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Essay on The Social Roles of Women in Hebrew and Egyptian Civilizations Hebrew Civilization
At this point we must distinguish between "Israelite woman" and "biblical woman." Few could dispute the overwhelming orientation of the Hebrew Bible to the male world, a fact to which we shall return repeatedly in this work. Yet there is no dearth of female characters, and there are even a few fragments of women's writings. But, unfortunately, these tell us little about "ordinary" Israelite women. The women we glimpse in the Hebrew Bible are, almost to a woman, exceptional. They are women who rose to positions of prominence. As such, can they be seen as representative of their gender? Can generalizations about the parameters and dynamics of the daily existence of women be extracted from what we know about a Deborah or a Miriam, an Athaliah or a Huldah?
The Israelite woman is largely unseen in the pages of the Hebrew Bible. To presume to locate her in biblical narrative would be to commit a fundamental methodological error. To assume we can see nameless women in the activities of the named ones is to believe we can see an entire structure when only a fragment is visible. Ideally, we should ferret out some sign of female eminence in the domestic life in the Bible. However, this is difficult to do because the biblical source itself. is largely a product of (male) public structures, of male-dominated civil and religious bureaucracies.
Many scholars have nonetheless turned to such texts as the patriarchal--or matriarchal--narratives of Genesis for information about family dynamics in ancient Israel. We have resisted using the Genesis narratives as reliable sociological data for earliest Israel and will look instead at other texts.However, the Genesis ancestor traditions combine two features relevant to our methodological perspective: first, they are oriented to the domestic or household world.....
