Israelite Society

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Israelite Society

Ancient Israel was a lineage-based tribal society with an agricultural economy. Like many such cultures, gender rules and boundaries were deeply enmeshed in virtually every aspect of life. The analysis of gender issues provides an entry into subtle interrelations among the forms of knowledge, mechanisms of power, and models of the self that operated in Israelite society. The Hebrew Bible, the major source of evidence, represents these matters through various genres (narrative, law, proverbial wisdom, etc.) and with varying perspectives and interests. These representations are sometimes fantastic, utopian, or polemical, and so must be treated with care. But gender rules are generally consistent throughout the text, illuminating the implicit and durable forms of biblical culture.

THE LOCATION OF GENDER

Everyday behavior and economic life were marked in ancient Israel by a gendered distinction between domestic space and public space. The domestic domain is predominantly female space, where women prepare food, weave textiles, tend children, and run the household (including, for a wealthy household, supervising servants). The public domain is predominantly male space, where men work the fields or tend livestock, pursue commercial activities, or engage in politics, war, or other public activities. There are many exceptions to this spatial opposition—daughters may tend sheep or work in the vineyards, wives may engage in some commercial transactions, and sons may cook—but the general spatial domains are clear. One of the few public places where unrelated males and females may mix is at the well, since it is women who fetch water. The traditional scene of "meeting at the well" occurs several times in Genesis and Exodus as the site of love and betrothal.

The association of women with tent and house has many discursive and behavioral consequences. A man can "go into" a house or "go into" a woman. Married and betrothed women are veiled outside of the tent, maintaining their (and their husband's) private space in public. City and nation—by metonymy with house and tent—are figured as feminine.

HONOR AND SHAME

Honor is an ascribed status—it is granted by others—which is a key component of the "practice of the self" in ancient Israel. Generosity, hospitality, and moral probity are conducive to honor, as is the proper regulation of sexual behavior within one's household. The patriarchal stories of Genesis 18-19 illustrate well the interplay of gendered spaces and the code of honor and shame. Abraham is the ideal man who offers exceptional hospitality to his unknown (divine) guests, while Sarah prepares fine food in the tent. The men of Sodom, the archetypes of wicked men, seek to shame the unknown guests by gang-raping them, which is the inverse of Lot's hospitality. Lot attempts to preserve his honor as host by offering his daughters to the men of Sodom in place of the guests, but in so doing shames himself as head of his household. Later, Lot's daughters, in their new domestic space (the cave), exercise domestic skill by tricking their father into impregnating them, which seals his dishonor and that of his heirs, which are the foreign nations of Ammon and Moab. Honor, shame, sexuality, morality, gendered spaces, and ethnic identity are intertwined in these stories.

Notably, what Western culture calls "homosexuality" is in this narrative a matter of gendered categories of dominance and shame, that is, a matter of power relations. The male (insertive) role is marked as dominant, while the female (receptive) role is marked as subordinate. For a male to insert his phallus into another male is to subordinate—and shame—that male. The Sodom story and the biblical laws about sexual conduct have nothing to do with homosexuality as sexual preference or orientation (note that Lot offers his daughters as an acceptable sexual substitute), but rather refer to a form of sexual shaming, comparable to the daughter-father incest at the end of the Sodom story.

CREATION MYTHS

The two creation myths in Genesis—which derive from two different sources, the P source (Genesis 1:1-2:4) and J source (Genesis 2:5-3:24)—present differing views on the origin of gender relations. The first creation account describes humans, "male and female," as created "in the image of God." It is not clear what this description implies, except that male and female equally participate in some kind(s) of God-like qualities, which may include moral, physical, and political attributes. Sexual relations, which follow immediately in the blessing and requirement to "be fruitful and multiply," are associated with these God-like qualities. In this account, which presents an ideal initial world-order, there is no institution of gender hierarchy or distinctive gender roles (aside from the activity of procreation). Humans as a whole are the pinnacle of creation, created to rule all the creatures of the world.

The second creation account presents a different view of the origins of sex and gender. Male and female have different histories—the first human, Adam, is inchoately male, although his sexuality is not foregrounded until the creation of Eve. Eve is made from Adam's flesh and bone as his proper counterpart (literally "helper corresponding to him"). She is created for com-pany, not immediately for childbearing, and sexual relations between them involve a return to "one flesh," a pleasurable restoration of primal unity. As a result of Eve's and Adam's violation of God's prohibition of eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (an act with implicit sexual connotations), they first realize their sexual difference (and feel shame at being naked) and later are punished with expulsion from paradise and a hard life. Eve is punished with painful childbirth and male domination, Adam with hard agricultural work, and both with the painful awareness of mortality. Gender hierarchy is one of the aspects of the imperfect world outside of paradise. Here we see the institution of gender hierarchy accompanied by its implicit critique as a hard consequence of primal transgression.

PURITY AND COSMOLOGY

The Israelite body is regulated by various rules, including the rules of purity. Here as elsewhere, the opposition of male/female intersects with the metaphysical distinction of human/divine. Human bodies are not allowed in close proximity with divine space (particularly the Jerusalem Temple and its courts) if they are presented as sexual bodies. Hence, a priest must not expose his phallus in the Temple court, and bodies that drip fluids from penis or vagina are prohibited from entering the Temple precincts or touching holy objects. Such impurity has no moral implications, but renders the body ritually impure for cultic activity. Because major impurities are contagious by touch, bodily impurity restricts interpersonal contact in the cases of childbirth, abnormal genital fluids, and menstruation, but not in the case of sexual intercourse (which causes a lesser degree of impurity). All bodily impurity requires separation from divine space until ritual purification occurs.

Presumably because God is a transcendent (disembodied) being, divine space is antithetical to human sexuality and reproduction. Although God creates humans as sexual creatures, sexual expressions are inimical to God's cultic presence. Hence, there is a spatial and sexual contrast between the holy and the profane. Holy space is beyond sexuality, and profane space is the domain of sexuality. This contrast between sexuality and holiness gave impetus to some later traditions of sexual asceticism. These traditions, while exegetically derived, are radical departures from the positive value of sexuality in ancient Israelite culture.

see also Judaism.