306 GENDER Ancient Near East
1
Uruk:' Journal of the American Oriental Society 133
(2013): 439.
Lerner, Gerda. The Creation ofPatriarchy: The Origins of
Womens Subordination. Women and History i. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Lesko, Barbara, ed. Womens Earliest Recordsfrom Ancient
Egypt and Western Asia: Proceedings of the Conference
on Women in the Ancient Near East, Brown University,
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Scholars Press, 1987.
Lion, Brigitte. "La notion de genre en assyriologie:· In Prob-
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medievale 90. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2007.
MacDonald, Elizabeth M. The Position of Women as Re-
flected in the Semitic Codes ofLaw. Toronto: University
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Makarushka, Irene. "Elizabeth Cady Stanton and The
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Marello, Pierre. "Vie no made:' In Florilegium Marianum:
Melanges en l'honneur de Michel Fleury, edited by J.-M.
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Marx, Victor. "Die Stellung der Frauen in Babylonien
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itzsch and P. Haupt, Vol. 4, pp. 1-n Leipzig: A. Pries,
1902.
Matthews, Victor H., Bernard M. Levinson, and Tikva
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field, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998.
Michel, Cecile. "Hommes et femmes pretent serment
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ofBiblical Literature 6. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995.
Suurmeijer, Guido. "Adoption and Inheritance among
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Van de Mieroop, Marc. Cuneiform Texts and the Writing
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Sophie Demare-Lafont
Hebrew Bible
The topic of gender and law immediately brings to
mind the analysis of legal status, rights, access, and
so forth, especially as these are inequitably distrib-
uted between the sexes. In the case of gender and
biblical law, one must in addition carefully distin-
guish between ancient and modern thought. As
Michel Foucault (1998) and others have taught us,
the history of knowledge is punctuated by various
"breaks" or "ruptures:' It follows that even the most
self-evident ideas-including such cherished notions
as the "rights" of the "individual" -have no equiva-
lents in the ancient world. Apparent points of contact
between modern and biblical law are illusory, being
mere homonyms rather than genuine synonyms,
which is to say that apparently equivalent legal terms
actually have different meanings. This is all the more
true when it comes to gender, which, after all, is a
decidedly modern preoccupation. If it will neverthe-
less be useful, and to some extent unavoidable, to
a
employ modern legal terminology in order to de-
scribe biblical law, one should not lose sight of the
radical differences separating the two legal systems.
Modern Western law-in theory, if not always in
practice-is based upon an abstract notion of the
legal entity, namely, an individual subject stripped of
concrete qualities •such as race, class, and gender.
The fact that this abstract individual was only grad-
ually constructed merely confirms the underlying
ideal: thus, the abolition of slavery, the establish-
ment of universal suffrage, and so forth, ultimately
point to the ideal of the "universal" human. The indi-
vidual is next endowed by law with certain intrinsic
rights-for example, the "unalienable Rights ... [to]
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness:· to quote

the U.S. Declaration of Independence. If each indi-
vidual is also encumbered with various duties and
obligations, these are extrinsic and secondary con-
straints deriving from the social contract: for ex-
ample, those needed to prevent the liberties of one
subject from infringing upon the liberties of another,
that is, those needed to prevent Thomas Hobbes's
war of all against all. A society consisting of such
subjects-this at least is the legal fiction of "modern
society" -constitutes, by extension, a type of mathe-
matical set, namely, an unordered and unstructured
collection of individuals. As a corollary, the modern
legal system, in principle, plays itself out within the
impersonal secular space of the courts.
Biblical law-and ancient Near Eastern law more
generally-is the inverse of modern law. First, one
must keep in mind that biblical law still functions, at
least in part, within the symbolic space of tribal life:
family honor, village elders, and religious values.
Israelite society is imagined to consist of a kinship
structure. This at least is how the census in Numbers
1-3 represents the "congregation'' ('edd) of Israel:
tribes (ma.tf;ot), clans (mispii}Jot), patriarchal house-
holds (bet 'iibot), and names (semot) of adult males.
Within this structure, it is the patriarchal household
or "house of the father" (bet 'iib), ratherthan the indi-
vidual, that constitutes the basic legal entity. Each
Israelite is legally constituted and defined in terms of
his or her position within the family: father, mother,
son, or daughter. By extension, the individual subject
as such is conceptualized concretely, precisely in
terms of race, class, gender, and so forth: Israelite
versus foreign, free versus slave, male versus female.
Finally, biblical law does not endow the individual
and the household with rights, but encumbers them
with duties and obligations. To the extent that one
can speak of "rights"-for example, the right of a
widow to marry her brother-in-law (Deut 25:5-10)-
these really derive from the preexisting duties and
obligations that others owe to the self-for example,
the duty of said brother-in-law to marry his brother's
widow.
The principal source of evidence for the Bible's
legal views on gender is naturally the Bible's legal ma-
terial, which is mostly found in three discrete corpora:
GENDER Hebrew Bible 307
the Book of the Covenant (Exodus 21-23), the Deu-
teronomic Law Code (Deuteronomy 12-26), and the
various Priestly instructions found in Exodus, Le-
viticus, and Numbers. Even when taken together as
a whole, however, these corpora amount to what is,
in the end, a rather modest collection of laws. It is
thus immensely useful to make comparative use of
the rich collections of Mesopotamian and Hittite
laws. In addition, a number of biblical stories-not
to mention the occasional oracle, proverb, and so
forth-bring into play various legal issues, and thus
provide important if indirect evidence for those
legal conventions that the biblical writers appar-
ently took for granted. The modest size of biblical
legal codes, as well as the elliptical style of their indi-
vidual laws, point to their incompleteness, which has
led scholars to conclude that they could not, and
thus were not meant to, function in "real life"; rather,
they constitute a representation of biblical society's
values. Both the absolute and relative dating of these
various texts are hotly contested. Most of the texts
discussed here are in my view preexilic, but no spe-
cific date will impinge upon the broad analysis of-
fered here. Similarly, while it seems clear at numerous
points that one law is revising another, these revisions
have to do with matters of detail that, again, will not
affect the present analysis. In fact, it is difficult if not
impossible to detect a clear shift in the conceptuali-
zation and treatment of gender within biblical law.
Just as "the preexilic biblical texts:· according to Tikva
Frymer-Kensky, "present a coherent and consistent
picture of the nature of women, their goals, and the
means by which they attain them'' (1992, p. u8 ), so too
these same texts present a coherent and consistent
picture of the intersection of gender and law. For this
reason, I will proceed neither corpus by corpus nor
passage by passage, but topic by topic.
Legal Status. The "house of the father" (Heb. bet
'iib) is equivalent to what we now call the extended
family-recall that in the priestly census (Numbers
1-3), it occupies the level above that of adult males,
meaning it contained two or more male relatives,
each of whom likely had a wife and children. It con-
stituted not only a legal entity, but an economic one
as well: it provided for the material needs of its

308 GENDER Hebrew Bible
members, just as they, in turn, were obliged to con-
tribute materially to it. Conversely, the category of
the "poor" seems to consist precisely of those who
could not claim membership within an established
house and thus lacked the legal and material protec-
tions it provided: widows, orphans, and aliens (Exod
22:20-21; Deut 10:18; 14:29; }er 7:6; Ezek 22:7; etc.).
The patriarchal household would seem to corre-
spond to those physical structures unearthed by ar-
chaeologists, which consist of individual dwellings
surrounding a central courtyard. These dwellings
were presumably occupied by the nuclear families of
the adult males, all of which were united within the
larger household. Here one confronts a certain am-
biguity in the meaning of the phrase "house of the
father:· Each adult male was to some extent the "father"
of his own individual "house" or nuclear family. For this
reason, the patriarchal household as a legal entity
seems to refer at tinles to the nuclear family and at
other times to the extended family. In either case, how-
ever, the concrete and corporate nature of the legal
entity remains.
An individual's legal status, then, was a function
of his or her concrete position within the household.
What this means is that one's legal status was not
unrelated to one's economic role within the family.
It also means that one's legal status, as a function
of kinship, was defined in terms of such factors as
gender and generation. Consider the command to
"honor your father and your mother" (Exod 20:12):
the father is mentioned first, but the mother, too,
must be respected by virtue of her generational posi-
tion. If not even the patriarch could be said to con-
stitute a legal entity independent of the household,
he nonetheless occupied its symbolic center and thus
represented it. The father of the house and only the
father constituted, by virtue of his position, a fully en-
dowed "legal subject;' and not a mere "agent:' Partly
for this reason, laws are typically addressed to men,
often in the masculine second person; Exodus 20:17.
for example: "You shall. not covet your neighbor's
house ... your neighbor's wife;' and so forth. But in-
sofar as many of these laws clearly applied to women
as well, one should sometinles interpret such gendered
language as a particular case of a larger widespread
·~
I
linguistic phenomenon: namely, masculine forms
referring to women as well as men, what one might
refer to as a "universal" or "neuter" usage (cf. "man-
kind;' l'homme, etc.). The prohibition against murder
in Exodus 20:13, for example, although addressed to a
masculine "you; presumably applied to women as
well. As a matter of principle, then: if a law is gram-
matically marked as feminine, it applies specifically
to females; but if it is grammatically marked as mas-
culine, it could either apply solely to males, or it
could apply, as a universal or neuter usage, to both
sexes.
Modern law distinguishes between minors and
majors. This distinction is a function of age (and
basic mental capacity), so that at successive points
early in life one gains the right to obtain a driver's
license, vote, purchase and consume alcohol, and so
forth. Biblical law, too, distinguishes between minors
and majors on the basis of age. The census in Num-
bers, one recalls, counts only men who are 20 years
and older (1:2-3), at which point, at least in the view
of the priests, they were obligated to serve in the
military. Similarly, when God finally decides to
punish the so-called wilderness generation for their
chronic disobedience, it is only the adults, those
again who have reached their 20th year, whom he
condemns to die on the way to Canaan (Num 14:29-34).
Those who are not yet 20 are effectively minors: as
such, they cannot be held accountable for their ac-
tions, and so they will still be allowed to enter the
Promised Land. The Deuteronomistic account of
this event follows the same general principle. Ac-
cording to Moses, it is the Israelites' "children, who
do not know today good and evil" (Deut 1:39) who
will enter the land. To "know good and evil;' whether
in the wilderness or in the Garden of Eden (Gen 3:5,
•
22), is to be, not a fallen sinful being, but a legally
competent adult or major. This basic legal compe-
tence can be said, then, to confer upon both men and
women what I will call the status of a "legal agent;'
namely, one who is legally responsible for his or her
acts, and can thus be held guilty of a crime.
Children, as long as they lived in their parents' house,
were subject to their authority, possibly regardless of
age. Two laws in particular reveal the importance

placed upon parental authority: Deuteronomy 21:18-
20, dealing with the recalcitrant son; Deuteronomy
22:13-21, dealing with the recalcitrant daughter. As
scholars have recognized, they form a matched pair
within this legal code. For our purposes, it is worth
noting how inappropriate behavior is gendered. The
former deals with a son who is said to be "stubborn''
and "rebellious;' a "glutton" and a "drunkard" who re-
fuses to "obey" his father and mother (21:20 )-which
would seem to imply that he still lives in their house,
insofar as both are alive and in a position to exert
control over him. His age is unclear, but even if he is
an adult, he is arguably a dependent within the ex-
tended family for as long as he lives under his par-
ents' roof-and he could expect to remain in this
position well into adulthood. It is the parents who
bring him before the elders with the express intent
of having him stoned to death. Great value is thus
invested in the son's duty to be a productive member
of the household. The latter deals with a daughter
who may have engaged in illicit sex before her mar-
riage, thus "fornicating [liznot] her father's house"
(22:21). In this case, it is the husband who accuses
his wife of previous impropriety during her child-
hood; but a guilty verdict would also seem to suggest
that her parents failed to come to her defense-
inasmuch as evidence of her innocence is easily fab-
ricated. At any rate, the wayward daughter, like her
male counterpart, is stoned to death-in this case,
at the door of "her father's house;' which has been
tainted by her criminal behavior. The daughter's sex-
uality and the shame it might bring upon her father's
house were thus the source of considerable anxiety.
If parents seem to have wielded the power oflife and
death over their children, the exercise of this power
was taken out of their hands: the city elders arbi-
trated in both cases, and in both cases the execution
was carried out by the "men of the city:' Biblical law
thus judged the proper submission of child to parent
to be a matter of public concern: in the language of
the Deuteronomist, society must "purge the evil from
[its] midst" (21:21; 22:21).
If legal agency was in theory symmetrical with
respect to gender and if parental authority applied
equally, albeit in non-identical terms, to sons and
GENDER Hebrew Bible 309
daughters, other dimensions oflegal status were not
so evenly distributed. For one's legal status was a
function of one's position within the household, and
girls and boys followed fundamentally different paths.
A boy could, in principle, hope eventually to become
the patriarch of his own house-first by establishing
his own nuclear family, and then by becoming the
patriarch of his own extended family, after the death
of his father and the subsequent division of the in-
heritance. In stark contrast, a girl, by definition, could
never fully become the head (or "patriarch") of her
own house, though a partial exception will be dis-
cussed later. Rather, she first lived under the legal
guardianship or "house" of her father (bet 'db), until
she was betrothed and eventually married, at which
point she entered the guardianship or "house" of her
husband (bet '£8). Formally speaking, then, a woman
could never achieve the status of "legal subject:'
The biblical system of legal status-entity, agent,
subject-is nicely illustrated by the discussion of
vows in Numbers 30. It begins with an absolute prin-
ciple: ''A man who makes a vow to Yahweh or makes
an oath, binding himself to a pledge, shall not break
his word. According to all that goes out of his mouth
he shall do" (30:3). This is no universal or neuter oc-
currence of "man; for the rest of the chapter is de-
voted to explicating the special constraints that apply
to the vows of girls and women, specifically, the power
of preemption that first the father and then the
husband shall have over the vows, respectively, of
daughter and wife (viz., the utterances of her "lips;'
see 30:7, g, 13). In retrospect, Numbers 30:3 seems to
apply to boys as well as to men, since the father ap-
parently could not veto his son's vows. And within
the context of Numbers 30, the distinction between
the male "mouth" and the female "lips" seems to cor-
respond to the distinction between the uncondi-
tional vows of a male and the conditional vows of a
female. Females may be legal agents, then, but the
agency of her legal guardian (father, husband) takes
precedence over her own decisions. Or, to look at
the matter from a different angle, her material obli-
gations to the patriarchal household outweigh what-
ever obligations she might impose upon herself. The
vows of widows and divorcees, in a telling exception,
310 GENDER Hebrew Bible
must stand, not unlike those of a man (Num 30:10),
precisely because she is attached to no man's house.
From birth to death, then, a female was always de-
fined in relation to a patriarchal household, even if
only to its absence. For this reason, the very struc-
ture of the passage represents the possible stages of
a woman's life spatially rather than temporally:
• Vows made by a girl in her father's house (Num
30:4-9)
• The father's veto power over these vows (Num
30:4-6)
• The husband's veto power over these vows
(Num 30:7-9)
• Vows made by a widow or divorcee between houses
(Num30:10)
• Vows made by a woman in her husband's house
(Num 30:11-16)
The exceptional case in verse 10 interrupts what might
otherwise have been interpreted as a chronological
sequence, by assuming its liminal position between
houses.
The logic of legal status ultimately leads to the
conclusion that children, especially daughters, con-
stituted a type of property, material resources at the
disposal of the patriarchal household. To return to
one of the commandments mentioned earlier-not
to covet one's neighbor's house, wife, male or female
slave, ox, donkey, ''or anything that is [his]" (Exod 20:17;
cf. Deut 5:21)-this list constitutes something like
an inventory of a man's property. For this reason, he
could conceivably, in dire circumstances, sell his chil-
dren as slaves (Exod 21:2-11). The asymmetry sur-
rounding gender, however, slips in once again. The
"Hebrew [male] slave" could "go out"-out of the mas-
ter's house-"into freedom'' in the seventh year for
free (Exod 21:2 ). Ifhe "entered" a single man, he would
leave a single man; if he "entered" with a wife, he
would leave with his wife. The wife's status is merely
a function of her husband's changing fortunes, as
though she were a "personal effect" or "personalty"
(i.e., movable property). But if it was the master who
"gave" him his wife, she along with any children she has
borne him must remain with the master. The wife and
children are conceived of, once again, as property.
Since, in this case, two households (the husband's
and the master's) can claim ownership of them, the
law must intervene by weighing their competing
claims: inasmuch as the marriage was transacted
within the domain of the master's house-while the
husband was a slave therein-the wife and children
belong to the master and so must stay behind.
This legal reasoning helps explain Lot's treatment
of his daughters in the story of Sodom and Gomor-
rah (Gen 19). The negotiation between Abraham and
God in the previous chapter is premised on the prin-
ciple, put forward by Abraham, that "the judge of all
the earth'' should not "kill the righteous with the
wicked" (Gen 18:25). That God's emissaries are clearly
determined to rescue Lot and his family from the
city's destruction thus constitutes compelling evi-
dence that they have deemed him to be righteous
(Gen 19:29 being a later gloss on the story). Now Lot's
righteousness would seem to be demonstrated in his
hospitality. But his hospitality would seem to reach
its apex in his willingness to give his daughters' vir-
ginity to the brutish mob gathered at his door, for the
sake of his guests. Lot is apparently saved by virtue of
the very act that modem readers often find so mor-
ally offensive. This, however, is a reaction born of
modem sensibilities, namely, the sense that his
daughters' inherent "rights" are being violated. In
fact, Lot's ostensibly indecent proposal becomes al-
together understandable once his daughters' vir-
ginity is seen to be the "property" of his household.
Indeed, the story seems to establish their virginity,
precisely in order to make possible Lot's offer to the
men of Sodom. It is true that his daughters might be
betrothed (Gen 19:14 ), which according to Deuteron-
omy 22:23-27 would already bind them legally to
their respective fiances, but it is also true that bib-
lical narrative rarJiy if ever agrees on all points with
biblical law, even when the latter is relevant to the
plot. The story still seems to maintain Lot's right-
eousness. The same legal reasoning underlies Judges
19, a type of repetition of Lot's misadventure in
Sodom. Here, an unnamed host offers his virgin
daughter, along with the concubine of his unnamed
guest, to the mob gathered at his door. Once again, it
is crucial that the daughter is a virgin; similarly, it

would appear that the concubine, who does not have
the same legal status as a full-fledged wife, is sexually
available in a way that a fully legitimate wife is not.
Patrimony. It was, in a sense, the patriarchal
household as a corporate legal entity, rather than
the patriarch as an individual, that owned property.
In fact, one might go further and argue that not even
the household "owned" property, insofar as property
was in theory inalienable-witness the prohibition
against the permanent sale of one's patrimony in Le-
viticus 25, and Naboth's outraged refusal to sell his
land to the king of Israel in 1 Kings 21. The house-
hold, then, might be described as a mere concretion
of an abstract and permanent structure joining suc-
cessive generations of a kin group to an estate. This
enduring structure would correspond, in turn, to
the biblical idea of "lineage" (toledot). The question
thus arises: What would happen to this lineage if
there were no male heir to maintain the continuity
of patrilineal succession?
The Priestly source answers this very question in
Numbers 27. Here, the daughters ofZelophehad peti-
tion Moses and Eleazar on behalf of the estate of
their father, who died without leaving behind any
sons to carry on his name: "Why should the name of
our father be removed from the midst of his clan, be-
cause he had no son? Give us a holding amidst the
brothers of our father" (Num 27:4). In response, Moses
(in consultation with God) creates a special dispen-
sation allowing women to inherit and own property
under certain extraordinary circumstances: in the
absence of sons, a man's daughters will inherit; in the
absence of daughters, his brothers; and in the ab-
sence of brothers, uncles. This ruling spells out a type
of"patriarchal line of succession"-the order in which
individuals will succeed to the position of patriarch:
son, daughter, brother, uncle. It is useful to compare
the patriarchal line of succession to the U.S. presiden-
tial line of succession, namely, those positions next in
line for the office of the president, should some mis-
fortune befall the individual actually elected to serve:
vice president, Speaker of the House, president pro
tempore of the Senate, and so forth.Just as the president
is not simply the particular individual elected to said
office, but a structural position that must be occupied,
GENDER Hebrew Bible 311
so too the patriarch (and the household as a whole)
was not simply an individual (or group of individu-
als), but a structural position (or complex of posi-
tions) that needed to be occupied-perchance by a
woman, in effect, a woman patriarch. If daughters,
predictably, stood in line after sons, it is neverthe-
less remarkable that they stood in line at all, indeed,
before the father's brothers and uncles. Being male
was not a prerequisite for succeeding the father as
patriarch.
This woman patriarch, however, did not cease being
female, which had implications for the continuity of
her lineage. Thus, in Numbers 36-the continuation
of the Zelophehad saga-the tribal elders, who see all
too well what lies ahead, approach Moses with con-
cerns regarding Zelophehad's daughters' future heirs.
As they explain to Moses: "Now, if they marry one of
the men from another Israelite tribe, their inheritance
will be removed from the inheritance of our fathers,
and will be added to the inheritance of the tribe into
which they marry" (Num 36:3). Even a woman patri-
arch, when she married-and it was her duty to marry,
if she hoped to pass on her patrimony to a suitable
heir-could still only hope to become a subordinate
within her husband's house. But this meant that her
father's legacy would eventually disappear, absorbed,
in effect, by another household. In order to minimize
the damage that this would inflict upon the integrity
of their father's tribe, Moses (in consultation with
God) makes an addendum to his earlier ruling: the
daughters of Zelophehad must marry "into a clan of
their father's tribe ... so that no inheritance of the Is-
raelites may be transferred from tribe to tribe" (Num
36:6-7 ). In sum, a woman was only permitted to
own property under certain circumstances, and then
merely as a concession to patriarchal necessity. For
this ad hoc provision existed primarily to serve the
interests of the father's "name" (Num 27:4), that is,
the patriarchal lineage.
Marriage. Insofar as daughters constituted a type
of property of the patriarchal household, marriage
constituted, in effect, an exchange of goods between
houses. (The gender dissymmetry of the household
and of marriage has as a secondary effect the fact
that while polygyny is lawful, polyandry is not.) As
312 GENDER Hebrew Bible
Numbers 30 makes clear, a girl was seen to reside
in "her father's house" until marriage, at which point
she moved to "her husband's house"; and in return,
as we know from numerous other texts, a "bride-price"
(mohar) was paid to her family (Gen 34:i2; Exod 22:16-
17; 1 Sam 18:25). The structure of exchange is re-
flected in the biblical Hebrew idiom for marriage: to
"take [liiqa/J] as wife:' In some cases the groom is said
to "take" his wife, but it is often the groom's father
who does so, as in this Deuteronomistic prohibition
against intermarriage, addressed to amale "you": "You
will not make marriages with them; your daughter
you will not give to his son, and his daughter you will
not take for your son" (Deut 7:3). Strikingly similar is
Hamor's attempt, in the name of his son Shechem,
to arrange for marriages between his people and Ja-
cob's: "Marry with us. Give your daughters to us, and
take our daughters for yourselves" (Gen 34:9 ). In both
passages, one notes not only the reciprocal exchange
of girls between kinship groups, but also the social
and economic bonds that would thereby be estab-
lished between them. In all of this, the girl's betrothal
and marriage were authorized by her family, usually
her father (1Sam18:i7-27), sometimes her brother(s)
(Gen 34:8-18 ), but never by her. The power of consent,
the legal authority to enter into legally binding agree-
ments, including marriage (and thus sexual relations),
resided in the father. Her family could choose to con-
sult her wishes, but they were not legally bound to do
so, for she was not a fully endowed legal subject. In just
this way, Rebekah's family asks her if she is willing to
go away with Abraham's servant (Gen 24:58 ), but only
after her brother Laban and her father Bethuel have
already consented to marry her off to Isaac (Gen 24:51).
Divorce constitutes a reversal of this movement
or exchange. Not coincidentally, the biblical Hebrew
idiom for divorce is to "send [siilalJ] the wife from his
house:' The fullest description of divorce is found in
Deuteronomy 24:1-4. According to this passage, di-
vorce was initiated by the husband: "if she does not
find favor in his eyes, because he has found some na-
kedness of a thing [ 'erwat diibiir] in her, he will write
her a bill of divorce [seper keritilt]" -apparently ena-
bling her to remarry-"and give it in her hand and
send her from his house" (Deut 24:1). Since infidelity
according to the Deuteronomist was a capital of-
fense (Deut 22:22), this unspecified displeasing thing
must have been of a lesser nature, which would
seem to give the man some latitude in choosing to
terminate his marriage, although the shame implied
by "nakedness" speaks against a frivolous attitude
toward divorce. Let us say that the man had, for lack
of a better word, the "right" to divorce-but let us
also note that this right is defined negatively and de-
rivatively in relation to a prior flaw in his wife, a
failure on her part to meet some criterion of a proper
wife. This right is effectively if indirectly confirmed
by those cases in which a man would lose it. Ac-
cording to Deuteronomy 22:28-29, for instance, if a
man "violates" an unbetrothed virgin, he must pay a
fine to her father (who is thus identified as the victim
of the crime) and marry her without possibility of di-
vorce. The precise nature of this sexual encounter is
unclear. Was it a forcible "rape;' a mere dalliance, an
elopement meant to force the father's hand? Re-
gardless, insofar as the man failed to procure the
father's consent before effectively consummating a
marital (sexual) relationship with his daughter, the
law deems him unfit to be trusted with the power to
terminate this marriage, which he initiated with so
little decorum, and so it punishes him by preemp-
tively stripping him of this right, which would other-
wise (by implication) have been his. Relatedly, Deu-
teronomy 22:13-21 describes a scenario in which a
man consummates his marriage and subsequently
comes to "hate" his bride-"hate" here being a tech-
nical term signifying the "intent to'' or "act of" di-
vorce. He thus accuses her of not being a virgin at
the time of their wedding. If the charges are shown
to be false-her parents having presented evidence
of her virginity-if, in other words, he has slandered
•
a "virgin of Israel; he is duly punished: the elders
beat him, impose a fine upon him (payable to the
bride's father once again), and permanently deprive
him of the option of divorcing her. Again, insofar as
he has sought wrongful termination of his marriage
(and his wife's very life), the law strips him of the
right to divorce, which is thus presupposed to exist.
Access to divorce was not symmetrically defined for
the wife. Since biblical law does not directly address

this issue-which omission is significant in and of
itself-it is useful to bring in comparative evidence.
According to the Laws ofHammurapi (LH §§142-143),
a woman could, in effect, initiate divorce proceedings
by "repudiating" her husband's conjugal rights. But
only if the authorities subsequently find that she is
"circumspect and without fault" and that her husband
is "wayward and disparages her greatly" will her dowry
be returned and she be allowed to return to "her fa-
ther's house" (Akkad bit abi8a); if, on the contrary, they
find that she is the guilty party, "they shall cast that
woman into the water:' One should therefore resist the
urge to exaggerate this woman's legal options and be
precise: ifthe husband might be said to have a type of
right (or perhaps better, broad access) to divorce, the
woman here is given (by the authorities) "permission''
to divorce, due to her husband's failure to uphold his
obligations toward her. It seems reasonable to sup-
pose that similar provisions existed for women in an-
cient Israel. According to Exodus 21:7-u, for example:
if a female slave is given in marriage to her master's
son, who subsequently takes a second wife, "he must
not decrease [the first wife's] food, clothing, or con-
jugal rights"; if he does, "she shall go out [into freedom]
at no cost, for no money" (Exod 21:10 -u), which entails
divorce. One can only assume that a free wife would be
given at least as much consideration.
Judges 19, in fact, seems to depict an actual attempt
on the part of a woman to initiate a divorce: she
abandons her husband's home and returns to her
father. In this instance, she is a concubine, not a wife,
and her husband successfully reclaims her from his
father-in-law, who seems only too happy to return
her to him. But if there were extenuating circum-
stances-comparable, say, to those described in the
Laws of Hammurapi-one could easily imagine a
father negotiating for his daughter's release instead,
whether by convincing the elders to grant his daughter
a divorce, or by convincing his son-in-law to write
her a bill of divorce of his own accord. Conversely, a
husband's abandonment of his wife could be inter-
preted by her and/ or her father as sufficient grounds
for divorce or perhaps even as a de facto divorce,
and acted upon accordingly. Consider Samson's short-
lived marriage. Due to a dispute that arises during
GENDER Hebrew Bible 313
the wedding festivities between him and his bride's
Philistine compatriots, Samson's "temper flared, and
he went up to his father's house" (Judg 14:19). His
father-in-law interprets his anger and abrupt disap-
pearance as a divorce, and so he remarries her: "I really
thought that you surely hated her, and so I gave her
to your companion:' he nervously explains to Samson,
when the latter returns for his wife some time later
(Judg 15:2). Consider as well David's ill-fated marriage
to Michal. After he effectively abandons her (1 Sam
19:12 ), Saul deems their marriage to be null and void,
and so he does not hesitate to remarry his daughter
(1 Sam 25:44). True, this case is complicated by the
fact that David has had to flee for his life as a type of
"enemy of state:· and the fact that Saul might actu-
ally be exercising his royal prerogatives. Neverthe-
less, the story depicts David's disappearance as an
act that could plausibly be interpreted as a de facto
divorce.
If a bride's non-virginity was tantamount to adul-
tery (or more precisely, an act of fornication against
her father's house) and constituted sufficient grounds
for terminating the marriage and her life (Deut 22:13-
21 ), it is because virginity was constituted as a legal
concept specifically in relation to the transaction of
marriage. More precisely, virginity was a type of mate-
rial "good" sold by one family to another in the body
of the bride-whence the monetary compensation
due to the father in the case of an unbetrothed virgin
girl being "seduced" and "deflowered" (Exod 22:16-17;
see also Deut 22:28-29). The very word for virginity,
betUltm, marks it as an attribute of girls, for it is cog-
nate with betUltt, which literally means "young girt:'
but also, by metonymy, "virgin:· It was assumed, in
other words, that a girl's virginity was merely a func-
tion of her age, and this critical age, when a girl was
classified as a betUla, naturally coincided with that
brief season during which she ought to be married
off-this at least is the ideal her father's house anx-
iously sought to maintain. Indeed, it was the rite of
passage of marriage and its consummation, rather
than age per se, that transformed a "young girl" into
the "woman/wife" ( 'issa) of her "man/husband" ( 'tS).
One should add, in a telling contrast, that male
virginity does not exist as a discernible concept in
314 GENDER Hebrew Bible
biblical law and literature. There is an obvious phys-
iological reason for the gendered nature of virginity,
but the point remains that the sexual initiation of
boys has left no traces in the Bible. (Adam's intro-
duction to Eve [Gen 2:21-25] is a partial and muted
exception, especially when one takes into account
the faint echo of Enkidu's transformation, in the Epic
of Gilgamesh [tablet I], from a savage boy into a do-
mesticated man, thanks to his sexual encounter
with the harlot; but even here it is a literary motif
without a legal analogue.) And this is due, at least in
part, to the fact that biblical law simply had no reason
to conceive of male virginity. Since the groom did
not constitute an object of exchange as did his bride,
his "virginity" was a structural nonentity within this
legal system.
We have already seen how a woman's legal status
and material well-being were tied to the patriarchal
household, first her father's, then her husband's. By
extension, if she were to outlive her husband, her wel-
fare would eventually depend upon her son's house-
hold. One sees, then, the difficult position a woman
would find herself in, if her husband were to die an
untimely death-that is, before she had a chance to
bear him a son. As one of the Middle Assyrian Laws
(MAL A §33) asserts: if a woman's "husband and her
father-in-law are both dead, and she has no son, she
is indeed a widow; she shall go wherever she pleases"
(Roth, 1997, p. 165). This woman's freedom to "go wher-
ever she pleases" in this world is, in fact, a burden: she
must, if at all possible, remarry, hopefully bear a son,
and thereby see to her old age. Otherwise, she would
remain a widow indeed. So enters the practice of
levirate marriage: "If brothers live together and one
of them dies, and he has no son, the wife of the dead
shall not be married outside [the house] to a stranger;
her husband's brother shall go into her and take her
as his wife and perform the duty of a husband's brother
to her" (Deut 25:5). In other words, if her husband, at
the time of his death, was still living with his brother
in their father's house, it was the duty of this house-
hold to continue to care for her as one of its own, and
it was the duty of the husband's brother (Lat levir)
to marry her, beget a son through her, and thereby
keep the dead brother's name from being "blotted
out of Israel" (Deut 25:6). (It is no coincidence that
the marital constraint placed upon the widow re-
sembles that placed upon Zelophehad's daughters,
for the continuity of patrilineal succession is simi-
larly interrupted in both cases.) This twofold obliga-
tion was deemed sufficiently grave as to justify
granting the neglected widow the exceptional ability
to prosecute her own case against a "deadbeat" broth-
er-in-law who refused to perform his levirate duty
toward her, dragging him to the city gates and sham-
ing him before the elders assembled there.
Two stories nicely illustrate the mechanism of
levirate marriage: Genesis 38 and the Book of Ruth.
In the former, Judah, his wife, and three sons implic-
itly live together in one household. When Er, Judah's
firstborn son and Tamar's first husband, dies, Judah
marries her to his second son, Onan, in order to "raise
up seed" for Er {Gen 38:8). When Onan dies, Judah
sends Tamar back to her father's house, with the
promise of marrying her to his third son, Shelah, when
he comes of age. {Apparently it is unseemly for her
to remain in her father-in-law's house without the
anchorage of a husband and/ or son.) But Judah ends
up withholding Shelah from her, fearing that he will
die like his two older brothers. The position Tamar
finds herself in as a result of Judah's nonfeasance is
revealing. Years later, when her would-be groom has
grown up, she is still wearing her widow's garments.
She is not a widow indeed, free to go wherever she
pleases; rather, she is trapped in a liminal position, a
life of perpetual widowhood (cf. 2 Sam 20:3). Since
Judah's household refuses to do its duty, she is forced
to take matters into her own hands. But rather than
taking legal action, she resorts to trickery, ultimately
managing to become pregnant by her "deadbeat" fa-
ther-in-law. Not c_oincidentally, the story concludes
in an act of public humiliation. Tamar may not remove
Shelah's shoe, but in a structurally analogous act, she
manages to strip Judah of his signet, cord, and staff.
Armed with these, she is able to compel him publicly
to admit the wrong he has done her and to acknowl-
edge paternity of the child now in her womb.
In the other story, Ruth's situation (and Orpah's) is
even direr than Tamar's. As Naomi bitterly declares
to her two daughters-in-law: "Have I yet sons in my
,,..
r.
~·
!.?..
womb, and shall they be your husbands? ... Even if I
were to marry tonight, and even if I gave birth to
sons, would you therefore wait for them until they
were grown? Would you therefore refrain from mar-
rying?" (Ruth 1:11-13). In effect, she is warning her
daughters-in-law that the traditional form oflevirate
marriage does not apply here. Fortunately for Ruth,
in this idyllic narrative world-ironically set in that
chaotic era presided over by the judges-even though
there is no brother-in-law who can uphold the duty
of the levir, there is a kin-redeemer (go'el) named
Boaz who can marry her and thereby sustain the
name of her dead husband (Ruth 4:10 ). The duty of
levirate marriage has been extended from the house-
hold to the clan-which seems, in part, to motivate
the preference for the language of"redemption" over
that of "levirate marriage." Once again, matters must
ultimately be settled in public before the elders. The
next of kin who is unable to redeem Ruth removes
his shoe, but true to the story's gentle ethos, any sense
of public shame is neutralized, the act being reinter-
preted as a purely contractual gesture {4:6-8).
Adultery. Adultery, like marriage and the patriar-
chal household, is an asymmetrical concept with re-
spect to gender: a wife must remain faithful to her
husband under pain of death; a husband need not
remain faithful to his wife. Which is also to say that
a wife could commit adultery against her husband,
but a husband, by definition, could not commit adul-
tery against his wife. For this reason, the "Sotah"
(vs-t-h) ritual described in Numbers 5:12-31 is the
prerogative of the husband, not the wife-she only
might "go astray" (tiS,teh from vs-,t-h ). The ritual most
likely functioned as a "danger belief:' It did not con-
stitute an actual procedure for determining her guilt
or innocence; still less did it diabolically poison the
wife, regardless of her guilt or innocence. Rather, it
provided the husband with a formal means for as-
suaging his "spirit of jealousy;' by confronting his wife
with his suspicions and subjecting her to the per-
ceived threat of divine punishment: "The husband
will be free from guilt, but that wife shall bear her guilt"
(5:31). (Structurally speaking, such a practice would
differ little from that current legal ritual, according to
which a witness's testimony is admissible only after
GENDER Hebrew Bible 315
extracting an oath to tell the truth pronounced over
a Bible while invoking the help of God.) One might
even argue that this law requires a husband who
suspects his wife of infidelity to subject her to this
ritual ordeal, inasmuch as not doing so would be
tantamount to "criminal negligence" regarding the
possible pollution of his wife and thus of himself.
It is under the rubric of adultery that one should
interpret Deuteronomy 22:22-29, a passage that is
usually thought to contain the Bible's "rape laws:· In
fact, rape was not a legal concept in biblical law. Ac-
cording to the system oflegal status described above,
both men and women of a certain age {majors) con-
stituted what I have called "legal agents;' namely,
individuals who were accountable for their actions
and could therefore be held guilty of a crime. But
only men, as fully endowed "legal subjects:· could
constitute the victim of a crime. Actually, one might
even argue that only the patriarchal household, as
the basic legal entity, could ultimately constitute
subjects and therefore victims in this legal system,
but insofar as adult males held positions of author-
ity within the household and thus represented it in
their persons, they effectively counted as subjects
before the law. Since neither girls nor women counted
as legal subjects, the law was generally unable to con-
ceive of them as victims of crime.
Deuteronomy 22:22-29 comprises four distinct
cases, chiastically arranged in terms of the various
combinations of two features: ± virgin and ± mar-
ried: A and A' deal with the opposite combination of
features; B and B' involve the same combination of
features in two different crime scenes, town and
field. Moreover, the verb "find" (m~') occurs in each
case, the passive voice {Niphal) in A and A', the active
voice (Qal) in Band B'.
(A) Deuteronomy 22:22: +married, -virgin; "he is
found"; implied complicity; kill both
{B) Deuteronomy 22:23-24: +engaged,+ virgin; "he
finds her in the town"; + complicity; kill both
(B ') Deuteronomy 22:25-27: +engaged,+ virgin; "he
finds [her] in the field"; -complicity; kill him
(A') Deuteronomy 22:28-29: - engaged, + virgin;
"they are found"; ? complicity; fine him
316 GENDER Hebrew Bible
In all four cases, the principal perpetrator is a man;
the crime is the sexual "violation" ['inna] of another
man's wife or daughter; the "direct object" of the
crime is this wife or daughter; and the victim of the
crime is her husband or father.
Case B corresponds to what we would call adul-
tery (treating her engagement as tantamount to
marriage): because the man has "violated his neigh-
bor's wife;' he must be put to death. If the wife, gram-
matically speaking, is the direct object of the verb/
crime, she is not, legally speaking, its victim. On the
contrary, she must be put to death as well, since she
did not cry out for help in the town (where she would
presumably have been heard and rescued); in which
case, it is the husband who is the real victim of this
"violation:' Case B' corresponds to what we would
call forcible rape: the law assumes that she cried out
for help, but that no help was to be found in the field;
she is therefore innocent, while the male perpe-
trator must once again be put to death, presumably
for having "violated his neighbor's wife:' This law,
however, does not actually distinguish between adul-
tery and forcible rape. For both cases deal with one
and the same crime, namely, the violation of a hus-
band's sexual "rights" over his future wife. What at
first appears to be an effort to determine whether or
not the girl "consented" to this encounter actually
turns out to be an effort to determine whether or not
she was complicit, whether or not she, too, should
be executed alongside the principal perpetrator of
the crime of adultery as his accomplice. Case A
amounts to a sexual "violation" as well, but this time
the "object" of the crime is a married woman rather
than an engaged virgin girl. Some would argue that
this woman must die whether or not she was com-
plicit; it seems more likely that the criterion of com-
plicity applied in the case of an engaged virgin girl
(B and B ') would likewise be applied in the case of a
married woman. Finally, since there is neither hus-
band nor fiance in Case A', the victim is the father, for
which reason it is he who is paid the fine imposed
upon the perpetrator. Case A' does not address the
complicity of the unengaged virgin girl. It is mean-
ingless in this case, however, since her marriage ret-
roactively legitimates this premature sexual encounter.
Here, one should recall the case of the recalcitrant
daughter (Deut 22:13-21 ), which amounts to a sexual
encounter (as described in A') which is not legitimated
by marriage. What this law means to say is that: for a
girl not to marry her first sexual partner is structur-
ally equivalent to adultery against the man she even-
tually marries; but inasmuch as chronology is taken
into account, her crime is retroactively treated as an
act of fornication against her father's house instead.
The story of Amnon and Tamar (2 Sam 13) clearly
illustrates the legal reasoning underlying the crime of
sexual "violation" that is so contrary to modern legal
norms. Amnon unquestionably forces his virgin half-
sister Tamar to have sex with him: 'l\nd he overpow-
ered her [wayye!Jezaq mimmenna], and he violated
her [way'annehii], and he lay with her" (2Sam13:i4)-
the verb "overpower" being cognate with "seize" (Deut
22:25). But what is the crime, and who is its victim?
Incest does not seem to be at issue. Nor does Tamar's
lack of consent. Rather, as she explains to Amnon:
"No, my brother, do not violate me [te'annent], for it is
not done thus in Israel. Do not do this outrage
[nebiila] .... Speak, please, to the king; for he will not
withhold me from you'' (2 Sam 13:i2-13). The "viola-
tion" here consists of him engaging in sexual inter-
course with her without first procuring the consent of
her father, namely, David.Just as surprising, she does
not flee the crime scene after being violated; rather,
she expects Amnon-whom modern law would iden-
tify as her "rapist"-to marry her. When he, on the
contrary, comes to "hate" her and commands her to
leave, she views this rejection to be a greater wrong
than the violation: "No, my brother, for this evil, to
send me away, is greater than the other that you did
to me" (2 Sam 13:i5-16). Recall that "hate" and "send
away" are technical terms for divorce. If Tamar's be-
havior will seem Jhocking to modern readers, it is
entirely consistent with B' (Deut 22:28-29 ): if a man
"violates" an unengaged virgin, he must marry her
and can never divorce her. The fact that Amnon effec-
tively divorces her makes his crime complete.
According to these laws, females could be accom-
plices to the crime of adultery, but not principal per-
petrators thereof. Sex crimes were first and foremost
a wrong inflicted by one man against another man

through the medium of a female. For this reason, it
should be pointed out, biblical law could not con-
ceive of a woman sexually violating a man. Not even
Potiphar's wife, as mistress of the household, was
imagined to be in a position to force herself upon
her Hebrew slave (Gen 39). To be sure, she makes an
inappropriate sexual advance toward Joseph-what
we would now call "sexual harassment"-but the story
assumes that Joseph is entirely capable of escaping
her grasp, albeit not without leaving behind incrimi-
nating evidence in her hands. (Note how effective is
her dissimulated cry for help, illustrating the signifi-
cance that biblical law ascribes to the scene of the
crime: town or field.) Deuteronomy 25:11-12 is signif-
icant in this regard because it deals with a case of a
woman physically assaulting a man: if two men are
fighting, and the wife of the one defends him by
"seizing" (wehe'!J,eztqa be-) the genitals of the other-
just as in the forcible encounter in Case B' (Deut
22:25-27 ), the man "seizes" the girl (wehe'IJ,eztq-bah)-
then her hand shall be cut off. At worst, then, a
woman was thought to be capable of battery-for
which reason it is a noncapital crime-but only ifher
victim was already engaged in a struggle with an-
other man and thus vulnerable to attack. And even
then, the only attack that legally matters, the only
one that the law takes the trouble to describe, is an
assault on his manhood.
Female Authority. Biblical law betrays only an
inkling of an impulse toward gender equality. Sur-
prisingly, it is the Priestly source that most clearly en-
tertains this idea-surprising, insofar as the priesthood
was entirely male, even if women could play mar-
ginal supporting roles within the cult. In Numbers 6,
priestly law explicitly makes the Nazirite vow avail-
able to women as well as to men, giving official per-
mission to both sexes to "undertake an extraordinary
vow" (Num 6:2). This is a remarkable concession,
when one considers that the Nazirite attains a level
ofholiness comparable to that of the high priest.Just
as the Nazirite may not defile himself or herself by
approaching a corpse, not even to mourn the death
of a parent or sibling, "for the crown [nezer] of his
God is upon his head" (Num 6:7 )-namely, the head
of consecrated hair-so too the high priest may not
GENDER Hebrew Bible 317
defile himself by approaching a corpse, not even
to mourn the death of a parent, "for the crown
[nezer] of anointing oil of his God is upon his head"
(Lev 21:12; see also Exod 39:30 and Lev 8:9 ). The
Priestly source, in this respect, might merely reflect
the brute fact that there really were female as well as
male Nazirites-although one should note that the
only Nazirites attested to in the Bible are Samson
and (most likely) Samuel (see also Amos 2:11). Be that
as it may, it is still significant that the priests did
not prohibit the existence of female Nazirites-and
indeed, explicitly affirmed it-in their description (or
perhaps appropriation) of this non-Priestly religious
practice. In the eyes of the priests, then, holiness and
the authority it conferred were not intrinsically mas-
culine in nature, a corollary, perhaps, of the oft-noted
symmetry found in the Priestly story of creation:
"And God created the human in his image. In the
image of God he created him. Male and female he
created them" (Gen 1:27 ). And so, when the particular
concerns of the priesthood were not at issue, they
did not restrict the experience of the sacred to men.
It should finally be noted that all of the offices that
women are explicitly said to have assumed in the
Bible-judge, Nazirite, prophet, and wise woman-
are instances ofwhat Max Weber called "charismatic;'
as opposed to "traditional;' authority. Perhaps, then,
within biblical Israel, traditional authority (including
the priesthood and the rule of law) was marked as
male, whereas charismatic authority was unmarked in
terms of gender. In parallel fashion, the "official" doc-
trine of biblical law may have been decidedly patriar-
chal, but biblical literature suggests that the "unoffi-
cial" practices of everyday life could be far less rigid.
As Frymer-Kensky argues: "The biblical image of
women is consistently the same as that of men" (1992,
p.121). Not only are there numerous examples of intel-
ligent, resourceful, and courageous women in biblical
narrative, but also in some cases the wife actually
seems to exert more control over the household than
the husband, whose household it officially is: think of
how Rebekah manipulates fate, thwarting the express
wishes of her dying husband (Gen 27); think of how
Abigail, speaking in the name of the household, saves
Nabal and all his men from a catastrophic confrontation

318 GENDER Hebrew Bible
with a David intent on exacting vengeance for the insult
his men have endured from her "fool" (nabiil) of a hus-
band (1Sam25). Such women have apparently not been
properly instructed as to a wife's lawful place. We have
come, in other words, to the limits oflegal discourse.
[See also Ancient Near Eastern Law; Biblical Law, sub-
entry Hebrew Bible; Blessing and Cursing; Book of the
Covenant; Capital Punishment; Children; Civil Law;
Decalogue; Deuteronomic Law; Divorce; Elephantine
Legal Texts; Evidence; Gender, subentries on Ancient
Near East, New Testament, and Rabbinic Literature;
Holiness Code and Writings; Inheritance; Injury and
Assault; Laws ofHammurapi; Legal Institutions; Mar-
riage; Middle Assyrian Laws; Narrative; Neo-Babylo-
nian Laws; Nuzi Texts; Oaths and Vows; Ordeal;
Priestly Law; Property; Punishment and Restitution;
Reproduction; Ritual; Sexual Legislation; Sociology of
Law; and Widows.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ben-Barak, Zafrira. Inheritance by Daughters in Israel
and the Ancient Near East. Tel Aviv: Archaeological
Center, 2006.
Berlin, Adele. "Sex and the Single Girl in Deuteronomy
22:' In Mishneh Todah: Studies in Deuteronomy and
Its Cultural Environment in Honor ofJeffrey H. Tigay,
edited by Nili Sacher Fox, David A. Glatt-Gilad, and
Michael J. Williams, pp. 95-112. Winona Lake, Ind.:
Eisenbrauns, 2009.
Bird, Phyllis. Missing Persons and Mistaken Identities:
Women and Gender in Ancient Israel. Minneapolis:
Fortress, 1997.
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Robert S. Kawashima
New Testament
"Gender:· once primarily a grammatical designation
used to differentiate masculine, feminine, and some-
times neuter nouns, has come to be used more widely
to talk about people. In part this was a reaction to
classifying people on the basis of sexuality. Both terms,
"gender" and "sexuality;' have been variously under-
stood. At first sight, sexuality appears to be simply a
matter of differentiating men and women on the
basis of their genitalia. While that may suffice as a
broad generalization, it runs into difficulty both due
to the fact that there are people whose genitalia are
mixed or irregular and due to the growing realization
that some people may be primarily or only attracted
GENDER New Testament 319
sexually to people of their own sex. Such sexual ori-
entation may also change over a person's lifetime
and further may not necessarily be mono-directional.
The classification, heterosexual or homosexual, is
an oversimplification. The matter is further compli-
cated by what people take as evidence for such differ-
ences: from doctrinal statements based on an exclu-
sive reading of Genesis 1:27 to lived experience of
people having such orientations, or encountering
them among friends and families, and not least in
public life. The word "gender," like "sexuality;' serves
to identify these variations, but is appropriate also
for discussing roles of men and women, unrelated to
sexual interaction or orientation. Thus gender identity
cannot be reduced to genitalia, but is shaped prima-
rily by roles and expectations in society, which may
indeed be differently allocated depending on the
socio-historical context at hand. For instance, while
giving birth is clearly a female function and so bio-
logically determined, the matter of who brings them
up is not.
Gender Studies and the New Testament. The fol-
lowing discussion of gender in the New Testament
both assumes the complexities identified above and
engages in a description of gender and gender roles
based necessarily on the general differentiation of
men and women. New Testament material on ho-
mosexuality is discussed in a separate entry.
Attention to gender issues in the New Testament
found its first major impulse in the movement for
equal rights for women (Schussler Fiorenza, 1989;
Schussler Fiorenza, 2011, pp. 1-20; Burrus in Penner,
2007, pp. 1-10; Corley, 2002, pp. 7-26). Initially fo-
cusing on biblical passages that affirmed women, it
moved to an awareness that the New Testament au-
thors primarily reflected men's priorities and values
about women and that New Testament interpreters
were mostly men who frequently missed or miscon-
strued significant material about women. Further,
there was a realization that some biblical values about
women warranted critical engagement, and in some
cases, refutation since they could potentially be de-
structive of women and of women's interests and
stood in tension with values preserved elsewhere in
the biblical tradition that affirmed women. A concern