A Woman's Place is in the House: Royal Women of Judah and Their Involvement in the House of David (review)

This study seeks to explore the roles and functions of the royal women of Judah as presented in the Hebrew Bible, focusing primarily on the books of Samuel and Kings. An introductory discussion, locating the thrust of the work in its immediate scholarly context, is followed in chapter 1 by an overview of the roles and positions of royal women in the ancient Near East, taking in a range of material which includes Egyptian, Sumerian, Akkadian, and Ugaritic texts. As is well known, many of the titles ascribed to ancient Near Eastern royal women are relationally passive, that is, they define a royal woman in terms of her relationship to the monarch (for example, "mother of the king," "wife of the king"). However, in examining the titles and functions of many of these royal women, Solvang is keen to emphasize their active roles within the monarchy in the particular arenas of political and social access, industry in the royal household, service to the kingdom, dynasty, and cult.

The second chapter, entitled "Women's Place in the House," offers a cogent critique of the term "harem," a label employed in scholarly discussions of the roles and positions of women in royal households. Solvang demonstrates the various ways in which this label—which is argued to have no technical equivalent in the pertinent ancient languages—is misused within scholarship. Its common application to groups of royal women renders them restricted and powerless figures in its evocation of "images of a collection of women retained for the sexual pleasure of the king locked in a section of the palace accessible only to the king and guarded by eunuchs" (p. 51). Rather, the women of royal households were all those for whom the king was responsible, including unmarried sisters, female dignitaries inherited from preceding royal households, and high status women of defeated enemies, as well as those sexually connected with the king. Among them, these women were responsible for a range of administrative, diplomatic, and cultic duties, and as such, Solvang argues, are better understood as "hierarchically organized female functionaries" (p. 65) of the royal household.

Chapter 3 marks the beginning of the second part of the study, in which the biblical material forms the primary focus. The types and titles of biblical royal women are briefly examined and assessed in this chapter, along with the information presented in the regnal notices of the so-called Deuteronomistic History. Here, the discussion departs from its former historical context, and enters instead the narrative world constructed in the texts. This is a sensible shift, given both the dearth of inscriptional and iconographic material relating to royal Judahite and Israelite women, and the often tendentious nature of the biblical texts. However, one suspects that the shift may result from necessity rather than methodological prudence, for the discussion in chapters 3–6 frequently slides, perhaps unwittingly, into an historical tone, betraying the difficulty of the transition from the historical discussions of chapters 1 and 2, to the narrative context of the remainder.

Chapters 4–6 are the strongest of the book. Each offers a reading of biblical perceptions of royal woman, employing the "anthropological-historical" perspectives of chapters 1 and 2 as an interpretative guide. Thus the narrative portrayals of a royal daughter, Michal (ch. 4), a royal mother, Bathsheba (ch. 5), and a royal wife, Athaliah (ch. 6) are carefully and closely examined. These discussions are detailed and judicious, and offer three striking portraits of biblical women constructed upon the text-sensitive approaches of narrative criticism. A particular strength of these chapters is the explicit recognition, initially articulated in the Introduction (p. 14), that these readings of Michal, Bathsheba, and Athaliah are not intended as the only appropriate interpretations, but as a selection of...