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NWSA Journal 16.2 (2004) 196-206



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Gender in Jewish Antiquity:

Biblical Texts, Rabbinic Interpretations, and Feminist Interventions

Dinah's Daughters: Gender and Judaism from the Hebrew Bible to Late Antiquity by Helena Zlotnick. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002, 248 pp., $55.00 hardcover, $19.95 paper.
Reading the Women of the Bible: A New Interpretation of Their Stories by Tikva Frymer-Kensky. New York: Schocken Books, 2002, 446 pp., $28.95 hardcover.
Midrashic Women: Formations of the Feminine in Rabbinic Literature by Judith R. Baskin. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2002, 232 pp., $60.00 hardcover, $23.95 paper.
Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender by Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000, 326 pp., $60.00 hardcover, $22.95 paper.
Rebuilding the House of Israel: Architectures of Gender in Jewish Antiquity by Cynthia M. Baker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002, 260 pp., $60.00 hardcover.

How do we approach and interpret the status and role of women in Jewish antiquity and in ancient Jewish texts, notably the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud? Can we study the distinct texts and periods of the Hebrew Bible (ca. 1200-200 B.C.E.) and Hellenistic and rabbinic literature (ca. 200 B.C.E.-600 C.E.) as aspects of "Jewish antiquity?" How are women represented in the texts, and what do we know about their lives? Are these sources hopelessly androcentric, even misogynous, or do they reveal female voices and spaces that previous scholarship has ignored? The books under review differ in their focus, object of inquiry (e.g., Bible versus Talmud), method (literary analysis versus historical reconstruction), and conclusions. [End Page 196] In general, Zlotnick and Baskin offer an unstinting critique of ancient Jewish sources, while Frymer-Kensky rejects such feminist criticisms of the Hebrew Bible and Fonrobert and Baker do the same for the Talmud.

The academic and disciplinary division between biblical and rabbinic literature is called into question in Helena Zlotnick's Dinah's Daughters: Gender and Judaism from the Hebrew Bible to Late Antiquity. Her thesis is that Jewish antiquity, as such—including the Hebrew Bible, extra-canonical Hellenistic sources, as well as rabbinic literature—have produced a restrictive interpretation of what it means to be a "Jewess." The Jewess—docile, chaste, and homebound—is constructed in the Hebrew Bible as the antithesis of the gentile woman who is active, sexual, and at home in the world. The Talmud also restricts the Jewess to marital and domestic plots. Zlotnick sees little difference between the Greek, Roman, or Jewish cultural delimitations of feminine propriety, though in general she perceives Jewish articulations of femininity as more restrictive and oppressive than their Greco-Roman analogues. Based on the stories of Cozbi, the Moabite wife (25 Numbers) and the rejection of exogamous marriage in Ezra-Nehamiah, and the post-biblical book of Jubilees, she argues that Jewish antiquity evinces a special hostility toward foreign women. The glowing portraits of the biblical queen Esther, the beautiful and meek Jewess who saves her people from extinction at the hands of the Persians, and of the pure and chaste Aseneth of the second Temple period do not mitigate Zlotnick's judgment. While Jewish women may marry foreign men under the most extreme of circumstances, foreign women must undergo a complete conversion to Judaism. Zlotnick suggests, though she does not theoretically develop, a linkage between gender and ethnicity. Zlotnick points out that both Roman and rabbinic rulings connect women's affiliations to society with her marital fidelity. Even after the destruction of the second temple, rabbinic discussions of the defunct law of the suspected adulteress (sotah)exemplify the discursive policing of wifely propriety: "Both emperors and rabbis, then, regarded husbands and not wives as the guardians of marital chastity. Husbands possessed full powers over the body of their wives not only by having exclusive access to it but also by being invested with the authority to prosecute the violation of her body by another" (122). Thus, women in general, and Jewish women in particular, were...

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