Rediscovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context

ISBN-13: 9780199734627 / Angielski / Miękka / 2012 / 312 str.

Carol L. Meyers

Opis

This groundbreaking study looks beyond biblical texts, which have had a powerful influence over our views of women's roles and worth, in order to reconstruct the typical everyday lives of women in ancient Israel. Carol Meyers argues that biblical sources alone do not give a true picture of ancient Israelite women because urban elite males wrote the vast majority of the scriptural texts. Also, the stories of women in the Bible concern exceptional individuals rather than ordinary Israelite women. Drawing on archaeological discoveries and ethnographic information as well as biblical texts, Meyers depicts Israelite women not as submissive chattel in an oppressive patriarchy, but rather as strong and significant actors within their families and in their communities. In so doing, she challenges the very notion of patriarchy as an appropriate designation for Israelite society.

Recenzje

Meyers elegantly documents the Hebrew Bible's minimalist and misogynist views of women in ancient Israel. More importantly, she then proceeds to document this using perceptive new insights into the biblical texts; the pertinent but neglected archaeological data on household activities; and especially a considerable body of ethnographic data unfamiliar to many scholars in our respective fields. This pioneering work goes a long way toward rescuing ancient Israelite women from obscurity, ably demonstrating that they played far more significant roles than we had imagined in the domestic arena, in communal and public life, in the cult, and even in cultural and political life. This is feminist scholarship at its best—neither doctrinaire nor defensive, but simply factual, honest, incisive, bold scholarship...a landmark publication. It will change the way we view women in ancient Israel, in the church and synagogue, and in the academy.

O autorze

Carol Meyers holds the Mary Grace Wilson Professorship in Religion at Duke University. A specialist in biblical studies and archaeology, she is a prominent scholar in the study of women in the biblical world and a trustee of the American Schools of Oriental Research and of the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research. She also serves on the board of directors of the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation and is president-elect of the Society of Biblical Literature.