Rejecting Patriarchy

Rejecting “Patriarchy” Reflections on Feminism, Biblical Scholarship, and Social Perspective* SHAWNA DOLANSKY I was in the middle of conducting a close reading of Genesis 16 in my introductory Hebrew Bible class when I heard a loud whisper and the sound of a book slamming shut from somewhere near the back of the room. I looked up from my Bible and made eye contact with a slightly flustered and embarrassed student. I raised an eyebrow at her as heads turned and necks craned to see what the disruption was about. Red-faced, she sputtered “I’m sorry, I just never knew how immoral the Bible was!” I laughed reflexively and pointed out the irony of her statement, but then realized that a sober teaching moment had presented itself in Sarah’s presentation of Hagar to Abraham as sexual partner and potential surrogate mother. I closed my Bible and started a class discussion about morality — what it was, and where it came from — and then guided them toward the concept of cultural relativism. We talked about polygamy, and the kinds of sexual values that might prevail in a culture that prized patrilineage for purposes of maintaining both birthrights and covenantal blessings. We talked about the worldview of the biblical texts that we had examined thus far, and juxtaposed it with the worldviews of the Bible’s modern readerships. We also contrasted the oral nature of individual tales like Genesis 16, with the way in which we were reading the text in a physical book that was understood to be a sacred text about the origins of God’s people. Although the term “patriarchy” was bandied about by students in the context of our discussion, we concluded that if we wanted to understand the values and mores of the society that produced the text, we would have to refrain from judging them based on twenty-first-century Western standards of behavior. To arrive at this conclusion, we explored the concept of patriarchy in some depth; what it meant, and whether or not it was an appropriate term to use to describe the world portrayed in Genesis. Carol Meyers has been calling for biblical scholars to discontinue using the term “patriarchy” to describe biblical Israel for more than 30 years.1 Meyers’ argument has been accepted by some scholars, but ignored or vociferously rejected by others. Most vocal among those who refuse to reject the use of the term “patriarchy” for ancient Israel have been feminist biblical scholars. *An earlier version of this essay was presented as “Rejecting Patriarchy: On Clarifying the Objectives of Feminist Biblical Scholarship” at the Society of Biblical Literature 2014 Annual Meeting in Biblical Hermeneutics and Women in the Biblical World joint session discussing Carol Meyers’ call for the rejection of the term “patriarchy” in biblical scholarship. I am grateful to Susan Ackerman and Adele Reinhartz for commenting on pre-presentation drafts, and to the audience at the Annual Meeting for their feedback and encouragement. A separate version of this paper, “What is Gendered Historiography and How Do You Do It?,” was immeasurably enriched by co-authorship with Sarah Shectman, whose insights have also been brought to bear on the present work (see further n. 8, below). 1 The first well-known publication in which Meyers advances this argument is Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), but see earlier “Procreation, Production, and Protection: Male–Female Balance in Early Israel,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion (1983): 489–514, and also “Gender Roles and Genesis 3:16 Revisited,” in The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman on his Sixtieth Birthday, ed. C. Meyers and M. P. O’Connor (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1983), 118–41. Most recently, see Meyers’ Rediscovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 134 SCRIBES AND SCRIBALISM The following morning, I met my upper-level seminar entitled “Theory and Method in the Study of Religion.” That day, our topic was feminist theory; a concept that, like the Bible (or the term “patriarchy” for that matter), tends to be one that everyone thinks they understand because they’ve seen it depicted often enough in popular culture. Much of our discussion ended up focusing on distinguishing between feminist activism and feminist causes, on the one hand, and feminist analysis and theories on the other. One of the students asked me if I considered myself a feminist biblical scholar. My answer, after a pause, was a qualified “yes” — qualified, because I disagree with fundamental positions held and advocated by most biblical scholars who label themselves feminist, who focus on literary criticism and/or seek theological meanings from the text to make a case for female empowerment. As a historian, I understand that there is already a great divide between what I do and what many post-modern literary critical readings of biblical literature posit is possible. Literary criticism often asserts that authorial intention and even context cannot be adequately reconstructed, denying the ability of a modern reader to know what an author was thinking when that author wrote. Literary critical methods are often in fact explicitly a-historical. At the same time, however, literary criticism does not deny history or the possibility of history, or even the importance of historical context in at least looking at the authors’ texts; the problem arises only in terms of reading meaning. For example, studies of Shakespeare can look at reconstructing who he was and what we can know of his context and/or they can look at the history of the ways in which Shakespearean plays have been read, acted, and appropriated in later contexts. These are acknowledged as related but distinct enterprises. Theoretically as well, the history of biblical interpretation is a separate undertaking in scholarship than reconstructing the origins of the Bible. Both are historical projects, and both seek to understand text in relation to context. But since the Bible is most often read in society as though it were speaking to us today, modern readings interested in “the meaning of the text” tend to collapse incredibly diverse layers of meaning built up over thousands of years into a single framework of interpretation that itself is a-historical — or as theologians might prefer, “timeless” and “eternal” — in its intended meaning. Unlike Shakespeare, reading the Bible for meaning has, in all places and times, been ultimately a reader-centred enterprise. Feminist theology, another sub-discipline of feminist biblical scholarship, grapples with the problem of asserting equal rights for women in the context of a received Jewish and Christian biblical tradition that they perceive as irreparably sexist and patriarchal. This has meant that feminist theologians have had either to leave their traditions in search of entirely new spiritualities that are more empowering to them as women,2 or to attempt to reform their traditions from within. This has often involved radical revision and reinterpretation of those traditions, starting with recovering what they see as the hidden power and agency of women in biblical texts.3 Feminist literary critics, on the other hand, have often devoted enormous effort to exposing the inherent “patriarchy,” 2 See, e.g.: Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow, eds., Womanspirit Rising (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979); Naomi R. Goldenberg, Changing of the Gods (Boston: Beacon, 1979); Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1973); and Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); for a comprehensive overview see R. Ruether, Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History (Berkelely: University of California Press, 2006). For a useful discussion of the origins of a split between “Reformers” and “Revolutionaries,” see M. Weaver, “Who Is the Goddess and Where Does She Get Us?” Journal of Feminist Studies 5 (1989): 49–64. 3 The 1970s saw a revolution in feminist biblical interpretation focused on reclaiming the biblical text for women, starting with Phyllis Trible’s 1972 article “Eve and Adam: Genesis 2–3 Reread,” ANQ 13 (1972): 251–58, and her 1973 follow-up, “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation,” JAAR 41 (1973): 30–48. Trible further developed her arguments in her 1978 book, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress), which expanded on the idea of the equality of the sexes in the Bible as a reflection of a biblical portrait of God with both male and female qualities. Feminist theology continues to plumb the depths of potential meanings for women within both testaments in the works of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Carole Fontaine, Athalya Brenner, and many others. REJECTING “PATRIARCHY” 135 “androcentrism,” and “misogyny” of the biblical authors’ worldviews, arguing that the Hebrew Bible’s enduring cultural and religious legacy in the modern West undermines feminist activist efforts toward social equality.4 Although their goals are different (rejection vs. redemption), both stem from the dual recognition of androcentric biases in the Bible on the one hand, and the predominance of biblical symbolism and meaning in their own present world, interpreted as “patriarchy,” on the other. Also common to both perspectives is their underlying method: all of these approaches employ narrative criticism to seek out the Bible’s message for and about women. Most interestingly, those feminists who seek to reject the Bible define themselves over and against confessional attempts to redeem the biblical text for use by women, seeing themselves rather as “biblical scholars.” However, even as they reject feminist theology for its goals, they also reject the historical-critical methods of traditional non-theological biblical inquiry as the tools of “malestream” scholarship that is equally responsible for suppressing women-centered readings. Thus they have appropriated for themselves the title of feminist biblical scholars, simultaneously eschewing traditional biblical scholarship and feminist theology. These feminist literary critics demonstrate the ways in which the overall ideology of the text is patriarchally determined, and thus even when women are depicted as exercising power, this is only in support of a patriarchal agenda.5 In both confessional and non-confessional literary analyses, however, present ways of reading the text, and present frameworks for understand gender and power structures and constructions — such as the term “patriarchy” — are imposed on the Bible. Such presentist ideologies are attributed to the scribes who stood behind the Bible’s production and transmission, portraying them as oppressors of women and thereby painting the original context of the Bible’s authorship as a patriarchal one that simultaneously produces and mirrors our own worldview. But scribal androcentrism is not patriarchy, and the milieu of biblical production in Iron Age Israel does not socially, culturally, or politically resemble the West in the twenty-first century. So, in my “Theory and Method” class, we also talked about cultural relativism, patriarchy, and biblical scholarship, and I came to the conclusion that feminist theorists, rather than thinking about the Bible as patriarchal, are in fact uniquely positioned to argue with Meyers that the term “patriarchy” has no place in historical-critical scholarship of the Hebrew Bible. Before delving into the reasons why I think feminists in particular should take up Meyers’ call to reject the use of the term “patriarchy” for ancient Israel, I want to offer some definitions. “Patriarchy” denotes the social-science concept of systemic male dominance. It assumes a strictly hierarchical dichotomy between male and female at every level of society, and the concomitant limitation on female power, autonomy, and agency. It was a term coined in a nineteenth-century post-industrialist capitalist economic and political system to describe a world run by men, in which women’s social, political, and economic power are all severely circumscribed; a world in which men are considered autonomous agents, and women are not. “Androcentrism,” on the other hand, is a 4 There are many examples of this type of feminist criticism. Mieke Bal is explicitly concerned with a reader-centered approach to the text and what she terms the “cultural function” of the Hebrew Bible in its constructions of gender. Her work has been extremely influential on other feminist biblical critics, such as J. Cheryl Exum, Esther Fuchs, and Susanne Scholz. It is not within the purview of the present study to review the history of feminist biblical scholarship, including for example the more literarily and historically inclined contributions of Phyllis Bird, Susan Niditch, and others: for an excellent comprehensive overview of the history of feminist biblical scholarship, see chapter 1 of Sarah Shectman’s Women in the Pentateuch: A Feminist and Source-Critical Analysis (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2009), and Susan Ackerman’s “Digging up Deborah: Recent Hebrew Bible Scholarship on Gender and the Contribution of Archaeology,” Near Eastern Archaeology 66, no. 4 (2003): 172–84. 5 See, e.g., Exum’s “Second Thoughts about Secondary Characters: Women in Exodus 1.8–2.10,” in Feminist Companion to Exodus to Deuteronomy, ed. Athalya Brenner (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2000), 75–87. 136 SCRIBES AND SCRIBALISM term that indicates a perspective focused on men — male rights, male privilege, male discourse, and male interests. I would propose that the portrait of ancient Israel in the biblical texts is of a society that is androcentric. This makes sense from a historical perspective if we think about who composed and preserved these texts. Recent studies of scribal culture acknowledge the oral pre-history of biblical texts, preserved as cultural, social, and ethnic memories by groups over time, but emphasize that the textuality of the Hebrew Bible derives from official, elite settings like Temple and palace.6 In particular, priests tend to be credited with the writing down of traditions, as well as with their preservation and dissemination. In both pre- and post-exilic Israel, priests were male. Thus, an androcentric perspective pervading the biblical corpus is not unexpected.7 However, while “androcentric” is appropriate here, the radical differences between ancient and modern political, economic, and social systems precludes a legitimate application of the term “patriarchy” to biblical literature and the society that produced it. Further, it seems to me that continuing to use the term “patriarchy” in descriptions of ancient Israel undermines and obscures historical — and feminist — theory and method. My argument draws on the social-scientific principles of historical analysis and investigation on the one hand, and on feminist theory and method on the other. I understand feminist theory and method to be rooted in reflexive inquiry, acknowledging a variety of answers and aimed at bringing out intersectionalities, nuances, and complexities of human history, sociology, religion, and culture. As a feminist historian,8 when interpreting ancient texts and artifacts I prefer to raise possibilities and make arguments from the evidence at hand, building on knowledge and expanding scholarly lenses rather than providing answers or imposing conclusions based on my own presumed scholarly objectivity. Susan Ackerman, one of the leading proponents of feminist historical inquiry, has suggested that the reason why most feminist biblical scholars continue to approach the text from a literary rather than a historical perspective is that it is much more difficult to pursue more historical approaches.9 Ackerman defines historians as those scholars who want to understand more fully the nature of 6 See, e.g., William M. Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Karel van der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 7 Ronald Hendel (“Historical Context,” in The Book of Genesis: Composition, Reception, and Interpretation, ed. Craig A. Evans, Joel N. Lohr, and David L. Petersen [Leiden: Brill, 2012], 51–83) notes that in Deut 32:8 we can catch a glimpse of the nature of the oral tradition that precedes and lives alongside the written: “Remember the days of old, consider the years of antiquity. Ask your father and he will tell you, your elders and they will recount to you.” Hendel remarks that this passage “evokes the family and tribal setting of oral traditions of the collective past. These are narratives handed down through the generations, recounted by fathers and elders, which acculturate young Israelites by initiating them into the ancestral stories. The fathers and elders speak with the authority of tradition, since they are vested with power and are the patriarchal agents for the preservation and flourishing of the lineage. The collective memories of the past are part of the vital ‘social motor’ that sustains and renews the group’s identity and practices. This generational motor ensures the present relevance of the events of the remembered past.” Although not the point Hendel is making here, if we assume with him that Deut 32:8 reflects a reality of male transmission of history, the legacy of the pre-scribal oral tradition is also, unavoidably, an androcentric one. 8 That is: an historian making use of feminist theories and methods to produce a more nuanced “gendered historiography” of ancient Israel. For the exciting possibilities offered by a gendered historiographic approach, see my co-authored article with Sarah Shectman, “What Is Gendered Historiography and How Do You Do It?” JHS 19, no. 4 (2019): 3–18. This is an introduction to a collection of articles we originally convened for a session on Gendered Historiography under the auspices of the Pentateuch Unit at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Society for Biblical Literature. For an important discussion of gender and method in biblical studies, see further Jacqueline Lapsley’s “Introduction: Gender and Method,” in HeBAI 5, no. 2 (2016): 75–77, and, in the same issue, Cynthia Chapman, “Modern Terms and Their Ancient Non-Equivalents: Patrilineality and Gender in the Historical Study of the Bible,” 79–93; as well as the excellent collection of essays that explore gender construction and masculinity in the ancient world in Ilona Zsolnay, ed., Being a Man: Negotiating Ancient Constructs of Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 2016). 9 Susan Ackerman, “Digging up Deborah: Recent Hebrew Bible Scholarship on Gender and the Contribution of Archaeology,” Near Eastern Archaeology 66, no. 4 (2003): 172–84. REJECTING “PATRIARCHY” 137 women’s lives in ancient Israel by studying the Hebrew Bible alongside archaeological, sociological, and ethnographic data; alongside comparative materials (especially comparative materials from elsewhere in the west Semitic world); and alongside other extrabiblical evidence. The difficulty is that none of the texts of our primary written source, the Hebrew Bible, can be said to have been authored by a woman, and neither do any of the extrabiblical texts that we have from ancient Israel show any indication of female authorship. We thus lack the direct witness such texts might provide regarding the nature of ancient Israelite women’s lives and experiences. As has been noted as a central concern of feminist literary critics, the witness of male-authored texts regarding women suffers from the tendency to view women only in terms of their meaning for and significance to men. In addition, the witness regarding women available from ancient Israel’s male-authored texts is flawed because it, almost without exception, reports the perspective of only the elite of the Israelite commonwealth. Almost all of the authors of the Hebrew Bible were members of Israel’s religious institutions (the priests and the prophets) or members of aristocratic scribal groups.10 Extra-biblical inscriptions likewise are concerned with major public institutions of the monarchy and their diplomatic and military relations with neighboring states. As Carol Meyers points out, these written archives cannot be assumed to accurately represent the experiences of ancient Israelite commoners, including the experiences of women commoners, and this even though it was commoners who comprised the vast majority of the ancient Israelite population.11 Meyers’ work seeks to address this problem by viewing the biblical text in the context of the social worlds of ancient Israel as reconstructed through the interpretation of archaeological evidence. When Meyers and Ackerman do this, they use feminist methods to challenge, enrich, and broaden our understanding of the ancients who produced the Bible and their world. In other words: they are engaging in historical-critical study of the Bible using both the traditional tools of such inquiry (source-critical, text-critical, comparative, archaeological, anthropological, and literary analysis), and they are explicitly feminist in both their methodology and the subject of their studies.12 And yet, when a session at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature calls for papers dealing with feminist issues, there seems to be little question that the session will focus on literary issues in an a-historical way, whether in confessional or non/anti-confessional discourse. And in fact, although the literary-critical conclusions will tend to be radically opposed to theological readings of the Bible, their methods and theoretical approaches will likely have much more in common with theological hermeneutics than they will with traditional historical-critical biblical study. The term “feminist biblical scholarship” has largely become synonymous with postmodern literary criticism of the Bible. As a biblical historian who relies on feminist theory and methods, I have personally felt very out of place in such sessions, and very alienated from the literature that pours forth under this general category. 10 It should be noted that such categories as “priest,” “prophet,” and “scribe” were not mutually exclusive. Rather, distinctions among them pertained more to which modality was guiding the function or behavior of a biblical character at a given time. Isaiah, for example, was understood in the texts as a prophet when he delivered oracles, a priest by lineage (and possibly function; cf. Isa 6), and a scribe (cf. 2 Chr 26:22 and perhaps suggested in Isa 37–38). 11 Carol Myers, “Material Remains and Social Relations: Women’s Culture in Agrarian Households of the Iron Age,” in Symbiosis, Symbolism, and the Power of the Past: Canaan, Ancient Israel, and Their Neighbors from the Late Bronze Age through Roman Palaestina, ed. W. G. Dever and S. Gitin (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 426. 12 For discussions of the compatibility of historical-critical and feminist methods of inquiry, see, e.g., Monika Fander, “Historical-Critical Methods,” in Searching the Scriptures: A Feminist Introduction, ed. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, trans. L. M. Maloney, 2 vols. (New York: Crossroad, 1993), 205–24; also Hanna Stenstrom, “Historical-Critical Approaches and the Emancipation of Women: Unfulfilled Promises and Remaining Possibilities,” in Her Master’s Tools? Feminist and Post-Colonial Engagements of Historical-Critical Discourse, ed. C. Vander Stichele and T. Penner (Atlanta: SBL, 2005), 31–45. 138 SCRIBES AND SCRIBALISM The further consequence of this, and a greater concern than my own discomfort, is that mainstream biblical scholarship continues to resist incorporating the insights of feminist biblical scholarship. Whatever the reasons were in the past, historical criticism’s failure as a whole to engage with feminism in the present is largely due to the perception that feminism is synonymous with an a-historical, reader-centered literary criticism which may appear to most historians to have more in common with theological methods and hermeneutics than it does with historical ones. Feminist inquiry has in fact marginalized itself from mainstream inquiry by its explicit rejection of historical criticism, which is seen as an androcentric discipline and its tools those of patriarchy. Scholz believes that historical criticism of the Bible remains separate from feminism because it supports the status quo, keeping the Bible isolated from modern realities and the proliferation of worldviews in contemporary society.13 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has made similar observations about the apparent incompatibility between feminist and historical-critical methods, particularly because feminists tend to dismiss the positivism they see as endemic to historical criticism.14 On the other hand, Monika Fander has argued that historical-critical methods are not only suitable for feminist criticism, but may also be a corrective for some of the problems inherent in feminist analysis; for example, the lack of distinction between older traditions and later redactional elements in terms of understanding the historical development of ideas about women.15 Fander notes, however, that there is still tension between historical-critical study of the Bible and feminism, most notably the suspicion with which proponents of one regard the other, which she asserts is the result of the assumptions that scholars bring to the interpretational endeavor — particularly their stance on the authority of the text. Adele Reinhartz has also noted the tensions between traditional historical-critical scholarship and feminist sensitivity to women’s voices and women’s experiences.16 Alice Keefe, who likewise notes the gap between ideological and social-scientific feminist approaches to the Bible, seeks to bring the two critical approaches into closer dialogue by demonstrating the need to ground ideological criticism in an understanding of the historical context of ancient Israel.17 It seems to me that the way to enact what Reinhartz and Keefe advocate is to do what Ackerman and Meyers are already doing: feminist historical criticism that bases its literary analysis in the historical context of ancient Israel rather than in the political, social, or religious concerns of modern feminist hermeneutics. I propose that a starting point for such dialogue and cooperation is to take up Meyers’ suggestion of rejecting the term “patriarchy” in studies of biblical Israel, and specifically in our thinking about scribes as the mediators of the traditions about Israel preserved in the biblical record. All feminist scholars — historians, and literary analysts alike — agree that the Bible is the result of a society in which male-centered norms are reflected in the text. And yet feminist literary critics often focus narrowly on what they see as “patriarchy” in order to expose and vehemently condemn it — and overlook the fact that there is more than simple male–female hierarchy at work in the text. Scribes were not just males, but elite males, and as such, potentially shared more in common with elite females than with males of lower social statuses. There are larger ideologies and theologies, and much more complex power structures, as well as relational social identities inherent in the text’s 13 Susanne Scholz, “‘Tandoori Reindeer’ and the Limitations of Historical Criticism,” in Vander Stichele and Penner, eds., Her Master’s Tools, 47–69. 14 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “Remembering the Past in Creating the Future: Historical-Critical Scholarship and Feminist Biblical Interpretation,” in Feminist Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship, ed. Adela Yarbro Collins (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985), 43–63. 15 Monika Fander, “Historical-Critical Methods,” in Fiorenza, ed., Searching the Scriptures, 205–21 (212). 16 Adele Reinhartz, “Margins, Methods, and Metaphors: Reflections on A Feminist Companion to the Hebrew Bible,” Prooftexts 20, nos. 1 and 2 (2000): 43–60. 17 Alice Keefe, “Stepping In/Stepping Out: A Conversation between Ideological and Social Scientific Feminist Approaches to the Bible,” Journal of Religion and Society 1 (1999): 1–14. REJECTING “PATRIARCHY” 139 implicit worldview that go far beyond the strict gender dichotomy proposed (or imposed) by the term “patriarchy.” Developing a fuller portrait of how those involve and relate to women would serve not only feminist literary critical ends, but historical ones as well. It would also acknowledge that the Bible, as a literary product, reflects certain ideologies that are essential to understanding the texts themselves, whether one accepts or rejects such ideologies in the present. In order to understand the scribal culture reflected in the text, one needs to be able to reconstruct the society within which the scribes operated when they were transmitting the text, and also be able to do so in terms more familiar to that ancient society than those connoted by the term “patriarchy.” Meyers points out that using the patriarchy paradigm implies a fixed set of relationships, when in reality social arrangements are rarely static and power relations can shift over time. The focus on the subordination of women overlooks the fact that inequalities are a function of class or age as much as, if not more than, of gender. We think of “patriarchy” as the oppression of women by men at all levels of society. But ancient Israel had different levels and intersections of identity than we do, including servants, slaves, and strangers, as well as hereditary institutions like the priesthood, which excluded most men as well as women from arenas of community religious power. This means that in addition to thinking about text production occurring in inherently androcentric institutions, we also need to think about specific classes of males as responsible for producing, transmitting, and maintaining the written traditions. The term “patriarchy” obscures the way individuals and groups were organized in complex and interlocking spheres of activity.18 Meyers concludes that patriarchy denotes a hierarchical model that cannot be uniformly applied to ancient complex societies.19 One does not have to agree with all aspects of Meyers’ reconstruction of ancient Israelite life in the pre-monarchic period in order to recognize that the term “patriarchy” is not only no longer useful for understanding ancient Israel, but in fact obscures and undermines any historical reconstruction of gendered life in Israelite society by imposing presentist stereotypes on ancient realities. It is important to note that Meyers claims neither that hierarchies didn’t exist in ancient Israel, nor does she claim gender equality or the absence of male privilege. She doesn’t even claim that female sexuality was not controlled by men, or that the small group of educated scribal elites responsible for creating or recording the Hebrew Bible were male, and that the text reflects androcentric interests.20 She simply questions the usefulness of a term that cannot adequately capture the realities of a place and time very different from our own, and the concomitant ways of reading the text and appropriating it into our own time as though the hierarchies we perceive and fight against today were relevant in the same way in that ancient world. It is unfortunate that reactions from many feminist biblical scholars have been scornful, criticizing Meyers for producing a feminist revisionist treatise that is a-political and idealistic, stating for example “In regard to feminist thinking, Meyers is clearly not interested in the discourse of oppression,”21 and asking what, ultimately, might be the purpose of producing such work. Setting 18 Meyers, Rediscovering Eve, 198. Ibid., 195. 20 Ibid., 199. It is in fact all the more interesting to note that, although there were multiple scribal groups operating in ancient Israel from different linguistic, social, political, and theological perspectives, they all seem to have been exclusively male. The intersection of a literate scribal class with a male gender, resulting in a diversity of scribal factions which explicitly espouse different ideologies, presents a more complicated and nuanced picture of the scribal elites than that captured by the notion that the Bible is “patriarchal,” as though there were only one set of male perspectives, one male political ideology, universal in its oppression of all women by all men. Further, as discussed in Hilary Lipka’s “Shaved Beards and Bared Buttocks: Shame and the Undermining of Masculine Performance in Biblical Texts,” in Being a Man: Negotiating Ancient Constructs of Masculinity, ed. Ilona Zsolnay, SHANE (London: Routledge, 2017), 176–97, performances of a male gender differed among the various Israelite classes, opening up the possibility of further exploring the construction specific to a male scribal elite and whether/ how much it differed among scribal groups, and/or from other elites, such as priests and kings. 21 . Mieke Bal, review of Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context by Carol Meyers (Oxford University Press 1988), Journal of the American Academy of Religion (1990): 511–13. 19 140 SCRIBES AND SCRIBALISM aside the possibility that Meyers’ conclusions may actually be understood as explicitly political — since finding evidence of more equality for women in the biblical world than modern users of the Bible generally understand there to have been can be perceived precisely as a political act on her part — I think the question “to what purpose?” is most important. As with Shakespeare, a scholar reading the Bible can do so for a multiplicity of purposes (if not most simply, for the sheer pleasure of the literature itself ). We can seek to reconstruct the world of the author. We can try to understand his values, his fears, his ideologies. We can try to psychoanalyze him. We can focus on the reception history of his work. Or we can read or watch Shakespeare’s plays and see ourselves and our lives, our values and fears reflected and refracted in them, and marvel at the timelessness of the underlying issues that pervade literature from all places and times and speak to the essence of what it means to be human. When a scholar reads the Bible, in theory there is little difference; one can choose any or all of these approaches. But as with reading Shakespeare, to combine them all uncritically — to read the story of Romeo and Juliet and decry the patriarchy inherent in its construction of society and therefore invalidate its use in our own society — would not be considered a contribution to either a historical understanding of Shakespeare or an appreciation of his art. Similarly, reading the Bible as patriarchal — or even for the purpose of understanding “the discourse of oppression” — does not contribute to our understanding of the biblical texts’ historical contexts and origins, and arguably likewise produces nothing useful in terms of feminist politics for our own world (especially for non-confessional discourse). Fundamentally, by blaming the ancient world for patriarchy, it obscures an exposition of both the ways in which the Bible is used today to justify women’s oppression, and the underlying history of interpretation that is far more responsible for oppression of women in our world. That is not to say that value judgments and literary hermeneutics do not have a place in biblical scholarship, nor that they do not have something important to contribute to political conceptions of feminism and its applicability today. It is rather to point out that value judgments should be reserved for biblical interpretation and its history, as biblical texts became the ideological justification for the sexism and misogyny of those who have used the Bible as a religious text for the last two thousand years. Those patterns of interpretation grounded in and justified by biblical androcentrism are too often antithetical to current egalitarian values.22 Meyers points out that her historical reconstruction in fact can be used to inform feminist hermeneutics and theology: the implication here is that interpretative traditions that anachronistically read the gender hierarchies in biblically based Judaism and Christianity back into Iron Age Israel can be challenged by a model that sees Iron Age Israel as something other than patriarchal. But in order to establish a model in the first place, feminist biblical scholarship needs to have some basis in historical-critical study. As Meyers points out: After all, ancient Israel was first and foremost a community, a social entity. That its literary creation, the Hebrew Bible, was to become an authoritative religious document should not blind us to the fact that what we call religion was but one mode — albeit the most enduring and influential one — of ancient Israel’s existence as a society. Social science appraisals of ancient Israel are based on the fundamental premise of its social existence. To understand the living community of ancient Israel means examining it in the context of its own multidimensional environment, including its social and political prehistory, its ecological environment, and its 22 Meyers, Rediscovering Eve, 201–2. REJECTING “PATRIARCHY” 141 agrarian-pastoral economic base. Using a variety of resources, scholars have made significant strides in reconstructing the social history of ancient Israel. Our knowledge of the people of the Book is thus no longer limited by the information contained in that Book.23 To be clear, in terms of the reception history of the Hebrew Bible and the ways in which it is used to justify ongoing oppression and subjugation of women today, feminist hermeneutics — confessional and non-confessional — are invaluable ways of reading against traditional androcentric patterns of interpretation. But feminist biblical scholarship that defines itself in this way without engaging in or even by eschewing historical-critical understanding of the ancient context in which the Bible emerged, limits its usefulness to modern interpretation and disables historical reconstruction potentially performed without the baggage of the concept of patriarchy. The biblical text is not just an ancient artifact, but a scribal artifact. It was composed, produced, and transmitted by different groups over time. Although likely all male, literate, and elite, essentializing their perspective as “patriarchal” without historical-critical investigation into their methods, cultures, politics, and sociologies, flattens a diverse set of experiences and realities far beyond the corner of society that these scribes represent. Beyond obscuring the complexities of varied social realities, the categorical label “patriarchy” also assigns a totalizing agency to these scribes and what they produced, distorting and obscuring the process of production and ultimately reinforcing the politics of patriarchy in an ironic circularity. Feminist literary criticism of the text that assumes a patriarchal model for ancient Israel starts from the premise that in ancient Israel, symbolic production was controlled by men and therefore female portrayals in the Bible are male constructs reflecting androcentric ideas and serving androcentric interests. For this reason, the feminist critic reads against the grain, adopting an extrinsic analysis in order to avoid complicity with the patriarchal ideology of the text and to enable the subversion of that ideology. In this way of thinking, biblical woman is always the Other, defining the boundaries of a patriarchal order at the same time as she threatens those boundaries. There is no question that the exercise of reading against the grain and demonstrating the subjugation and oppression of women in biblical texts is important both for overturning entrenched androcentric readings of the texts, and as a corrective to the enduring influence that biblical portraits of men and women have in contemporary consciousness. Such readings are crucial for a comprehensive understanding of biblical reception history. However, both theological hermeneutics and non-theological literary criticism that assume patriarchy for ancient Israel subject the biblical text to judgments based on the importation of modern notions of women’s subjectivity into ancient contexts, and therefore are not conducive to a social-scientific re-construction of gender norms and behaviors in biblical Israel. Because of this, rejecting the use of the term “patriarchy” is necessary as a point of social-scientific method. “Patriarchy” carries with it assumptions and associations generated by nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century experiences of post-industrial capitalistic Western societies, baggage which is simply not transferable to an ancient agrarian, kinship-based polity. We cannot assume for ancient Israel the connotation that the concept of patriarchy carries: namely, that ancient Israelite women possessed the kind of social and sexual autonomy which we in the modern world take as normative, where human value and meaning for us is predicated on individual autonomy and bodily self-possession. In ancient Israel, identity seems to have been relational, not autonomous or individual: the personal worth and dignity of women and men were defined in terms of each person’s place within larger corporate structures of family and lineage, and by the way in which 23 Ibid., 12. 142 SCRIBES AND SCRIBALISM each contributed to those structures. Applying terminology that only makes sense in the postindustrialist capitalist West in order to understand what those structures were in the past, is not only unhelpful, but distortive. Without the hierarchically based oppression of all women by all men connoted by the term “patriarchy” as one’s premise, it is possible to read beyond a strict male vs. female, object vs. subject, empowered vs. submissive, dichotomy of gender relations and constructions in the ancient world. It is this nuanced, complex set of understandings of social relations in ancient Israel that Meyers and others who reject the term “patriarchy” are striving to re-construct. Finally, use of the term “patriarchy” and the categories and constructions this term imposes on the ancient world not only undermines our ability to understand history, but in fact our ability to properly apply feminist theory itself to that history. We are unable to understand history because we are imposing our own gender-social-cultural-political frameworks on a distant place and time which we can’t presume to have shared any of them. Feminist theory for the past 25 years has recognized these limitations of finding and defining women in other cultures by our own standards and according to our own concepts of patriarchal oppression, and the need for non-Western women and other groups that we classify as “oppressed” to speak in their own voices. Feminist theory has also recognized the difficulty of that. In my “Theory and Method” class, we spent some time trying to understand Gayatri Spivak’s post-colonialist concept of the subaltern. Spivak, in her classic 1988 essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” discusses the race and power dynamics involved in the banning of sati by the British colonizers of India as a practice oppressive to women.24 Subalterns are subjects rendered mute by the colonial discourse that speaks on their behalf about their experience, constructing it from the perspective of wise outsiders knowing and acting on what they consider to be the best interests of those who have been colonized; and doing so without feeling the need to understand an emic perspective on their practices, or hearing from the subalterns themselves. In fact, Spivak concludes that the subalterns cannot speak to the colonizers about their experience, because in the very act of learning the discourse that would allow them to do so, they of necessity adopt the frameworks of the colonizers and subvert their own to align them with the interests and authority of those in power. If Spivak doesn’t think it’s possible for subalterns to speak, even when they are alive and present, how much more is this the case in historical studies, when the subjects are dead and gone, remaining only as literary figments of an ancient male author’s imagination and then re-construed in a modern Western post-industrialist capitalist world as exemplars of the patriarchy we are trying to subvert here and now? Feminist theory provokes us to question our assumptions. If women in the ancient world were oppressed, as feminist biblical critics assert, we need to think about what we mean by the term “women” and by the term “oppressed” within the context of what these critics are insisting on calling “patriarchy.” On the one hand, if we don’t question those terms, or we take it as a premise that women in ancient Israel were oppressed, then these women can be understood as subalterns in Spivak’s formulation of the term. But even if we don’t accept a priori that women in the ancient world were oppressed — and I would argue that feminist theorists should never accept any such a priori assertions — there is a very real sense in which, in applying modern Western ways of thinking to the biblical text in order to read it and understand it, the people who give us the Bible are essentially subalterns within our dominant (and only) set of discourses. As biblical scholars we are of necessity giving voice to ancient communities that have left us only fragments of their own voices, out of space, out of time, out of context. Feminist literary critics who question neither their 24 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313. REJECTING “PATRIARCHY” 143 assumptions nor their own authority in imposing the modern concept of patriarchy on ancient Israel, become akin to colonialists interpreting the experiences of others in terms of their own experiences of oppression without understanding the nuance of the culture under study. In her work “Marginality as a Site of Resistance” (1990) bell hooks formulates the colonialist discourse of the oppressed in the following way: [There is] no need to hear your voice, when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Re-writing you, I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still [the] colonizer, the speaking subject, and you are now at the center of my talk.25 And so post-colonialist feminist social scientists conceive of their goal as listening to the subaltern subjects on their own terms, in their own contexts, without ascending to a position of dominance over the voice and thereby subjugating its words to the meanings we want to attribute to them within our own worldview. By subsuming the voices of subalterns into our own frameworks, we assume that our writings can serve as a transparent medium through which the voices of the oppressed can be represented, essentializing the subaltern and thus replicating the colonialist discourses we purport to critique. In other words, we “other” the subalterns even as we try to redeem them from having been “othered.” Spivak reminds us that a person’s or group’s identity is relational, a function of its place in a system of differences. There is no true or pure “other” — instead, the “Other” always already exists in relation to the discourse that would name it as “other.” By using the term “patriarchy,” feminist biblical critics are naming “women” and “men” as whole categories in opposition to each other in ancient Israel; thus feminist readings of the biblical text are pre-determining a reality, imposing a framework from their own set of discourses and experiences, onto the ancient world. Perhaps, as Spivak suggests, the subalterns can never speak for themselves; but certainly through social-scientific methods that attempt to reconstruct the ancient frameworks rather than imposing our own, we have a better chance of hearing their voices and understanding their experiences. It wasn’t long before this ongoing conversation with my students (and in my head) found its way back into my Hebrew Bible class, in the context of “The Rape of Dinah.” The ways in which feminist biblical scholars write about Genesis 34 illustrate this tendency to impose a modern voice on an ancient literary character for the purpose of decrying the patriarchy of the culture that produced the character.26 In this story, Jacob’s daughter Dinah has sexual intercourse with the prince of Shechem, who then asks Jacob for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Dinah’s brothers are angry that the intercourse took place without their knowledge and prior to negotiations around bride-price, depriving them of their ability to have a say in their familial marital alliances. Through deception, two of Dinah’s brothers massacre the men of the town and capture the women and children. Many modern biblical translations sub-title this story “The Rape of Dinah.” And building on this assertion that Dinah was raped, feminist biblical scholars have produced a mountain of protest literature against the biblical text, the society that produced the text, and the culture that continues to use the text for spiritual guidance. A curious fact, however, is that there is no single word for “rape” in Biblical Hebrew, and there is no clear sense in the narrative that Dinah was coerced into 25 bell hooks, “Marginality as a Site of Resistance,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. R. Ferguson et al. (Cambridge: MIT, 1990), 241–43. 26 See, e.g., Susanne Scholz, Rape Plots: A Feminist Cultural Study of Genesis 34 (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), and Caroline Blyth, “Terrible Silence, Eternal Silence: A Feminist Re-Reading of Dinah’s Voicelessness in Genesis 34,” Biblical Interpretation: A Journal of Contemporary Approaches 17, no. 5 (2009): 483–507. 144 SCRIBES AND SCRIBALISM sexual intercourse against her will. To be fair, there is no clear sense that she wasn’t either. The scribes who constructed and transmitted this story are rather completely unconcerned with the question of Dinah’s consent, and Dinah herself does not speak a single word in the story. And this is where the feminist social scientist ought to begin investigating: the issue of what we can learn about the society — and specifically the scribal agents responsible — that produced this text starts with the question of why Dinah’s consent is not an issue to the authors, rather than with assumptions around bodily autonomy projected from our world onto theirs in order to castigate a society that would allow for Dinah’s presumed bodily autonomy to be presumably attacked. The biblical text tells us that Shechem saw Dinah, took her, lay with her, and then did something connoted by the Hebrew verb ‫‘( ענה‬innah). That final verb is a difficult one to translate, and is the one that many modern translators render in English with the word “rape.”27 The modern concept of rape that many scholars read into this text is characterized by an aggressive act and lack of mutual consent. Rape does clearly occur in another instance in the Bible, and the word ‘innah is also found there: in 2 Samuel 13 Amnon rapes Tamar, with Tamar’s lack of consent made clear by her protests. But there is a difference in the wording of both episodes as well. Genesis 34:2 states that the prince “took her and lay her down and ‘innah-ed her.” In contrast, in 2 Sam 13:14, despite Tamar’s protests, Amnon “overpowered [or “seized” — ‫ ]יחזק‬her, he ‘innah-ed her, and he lay with [‫ ]שכב‬her.” The fact that the word ‘innah is found in both cases does not demonstrate that if Tamar is raped and this verb is used, then Dinah must have been raped as well. In fact, this same word ‘innah is used in Genesis 16 to describe what Sarah does to her handmaid Hagar, in her jealousy that Hagar was pregnant while Sarah was barren; this ‘innah action causes Hagar to flee from Sarah. There is no indication in the biblical text, in the history of interpretation, or in any translation in English (or any other language) that anyone thinks that Sarah rapes Hagar here. If this word doesn’t mean “rape” here, then the word ‘innah cannot be translated as “rape” elsewhere: it must mean something else.28 Deuteronomy 22 develops laws about adultery, specifically construed in that text as sex with a virginal woman who is betrothed to another man, and posits two scenarios: one in which the woman is presumed to have consented, and the other in which she is presumed not to have consented. Deuteronomy 22:23 states that if a man sleeps with a betrothed virgin in the city the woman is 27 I first developed this argument along with my colleague, Risa Levitt Kohn (in “Parshat Vayishlah,” in The Women’s Torah Commentary, ed. T. C. Eskenazi and A. L. Weiss [New York: Union of Reform Judaism Press, 2008], 183–201). We were asked to write a commentary on the Torah portion in which the story of Dinah appeared; however, the translation was provided for us by a third party, putting us in the curious position of writing in our commentary that the word ‘innah, found in the biblical text in translation alongside our commentary as “rape,” did not in fact mean rape. The understanding developed by Levitt Kohn and me drew on many other studies since the 1990s that argued for ambiguity in the text’s description of Shechem’s actions toward Dinah, and likewise questioned the traditional understanding of “rape” here: e.g. Lyn M. Bechtel, “What If Dinah Is Not Raped?,” JSOT 62 (1994): 19–36; Claudia Camp, “The (E)strange(d) Woman in the Land: Sojourning with Dinah,” in her Wise, Strange and Holy (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2000), Chapter 7; Joseph Fleishman, “Shechem and Dinah — in the Light of Non-Biblical and Biblical Sources,” ZAW 116 (2004): 12–31; Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “Law and Philosophy: The Case of Sex in the Bible,” in her Studies in Bible and Feminist Criticism (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2006, 5766ּ), Chapter 16; M. Gruber, “A Re-examination of the Charges against Shechem Son of Hamor,” Beit Mikra Quarterly 54 (1999): 119–27; Ita Sheres, Dinah’s Rebellion: A Biblical Parable for Our Time (New York: Crossroad, 1990); Ellen van Wolde “Does ‘Innâ Denote Rape? A Semantic Analysis of a Controversial Word,” VT 52 (2002): 528; N. Wyatt, “The Story of Dinah and Shechem,” UF 22 (1990): 433–58; and more recently, the excellent and thorough discussion in Chapter 3 of Eve Levavi Feinstein’s Sexual Pollution in the Hebrew Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); and Alison Joseph, “Understanding Genesis 34:2: ‘Innâ,” VT 66 (2016): 663–68. 28 ‘innah is used in many places throughout the biblical text in ways that cannot be translated as “rape.” In Deut 8:2, it describes God’s actions toward Israel in the desert as he makes the slaves wander for forty years; in Lev 16 it is used to describe what the Israelites are to do to their inner-selves on Yom HaKippurim. REJECTING “PATRIARCHY” 145 presumed to have consented and faces the same capital punishment as her lover, because in the city if she had cried out in protest someone would have heard her. The verb used to describe the action here is the same as in 2 Samuel 13: ‫שכב‬, “to lie (with)” — English “to lay” works well here too. In Deut 22:24, the law concludes that both the man and the woman must be executed: the woman because she was in the city and no one heard her cry out in protest, and the man on account of the fact that he ‘innah-ed the wife of his neighbor. If the point of this law is that the woman is presumed to have consented, then ‘innah here cannot mean rape. The law continues: in Deut 22:25, if the same offense takes place in the country, the betrothed virgin is presumed innocent because no one would have heard her protest, and therefore only the man is executed. From the description here and contrast with the previous law, this is clearly a case of non-consensual sex, or rape. The man’s sexual act with her is recounted differently in the text of this law from the way in which it is described in the case of sleeping with the woman in town. Rather than simply using the term ‫שכב‬, Deut 22:25 describes this encounter with the betrothed virgin in the country as “he overpowered (‫ )חזק‬her and lay with (‫ )שכב‬her.” These are the same terms (‫ חזק‬and ‫ )שכב‬used to describe Tamar’s encounter with Amnon. The verbal expression in common to both clear instances of non-consensual sex in 2 Samuel 13 and Deut 22:25 is based on the Hebrew root ‫( חזק‬meaning “strength”). As a verb, this word is often translated “to take hold of ” (also possible: “to seize,” or “to overpower”). This verb is the one used for non-consensual sex (in our terms, “rape”) in Deuteronomy (22:25) as well as in the story of Tamar and Amnon (2 Sam 13:14): not ‘innah. Notably, this expression using the verbal root ‫חזק‬ is not used in Genesis 34 in the string of verbs describing what happened to Dinah. So what exactly happened to Dinah, as far as the narrator is concerned? What does ‘innah mean? From the usage in Deuteronomy (e.g. 22:23–24) and in Genesis 16, one can conclude that ‘innah denotes a downward movement in a social sense, meaning to “debase” or “humiliate” as in Genesis 16, or to lower a person’s status, as in Genesis 34; or even to “violate” as in Deut 22:24 — but a violation that is not dependent on the woman’s consent, and therefore not equivalent to our concept of rape. Dinah’s virginity has been violated, regardless of whether she consented: her status is clearly lowered from a virgin in her father’s house, able to fetch a virgin’s bride-price and be of maximal use to her family’s negotiations for alliances through marriage with other kinship groups, to a non-virgin in a stranger’s house, no longer of use to her own kin for political purposes. Though an offense to Dinah’s family, the fact that Shechem has committed ‘innah on Dinah does not — and cannot — carry with it the psychological and emotional implications for the woman that the contemporary notion of rape suggests. In this particular text, the woman has no voice, and the narrator has no interest in whether or not she consented to the sexual act. In the context of the ancient Near East, by sleeping with someone without her family’s consent to marriage, Dinah would have been considered to have been ‘innah-ed whether or not she consented.29 If we pay attention to them, scribal linguistic strategies provide social-scientific insights into the culture their narrative was originally intended to address. Modern presentist approaches that read rape into the text infer from, and imbue the story with, different meanings and thereby obscure the worldview of its ancient context. Whether we envision the story’s context as that of fathers relating it to sons, or male scribes writing for a male audience, the sociological frameworks of its origin determine the type of rhetorical and even lexical choices scribes make while transmitting and developing narrative traditions. To understand Dinah’s story as told here, we should look at the narrative’s internal explanations and word choices to describe what has befallen her. 29 See similarly Frymer-Kensky, Women of the Bible, 182. 146 SCRIBES AND SCRIBALISM The brothers’ motive for deceiving the Shechemites into circumcising themselves only to fall by the brothers’ swords, is explained in 34:13: Shechem had defiled (‫ )טמא‬their sister Dinah. This is a word usually reserved to describe ritual pollution, not sexual behavior. How had Shechem’s sexual encounter with Dinah defiled her? The brothers give their answer in the form of a rhetorical question in 34:31: “He should make our sister like a prostitute?” Rather than focusing on Dinah’s consent, the story focuses on the result of her intercourse with Shechem: from her brothers’ perspective, she has become ‫טמא‬, polluted. As noted by Eve Levavi Feinstein and Tikvah Frymer-Kensky, the brothers’ exclamation that Shechem treated Dinah as a prostitute is the key to understanding why the narrative uses the term ‫ טמא‬to describe Dinah’s state: Shechem had intercourse with Dinah as though she lacked the protection and guardianship of father and brothers, and in so doing, brought shame on Dinah’s family.30 In other words, the problem is one of violating familial, and not personal or bodily, boundaries; or more aptly put, in the case of women in ancient Israel, there was no conceptual difference between the boundaries of her physical body and the social body of her family. Thus, despite the protests, outcries, and denigrations of a text that would feature the victimization of Jacob’s daughter, and the sympathy and support of modern feminist biblical scholars who feel the need to voice Dinah’s anger, shame, humiliation, and betrayal, this story is not about the rape of Dinah at all. It is tangentially about the lowering of Dinah’s social status as she moves from fulfilling the proper role in the proper place (virgin daughter in her father’s house) to a socially ambiguous role with no proper corresponding physical place. But her story serves as a warning pointing to the larger, and overriding issue of the political and ethnic identity of the Israelites in relation to the other people in the land. That is the reason for the story’s inclusion in the text, and that is the focus of the recounting. Suspending our judgments about “patriarchy” and what kind of bodily autonomy Dinah ought to have, allows us to better understand the context in which the text was written. This was a context in which the bodies of daughters — and of sons, slaves, wives, and even men — were part of a larger entity than the individual. Marriage alliances were forged by the family unit and dominated by fathers and brothers for the good of the family, clan, and tribe. These — and not the individual — were the building blocks of ancient Israelite society. And these corporate concerns are what informed the locution and rhetoric of the scribes who developed this story, and also justified — even necessitated — the inclusion of Genesis 34 in the larger narrative about Israel’s lineage and territory. Being feminist social scientists who allow the ancients to speak for themselves and who do not impose our own modern conceptions of sexual independence and bodily autonomy onto ancient peoples, we need to recognize that there is a fundamental difference between our modern concept of rape and a literary creation which features a sexual and potential marital alliance not consented to by Dinah’s family. In denying the relevance of history, feminist literary criticism is ultimately plagued most deeply by the problem of cultural relativism. Historians — and especially social scientific ones, heavily influenced by the tools and methods of anthropology — are trained not to judge the societies we study. Our purpose is to understand them, as much as possible, in emic terms; with the growing explicit acknowledgment that objectivity is unattainable, and perhaps even undesirable. Historians are not interested in criticizing the past for not having the values of the present; and when feminist biblical scholars do this, they make their work irrelevant — and even antithetical — to the historical task. Historical study of the Bible — as with the study of religion in general, as it has developed in the academy over the last century — defines itself precisely against value-loaded critical readings 30 Frymer-Kensky, “Virginity in the Bible,” 89; and Feinstein Sexual Pollution in the Hebrew Bible, 76. REJECTING “PATRIARCHY” 147 of sacred texts, whether laudatory or condemning. The task of a historian is to investigate, not to evaluate. Feminists in other fields have moved beyond use of the term “patriarchy” for exactly that reason; it is not helpful, and in fact is harmful to understanding the subjects under study.31 Third-wave feminism rejects the strict dichotomy of male–female, and the strict hierarchy implied by the term “patriarchy,” noting instead that power structures are more nuanced, and outsider imposition of capitalist, post-industrialist categories like “patriarchy” are just as contested as the power structures such categories seek to subvert. Feminist historians and other social scientists are interested neither in finding and decrying nor in finding and rectifying male dominance of women in the societies and cultures they study. This however has been, and remains, the central focus of feminist biblical scholarship as it is construed at the Society of Biblical Literature, in published research, and at universities everywhere in syllabi focused on “women in the Hebrew Bible” — both by feminist biblical scholars who consider their work confessional, and by those whose work is (stridently) non-confessional. Rejecting “patriarchy” is a step toward bringing together feminist literary criticism, feminist historical criticism, mainstream biblical scholarship, and feminist social science in other disciplines. Feminism defines itself by its attempt to give voice to the voiceless, be they women, men, slaves, children, or any other category of person. Feminist criticism can do this for the world of the Hebrew Bible; recover or at least reconstruct the voices, stories, histories, of the people who write and who are written, in terms that would be more familiar to that worldview; and should do this, should seek the voices of the various corporate bodies and communities within ancient Israel, beyond the hegemonic voices of both selected and selective authors of the biblical texts; and beyond the hegemonic voices of the biblical scholars — feminist or not — who read and seek to reify them as other. Giving them our voices — that is, giving voices to women as victims — doesn’t tell us anything about ancient Israel and only serves political ends, while undermining the authority of feminist historical investigations into ancient Israel. Continuing to use the term “patriarchy” in all of its connotative premises, can produce only polemics (confessional or non-confessional) about the way the Bible is used today to oppress women; polemics which are then used to inform biblical literary analyses from which are drawn conclusions about history (and the history of patriarchy). This circularity begins with the methodological flaw of reading modern constructions of patriarchy into an ancient text. In Meyers’ words, using the term “patriarchy” imposes “contemporary feminist standards (which hope for an elimination of sexist tradition by seeking to promulgate equality between the sexes) to measure the cultural patterns of an ancient society struggling to establish its viability under circumstances radically different from contemporary western conditions.”32 This is not only antithetical to socialscientific inquiry, but to the very nature and purpose of feminist theory and method. The student in my introductory Hebrew Bible class who remarked on the immorality of the patriarchs in Genesis felt very strongly that her own sense of what was moral was “right” and “true,” and she was deeply disturbed that the presumed source of her moral compass, the Bible itself, seemed to disagree. This appears to be the starting point for many feminist biblical scholars as well. However, the basic premise in historical-critical investigation of the Bible should be that the Bible represents the ideals and values of an ancient foreign culture and not presentist ones — even if we are motivated in undertaking such investigation by present ideological, theological, or political concerns. A goal in biblical pedagogy in an academic setting should be to help students 31 See Meyers, “Patriarchy.” Meyers, Rediscovering Eve, 26. 32 148 SCRIBES AND SCRIBALISM understand how their senses of what is “right” and “true” are mediated by cultural presuppositions. Likewise, such constructed frameworks inform our understanding of (and categorization according to) gender, class, ethnicity, and other social performances. How we think about and reconstruct the activities and settings of scribes and scribalism is part of this equation. The projection of anachronistic models onto ancient Israelite society invariably impacts the ways in which we conceive of scribal hegemony over texts and the traditions they transmit. If we are historians who seek to understand these figures and their methods, to gain a sense of the processes of composition, compilation, and transmission of the biblical texts within the context of the society from which they emerged, it is crucial for us as scholars and as teachers to think carefully about our categories of analysis — like “patriarchy” — so that we might move beyond imposing contemporary constructions on these ancient texts and the scribes who produced them.