnic,
cultural and religious differences existed; some of them became powerful
empires while other city states either disappeared or survived but at great costs.
it should be stressed that, despite complaints about the scarcity of the sources,
biblical scholarship gains enormously from studies about neighboring cultures,
because the volume and the detail of their primary sources exceed anything
available from ancient Israel and offers a wide-lens perspective.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
In the light of the areas surveyed above one might conclude that feminist
studies, with their many particular aspects, from the North-Atlantic and from
other regions of the globe, have started a journey from which there is no return,
and which everyone is invited to join. In this endeavor, I have enlisted allies
from other disciplines, especially ANE history and archaeology, and
anthropologists’ and sociologists’ insights.
The careful reader will find an imbalance in my sources: some are far more
abundant than others; very recent works are not many or are incomplete,
depending on what has reached the internet. This is due to practical reasons,
60 Moses Finley, “Was Greek Civilization Based on Slave Labour?” 147.