This program is brought to you by Emory University. Similar to the achievement of Jane Austen, the great novelist, similar to her achievement in English literature, the biblical authors reinvent the hero. Rather than valiant warriors are figures like Ruth and Boaz, where Boaz is a guy called this mighty hero. Gibbor is the Hebrew term for hero. But his heroism is no longer fighting and being a military warrior, but really being a man of class, of aristocratic virtue, of nobility. A nobility though, that presents itself in caring for others and establishing justice in his society. And some of the most beautifully told stories in the Bible then, especially within Genesis The Beginning, where all the most amazing stories are told, have nothing to do with military virtue. I mean we have a lot of them, David and Joshua and so forth, but those are kind of put back in the narrative. In the forefront of the narrative are these stories of family life. Finding a wife for Isaac. Very similar to Austen's novels where the adventure is really about romance and family life and preserving one's name upon the land and the inheritance and making it possible that a society can survive catastrophe and dramatic change. So for a people who lacked sophisticated military technologies, strength is in the numbers. This fact explains the extraordinary attention devoted to procreation and children in the Bible. Israel is a small people and therefore it's all the more imperative that family life and procreation and children and so forth are held up in high esteem, so that the nation can survive, just in terms of sheer numbers. Blessing is identified in the Bible, not only with a long life, but also with children who carry on their parents' names and the biblical law codes repeatedly return to family matters and go to great lengths to create conditions that ensure the preservation of individual families. And there are a few laws that deal with that and we'll look at them, both in the video segment, but also in some of the questions for the forum. Now, just as the biblical authors make the home, not the battlefield, the centerstage of collective life, they also refashion gender roles - gender roles meaning the role for men and for women. And the domestic sphere is no longer a place principally for women. So it's not the battlefield is the space for men and the home is the place for women. That becomes complicated within the biblical narratives, where men start to play a much bigger role in the family life than what you would find in a lot of heroic literature. Now by depicting the significant contributions women make to military victory, on the other hand, the biblical authors undermined a conventional justification for male authority. So one of the great heroines or one of the great heroes of the biblical narratives is Deborah or Jael. These are found in the first chapters of the Book of Judges and they're women. They're the ones who do all the great military victory, military feats on the battlefield and take out the enemy. And the authors explicitly use these stories to undermine the pretence that males have to power, by virtue of saying, look, I'm the one who saved us. If women are the ones who also do the real saving, also on the battlefield, then the basis for male authority is undermined. Now while assigning men a greater part in the activities of family and the home, the biblical authors present women in more public roles. They are expected to be present at public assemblies. They're extolled for taking individual initiative and ascribed significant political influence. And they are venerated along with the nation's patriarchs. Sarah is next to Abraham and Rebecca next to Isaac and etc. Now I'm not claiming that we'll ever establish total egalitarianism within the biblical literature, but we do have to, despite all the patriarchalism of the biblical narrative, notice that women are - the role that the biblical authors assign women is shifting in favor of a more robust role for women. And both within just the civic affairs, but also as I just noted, with regard to military life where that was the place where men would make their claim to authority and then most fundamentally, in just the creation of the nation. So that if Genesis depicts the most important moments in Israel's history in the lives of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, it's fascinating that all these stories have women so prominently in them. So I'm going to argue that this is not something to do - these new roles that men and women have that's so distinctive within biblical literature is not something that is revelatory that has to do with the monotheistic native thinking of ancient Israel compared to its environment, compared to the Canaanites and the Babylonians and all that, that Israel somehow just happened to think this way or received this revelation way back in the desert. I'm going to argue and claim and I think bring some useful evidence and powerful evidence to support my claim that these new ways of thinking about the roles men and women play in society have really to do with a response to a crisis and a catastrophe and it has nothing to do with that Israel in itself is any better than any other culture. But if they do assign roles to women and men that make sense to us much more and that continues on in more progressive societies, it's due to the fact that they, in a time when their society is wiped out, they need to involve men in the family life in a different way and they also needed to involve women in public life in a different way in order to expand their numbers, expand the participation. The nation becomes all the more stronger if everyone is doing their part. And if you're confining women to the domestic sphere and not allowing them to play a more prominent role in public, then you only have half as many people within your society and within your public life as otherwise. So I'm going to look at, in keeping with the larger theme of the course, that the ethics about gender roles and women and family life really grow out of a response to the destruction of a society and the attempt to reinvent oneself. OK, so let's get started.
