Religion Part IV: Patriarchal Values of Ancient Israel

"The world in which the Bible developed was dramatically

different from the world in which we read the Bible."

-from Social World of Ancient Israel

In my previous post (Religion Part II: The History of the Bible, The Evolution of God, & The Invention of Christianity), I described some of the ancient beliefs and cultures that converged to ultimately create the Christian religion that we know today. In this post, I want to dive a bit deeper into the social structures of the group of people that contributed most to the creation of Christianity: the ancient Israelites.

Again, my motivation for dissecting the history and context of the Bible is not to ruffle feathers or attack opposing beliefs. My goal is simply to shed light on the importance of taking a step back from the literal words on the pages of the Bible to ask critical questions like "who wrote these words?" and "what did the lives of these authors look like?" After all, how can we expect to fully understand the messages that the authors of the Bible were trying to convey, if we do not understand the ancient world in which they lived?

Although the world in which the Bible was written is now extinct, scholars have been able to put together a pretty clear picture of what society looked like between 1250 and 587 BCE when the Old Testament was being authored. Some of the major differences between the world of the Bible and the world we live in today include ancient Israel being an agricultural society (as opposed to industrial), limited on resources (as opposed to being renewable), and communal (as opposed to our modern focus on the individual). Additionally, ancient Israelites used story-telling as their major means of teaching and communicating (as opposed to our society's focus on history and fact). The ancient Israelites of Biblical times lived in tight-knit communities that relied solely on family and farming for their very survival. Each individual in a community played a very specific and essential role for the greater good. Some of the most important roles were that of the Father, the Mother, the virgin, and the midwife.

The Father

The society of ancient Israel was a patriarchal one, meaning households belonged to men, and only sons could be heirs of the household. Below the Father that headed each household were as many sets of childbearing adults and their dependents (sons with their wives and children) as was necessary for the entire group to survive. The Father held many responsibilities, all meant to protect and provide for his land and children. He was tasked with adopting and ex-communicating sons and daughters, negotiating marriages and covenants, recruiting workers and warriors, hosting strangers, and designating heirs.

"Adoption" in Biblical times held a different meaning than the word does today. When a child was born in Biblical times, it was the Father's responsibility to decide whether or not to adopt it (or accept it) into the household. In the world of the Bible, life began not with a viable birth, but rather with an adoption. If a Father chose not to adopt a newborn, the midwife would take it from the birthing room and leave it in an open field, where it would then be eligible for adoption by another household if so desired. (Hints of this process of adoption can be found in several places throughout the Bible, including in Ezekiel 16:4-5 which reads "On the day you were born your cord was not cut, nor were you washed with water to make you clean, nor were you rubbed with salt or wrapped in cloths. No one looked on you with pity or had compassion enough to do any of these things for you. Rather, you were thrown out into the open field, for on the day you were born you were despised").

The concept of marriage in ancient Israel was also much different than modern day marriage. Although much romance does exist in the Bible (between husbands and wives, unmarried men and women, and even between husbands and concubines), sexual relationships were not as much romantic as they were political and economical. Men and women rarely chose their own partners. Rather, it was the Father's responsibility to safeguard the status of the men and women in his household and to decide which were eligible to marry. The criteria for a woman to be legally eligible to marry was different than that of a man. A woman legally eligible to marry was called a virgin.

The Virgin

The word virgin held a different meaning in ancient Israel than it does today. In contemporary western cultures, we use the word "virgin" only to describe sexual activity. But the Bible actually focuses much more on the political connotations of this word. In fact, only when the word virgin is modified by phrases such as "no man had ever lain with her" in Genesis 24:16, and "who has never slept with a man" in Numbers 31:18, is the Bible actually talking primarily about a woman's sexual integrity. These two instances are very clearly discussing a woman's lack of sexual history. Otherwise, the use of the word virgin throughout the Bible is actually a technical term in reference to a woman's marriageability. It was the legal guarantee of land and children. Because virgins represented the honor and future of their households in Biblical times, they were the most politically significant women in ancient Israel. And it was the Father of the household who carried out the major responsibility of protecting them.

The Father protected the virginity (or marriageability) of the women in his household by restricting their movements and associations in the village. Virgins were to avoid sexual promiscuity (which was not simply a lack of sexual intercourse, but any political maneuver that would put the land and future children of her household at risk), resist rape, and ratify a covenant for her Father's household with her marriage.

Rape was not simply an act of sexual violence in Biblical times, but rather it was a political challenge to the Father of the virgin. These ancient communities needed hierarchies and power dynamics in order to survive, and the protection of virgins was one major responsibility of a household. Rape was therefore used as a means to test and challenge a household's honor and stability within the community. It was a political maneuver -- a hostile takeover bid to try to redistribute the limited goods which a society possessed so that the society would not be destroyed by the weakness of a single household. If a household failed to protect a virgin in this way, then it was shamed and declared unable to fulfill its responsibilities to the community as a whole. (The Bible contains too many incidents of rape to count, but one example of rape being used as a means to redistribute goods is in Genesis 34).

As long as a virgin's honor was upheld, she was eligible to marry. Marriage was a drawn-out negotiation between two households. It included gift-giving and the drawing up of contracts that spelled out dowries/bride prices, exchanges of property, future arrangements of financial support should the bride ever become widowed, etc. A virgin's chastity was her legal compliance with the terms of her marriage covenant. In other words, chastity was the technical term used to describe a woman's ability to bear children and contribute to the work needs of her household. Once married, a couple usually lived in the household of the Father of the groom until an heir was chosen.

Honor and shame were not gender-specific in Biblical times, but women were clearly living symbols of a family's honor more so than any other members. Unmarried women or virgins measured a household's potential for growth (through future marriages that would produce land and children), and married women were a measure of the fixed assets of a household. All members of a household were expected to fulfill their roles for the greater good and survival of all. While the Father managed the bigger-picture issues of his household, it was the Mother who was responsible for the daily homemaking tasks.

The Mother

The Mother of a household in ancient Israel had significant power and authority when it came to decision-making and problem-solving. The Mother's main role was to bear children and to arrange and help other wives to bear children. In addition to her crucial and well-respected child-rearing roles, the Mother was also the manager of the household. She assigned major responsibilities for the creation and maintenance of the home: She directed the manufacturing of soap, pottery, blankets, cloth, and tools. She determined how much food was to be consumed and stored as beer, grain, and dried vegetables. She was a teacher and a mediator of conflict. The Mother had domestic authority that the men of a household did not.

The Midwife

With child-bearing being of such great importance to survival in ancient Israel, the midwife was needed to help manage pregnancies and deliveries. The midwife had legal and clinical authority to negotiate pre-coital covenants between married couples and to provide the mother with prenatal, labor, delivery, and postpartum care. This included responding to mid-term traumas like miscarriages/abortions, labor and delivery traumas like breech births and still births, and post-delivery traumas like crib deaths. Immediately following delivery, it was also the job of the midwife to hold up the newborn and invite its adoption. The first cry of a newborn as it inflated its lungs and began to breathe was considered a legal petition to join the household and become a member of the village. In order to adopt the child, a parent would answer the newborn's primal scream with a hymn or joyful cry, inviting the household to praise the Creator and accept this child. In the world of the bible, life began not with a viable birth, but with this legal process of adoption. Regardless of the status of a newborn at the moment of delivery, without an adoption it was considered stillborn.

The social structures and day-to-day lives of those who authored the Bible were clearly very different than the world we live in today. We no longer have to stick to assigned roles based on our gender and/or place within a community. Rape is no longer used as a political tool to destabilize households and redistribute limited goods. And it is no longer acceptable to leave unwanted newborns in open fields to die. These traditions were created and upheld by ancient Israelites based on their narrow understanding of the world and as a means of survival, but the practices are clearly antiquated and no longer have a place in modern society. There is, however, great value in understanding the ancient world in which the Bible was written, so that we may better understand both the benefits and the dangers in trying to apply the teachings of the Bible to modern day issues.

Sources:

The Social World of Ancient Israel, book by Victor H. Matthews and Don C. Benjamin