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Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context
This groundbreaking study looks beyond biblical texts, which have had a powerful influence over our views of women's roles and worth, in order to reconstruct the typical everyday lives of women in ancient Israel. Meyers argues that biblical sources alone do not give a true picture of ancient Israelite women because urban elite males wrote the vast majority of the scriptural texts and the stories of women in the Bible concern exceptional individuals rather than ordinary Israelite women. Analyzing the biblical material in light of recent archaeological discoveries about rural village life in ancient Palestine, Meyers depicts Israelite women not as submissive chattel in an oppressive patriarchy, but rather as strong and significant actors within their families and society.
256 pages, Paperback
First published November 24, 1988
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January 30, 2023
Excellent read.
Warning - spoilers ahead
In her book "Discovering Eve: Ancient Women in Context" (1991), Carol Meyers argues that the traditional view of women in the ancient Near East is incomplete and misleading. She contends that the biblical and other texts that have been used to reconstruct the lives of ancient women have been heavily influenced by patriarchal perspectives and biases. Meyers argues that women in the ancient Near East played a much more active and significant role in society than has been traditionally assumed.
She also emphasizes the need for a more nuanced and context-specific approach to understanding the lives of ancient women, taking into account factors such as class, ethnicity, and religious beliefs. Meyers also focuses on the different roles and status of women in various ancient Near Eastern societies, such as Israel, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, and highlights the diversity of women's experiences and perspectives.
She opens her book, dispelling myths that many perpetuate when attacking the Hebrew Bible. Meyers tells us that “the parameters of male dominance, at the very least, must be examined more closely than has been the norm” (p. 43). She writes that “group survival is dependent on the involvement of its members in three basic kinds of activities: reproduction, defense, and the production of subsistence goods. The interrelationship of these activities is meaningful with respect to gender in societies like tribal Israel in which state mechanisms do not interfere with the distribution and use of the products of any of these activities. That is, we can reconstruct the extent to which females and males took on the tasks associated with each activity and in that way begin to estimate their relative contributions to society. Reproduction, of course, was an exclusively female contribution to Israelite society. Similarly, defense matters fell largely to the males; in the militia system alluded to in the stories of the Judges, the men of the various tribes respond, and in some cases fail to respond, to a call to arms (Judg 4:10; 6:34-35; 7:24; 12:1). The subsistence activities of ancient Israel, as for most social groups, were therefore those in which a shifting balance of female and male participation could take place… frontier life mean more work for everyone” (p. 56).
Carol Meyers provides several examples of how traditional readings of the Hebrew Bible are mistaken. One example she gives is the story of the creation of Eve in the book of Genesis. Meyers argues that the traditional interpretation of this story, which portrays Eve as a secondary and inferior (coming from the translation of עֵזֶר כְּנֶגְדּֽוֹ ezer kenegdo – see Genesis 2.18, translated in the King James as “help meet”) being created as a helper for Adam, is a result of patriarchal biases. She explains:
Traditional interpretations of this story would have us believe that a helper is an assistant or subordinate, who renders aid to a master or superior. Yet, in the Hebrew Bible the noun "helper" can refer to just the opposite, namely, to a superior, notably God, to whom one turns for help in time of distress. Think of the familiar words of Psalm 121:1-2: "From whence does my help come? My help will come from the LORD." Or, consider the etymology of the name Ezra, which is a shortened form of a theophoric name (containing the divine name) meaning "[God is] helper." Or look at Azariah, which means "Yahweh has helped" (one of the most popular names in the Bible, it is used for more than two dozen different individuals). The noun "helper" can thus indicate either a superior or a subordinate. How can one resolve this ambiguity in any given case? The prepositional phrase in Genesis 2:18 and 20 provides the answer by telling us which kind of helper is meant. In fact, the answer is neither of the possibilities suggested above: the helper stands neither higher nor lower than the one being helped. The prepositional phrase establishes a nonhierarchical relationship between the two; it means "opposite," or "corresponding to," or "parallel with," or "on a par with." (Discovering Eve, p. 85)
Another example that Carol Meyers provides in her book is the portrayal of women in the Hebrew Bible as property or possessions of men. Meyers points out that the laws and regulations in the Hebrew Bible regarding marriage, divorce, and inheritance treat women as the property of their fathers or husbands and have little autonomy or agency. She argues that this portrayal is a reflection of patriarchal biases and does not accurately reflect the reality of women's lives in ancient Israel. Meyers also points out that there are examples of women who held positions of power and authority, such as Deborah in the book of Judges and Huldah in 2 Kings 22, which contradicts the idea that all women were subservient and without agency.
In one place she argues that the situation in Israel prior to the foundation of the monarchy provided a social climate that made it so that men and women were equal in the respect to power in their marriages and their social kin groups. Survival was essential, and men did not dominate women. To the contrary, women exercised power in their clan groups, and both men and women provided all the material goods in premonarchial Israel necessary to live in a harsh environment where rainfall was scarce and the land needed to be terraced and claimed for agricultural needs:
Because of the complexity of Palestine's highland ecology, a farmer in one village may have developed a strategy that differed in significant ways from that of a farmer in a nearby village. The gross technology and crop selection would be the same, but subtle and vital variants would have evolved according to the ecology of each village. Women from the broader kinship groups, from nearby villages, were the wives in an endogamous system. Yet, they too would have had to learn the management of their husband's household. The husband's authority in establishing household practices suitable to the local ecology thus had a strong functional advantage. In light of these considerations of male authority, the role of the husband as ba'al (master) appears to have been operant in maintaining household efficiency when outsiders, whether from near or far, were brought into the compound. Such authority would have been shared by the senior female to the extent that she had long experience with the operation of the household domain. If the male held the authority to determine the method of completing household tasks as well as the means of integrating behavior into a cultural system, he did so because of his prior tie to the land that was the source of the household's survival. But male behavior in this regard should not be generalized to all aspects of household life. Much of daily life and technology were uniform throughout the hill country and even the Levant as a whole… The structural authority of the male in the Israelite household cannot be separated from the considerable female involvement in the economic and other aspects of household life. Family dynamics were naturally radically different from those in the present-day western family, which is a "non-producing collectivity of consumers." As long as the household remained the central institution of the villages and tribes, the critical role of the female in sharing the labor, bearing and socializing children, and managing vital subsistence procedures offset the hierarchical potential of formal male authority. The decentralized and difficult village life of premonarchic Israel provided a context for gender mutuality and interdependence, and of concomitant female power. Male authority existed in certain spheres but there was no connotation of misogyny, the oppression of females, or the notion of female inferiority. (p. 185-187)
The Denigration of Mother Eve חַוָּה
Another example that Carol Meyers provides in her book Discovering Eve: Ancient Women in Context (1991) is the portrayal of women in the Hebrew Bible as being responsible for the original sin and for the fall of humanity in the story of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis. Meyers argues that this interpretation is a result of patriarchal biases, and that the story has been used to justify the subordinate status of women in society. She argues:
The early chapters of Genesis challenge our ability to be open-minded in dealing with biblical texts relevant to gender. Perhaps more than any other part of the Bible, those chapters have influenced western notions of gender identity and roles. But we must remember that Genesis 2-3 antedate by a millennium or more the religious traditions that have appropriated those texts as normative statements about human nature. That is, the earliest Jewish and Christian communities used the Genesis stories, as they used many other parts of the already ancient and sacred literature of Israel, to help them deal with their own sociological and theological concerns. The leaders of nascent postbiblical religion interpreted and emphasized certain features of Genesis 2-3 as they established their own views of creation and gender, of sex and sin. The church fathers and the early rabbis were interpreters of new religious developments emerging from the biblical past, and their views became authoritative and normative. Consequently, we tend to see those pivotal texts of the Hebrew canon through the interpretive eyes of the early Jewish and Christian sages. So fixed in our minds are the explanations of postbiblical tradition that we are hardly aware that the commonly accepted translations and expositions of Genesis 2-3, among other biblical passages, may not accurately or fairly represent the meaning and function of these texts in their original contexts (p. 72).
Meyers notes that after Genesis, Eve does not get any mention in the Hebrew Bible (p. 74). But she does resurface later.
Eve finally appears in extant literature in the second century BCE, when she figures in a work that is not part of the Hebrew canon. After Genesis 2-3, the earliest writing that refers to Eve is probably Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Ben Sira, which is part of the canon in Catholic but not in Jewish or Protestant Bibles. Ben Sira apparently is alluding to Eve when he says, "From a woman was the beginning of sin, / And because of her we all died." In associating sin with Eve, Ben Sira was probably taking a minority position because his contemporaries tended to ascribe sin either to Adam or, on the basis of Genesis 6:1-4, to the fall of evil angels and their cohabitation with women. Nonetheless, as the first known author to state that sin and death are the negative results of a woman's act, this early stage provided one of the most extraordinarily tenacious interpretations of a biblical narrative.
A century later, the unknown author of a work called the Books of Adam and Eve picked up on Ecclesiasticus' reading of the Adam and Eve story. Written in part as if Eve herself were the author, this pseudepigraphical book leaves no doubt as to the role of Eve in bringing about all the sin and suffering in the world. In passage after passage, Eve recounts and confesses her awful deeds. One sample indicates the tone of Eve's words, as she seeks to relieve the suffering that Adam experiences when God begins to punish him for disobedience. " 'O Lord my God, hand over to me his pain, for it is I who sinned.' And Eve said to Adam: 'My Lord give me a part of thy pains, for this has come to you from fault of mine.' " A related composition also dating to the early first century BCE, the Apocalypse of Moses, similarly underscores the causality of Eve with respect to sin. The anonymous author of that work has Eve proclaim: “'I have sinned, O God, I have sinned, O God of All, I have sinned before Thee. . . . I have sinned before Thee and all sin hath begun through my doing in the creation.'”
Such attitudes as these, current in the Jewish world in the last few centuries before Christ, entered Christian tradition and can be found in the New Testament in such passages as 1 Timothy 2:13-14: "For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor." Not only is Eve associated with sin; her creation is viewed as secondary and, by implication, of lesser importance.
By the early centuries of the Christian era, instances of such attitudes toward Eve become common in religious literature. The association of Eve and sin with sexuality and lust, already present in texts such as the Books of Adam and Eve and the New Testament, is expanded in both Christian and Jewish postbiblical sources, with the serpent playing an increasingly satanic and phallic role. And of course the more Eve is identified as the source of sin, the more urgent becomes the need to control, subdue, and dominate her. Eve is seen as representative of her sex, and thus all women are regarded as requiring subjugation to wiser and superior male figures.
As if this situation were not already problematic enough, it led to still another kind of interference with our vision of the Eve of Genesis: the problem of translations. That is, most of us read about Eve in texts that are not in their original language. While translations can and do often accurately represent the texts they render, they can also—often unconsciously— subtly change and distort the original meaning. Because the process of translating the Hebrew Bible began in the same centuries that the interpretive literature just described was being composed, the ancient translations also suffer from the possibility of bias and distortion… Western literature and art are replete with expressions of the Eve story cast so as to express the author's or artist's own social views. Perhaps the most influential of all has been John Milton's Paradise Lost, which developed the Eden tale so strongly that many of our present recollections of the biblical story are more faithful to his portrayal of Eve or Satan than to the original Hebrew narrative (p. 75-76).
The shift from agrarian society towards monarchy
The move towards monarchy and an organized military with taxation and a market economy disrupted the local household and clan based economic systems of early Israel. With this shift, more power came into the hands of the men, but I would add that this was still a minority of men, from my reading of Meyers and others that have dealt with this topic. Most men in Israel at the time of the monarchy were still in an egalitarian system, as survival was paramount, and many clans lived season to season, working and praying that their crops came in, hoping to survive. Certainly there were large land holders in 7th century Israel, and elites cropped up with the rise of statehood, but I don’t see a domination over women for the majority of men at this time. Meyers seems to reflect these ideas as well, as she covers the shifting sands of male-female relations with the rise of the state:
“The rise of the state meant the gradual end of a society in which the household was the dominant social unit. The locus of power moved from the family household, with its gender parity, to a public world of male control. The establishment of a nation-state meant the growing prominence of the military and of state and religious bureaucracies controlling economic development… State formation created hierarchical relationships and robbed females of their customary equality or interdependence with males” (p. 190).
“The market economy, along with the burden of taxation and the inexorable ecological risks of the Palestinian environment, all strained the fragile household economy beyond what it could bear in many cases. The struggle of households for survival is reflected in the expansion of the earlier legal handling of debt in the biblical laws by the eighth or seventh century BCE. Deuteronomic law deals extensively with debt servitude. Such legal attention indicates an increase of debt servitude as households either failed or took desperate measures to remain viable… Large landholders emerged, and the peasants lost control of their means of subsistence and consequently of their social and economic power. This process perhaps culminated in the events of the seventh century BCE, when the crown appears to have broken whatever remnants of the lineage system” (p. 192).
Certainly, then, the monarchy meant changes in the entire fabric of society… The eventual disruption of the lineage system certainly reinforced social and political hierarchies, which would have contributed to gender hierarchies. Furthermore, the development of a market economy would probably have exaggerated the division of labor along gender lines with more prestige and control going to the males dominating the extradomestic economic life” (p. 193).
Overall, this is an excellent read if you are wanting to see Eve in a new light, or if you want more information regarding life in Israel prior to the monarchy, and how this type of existence relates to the account of the creation and “Fall” told in the Genesis narrative. Reading the statistics regarding life expectancy, infant mortality, and work distribution was excellent. I always like seeing Eve in new ways, and Meyer’s work was worthy.
Warning - spoilers ahead
In her book "Discovering Eve: Ancient Women in Context" (1991), Carol Meyers argues that the traditional view of women in the ancient Near East is incomplete and misleading. She contends that the biblical and other texts that have been used to reconstruct the lives of ancient women have been heavily influenced by patriarchal perspectives and biases. Meyers argues that women in the ancient Near East played a much more active and significant role in society than has been traditionally assumed.
She also emphasizes the need for a more nuanced and context-specific approach to understanding the lives of ancient women, taking into account factors such as class, ethnicity, and religious beliefs. Meyers also focuses on the different roles and status of women in various ancient Near Eastern societies, such as Israel, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, and highlights the diversity of women's experiences and perspectives.
She opens her book, dispelling myths that many perpetuate when attacking the Hebrew Bible. Meyers tells us that “the parameters of male dominance, at the very least, must be examined more closely than has been the norm” (p. 43). She writes that “group survival is dependent on the involvement of its members in three basic kinds of activities: reproduction, defense, and the production of subsistence goods. The interrelationship of these activities is meaningful with respect to gender in societies like tribal Israel in which state mechanisms do not interfere with the distribution and use of the products of any of these activities. That is, we can reconstruct the extent to which females and males took on the tasks associated with each activity and in that way begin to estimate their relative contributions to society. Reproduction, of course, was an exclusively female contribution to Israelite society. Similarly, defense matters fell largely to the males; in the militia system alluded to in the stories of the Judges, the men of the various tribes respond, and in some cases fail to respond, to a call to arms (Judg 4:10; 6:34-35; 7:24; 12:1). The subsistence activities of ancient Israel, as for most social groups, were therefore those in which a shifting balance of female and male participation could take place… frontier life mean more work for everyone” (p. 56).
Carol Meyers provides several examples of how traditional readings of the Hebrew Bible are mistaken. One example she gives is the story of the creation of Eve in the book of Genesis. Meyers argues that the traditional interpretation of this story, which portrays Eve as a secondary and inferior (coming from the translation of עֵזֶר כְּנֶגְדּֽוֹ ezer kenegdo – see Genesis 2.18, translated in the King James as “help meet”) being created as a helper for Adam, is a result of patriarchal biases. She explains:
Traditional interpretations of this story would have us believe that a helper is an assistant or subordinate, who renders aid to a master or superior. Yet, in the Hebrew Bible the noun "helper" can refer to just the opposite, namely, to a superior, notably God, to whom one turns for help in time of distress. Think of the familiar words of Psalm 121:1-2: "From whence does my help come? My help will come from the LORD." Or, consider the etymology of the name Ezra, which is a shortened form of a theophoric name (containing the divine name) meaning "[God is] helper." Or look at Azariah, which means "Yahweh has helped" (one of the most popular names in the Bible, it is used for more than two dozen different individuals). The noun "helper" can thus indicate either a superior or a subordinate. How can one resolve this ambiguity in any given case? The prepositional phrase in Genesis 2:18 and 20 provides the answer by telling us which kind of helper is meant. In fact, the answer is neither of the possibilities suggested above: the helper stands neither higher nor lower than the one being helped. The prepositional phrase establishes a nonhierarchical relationship between the two; it means "opposite," or "corresponding to," or "parallel with," or "on a par with." (Discovering Eve, p. 85)
Another example that Carol Meyers provides in her book is the portrayal of women in the Hebrew Bible as property or possessions of men. Meyers points out that the laws and regulations in the Hebrew Bible regarding marriage, divorce, and inheritance treat women as the property of their fathers or husbands and have little autonomy or agency. She argues that this portrayal is a reflection of patriarchal biases and does not accurately reflect the reality of women's lives in ancient Israel. Meyers also points out that there are examples of women who held positions of power and authority, such as Deborah in the book of Judges and Huldah in 2 Kings 22, which contradicts the idea that all women were subservient and without agency.
In one place she argues that the situation in Israel prior to the foundation of the monarchy provided a social climate that made it so that men and women were equal in the respect to power in their marriages and their social kin groups. Survival was essential, and men did not dominate women. To the contrary, women exercised power in their clan groups, and both men and women provided all the material goods in premonarchial Israel necessary to live in a harsh environment where rainfall was scarce and the land needed to be terraced and claimed for agricultural needs:
Because of the complexity of Palestine's highland ecology, a farmer in one village may have developed a strategy that differed in significant ways from that of a farmer in a nearby village. The gross technology and crop selection would be the same, but subtle and vital variants would have evolved according to the ecology of each village. Women from the broader kinship groups, from nearby villages, were the wives in an endogamous system. Yet, they too would have had to learn the management of their husband's household. The husband's authority in establishing household practices suitable to the local ecology thus had a strong functional advantage. In light of these considerations of male authority, the role of the husband as ba'al (master) appears to have been operant in maintaining household efficiency when outsiders, whether from near or far, were brought into the compound. Such authority would have been shared by the senior female to the extent that she had long experience with the operation of the household domain. If the male held the authority to determine the method of completing household tasks as well as the means of integrating behavior into a cultural system, he did so because of his prior tie to the land that was the source of the household's survival. But male behavior in this regard should not be generalized to all aspects of household life. Much of daily life and technology were uniform throughout the hill country and even the Levant as a whole… The structural authority of the male in the Israelite household cannot be separated from the considerable female involvement in the economic and other aspects of household life. Family dynamics were naturally radically different from those in the present-day western family, which is a "non-producing collectivity of consumers." As long as the household remained the central institution of the villages and tribes, the critical role of the female in sharing the labor, bearing and socializing children, and managing vital subsistence procedures offset the hierarchical potential of formal male authority. The decentralized and difficult village life of premonarchic Israel provided a context for gender mutuality and interdependence, and of concomitant female power. Male authority existed in certain spheres but there was no connotation of misogyny, the oppression of females, or the notion of female inferiority. (p. 185-187)
The Denigration of Mother Eve חַוָּה
Another example that Carol Meyers provides in her book Discovering Eve: Ancient Women in Context (1991) is the portrayal of women in the Hebrew Bible as being responsible for the original sin and for the fall of humanity in the story of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis. Meyers argues that this interpretation is a result of patriarchal biases, and that the story has been used to justify the subordinate status of women in society. She argues:
The early chapters of Genesis challenge our ability to be open-minded in dealing with biblical texts relevant to gender. Perhaps more than any other part of the Bible, those chapters have influenced western notions of gender identity and roles. But we must remember that Genesis 2-3 antedate by a millennium or more the religious traditions that have appropriated those texts as normative statements about human nature. That is, the earliest Jewish and Christian communities used the Genesis stories, as they used many other parts of the already ancient and sacred literature of Israel, to help them deal with their own sociological and theological concerns. The leaders of nascent postbiblical religion interpreted and emphasized certain features of Genesis 2-3 as they established their own views of creation and gender, of sex and sin. The church fathers and the early rabbis were interpreters of new religious developments emerging from the biblical past, and their views became authoritative and normative. Consequently, we tend to see those pivotal texts of the Hebrew canon through the interpretive eyes of the early Jewish and Christian sages. So fixed in our minds are the explanations of postbiblical tradition that we are hardly aware that the commonly accepted translations and expositions of Genesis 2-3, among other biblical passages, may not accurately or fairly represent the meaning and function of these texts in their original contexts (p. 72).
Meyers notes that after Genesis, Eve does not get any mention in the Hebrew Bible (p. 74). But she does resurface later.
Eve finally appears in extant literature in the second century BCE, when she figures in a work that is not part of the Hebrew canon. After Genesis 2-3, the earliest writing that refers to Eve is probably Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Ben Sira, which is part of the canon in Catholic but not in Jewish or Protestant Bibles. Ben Sira apparently is alluding to Eve when he says, "From a woman was the beginning of sin, / And because of her we all died." In associating sin with Eve, Ben Sira was probably taking a minority position because his contemporaries tended to ascribe sin either to Adam or, on the basis of Genesis 6:1-4, to the fall of evil angels and their cohabitation with women. Nonetheless, as the first known author to state that sin and death are the negative results of a woman's act, this early stage provided one of the most extraordinarily tenacious interpretations of a biblical narrative.
A century later, the unknown author of a work called the Books of Adam and Eve picked up on Ecclesiasticus' reading of the Adam and Eve story. Written in part as if Eve herself were the author, this pseudepigraphical book leaves no doubt as to the role of Eve in bringing about all the sin and suffering in the world. In passage after passage, Eve recounts and confesses her awful deeds. One sample indicates the tone of Eve's words, as she seeks to relieve the suffering that Adam experiences when God begins to punish him for disobedience. " 'O Lord my God, hand over to me his pain, for it is I who sinned.' And Eve said to Adam: 'My Lord give me a part of thy pains, for this has come to you from fault of mine.' " A related composition also dating to the early first century BCE, the Apocalypse of Moses, similarly underscores the causality of Eve with respect to sin. The anonymous author of that work has Eve proclaim: “'I have sinned, O God, I have sinned, O God of All, I have sinned before Thee. . . . I have sinned before Thee and all sin hath begun through my doing in the creation.'”
Such attitudes as these, current in the Jewish world in the last few centuries before Christ, entered Christian tradition and can be found in the New Testament in such passages as 1 Timothy 2:13-14: "For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor." Not only is Eve associated with sin; her creation is viewed as secondary and, by implication, of lesser importance.
By the early centuries of the Christian era, instances of such attitudes toward Eve become common in religious literature. The association of Eve and sin with sexuality and lust, already present in texts such as the Books of Adam and Eve and the New Testament, is expanded in both Christian and Jewish postbiblical sources, with the serpent playing an increasingly satanic and phallic role. And of course the more Eve is identified as the source of sin, the more urgent becomes the need to control, subdue, and dominate her. Eve is seen as representative of her sex, and thus all women are regarded as requiring subjugation to wiser and superior male figures.
As if this situation were not already problematic enough, it led to still another kind of interference with our vision of the Eve of Genesis: the problem of translations. That is, most of us read about Eve in texts that are not in their original language. While translations can and do often accurately represent the texts they render, they can also—often unconsciously— subtly change and distort the original meaning. Because the process of translating the Hebrew Bible began in the same centuries that the interpretive literature just described was being composed, the ancient translations also suffer from the possibility of bias and distortion… Western literature and art are replete with expressions of the Eve story cast so as to express the author's or artist's own social views. Perhaps the most influential of all has been John Milton's Paradise Lost, which developed the Eden tale so strongly that many of our present recollections of the biblical story are more faithful to his portrayal of Eve or Satan than to the original Hebrew narrative (p. 75-76).
The shift from agrarian society towards monarchy
The move towards monarchy and an organized military with taxation and a market economy disrupted the local household and clan based economic systems of early Israel. With this shift, more power came into the hands of the men, but I would add that this was still a minority of men, from my reading of Meyers and others that have dealt with this topic. Most men in Israel at the time of the monarchy were still in an egalitarian system, as survival was paramount, and many clans lived season to season, working and praying that their crops came in, hoping to survive. Certainly there were large land holders in 7th century Israel, and elites cropped up with the rise of statehood, but I don’t see a domination over women for the majority of men at this time. Meyers seems to reflect these ideas as well, as she covers the shifting sands of male-female relations with the rise of the state:
“The rise of the state meant the gradual end of a society in which the household was the dominant social unit. The locus of power moved from the family household, with its gender parity, to a public world of male control. The establishment of a nation-state meant the growing prominence of the military and of state and religious bureaucracies controlling economic development… State formation created hierarchical relationships and robbed females of their customary equality or interdependence with males” (p. 190).
“The market economy, along with the burden of taxation and the inexorable ecological risks of the Palestinian environment, all strained the fragile household economy beyond what it could bear in many cases. The struggle of households for survival is reflected in the expansion of the earlier legal handling of debt in the biblical laws by the eighth or seventh century BCE. Deuteronomic law deals extensively with debt servitude. Such legal attention indicates an increase of debt servitude as households either failed or took desperate measures to remain viable… Large landholders emerged, and the peasants lost control of their means of subsistence and consequently of their social and economic power. This process perhaps culminated in the events of the seventh century BCE, when the crown appears to have broken whatever remnants of the lineage system” (p. 192).
Certainly, then, the monarchy meant changes in the entire fabric of society… The eventual disruption of the lineage system certainly reinforced social and political hierarchies, which would have contributed to gender hierarchies. Furthermore, the development of a market economy would probably have exaggerated the division of labor along gender lines with more prestige and control going to the males dominating the extradomestic economic life” (p. 193).
Overall, this is an excellent read if you are wanting to see Eve in a new light, or if you want more information regarding life in Israel prior to the monarchy, and how this type of existence relates to the account of the creation and “Fall” told in the Genesis narrative. Reading the statistics regarding life expectancy, infant mortality, and work distribution was excellent. I always like seeing Eve in new ways, and Meyer’s work was worthy.
August 13, 2014
This was an excellent book! I wish there was more, so hopefully Meyers' other book, "Rediscovering Eve" will shed some more light on what she didn't go in depth on in this book. The bulk of this book discussed the difficulty in defining a concrete idea of what life was like not only for Israelite women, but agrarian Israelite life in general, because the androcentric bias of the Hebrew Bible reflects the language, events, and ideas of monarchy, priests, and nobility, rather than the general agrarian population, and of course, women. Additionally, it lightly touches on (as other academic books in the field of Biblical studies have noted) how modern ideologies and assumptions (as well as erroneous research methodologies) can cloud and restrain full understanding of the reality that was Ancient Israel; a pre-modern agrarian West Asian society. Despite these setbacks, Meyer brilliantly explains some very difficult passages of scripture, shedding new insight to portions that have been misinterpreted by both feminists and Bible scholars as having a misogynistic bias, and instead frames them within the cultural demands of Palestinian highland living. The various insights and alternative readings make this selection highly recommended!
January 19, 2019
It does a great job of uncovering a broad picture of women in ancient Israel. She seems to want an equality that wasn't there so badly though, that she makes statements like "clearly the notion if chauvinism needs to be removed. " On one hand she's right, communities living hand to mouth have an egalitarian streak caused by such an existence. Conversely in all public settings men appear to have final say, so the concept of equality as expressed in Western thought just isn't there.
January 18, 2021
The Goodreads blurb is a good description of this book, one of the key points being that women in Biblical times lived in a patriarchy but were not without agency. Great resource for anyone doing Bible studies (how I found out about the book).
I found it interesting but very scholarly and slow reading. I confess I gave up after several chapters because I cannot concentrate on this type of reading during the pandemic.
I found it interesting but very scholarly and slow reading. I confess I gave up after several chapters because I cannot concentrate on this type of reading during the pandemic.
September 24, 2025
tbh I only read a few chapters of this for a research paper, but I enjoyed what I read! Meyers's arguments are tight and her prose isn't bloated like some academic texts tend to be. It might be a little much for the casual reader, but I'd still recommend it for Meyers's unique perspective when it comes to Eve's story.
May 28, 2017
One of the first feminist accounts of Bible interpretation so it's unfair to compare it too harshly with what came next. A university textbook with its heart in the right place.
October 10, 2014
Once again, I am taking a class at Randolph-Macon College. This time I am learning about women and Judaism. This was the first text for the class. This book was published in 1988 and I wish I had encountered it before. Meyers does a good job of showing scholars and students that using the Bible to reconstruct ancient Israeli women's everyday lives does not really help us understand those lives. Given who probably wrote the Bible, they did not have the same experience as rural women. I am grateful to Meyer's insights about ancient Israel.
However, the most important part of this book, for me, is the chapter on Genesis 3:16. When I have read how God "punishes" Eve for her role in the fall of humankind, I have always cringed. The translations I have read make me angry, for Eve really does take the fall. However, Meyer shows her readers that there is another way to read that verse in Genesis.
I was told that my professor was a good teacher and this class would be enlightening and challenging. So far that is very true and I am enjoying the class.
However, the most important part of this book, for me, is the chapter on Genesis 3:16. When I have read how God "punishes" Eve for her role in the fall of humankind, I have always cringed. The translations I have read make me angry, for Eve really does take the fall. However, Meyer shows her readers that there is another way to read that verse in Genesis.
I was told that my professor was a good teacher and this class would be enlightening and challenging. So far that is very true and I am enjoying the class.
June 1, 2008
So far so good... it's a more intellectually stimulating book than I've read since my feminist lit classes in college, but it's been genuinely interesting, as well. A good base for study and understanding of ancient women. I've been pleasantly surprised at the decidedly non-radical feminist approach it takes, to the point of defending patriarchal societies instead of rallying against male domination. Mirrors more closely my own beliefs than many of the worlds' studies of women, in that women can be powerful and happy in patriarchal societies, and are not always oppressed.
December 10, 2020
The author executes a balanced and unbiased examination of ancient Israelite women by exploring both archaeology and Scripture. I was fascinated by the translation and interpretation of passages in Genesis, Song of Solomon, and others. This is a great resource to anyone interested in studies of women's roles, especially Jews.
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