Theology in the Raw - Was Ancient Israel a Patriarchal Culture? Dr. Carol Meyers

Episode Date: August 22, 2024

Dr. Carol Meyers (Ph.D. Brandeis) is an American feminist biblical scholar. She is the Mary Grace Wilson Professor Emerita of Religious Studies at Duke University. Meyers' field of research is focused on biblical studies, archaeology in the Middle East, and the study of women in the biblical world. In this podcast conversation, we talk about her fascinating essay: "Was Ancient Israel a Patriarchal Culture" (JBL 2014), where she argues for the concept of heterarchy rather than patriarchy as a better description of the role women played in ancient Israelite culture. https://scholars.duke.edu/person/carol Register for the Austin conference on sexualtiy (Sept 17-18) here: https://www.centerforfaith.com/programs/leadership-forums/faith-sexuality-and-gender-conference-live-in-austin-or-stream-onlineRegister for the Exiles 2 day conference in Denver (Oct 4-5) here: https://theologyintheraw.com/exiles-denver/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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when you spend $60 or more on children's apparel. Only until August 28th, shop smart with one cart and check everything off your back to school list. Conditions apply, see in store or joefresh.com for details. Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of theology in the raw. We have our exiles and Babylon conference in Denver, Colorado, October 4th to 5th. It's a two day conference. Space is filling up. So if you want to register, please go to theology in the rod.com. It's going to be a barn burner. I am so excited about this conference. And I really,

really hope you can make it out to it. Okay. Bye guests today. Where do I start? Oh my word. Dr. Carol Myers is a world renowned Old Testament scholar who specializes in ancient Israelite history. She is a historian, a biblical scholar, an archeologist. One of the most brilliant, I mean, as you'll see, one of those brilliant people I've had on the show, Dr. Myers is Mary Grace Wilson, distinguished professor of emeritus

of religion in Trinity college of arts and sciences at Duke university. She got her PhD from Brandeis university in 1975. She's been teaching at Duke since 1976. The year I was born full prof. She made full professor, uh, from in 1990, a position she occupied until 2015 when she, uh, sort of retired. She, she, I don't know how many books and articles she's written. I just was looking at her CV. I mean, it's probably, it's gotta be over a hundred. She didn't even know she's written so much stuff, books, chapters, articles. Um, a couple that I would like to highlight is her book, Rediscovering Eve, Ancient Israelite Women in Context, published by Oxford University Press and a fascinating article titled, Was Ancient Israel a Patriarchal Society in the

Journal of Biblical Literature 2014, that article was fascinating. And after reading that, and I've read several of her works, but after reading that article about patriarchy, I was really blown away. I'm like, man, what if I can get like Carol Meyers to come on the podcast? I was like, yeah, right. I wasn't even going to try. Ended up shot her an email. She was like, yeah, sure. When you want to do it. So that's what we did. This was a fascinating conversation. I think you'll absolutely love it. Especially if you're a nerdy like me, when it comes to needy greedy details in the old Testament, and especially as it pertains to how the old So please welcome to the show, the one and only Dr. Carol Meyers. Dr. Carol Meyers, I'm honored to have you on theology in the raw. Thanks for making

the time for this. Great to be here. You've written, I mean, I don't know how many books and articles do you keep track of how much you've published over the years or do you just say, Oh yeah. Well, we academics have to keep a current curriculum VTI. So I, when I publish something, I add it to the list. Okay. Awesome. Tell it, let's go back in time. When did you first get interested in ancient society in particular ancient Israelite society. And then what led you to be, what a pursue scholarship in that area. So you want to talk about ancient history, my ancient history. I did not say that. No, that's okay. I'm with it. It goes back to, well, it goes back to college. I went to a

college that had a required Bible class. And I don't think I knew that was a requirement when I applied and decided to go there because I wasn't interested and probably wouldn't have gone there otherwise. But it was called sophomore Bible, Wellesley College, by the way, if your listeners are interested. That requirement no longer exists. So, all of us in sophomore year had to take one semester of Old Testament and one semester of New Testament. I had, I think, the worst teacher in my section, but the subject matter blew me away, okay? I got

really interested in the interdisciplinary aspect of it that involved history, literature, anthropology, archaeology, literature, all kinds of things that I was really interested in as a young college student. So that got me interested in biblical studies. And the summer after that course, I just happened to, looking for something to do in the summer, I happened to join an archaeological project sponsored by Harvard in Wyoming. And I was blown away by archaeology. I really liked the process of trying to find out about people from their material remains, even people who lived a very long time ago. I also like the fellowships, shall we say, of an archaeological project, a way to be with a lot of different people in close quarters, and I like the physicality

of it. So by my junior year, I put two together, biblical studies and archaeology. What does that lead you to? Archaeology in the land of the Bible. And so before my senior year in college, I figured out a way to work on two different archeological projects in Israel. And as they say, the rest is history. I went on to do graduate work in this subject. What, what, what archeological projects we are part of in Israel. I spent some time in Israel and did a few, I mean, touristy kind of stuff, but yeah. Well, I worked at Tel Ash Dod, which is a Philistine site on the, on the coast, just

north of Gaza. I hate to say that word. And the other was here, but care or tell Bay Gierach, which is on the sea of Galilee. Okay. Interesting. Tell Ash Dodd. Yeah. That's bringing back some memories. Yeah. We, we, we were part of, I was a student there for just a semester is like a semester abroad kind of thing. And we were part of a has a guys tunnel. I mean, it, you know, it sounds cooler than it is. We were on an archeological dig and has a guy's tunnel. It was actually just hauling buckets of dirt out for some, some archeologists there. There was doing some work and then we did a, no, we did something with AI or maybe we just visited the site. Anyway, that's fascinating. So, so, okay. So then you just went and did

a bunch of degrees, became a, a, Oh, that's my scar. Ancient historian. Arc, do you consider yourself an archeologist or of all the disciplines you kind of traverse, which one would be your main kind of area that you enjoy or, you know, I wouldn't want, I do biblical studies and archeology. I wouldn't want to pick one over the other. Depends on where I am. Some people would look at me first as an archeologist. Other people would think of me as biblical scholar. So, thank you. Thank you. I mean, you have a lot of publications

in each, publications in each field. Yeah. Did you grow up in a religious household at all? Did you ever have like a religious commitment or cause I know, yeah. No, I mean, it was modestly, but as I told you, I was not interested in taking a college course in biblical studies.

I had done Sunday school and that was enough. Okay. Yeah. What, what was it like? I mean, there wasn't probably a lot of women in your area of research at that time, especially. I mean, even now, Speaker 2.1.1 Your next question should be, okay, you do biblical studies in archeology. Where did the women think come in? You want to ask that or should I just go ahead? Just go for it, yeah. Okay, well, this is, I'm serendipitous kind of. When I started teaching at Duke in the 1970s,

I was the only woman in my department, as you might imagine. And it was a pretty big department because it was a popular major, a popular elective. A lot of people took biblical course, Bible courses, and other courses in religious studies. So I was the first and only woman in the, I don't know if I was the first, but at that time was the only woman. And the chair of the department, this is the 1970s. I'm going to say that again because that's when gender studies started to emerge in American colleges and universities. Duke already had a course in the history department on women in the South. And there was an English department course on British women writers.

So the chairman of the department wanted to be in step with the times, and he called me in, and he said, you're teaching the introductory Bible class, but you also need to teach another class. And before I could open my mouth, and I was thinking I'd want to do something on temple architecture or sacred architecture, he blurted out, why don't you do a course on women in the Bible? And since I was an untenured beginning faculty member, I couldn't say no to that. So I never had a course in that. There weren't any courses in that. So I said yes. And the students in my first couple years were really lucky. There were very few articles to assign them to read. We just read some biblical passages and I started writing the

things that I wanted students to read and other people were doing this too. So it developed into a full blown aspect of my scholarly work. Yeah. And you've written so much on it. That's been so, so intriguing. Well, okay. So let's, let's jump now really far forward to you. One of your most recent publications. It's all almost 10 years old now. Was ancient Israel a patriarchal society? I remember first coming across that very question. And I didn't even know it was a question. Like I just assumed that this is just two plus two equals four ancient Israel's a patriarchal society.

And I've read not now, you know, read a few things that were kind of questioning that. And then reading your article is just was, was really fascinating. Can you let, why don't we start with, can you give us the summary of the, the, maybe the popular typical narrative about women in ancient Israel? Like like what's the popular view that people kind of assume, you know, how women are treated, how women are viewed, and then would love your more fresh perspective on that. Okay, that question is like, when I started developing my course on women in biblical tradition, which is what I called it, the first day of class, before students opened a book, before they had any assignments, I

asked them all to take out a piece of paper, and I said, what is your impression of women in ancient Israel? And they said things like, oh, to be seen and not heard, they were largely invisible, they were subservient, They were dominated by men. Virtually nobody had anything positive to say. They were all negative images. By the time I heard all those negative images from them, I already knew enough about women in ancient Israel to

realize that those images couldn't hold true. They weren't, they weren't facts on the ground. They weren't, they didn't fit with what I had learned by using a number of disinter by using an interdisciplinary approach. What I had learned about women in ancient Israel. And that's why I wrote some of the books and articles, including the one that you just mentioned. So what's that? What's that based on? Like what, what, if somebody just reads the old Testament, there's probably passages themes that they can read at first glance, maybe and say, see, you know, women were just treated like property. They were definitely not treated

on par with men. There's certain laws in the old Testament where it's like, wow, this seems really kind of misogynistic at first glance, at least. I mean, there's some that I think have been really misunderstood, but is that, is that, yeah. Yeah, of course. Well, most of the negative stuff is in the Pentateuch. Okay. And especially you mentioned laws in the laws, in the legal materials. And there are a couple of things I want to say about that. First of all, those legal materials in the Pentateuch come from the very end of the period of Israelite existence, from the end of the Iron Age or after the Iron Age, the Exilic period. Now when I

say Iron Age, I mean about 1200 BCE to the Babylonian conquest in the sixth century. And then there's the post Israel post-Israel period, post-Judean period, which is the Persian and then the Hellenistic period. So most of those legal materials come from the very end, if not after. The second thing is that those materials do not necessarily reflect the daily life of people who lived before that. The Hebrew Bible in general, and those laws in particular, are the product of an urban male elite. They deal with, they're concerned with property and economic issues of wealthy landowners or elites. And so what those laws say, first of all, those laws didn't exist in the period of ancient Israel.

Okay. So we can take them away with all their negativity and say, that wouldn't have been the way, part of the way of life of the Israelites themselves in the iron age. Now, just so I have a wide diverse audience. Yeah. Well, let me just put four by maybe more conservative Christians are like, wait a minute. They're getting thrown off with the dates. Like so a conservative evangelical viewpoint would be, you know, Moses wrote all these in the 14th century and that's when the laws are written and everything. The standard, let's just say mainstream scholarly viewpoint is that is what you just shared that these are, you know,

much, much, much later. I would say that I was just at a conference in which I gave a paper and there were other people giving papers, including a professor from Wheaton College, which is a conservative Christian college. And the more intellectual of those evangelicals understand the process of scripture formation, and they understand the traditions of Mosaic authorship or authorship under Moses' control in the late Bronze Age,

but they still understand that there's a series of developments. So I know that there are ultra conservative Christians who still see it as a one-shot deal in the late bronze age, but I can't accept that. And even evangelical, good evangelical scholarship has other ways of understanding that tradition. I mean, I went to a very, very conservative seminary. You've probably never heard of, I mean, far to the right of Wheaton. And even there, my old Testament professor argued for editorial and editorial hand at work throughout the redaction of the old Testament. That was, that was seen as like a really, I was like, Whoa, like, so yeah, definitely there there's, I think there's some evangelical viewpoints that rely on kind of an, like a theological

assumption of inerrancy. There'd be the Bible, like that's our presupposition. And then they go to the evidence. But I think there's more thoughtful people that say, okay, we got to make sense of what we find in archeology, what we find in history. And other than just reading our presuppositions in the text, I'm curious if it was a Daniel block that you're talking of. He's typically a, a conservative. No, it was John Walton. Oh, John Walton. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's, yeah, he's typically a, a conservative. No, it was John Walton. Oh, John Walton. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's yeah. He's, he's a good guy. He's a very good. Yeah. He's a very, he's a shark. I hope you do a podcast. I might've had, did I have not a tremper longman

on a while back? I'm trying to think. Maybe I had Walton. I just had Peter ends. You know, Pete ends on, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So what is the evidence that ancient Israel was not a patriarchal society. And if it's not, if patriarchal is not the, the proper term, then, then what's a better term that we should use to describe it. First of all, the Bible itself does not use the term patriarchal. Just want to clear that up, get that off the table. The term patriarchal and the concept of patriarchy is not an ancient concept. It arrives with the arrival of modern social studies, especially anthropology and ethnography in social studies, social

sciences, in the 18th, 19th centuries in Europe and in the United States. And the pioneers in looking, trying to understand societies, some of them look back at ancient societies. And what ancient societies could they view besides what you see in the Bible, besides the classical world? And so they looked at Greek and Roman sources, Greek and Roman laws, and they saw that women really were in a secondary position there and that there seemed to be a position of the father as the patriarch, the all-powerful father could control everything in the household. And they took that and ran with it

into a concept of patriarchy, of paternal control over the household. This is not society as a whole, just the household. And then that gets later developed in sociology by Max Weber into the idea of the whole society being male dominated and controlled. And then those notions get planted onto other societies everywhere, including ancient Israel in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Since then, classical scholars have looked at this evidence

and said, oh, they say the same thing in a way that I just said. Those laws just pertain to a upper stratum of the societies. If you look at other literary and archaeological sources from ancient Greece and Rome, you'll see something very different, that women have a lot of power in a lot of different areas of life. Even if you look at Greek drama, you look at some of the powerful female figures in those pieces of life. Even if you look at Greek drama, you look at some of the powerful female figures in those pieces of literature. If you look at some of the depictions on the paintings and pottery, if you look at ancient poetry, even in the Iliad and the Odyssey, women are not controlled by men

in every place. And they began to see what I just said a little while ago, that the legal materials are applicable in a relatively later period to a substratum of society and did not control the daily life of people all over ancient Greece and ancient Rome. All right, so there's been pushback against this notion of a societal patriarchy and also of the family hierarchy with the father at the head.

In terms, so I'm gonna leave the society-wide thing aside, because I agree that it is male-controlled or male-dominated. I never suggest otherwise. I think, listen, ancient Israel had a king, and the word queen isn't even mentioned in the Hebrew Bible except with respect to a foreign ruler like… The queen of Sheba or…

The queen of Sheba, but never… There's no Hebrew woman or Israelite woman who's called a queen. We have the queen mother, but not the queen. So there are hierarchies. The priesthood is all male. So in terms of general public life, it was male dominated. But I want to talk about the household and see the role of men and women in the household. And the household, I want to remind all you people out there, that was the major sphere of life for virtually everyone for most of the biblical period. People didn't go very far from their own household.

They didn't have media to let them know about what was going on somewhere else. As many as 90% of the population of ancient Israel was agrarian farmers. They were farm families who lived in relatively small communities. So they didn't even come in touch with this outside male-dominated world very often, if at all sometimes. The priesthood, sure, was all male, but that was in Jerusalem, and people lived many donkey days' drive away from Jerusalem. So they wouldn't have even come in touch with that hierarchical male-dominated aspect of

life. So what about in the household itself? Well, the Bible doesn't really tell us very much about that. It's more interested in public affairs, what the nation of Israel as a whole is doing or not doing correctly. And so I found it necessary once I decided to look into this to use this interdisciplinary approach that I've already mentioned. There are some biblical texts that are relevant. Also, archaeology of the household. And by the way, this is a relatively recent development. I'm going to just a little sidebar here.

Archaeology kind of began by looking for the grand things. Archaeology in its beginnings was almost a treasure hunt. Who could find the biggest palace or the gold objects? People are still doing this in some parts of the world. Egyptians archaeologists still looking for tombs with all kinds of goodies in them. Those get the headlines and those get the funds for more archaeological work, so that's kind of understandable. So even in the archaeology of the land of Israel, archaeologists gravitated towards the big cities that are mentioned in the Bible, Jerusalem, Hazor, Megiddo, Gezer, Ashkelon, Ashdod, and so on.

And they paid relatively little attention to small villages. They dug monumental remains and paid little attention to the small houses in which most people lived. That began to turn around in the past couple decades. So there is now material for people like me who want to look at households of average folk to look at. And so I looked at household archaeology. I'll get back to that. But the third piece, the text, the Bible sometimes, archaeology and ethnography. ethnography, that is how do you interpret what you find in archaeology. Now, one of the things that popped out to me in looking at households was that we do

have the instruments of a lot of the work that was done in the household. I'm going to do another sidebar here. Household is not just the house itself, not just the dwelling, but the term household, as we who like to use social science concepts would say, the household is not only the place, the space in which people lived and worked, it's also household also means the people who are involved, and it also means the things or the animals or the land. So it's a more inclusive concept. That means everyone, men and women, worked in the household. It's not like in industrial revolution and post-industrial revolution

times where some people stayed at home and some people went to work outside the household in factories, in other places outside the home. All the livelihood of the household was done in the household itself. So women worked in the household, men worked in the household. It's no such thing as a housewife, in other words. Okay. No, so you can't use the modern concept of what a woman does in the home

as in any way equivalent to what women in a pre-modern society did in their homes. It is tough these days to stay healthy. And as I get older, I notice that when I'm not eating healthy, I get lethargic, my brain slows down, I start promoting heresy, you know how it is. Anyway, this is why I take AG1 every single day. AG1 is a foundational nutrition supplement that delivers daily nutrients and gut health

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Try AG1 and get a free one-year supply of vitamin D3 K2 and five free AG1 travel packs with your first purchase at drinkag1.com forward slash TITR. That's drinkag1.com forward slash TITR. Check it out. Could we also, could we assume, I mean, just based on what you're saying to like any kind of biblical texts that praises a woman, I'm thinking of like problems 31 or others, praises a woman for her work in the home. We just have to read that through a very different lens than a modern day society where the woman stays at home. The man goes off to work. She bakes bread and waits for him to come, you know, like that, or even like Paul talks about women being busy at home. I forget the Greek word there. It's translated differently. And

I think Titus or whatever. It's just, we, we, we, we have to put on a very different lens when we read those. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and one of my books, I have a little section there called the dangers of presentism. Not using, well, I didn't invent it. I mean, there's a literature on this, not using present ideas of what work in the household is and equating it and how it's evaluated today and equating it to ancient times. Because, you know, let's be let's be clear. We tend to even though we shouldn't, we tend to devalue what a non-working mom does at home as being not as important as what people do out there in the world. There was no such thing as out there in the world for 90% of the people. Okay. So men worked in the household, women worked in the household.

They both had economic important economic roles to keep the place going. They didn't do the same thing. There was a division of labor by gender. didn't do the same thing. There was a division of labor by gender. And women did a lot of the work in converting the raw materials that men produce, like they grew the grain, they plowed the fields, they sowed the fields. The family as a whole usually did the harvesting. And then women had to convert those raw materials like grain, grapes, and so on into edible form. Well, you can eat grapes, but if you want wine or grape juice, then there needs to be some processing. I want to just talk about bread because bread was literally the staff of life in biblical antiquity literally the staff of life in biblical antiquity and in most cultures all over the world

until relatively recently. And by bread, I mean the basic carb. It could be rice, it could be maize, it could be something else. It's been estimated that as much as 75% of a person's daily caloric intake was from grain. That's a high carb diet. And we have statistics that we know from more recent times that indicate this, that whenever you have a way of life and which is a lot of physical labor involved, that you need a lot of calories. And the most available calories are the grains, the rice from the maze, whatever it is. And

for example, in, in France, in the 18th century, there are documents that indicate that the average farm or eight, two to three pounds of bread every day. If I did that, I would look very different. Wouldn't we all, wouldn't we all? But they didn't have much else to eat. That was their main caloric source and they needed a lot of calories for the heavy physical work they were doing. We have similar documents, I think from 1716, 1718, something like that, Canada in Quebec province that a farmer is recorded as having eaten two to three pounds of bread a day. All right, so this is a high carb, bread intensive, grain intensive economy, agricultural economy.

Now the grains themselves do not really release their nutrient value unless they're crushed and cooked. So the grains need to be ground into flour and then either cooked into some kind of porridge or oatmeal or gruel or made into bread. Now I'm going to show you, I have an artifact here. I hope it's okay to show this. Everybody see this? Yeah. It's a basalt grinding stone.

I don't, just wanna be clear, I don't own this. Duke University owns it. And it was given to Duke University by the excavators of Beit Shemesh in the 1920s, I think a box of artifacts were sent to Duke for display. They never were returned. They're now on permanent loan. So this is, it's about at least five pounds, very heavy.

And this was rubbed back and forth on a big flat basalt tray. Now, experimental archeologists tell us when they've tried to replicate how this was done, it would have taken, hold your breath, two to three hours a day for a woman to grind enough grain for flour to feed a family of about six people. Wow. That's a lot of time. And that's a lot. I mean, that's a heavy thing. It's back and forth back. So proper 31, it doesn't say like her arms are strong or something. I mean,

anybody that does that a few hours a day is going to have really, really strong arms and a bad back. I mean, another sidebar, there's an excavation of some tombs in Syria in which women show skeletal deformities that can only have arisen from being in that position for several hours a day, every day of their adult lives. So what does that date back to? I'm curious that what, what, what is that stone? What the date? Oh, it's probably iron age. Okay. But they're, they're almost exactly the same from the stone age down to the, down to the, to the Hellenistic Roman period, when there was a big technological invention, a machine that could grow grand green, a rotary mill,

and then a donkey mill. And the in some parts of the world, they still use these, but in the Holy Land, gradually in the Roman period, they shifted, at least in in terms of the growing urban population. And when there were shops that were you could buy flour, and they had machines to do it. But this was not the case in the Iron Age. Yeah, okay. Where was I?

Okay, so they had to do this every day for two to three hours. Now, if you don't have a radio, if you don't have internet, if you don't have a television, and you have to be in that same position for a couple hours a day, what do you do to keep from going bananas? Well, interestingly enough, archaeologists have found in household archaeology

sometimes two or three sets of these grinding stones lined up together. And what does this tell us? Even though this is silent, it doesn't talk, but we find a way to identify both the gender and the context of grinding. So the gender of grinding is, we can figure that out pretty easily. There are biblical texts that refer to women and grinding. There are depictions in ancient art. The social context comes from having these lined up side by side, that several women were doing this together at the same time.

And they're not just doing this silently. Do you think they're side by side and not talking? That's a rhetorical question. Of course they were talking. If they're next to each other for two to three, what's the point of being next to each other for a couple hours if they're not schmoozing? Gossiping even, but that, I don't even,

I shouldn't use the word gossip because it has negative connotations. I'll come back to what they may have been talking about in a second, but in any case, this is clear ethnographically the world over. When there are tedious, time-consuming tasks, people tend to figure out ways to do them together. Now, what does this get us? It gets us a very important insight into the social role of women's work in grinding. I will add one more archaeological fact to that

before I get into the social role itself. You've got flour, you mix it with water, a little bit of salt, you make bread, unleavened or leavened, whatever, and you bake it. And where do you bake it? Aha, archaeology again helps us. Many household areas have a common oven. In a place where there's not a lot of fuel available, having people share an oven makes better ecological sense, environmental sense. So that although there may be small ovens within each house for inclement,

in case of inclement in turn, in case of inclement weather or cold weather, in general, in decent weather, women shared an oven. And this is still true in some remote villages in Asia Minor, in the Middle East today, that if they're remote and they don't have, may not have electricity, might not have power, and they still have to bake their breads,

bake their bread every day, they tend to do it. They share an oven to do it. And when you share an oven and you're there waiting for your bread to come out, you talk, okay? So again, just as grinding is a social occasion, we can now understand from looking at the location of ovens that baking would have been a communal event, a social event. All right, now what did they talk about? Your imagination is as good as mine about, you know, whose boyfriend is looking at whose

daughter or something like that, who's about to have a baby, you can imagine. But they would also know, and this is the critical part, they would also know if one household was having a problem. If one woman says, well, my husband hurt his leg yesterday, and he's supposed to go out and sow the seeds for the next planting, and the weather is right to do it, but he can hardly walk. And if we don't plant the seeds, what happens? No bread. And so these women who are working together, they say, well, I have a teenage son, and

he's just finished helping his dad do it. I'm going to send him over, and he can help finished helping his dad do it, I'm gonna send him over and he can help out in your household. And if a woman just has had a baby and can't manage all the other household chores, you send an older daughter over to help. And we still do this kind of thing today to a certain extent. We send over a casserole, whatever. But that's the idea of neighbor helping neighbor. Today, there are other ways in which a family in trouble can get help. They don't always get it, but there's government supposedly can help. In pre-modern times,

and in biblical antiquity, that was not the case. So women working together form what social scientists call informal women's networks. And these networks were a form of communication without telephones, internet and so on. This is the way people knew what was going on in other households. And it was a mutual support network because there was the understanding that people who had difficulties would help each other. So this simple task of grinding flour or baking bread was immersed into a network of social interconnections

that allowed people to get through difficult times. And I'm gonna add to that a religious dimension, okay? If bread is, as I said at the beginning of this little track to our conversation, that bread was the staff of life and it was understood to be holy. And there is a passage in Ezekiel that mentions pulling off a piece of bread that you, after you need it to set aside as kind of a Thanksgiving offering to God for having provided the wherewithal

for there to be bread. Now Ezekiel is probably the sixth century, comes from the end of the Iron Age, but I think the idea of bread being sacred is part and parcel of life in ancient Israelite society. Breaking bread means having a meal. It doesn't mean just eating a piece of bread. We still say that today, don't we? Feel less bread together. It doesn't mean that we're just going to sit down and eat a baguette. It means that we're going to have a whole meal.

In fact, there is a passage in Genesis where Jacob says to some people, come have bread with me. It almost certainly means come and have a meal with me. So it represents food in general. It's not just this carbohydrate. It represents sustenance. And so having bread was almost a sacred concept, eating bread. I found something really interesting when I was doing research on this topic, that in many places in the Middle East to this day, bread is still considered sacred.

If someone drops a piece of bread on the ground, you don't just sweep it away or throw it into the garbage, you pick it up and put it in a special place or you say a blessing over it. In other words, the bread itself is considered sacred. So if women in ancient Israel are engaged in a social enterprise in making bread, they are also engaged in a religious enterprise of making a substance which is the sustenance of life and to which they almost certainly

would have been grateful to God. With this is first of all fascinating and you've written several articles just on, I think one's titled the importance of bread or something like that. And so people can go find the, yeah, everything you're saying you've, you've, you've published on what, what this, in terms of male female relations in the household, and I'm thinking through specifically through the lens of like hierarchy authority, these kind of categories, would this have ascribed to women, a certain say power agency authority? How would men have viewed this unique skill that women had in terms of really enabling

society to even live? I mean, if, if, yeah, I don't know that they would have looked at it in these kinds of gender terms that we look at it, but this, I mean, you're bringing this conversation back to something that you asked at the very beginning about the household dynamics. And again, using ethnography, I found that in pre-modern households where women supply the major components of sustenance, bread,

where they also make the fabrics, the garments that everybody wore, or the tent cloths, or whatever fabrics they needed. When women do all these things that were an essential part of the economy, their work is valued. It's understood that the household doesn't survive unless the men plow the fields and unless the women grind the flour and bake the bread. So there's a kind of mutuality or interdependence in household life. And that's where I came up with the idea of using a social science concept developed by a colleague of mine at the University of North Carolina,

just down the road from Duke, where I'm on the faculty. The idea that you can't, especially for early societies, pre-modern societies, you can't look at the structure of the society of whole when you're evaluating gender roles. And while men may dominate in the public sphere, there may be other areas of life in which women dominate. And in terms of the day-to-day life, I don't know that I would necessarily like to say women dominated, but women certainly had powerful roles in carrying out all these tasks. And they had a certain kind of authority over how resources

were used, how the younger members of the family were deployed to do certain kinds of labor. So the idea of a patriarchal household just didn't seem to fit what I was finding by looking at the facts on the ground and interpreting them through the lens of ethnography. And the concept that this colleague down the road at UNC developed is called heterarchy, H-E-T-E-R-A-R-C-H-Y, that it says there can be different modes of social structures in different aspects of society and you can't lump them all together. You can't say it was patriarchal as a whole. You can only say that this priesthood was patriarchal, the monarchy was patriarchal, the household had a different kind of internal arrangement.

And inside the house space itself, women probably had more power than men did in terms of the daily living of the house. Now there are actually biblical texts that would indicate that this was the case. And you mentioned one, Proverbs 31, the so-called, the translations are terrible. They call it something wife or whatever. Pete Slauson Excellent wife, noble wife, or yeah. Dr. Elizabeth S. Hickman But it can also be called strong woman. The ancient chayal, the word is wife, but it can also be translated woman and chayal means strong. It's the same word

is used for the army. So I like to call it strong woman. I would change the translation right there. And she does, she manages the household. There's no, there's no doubt about it. The guy's not even around. So that's one good example. Another example I like to use is the Shunammite woman in the book of Kings in first Kings, where is it? In second Kings four and eight. And she is a married woman and she lives in this village and a prophet, Elisha, who's a ninth century prophet, a disciple of Elijah, he comes by and she gives him a meal,

and he stays overnight and she says, well, anytime he's in the neighborhood, he should have to say, and she adds on a room to the house, which will be a guest room for him. He's so grateful for her hospitality, day, and she adds on a room to the house, which will be a guest room for him. He's so grateful for her hospitality, and he sees that she's childless. So he says, I'm going to tell God that you need to get pregnant, basically.

He doesn't use those words, those are my words. But he says, I think I can arrange it for you to get pregnant. And she says, no, that's okay. We're fine the way we are. You don't need to commend me to the local people in the town. They know me and I'm in good standing with the local people. Nonetheless, she does get pregnant,

and she has a little boy. One day, the boy is out in the field working with his father. That's what the guys do, and the boy gets sick. Now what happens when there's a sick child? Father brings him home to his mother. Sadly the child dies, but the mother contacts the prophet who comes and in one of these miracle working stories he revives the child. Now that's not the end of the story. It gets in some ways even better. There's a famine in the land, and as people often did, you know the

stories in Genesis when there's a famine, what did they, they packed up Abraham and his family and went to Egypt, for example. So she packs up and she goes to Moab with her family. And several years later when the famine is over, they come home and lo and behold, there's a squatter living in the house. What does she do? She, not her husband, she goes to the king and she makes a case directly to the king. And she says, someone's been sitting in my chair, someone's been living in my house, and the king rules in her favor, and the squatter has to pay her whatever the goods were or the crops were that would have grown when

she was away. So there you have a woman who's in charge. She has a direct conversation with the king and with one of the leading prophets of the day. And she makes decisions about going into another country during the famine, about adding a room onto the house, home renovation projects she undertakes on her own, and so on. So it's clear that in biblical society, if we want to call it that there is a narrative of a woman who certainly is in charge of the household. And you can say the same thing about Abigail. I was going to say, it sounds a lot like Abigail. Now her husband was clearly foolish, right? But yeah,

Speaker 3rd-5 And she has a lot of resources and she brings them and she goes to meet David who's in hiding somewhere and she makes an arrangement with him and her household is spared. So there are these examples in biblical narrative about women who are in control of their households and these happen to be elite women or else they probably wouldn't have made it into biblical narrative but I think one could say the same thing about ordinary everyday farm elite woman, women, or else they probably wouldn't have made it into biblical narrative. But I think one could say the same thing about ordinary everyday farm women. Abigail seems to be elite because she, given how much food she's able to provide, probably

has a lot of resources. Right. Do we know that the Shunamite woman was elite or is that just kind of assumed? Cause that there's a word that's used. I can't remember it now. And he talks about the, the great, I think the great woman of Shunam or something like that. And it's interpreted to mean that she was a leader in the community or had resources. Okay.

Okay. Uh, let me go back to the division of labor just to kind of, I think you were already kind of said this, but just to get clarity. So there's a division of labor men are say out in the fields, women are home making bread and that this was not seen, say hierarchical because when we hear that, Oh, the woman's at home, the man's out, we just can't, we didn't seem to get rid of those kinds of categories. There is a interdependence here. Right? Okay. What was the, what was the basis for the division of labor? Was it simply cultural or biological? Maybe men did things that, you know, you need a stronger person to do or why?

I've read a ton of anthropology on this. Why is it that women do some of these? In most societies, there's a study done called the Murdoch study, where they look at dozens of societies and a list of 30-some tasks, and to see which ones are done by men, and which ones are done by women, and which are done by both. And not every, but in almost every society, men are doing the heavy plow field work

and women are making bread or grinding. So is it biological? Is it, you know, I have to leave that to the anthropologist to tell us why it ends up that way, but that's the way it ends up around the world. Okay. Okay. Okay. My other question is how do you, how do you account for what I'm going to assume is all male authors of biblical text, uh, highlighting very much that the power agency of, of women. Um, yeah, I, I feel like if you go theologically, you know, I, you know, I can make a case that because Genesis one 27, right? I mean, I mean, God created a male and female there. They're

both creating his image and you have kind of like the hand of God kind of like whispering that throughout these male dominated tech saying, no, women are still valued. Let's leave aside inspiration or all that stuff. Let's just historically, how do you account for a religious texts that oftentimes elevates women and it even speaks negatively, negatively of bed. I mean, Abigail Naval is a classic example. What would, what would spur on a male writer to even want to record that in the narrative? Well, familiarity with real life in which women did control households. But aren't, I mean, most of the literate people, first of all, not everybody was literate. Right.

I actually try trying to write or about to write another article where this comes into play about literacy and literature, literacy as opposed to orality. And in ancient Israel, as in most societies, literacy was not available to everybody, even though Israel had an alphabet which made learning to read and write easier than in Egypt, which had these elaborate pictographs or Mesopotamia with those cuneiform letter syllables that you had to memorize. I took a katie and I know it's impossible. But still, there's been really important work on Hebrew epigraphy writing that tells us that people learn to read and write in schools. And I don't, when I say shouldn't we use the word people that elite boys went to, went to palace schools in the Capitol. So writing was a male, for the most part,

a male skill. Now there are two references to women writing, Jezebel and Esther, but it's not clear when it says they wrote whether they were actually doing the writing themselves or they had a palace scribe doing it for them. I mean, the language is a little ambiguous on that So if elite men are doing all the writing, they're more apt to be capturing the writings of other elite men. That doesn't mean that there was no women's literature. And there's a fascinating book by two female scholars, two women scholars, Van Dyke Hems and Brenner, who I think have succeeded

in showing certain parts of the biblical texts that certainly were originally women's tales, women's oral literature that male scribes then transcribe. Some of the stories in Genesis, for example, Genesis 24, the so-called wooing of Rebecca, sounds like a woman storyteller underneath this. And there are other places that identify here and there throughout the Bible that probably represent women's oral literature being written down by male scribes. And maybe the Shunammite woman and maybe Abigail, they were stories told by women. I've just done a paper about old women, elderly women, and fascinating cross-cultural information

that in a society that's mostly oral, except for in the largest urban centers where you have elite scribes, the culture is transmitted orally. And women are often the repositories. Elder women are the repositories of this culture, in terms of what we might call literature, storytelling, social norms of behavior and so on.

There is often women as well as men who, if they live long enough, have learned enough that they can preserve these kinds of traditions across generations. Well, I was just, it made me think going back to your statement about women being the kind of the main repository of societal or household information, the kind of ancient, they were kind of the ancient internet, right? That when male, let's just say male authors were writing these stories, is it, is it a fair assumption to say they were relying on the information stored among women that were baking bread and telling these stories and talking about, I mean, is that too much of a stretch or is it, was it just kind of like, Speaker 3rd-5 listen, we can reconstruct it in our own heads any way we want. We have

no way of looking at the actual mechanism by which that happened. So as I said, your guess is as good as mine on that. It makes societal sense. It does. You write that article. I'm sorry. As you're talking, I just have so many things written down and questions and stuff. Talk to us about the queen that you mentioned in passing the queen mother, the mother of the king, while there were no queens in Israel, didn't the queen mother hold a decent amount of power agency in ancient Israelite society? Yeah, there's, there's a term for her, the Gbirah, which kind of means another word for being a kind of a strong woman, a powerful figure. I don't

think we understand what that means, why it's the Queen Mother that seems to be the most important woman in the royal household. But I would speculate in one way about that, that a wife who would be what we would call the queen normally is someone from outside the royal household. She's an outsider coming in, whereas the mother is part of the household in which the king grew up. And again, ethnographically, we see, even in Arab societies today, there's a very strong bond between a man and his mother, often stronger between a man and his wife, or certainly between a man and his mother-in-law. So I think that that cultural aspect

in terms of where women lived and where men lived and where women lived after they were married, as opposed to men staying in the, in the ancestral home with their mothers, that the mothers had more knowledge of the workings of the household, even the royal household than a someone who was brought in from the outside. My, my Latino Latina friends say the same thing about their culture that sure there are bands ahead of the household, but kind of the mom. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, that's not so far-fetched to speculate in that direction. Is that normal in other ancient cultures or like, or I guess my follow-up is, is, are there, are there aspects of how

women were viewed and operated in ancient Israelite culture that was different than other cultures or are they just part and parcel with the broader ancient Near East culture and how women were? I really can't. I really can't answer that. I don't know enough about it. Yeah. I just don't know enough about it. I just got to say to my audience, you know, you know, you're a real scholar when you're perfectly comfortable saying, you know what? That's not my area. I'm not going to voice my opinion on it. It's worth looking at next article. Yeah. Yeah. So H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H

H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H you say that's a better concept to describe ancient Israeli households or even society as a whole. Would you say the society as a whole was more hetero, heterarchical? And can you expand on

that a little bit? Just so we understand what that means. I'll try again. Heterarchy means that there are different power dynamics in a society. It's not higher. It's not, first of all, let me say it's non-hierarchical. Hierarchical means that there's the very top, and then things go out from there. This is saying that there could be different modes of control over groups underneath them, and they can be overlapping or completely separate. That would be a heterarchical society.

Social scientists, anthropologists have documented this for certain pre-modern societies. How do we make sense of an all-male priesthood? Is that evidence of a certain kind of male domination, male authority, or how does that fit in with the heterarchy? Yeah, I guess. And that's true in many cultures. It may be related to notions of purity and impurity. That is, a menstruating woman would be considered impure and not allowed into the sacred realm. And this is true in other ancient cultures, so that may be part of it. But since you brought that up, I would like to say that in the household, which was, as I said, the basic part of society,

the most important segment of society, the household. Everybody lived in a household, and not many people even got near the temple in Jerusalem. So religious activities take place almost on, I would say, on a daily basis in every household, including baking bread, putting aside a piece as a sign of God's favor or in gratitude for God's favor. That there were all kinds of rituals about which we know very little that women carried out in order to try to keep safe during pregnancy. Pregnancies were fraught with danger in the pre-modern world. Death and childbirth was in the pre-modern world. Death and childbirth was as many as one in two. Wow.

Well, maybe that's to start, but as many as one in two children, this is what I should have said, as many as one in two children did not survive to the age of five. So there's all kinds of problems. How do you safeguard a child? How do you safeguard a pregnant woman?

How do you make the birth easy? Well, there are all kinds of rituals, which we would today call magic, but that's not fair to think of that in pejorative terms in the ancient world, in the pre-modern world. These were struggles of people to try to find a way to control the forces that endangered their family. And women did these rituals on a daily basis in terms of being pregnant, taking care of their children, taking care of their food supply and so on.

Women in a sense, as one anthropologist would call them, were ritual experts in their homes, in their households, just as priests were in the shrines and sanctuaries and temples. So I would not like to privilege a priest in the temple in Jerusalem as being more important for a family than the role of the female head of the household in their own family. Turn that on its head. Pete So, the day-to-day interaction with spirituality, religion, et cetera, would not have been kind

of focused on the male priests. Absolutely not. In the household, it would, the woman would have been in charge of virtually all kinds of what we would call religious activities. What about real quick? And I know I'm going to, we'll wrap things up here in just a second. One more question about parenting. I read it somewhere that in the, in the Hebrew Bible women name their children more than fathers do. I think it's something like 55%, 60. It's not too much more, but it's that's how you count them. It's really hard to do. That's right. Yeah. Hugh Williamson, I think has an article on that that is, is that significant that the women, let's just say just as much as men, if not more are naming their children

and who's, who's raising the kids, who's educating the kids. And does that show us any kind of authority ascribed to two mothers and women? Well, I think you've asked those almost rhetorically because to all of those questions is yes, yes, and yes. Interestingly enough, when men name children, sometimes it's because there was something happened or the woman died or something like that, that the woman wasn't available. So in general, in the majority of cases, women have the role, which is an authoritative role because the name really represents the human being.

So that's not a kind of acute cultural aside. It's a strong part of the female role as a parent and being in charge of this new life and then guiding this life into whatever it will be, he or she will become. And there were no schools for most kids except in the palace for the elites or in the large urban centers. So children learned from boys and girls, learned from their mothers and the boys then went out,

when they're old enough, they went out with their fathers, as the son of the Shunammite woman did, went out in the field. But mothers were the teachers, the primary teachers. And I'm not talking about learning to read and write, because they didn't, but the teachers of how to do things. If you didn't learn how to grind grain, when you got married, you couldn't survive. You wouldn't get a husband, so to speak. So they taught life skills and men taught life skills to boys beyond the age of five or six

or whenever they were old enough to go along with their fathers. And kids probably, again, speaking from ethnography, as young as three or four were already doing simple tasks in the household. Household was their school. There's a wonderful quote that the, what was her name, one of the science editors for the New York Times wrote about the household in the pioneer period in our country. And she said, she used this metaphor, it was like a Swiss army knife, a lot of tools in one simple package. Well, that was the household in ancient Israel.

It was a school, it was a hospital, it was a bread factory, it was whatever you wanted, whatever the society needed, it was all there in the household and that the woman was in control of those kinds of operations, day-to-day operations. Goodness. We can keep going. Carol. But I've taken you over an hour. Thank you, gosh, so much for opening up our minds to, I mean, you've introduced us to categories that I think a lot of us are like, we'll definitely want to explore deeper. And yeah, this has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you for the work that you've done. And thanks for being a guest on theology in the raw.

Well, thank you for inviting me to be here with you. Nice way to spend my late morning rainy day. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network. Hi, I'm Haven, and as long as I can remember, I have had different curiosities and thoughts and ideas that I like to explore, usually with a girlfriend over a matcha latte. But then when I had kids, I just didn't have the same time that I did before for the one-on-ones that I crave.

So I started Haven the Podcast. It's a safe space for curiosity and conversation. And we talk about everything from relationships to parenting to friendships to even your view of yourself. And we don't have answers or solutions, but I think the power is actually in the questions. So I'd love for you to join me, Haven the podcast. Hey friends, Rachel Grohl here from the Hearing Jesus podcast. Do you ever wonder

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