Women in Judaism

The Status of Women in Formative Judaism

Leonard Swidler

The Scarecrow Press, Inc.

Metuchen, N.J. 1976

Library Of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Swidler, Leonard J

Women in Judaism.

Includes index.

1. Women in Judaism.

I. Title.

BM729. W6S9

296

75-46561

ISBN 0-8108-0904-4

Printed in the United States of America

Conditions: Copyright in the underlying marked up html files which implement the hypertext features of this World Wide Web site is held by Ingrid Shafer. Distribution of this version on the Internet, does not constitute consent to any use of the underlying hypertext markup for commercial redistribution either via the Internet or using some other form of hypertext distribution.

“He who has no wife dwells without good, without help, without joy, without blessing, and without atonement.”

--Genesis Rabbah 18, 2

A woman is “a pitcher full of filth with its mouth full of blood, yet all run after her.”

--Talmud, b. Shabbath 152a

“The difference in the relations of men and women to each other makes a constant difference between the Rabbis and ourselves. It is always cropping up. Modern apologists tend to ignore or evade it. They quote a few sentences such as ‘Who is rich? He who has a good wife’; or they tell of a few exceptional women such as Beruria. It is quite true that wife and mother played a very important part in Rabbinic life; it is true the Rabbis were almost always monogamists; it is true that they honored their mothers profoundly, and usually honored and cared for their wives. But that is only one side of the story.... Women were, on the whole, regarded as inferior to men in mind, in function and in status.”

C. G. Montefiore, A Rabbinic Anthology

(Philadelphia, 1960), pp. xviii-xix

CONTENTS

I. PURPOSE AND SETTING

1. Rationale of the Study

2. Status of Women in the Ancient Fertile Crescent and the Greco-Roman World

a. Ancient Fertile Crescent

b. The Greek World

c. The Roman World

3. Ancient Hebrew Background

II. ATTITUDE TOWARD WOMEN IN WISDOM AND PSEUDEPIGRAPHICAL

LITERATURE

1. Wisdom Literature

2. Pseudepigraphical Literature

III. ATTITUDE OF MAJOR JEWISH GROUPS TOWARD WOMEN

1. Pharisees

2. Sadducees

3. Essenes--Qumran

4. Therapeutae

5. Elephantine Women

6. The Rabbis

a. Positive Evaluations of Women

b. Negative Evaluations of Women

IV. WOMEN IN RELATION TO CULT AND TORAH

1. Women Fulfilling Torah

2. Segregation in Temple and Synagogue

3. No Men, No Minyan

4. Women Reading Torah

5. Women Studying Torah

a. Beruria: The Exception That Proves the Rule

b. Imma Shalom: No Exception

c. Other Non-exceptions

6. Women Distract from Torah

V. WOMEN IN SOCIETY

1. Women’s Education

1. Women Bearing Witness

2. Women, Children, and Slaves

3. Women Appearing in Public

4. Women’s Head and Face Covering

5. Conversation with Women

6. Women’s Absence from Meals

VI. WOMEN AND SEX

1. Women as Sex Objects

2. Impure Menstruous Women

3. Married Women

4. Polygyny

5. Adultery

6. Divorce

VII. CONCLUSION

NOTES

INDEX

CHAPTER I

PURPOSE AND SETTING

1. RATIONALE OF THE STUDY

This study attempts to answer the question: What was the status of women in the period of formative Judaism; that is, where did women stand in the social scale in comparison to others, namely, men? Were they thought of as having the same rights and responsibilities as men, and if not, how, and why, were they different, and with what results? By formative Judaism is meant the time span from about the second century before the Common Era (B. C. E. ) to the fifth century of the Common Era (C. E. ), and the geographical area first of all in Palestine and secondly in Babylonia. This was the time and locus of the formation of what emerged as mainline Judaism. Of the various Jewish “sects” teeming in the first decades of the Common Era, such as Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots, and Christians, only the first and the last persisted in an organized fashion, coming down to us as Judaism and Christianity. I hope also to study the status of women in formative Christianity, but that will be a subsequent volume, which of course could not be attempted until this study was completed.

The reason for undertaking such a study is not unlike the motive of the teller of the story of Adam and Eve, namely, how can we explain the contemporary relationships between men and women? Our attempt to answer the question, instead of using mythic means, will use the historical- critical method. Naturally all serious history attempts to be as “objective” as possible, i. e., to “tell it like it was” (“wie es eigentlich gewesen”), as much as that is possible within inevitable human limitations. Like most historiography, this study is prompted by a question that is important in contemporary life; in this case, the place of women in human society and their relationship to men. Surely this is a fundamental question and one worthy of being put to our past. Any attempt at responsible history will seek to avoid tendentiousness and hold the conclusions to what the evidence will bear. Concerning the present subject on the one hand the positive evaluations of women in formative Judaism will have to be sought out and recorded. But, given the subject matter, it will be particularly important to guard against the sort of apologetic that became especially prevalent since the Enlightenment and the rise of the subsequent feminist movements: the tendency to claim that Judaism, and Christianity, have really valued women very highly and even made them “equal” to men, a claim that an earlier day would have rejected. Josephus stated quite clearly that “The woman, says the Law, is in all things inferior to the man,”¹ and his contemporary, Paul of Tarsus, echoed the same idea: “Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent.”²

A second tactic which embarrassed modern Jewish and Christian, scholars have adopted has been to grant, grudgingly, that women were treated “differently” from men, but to insist either that this did not mean that they were thereby any less valued, or that in any case it was “better” that they be thus “differently” treated. Of course, treating two groups of human beings differently does not automatically mean in logic that one group is valued more or less than the other, but empirically, when groups of mature human adults with millions upon millions of members and a highly systematized social differentiation of major proportions are in question, then there is more than ample prima facie evidence that a higher and lower valuation of the groups is involved. To argue oppositely merely on the grounds of logic or some references to structurally superficial evidence, without a thorough analysis of the structure of the society involved, and its presuppositions and inevitable results, is to argue speciously. This was the sort of argumentation that stated in America that it was a good thing for Black slaves to be treated “differently,” that they were in fact happier so, and referred to some statements and actions of “happy” Black slaves and the paternal attitude of some benign slave holders. The same approach led to the second line of defense after the abolishment of slavery; namely, that Blacks were to have “different” schools, etc. from Whites, but of course they would be equal! The United States Supreme Court finally dismissed that line of argument as the rationalization of the White group in power oppressing the Black group not in power. Such a manner of arguing was not honest; it did not seek to describe reality “wie es eigentlich gewesen.” To so argue in the matter of the status of women would be similarly dishonest.

At the same time this study cannot be an attempt to argue that the past under scrutiny necessarily could, or should, have been different than it was, or that the values of contemporary society are necessarily better than those of the past. Rather, as initially stated, it can only be an attempt to answer as accurately as possible on the basis of evidence, the question proposed by the author--which naturally is prompted by a contemporary concern. As a historical study, this work can only stand or fall, in whole or in part, on the basis of the gathering and analysis of, and argumentation from, the evidence available. However, distinct from that study, but based on it, the author, not so much as historian but as a concerned human scholar, who is also committed to religion, institutional and otherwise, should also be able to offer an evaluation, indicating something of the study’s significance for contemporary society. That I expect to do in a concluding chapter.

The main documentary sources for this study are the following: the later books of the Hebrew Bible (mainly the Wisdom literature); the apocrypha, that is, the additional books found in the Jewish translation of the Scriptures into Greek (the Septuagint); the pseudepigrapha, i. e., Jewish writings around the beginning of the Common Era which were not taken into the scriptural canon; the Dead Sea scrolls; the works of Josephus, a Jewish historian of the first century C. E.; the writings of Philo, the great first century C. E. Jewish philosopher and religious thinker; and the rabbinic writings. These latter include primarily the Mishnah, a collection of the sayings, discussions and decisions of early rabbis, called Tannaim, on how to live according to the Torah (codified around 200 C. E. ); the Babylonian Talmud, commentary of later rabbis, called Amoraim, on the Mishnah (codified in Babylonia in the fifth century C. E. ); to a lesser extent the smaller Palestinian Talmud (codified in the fourth century C. E. in Palestine), the Tosephta, Mechilta, Sifre, and Sifra Scripture commentaries (mostly all additional materials from the Tannaim), and the early midrash--i. e., rabbinic stories, etc. illustrating the Torah--mainly the Genesis Rabbah (codified in the fourth century C. E. ).

2 STATUS OF WOMEN IN THE ANCIENT FERTILE CRESCENT

AND THE GRECO-ROMAN WORLD

To understand any human event it must be seen in its historical context, for every human event is the product of the interplay of the forces of the past and the responses of the forces of the present. We can no more understand a human event outside of its historical context than we can grasp the concept of the sound of a single hand clapping--Zen Buddhism notwithstanding. The importance of the historical context is even further heightened when the human event being investigated is a person’s, or a society’s, attitude concerning the status of the most broadly distributed class of persons in a society, namely, the status of women in society. Hence, to approach properly the subject of this investigation-the status of women in formative Judaism--it is essential to seek to learn the attitude toward women prevalent in the surrounding milieux as this Jewish society developed.

a. Ancient Fertile Crescent

By way of remote background it should be noted that the status of women in the ancient Near Eastern world was generally that of an inferior.³ Of the perhaps most ancient of those civilizations, the Sumerian, it has been said that it was male-dominated: men ran the government, managed the economy, administered the courts and schools, manipulated the theology and ritual, and therefore women generally were treated as second-class citizens without power, prestige, or status.⁴ However, as the eminent Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer has pointed out, there are some indications that this was predominantly true only of later Sumerian society, i. e., from about 2000 B. C. E. on. In the earlier period the Sumerian woman may well have been man’s equal socially and economically, at least among the ruling class. Further, in the area of religion, the female deity was worshiped from earliest times to the very end of Sumer’s existence. In spite of some manipulative favoritism on the part of the male theologians, God in Sumer never became all-male.

Among other things, Kramer points out that polyandry apparently existed in Sumer previous to 2400 B. C. E., for one of the Urukagina “reform” documents of that period reads: “The women of former days used to take two husbands, (but) the women of today (if they attempted this) were stoned with stones (upon which was inscribed their evil) intent.” Kramer pointed out that, judging from this rather strident boast, some women in pre-Urukagina days practiced polyandry, and got away with it--which hardly smacks of a male-dominated society. In this early period of the twenty-fourth century some women also owned and controlled vast amounts of property, enjoyed some laws which in effect enjoined something like equal pay for equal work, and were able to hold top rank among the literati of the land, and be spiritual leaders of paramount importance.⁵

By the year 2000 B.C. E., and onward, the role of women deteriorated considerably and on the whole the male ruled. For example, marriage was then theoretically monogamous, but the husband was permitted one or more concubines, while the wife had to remain faithful to her one and only spouse.⁶ Continuing in this trend, the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi (1728-1636 B.C. E.) and similar laws legislated, for example, that men were free to repudiate their wives for any or no reason ⁷, though the woman was able to divorce the husband only for very serious cause;⁸ indeed, even if in such a case a wife e were “a gadabout,” her life was forfeit: “If she was not careful, but was a gadabout, thus neglecting her house (and) humiliating her husband, they shall throw that woman into the water.⁹“ Polygyny was accepted, but not polyandry; hence adultery was solely a crime against the husband ¹⁰. However, it should be noted that the oriental woman enjoyed, on the other hand, a very large legal capacity. In the presence of the man (father or husband) the oriental woman was silent and passive; but if the man disappeared--and not only by death or by absence in the technical sense, but even by a temporary absence--the woman became a fully capable person.¹¹

Such general disability of women was not uniformly the case in the other massively important cultural milieu in the ancient fertile crescent, including Palestine, i. e., in Egypt. In fact, during half the history of ancient Egypt, the age of the pyramids (2778 B.C.E. and following) to the end of the Hellenistic period (30 B. C. E. ), women enjoyed a high status. For example, during the third, fourth, and into the fifty dynasties (2778-2423 B. C. E. ), when the highest level of culture of the Old Kingdom was reached, daughters had the same inheritance rights as sons, marriages were strictly monogamous (with the exception of royalty) and tended to be love matches; in fact, it can be said that in the Old Kingdom the wife was the equal of the husband in rights, although her place in society was not identical with that of her husband.¹² With the decline of the Old Kingdom (2270 B. C. E.). centralized control also waned and feudalism arose, which brought in its wake the decline of individual rights and the rise of corporate rights in private law; this meant that women lost their equality of rights and were subordinated to men, usually fathers or husbands. At any rate, this was true among the nobility (where polygyny then also became widespread) and on the land; in the cities, commerce continued to be based on individualism in private law (i. e., urban property remained free and alienable), and the equality of the sexes persisted as under the classic law of the Old Kingdom. In the cities the woman had an independent legal personality.¹³

The situation was reversed again during the New Empire (1580-1085 B. C. E.--18th,.19th, and 20th dynasties) and women again generally enjoyed equality of status, particularly during the 18th dynasty (1580-1341 B. C. E.). Centralization was restored in the monarchy and individualism triumphed in private law, and consequently during the 18th dynasty women recovered their entire independence and their own legal personalities. They again took up the social role they had had, at the side of their husbands, in the Old Kingdom.¹⁴ (It was during this period that the Hebrew people traditionally are said to have lived in and left Egypt.) Once again in 1085 B. C. E. the Egyptian empire disintegrated into a feudal pattern, with its stress on corporate rights in private law and the consequent subordination of women to men.

With the beginning of the 26th dynasty (663-525 B. C. E.) and its centralized monarchy a definitive change in favor of equality for women in ancient Egypt took place. Women possessed a situation of legal independence and from then on disposed of themselves freely. Absolute equality of spouses was established in marriage. Strictly monogamous, the conjugal union was based on the mutual consent of the partners and imposed on the spouses identical obligations: the infidelity of the husband as well as that of the wife permitted the injured spouse to obtain a divorce at her or his own profit.¹⁵ Thus, as Jacques Pirenne put it, “we have arrived at the epoch of total legal emancipation of the woman. That absolute legal equality between the woman and the man continued to the arrival of the Ptolemies in Egypt.”¹⁶

Pirenne provides a very precise overview of the history of the status of women in ancient Egypt from the beginning, excluding the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Women in ancient Egypt were considered legally the equal of men in the epochs of individualism. They were, on the contrary, treated as minors and’ placed under tutelage in feudal-seignorial epochs, during the course of which those social groups founded on the solidarity of authority and hierarchy were restored. Pirenne argued that although that conclusion could, in varying degrees, well be extended and adapted to all civilizations, none, at least in antiquity, accorded to women an independence equal to that which they knew in Egypt. Greek civilization itself, which one nevertheless generally admits was the most individualistic in antiquity, was far from granting women the independence which they knew in Egypt during the periods of its apogee.

There is there a very important element which perhaps ought to stimulate historians of law as well as moralists to study, in comparison with Greek individualism, Egyptian individualism which, before our period, alone issued in the complete legal emancipation of the woman.¹⁷

b. The Greek World

Let us now turn our attention to those cultural forces, Hellenism and Romanism, which largely formed the immediate context within which so much of formative Judaism developed.

Some scholars argue that the almost omnipresent patriarchy perceived from the beginning of humanity’s written records was preceded by a very long, beneficent period of matriarchy.¹⁸ This thesis, which is lent at least some support by the findings of the Sumerologist Kramer (discussed above) and the Etruscanologist Heurgon (discussed below), is, however, disputed. In any case, as a very careful historian, Vern L. Bulloughl, noted in general, scholars have argued that women in the Homeric poems, which probably were put into final form in the ninth century B. C. E., had a higher position and were better regarded than later in Greek society. However, by the time of Hesiod in the eighth century B. C. E., male dominance was no longer in doubt, and in Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries B. C. E. the “golden age” of Pericles, the status of women seemed to have reached some kind of nadir in Western history.¹⁹

In this period of “classical” Greece there was also a large difference between the status of women in Athens and in Sparta. Of the two largest Greek city states, Sparta provided women with by far the greater freedom, i. e., scope for human development, and equality with men. In Sparta women wore clothes which did not restrict their movement (e. g., their robes were open on the side)²⁰, and took part in sports (e. g., see the Vatican girl racer, a statue originally from the time of the Persian wars), in politics,²¹ and in the owning and running of businesses and farms; in fact., women owned almost forty per cent of all the real estate of Sparta,²² which in itself also tended to increase and sustain the high estimation of women in Sparta.

Though Athens was only a short distance away from Sparta and though the two spoke basically the same language, the styles of life of the two city states were dramatically different--and so was the status of women in each. In Athens women did not participate in politics; in fact they were largely shut out of social life as well. Among the works attributed to Demosthenes we find the statement of one fourth-century Athenian: “We have hetaerae for our pleasure (hedone), concubines for the daily needs of the body (therapeia), and wives so we may have legitimate children and a faithful steward of our houses.”²³ Only the hetaerae (“companions”) were educated and entered into male society. They were like courtesans who were to provide men with interesting conversation and entertainment as well as venereal pleasure--in short, social intercourse and sexual intercourse. Marriage was usually monogamous in that there was only one legitimate wife at a time. However, she normally did not mix with the husband’s male friends, but was largely the bearer and rearer of legitimate offspring and the administrator of the household--to which she was largely confined. In Athens the wife “lived entirely or almost entirely as in a harem.”²⁴

Leipoldt has some very enlightening remarks about how Athens developed the harem-like condition for its women:

Athens, especially through its export business and commerce, became a rich city. There were men who no longer worked (the rabbis have a very instructive definition: a settlement is to be designated a city when there are to be found in it at least ten men who do not pursue a profession Megilla 1, 3), and all necessity for the women to work outside the home disappears--why else have slaves? Whoever has such trains them to take over all toilsome work (ponos). Some wives will at first find that pleasant and a reason to carry their heads higher. But now there awakens the feeling among the men that the women are their personal possessions, useless, but ornamental pieces, which one can best preserve by keeping them at home (the notion of envy probably says too little here). Thus is the path to the harem entered upon.²⁵

An important point that is alluded to here is that within the same culture women tend to be more restricted in cities than in villages or in rural areas (distinct of course from the lot of women of the landed nobility in a feudal society, as in Egypt, where even women in cities tended to retain a certain legal liberty, as noted above). The present writer experienced this personally within the Arab Muslim culture in the fall of 1972 when visiting the Muslim city of Hebron (south of Jerusalem) and a number of Muslim villages nearby. In the villages the women always wore a head covering, but never veiled their faces; in Hebron, however, many of the women in the streets went about with face veils. Something of the same thing occurred in the movement of populations to urban areas in nineteenth and twentieth century America; pioneer and rural women had a whole range of indispensable roles to play in their families and societies, including a key economic one, and consequently led a human life relatively as full as their husbands’. But when it was no longer necessary to share in the fighting of Indians, or in working to help provide food, clothing, and other necessities, they tended to become the “ornamental pieces” mentioned above; the wives of most professional men did not take a job, and so there later developed the mysterious malaise among suburban women which Betty Friedan called the “feminine mystique.”

Thus, economical and technological progress gradually released more and more women from hard physical labor into being “ornamental pieces,” but this same progress also tended to equalize men and women in that the male’s physical strength became less and less important--a tiny woman with a machine-gun was as deadly as any muscular male with the same. More and more in a technologically advancing society, knowledge and experience became the important things--and women could gain these as well as men. Hence, although women are at first lowered in importance vis-a-vis men as a civilization “advances,” if this advance continues sufficiently it bears within it the seeds of a growing movement of women’s liberation. This can, of course, be seen in the development of the feminist and women’s liberation movements of nineteenth and twentieth century America and Europe. But the same thing also happened in the Hellenistic and Roman world, as we shall see in somewhat more detail later.

The phenomenon of ancient women--and modern women--becoming “ornamental pieces” was carefully analyzed by the twentieth-century sociologist Thorsten Veblen, who in the process coined the concepts “conspicuous leisure” and “conspicuous consumption.” When men earned more than they really could use they would tend to use their superfluous wealth in a public way that would call attention to it--like lighting a cigar with a ten-dollar bill. The wives of these men, of course, became veritable clothes models, for by the extravagance of a woman’s attire people could see something of her man’s wealth--vicarious conspicuous consumption. Likewise, the women of wealthy men, or men who had pretensions of wealth, usually did not work, again to show publicly that the husband had so much money that the wife need not work--vicarious conspicuous leisure. Thus, the woman contributed little to the family or society, became just an ornamental piece, a conspicuous consumer of commodities for the sake of showing the husband’s wealth.

As wealth massively increased in Athens it was no wonder that such women had no significant part in the world of decision-making, that men came to think of them as their possessions which they needed to protect from thieves--in a restricted., harem-like existence.²⁶

Shortly after the time of the great philosophers of classical Greece--that is, from the end of the fourth century B. C. E. on--an extraordinary change in the general societal feeling took place, at first in Greece and then elsewhere in the Hellenistic world; a sensitivity developed for other persons, particularly the previously overlooked, and for animate and inanimate reality all around. It was a cultural phenomenon something like the Romantic Movement which burst upon the Western world at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This change, which continued to develop with the passage of time and spread throughout the Mediterranean and Near East through Hellenistic military and cultural expansion, was expressed in many ways, including painting, poetry, the emotions, and concern for animals, slaves, children--and women.

An appreciation of landscapes is usually something that children do not possess; it comes only with the development of more intense human emotions. Just as such an appreciation was often reflected in the paintings of the Romantics and afterward, so too in Hellenistic and Roman paintings the beauty of the countryside was highlighted--which was not done in earlier Greek art--for example, in extraordinary wall paintings in Pompeii.²⁷ This more highly developed emotion and sensitivity was also reflected in the much more frequent reports of expressions of joy or sorrow and of crying than was earlier the case.²⁸

There was also an increase in fondness for animals. For example, those in the Greek world who did not possess a dog were thought poor,²⁹ and yet domestic dogs were almost unknown in the East in pre-Hellenistic times; they were introduced through Greek influence, as can partly be seen in the stories of Tobit and the Syrophoenician woman whose daughter Jesus healed.³⁰ This Hellenistic fondness for animals was also expressed in poems dedicated to pets that had died. It is perhaps significant that it was a woman, Anyte of Tegea in Arcadia (around 300 B. C. E.), who firmly set the custom in Greek culture. Couplets by her, some in the form of grave inscriptions, exist on a hunting dog, a locust, a dolphin, a war-horse, and a rooster. Leipoldt says of her work: “These are really works of art: brief texts in chosen language, without exaggeration, full of genuine love for the animals--and each of the little poems is differently constructed.”³¹ Another scholar has gathered together over fifty such examples from antiquity,³² including the Latin: Catullus’ poem on the dead sparrow of his daughter is perhaps the best known example.

Even more important is the fact that this new sensitivity was also extended to “inferior” human beings. Slaves were more often viewed as other humans with various talents., feelings, etc., and were consequently more humanly appreciated; e. g., they often were given grave stones. Children received a greater appreciation, especially small children.³³ (Again one is reminded of similar developments in early nineteenth-century Europe under the leadership of children’s education pioneers like Pestalozzi.) This “discovery” of children can be seen in the Greek plastic arts: in the earlier period children were obviously not thought important enough to observe carefully; only after the time of Alexander the Great were the sculpted figures of children properly proportioned. The figure of Eros on the east frieze of the Parthenon and on vase paintings is that of a half adult; later it becomes a real infant.

The question naturally arises: Why the development of this new sensitivity toward the end of the fourth century B. C. E.? The causes of such a complex historical development can only be proportionately complex, but a few “causes” do lie close to the surface. The new sensitivity became apparent a generation after Alexander exploded the Greek world of city states into the vast imperial world of Hellenism. Energies that most Greek citizens had formerly devoted to politics could now be turned to themselves, persons, and things around them, all of which they had not had much time or energy to really observe or appreciate before. Also, most humans cannot live merely as a single unit in a massive impersonal organization; they must also have satisfying personal relations; they must live in a personal community, or communities. That was possible as a citizen in a city-state such as Athens or Corinth, but not in an empire. Hence, not only was there now time and energy available to devote to new relations, but there was also a need to find a more human community (witness the incredible popularity of the mystery religions at this time; indeed, the massive spread first of Judaism--perhaps ten per cent of the population of the Roman empire at the beginning of the Common Era!--and then of Christianity are still further evidence). Whatever other “causes” of this historical event are put forth, these two will at least have to be reckoned in.

In ancient Greek society, as in many others, women were often categorized with the other “inferior” beings, slaves and children--usually to place some restrictions on them. Quite naturally, the development of the new sensitivity which raised the status of slaves and children also led to the raising of the status of women. In fact one can speak of a gradually developing women’s liberation movement in Hellenism. It did not move as rapidly or as dramatically as the one in the nineteenth century of Western civilization, but it was clearly there and made enormous advances from the time of Alexander to Constantine. In fact, already in the fifth century, in Periclean Athens, there were at least the beginnings of a movement, particularly in the areas of philosophy and politics, as is attested to by the plays satirizing gynocracy and, just a little later, by Aristophanes’ play on the first “Women’s Strike for Peace,” Lysistrata.³⁴ In speaking of a Greek women’s liberation, however, it is well to keep in mind what was succinctly stated by Klaus Thraede: “One does well, when concerned with the development of a freer situation [for women], which nevertheless did take place in Hellenistic times, to distinguish between Asia Minor and Athens and Sparta as well as between city and land.”³⁵ One might add to this the need at times to distinguish between early and late Hellenism and, perhaps more importantly, between social classes. Likewise, one must keep in mind the advanced state of the liberation of women in Etruria, as well as Egypt, which persisted in the Hellenistic periodic ³⁶ and also doubtless spread these ideas throughout the ancient world through the medium of Hellenistic culture.

In terms of “causes” of the spread of this women’s liberation movement in the Hellenistic world, one must calculate, in addition to what has been discussed above about the new sensitivity and about Egypt, the important influence of the queens, princesses, and other royal women of Hellenistic courts.³⁷ The court of Philip II was not marked by great elegance and refinement, but to it belonged Olympias, and where such an imperious and self-willed woman reigned, her sex must have enjoyed a freedom and consideration not possible in Athens. It was, however, on the model of the Macedonian court that the officers of Alexander ordered their households, and when Eastern customs were considered, they were the customs of the Persian and Egyptian monarchies, where the queen and the queen-mother were always potent personages. Hence they could but strengthen Macedonian tendencies to accord women social and political importance. “The influence of a court is always far-reaching, and in this case it accelerated a movement, of which the Greek courtesans had been hitherto the leaders, for the emancipation of women.”³⁸

William Ferguson added a further insight into the spread of Hellenistic women’s liberation when he described how an Athenian girl installed in a new home in Elephantine or in Antioch was dependent upon her own resources to a much greater degree than one who remained at home surrounded by her kinsmen and within easy reach of her natural guardian. She had to be given freedom of access to the courts and personal right to hold property, without which she would have been entirely at the mercy of her husband. In other words, her parents were bound to see that privileges were guaranteed to her in the marriage contract which they would not think of demanding for their daughters who married their neighbors’ sons. The instability of life, the enormous increase of opportunity to move from one place to another, made new safeguards for the wife and mother advisable. The consequence was that everywhere in the Hellenistic world the old rules of society were being abandoned, and new ones, dealing with woman’s liberties, were being formed to take their place.

There had been no such occasion for the creation of a new social regime since the seventh century B. C. E. In Athens, as for that matter in the cities of old Greece generally, these causes of social change were not directly operative. A royal family did not exist there; the city was not dependent for its prosperity upon its attractiveness to immigrants; there was no new contact with foreign races. Hence it is the influence of the hetaerae upon the structure of Athenian society, and the reaction of the new world upon the old, that must be considered and, if possible, measured at this point-“...the emancipation of women made slow, if any, progress in Athens. It was, in fact, an unfriendly territory for the social innovations of Hellenism.”³⁹

The above mentioned “cautions” having been noted, a rather impressive list of indications of a gradually developing women’s liberation movement in the Hellenistic world can be put forward. Even the form of address to a woman that grew up in this period is an indication of her increase in status: as it became customary in late Greek times to address men as “Lord” (kyrie), it became equally customary to address women as “Lady” (kyria); the custom split out of the Greek language area into Latin as well, where men and women tended more and more to be addressed as dominus and domina.⁴⁰

To this one can add the fact that in growing contrast to the earlier frequent social restriction of the Greek married woman, in Hellenistic times the wife was quite likely to turn up at social gatherings, at symposia;⁴¹ and women went on long journeys.⁴² Whereas earlier it was customary for Spartan women to participate in sports, including the Olympics, women’s involvement in this area advanced in late Hellenistic times to the point where there were women professional athletes, as, for example, the three daughters--Tryphosa, Hedea, and Dionysia--of Hermesianax of Tralles, who engaged in foot and chariot races in the years 47 to 41 B.C. E.⁴³ Many women pursued music as a profession,⁴⁴ but not many became actresses or dancers (at least not “socially acceptable” women),⁴⁵ although we hear of women who traveled about Greece giving recitations, such as Aristodana of Smyrna who was accompanied by her brother as a manager.⁴⁶ Asia Minor was known for its women physicians,⁴⁷ though according to Pliny the Elder much of the information about these women physicians was deliberately suppressed.⁴⁸ On the level of skilled artisans, women often pursued a craft similar to their husbands’, e. g., a woman goldsmith and a man armorer.⁴⁹

The position of women within marriage is, of course, an important key to the status of women in society in general. We have noted something of the atypical freedom and equality Spartan women enjoyed in classical times, and something of the extremely limited position of other Greek married women (being shut out of politics and social life and having to run competition with the hetaerae and the concubines-that is, mostly slave women who were always totally at the disposal of the husband, sexually and otherwise).⁵⁰ The Greek wife of classical time did nevertheless retain her right over her dowry, even if a divorce occurred; and she as well as the husband could initiate a divorce-quite a different situation than existed in the Jewish world, where only the husband could initiate a divorce; but that will be discussed in detail later.

In the Hellenistic period the status of women in marriage advanced quite dramatically, allowing, of course, for wide variation according to the location and the dominant local legal tradition. Marriage was monogamous in classical Greek times and it continued to be so in an even more intense fashion in the Hellenistic period, e.g., the restriction on concubines-as reflected in a late fourth century (311 B. C. E.) marriage contract, presumably drawn up according to the Greek law dominant on the island of Cos (off the coast of Asia Minor). Part of it runs as follows:

Contract of marriage of Heracleides and Demetria. Heracleides takes for his legitimate wife Demetria of Cos. He receives her from her father Leptine of Cos and from her mother Philotis. He is free. She is free.... It is not permitted to Heracleides to take another woman, for that would be an injury to Demetria, nor may he have children by another woman, nor do anything injurious to Demetria under any pretext. If Heracleides be found performing any such deed, Demetria shall denounce him before three men they will both choose. Heracleides will return to Demetria, the dowry of 1000 drachmas, which she contributed, and he will pay an additional 1000 drachmas in Alexandrian silver as an additional fine.⁵¹

Here the husband is not only committed to monogamy and to marital fidelity (as is the wife, elsewhere in the contract) but is even subject to a double penalty if he violates that commitment. The contract also clearly assumes an equal right for both spouses to initiate a divorce on the grounds of infidelity. (It is also interesting that the bride is given away by the mother as well as the father.) It should be noted that this advance in the status of the married woman took place at a time and place where the forces at work were probably Greek. The later Egyptian influence could only further raise the status of women, which can be seen in, among other things, the fact that in Hellenistic Egypt the wife, as well as the husband, could initiate a divorce when and as she wished.⁵²

Klaus Thraede speaks of Hellenism’s linking of the goal of women’s liberation with equality in marriage: “In a more progressive civilization equal rights for both women and men is a condition for married harmony (the Stoics formulate it the same way also). Hellenism discovered that because the value and individuality of the woman is fulfilled in marriage, monogamy is required.”⁵³

Women in Hellenistic times also exercised extensive rights in the economic sphere. A woman could inherit a personal patrimony--equally along with sons!--buy, own, and sell property and goods, and will them to others.⁵⁴ Indeed, in Hellenistic times there were wealthy Greek women, some of whom were greatly honored for their philanthropy.⁵⁵ Thraede sums the matter up when he says:

The emancipation of the woman in private law was decisive for the development which began already in the classical period: the equalization in inheritance and property rights as well as the de facto independence in marriage and divorce.⁵⁶

In classical Greek times a woman usually could undertake a public act--i. e., one involving property or marriage--only with the cooperation or approval of a kyrios (lord), who usually was the father, then the husband. This institution, reflective of ancient familial solidarity, continued into Hellenistic times.⁵⁷ The custom, however, was resisted in Hellenistic Egypt, and was eventually eliminated.⁵⁸ For some time then, the Hellenistic woman exercised her quite large public capacity with a kyrios under Greek law and without a kyrios under Egyptian law. However, even outside Egypt the institution of the kyrios declined to a mere formality ⁵⁹ and finally was eliminated in Roman times, i. e., after the Antonine constitution of 212 C. E.⁶⁰ Nevertheless., even in the third century B. C. E. many women initiated a wide range of legal actions, civil, penal, and administrative--without a kyrios.⁶¹ Not only Egyptian women did so, but even Greek. “This capacity is without a doubt an innovation in regard to women living under Greek law when compared to the institutions of classical times.”⁶² It is also an “innovation” when compared to the situation in contemporary Judaism, where women were not able even to bear legal witness.⁶³

From one perspective the dramatic difference in the status of women in classical Athenian society and Hellenistic society reflects the difference in the societal structures: the former was patriarchally collective and the latter was individualistic. Parenthetically, it should be noted that Jewish society was built only on the patriarchal collective model: “Talmudic family structure is based upon the biblical patriarchal system, which for its part is the continuation of the custom of the tribal age. Preference is given to males, within the family as well as in society. A person’s status is determined by his descent and for this purpose the paternal rather than the maternal relationship is decisive.”⁶⁴ On the other hand, Hellenistic law of persons and family assumed a definitely individualistic shape.⁶⁵ Furthermore, behind the legal, though not necessarily social independence of women, there was the fundamental fact that a new type of family, which rested entirely on blood relationship, had replaced the classical oikos. This new family was based purely on personal ties and, consequently, there was no patriarchal family organization at all. Various restrictive practices atrophied in a gradual change of custom that was inherent in the logic of a social development which did away with the concept of a family in which women were subject to the head of the “house.” “The husband had no conjugal power over his wife.”⁶⁶

In an advanced civilization the key to advanced status is education; by itself it will not accomplish everything, but without it usually little will be possible. Whereas in classical Athens usually only the hetaerae had any kind of an education, education for young girls became ever broader and more widespread throughout the Hellenistic period, and one result was that more and more wives as well as husbands were educated.⁶⁷ In fact, in Hellenistic Egypt there were more women who could sign their names than men,⁶⁸ “and thus Hellenistic literature, particularly the novel, was written for a feminine public.”⁶⁹ Another result of the broader Hellenistic education of women was the appearance of a flood of Hellenistic women poets.⁷⁰

It is perhaps most of all in that discipline of the spirit for which the Greeks are most renowned, philosophy, that one can see the striving for women’s liberation. We hear from an ancient biographer of Pythagoras that already in the seventh century B. C. E. there were many women students of Pythagoras.⁷¹ The comedy writer Alexis even wrote a piece entitled “The Women Pythagorians” (Pythagoridzousa).⁷² The comment on the “woman question” by one of the women philosophers of the Pythagorean school, Theano, who was either the wife or daughter of Pythagoras, is still extant. Within the context of the primitive assumption that sexual intercourse makes a person “unclean,” she was asked: “In how many days after intercourse with a man will a woman be clean?” Her reply: “If it is her own husband, she is immediately clean; if it is with a stranger, never.”⁷³ Continuing this tradition, the sophists and Socrates (470-399 B. C. E.) raised criticisms of the subordinate position of women in society.⁷⁴

In his writing about the ideal state Plato (427-347 B. C. E.) made a rather extraordinary breakthrough concerning the status of women; he argued in favor of equality for women with men--indeed, equality was in the nature of things. He wrote:

Are we of the opinion that the female watchdogs must perform their guard duty just as the male watchdogs? Do they have to go on the hunt and do everything with the rest? Or do the female dogs remain at home, incapable because they must bring offspring into the world and nourish them, whereas the male dogs do all the work and take care of everything involved in shepherding?

Everything must be done together! Only we assign lighter tasks to the former and heavier ones to the latter. Is it possible, however, to assign to any beings the same kind of tasks if the same education and training are not available to all alike? Impossible. Therefore, if we wish to engage the women in the same work as the men, they must also be allowed to learn the same things. The men receive intellectual and physical education. Thus, the women must also learn and appropriately employ these two disciplines and the art of warfare.... They must take part in war and everything involved in guard duty.⁷⁵

However, although educated women thus were seen by Plato as equally a boon for the state as men, he nevertheless wished to curtail the development of too much freedom for women by legally limiting their lifestyles.⁷⁶ (It should also be noted that we do know of at least two women philosophical disciples of Plato.)⁷⁷

Like his teacher Plato, Aristotle (384-322 B. C. E.) also paid lip service to the desirability of the freedom of women in a democracy,⁷⁸ but at the same time he argued that too much freedom for women was a political evil ⁷⁹ and that women should take a subordinate position.⁸⁰ However, we know that one of Aristotle’s followers, Theophrastus (d. 287 B. C. E.), had both a woman disciple, Pamphile (some of whose writing is extant), and a woman opponent, unfortunately anonymous. Thereafter to some extent the Cynics also spoke out in favor of equal rights for women, and women played a prominent role in the school of Epicurus (343-270 B. C. E.), not only as disciples but even as favorite teachers.⁸¹

The philosophical school which did most to promote the improved status of women was that of the Stoics. These grassroots philosophers stressed the worth of the individual woman, the need for her education (consequently there were many women followers of Stoicism), strict monogamy and a notion of marriage as a spiritual community of two equals.⁸² “In the woman question the Stoics of later times are much more influential because they concern themselves above all with the proper living of everyday life.”⁸³ The Roman knight C. Musonius Rufus, a contemporary of the apostle Paul, discusses at length whether women should also pursue philosophy and whether daughters should be brought up the same as sons; he answers yes to both questions. The dependence on Plato’s Republic is everywhere apparent in the essay. Even the male and female dogs are reported on in similar fashion. What is decisive is that both sexes have the same relationship to virtue and must be correspondingly educated. Indeed, both receive the same spiritual capabilities (the same logos) from the gods. Furthermore, it is specifically the profession of housewife that the woman can correctly fulfill only when she is a philosopher. These thoughts of Musonius have a great significance for intellectual history, for they influence later thinkers, as can be seen, for example, in Plutarch and Clement of Alexander. In fact, we know of a third century C. E. Syrian princess with the Arabian name of Zenobia who lived according to the precepts of Musonius.⁸⁴

What makes the teachings of the Stoics especially important in the spread of the liberation of women in the centuries just before and after the beginning of the Common Era is not only that they keenly stressed woman’s personal value and equality with men, but also that they were so widely spread abroad even on the grass-roots level. Many educated people were counted among the adherents of Stoicism, but so too were many others who had never heard a professional Stoic teacher, for many of their ideas and sayings became standard elements of traditional education. However, there were many Stoic popular speakers who went about like circuit preachers, speaking in homely language about their ideas of life. They thus penetrated all classes, even that of the slaves.⁸⁵ “But all this was not only the result of stoical stumping; the masses were especially prepared to receive the teachings of the Stoa because they helped the oppressed to preserve at least the feeling of inner freedom.”⁸⁶

Not every aspect of every teacher, let alone adherent, of Stoicism reached the full height of complete equality between men and women in its expression,⁸⁷ nor, doubtless, did every professed disciple always practice fully what he preached. Still, Stoicism and the other forces discussed above surely spread ideas of women’s liberation far and wide throughout the Hellenistic world and massively influenced many people to live by them.

In religion and cult, women in classical Greece experienced restrictions that were broad, but by no means absolute. There were a number of religious activities or places that they could not enter upon, as, for example, the very important oracle of Delphi, the cult of Hercules; and only maidens, not married women, usually could watch the sacred games at Olympia. Women were also almost entirely absent from, or were kept in the background of, state religion activities. Still, in some cults, such as those of Artemis and Dionysius, women did play a significant role.⁸⁸ The restrictions, however, along with a lesser education, encouraged the popularity of superstition and magic among women; their normal human need for religious expression naturally moved in the direction of the occult when the more “legitimate” outlets were restricted. Strabo (63 B.C. E. -24 C. E.), e. g., unknowingly pointed toward this when he complained that women were the originators of superstition (deisidaimonias archegoi).⁸⁹ The rabbi Hillel (70 B. C. E.-10 C. E.) also unknowingly pointed to the same outcome of the religious restriction of women when he said: “Many women, much magic.”⁹⁰

It was doubtless the same kind of pressure, plus the burgeoning liberation of women in the Hellenistic period, that led to the extraordinary popularity at that time of the Eastern cults and mystery religions, particularly among women.⁹¹ Women not only took part in these religious cults, but often did so in great numbers and often in leading and even priestly roles, as, for example, in the Eleusian, the Dionysian and the Andanian mysteries (indeed, it would seem it was just such placing of women on a level with men in religion and cult that provoked a Christian polemic against the equality of women by Cyril of Alexandria--376-444 C. E.).⁹² The cult of the goddess Isis, which came from Egypt but spread all over the Hellenistic and Roman world, was at the beginning of its popularity exclusively a women’s cult, and even after men were admitted it still provided women with leading religious roles ⁹³ and justly had the reputation of being a vigorous promoter of women’s equality and liberation.⁹⁴ The extraordinary appeal to women of the Hellenistic world of Judaism (reflected, for example, in Josephus’ remark that almost all of the women of Damascus embraced Judaism!)⁹⁵ and then Christianity (e. g., the first European convert to Christianity was a woman, Lydia of Philippi)⁹⁶ also must be at least partly traced back to the same forces of restriction, reaction and liberation discussed above--the latter was also doubtless responsible for the fact that the status of women in diaspora Judaism and Pauline Christianity was higher than it otherwise would have been.⁹⁷

c. The Roman World

Although it was the Hellenistic cultural world that exercised the greatest outside influence on Palestinian Judaism, the influence of Rome was also present in its own way, i. e., mostly political, legal, and military, from the time of Pompey’s conquest in 63 B.C. E. Hence, it is proper to note briefly the condition of women among Romans.

Behind the culture of Rome there stood the extraordinarily developed culture of the Etruscans, stretching in space from Rome up to Pisa, and in time from before the seventh into the third centuries B. C. E. Whether one agrees with Jacques Heurgon or not when he says that “one must imagine, at the outset, in Italy, as also in Minoan Crete, a civilization dominated by the importance of Chthonian cults and by the pre-eminence of women,”⁹⁸ it must be granted that he offers ample documentation that the Etruscan women “went out” a great deal. Everywhere women were at the forefront of the scene, playing a considerable role and never blushing from shame, as Livy says of one of them, when exposing themselves to masculine company. In Etruria it was a recognized privilege for ladies of the most respectable kind, and not just for courtesans as in Greece of the contemporary classical period, to take part with men in banquets, where they reclined as the men did. They attended dances, concerts, sports events, and even presided, as a painting in Orvieto shows, perched on a platform, over boxing matches, chariot races and acrobatic displays.⁹⁹

Heurgon notes that in addition to the documentary evidence of the high status of women in Etruscan society, there is also decisive evidence from archaeology, not just in paintings where we see Etruscan women participating with men in numerous aspects of social life, not only in the epitaphs where the matronymic often is given a prominent place, “but in certain evidences, not sufficiently noted before, which are provided by the contents and the disposition of the tombs.”¹⁰⁰ A large number of the Etruscan tombs clearly set women in the pre-eminent position: “It is as if, between 650 and 450, the Etruscans, or at least those of Caere, had considered women to be of a superior essence and more and more susceptible of divinization than men.”¹⁰¹

All the evidence taken together allows Heurgon to attribute a privileged position to the Etruscan woman in a society where “we see her mingling with such brilliance in the business and the pleasures of men, her character torn to pieces by envious outsiders but invested in her country with an authority that was almost sovereign; artistic, cultivated, interested in Hellenic refinements and the bringer of civilization to her home; finally venerated in the tomb as an emanation of divine power.”¹⁰²

However, we do not find in Etruscan society either a theoretical Mutterrecht or an ideal gynaeocracy, but rather a stage in a long development, an unstable equilibrium of antagonistic forces in evolution which is given its full significance only if compared with Greece and Rome. furthermore, “Etruscan civilization was an archaic civilization. Its feminism, strange as it may seem to us, is not so much a recent conquest as a distant survival threatened by Graeco-Roman pressures; it recalls in many respects the Crete of Ariadne and the paintings of Cnossos more than the Athens of Solon and Pericles.”¹⁰³

Women, of course, did not enjoy such a high status in contemporary Greece, nor did they in early Rome. But by the third century B. C. E. Rome moved to improve the property rights of women. Somewhat later in the republic, doubtless due to the influence of Etruscan culture and the growing pressure of the women’s liberation movement in Hellenism, the condition of women improved to the point where a woman could in general marry and divorce on her own initiative and even choose her own name.¹⁰⁴ In speaking of the improvement of women’s legal position in the late republic, Thraede wrote: “Toward the end of the republican period the goal was to some extent attained”; he then referred to the capability of women to bear legal witness.¹⁰⁵ During the same period the image of leading women appeared on coins--for the first time.¹⁰⁶

The Roman Cornelius Nepos (d. 32 B.C. E.) even felt that the advanced status of Roman women was something to boast about (in doing so he perhaps painted the situation of the Greek women as too uniformly bleak--so as to enhance the contrast with that of Roman women):

What Roman would find it annoying to be accompanied by his wife to a banquet? Or what housewife does not take the first place in her house or go about in public? Quite different in Greece. There the wife is not brought to a banquet, except when relatives are involved; and she occupies only the inner part of the house, the so-called Gynaikonitis, where only close relatives can enter.¹⁰⁷

The status of women continued to improve dramatically under the empire. Indeed, the political activity of women of the senatorial class developed so vigorously that we find on the walls of Pompeii the names of women running for office, a definite advance over Egyptian and Greek women, who had few political rights; women were sent on imperial missions to pro-consuls; the possibility of a woman consul was even discussed.¹⁰⁸ Women were everywhere involved in business and in social life-i. e., theaters, sport events, concerts, parties, traveling-with or without their husbands. They took part in a whole range of athletics, and even bore arms and went into battle: “A still more marked sign of the advanced emancipation is the conquest of the world of professions by the women of the empire.”¹⁰⁹

In family affairs one would have to speak of “a veritable equality of the sexes in daily life.”¹¹⁰ The woman’s consent was necessary for marriage;¹¹¹ “the woman had no obligation to obey; the husband had no right to correct her.... legally the husband had no right of power over his wife ... from the point of view of money, the regime was one of equality and of separation.”¹¹² “The equality of the spouses was in effect total, whether concerning the full liberty of divorce in classical law, the limiting causes of that liberty in the late empire, or the sanctions of an unjustified divorce.”¹¹³

Republican Rome, acting originally under the influence of Etruscan culture, took up the impulse of women’s liberation from Hellenism and carried it forward to where the empire also made it its own and continued to promote it ever further throughout the first several centuries of the Common Era.

In sum: The status of women in the ancient world of the fertile crescent after the early Sumerian period was quite uniformly low except in Egypt, where it was early and often quite high. In the classical Greco-Roman world the condition of women was varied, but often quite restricted, with the clear exception of Etruscan culture. It nevertheless improved particularly during the Hellenistic period, so vigorously and continually that one must speak of a women’s liberation movement which had a massive and manifold liberating impact on the lot of women--not everywhere and in every class and at every period equally effective, of course. This improving impulse was picked up and carried forward by Rome. In fact, I believe we can accept as a general rule the statement of Oepke ¹¹⁴ that “the general rule in this matter is that the further west we go the greater is the freedom of woman. In detail., however, there are the greatest possible variations,” and add to it that in general there is also a progression in the freedom for women according to time as well. Thus, as the women of Rome tended to be freer than those of Greece, who were more liberated than women of the oriental world, so also the women of the time of the Roman empire had greater freedom than those of the time of the Roman republic, and their sisters in the Hellenistic world and period were less restricted than those of Greece at the time of the Athenian empire. Due account must be taken, of course, of the unsympathetic vagaries of all human history, and the fact that in so many ways the liberation of women was long since preceded in ancient Sumer, in Egypt, and later also in Etruria.

It is in this context and under this surrounding and pervading influence of the Greco-Roman (Egyptian) world that Judaism developed.

3. ANCIENT HEBREW BACKGROUND

Although it would be very helpful to a study of the status of women in formative Judaism to first do a thorough study of the status of women in pre-exilic Hebrew society, it is, fortunately, not essential. Nevertheless, it is very important to highlight at least one significant fact from that earlier period that will shed a good deal of light on the status of women in the post-exilic, formative period of Judaism: namely, that there are in the Bible two traditions about women.¹¹⁵

These two traditions about women depict her first-i. e., before the Fall-as the equal of man, if indeed not the perfection of humanity, and secondly-after the Fall-as subject to man, under the curse. This bifurcation is clearly seen in the Yahwist story of creation in Genesis 2, which is the older scriptural tradition. Contrary to much later, and often superficial., interpretation of this story, a careful analysis reveals that the Yahwist writer did not think of woman as lesser because she was created after Adam. Quite the contrary. The pertinent passage reads:

Yahweh God said, ‘It is not good that the man [ha adam, “the earthling,” from adam, “earth”] should be alone. I will make him a helpmate.’ So from the soil [adam] Yahweh God fashioned all the wild beasts and all the birds of heaven. These he brought to the man to see what he would call them; each one was to bear the name the man would give it. The man gave names to all the cattle, all the birds of heaven and all the wild beasts. But no helpmate suitable for man was found for him. So Yahweh God made the man fall into a deep sleep. And while he slept, he took one of his ribs and enclosed it in flesh. Yahweh God built the rib he had taken from the man into a woman, and brought her to the man. The man exclaimed: ‘This at last is bone from my bones, and flesh from my flesh! This is to be called woman, for this was taken from man.’ This is why a man leaves his father and mother and joins himself to his wife, and they become one body. Now both of them were naked, the man and his wife, but they felt no shame in front of each other. (Genesis 2: 18-25)

Here, first of all, the creation of woman was set in contrast to that of the animals, which preceded. The latter were to have been understood by, and placed under, the authority of the man--they were not to have been worshipped, even symbolically, as they were in Canaanite and Egyptian cults. But the main point of the text was man’s relationship to woman. Clearly woman’s creation was also essentially related to man, since his solitude was the occasion for her creation. But was she to be seen as simply an afterthought, a companion slightly higher than the animals? Such an understanding would hardly square with the tone of the story wherein Yahweh was depicted as knowing well what he was doing and as having done everything purposefully. Yahweh was not a hesitant potter who tried one thing after another in hopes of final success; rather, he was the Almighty, whose actions carried lessons of major importance. Rather than seeing woman’s creation as the lowest in a series of creation attempts that started on a triumphant note with the forming of Adam and proceeded on a descending scale to that of Eden, plants, rivers, animals, and, finally, woman, we should view it as a creation that evolved from Adam to woman, with the intermediate creations serving to establish the stage for the higher creation that was attained with the modeling of woman.¹¹⁶

George Tavard spells out this understanding of the Yahwist’s description of the prelapsarian state of woman as humanity’s (i. e., adam, man in the generic sense) perfection: as far as humankind as a whole is concerned, there is only one creation, that of adam. The next step is not a second process of creation, but rather a step within the total process., a further development of what began with the fashioning of Adam. We should therefore understand woman not as an addition to the humankind that already was in the person of Adam; rather, Adam himself (in that part of him which was his rib) is built up into woman. Adam becomes a person, aware of himself, reaching consciousness as humankind with the disclosure of woman. For woman also is humankind. She is not other than adam; but she is adam as bringing to perfection what had first been imperfect. She is humankind as fully aware of its status, as the goal and perfection of man. Thus, woman is not made to be Adam’s helpmate just because he is lonely; she is created as the perfecting element, to the revelation of which he aspired when he refused companionship with the animal world. In one way, Ishah was made for mankind., as she was to bring it perfection, to be its perfection. In another, mankind was made for Ishah, the less perfect, the uncompleted, the undifferentiated being preparatory of the more perfect, the fullness, the being-in- relation. In the oneness of man and woman, it is woman who brings perfection.¹¹⁷

Thus in Genesis 2 the Yahwist pictured the state of woman as it was in the beginning, before the Fall. But he knew from experience that that was not the state of woman in contemporary society. Present reality was the opposite of that in Eden. The curse of woman evoked a reversal of the order of the universe attained in Eden. While woman in innocence was creation’s acme, woman in experience, following her initiation to sexuality, would be dominated by her sexual “desire for her husband,” indeed, by her husband himself, and by pregnancy’s pains. “The higher aspect of mankind becomes enslaved, and the ruder aspect, the man, takes over leadership.”¹¹⁸

Thus, seen in the light of the earlier analysis of the events in the Garden, this story of the curse provides the key to the entire meaning of the Yahwist tradition about the origins of humanity. The author, of course, belonged to postl-apsarian history, to the order of the curse. Yet he was convinced that it was not always thus. And the poet reconstructed a pre-lapsarian state which was the exact reversal of everyday life as he experienced it. When throughout centuries the Hebrews heard these stories and later read them, it was recalled to them that they were experiencing the ambiguity of living East of Eden, while they yet longed to return to Paradise. They were thus fed by two conflicting traditions, the post-lapsarian, which governed their daily lives and the structure of society, and the dream of the pre-lapsarian, which they hoped to return to at the end of their cycle in life--eventually to be called the messianic era.

Tavard summarizes this explanation when he says that we are thereby invited to read the whole Hebrew biblical tradition in this light: “There were two traditions about woman. The one corresponded to the order of society, in which woman, though protected by many laws, was inferior to man. The other echoed the legends of the origins as recorded in the Yahwist text: originally, woman was the higher and better part of mankind.”¹¹⁹

These two traditions do indeed continue to run from Hebrew society to beyond the Exile into inchoative and maturely formed Judaism (and into Christianity as well), but, as the subsequent study will clearly show., the pre-lapsarian tradition will tend to fade, be distorted, and even be suppressed at times. But it recurs, as, for example., with the prophets, who see Israel as the espoused of the Lord; with the wisdom literature where Wisdom is pictured as the primordial woman antecedent to the creation of the world; with some poetry, like the Song of Songs, where the love depicted is humanist and egalitarian (this erotic humanism was later rejected by Ben Sira, e.g., 9: 8), and even when it was interpreted, beginning with Rabbi Akiba, first century C. E allegorically, whereby the union of love between man and woman became a symbol of the relationship between God and his bride Israel; indeed, with the understanding of Israel as humanity, humanity as loved by God., for here humanity itself is feminine vis-a-vis God. It continues to recur throughout later Jewish history, as with the medieval Kabbalah, where the feminine is projected into the divinity. But most important, this pre-lapsarian tradition of woman as man’s equal, indeed, his completion, is there at the source, waiting to renew the tradition.

CHAPTER II

ATTITUDE TOWARD WOMEN IN WISDOM

AND PSEUDEPIGRAPHICAL LITERATURE

1. WISDOM LITERATURE

Most of the Wisdom literature was written after the return of the Jewish people from the exile (587-537 B. C. E.); a small portion of it--the central section of the Book of Proverbs, e.g.--was pre-exilic. In the Wisdom literature we find the two traditions about women reflected. First, it must be noted that these books, which include some most disparaging remarks about women, also project the feminine into a personification of divine Wisdom. In the Book of Proverbs, Wisdom is described as the highest and first creature of God, identical with the Law, and this Wisdom (Hokmah)is a woman. In Ben Sira, Wisdom, Sophia, is also a feminine creature, though an eternal one, that is, identified as the spirit of the Lord and the glory of Yahweh. In the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon the personification of the feminine Sophia attains its acme; she is no longer a creature, but an eternal emanation from God: “She is a breath of the Power of God, pure emanation of the Glory of the Almighty” (7:25). Wisdom takes part in all the powers of God. She is divine, yet not God, who, as in all biblical texts, remains the Unknowable One. Wisdom is what humans can know of God’s glory, that of God which can be communicated to humans. Said differently, Wisdom is the “good and evil” which the Ishah of Genesis 2 desired to know but never learned. It is the image of Ishah as transformed by the true knowledge of benediction and malediction, the divine antitype of Ishah. “It shows what Ishah would have been had she waited for God’s self-unveiling instead of attempting to grasp the secrets of God by herself.”¹

It should also be noted that although it is doubtless accurate to see the persistence of the prelapsarian, more positive tradition about woman in this personification of Divine Wisdom as the feminine Hokmah or Sophia, such a projection can also often become a device to further shunt a suppressed individual or group out of the path of power; it can serve as a sop of tokenism, a safety valve which drains off potential rebellion. Placing someone, or some group, on a pedestal clearly takes that person or group out of the real order of affairs where decisions are made; it is like “kicking someone upstairs” to get her out of the way. Thus, even the persistence of the positive tradition about woman is ambiguous, though, to be sure, its positive power does persist.

Almost parenthetically, it would also be proper at this point to discuss in a little detail the image of woman and of female-male relations projected in the Song of Songs, since it is classified with the wisdom books in the Septuagint and the Vulgate., though not in the Massoretic Hebrew Bible.

The book as we have it probably comes from the third century B. C. E., though much of the material is