They fed, clothed and reared each successive generation of the nation, yet they are ignored as if they never existed. They wandered with the men, living in tents, herding the sheep and goats, cooking over open fires, giving birth to their children and sometimes burying them. They constituted half the Israelite population, those women. Who gave birth to all these generations? All these men had wives and mothers, but the women remain nameless, lost for ever in the mists of time. If we examine the many genealogies in the Old Testament, which can make parts of it very tedious for the modern reader, we have to ask: Where are the women? X begat Y begat Z ad infinitum, but only the generations upon generations of men are recorded. Some will recall that John the Baptist’s mother was called Elizabeth. From the New Testament: Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Mary and Martha, Salome. The list is unlikely to extend much beyond that.
was she called Miriam? A few might remember Judith, the heroine who slew Holofernes. From the Old Testament: Jezebel, Delilah, Eve, the Queen of Sheba, Ruth. If you ask the average person brought up in our modern secular society (which still has its roots in the Christian tradition) to name women from the Bible, the answers will go something like this. And how the authors rub their hands in glee over their horrific ends! So bad, indeed, that their names have become bywords for evil. However, the majority of women in the Old Testament who are sufficiently honoured as to have their names recorded for posterity are ‘bad’ women. Until, that is, the church fathers seized control of the church hierarchy and turned it into the mirror image of the male secular power of the time, the Roman Empire. Women even played a major role in the early Christian church, preaching, travelling through Gentile lands spreading the word, and perishing for their faith in the Roman arena. This reflected the kindlier, more humane face of the new dispensation. Have you noticed how few ‘good’ women there are? By and large they are found in the New Testament. In this piece, I am not planning to look at the Bible as a religious work, but in those other three aspects: a history, a genealogy, and a collection of stories.
Would our individual perceptions of ourselves be the same without this influence? Difficult to say. The world’s three great faiths – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – are all rooted in this extraordinary book, a book which has outsold every other and whose influence on our thoughts, culture, literature, and history is incalculable. The New Testament takes matters forward into the birth of the modern world and the foundation of Christianity. It also contains a carefully preserved genealogy of families and tribes, and a collection of some of the world’s most memorable stories. The Old Testament is an historical record of a nomadic people’s wanderings over the Middle East and North Africa followed by their settlement in Judaea. Assembled over several centuries, it is not simply a testament of faith. One of the earliest written records is, of course, the Bible. The patriarchal principle had won the battle for social dominance.
Archaeological evidence points to earlier matriarchal cultures which preceded the pervasive patriarchal bias, but by the time written literature began, this matriarchal culture had been suppressed, pushed to the margins into folktale, superstition, and myth. Western history and culture have their roots deep in the Judaeo-Graeco-Roman tradition, and it is a strongly patriarchal tradition. It is a truism that history is written by the victors.
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