Sara Parks, Shayna Sheinfeld, and Meredith J.C. Warren. Jewish and Christian Women in the Ancient Mediterranean. New York: Routledge, 2022.
“Who decides which parts of the past are important (p. 7)?” Sara Parks, Shayna Sheinfeld, and Meredith J. C. Warren in their recent book, Jewish and Christian Women in the Ancient Mediterranean, make their intentions clear: while women have often been overlooked as worthy of study, it is time for that to change. Of course, in many historical books, such an explanation wouldn’t be necessary, but it is a fact that academia and the study of religion in general has often deemed these matters to be secondary. The goal of the authors is to bring women, or rather, what is characterized as feminine both in the ancient world and modern, from the periphery to the center of the study of the Ancient Mediterranean.
This concise book serves anyone studying and/or teaching about women in the Ancient Mediterranean context (approximately 300 BCE - 300 CE). The first four chapters give a broad overview of the religious systems within this geographical and chronological scope as well as the literature and archives available. The authors explore in detail the roles women played, attending to commonalities and particularities of “Jew and Gentile” women. From the very beginning, the authors take great care to guide those who will teach from this textbook, and they are explicit about the book’s scope and limitations. Readers will find not only a useful primer for studying gender within ancient texts, but also, a detailed account of the various ways in which readers and students themselves interpret these texts. The introductory chapter encourages readers to slow down, consider diverse methods of approaches, and be curious about unexplored interpretative angles. The call of scholar Bernadette Brooten to attend to gaps within historical sources animates the book’s case studies and analyses.
In subsequent chapters, the authors shift from broad categories into narrower, yet still foundational, studies of these ancient religious systems. Simplistic categories like “religion” and “gender” are shown to be complicated, with deceptive clarity and porous boundaries. Just like contemporary individuals, many in antiquity fit many proverbial boxes at once or none at all. Even the terms Jew and Gentile require nuanced attention to the multiple and contiguous facets of their attendant identities. Ultimately, the textbook chooses to continue to use Jew and Judaism, a decision based in a refusal to contribute to the erasure of Jewish people today, while shifting the language from “Christian” instead to those within the “early Jesus movement.” Since early Christ followers would not necessarily have understood themselves as Christian, this vocabulary shows greater respect for their traditions without retrojecting a later understanding back onto the earliest texts (p. 34-41). Recognizing as well that one “cannot discuss religion and politics separately for this period of antiquity,” the authors show a considerable awareness of the overlap between terms that continues into the present, another necessary consideration for readers and students alike.
The next two chapters “zoom in” on specific texts and tools to offer illustrative case studies. These sections broaden readers’ horizons, taking the time to discuss the vast amount of material available for the study of Jewish and Christian women in this period, and the many ways it might be approached. The book investigates the political contexts wherein certain literature is formed and represented and considers even the processes of canonization in order to address a variety of genres of text from the Apocrypha to Apostolic Literature. The authors introduce key figures such as Queen Salome Alexandra and Herodias, as well as key groups discussed like the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes, in a clear fashion that makes the movement from information to practice seamless. Most chapters invite readers to consider how much more there is to uncover and how many more clues there are to tease out.
The second half of the book concentrates on the first few centuries CE to consider the “Early Jesus Movement.” The authors emphasize the fluidity of the movement in the period when it was “not yet separated from Judaism,” including discussions about critical topics such as the anti-Jewish tendencies within feminist scholarship on biblical and early Christian literature. The case studies in this section reveal women’s daily rituals and experiences with religion. The seventh chapter, subtitled “from birth to death,” covers topics such as marriage, childbirth, menstruation, leadership, and death, highlighting ways our modern assumptions may gloss over the challenges ancient peoples faced. This chapter exposes the fact that the lives of women in the ancient Mediterranean do not neatly map onto the binaries such as “private” and “public” which are often found in scholarship. Using some artefacts and other archeological findings from these time periods also help to make sense of what the authors call “slippages (p. 218),” continuing on Brooten’s legacy of looking “outside” the corpus (p. 319), they find many behaviors that were considered quite normal but have escaped attention in other studies.
In addition to treating historical women, the authors also attend to the methodological challenges presented by literary representations of women as they trace “women in story, women making story, women consuming story.” This chapter begins with a discussion of what it means to use women as a tool for male authors to express their viewpoints, often described as “thinking with women.” In a series of case studies, the authors develop a framework for understanding the literary portrayal of women. For example, in a section called “texts of terror,” the authors treat explicit depictions of sexual violence in order to reinforce what that author would call proper behavior. The subsequent chapter partially on martyrdom accounts builds upon this foundation, and the authors carefully flag “difficult topics” to signal the difficulty of reading these texts while encouraging proper interpretative care.
If it hasn’t already been said before, Parks, Sheinfeld, and Warren make it easy to use this book as a full-fledged textbook for courses. Not only is the information within the book well formed, so too, are the many activities and discussion questions that are found within it for both pedagogical and even devotional purposes. Activity 4.1 (p. 92), for example, asks readers to
“become aware of their norms, assumptions, beliefs, and values which are based on our experience of the world and the power dynamics within it,” by writing an “I am from” poem, accessing students’ self-reflection. This specific activity is easily done and accessible, using free resources from the internet and in other places, simply using one’s imagination. Generally, all the activities and questions used as teaching tools in the book push students to truly engage with themselves and the content, encouraging them not only to develop vital skills in the study of ancient texts, but to connect ancient history to the present.
The book concludes with a discussion of the periodization and division between Judaism of the Rabbinic period and early Christianity (often referred to as the early Church or Patristic period) under the umbrella of early “Late Antiquity.” While recognizing the blurriness between epochs, the discussion here still offers a formidable foundation for understanding not only the period it covers, but the key developments before 300 BCE and after 300 CE to foster discussion and spur further inquiry. The authors point to the way that rabbinic literature is quite “comfortable with pluriformity and dissent (p. 318),” a potential model for seeking out the many still unheard voices that existed in antiquity too. Such an approach promises a constant revision and refinement of our historiography that upends current understandings of the ancient world. While the authors concentrate on gender, future work could extend their contributions by introducing more intersectional up-to-date approaches to consider the function of race and ethnicity in antiquity. Jewish and Christian Women in the Ancient Mediterranean provides scholars and students an informative and accessible textbook for understanding the lives and significance of women within our ancient sources. This book has helped lay a foundation, and many more can build upon it, as the study of women in the ancient world begins to achieve the prominence it deserves.
Alexiana Fry has her PhD in Old Testament from Stellenbosch University in South Africa, focusing on migration, trauma, and feminism. She is currently working on her first publication with Lexington Press on the intersectional lens of Speech Act Theory and Trauma Hermeneutics. You can find her at just about any time of the day with her two pugs and highly caffeinated.