Biblical Theology Bulletin: Journal of Bible and Culture

Scholars have long recognized the diverse and contradictory evidence for women's activities in the Roman world. Women are expected to be modest and subordinate to men; yet they are also found in leadership roles. A common solution has been to say that women leaders were exceptions to the rule. Certain women or groups stepped outside of cultural norms and took on influential roles. Instead of reading the conflicting reports as evidence of distinct groups of women, I interpret them as evidence of a tension that pervades the culture. At the same time that women are ideally described as modest and confined to the home, some virtues required women to exercise leadership and to pursue the broad interests of their households and cities. Women who exhibit leadership are not stepping outside of culture but also inhabit familiar social norms. Because of this, I argue that we should approach the contradictions in early Christian sources as evidence of participation in this shared cultural background. Both inside and outside the church, conformity to social norms for womanly virtue left open a range of possibilities for women's behavior, including active leadership.

The article surveys early references to the story of Adam and Eve, which are surprisingly few in number, beginning only around 200 bce, with the Book of Tobit. The common notion that Adam was punished by death for his sin is verified neither in Genesis 2–3 itself (and the surrounding chapters) nor in any pre-Pauline texts. Paul's focus on Adam's sin was out of the ordinary, and his conclusion that he was punished by some kind of death does not resemble interpretations in any other contemporary source, including Philo. The equally common idea that the Devil was assumed to participate in causing Adam's sin does not occur in early texts (for instance, Wisdom or the books of the New Testament), being first found in Justin Martyr. Therefore, assessments of biblical theology that depend on these concepts should be emended.

According to 1 Kings 21:1–16, Ahab sought to purchase the vineyard of Naboth, which adjoined the royal estate in Jezreel. Although Ahab offered a fair price or replacement land, Naboth declined: “Yahweh forbid that I should sell you the inheritance of my ancestors!” Commentators explain the force of Naboth's reply by comparing attitudes toward land in one of two complexes of biblical literature. According to the Deuteronomistic History, the land was a divine gift allotted by Yahweh to individual clans, and according to the Holiness Code, land could not permanently be sold outside the family. In this context, Naboth's reply seems appropriate. These approaches, however, tend to overstate the case by proposing an overly narrow framework for understanding land rights in the story. They make unwarranted assumptions about the relationships between biblical texts, and they are inconsistent with the narrative logic of the episode. I argue that Naboth's refusal is better understood within the context of a much broader theme in ancient Israelite tribal life—what anthropologist Parker Shipton has called in another context “ideologies of attachment,” connecting households, ancestors, and land. An examination of this theme in a wide variety of biblical literature and in the archaeological record offers a more robust framework within which to appreciate the rhetorical force of Naboth's refusal.

An insight from anthropology is that the human body may serve as a symbol of society. In the ancient Near East, including in Israel, the body mediated symbolic relationship between of people's experience of their physical and social worlds. This essay will argue that that this complex symbolic relationship between the body and the world formed the basis of the ancient Near Eastern understanding of creation. Because the body functioned as a model for the world, the procreation of the human body (microcosm) offered an appropriate analogy for understanding the creation of the world and society (macrocosm). The essay will focus on a variety of creation metaphors from Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Israel to construct a heuristic model of creation that will delineate the symbolic relationship between the body and the world.