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Biblical Israel Wasn’t the Patriarchal Society Most People Think It to Have Been

Sept. 10 2020

According to one prominent Catholic feminist theologian, ancient Israelite women experienced “enslavement” within their families. Carol Meyers attests that her undergraduate students likewise tend to assume biblical women were veiled, subservient, and oppressed. Yet the archaeological record of ancient Israel, when combined with a more careful reading of the Hebrew Bible itself, yields a very different picture of relations between the sexes. Meyers illustrates this point by focusing on the role ancient Israelite women played in processing grains into flour and baking it into bread:

The biblical prominence of national religious institutions—priesthood, sacrifice, tabernacle, and temple—often means that household religious activities are overlooked. Yet those activities were arguably the primary and most common aspect of the religious lives of most Israelites, and women had essential roles in sacral household activities involving food and its preparation.

Sanctity related to bread production appears in the offering of a piece of bread dough to God (Numbers 15:19-21) in order to secure God’s blessing for the household (Ezekiel 44:30). This ritual reflects a belief about the sanctity of bread. . . . In addition to the sacred task of making bread, women prepared special loaves and other foods for everyday and seasonal festivals.

All this should sound familiar to modern practitioners of Judaism. In a similar vein, Meyers warns about misreading the Bible’s depiction of a woman’s role in economic life:

Preparing bread was not simply a domestic chore; it was a life-sustaining activity. It was no less important to household survival than was the work of men in growing grain. While men and women were not equal in all aspects of community life, . . . both women and men were “breadwinners.” In fact, women dominated many household activities and men dominated others.

And let’s not forget the “strong woman,” [usually rendered as “woman of valor”] of Proverbs 31:10‒31. These 22 verses portray a household manager. More than half refer to economic processes. She provides food and engages in textile production; she purchases land, has a profitable business, and sells the textiles she produces to merchants. Moreover, she uses some of her household’s resources as charity for the poor.

Read more at Biblical Mind

More about: Ancient Israel, Archaeology, Hebrew Bible, Sexism

 

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic