The Biblical World of Gender: The Daily Lives of Ancient Women and Men

By Cascade Books

What were the lives of women and men like in ancient Israel? How does it affect their thinking about gender? Recent discussions of "biblical womanhood and manhood" tend to reflect our current concepts of masculinity and femininity, and less so the lived world of the biblical authors. In fact, gender does not often appear to be a noteworthy issue in Scripture at all, except in practical matters. Nonetheless, Genesis 1 invests the image of God itself with "male and female," making sex central to what it means to be human.
Instead of working out gender through Genesis's creation and Paul's household codes, we want to ask: What was life like on an ancient Israelite farmstead, in a Second Temple synagogue, or in a Roman household in Ephesus? Who ran things in the home, in the village, in the cities? Who had influence and social power, and how did they employ it?
Taking insights from anthropology and archaeology, the authors of this collection paint a dynamic portrait of gender in antiquity that has been put into conversation with the biblical texts. The Biblical World of Gender explores gender "backstage" in the daily lives and assumptions of the biblical authors and "on-stage" in their writings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jun 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781666720822

Book preview

Surprising Gender Roles in the Ancient World

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The Importance of Bread

Archaeology, the Bible, and Women’s Power in Ancient Israel

Carol L. Meyers

For many years I taught an undergraduate course on Israelite women in the biblical world. In the very first class, before students had read any of the assignments, I asked them to jot down their image of women in the world of the Hebrew Bible, that is, in ancient Israel. Here are a few typical examples of what they wrote:

•Women were shrouded and quiet.

•I think of women as being oppressed.

•Women were vastly inferior to men in biblical times.

•Subservience is what comes to mind.

These bright students were echoing popular views. The website of an organization championing religious tolerance says this about Israelite women: Women’s behavior was extremely limited . . . much as women are restricted in Saudi Arabia in modern-day times.¹

Many scholars have likewise considered women severely restricted in biblical days. The influential feminist theologian, Rosemary Ruether, referred to the enslavement of persons within the Hebrew family itself: namely, women and children.² Thankfully, most now reject this extreme view. Yet descriptions of Israelite family life continue to see women as second-class members of society.

The Woman Problem of the Hebrew Bible

Perhaps these negative views were to be expected, given that, until relatively recently, the main source of information about ancient Israelite women was the Hebrew Bible.³ Yet the Hebrew Bible is hardly a balanced repository of information on this topic. For one thing, women are not very visible. Fewer than 10 percent of the named individuals in the Hebrew Bible are women. Also, those who do appear tend to be exceptional women—royal women, the matriarchs, a few female prophets—not representative of most ordinary women.

Then there’s the problem of the legal materials in the Pentateuch, where most of the stipulations that seem to favor men are found. Indeed, examples of the supposed subordination of women almost always involve Pentateuchal rules. Those laws cannot be viewed in the same way we look at jurisprudence today. They were not law codes in the modern legal sense. They did not function as society-wide regulations. Rather, they likely expressed the views and practices of a small, literate, urban elite and were not the regulations of the general populace.⁴ They ultimately became canonical and authoritative in the post-biblical period, but they did not function as such in the period of ancient Israel, the Iron Age (ca. 1200–587 BCE). We need to look at information from the Iron Age itself.

An Iron Age Source: Archaeology

The land of the Bible has been the focus of archaeological exploration and excavation for centuries. Understandably, the focus of archaeology has been the cities mentioned in the Bible. But the great majority of Israelites—as many as 90 percent—were rural farmers, not city dwellers; and even many city-dwellers were really farmers whose lands lay outside the city walls.⁵

Fortunately, many archaeologists now pay attention to the setting for the farm families of ancient Israel. They do this by the careful excavation of dwellings and all the installations, tools, vessels, and other objects of daily life. In other words, they can reconstruct the daily life of ordinary Israelites by analyzing the material culture of their settlements.

But using archaeological data to recover the lives of Israelite women is not a straightforward process. The stones and bones, the pots and plow tips, are silent. They signal the processes of ancient agrarian life but not the gender of the people who used them. Who used which tools? What did they make? Answering those questions relies on hints in the Bible and other ancient texts. Furthermore, understanding the meaning of household activities relies on the perspectives of ethnographers who have observed pre-modern societies similar to ancient