Women in Israel

In the course of her lively challenge to goddess-obsessions among scholars (In the Wake of the Goddess), Tikva Frymer-Kensky claims that ancient Israel embodied a proto-feminist sexual polity: 

“There i nothing disinctively ‘female’ about the way women are portrayed in the Bible, nothing particularly feminine about either their goals or their strategies. The goals of women are the same goals held by the biblical male characters and the authors of the stories. . . . Women pursue their goals as actively as men, and use the same techniques and strategies that men in their sicuation could be expected to use. . . . The biblical tales of women’s persuasion . . . ignore erotic attraction. There are no stories of sexual enticement, no femmes fatales, no figures like Mata Hari who use sex to seduce and then deceive men [Judith, she thinks, reflects a Hellenizing battle of the sexes]. There are women who actively seek sex in the Bible, either for enjoyment . . . or for children. . . . But in these cases, sex is the woman’s goal; it is never a woman’s strategy in order to gain power, influence or information, never a woman’s weapon by which she seeks to disarm or weaken men” (140-1). She doesn’t think Delilah an exception (135-6).

This is a sharp response to feminist scholars who point to the Bible as the fons et origo of all sexism in Western culture. But when she argues that “the differences between male and female are only a question of genitalia,” she has gone too far.

In a First Things review that appeared soon after the book’s release, Jon Levenson thinks that her argument about the “homogenization of gender” in Israel runs into series difficulties: “That women are not therein seen as morally and intellectually inferior to men is surely the case, but it is a far cry from this to the view that ‘the differences between male and female are only a question of genitalia.’ The genitalia, after all, are part of God’s design (‘Male and female He created them,’ Gen. 1:27), and as Frymer-Kensky acknowledges, the Hebrew Bible strictly prohibits cross-dressing and homosexual behavior, the latter because, in her words, ‘it blurs the distinction between male and female, and this cannot be tolerated in the biblical system.’ Quite so; and powerful evidence that, contra her view of the matter, the Hebrew Bible does not make a hard distinction between ‘biology and social roles’ on the one hand, and the ‘basic nature or identity’ of human beings on the other. Indeed, that men and women share a common human nature in no way implies the dispensability or arbitrariness of social roles assigned on the basis of gender.”

Levenson suggests an analogy between male-female distinctions and that between an Israelite and a Gentile: “Israelites and Gentiles . . . share a common human nature in the Hebrew Bible (which does not speak of innate racial superiority or inferiority), and yet their duties, privileges, and destinies are not at all the same, and the distinction between the two groups is a matter of high import to most of the authors of the Hebrew Bible. It is not seen as an historical accident.”