[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Re: Re: Ezra-Neh

On         Sat, 03 Aug 96 09:55:44 EDT,  PWEGNER@BROWNVM.brown.edu writes:
>
>>As to the argument she was living in a man's world, that too doesn't
>hold water.  Sorry to contradict you, but a piece on women's power in
>Egypt is too long - and too off topic - for this board.  Bloom has
>outraged a lot of people, I see, but his scholarship credentials are
>awesome otherwise.  Examine the thesis carefully, if necessary take an
>outsiders view, as I do, and see if it doesn't make sense.  Your "so
>what" may be the mark of a frozen mind!  You don't follow it with anything
>but a unjustified putdown of ancient women in Israel.  Where is youyr
>evidence?<
>
>The first part of the above has  nothing to do with me, but appears to be
>responding to some earlier poster whom I cited in my message.  As for the
>second remark, it should be obvious  to anyone with a grain of intelligence
>that Bloom's credentials, however "awesome", have zip to do with either
>women's studies or bible studies and are therefore irrelevant to a judgment
>of "The Book of J" -- except in so far as they support a negative judgment.
>
>As to your last comment, you apparently have failed to understand that any
>"putdown"that might be presennt here) is a putdown, not of women, but of
>the male rulers of patriarchal cultures that have put women down!  (So, I
>can't help wondering exactly whose mind is "frozen" here!)
>
>As for my "evidence", it comprises the language and content of the entire
>Hebrew Bible.  Take a leaf out of your own book, and read carefully.  Also,
>try reading the large body of religious feminist scholarship on biblical
>literature and (if you read with an unfrozen mind, you'll attain insights
>that will astonish you).  I myself have written extensively on these
>subjects, but obviously my work (even though published by O.U.P.) is unknown
>to you.
>
>Judith Romney Wegner
>Connecticut College

   Sorry.  I have Bloom's book.  I don't have yours.

   However, I stick with my letter to the Editor of BAR commenting on Redford's
   question about Solomon and Bithiah bu asking, "What was their pillow talk?"
   Redford denied any influence of Egyptian Wisdom Literature on Hebrew
   Religious texts.  I have little of his awesome credentials but this is one
   time that "parallel development" will not wash.

   If you are outraged by Jewish male chavinism, so am I.  However, to call
   Egyptian society patriarchal is a bad reading of the Sociology of Ancient
   Egypt.  The right to the throne was matrilinear; The Heb Sedj Festival or
   Jubilee where simulacrum of the ritual murder of the king replaced its
   real murder shows how Matrilinear the system was from the beginning; the 
   Great She Elephant model of modern South African king selection was the 
   model in early Ancient Egypt.  The "illustrations" lining the inside of the
   covered funeral ramps leading from the riverbank funerary temple testify to
   a very different view of the gods than the one that swept down from Sycthia
   with the Sea Peoples.  The Egyptians had ruling Queens at several times in
   their history.  However, the duties of providing the next royal heiress 
   left little time for the onerous worship duties of the king.

Tom Simms