Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books and the New Testament
608
Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books and the New Testament
608eBook
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Overview
In recent decades, many biblical scholars have studied the holy text with a new focus on gender. Women in Scripture is a groundbreaking work that provides Jews, Christians, or anyone fascinated by a body of literature that has exerted a singular influence on Western civilization a thorough look at every woman and group of women mentioned in the Bible, whether named or unnamed, well known or heretofore not known at all.
They are remarkably varied—from prophets to prostitutes, military heroines to musicians, deacons to dancers, widows to wet nurses, rulers to slaves. There are familiar faces, such as Eve, Judith, and Mary, seen anew with the full benefit of the most up-to-date results of biblical scholarship. But the most innovative aspect of this book is the section devoted to the many females who in the scriptures do not even have names.
Combining rigorous research with engaging prose, these articles on women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, and the New Testament will inform, delight, and challenge readers interested in the Bible, scholars and laypeople alike. Together, these collected histories create a volume that takes the study of women in the Bible to a new level.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780547345581 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 608 |
| Sales rank: | 604,217 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE HEBREW BIBLE
* * *
Carol Meyers
The first, largest, and oldest part of the combined Jewish and Christian Scripture is the Hebrew Bible, known in Christian tradition as the Old Testament. Because it is so much a part of the religious and cultural life of the contemporary world, its antiquity and complexity are not often recognized by Bible readers. Biblically based liturgy and theology and also biblical allusions in Western culture are so familiar that the long passage of biblical texts from their often unrecoverable origin to their role as sacred Scripture is obscured. It is beyond the scope of this work for the individual entries to indicate the place of various passages or persons within the overall shape and story of the Hebrew Bible. The following description is thus meant to provide rudimentary information about the organization, age, contents, and authorship of the Hebrew Bible.
In its original languages (Hebrew and Aramaic) and in modern Jewish translations, the Hebrew Bible is an anthology of twenty-four books. Those books are organized into three major divisions, which probably reflect the order in which they became selected and collected. That process, whereby certain writings became important in the community and were considered sacred and authoritative, is called canonization. The word canon is derived from a Greek word that goes back to the Hebrew word qaneh and eventually to a Sumerian word denoting a reed that served as a measuring rod. The concept of physical measurement came by extension to mean a standard by which something is evaluated. Biblical literature was considered canonical when it "measured up" to some standards, which cannot be clearly recovered, about what was authentic revelation and should be included in a collection of holy texts.
The formation of the canon of the Hebrew Bible represents an ongoing process rather than a single decree by an individual leader or a religious council. The status of certain sacred works was apparently discussed from about 90 to 100 C.E. by a group of rabbinic sages meeting at a center of ancient Jewish learning called Jamnia, near the Mediterranean coast west of Jerusalem. Most scholars reject the notion that the Jamnian sages made any official decisions about the canonical whole. Rather, they apparently were concerned with a group of texts, or biblical "books," that were already widely accepted as sacred. They may have consolidated some texts and debated the sanctity of others; but they were working with a set of works that was already close to its final canonical form. Indeed, long before Jamnia, several late Hebrew Bible passages refer to parts of the three major sections, to be described next, of the Hebrew Bible. Ezra 3:2 (late fifth or early fourth century B.C.E.) refers to the "torah [NRSV, law] of Moses"; Dan 9:2 (second century B.C.E.) alludes to "books" that seem to be a set of biblical prophets. Somewhat later, Luke 24:44 (late first century C.E.) mentions the "teaching [NRSV, law] of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms." It seems safe to say that twenty-two of the books of the Jewish canon had been accepted as sacred by the end of the first century C.E. (some of them having achieved that status many centuries earlier) and that the full Jewish canon of twenty-four books was fixed somewhat later, perhaps not until the end of the next century.
The first of the major divisions of the Hebrew Bible is the Pentateuch or Torah (from Hebrew torn), composed of the first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy). This group of books is sometimes called the Five Books of Moses because of the traditional ascription, as in the Ezra and Luke passages just mentioned, of these works to Moses, who was considered the transmitter of God's teachings to Israel. The designation Torah for the Pentateuch — and sometimes for the entirety of Jewish Scripture — is often misunderstood. The word means "teaching" or "instruction," and by extension in its canonical setting, "revelation." A more narrow meaning, "law," is sometimes used in translations (as in the NRSV of the Ezra and Luke passages quoted earlier) and gives the erroneous impression that the Pentateuch and even the legal materials it contains are primarily laws when in fact they are conceptually teachings, some of which are expressed in the form of prescriptive regulations.
The material contained in the Pentateuch represents a wide chronological range. No one knows how old the earliest passages are or how ancient are the events they purport to describe. As our discussion of critical biblical scholarship indicates, it is now deemed unlikely that the ancestral narratives of Genesis, believed for a long time to reflect Semitic migrations of the early to middle second millennium B.C.E., are authentic historical documents. Even if they do contain vestiges of social customs of life in the second millennium B.C.E. or references to sites occupied in that epoch, the form in which they have come to us bears signs of the writing style and spelling of the tenth century B.C.E. or later. Similarly, the story of the exodus and the wanderings in the wilderness, which may reflect thirteenth-century B.C.E. movements of peoples out of Egypt, is the product of much later literary activity. Embedded in those narratives of Israelite beginnings, however, are several archaic poems, such as the so-called Song of the Sea and the Song of Miriam in Exodus 15, which many scholars date to the period of earliest Israel (thirteenth–twelfth centuries B.C.E.).
The legal and cultic materials that comprise the rest of the Pentateuch contain sections of various ages and probably reached their final form at some point in the mid–first millennium B.C.E. Scholars vary widely in assigning dates to the completion of the Pentateuch, offering possibilities from the sixth to the fourth centuries B.C.E. However, because Ezra apparently considered the "torah [NRSV, law] of Moses" an authoritative document and is said to have read it out loud to an assembly of all the people (see Neh 8:1–3) by the late fourth century B.C.E., most scholars accept that the Pentateuch had achieved something close to its final form by that time, if not earlier.
The second and largest division of the Hebrew Bible is known as the Prophets (Nevi'im in Hebrew). That designation is somewhat misleading in that the Prophets consists of two major sections, the Former Prophets and the Latter Prophets, the first of these being a collection of "historical" rather than prophetic books. The Former Prophets consists of four books — Joshua, Judges, 1–2 Samuel, and 1–2 Kings — which relate the tribal beginnings of Israel in the "promised land" and its subsequent existence as one and then two monarchic states. The ancient designation of the Joshua–Kings set as prophetic probably reflects the fact that these books have what might be termed a prophetic worldview in which, simply stated, God blesses those who obey the divine word and punishes those who are disobedient. It may also stem from the way in which a series of early prophets, such as Samuel, Nathan, Elijah, and Elisha, figure in the narratives, particularly in the books of Samuel and Kings. In any case, these works are quite different from the Latter Prophets, which consists of the books of the three Major (that is, large) Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel) and a fourth book, itself a collection: the twelve Minor (that is, small, or short) Prophets, sometimes called the Book of the Twelve.
The historical material that begins in Joshua and ends in Kings is a continuation of the story of the people Israel that begins in the Book of Exodus. Although not long ago critical biblical scholarship had understood the pre-Israelite narratives of the ancestors to be highly legendary, it had viewed the biblical books that comprise the Former Prophets as a collection of historical records, albeit ones with impressive folkloristic and literary embellishments. The biblical books that read as history were taken to be just that.
Contemporary biblical scholarship has revised this notion. Because of disparities between the past "recorded" in the Bible and the past recovered by archaeological work that is far more sophisticated and accurate than the prove-the-Bible type of projects carried out earlier in this century, most biblical scholars now recognize that these narratives about Israel, from its twelfth-century B.C.E. beginnings in the land until its defeat by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E. and the subsequent exile of its leadership and many of its people, were not written as a historical record by eyewitness observers of a series of Iron Age events. Rather, much of the Former Prophets, especially those portions dealing with the premonarchic and early monarchic period — the united monarchy of Saul, David, and Solomon (c. 1025–928 B.C.E.) — was probably composed to express emotions as well as ideas and values, using the vehicles of story and of poetry. The biblical materials mix creative imagination, historical memory, and probably some information from written sources; they were brought together for ideological purposes, decades if not centuries after the events they purport to describe. Even the materials about the later monarchic states, the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah (formed after the death of Solomon and the breakup of the united monarchy), although probably drawn from archival records, are selected and framed by editors to express their views about past events.
The process that cast the Former Prophets in its preserved form may have been initiated as early as the beginning of the monarchy in the late eleventh–early tenth century B.C.E. However, many scholars believe that a major impetus for collecting the historical narratives was the late-seventh- century B.C.E. nationalist reform of King Josiah, as reported in 2 Kings 22–23. A subsequent updating, to account for the latest event mentioned in 2 Kings (the release of the exiled King Jehoiachin from Babylonian prison c. 562 B.C.E.; see 2 Kgs 25:27), would then have occurred during the exile. These two spurts of compilation and editing together produced the four books of the Former Prophets, a work that many scholars link with the Book of Deuteronomy, calling the resulting five books the Deuteronomic History because the ideology of the Former Prophets seems to be based on that of Deuteronomy.
The origin and dates of the Latter Prophets have been somewhat easier for scholars to identify. In some cases, the prophetic books themselves are replete with chronological data. The superscriptions of many of them link the ensuing prophecies to the reigns of certain kings, whose regnal years have been established quite reliably. For example, the first book of the Major Prophets, Isaiah, opens (1:1) by declaring that Isaiah's visions are from the epoch of four specific kings of Judah, whose reigns all date to the eighth century B.C.E.; and two of the Minor Prophets, Hosea and Amos, can similarly be dated to that century. These three prophetic books mark the beginning of what is known as the era of "classical prophets"— those who produced books that are called by their names and are included in the canon of the Hebrew Bible.
Although there are fifteen canonical prophets (three major and twelve minor), at least some of these prophetic works, as pointed out earlier, represent the work of more than one prophetic hand. References to several eighth-century B.C.E. kings at the beginning of Isaiah would seem to make that book an eighth-century work. Yet the oracles of comfort and restoration beginning in Isaiah 40, along with specific references to Cyrus, the late-sixth-century B.C.E. Persian emperor (Isa 44:28; 45:1), make it certain that parts of Isaiah, probably chaps. 40–55, come from an unnamed sixth-century prophet known by scholars as Second Isaiah; and the rest of the book (chaps. 56–65, called Third Isaiah) was probably authored by yet another anonymous prophet or prophets. The Book of Jeremiah, although quite certainly spanning the reigns of the last five kings of Judah — the prophecies begin in 627 B.C.E. and end a few years after the 586 B.C.E. conquest of Jerusalem — contains more than the oracles of Jeremiah. Some of the prophetic sections may be the work of one or more of Jeremiah's disciples, and certainly the prose narratives that contain biographical data about Jeremiah were penned by someone other than the prophet — probably his scribe, a man named Baruch (see Jer 36:4).
The last of the canonical prophets are associated with the restoration, in the late sixth century B.C.E., of a political community that approximated the preexilic kingdom of Judah. The Babylonians had not only conquered Judah and deported its rulers and leading citizenry, but also demolished its chief national symbol, the temple in Jerusalem. When the Persians replaced the Babylonians as imperial rulers of the east Mediterranean lands, their policies of dominion meant limited self-rule for subject territories, including that of the Judeans, which now became a province called Yehud. Granted considerable local autonomy, the people of Yehud rebuilt their temple with the encouragement of the postexilic prophet Haggai and his contemporary Zechariah (whose oracles appear in Zechariah 1–8; the rest of the Book of Zechariah contains the words of one or more slightly later prophetic figures). Finally, the last postexilic prophetic work is the Book of Malachi. This book has no direct chronological information, but most scholars place it in the mid–fifth century B.C.E. Like Haggai and much of Zechariah, Malachi is a prose work, differing from the soaring oracular poetry of the preexilic and exilic prophets. The emotional force of poetic prophecy was apparently an important ingredient of prophetic communication to the ancient Israelites and their leaders; and the shift to prose in the latest biblical prophetic works, which some scholars call proto-rabbinic, indicates a transition to other forms of literature that would emerge in nascent Judaism.
The third division of the Hebrew Bible, called the Writings (Ketuvim in Hebrew) or Hagiographa (Holy Writings), contains the remaining books of Jewish Scripture and was the last to assume its canonical shape. Its component books are largely a product of the postexilic and Hellenistic periods (late sixth to second centuries B.C.E.). Some of the Writings, however, such as the Book of Psalms, contain materials that are similar to second-millennium B.C.E. Canaanite poetry and thus may be as old as other early parts of the Hebrew Bible. Similarly, some parts of Proverbs show a clear dependence on Egyptian wisdom literature of the early first millennium B.C.E.
The books that comprise the Writings are grouped in several miscellaneous collections. Five of the short books (Ruth, Esther, Song of Solomon, Lamentations, and Ecclesiastes) are known as the five megillot (scrolls), or festival scrolls, because they are read aloud as part of Jewish liturgy for certain holy days. Two other of the Writings are themselves compilations: Psalms and Proverbs. Two more, Job and Daniel, are in a class by themselves. Finally, the Writings division — and thus the entire Hebrew Bible — ends with two historical books that were perhaps originally one continuous work: Ezra-Nehemiah, the account of the postexilic organization of the province of Yehud under the leadership of two returning exiles whose names the book bears, and 1–2 Chronicles, which recapitulates the historical narrative of parts of Samuel and Kings but with special attention to priestly matters and the reign of King David. The Hebrew Bible thus ends with a quotation from the Persian ruler Cyrus, urging the rebuilding of the temple and the return of the people to their land. This final message of renewal was pointedly appropriate to the period in which the canon was nearing completion — immediately following the destruction of the second temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. and the concomitant departure of many Jews from Jerusalem.
Some of the books that form the Writings section of the Hebrew Bible were not recognized as canon-worthy by at least some groups of first-century Jews. The Book of Esther, for example, was a contested part of the Writings because it never once mentions God, nor does it refer to basic biblical concepts such as covenant and temple. Similarly, the Song of Solomon does not seem to contribute to Jewish piety; and its explicit sexual language may have been troublesome to some. Yet there was apparently enough popular support for these books to ensure their inclusion in the canon. But other late-first- millennium Jewish writings, some of which are found in the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, were ultimately excluded from the Jewish canon for reasons that can no longer be determined.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Contributors,
PREFACE,
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE BIBLE,
Critical Biblical Scholarship by Carol Meyers,
The Hebrew Bible by Carol Meyers,
The Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books by Toni Craven,
The New Testament by Ross S. Kraemer,
FEMINIST BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP by Alice Ogden Bellis,
NAMES AND NAMING IN THE BIBLICAL WORLD by Karla G. Bohmbach,
PART I NAMED WOMEN,
PART II UNNAMED WOMEN,
The Hebrew Bible,
The Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books,
The New Testament,
PART III FEMALE DEITIES AND PERSONIFICATIONS,
Additional Ancient Sources,
Abbreviations,
Bibliography,
Acknowledgments,
