Work in progress.
Ancient Hebrew Marriage and Family in the Old Testament Period:a Perspective from the Standpoint of Social History and Social Anthropology
PhD, University of Manchester, 1974
I was an undergraduate in Biblical Studies at Manchester University between 1967 and 1970. This involved academic, critical study, unlike Theology courses which were then designed for and used by church training. My subsidiary studies included Akkadian, and Ugaritic. I remember F F Bruce teaching on The English Bible. Other lecturers were Arnold Anderson, J M Allegro, James Barr, Ralph Martin, Stephen Smalley. I obtained a Major State Studentship to carry on to PhD and on the basis of that got married. When I think of the efforts today to guide students to produce a viable synopsis, focused and meeting scholarly criteria, there was none of that. What do you want to do? Write it on a side of A4. So My PhD on Ancient Hebrew Marriage and Family was born. It was three PhDs rolled into one - The Old Testament and Social Anthropology; OT Marriage; and OT Family. That pre-internet time relied on the library and print journals, and the writing tools were a portable typewriter, carbon papers, tippex, scissors and glue. Given all that I am still proud of the monster I achieved (there were no word limits). This thesis exists if at all only on microfilm. It was however an early example of two fields that grew in importance, women's issues/feminist interpretation and the use of anthropology in Biblical Studies. I ended up teaching education in university rather than Bible. I did however bring together a writing team from the Society for Old Testament Study and edited Creating the Old Testament: The Development of the Hebrew Bible in 1989.
Today we have the technology to make early writings available relatively easily. Each section is introduced by my maturer comments (in the light of subsequent reading) from 2017 onwards. I have changed the order of chapters to lead off with attitudes to women in Ancient Israel. This allows me to set marriage in context, whilst seeking to do justice to the mass of material now available on feminist biblical interpretation.that has appeared since my thesis was completed. This sequence will undoubtedly change over time but it gives me a rough plan.
Part I Attitudes to Women
[https://ancienthebrewwomen.blogspot.co.uk] not yet live, material is given below
- Introduction
- Feminist Bible Interpretation
- Patriarchy
- Social Issues
- Sexual Issues
- Religious Issues
- Conclusions to Part I
Part II Marriage
- Marriage (General)
- Monogamy and Polygyny
- Intermarriage
- Incest and Adultery
- Levirate Marriage
- Divorce
- Conclusions to Part II
Part III Family and Kinship
- Patriarchy
- Family
- Children
- Genealogies
- Kinship
- Social Order
- Concluding Remarks
I suppose that getting married during my undergraduate course may have affected my choice. So did a new course offered by Rev Arnold Anderson on ancient Hebrew social institutions. I wrote then as a social historian first and foremost. Feminism as yet had no foothold in OT study by 1973-4 when the thesis was completed. The Christian fundamentalism I was brought up with in the Plymouth Brethren had long since gone, even before entering university (it had been abusive in several ways) and I counted myself as an agnostic first and an atheist finally. A study of Old Testament (OT) marriage from an evangelical scholar, The Flame of Yahweh (R.M. Davidson 2007) was so openly apologetic (that is, defending evangelical Christian assumptions) that I was spurred to rework my thesis. By this time I viewed the OT narratives as stories and not as history. I accept much less as history than we did then. As I said in my Creating the Old Testament, the history is contained in the fact thanthat some person or persons unknown wrote the texts at a time we do not know and for purposes that we do not know. The historian's task is to unravel these issues.
My supervisor was Arnold Anderson, the examiner was Prof John Gray (University of Aberdeen, 1913-2000) whose posthumous commentary on the book of Job has only recently been published. Manchester University unbound the top copy to make the microfiche. My own copy is the second carbon and not possible to scan. I don't really want to put a 1974 work with all its flaws into the public domain, not least because of its size and close to 200,000 words. I would today have told my younger self to focus and not bind two PhDs, on marriage and then on family life, into one volume. That was the time before computers or word processors, spell check or easy editing. Make a mistake or want to add a section type the whole page again.
In those days, feminist Bible criticism was only just beginning. Phyllis Trible's first article coincided with the submission of my thesis. Many feminist studies over the next two decades have considerably enriched the literature about women, marriage and family. Also OT studies mainly operated within a source-historical paradigm of which John Bright's History of Israel was the main textbook. This influenced my text more than it would today. The presumption then was that Abraham to David described real people and real events. Few outside faith dogmatics would be confident about that extreme position, and there is a range of positions between treating stories as rooted in history, or as fiction. My view has shifted from the former to the latter.
The abstract and a preface is attached below. It presumed that a social history could be obtained from the texts. Due caution is needed. It is a bit like constructing social history from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales,or a Shakespeare play an imprecise exercise because the stories have a literary purpose. What the OT material does show is an attitude to gender and relationships, and hints at a social structure based around genealogy and 'true blood' legitimacy. Here use of social anthropology was a help and a hindrance. Many tribes use genealogy as everyday relationship location, so modern parallels were helpful. However, in the OT was this a social activity or a literary-theological one?
The account here is new writing to a different writing plan. This will develop over time. I will on occasions be extracting exegetical passages, for example on Genesis 34 (Dinah) and 38 (Tamar) and many other passages that are currently lost in dense text. My study overall comments on Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Leah, Zilpah and Zilpah, Zipporah, Miriam, the women in the Former Prophets, so-called history books and beyond. A hopelessly optimistic project, but providing the bare bones I can now fill out.
The Bible (Old Testament) is the topic of this blog. As it serves as scripture within Judaism and Christianity, so some readers may have theological issues with what I write. I am not a theologian but an historian, for whom Bible texts are simply ancient documents written by and about a society long gone. 'Old Testament' is a Christianised title for the Hebrew Bible, bearing the explicit assumption that Christianity has superseded its predecessor, whose own texts were named New Testament. 'Testament' in this context is a translation of 'covenant': Jeremiah 31 refers to an old legalistic covenant giving way to a new spiritual one, so this supersession is part of pre-Christian Hebrew theology which the first Christians appropriated. The Hebrew Bible comprises a group of ancient texts not to be taken uncritically since some texts appear to advocate homophobia, genocide, capital punishment and misogyny. If taken literally, it has claimed justification for war, genocide, slavery, polygyny and other undesirable things. Whatever else these texts are, they are not a guide to life and society. Many religious people interpret their religion ethically, but some do not. Some people, usually men with power, interpret their religion to maintain their power and privilege. This damaged my own adolescence. Religion has promoted division and conflict. We must read religious texts critically and ethically.
Old Testament Studies Then and Now
I
The Old Testament studies I entered in the 1960s were generally conservative. That is, it assumes that events described in the OT really happened, and figures in the narrative really existed. The basic textbook was John Bright's History of Israel who believed that OT history was broadly accurate and datable. I was awarded two school prizes of books by W F Albright, the biblical archaeologist who tended to use archaeology to 'prove' the Bible's historicity. At university there was a broader mix. Ken Kitchen's very conservative Old Testament and Ancient Orient was met with scepticism; but the old certainties of the Graf-Wellhausen's documentary hypothesis (so called Higher Criticism) were becoming ragged. Nevertheless most scholars worked within its assumptions, as I was encouraged to do. The late John Allegro the Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, taught us Hebrew texts, whilst following his own anarchic journey via sacred mushrooms. I liked him, my evangelical colleagues didn't. Samuel Brandon raised the ire of the Christian Union with his (reasonable) proposals in Jesus the Zealot that the disciples were not as innocent as generally assumed. Manchester University department, under the well-respected conservative F F Bruce, was a mixed bunch. I worked also with Classics (who taught me ancient Greek) and the Near Eastern Studies department which taught me Hebrew, Ugaritic, Akkadian and Epigraphy.I
Fundamentalist Christians, such as those who brought me up, rejected all attempts to approach the Bible critically. I was in constant trouble in church for asking too many questions; rather I was told to just accept it as word of God. Christian-centric assumptions could be implicit and insidious. Anthony Phillips, lawyer and priest, who wrote some good OT books on law, declared, in God B.C. (1977) an evolutionary view with God in the OT depicted as jealous, illogical, and absent and gradually progressing to eventual Messianic Christianity. The mix of Biblical Studies, Theology and evangelical ministerial training did not encourage enough critical radicalness. Christianity was a broad church of evangelical, fundamentalist, charismatic, liberal, Catholic and others. There was a similar range of views in Judaism. There are no 'Christian views' or 'Jewish assumptions' - faiths divide into a wide range of incompatible points of view. Conservative normally describes someone with faith regarding the Bible as scripture, inspired by God in some way. The opposite is harder to categorise, since it includes people with faith but radical theology, and people like me with no faith at all who don't want theology clouding issues.
We could then divide OT scholarship into the work of theologians and of historians. Sometimes the title states the allegiance. Theological work is concerned with hermeneutics, explaining relevance for today, its use for preaching. Some fellow students with me were trainee ministers and pastors, since several courses attended the same lectures. Some on the conservative side are 'apologetic', that is defend the 'truth' of the Bible with a closed mind. This approach cannot be radical as it is circular and cannot come to non-conservative conclusions. Scripture should not, the ideology goes, be criticised as racist, sexist or just plain wrong (though it can in fact be all of those things). I self-identified as being an historian and not a theologian. I do not start from the presumption that the Bible is in any way 'true' or 'word of God', but rather it is a human document written for socio-political purposes to set an ideological agenda, probably by people with power. In other words it is a document for the powerful to diminish and control the powerless. My deconstruction of the texts will reconsider the point of view of the victims. Since women were institutionally discriminated against, this is a good mechanism to develop this purpose. My interest in a sense bridged the two: history implies listening to a text as written for its own day, using the processes of hermeneutics for literary purposes. I wanted a window on the past, not a sermon for the present. However, we need to consider with an open mind whether history writing is fact or fiction (or a mix), and to distinguish between story, allegory and poetry. Also we need holistic reading as well as focus on small stories.
II
David Clines of Sheffield University described the old approach as atomism and geneticism - atomism breaking the text down into small parts instead of viewing the whole; geneticism being concerned with the history of interpretation rather than letting the whole speak. Clines interviewed me as an 17 year old university applicant as Sheffield was one of my preferred university choices. I had also met him socially. Clines was from a conservative church background but with a critical mind, resulting in a wealth of books of lasting value. His The Theme of the Pentateuch (1978) asked scholars to read the Pentateuch as a whole without getting too tensed up about what 'final form' means, accepting that in is normal for versions to be revised from time to time. This was not a denial of the history of criticism but a focus on meaning rather than sources. Various themes of promise and continuity are emphasised, written for and by the exiles about to make the journey back to Israel/Palestine, giving the Pentateuch an historical function. The theme had to do with the promise of for God's relationship with humanity, in spite of humanity's constant rejection of it. The covenant with the Hebrews is only partially fulfilled because of this, and its fruition must remain a future aspiration. This interest in the themes and purpose of the final text of the many books was my vision for Creating the Old Testament (COT), not derivative from Clines' book in particular except as a cog in the broader methodological shift. Clines was a member of my writing team.
The 'final form' account presupposes a final text form of around the 6th century BCE, around the time of the Babylonian exile and subsequent return to Israel/Palestine, in which earlier events described cannot be regarded as history as we know it. It is worth commenting that there is scant archaeological or documentary evidence for these early characters and events. The late kings Omri and Jehu appear as defeated enemies on ancient inscriptions, but that is about all. The earlier events (if events they were) of the Exodus would have been 13th or 12th century BCE, the time the bronze ages became the Iron Age. In the Pentateuch we see Abraham the wanderer from Babylonia (Ur in Chaldea) into Canaan, the turbulence of marginal settlement, and the threats of local power blocks including Egypt. The story of the 'wilderness wanderings' is one of sin, rebellion and idolatry, not dissimilar from what is reported in Ezra-Nehemiah leading to the intermarriage crisis. In COT: 118 I wrote:
"Thus there is no compelling evidence that Moses existed or that the events recorded in Exodus occurred. The only point of which we can be sure is that the present literary version of the Moses story was written for reasons which can be guessed and with concerns which can be seen in the texts."On "the message of Exodus", my conclusions are much the same as Clines, that the theme was of the divine promise frustrated by human rebelliousness, and therefore incomplete.
Within this mix comes literary style and expressive methods. Robert Alter titled his pioneering book The Art of Biblical Narrative. Alter was a professor of literature who, being Jewish, read Hebrew. He wanted to know how the narrative worked as narrative. This is a further reaction against atomising sources, seeking rather to read the text as a whole to work out why the writer expressed himself as he did. I use the word 'he' as likely, since there is no evidence of female authors. He followed this by editing a survey of OT books using this approach as The Literary Guide to the Bible (with Frank Kermode,1987), with contributions by significant scholars such as Jan Fokkelman on Genesis-Exodus, discussed above. Exegesis draws out original meaning. Searching for relevance to life today is called hermeneutics. Traditionally hermeneutics refers to expounding the word of God to enrich religious life. Hermeneutics outside of a faith position interrogates the text within the values of today. Exploring feminist interpretions, or discussing discriminatory issues are examples of hermeneutic use of texts through modern values (noting of course the problematic nature of all values).
Robert Polzin wrote the Deuteronomy chapter of the Literary Guide. He is no conservative theologian. The purpose of this approach is most certainly not to 'prove' the Bible to be true but to read it as a narrative. Polzin's Moses and the Deuteronomist (1980) introduces his postmodern methodology starting with Gadamer's modern hermeneutic - a crisis between what the Bible claims (divine authority) and how scholars approach it (even if they believe the Bible is the word of God). Polzin notes that modern historians of the period should seek to step into the theological shoes of the ancient historians to understand how they saw their community. In other words, historians should try to understand the worldview of ancient writers to appreciate its internal logic. Polzin puts it well in his introduction to Samuel and the Deuteronomist (1989: 2-8), that previous discussions and commentaries had focused on this history of the text and tradition to the detriment of discussion of what the narratives were actually saying and the artistry of their composition. The 'author' is communicating something she or he regards as important. We may not agree with it but we need to understand it. He rejects those who approach Deuteronomy by using "comparative material to reconstruct the putative setting of a putative text, all the while ignoring the rather obvious relevance of their material for the real text. What is the putative doubt of Israelites during a putative few years in Israel's history counteracted by a putative document, in comparison with the relevant background everywhere apparent in the real text" (p.7). This dilemma sums up a century of Old Testament study. Let us read clearly what has been passed down.
The German critics up to Wellhausen were Christians operating in an anti-semitic world, the world of the Dreyfuss affair. They felt that Christians owned the Old Testament. Higher criticism (as the documentary hypothesis was called) discredited the Old Testament narrative by postulating (putative) sources.
My last example here is the Jewish liberal scholar S David Sperling (The Original Torah:The Political Intent of the Bible's Writers (1998) from the Hebrew Union College/Jewish Institute of Religion). He argues that stories of patriarchs and others were fiction and not history, allegorically addressing issues of the time of writing, that is the post-exilic period. The returning exiles were 'sojourners' in the new land, needing to confirm their identity, and create a narrative of entitlement to their new territory. This makes new demands on interpretation and is likely to cause the ire of conservative Jews and Christians. Rationalism crosses religious boundaries, seeking evidence and explanation. Some less rational readers are likely to find this disconcerting. An argument that ancient Israel was not what it seemed, and that narratives about ancestry and land-claims were fiction is likely to be politically controversial. Sperling concluded that the patriarchs and even Moses were "wholly fictitious characters" (p.28), that the narrative was "fiction composed to look like history" (p.25). Anachronisms suggest a post-exilic date - Ur of the Chaldeans (Genesis 12) and the Persian name Parnach for an ancestor (Numbers 34.25) suggesting a 6th century date for writing, not earlier. Sperling's view is to read Old Testament narrative as allegory and not history, allegories which provide commentary on the period of the writers (6th century BCE) but not their subject matter. If this is true, the origins of ancient Israel was the story told by the politicians who migrated to Palestine to justify their land claim as being historical when actually they were, like Abraham in the story, sojourners (immigrants) in a foreign land. How these stories were composed, and whether there was a folk tradition, are questions we need to consider.
So this re-writing of my 'thesis' (my research idea rather than the printed text) starts now from a radically different place.
My 1974 Abstract
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