"Women at the Time of the Bible" by Miriam Feinberg Vamosh, Palphot, 104 pages, NIS 60
What was life like for a woman during the biblical era, which for the author and a good deal of her intended audience includes the time of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament? What was her intellectual life like? What was her place in the religious life of the times? What was her role in the workforce? How did the roles of wife and mother in the family and in the outside world manifest themselves? What were her physiological needs? What were her emotional needs? How did she relate to husband, children, family, friends and the outside world? These are just some of the questions Miriam Feinberg Vamosh deals with in her latest study on everyday life in Bible times.
"Women at the Time of the Bible" is not, however, a work of social archaeology or material history. Nor is it a book about gender studies, revisionism, post-revisionism or "post" anything for that matter. Feinberg Vamosh, whose earlier books, "Daily Life at the Time of Jesus" (Palphot, 2001) and "Food at the Time of the Bible: From Adam's Apple to the Last Supper" (Palphot, 2004), have already described numerous aspects of ancient daily life, addresses those men and women who seek inspiration from Scripture. How would they, we, "have responded if, like Manoah's wife, or Mary the mother of Jesus, an angel appeared to us? Would the challenges to Ruth, Esther, or Mary find us ready? How would we respond to the demands of Jezebel or Herodias?"
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Feinberg Vamosh believes that in order to answer these questions it is necessary to understand the everyday life of these women and their contemporaries. By opening the door to homes and palaces that have long since crumbled into dust, by accompanying these women through their daily tasks and lives, the author seeks to bring the Bible to life in an almost three-dimensional way in order to enable her readers to find new meaning in Scripture.
On the topic of rooftops, the author immediately establishes the connection between them and one of the more famous biblical women, Bathsheba: "When we first meet Bathsheba, we find her bathing, presumably on her roof, because it was from the roof of the palace that David saw her and was smitten" (2 Samuel 11:2).
Feinberg Vamosh goes on to discuss how to this day, women in traditional Middle Eastern societies carry out many domestic tasks on the roof. But the lessons of David and Bathsheba have been learned: "Such roofs are often surrounded by a parapet with apertures that allow air to come in, but are designed to prevent just such indelicacies as the one described in the story of David and Bathsheba."
The author clearly has a particular target audience in mind and her previous two books have met with huge success in the global Christian market. There is no reason to assume that this volume will meet with any less success. Many Jewish readers, however, will probably not make it past the introduction - a real shame. The book may not be "academic," and the author makes no pretensions to classify it as such, although she is well-acquainted with the relevant scientific literature. In any case, combining the times of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles in terms of material culture and everyday life would not pass academic or scientific muster in any formal scholarly milieu. However, it does constitute an excellent, popular presentation of everyday life in ancient Israel in general and of women in particular.
Any attempt at reconstructing ancient daily life, whether academic or popular, poses immense problems. What approach should be taken? Is daily life the product of landscape or does it represent the study of all cultural artifacts? How much of daily life is shaped by material culture and how much of it is influenced by a more intellectual (or religious) culture? Can the tools available to a future student of such daily life allow for the reconstruction of society?
More than words
Feinberg Vamosh is clearly at an advantage here. She does not attempt to provide a systematic reconstruction, and the numerous caveats and pitfalls that plague the scholar of such fields are less important for her than bringing the Bible to life through the experience of women who lived during biblical times. And she does so with much skill, gliding through the cornucopia of ancient sources, foremost among them the Holy Scriptures, making use of the literature of the sages, referring occasionally to the Greco-Roman world and its traditions, while also providing the reader with photographs and drawings of archaeological finds from Israel and other Bible lands.
This last point is of especially great importance: Ironically, describing what are often seemingly simple and mundane aspects of everyday life can require a great deal of complex verbiage. Feinberg Vamosh has not written a long book. The attention span of her potential audience is not great. Rather she makes excellent use of illustrative material, whether archaeological or contemporary, and proves the truism that "a picture shows me at a glance what it takes dozens of pages of a book to expound." From limestone statues of women and children dating to the ancient Middle Kingdom in Egypt to modern-day depictions of Bedouin women singing together in the Negev, the book is replete with small and large-scale reproductions, copies of inscriptions, clay tablets and dioramas, and magnificent photographic reconstructions of women's roles in ancient daily life, such as weaving and dyeing material. All these visual aids only serve to reinforce the importance of the author's text, and even add a contemporary relevance.
Each brief chapter reveals a different fascinating aspect of a woman's life during the biblical era. The first chapters deal with home and work, while the next few focus on specific episodes such as betrothals, weddings, marriage, divorce, widowhood and motherhood. Here we learn about the relationships between biblical mothers and sons - beginning with Reuben bringing his mother mandrakes to aid her in conception, up to the unique relationship between the mother and son, whose interactions, and actions, changed the world: Mary and Jesus. The following few chapters deal with worship, including music, dance and professional mourners.
Women's prayer is a particularly interesting subject of study. Here Feinberg Vamosh illustrates her biblical tales with additional Talmudic texts - for example, by recalling the story of Abba Hilkia's wife, whose prayers, and not those of her husband the sage, brought rain during a drought. When her husband was asked how she merited this miracle, he replied that while he would give money to the poor so they could buy bread, she would give them the bread, which they could enjoy immediately. Women's practical nature and close contact with food products thus turned from a necessity of everyday ancient life into the fulcrum for their achievement of religious and even national stature, thereby making them the saviors of their people.
Next Feinberg Vamosh describes clothing and adornments, and immediately afterward women and learning, as well as female leadership. She ends her book by discussing women on the periphery, dealing with prostitutes, mediums, seductresses and loners. Each chapter concludes with a "portrait" of one woman who personifies its basic lesson. Sarah, Rachel, Miriam, Mary and Hannah, Priscilla, Jephtah's daughter - each of them has a page of her own, where we learn about their lives, activities and what exactly made them famous. In her brevity, the author succeeds in navigating the fine line between descriptive analysis and gendered preaching, turning these portraits into a rich learning experience for readers of all backgrounds.
Matter of luck
Life for the woman of Bible times was not easy. The Mishnah (Ketuboth 5:5), for instance, states that a wife must perform certain deeds for her husband, such as grinding flour and baking bread, washing clothes and cooking, feeding her children, making her husband's bed and working with wool. It was taken for granted that raising children and taking care of the family was her primary function. In addition to all this she was often expected to work in the fields during harvest or other essential times, and even to tend flocks of sheep. And there were also women who engaged in trading or in crafts. While well-to-do women may have had it easier, even their work was never done. In a society in which producing daily bread for a family might have taken three to four hours and surviving childbirth and its aftermath was often a matter of luck, being an eshet hayil, a woman of valor (Proverbs 31:10), was often a matter of survival for both woman and family.
The typical biblical woman was truly the original "multi-tasker," with little time for anything but completing the most basic and ongoing daily chores. It is little wonder that music and dance were an integral part of her life, giving her a means to express herself as both an individual or as part of a group, "in joy or mourning at life's milestones, in worship, or purely as entertainment." Consequently, the image of women dancing and singing became deeply engrained in the culture of biblical times.
Many of those reading this book will indeed find new and meaningful interpretations of Scripture, as is the author's intention. However, even those who might recoil from the theology aimed at the target audience will learn from it about the daily life and everyday challenges facing the women of the Land of Israel in ancient times.
Prof. Judy Baumel-Schwartz and Prof. Joshua Schwartz teach in the Faculty of Jewish Studies at Bar-Ilan University.
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