Marriage Gifts and Social Change in Ancient Palestine: 1200 BCE to 200 CE

Marriage Gifts and Social Change in Ancient Palestine In Marriage Gifts and Social Change in Ancient Palestine, T. M. Lemos traces changes in the marriage customs of ancient Palestine over the course of several hundred years. The most important of these changes was a shift in emphasis from bridewealth to dowry, the latter of which clearly predominated in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Whereas previous scholarship has often attributed these shifts to the influence of foreign groups, Lemos connects them instead with a transformation that occurred in Palestine’s social structure beginning in the preexilic period. In the early Iron Age, Israel was a kinship-based society with a subsistence economy, but as the centuries passed, it became increasingly complex and developed marked divisions between rich and poor. At the same time, the importance of its kinship groups waned greatly. Using an interdisciplinary approach that draws heavily on anthropological research, cultural theory, archaeological evidence, and historical-critical methods, Lemos posits that shifts in marriage customs were directly related to these wider social changes. T. M. Lemos is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee. She has published articles in the Journal of Biblical Literature and The Journal of Religion.

Advance Praise for Marriage Gifts and Social Change in Ancient Palestine “A millennium and a half is a very long sweep of history for a scholar to cover when providing an in-depth analysis of something as complicated as marriage practices, bridewealth, and dowry, yet Lemos’s remarkable book covers Israelite culture, society, and history from 1200 BCE to 200 CE. The study is innovative in method, sophisticated in theory, impressive in scope, and convincing in conclusion. Even if the topic is outside one’s area of specialization (as it is outside mine), the book nonetheless repays study and deserves a handy place on one’s bookshelf, both for what it demonstrates about ancient Israelite and Jewish marriage practices, and as a model of comparative, interdisciplinary method in biblical studies.” – Dale Basil Martin, Yale University “A fascinating and thorough examination of a complicated topic, this book is a superb example of how interdisciplinary work can bring clarity to a much-debated issue. The author’s skillful and thorough use of relevant sources and methods has produced a compelling new portrait of the nature and development of marriage gifts in ancient Israel and post-exilic Judaism.” – Carol Meyers, Duke University “Lemos’s study is the first of its kind to incorporate new approaches to marital and inheritance transfers in ancient Israel. It is a thorough examination that will be a standard work for a long time.” – Jack Goody, University of Cambridge “Biblical scholars have long engaged in comparative work, but T. M. Lemos provocatively pushes this enterprise beyond its usual confines – the eastern Mediterranean and the ancient Near East – to engage anthropological analyses of different types of marriage gifts from such regions as sub-Saharan Africa and north India. Armed with these data, Lemos returns to the Bible to present a bold new hypothesis that explains the varying traditions of marriage gifts in ancient Israel and Second Temple Judaism – one that so significantly advances our understanding of marriage during these periods that no future discussion can fail to take Lemos’s conclusions into account.” – Susan Ackerman, Dartmouth College

Marriage Gifts and Social Change in Ancient Palestine 1200 BCE to 200 CE

T. M. Lemos Rhodes College

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013–2473, usa www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521113496 © T. M. Lemos 2010 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2010 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. isbn 978-0-521-11349-6 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For my wife, Andrea, whose gifts to me are beyond measure

0

Contents

Acknowledgments

page ix

Abbreviations

xi

Introduction

1

1

Biblical Evidence for Marriage Gifts

20

2 Postexilic Evidence for Marriage Gifts

62

3

Anthropology and the Study of Marriage Gifts

89

4 The Social Structure of Ancient Israel from Iron I to the Babylonian Exile

159

5

200

The Social Structure of Palestine in the Second Temple Period

Final Analysis and Conclusions

230

Appendix: Marriage Gifts Among Judeans Living in Babylonia During the Sixth Century BCE

237

Glossary

245

Bibliography

247

Index of Biblical and Other Ancient Sources

275

General Index

283

vii

Acknowledgments

This work was completed in large part while I was a doctoral student at Yale University. While the writing of dissertations is a grueling and frustrating enterprise for most graduate students, I cannot say that this was the case for me. On the whole I found the endeavor to be a rewarding one, and the reason for this certainly lies in the many supportive mentors and peers with whom I found myself surrounded at Yale. My committee members, Robert Wilson, John Collins, and Saul Olyan, were instrumental in making the process of researching and writing a smooth one. I thank Robert Wilson and John Collins for having read multiple versions of the different chapters and for the many helpful suggestions and comments they made along the way. I also wish to express my gratitude to Saul Olyan, my undergraduate mentor at Brown University and my inspiration to enter the field of biblical studies, who agreed to serve as a reader of my dissertation and lent me extremely useful advice on pursuing publication. Saul has always made himself available to read and offer constructive criticism on my work, whether it be a ninety-page chapter or a two-page proposal, and this willingness is very much appreciated. I also am grateful for the suggestions of Dale Martin, Brent Nongbri, Dylan Burns, Adam Marshak, David Vanderhooft, and Emmanuelle Salgues, each of whom read part or all of the present manuscript. I thank, too, the editorial staff at Cambridge University Press, especially Andy Beck, Lewis Bateman, and my charming and meticulous editor, Ronald Cohen, as well as the anonymous reviewers of the work. I would be remiss if I did not here thank my parents, who have always supported me in my academic endeavors and who have been role models for me of caring and diligence. It is also fitting to begin this work on marriage by thanking my own wife, Andrea Stevenson Allen, whose support over the last few years has facilitated far more than the writing of this project. Her joyful and irreverent sense of humor delights me as much now as it did when we first met, and her generosity of spirit is a blessing in my life. ix

Abbreviations

All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. Translations of works by Josephus are from The Loeb Classical Library. I use conventional abbreviations for biblical books and for rabbinic and other ancient texts. When transliterating into the Roman alphabet, I have used the standard scholarly equivalents, with the exception of certain proper names and words (most notably the word kethubba) that are still used frequently in the contemporary period or are most easily recognized by a certain spelling. While I have in certain cases left Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek untransliterated, I have endeavored to transliterate all words used or discussed repeatedly throughout the book. AASOR AB ABD AOS ASOR BA BAR BASOR BDB

BMA

BZAW CAD

Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research Anchor Bible Series The Anchor Bible Dictionary. Edited by D. N. Freedman. 6 vols. New York: Doubleday, 1992. American Oriental Society American Schools of Oriental Research Biblical Archaeologist Biblical Archaeology Review Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research Brown, Francis, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs. The BrownDriver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996. Roth, Martha T. Babylonian Marriage Agreements 7th–3rd Centuries B.C. Alter Orient und Altes Testament 222. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Verlag Butzon & Bercker Kevelaer, 1989. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Edited by A. Leo Oppenheim. Chicago: Oriental Institute, 1956–. xi

xii CAT

CHJ COS CR: BS DJD FOTL HALOT

HTR HUCA IEJ JAOS JBL JJS JNES JPS JSOT JSOTSup LXX NEAEHL

NRSV OTL SBL SWBA UF VT WDSP ZPE

ABBREVIATIONS

The Cuneiform Alphabetic Texts from Ugarit, Ras Ibn Hani, and Other Places. Edited by Manfried Dietrich, Oswald Loretz, and Joaquin Sanmartín. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 1995. Cambridge History of Judaism. Ed. W. D. Davies and Louis Finkelstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–. The Context of Scripture. Edited by W. W. Hallo. 3 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1997–. Currents in Research: Biblical Studies Discoveries in the Judaean Desert Forms of the Old Testament Literature Series Koehler, Ludwig, Walter Baumgartner, J. J. Stamm. The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament. 2 vols. Translated and edited by M. E. J. Richardson. Leiden: Brill, 1994–2000. Harvard Theological Review Hebrew Union College Annual Israel Exploration Society Journal of the American Oriental Society Journal of Biblical Literature Journal of Jewish Studies Journal of Near Eastern Studies Jewish Publication Society Version Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Supplement Series Septuagint The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land. Edited by E. Stern. 4 vols. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society and Carta, 1993. New Revised Standard Version translation of the Bible Old Testament Library Series Society of Biblical Literature Social World of Biblical Antiquity Series Ugarit Forschungen Vetus Testamentum The Samaria Papyri from Wadi ed-Daliyeh Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik

Introduction

Those who think of cultural diffusionism as being long since dead in the academy would do well to look to biblical studies. Cultural diffusionism is based upon the concept of diffusion, or the transmission of features from one culture to another.1 Diffusionism, then, as one reference work puts it, “refers to any learned hypothesis that posits an exogenous origin for most elements of a specific culture or cultural subset.”2 Diffusionism as a mode of thinking flourished in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its main proponents “aimed at a comprehensive survey of the spread of cultural traits from the earliest times until today. They developed complex . . . classifications of ‘culture circles’ (Kulturkreise) and surveyed their possible dissemination from an original centre.”3 That is, the hypothesis that most features of any given culture will have come from outside of the culture led to the idea of “culture areas,”4 wherein various ostensibly distinct groups in actuality share very similar cultural traits. This is because these traits, at some prehistoric or historic point, diffused outward from the place, or “centre,” where they originally developed, lending a similarity to the cultures, or subcultures, of one area. Yet, once these culture areas established themselves, further cultural changes could still arise through the diffusion of traits from one Kulturkreis to another. Although diffusionism has long fallen out of favor in academic circles, and no biblicist would subscribe to diffusionistic theories as they were originally formulated a century or more ago, many biblical scholars nonetheless seem to hold ideas about culture and cultural change that betray traces of 1 2 3 4

Glick, “Diffusion, diffusionism,” 118; Barnard, History and Theory, 47. Glick, “Diffusion, diffusionism,” 118. Eriksen and Nielsen, History of Anthropology, 28. Barnard, History and Theory, 47, 50, 54. It should be noted, however, that the term “culture area” has taken on a broader meaning in anthropology and is not strictly moored to diffusionistic thinking.

1

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MARRIAGE GIFTS AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN ANCIENT PALESTINE

diffusionism. For example, when assessing changes in ancient Israelite texts, history, and society, the instinct of many biblical scholars is to look outward: Where did the particular change, the new practice or idea, come (i.e., “diffuse”) from? From which group did the ancient Israelites adopt it: The Mesopotamians? The Egyptians? The Greeks? While it is of course valid and important to ask these questions, too often what underlies the posing of such questions by biblical scholars is the presumption that cultural change must be the result of borrowing from another group. In the case of the Israelites, the origin of most cultural traits is understood to be Mesopotamia, with whom the Israelites and various other groups inhabited the “culture circle” of ancient Near Eastern societies. According to this viewpoint, whether consciously or unconsciously held, features that deviate from the reconstructed norms of this broad ancient Near Eastern culture are the ones seen as being most in need of explanation, but the reasons posited for such deviations often proceed along similarly diffusionistic lines of thinking. For example, instead of deriving from Mesopotamia, a newly “adopted” practice or idea might be seen as originating in some other cultural center, ancient Egypt – perhaps, or Greece, or Rome. Thus, though cultures do change, and can even change often, such change is generally treated as an epiphenomenon of the constant intrusion of foreign elements.5 It is the aim of this book to utilize a more nuanced conception of culture. Although it is certainly true that cultures can and do influence one another, it is my view that change is also, or even primarily, a product of internal processes that drive cultural shifts on both the regional and societal levels.6 This stance will underlie my examination of one particular aspect of cultural change in ancient Palestine – that in patterns of marital gift exchange – and its relationship with other, wider changes in Israelite social structure.7 While 5

6

7

This points to one of the major problems with diffusionistic thinking. As Barnard writes: “An implicit presupposition of extreme diffusionism is that humankind is uninventive: things are invented only once, and then are transmitted from people to people, sometimes across the globe” (ibid., 47). Yet, less extreme forms of diffusionism, like the one described above, seem to make the equally problematic assumption that human inventiveness was limited to only a few societies in the ancient world. For other criticisms mounted against diffusionistic ideas, see Eriksen and Nielsen, History of Anthropology; Barnard, History and Theory; and Herzfeld, “Mediterraneanist Dilemma,” 439–454. I will not attempt a systematic critique of diffusionism in this work. Rather, the summary I have just presented of this way of thinking will serve to contrast the methods I will utilize to examine changes in marriage gifts with those that have sometimes been used by other scholars. For the sake of clarity, let me state that I see this as being the case for all societies, and not just ancient Israel. The focus in this book will be on the practices of the Israelites and Judeans, rather than on those of other groups within ancient Palestine, whose cultures are generally much less well known to us.

INTRODUCTION

3

some of these changes may have been spurred by foreign interventions and foreign influences, I will argue here that it is not only more accurate, but more fruitful to regard such changes as being borne of gradual and ongoing social processes that intersect and are interwoven with, and influence and are influenced by, other social processes. Thus, marriage and other localized social practices are not separate from such features of social structure as economic stratification and modes of production but are inextricably linked to such features. Changes in one area relate directly to changes in the others. Before I discuss these issues in more detail, however, it is necessary to define the question – that is, to define marriage gifts – and explicate why this study is even necessary. While marriage gifts are, of course, gifts given upon the occasion of marriage, these gifts can differ markedly in both form and content. Anthropologists, who have perhaps had the greatest occasion to study marriage gifts, have noted that such gifts fall into four different categories cross-culturally: bridewealth and groomwealth, and dowry and dower, with bridewealth and dowry being far more common than the other two varieties. Bridewealth – and I will use this term throughout this work, rather than the term “brideprice,” because the latter fell out of favor in anthropological circles decades ago – is normally defined as property “tendered by the husband’s grouping to the kin of his wife,” as J. L. Comaroff puts it.8 Groomwealth moves in the opposite direction: it is property tendered by the wife’s family to that of her husband. It is important to note that in neither of these cases does the property go directly to the bride or to the groom, but only to their kin. This feature is regularly emphasized by anthropologists because it is this that most clearly separates bridewealth and groomwealth from dowry and dower, gifts involving “property which is brought to a union, the former being provided by the bride’s family and the latter by that of the groom.”9 As another work describes it, dowry “is property given by a family to its daughter upon marriage for the benefit of her new conjugal household.”10 Dower, then, is just the opposite – property given by a family to their son upon marriage – though 8

9 10

“Introduction,” 4. The term bridewealth was originally proposed by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, who wrote: “On one point at least there seems to be fairly complete accord among specialists, namely about the undesirability of retaining the expression ‘bride-price.’ There are very good reasons for cutting the term out of ethnological literature since at best it emphasizes only one of the functions of this wealth, an economic one, to the exclusion of other important social functions; and since, at worst, it encourages the layman to think that ‘price’ used in this context is synonymous with ‘purchase’ in common English parlance. Hence we find people believing that wives are bought and sold in Africa in much the same manner as commodities are bought in sold in European markets. It is difficult to exaggerate the harm done to Africans by this ignorance” (“Alternative Term for ‘Bride-price,’” 36). Ibid., 4. Dictionary of Anthropology, 129.

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MARRIAGE GIFTS AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN ANCIENT PALESTINE

such a gift is in any case rare. Jack Goody has further suggested that the category of dowry be subdivided into dowry proper and indirect dowry, where the groom or his family either gives property directly to the bride or else gives it to her family, who then pass it on to her as dowry.11 Such differences are not merely classificatory, but relate directly to why these gifts take diverging forms to begin with, a subject that will be treated at length in Chapter 3. Suffice it to say here that when examining marriage gifts, it is imperative to keep in mind with whom the gift originates and with whom it ends up. Putting definitions aside for the moment, scholars have long noted the presence of marriage gifts in many different ancient texts, including the Hebrew Bible. These gifts are discussed or mentioned in a variety of biblical sources, including legal materials and Pentateuchal and other narratives, and also appear in many postbiblical materials, such as the Elephantine Papyri, Philo, Josephus, the archives from the Judean desert, and the Mishnah. The gifts are referred to by different names – mōhar (rhamo), šillûh?îm (Myx?w@l@#?$), proix (proic), phernē (fernh), kethubba (hb@ftuk@;) – and take on different forms: In some cases, property goes to the bride’s family, in other cases, it goes to her. In some cases, it originates with the groom’s family; in other cases, it originates with hers. Roughly speaking, mōhar is the most common form of gift in the Bible, and has been taken by most, though not all, scholars to constitute bridewealth. In later texts, however, mōhar as bridewealth is almost entirely absent.12 Dowry, on the other hand, while relatively infrequent in the biblical corpus, is attested by many postbiblical texts. Scholars have chosen to make sense of these divergences, and of Israelite marriage gifts in general, in different ways. Some scholars seem unaware of the evidence pointing to the decline of bridewealth and the rising prominence of dowry in the Second Temple period. Others, as I implied earlier, have taken a diffusionistic stance, attributing these changes to the influence of one foreign group or another. Still others have taken a culturally evolutionistic stance, not unlike the nineteenth-century thinking that saw bridewealth as being merely a “primitive” purchase price through which a man acquired a wife, or being primarily concerned with assessing whether or not the biblical mōhar does in fact serve as such a purchase price. Let me begin here with the work of W. Robertson Smith who, apart from being influential, himself subscribed to the idea that bridewealth – or brideprice, as he would have called it – is a purchase price. Furthermore, he saw it as being central 11

12

He introduces the term in Goody, “Bridewealth and Dowry,” 20, and uses it in all subsequent works on marriage. These will be discussed at length in Chapter 3. While the term is found in the marriage contracts from Elephantine, it is used there to refer to indirect dowry rather than bridewealth. See Chapter 2 for more on this issue.

INTRODUCTION

5

to a particular type of marriage deemed “marriage by purchase,” whereby a man acquires a wife for himself, or his father does so for him, by exchanging property for a wife in what amounted to a sale.13 Robertson Smith states: “In fact marriage by purchase is found throughout the Semitic races wherever the husband is the wife’s ba’al or lord. The Arabic mahr is the same word with the Hebrew mōhar, which is also paid to the damsel’s father (Deut. 22. 29), and the Syriac mahrā, which Bar ‘Ali . . . defines as ‘whatever the son-in-law gives to the parents of the bride.’ The etymological sense is simply ‘price.’”14 Yet Robertson Smith does not treat Israelite marriage gifts at length, a fact that is unsurprising given that his work on marriage focuses primarily on Arabia. While he does remark upon dowry among Arabs, he does not discuss the few cases of dowry that appear in the biblical corpus, nor does he note the prominence of dowry and absence of “brideprice” in the postbiblical period. Robertson Smith’s ideas about the mōhar reflect ideas about “brideprice” and non-Western marriage that were widely held in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and were consequently followed by many who wrote on the Bible. Louis M. Epstein is a case in point. The similarity between Epstein’s view of the mōhar and that of Robertson Smith is evidenced by the following statement: “Mohar means purchase price . . . [The] form of Jewish marriage . . . represents a transaction, a conveyance of rights.”15 Unlike Robertson Smith, however, he does note that the mōhar changed over time: “It was paid in cash to the bride’s father, later to the bride herself. With the enactment of Simeon b. Shetah, it was merely promised to the bride, and thus became a divorce price, rather than a marriage price.”16 Epstein refers here to an edict described in rabbinic texts.17 In tannaitic and later materials, the mōhar is equated with the rabbinic kethubba payment or divorce penalty – the sum promised to the wife by her husband in the event that he should divorce her. Rabbinic texts attribute the change from the biblical gift, which was given to the bride’s father, to the later Jewish payment that occurred only in the 13 14 15

16 17

So-called “marriage by purchase” will be discussed at greater length in Chapter 3. Smith, Kinship and Marriage, 96. Jewish Marriage Contract, 58–59. He contrasts this with the content of Jewish marriage, which is “all that romance and union imply” (ibid., 59). Ibid., 58. See t. Ket. 12:1 and b. Ket. 82b, as well as Satlow, Jewish Marriage in Antiquity, 213–216 and 352, where he provides a brief bibliography of scholarship on this famous text. Epstein’s statement is seemingly based on the Bavli passage, which posits a three-stage development in the mōhar: from bridewealth to indirect dowry to divorce penalty. This contrasts with t. Ket. 12:1, which seems to assume the change was from bridewealth to divorce penalty, without the intermediate stage.

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case of divorce to a rabbi living in the first century CE.18 We will leave aside for the moment the question of whether or not this story is best seen as factual or aetiological. More important to note here is that the rabbis themselves noticed a change between the marriage customs practiced in their time and those described in the biblical corpus. Epstein notes that this divorce penalty was not practiced by the Israelites, and also points to differences in customs surrounding dowry in the Hebrew Bible and in later times. Yet what he posits is not the rising prominence of dowry – he sees dowry as a gift common even in Israelite times – but a change from dowry as merely a parental gift to the bride to dowry as property over which the husband has the power of usufruct.19 Unfortunately, however, Epstein is content to make broad generalizations based upon a small number of examples. The few biblical narratives that mention dowry give too little information about the gift for one to draw firm conclusions about what if anything was its legal character in the preexilic period, thus making it difficult or impossible to compare it with dowry later on. Equally problematic is that Epstein points to certain changes in marital gift exchange, but offers no explanation as to why such changes occurred. Like Epstein, E. Neufeld clearly draws upon the ideas of Robertson Smith in discussing biblical marriage gifts, and especially the biblical mōhar. Though Neufeld problematizes Robertson Smith’s assertion that the word mōhar is etymologically equivalent with “purchase,” calling it “very obscure” and “one of those very ancient words of which the etymology is almost lost,” he does subscribe to the idea that the mōhar is a purchase price.20 He also accepts the argument made by other scholars that mōhar is paid as a compensation to the father for the loss of his daughter’s labor, arguing that this viewpoint does not fundamentally conflict with the idea of purchase (which is in any case true), and also sees it as a pretium pudicitiae, or payment for taking a woman’s virginity. In addition, Neufeld provides a detailed discussion of biblical marriage gifts of all kinds – his and Millar Burrows’s respective treatments remain to this day the most detailed studies of such gifts in existence, the present work excluded. Yet Neufeld’s treatment is generally synchronizing. That is, he assumes one static Israelite culture that exchanged both bridewealth and dowry, and perhaps other types of less significant marriage gifts, in a manner similar to other “Semites.” He is especially interested in finding analogues to Israelite practice among the Mesopotamians, seeking continuity in the practices of the Israelites and the other “Semitic” peoples of the region. 18 19 20

Satlow, Jewish Marriage in Antiquity, 213. Neufeld, Ancient Hebrew Marriage Laws, 89–106. Ibid., 94–110.

INTRODUCTION

7

Interestingly, he does note certain differences between Israelite practice and the marital customs described in the fifth century Elephantine Papyri, differences he attributes at least partially to the “foreign influence” of the Egyptians.21 However, like Epstein, Neufeld notes that the mōhar did change over time, undergoing a “historical evolution . . . under the influence of economic and social changes. In later times the Mōhar declined in actual value, lost much of its original meaning and eventually assumed a merely symbolical character.”22 Unfortunately, Neufeld does not state when he believes this historical evolution began or describe what exactly were the economic and social changes to which he refers. Though Millar Burrows wrote a few years before Neufeld, I only now treat his work, because unlike Epstein and Neufeld, he is critical of the idea of the mōhar as a purchase price.23 His monograph The Basis of Israelite Marriage in fact concerns itself almost exclusively with the arguments for and against this stance.24 In the end, he rejects both the idea of purchase and of the gift as pretium pudicitiae, at that time a popular rival idea. His preference is instead to regard the gift as a compensation to the bride’s father. While, as we saw, Neufeld in fact combines all three of these ideas in his interpretation of mōhar, the work of Burrows can be seen as a first step away from the problematic idea of purchase, an idea patently contradicted, as he and others argued, by the fact that an Israelite wife is not a slave: she can be divorced, but she certainly cannot be sold.25 Like Neufeld, Burrows does discuss dowry,26 which he clearly regards as having been a regular part of marital arrangements in ancient Israel, and even includes a discussion of indirect dowry. He entertains the notion that the nature of bridewealth was changing, not only in ancient Israel, but in ancient Near Eastern society as a whole. Although Burrows, in contrast to Neufeld, does attempt to explain why this change was occurring, his explanation is based at least partially on the evolutionistic thinking that was still fairly widespread at the time he was writing – that is, a Eurocentric evolutionism that assumes all cultures move, albeit at different speeds, along the same path of development, from the basest primitivism to 21 22 23

24 25

26

Ibid., 106, 156. Ibid., 107. For other early scholars critical of this idea, see Eberharter, Das Ehe- und Familienrecht and Dussaud, “Le ‘Mohar’ Israelite,” 141–151. See also Christopher Wright, God’s People, 183–200, for a review of scholarship on the question of whether or not the mōhar was a purchase price. See Basis of Israelite Marriage. Other arguments against the idea of Israelite marriage as marriage by purchase are outlined in Burrows, Basis of Israelite Marriage, 30–52. Ibid, 41–50; and also in Burrows, “Complaint of Laban’s Daughters,” 250–276.

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MARRIAGE GIFTS AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN ANCIENT PALESTINE

the haute civilization of Western Europe. He posits that, prehistorically, the mōhar most likely was a purchase price and that in the course of social development an emerging sense of dissatisfaction with such a practice might give rise to the custom of giving a bride a dowry. When fathers were no longer able to regard their daughters as mere objects of market-value, and affection inspired regret at losing them from the home (a situation which may have arisen very early), it would be natural to give them presents to atone, so to speak, for enriching the family treasury by selling them.27

Thus, changes in bridewealth, and in fact the very inception of dowry, are connected to an increasing respect for women, who are mere chattels in bridewealth-giving societies, but regarded with “affection” and valued as human beings in societies that, as a consequence of this enlightened attitude, give dowry instead. The Eurocentrism in such ideas is, to my eyes, patent, especially when one considers that bridewealth was a custom virtually unknown to Europeans until contact with other cultures, and especially those of Africa, brought it to their attention. Unsurprisingly, debates in the scholarly literature over whether or not Israelite marriage constituted marriage by purchase gradually died down as the very concept of marriage by purchase, and the unilinear cultural evolutionism upon which it was so often based, were assailed and ultimately debunked by functionalist anthropologists.28 For example, the view of mōhar as purchase price goes unmentioned in Raphael Patai’s Sex and Family in the Bible and the Middle East, despite his use of the term “bride price” to refer to the mōhar. Instead, it is replaced with the view of mōhar as compensation for economic loss, an idea already evidenced in the work of earlier scholars, as we saw, and also with the conception of mōhar as a compensation for the loss of progeny to the wife’s lineage. Patai writes: Over and above the purely economic considerations there has always been, of course, the procreative factor. In the patrilineal family children belong only to the families of their fathers. A new union, therefore, holds out the promise of increasing the numbers and the strength of the bridegroom’s father’s family, enabling him to gain status and prestige through the birth of grandsons. No comparable advantage accrues from the birth of children to the mother’s family, of which they will not be members. There, it is regarded as proper by all concerned that the bride’s father, who loses, not only a daughter, but all her future progeny, should receive material 27 28

Burrows, Basis of Israelite Marriage, 43. See Chapter 3 for a detailed discussion of the history of ideas regarding marriage and marriage gifts in anthropology.

INTRODUCTION

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compensation for her in the amount and up to the limit allowed by local tradition.29

Interestingly, Neufeld entertains this same idea, but ultimately denies its applicability to the Israelites because of a lack of evidence.30 While it is true that no direct connection between progeny and mōhar is made by the biblical texts that speak of this gift, Patai’s viewpoint was closer to the functionalist ideas of bridewealth current at the time he was writing than was Neufeld’s position regarding marriage by purchase. Despite this, Patai’s discussion is rather simplistic and treats the entire Middle East as if it were one large cultural bloc whose customs might be compared willy-nilly, presumably because, regardless of differences in time period, environment, and mode of production, the groups in the region are all “Semites” and thus assumed to be culturally of one piece. In addition, he does not treat biblical marriage gifts as thoroughly as does Neufeld – only what he calls “bride price” is addressed – nor does he discuss the changes that occurred in the Second Temple period. An even clearer case of diffusionistic thinking regarding marriage gifts is provided by Markham Geller’s “New Sources for the Origins of the Rabbinic Ketubah.”31 Unlike the works cited thus far, this article is concerned exclusively with marriage gifts in the Second Temple and rabbinic periods, and more precisely with the shifts that led to the rabbinic kethubba payment, or divorce penalty. Geller attempts to reconstruct these shifts, but is equally concerned with finding “Mesopotamian analogues,” “precedents,” or “prototypes” to what one finds in the Elephantine papyri and rabbinic literature.32 His assumption is clearly that changes in Israelite or Judean practice must have “derived from Mesopotamia” or elsewhere – that is, that foreign influence is what causes cultural change.33 When he fails to find analogues for certain aspects of the rabbinic marriage contract in Mesopotamia, he shifts his focus to the Demotic marriage deeds from Egypt, in which he does uncover several parallels. While these parallels are certainly intriguing, Geller’s assumption that changes must be absorbed from outside is problematic. This is especially so considering his observation that Demotic marriage contracts themselves changed over time34 – did the Egyptians, too, absorb these changes from elsewhere?35 29 30

31 32 33 34 35

Patai, Sex and Family, 56. Though he does state that this theory may be “a partial explanation of the prehistoric origin of the Mōhar.” See Neufeld, Ancient Hebrew Marriage Laws, 97. “New Sources.” Ibid., 233, 235–237, and elsewhere. Ibid., 239. Ibid., 242. Interestingly, Esther Eshel and Amos Kloner argue, contra Geller, that “different ethnic groups that inhabited Palestine and Egypt were influenced by the Aramaic common law. It is

10

MARRIAGE GIFTS AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN ANCIENT PALESTINE

Geller’s article aside, biblical and later marriage gifts received only sporadic attention in the scholarly literature between the 1950s and the 1980s, even as the study of women received more attention. While the mōhar and other gifts sometimes received brief treatments, no thorough studies were put forth. The most noteworthy example of one of these briefer treatments may be seen in Roland De Vaux’s seminal work of social history, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions, originally published in 1961. De Vaux, in a discussion of the “typical Israelite marriage,” refers to and rejects the old argument for mōhar as a purchase price.36 Instead, he echoes the simplified functionalist explanation of Burrows and others that it is a “compensation given to the family” of the woman.37 His view is different, however, in that he views the mōhar, over which he argues the bride’s father only has the right of usufruct, as reverting to the daughter at the time of succession; he thus regards it as a type of indirect dowry.38 Because the evidence for this in the biblical text is virtually nonexistent, de Vaux’s reconstruction relies on comparative evidence from Mesopotamia and from modern Arab groups, though this evidence itself is not uniform. To his credit, though, de Vaux also does what many scholars have not done: treat the other forms of marriage gifts found in the Hebrew Bible. He refers to two cases of indirect dowry in the book of Genesis (24:53 and 34:12, though it must be said the latter is unclear), and asks the following question: “Was there, in addition [to indirect dowry], a dowry, a contribution on the part of the bride at the time of the marriage?”39 Due to the paucity of evidence, he concludes in the negative: “In general, the custom of providing a dowry never took root in Jewish territory, and Si 25:22 seems even to repudiate it.”40 While de Vaux’s conclusion might be seen as reasonable with regard to the biblical evidence, he was wrong to read so much into Sirach’s statement – an examination of other Second Temple period and Roman-era sources makes clear that dowry had in fact very much taken hold during these periods.41

36 37 38 39 40 41

therefore difficult to maintain that the Jews were influenced directly by the Egyptian culture; it is more likely that the tendency to secure the woman’s rights was developed in the Aramaic common law during the Hellenistic period” (“Aramaic Ostracon,” 21). This statement demonstrates the chicken-and-egg problem inherent in diffusionistic analysis. Eshel and Kloner fail to note, however, the changes in Demotic marriage contracts that precede the Hellenistic period: were they, too, the result of Aramaic legal influence? (On the Egyptian evidence, see Pestman, Marriage and Matrimonial Property; and Porten et al., Elephantine Papyri in English, 23–25, 346–347, 366–370.) De Vaux, Ancient Israel, 26–27. Ibid., 27. The view of mōhar as indirect dowry is also expressed on p. 39 of de Vaux. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 28. See Chapter 2 for a thorough examination of this material.

INTRODUCTION

11

Grace I. Emmerson’s treatment of mōhar and other marriage gifts in the article “Women in Ancient Israel,” published in 1989, is unconvincing for some of the same reasons. While Emmerson rejects the outdated translation “brideprice” in favor of “marriage present,” her view of mōhar as compensation is little different from Burrows’s and is in fact less nuanced than that of Patai, for she does not treat the issue of whether or not the gift has any relationship with future progeny. More problematic, however, is that she makes inaccurate statements regarding dowry: “The giving of a dowry by the bride’s father was not practised in Israel, the only exception being Pharaoh’s gift (šillūh?îm) on the occasion of his daughter’s marriage to Solomon (1 Kings 9.16). Meyers . . . considers this an indication of the relative shortage of women, in that fathers had no need to entice husbands for their daughters.”42 As we will see in Chapter 1 of this book, while dowry is rare in the Hebrew Bible, the example Emmerson cites is not the only one available. In addition, few anthropologists see the giving of dowry as being related to a shortage of women, and so Emmerson’s statement demonstrates that she did not engage the anthropological literature of the 1970s and 1980s, when several major anthropological works on marriage gifts were produced. Although Christopher J. H. Wright presents a more thorough treatment of marriage gifts, or more precisely, of mōhar, in his book God’s People in God’s Land, this treatment presents difficulties similar to those of Emmerson. In the first place, Wright is primarily concerned with engaging and negating the view of mōhar as purchase price. He advocates instead a “modern anthropological perspective,” and while I certainly share his sentiment, it is problematic that the “more recent work of field anthropologists” that he cites – that of E. E. Evans-Pritchard – was already forty years old at the time Wright’s book was published.43 Needless to say, arguments that Israelite marriage amounted to a purchase of the woman were even older. In addition, later changes in the mōhar go unaddressed, as do the other types of marriage gifts attested in biblical literature. Rather disappointingly, Wright spends so much time attempting to debunk an already debunked idea that he neglects to provide a full account of why the mōhar was given in ancient Israel, why it ceased to be given later on, and what its relationship was to other marriage gifts. Interestingly, a year after Wright published his work, Raymond Westbrook would put forth a treatment of dowry, a gift seldom discussed by biblicists.44 This treatment is thorough, but also has some problems. First, his description 42

43 44

“Women in Ancient Israel,” 382–3. She refers here to Carol Meyers’s article, “Roots of Restriction,” 91–103. Wright, God’s People, 194. Westbrook, Property and the Family, 142–164.

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MARRIAGE GIFTS AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN ANCIENT PALESTINE

of Israelite dowry is almost completely dependent upon Mesopotamian sources. This is of course because of the paucity of evidence for this gift in ancient Israel, but it seems to demonstrate an assumption that the ancient Near East was a seamless cultural bloc, wherein all groups kept the same customs through millennia. In addition, Westbrook seems unaware of the realities of dowry-exchange outside of the ancient Near East. He writes: “In most traditional societies, the dowry is an important social institution, the inevitable accompaniment to all but the poorest of marriages. It is somewhat surprising, therefore, that the dowry receives little mention in the Bible.”45 Yet the fact of the matter is that dowry is not given in most “traditional” societies, and is actually fairly rare cross-culturally. An awareness of this might have led to a different treatment of dowry in ancient Israel. In 1997, Leo G. Perdue, Joseph Blenkinsopp, John J. Collins and Carol Meyers published a refreshing volume entitled Families in Ancient Israel, which examines family life in Palestine46 from the time of early Israel to that of early Judaism.47 This collection of articles has much to recommend it. For example, the articles utilize a wide range of evidence, including biblical narratives and legal texts, rabbinic material, and epigraphic finds, to reconstruct family life during the different periods of Israelite history, rather than focusing only on biblical sources. Also, the authors generally choose to render the term mōhar as “marriage fee,” rather than “brideprice,”48 and rightfully elect to give the conception of mōhar as purchase price no more than a cursory mention, with Collins stating that “this view has been widely rejected.”49 Yet there are a few areas where the articles raise questions that the authors fail to answer. Blenkinsopp, in his piece on the family in the First Temple period, notes that “our sources have curiously little to say about the bridal dowry.”50 Unfortunately, though, he does not address why this might be,51 nor does Perdue, who states 45 46

47 48

49 50 51

Ibid., 142. I use the term Palestine here because it is the most accurate geographical (rather than political) designation for this region, though Israel will be used to refer to the area in the preexilic period, as is the scholarly convention. Perdue et al., Families in Ancient Israel. See, e.g., Blenkinsopp, “Family in First Temple Israel,” in Families in Ancient Israel, 60; Perdue, “Israelite and Early Jewish Family,” in the same volume, 184; and elsewhere. Collins is the exception (“Marriage, Divorce, and Family,” 108), though he generally leaves mōhar untranslated. Collins, “Marriage, Divorce, and Family,” 113. Blenkinsopp, “Family in First Temple Israel,” 60. Instead, he utilizes the few pieces of evidence available with a surprising degree of confidence. For example, based upon only two examples (Josh 15:18–19 and 1 Kings 9:16), both of which present atypical marriages, he concludes that “the bridal gift could include land” (ibid., 60). Based upon only one questionable example (Gen 30:20), he states that the term zēbed refers to the property “ceded to the woman at marriage” (ibid., 60).

INTRODUCTION

13

that “it is not clear that in ancient Israel the marriage arrangement included a dowry.”52 Similarly, Collins discusses the changes that occurred in the mōhar in the Second Temple period, but does not argue for or suggest a reason for why these major changes occurred.53 In addition, these scholars on the whole do not engage with the anthropological literature on marriage, a fact that perhaps leads Perdue to put forth the same explanation for mōhar, that of compensation for productive and economic loss, that Burrows held six decades earlier. While a review of the anthropological scholarship would not necessarily contradict this viewpoint, it would show it to be oversimplified. Another, more recent collection of essays very relevant to this subject is Marriage and Family in the Biblical World, edited by Ken M. Campbell.54 The first essay in this volume, by Victor H. Matthews, concerns marriage in the ancient Near East. Matthews displays a familiarity with anthropological literature in many of his writings, and especially in the work he co-authored with Don C. Benjamin, entitled Social World of Ancient Israel 1250–587 BCE; this can only be regarded as commendable.55 In my view, however, Matthews’s use of some of the primary and secondary material on marriage gifts must be called into question. For example, he states that the term for dowry in the Hebrew Bible is zēbed, which, as we will see, is unlikely. Much more problematic, though, is that he does not address the surprising paucity of evidence for this gift in the Hebrew Bible. Not only does he not address this fact, but in his work Manners and Customs in the Bible he goes so far as to conflate bridewealth and dowry, applying the term “dowry” to refer to what anthropologists would call bridewealth and to what he in earlier works would have called “bride-price.”56 It is interesting to trace the author’s use of the latter term, which he applies as late as 2003 in his essay in Marriage and Family in the Biblical World.57 Considering his familiarity with some of the major works of anthropology on marriage gifts, including Jack Goody and Stanley J. Tambiah’s Bridewealth and Dowry, Matthews clearly knows that the word “bride-price,” based as it is on such problematic notions as marriage by purchase, is outdated; it is perhaps this that causes him to abandon the term in Manners and Customs. It is unclear to me, however, why he glosses over the differences between bridewealth and dowry in that work rather than just 52 53 54 55 56 57

Perdue, “Israelite and Early Jewish Family,” 184. Collins, “Marriage, Divorce, and Family,” 113–114. Marriage and Family. Social World. Manners and Customs, 38, 66. See “Marriage and Family in the Ancient Near East,” in Marriage and Family, 8–10; and also Social World, 14, 127–128.

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MARRIAGE GIFTS AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN ANCIENT PALESTINE

utilizing the former term to translate the word mōhar. In addition, Matthews at times utilizes secondary material to make arguments about biblical marriage gifts that are arguably insupportable for ancient Israel, the ancient Near East, or even most societies in the world. He states: “If the bride-price is equal to the dowry, there is economic parity between the households of the bride and groom. Households will only pay greater bride-prices or dowries when they wish to improve their social status by the marriage.”58 Matthews cites Katarzyna Grosz’s excellent and very careful article “Bridewealth and Dowry in Nuzi” to support this statement, but the page (and evidence) he cites discusses royal marriages, not those of “regular” people.59 That tiny and very atypical group aside, his statement, as we will see later in this book, is not reflective of how bridewealth and dowry normally function, and is certainly not reflective of how they functioned even in ancient Babylonia, where the amount of the dowry almost always exceeded the amount of bridewealth in the marriage contracts available to us. Unless one posits a widespead custom of hypergamy in that society – where women “marry up” and men “marry down” – Matthews’s assessment cannot be seen as accurate. His statements regarding the economic considerations of marriage in the volume edited by Campell are, however, more satisfactory. Moving to the other articles in the Campbell volume, Daniel I. Block’s discussion of Israelite marriage presents the giving of dowry as having been normative in ancient Israel, a problematic stance considering the paucity of evidence for this gift.60 David W. Chapman’s article, on the other hand, does recognize the changes that occurred in the biblical mōhar in the postexilic period.61 He cites the three-stage development envisioned by Collins and others – from bridewealth to indirect dowry to divorce penalty (though he doesn’t use this terminology) – but like other scholars does not seem to see this shift as something in need of explanation.62 Also, though he does note the prominence of dowry in the Second Temple period, he does not contrast this with dowry in the Hebrew Bible, seemingly sharing Block’s position that dowry had always been important in the region.63 58 59 60

61 62

63

Social World, 128. Grosz, “Bridewealth and Dowry in Nuzi,” 205. “Marriage and Family in Ancient Israel,” in Marriage and Family, 54. Léonie J. Archer does the same, though she does recognize that the Hebrew Bible contains no technical term for dowry – a fact that will be discussed later in this book – and the dowries discussed by biblical texts are “of non-uniform character and unspecified amount.” See Her Price, 166. “Marriage and Family in Second Temple Judaism,” in Marriage and Family, 193–198. Ibid., 196–197. Archer reads the rabbinic texts as describing a four-stage development. See Her Price, 161–162. “Marriage and Family in Second Temple Judaism,” 193.

INTRODUCTION

15

I will discuss here one final work, and it is certainly one of the most important: Michael Satlow’s Jewish Marriage in Antiquity. Satlow presents a very full and very useful treatment of marriage in the Second Temple and later periods, drawing upon a host of sources. This work is arguably the most important work on Jewish marriage in some time, and is an advance over much of the scholarship in this area. Yet, for all its care in describing early Jewish marriage laws and customs, it seems to fall on occasion into the same diffusionistic trap that has ensnared so many scholars of ancient Palestine. Satlow states: “The Hebrew Bible describes a single primary marriage payment, the mōhar.” He then goes on to describe the evidence for the diminishing importance of this payment in the postexilic period and the rising importance of dowry. He writes of this material: “The significance of this evidence is clear: Jews who lived among Greeks adopted the Greek custom of bestowing dowries upon their daughters. Greeks placed great symbolic, if not constitutive, importance on the dowry: its presence signified a ‘respectable’ union, and its amount marked and announced status.”64 The rising importance, then, of dowry is directly attributable to the foreign influence of the Greeks. Satlow himself discusses the evidence from the Persian-era Judean colony at Elephantine in Egypt, where these Judeans clearly gave dowry, and while one might assume that their interest in this gift is attributable to the influence of the Egyptians, one wonders how he would explain the cases of dowry that one does find in the Hebrew Bible, however few and atypical they might be. Also, what of the longstanding importance of dowry among the Mesopotamians? While the Israelites were not “living among” them – though it is perhaps more accurate to state that the Greeks were “living among” the Judeans in Palestine, rather than vice versa – the interest of Mesopotamians in dowry, and of the Egyptians, and of the Romans for that matter, might have pointed Satlow toward a different type of explanation, one that considers why some societies care so much about dowry and why some societies fail to exchange this gift at all. In this review of scholarship, which is certainly not exhaustive, I have chosen to emphasize certain scholarly tendencies. One of these concerns scholars’ choice of terminology. While it might even seem that I have overemphasized this point, I have returned to this issue repeatedly because I think it is emblematic of the failure of many biblical scholars to engage with other disciplines, and particularly anthropology, which has produced a wealth of writings and ideas on the topic of marriage gifts. Engaging with anthropology has many benefits – something I hope this book will make clear for this 64

Jewish Marriage in Antiquity, 201.

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MARRIAGE GIFTS AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN ANCIENT PALESTINE

particular topic and that I think has already been shown for other areas of biblical scholarship.65 One of these would be to put an end to the repetition of ideas or debates about biblical marriage gifts that are no longer current, and that have not been current for many decades. Biblicists should not, in my opinion, continuously debate whether or not Israelite marriage constituted a purchase. Nor should we continue to espouse a view of culture that sees all cultural change as being the product of the influence of other groups, or assume that all the groups within a region – and especially those groups who speak related languages – constitute a cultural bloc. That the groups of the ancient Near East had features and practices in common is an incontestable fact, but to collapse the different cultures of this geographically and economically varied region into one amorphous cultural blob ignores the very localized nature of cultural practices both in the ancient world and in the modern. In Chapter 3 of this book, I will demonstrate this point by comparing the Tallensi and the Gonja, both of whom live in what is today Ghana. Despite their relative geographical proximity, these groups are very different from each other, and their marriage customs, too, are divergent. In contrast, the Tallensi hold many similarities with the Nuer of Sudan, who occupy an area thousands of miles distant from them. This example challenges some of the assumptions that many biblical scholars continue to make. What approach, then, should one use to study biblical and postbiblical marriage gifts? I will adopt here a comparative approach that looks to, but also well beyond, other ancient Near Eastern societies. In comparing the practices of different societies, my approach is in one sense synchronic, but is also very much historical, drawing upon a wide range of methods and sources; these include traditional historical-critical scholarship on the Bible, archaeological data, the work of the Annales school of historiography, comparative ethnographic material, cultural studies, and, as should be at this point clear, anthropological ideas on marriage and marriage gifts. In the latter category, the work of Jack Goody has been most influential to this study. Goody’s approach is comparative, historical, and melds functionalist, structuralist, and Marxist (i.e., historical-materialist) modes of analysis. Goody has written extensively on marriage gifts and has observed, based on empirical and other data, that bridewealth and dowry are associated with two very different types 65

Examples may be seen in the scholarship on biblical genealogies, biblical prophecy, impurity, and the concepts of honor and shame. On genealogies, see particularly Wilson, Genealogy and History; on prophecy, idem, Prophecy and Society; Overholt, Prophecy in Cross-Cultural Perspective and idem, Channels of Prophecy; on impurity, Houston, Purity and Monotheism; and Olyan, Rites and Rank, among others; on honor and shame, see Matthews and Benjamin, eds., Honor and Shame; Lemos, “Shame and Mutilation,” 225–241, among others.

INTRODUCTION

17

of societies.66 While the societies in which bridewealth is important tend to be marked only by minimal social stratification and such features as corporate ownership of property, subsistence agriculture, and widespread polygyny, those that value dowry – or in which dowry is exchanged at all, for it is a relatively rare gift cross-culturally – are marked by very high levels of stratification characterized by multiple socioeconomic classes, generally transmit property through nuclear families, and discourage or prohibit polygyny. If a single feature can be held up as being most important in the distribution of bridewealth and dowry, it is social stratification, and this is the feature that I will most emphasize in the latter half of this book. The work is organized as follows. The first chapter treats the biblical evidence for marriage gifts, and provides a taxonomy of these gifts. I will give the latter for two reasons. Though most scholars have interpreted the mōhar as being what anthropologists would categorize as bridewealth, because a few scholars have seen this gift as going to the bride herself, and thus as indirect dowry, I feel a reexamination of this gift is necessary. Also, because scholars’ treatments of dowry have varied so widely – with some assuming it was widespread in ancient Israel, others remarking on the relative absence of evidence, and others implicitly acknowledging this absence by not addressing dowry at all – a reexamination of the instances of dowry and indirect dowry in the Hebrew Bible is very much in order. As is well known, the dating of biblical, and especially of Pentateuchal, sources has become a contentious issue in the last few decades, and so my treatment of biblical marriage gifts will begin with a review and analysis of the major arguments for source dating. My second chapter continues along the same lines, proceeding from the earliest postbiblical evidence to the evidence from the second century CE, where the project concludes. This century is not an arbitrary point at which to leave off; rather, the evidence from this time, both epigraphic and rabbinic, is not only abundant, but signals the culmination of many centuries of shifts in marriage customs. Athough it is unclear just how profoundly the Judean community at Elephantine was influenced by its Egyptian environment and, for this or perhaps other reasons, how well their practices evidence wider Judean practices, the marriage contracts from Elephantine will nonetheless be examined in detail. This corpus is the most expansive evidence we have for marriage gifts in the Persian period, and it is better to utilize it cautiously than to jettison it. The chapter will also examine the contracts from the Judean desert archives, discussions of and references to marriage gifts in the extrabiblical literature from the Hellenistic and Roman periods, 66

See “Bridewealth and Dowry”; Production and Reproduction; and The Oriental, the Ancient.

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MARRIAGE GIFTS AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN ANCIENT PALESTINE

and tannaitic materials. The objective of both the second chapter and the first is to determine which types of marriage gifts were given in each period and whether or not changes in practice occurred.67 The third chapter has a different objective. It will provide a review of the many decades of scholarship on marriage and marriage gifts that have been conducted in the field of anthropology. The chapter not only summarizes but critiques the major approaches to these gifts, and explicates why the approach of Jack Goody serves as the most fruitful method for approaching marriage gifts in ancient Palestine. A thorough discussion of Goody’s work and methods will be followed by various case studies, including the Nuer, the Lovedu, North India, and ancient Babylonia, in which I apply Goody’s approach in order to illustrate its utility and flexibility. For the sake of balance, the chapter concludes with a review of the reactions to Goody’s work, both positive and negative, on the part of other anthropologists. In this way, I provide a nuanced appraisal of the anthropological work on this subject in order to base my adoption – and my revision – of Goody’s methods and ideas on responsible, informed consideration of the issues. Because Goody’s research has shown levels of social stratification to be closely correlated with types of marriage gift exchanged, in my fourth chapter I put forth a detailed discussion of the evidence regarding stratification in ancient Israel, beginning with the Iron I period and concluding with the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, what is generally regarded as the end of the Iron Age in Palestine. This chapter demonstrates that levels of stratification increased markedly in the region from the time of Israel’s emergence to the time of the Babylonian exile. The fifth chapter provides a similar examination of Judah and, where appropriate, the surrounding regions of Palestine, in the postexilic period. Again, we will see a marked increase in stratification levels through the centuries, though the evidence will show that Palestine was in all likelihood a stratified region even in the Persian period. Taken together, the widely diverse sets of data available to us present the following picture: ancient Israel, over the course of the centuries, underwent a striking metamorphosis. At the time of its emergence, the society was comprised of isolated, subsisting farmers and herders who held their land in common and were organized according to lineages. Stratification was minimal. This society conforms almost perfectly to Goody’s description of 67

As has perhaps already become clear, these two chapters – and this work as a whole – will focus on the marital practices and society of ethnic Israelites and Judeans and how these changed over the course of centuries, with other groups in ancient Palestine being examined only where the evidence for them is particularly relevant or abundant. The latter is rarely the case, however.

INTRODUCTION

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a bridewealth-giving society – a society that gives bridewealth alone, without dowry, and within which bridewealth is central to the overall kinship and inheritance structure. Over time, however, the society changed – it grew more and more complex, more and more stratified, and its systems of ownership, inheritance, and kinship all changed. When one looks at the evidence for marriage gifts, one sees, too, that bridewealth, the most prevalent gift in the Hebrew Bible, grew less and less important over time, and that dowry, appearing only a handful of times in the Hebrew Bible but many dozens of times in the later material, would grow more and more central. It is the main objective of this book to show that these two sets of changes, rather than being separate phenomena, are very much related, and that the latter set, rather than being caused by the influence of foreign groups, is instead due to the widespread changes that occurred in the social structure of ancient Palestine over the course of many centuries.

1

0 Biblical Evidence for Marriage Gifts

Dating the Source Material: The Pentateuch At this point, any discussion of biblical, and especially pentateuchal, material must begin with a discussion of the dating of texts. As is well-known, the general consensus that existed two or three decades ago regarding the dating of pentateuchal sources, or even the legitimacy of the source-critical approach itself, has evaporated and been replaced by a seemingly endless array of approaches and arguments.1 Narrative sources that were once seen as dating to the reign of Solomon are now placed by some in the exilic period, or later.2 Legal materials that were once seen by all as predating other legal materials are now thought by some to postdate those self-same corpora.3 But before I describe these challenges in more detail, let me make clear at the outset that my argument does not in any way depend on the precise dating of texts, but only on relative dating – a fact that I will turn to again later – nor does it rely on adherence to source criticism as it was traditionally conceptualized. It also bears mentioning that, though the state of pentateuchal studies may currently seem to be one of total confusion, there is in actuality more agreement by scholars on issues of dating than there might at first glance appear to be. While shifting has in fact noisily occurred on these and other issues, it is inaccurate to allege, as some might, that the study of the Pentateuch is in a state of irreconcilable discord. From the end of the nineteenth century to perhaps only a decade or two ago, the source-critical hypothesis was incontestably the consensus approach 1

2 3

Useful summaries on the history of pentateuchal scholarship may be found in Blenkinsopp, Pentateuch; Rendtorff, “Directions in Pentateuchal Studies,” 43–66; Nicholson, Pentateuch, an especially lucid and helpful work, and “Current ‘Revisionism,’” 1–22. I refer to those passages attributed to the Jahwist. I refer to the disagreement over the dating of the Book of the Covenant, or Covenant Code, and whether it predates the other law codes.

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21

to the study of the Pentateuch. While there have been from early on voices of dissent,4 the overwhelming majority of biblical scholars subscribed to this hypothesis and set it as the foundation of their scholarly work and of their pedagogy. Within this consensus approach, there were consensus positions on the dating of sources and on the order in which the sources were written. Though the source-critical hypothesis has itself been challenged, because of its previous influence, and the prominent position it holds in biblical studies even now, I will address those revisionist viewpoints that fall within the overarching schema provided by source criticism before turning to those that do not. Naturally, I will not treat every revisionist argument or challenge to the former consensus positions, but only arguments that concern pentateuchal and other biblical texts that are relevant to this book.5 Of the four traditional pentateuchal sources, only texts assigned to J and the Deuteronomists are relevant to the issue of marriage gifts, and so scholarly discussion that relates specifically to E6 and P will not be addressed.7 Because the great majority of scholars saw – and most still see – J as being the earliest of the sources, I believe it makes sense to deal first with the traditional views regarding this source, as well as with the challenges to those viewpoints. In the mid-twentieth century, Gerhard von Rad argued that J was the product of the so-called “Solomonic enlightenment.”8 According to him, not only did J predate the other sources, as Wellhausen too had argued, but it predated even the division of the monarchy. This idea drew very wide currency. As de Pury states: “With Von Rad’s brilliant staging of the ‘Solomonic enlightenment’, his proposed date of around 930 B.C. was no longer seriously questioned.”9 Thus, that J could be dated to the united – or at the very latest the early divided – monarchy, and also that it was the earliest source, became ideas central to the documentary hypothesis, and ones accepted by virtually all mainstream Hebrew Bible scholars. Though Frederick Victor Winnett countered as early as the mid-1960s that J dated from the early postexilic period,10 his dating 4

5

6

7

8 9 10

See Rendtorff, “Directions in Pentateuchal Studies,” 44–45. One also finds various examples in Nicholson, Pentateuch, 3–28. These are J, the Book of the Covenant, Deuteronomy, Judges, and the books of Samuel and of Kings. One or two other texts will be referred to, but will not require a systematic discussion of this kind. Two texts with questionable source attributions will be discussed later, though, as we will see, it is unclear whether either of those texts contains an actual reference to marital gift-giving. The debate over whether or not the Book of the Covenant should be assigned to one of these sources will be dealt with briefly in the second part of this chapter. See von Rad, “Das formgeschichtliche Problem,” 1–72. De Pury, “Yahwist (‘J’) Source,” VI: 1015. Winnett, “Re-examining the Foundations,” 1–19. See also Mosaic Tradition, where Winnett already begins to call into question various tenets of the Documentary Hypothesis.

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found few adherents, and an early dating for J remained the consensus viewpoint. A decade later, however, this dating was taken up and argued for in revised form by one of Winnett’s own students, John Van Seters, who too saw J as dating from the exilic period. This revised dating won over few converts in the English-speaking sphere in the decade or two that followed, but did quickly gain a number of adherents in Germany, where scholars such as Hans Heinrich Schmid, Hermann Vörlander, Hans-Christoph Schmitt, Martin Rose, and Christoph Levin all accepted and argued in print for a late dating of J.11 Not only have these scholars argued that J is exilic or postexilic, but a few – for example, Van Seters and Schmid – have also argued that J is contemporaneous with or postdates the Deuteronomistic writers. First, the issue of exilic dating.12 These scholars have marshalled various pieces of evidence to support their claims. I shall discuss what seem to be the most important of these. To Winnett, the theme of universal blessing found in Gen 12:2–3 is strong evidence for an exilic or postexilic date. This theme “does not appear elsewhere in Hebrew literature until the time of DeuteroIsaiah,” he writes, and “[w]hile it is . . . possible that a writer is far ahead of his time, the testimony of other Hebrew literature to the development of Hebrew religious thought suggests very definitely that either the exilic or the postexilic period provides the most natural milieu for the author of the primeval history” or the story of Abraham.13 The universal blessing in Genesis 12 points to the larger “universalistic and monotheistic outlook” of J, which Winnett felt contrasts with the “nationalistic” view of sin found in the eighth-century prophets.14 Also, the references to “Ur of the Chaldeans” in Gen 11:28, 31 necessitate that the text postdate the rise of the Chaldeans in the late seventh century.15 Van Seters echoed these arguments, and argued that Genesis 15 too evidences the worldview of Deutero-Isaiah and is thus a product of the same exilic setting that gave birth to that text.16 He also argues that the promises of 11

12

13 14 15 16

See Schmid, Der sogennante Jahwist; Vörlander, Die Entstehungszeit; Schmitt, Die Nichtpriesterliche Josephsgeschichte; Rose, Deuteronomist und Jahwist; Levin, Der Jahwist. The revisionist dating and claims of Philip R. Davies, which are much broader in scope than those of Van Seters, Schmid, and others, will be addressed in a later section. Winnett, “Re-examining the Foundations,” 4 and 11. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 4. Van Seters, Abraham in History, 263–278. It bears noting that Van Seters divides the material traditionally assigned to J into five different strata, two pre-J stages, the work of the Yahwist proper, additions by a Priestly editor, and post-Priestly material. The Priestly and postPriestly additions he assigns to the postexilic period, J proper to the late exilic period, and the pre-J stages to some time before J proper (exactly when is unclear to me and others). See Van Seters, Abraham in History, esp. chapters 12 and 15.

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land and progeny in J point to this same exilic setting.17 In addition, Schmid and Rose cite various points of contact between deuteronomistic literature and J18 as evidence for an exilic date.19 Levin also cites the portrayal of the patriarchs as “Fremdlings,” as well as “the absence of a narrative of the entry into Canaan,” as attesting to the exilic social setting of the Yahwist.20 Naturally, a brief summary such as this does not do justice to the work of these scholars, but a more detailed treatment would be beyond the scope of this book. What is more important here are the refutations of these scholars and reaffirmations of a preexilic dating provided by Nicholson and others.21 Addressing the universalistic outlook of J that Winnett and others take to be proof of exilic composition, Nicholson rightly states that . . . such universalism is by no means a development of the exilic period. It is already well in evidence in the preexilic period. It is the presupposition of Amos’s oracles against the nations (Amos 1–2), and of his statement concerning Yahweh’s providential guidance of nations other than Israel in chapter 9:7. Deities other than Yahweh are not mentioned a single time by this prophet.22

Regarding Van Seters’s similar argument that the promises of land and progeny in J point to an exilic setting, Nicholson contends that “the case remains a strong one . . . that these promises are secondary, or mostly so, in their contexts.”23 Thus, whether or not they are of exilic character, a fact that in 17 18

19

20

21

22 23

Van Seters, Abraham in History, 269–278, 311, and elsewhere. See Schmid, Der sogenannte Jahwist; Rose, Deuteronomist und Jahwist. It should be noted that Schmid’s conception of J does not quite fall within the confines of traditional source criticism, but perhaps lies somewhere between the schema provided by source criticism and that put forth by Rendtorff. See Schmid, “In Search of New Approaches”, and Der sogenannte Jahwist, 167, where he posits an “(inner-) jahwistischen Redaktions- und Interpretationsprozess,” rather than a traditional source. He sees the Yahwistic material as “being very closely related to the style and the theological preoccupations of Deuteronomistic literature” (as de Pury puts it, “Yahwist (‘J’) Source,” 1016). Nicholson attributes to Schmid the position that J texts were “directly influenced by Deuteronomic and Deuteronomistic literature and theology,” but this perhaps oversimplifies Schmid’s argument. It does more accurately represent the argument of Rose, however. Van Seters, too, makes an argument for direct influence by claiming that J’s work is a prologue to Deuteronomy and the books that follow it. See Van Seters, In Search of History, 361, and at length in Prologue to History. Though Schmid does not propose a specific date for his deuteronomistically related J material, the implications are clear. Levin, Der Jahwist, 414–417, and elsewhere. The latter quotation is from Nicholson, Pentateuch, 162. Another recent defense of a preexilic dating for J is provided by Emerton, “Date of the Yahwist,” 107–129; he sets this source sometime in the ninth to seventh centuries. Nicholson, Pentateuch, 168. Ibid., 141.

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itself is contested,24 does not necessarily serve as evidence for a late dating of J. Nicholson also presents a plausible alternative to an exilic setting for these promises: a setting after the fall of the northern kingdom “with its consequence of loss of land and deportation.”25 Nicholson also points to a further problem with Van Seters’s work: how he separates what he considers the work of the Yahwist proper, and thus late exilic, from what he assigns to pre-Yahwistic stages of composition. Van Seters assigns narratives that betray features of oral composition to the preYahwistic stages and those that are characteristic of “scribal” composition to J proper. In doing this, Van Seters is heavily reliant upon the folktale model, or “epic laws,” of Axel Olrik, which were published in 1909! Unsurprisingly, more recent work on folklore has called these supposed laws into question, and has shown that it is essentially impossible to determine whether a text was composed using an oral narrative as opposed to a written one.26 Thus, much of the material that Van Seters assigns to the Yahwist proper, and thus to the exilic period, could just as easily have been assigned to one of the earlier pre-Yahwistic stages he posits. Wenham convincingly refutes one of the other major arguments for a late dating of J: that of Schmid and others for a close relationship between Deuteronomistic and Yahwistic texts, or of deuteronomistic influence on the latter. Schmid accepts the arguments of Perlitt that the covenant theology was a late innovation of the Deuteronomists, and so sees covenantal passages in Exodus as evidencing both connections between J and deuteronomistic literature and a late date for the former.27 As Wenham writes, however: Despite the arguments of Perlitt and others [the covenant as a late institution in Israel] seems improbable. It requires extra-biblical evidence about covenant practices to be set aside, the content of such early poems as Exod 15, Deut 33 and Jdg 5 to be ignored, and even more radical surgery of such prophets as Amos and Hosea than Schmid contemplates. Their covenant ideology cannot be expunged just by assigning an occasional verse to a late redactor.28

24 25 26

27

28

See Emerton, “Origin of the Promises,” 14–32. Nicholson, Pentateuch, 142. Ibid., 140. See also Culley, Structure of Hebrew Narrative; and Kirkpatrick, Old Testament. Specific features that were previously seen as indicating orality but that have been shown more recently not to necessarily be confined to oral literature are the presence of “tale motifs” and the presence of formulaic phrases (see especially Kirkpatrick, Old Testament, 115–117). Schmid, Der sogenannte Jahwist, 83–119. See also Wenham, review of Schmid, Der sogenannte Jahwist, 57–60. Wenham, review, 60.

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Another problem with the work of Schmid is that “he defines deuteronomic in such a broad and loose fashion that it becomes a catch-all for ideas that are common to many parts of the OT.”29 As Wenham points out, if one were to apply Schmid’s criteria to other books in the biblical corpus, the dates for Ezra, Malachi, and Daniel would be shifted to the sixth century because of the deuteronomistic passages that they contain. “If it is admitted that deuteronomists had successors,” he asks, rightfully in my opinion, “might they not have had precursors as well?”30 Nicholson also addresses, if somewhat indirectly, the arguments of Levin mentioned earlier regarding the portrayal of the patriarchs as strangers and the absence of a J narrative of entry into the land. He contends that, even if these features might fit an exilic setting, the “general character of J also ill fits an exilic background, and the evidence suggests that the historical circumstances in which the Yahwist wrote it were different from and earlier than those of the sixth century.”31 First, in contrast to all of the literature we know to be exilic, there is no sense in J of Yahweh having abandoned his people, no sense of “the trauma of the exile,” or “the dire question of the future of Israel as the people of Yahweh.”32 In short, the theme of theodicy, so central in all the other exilic works, is virtually absent. A second feature of the J narratives that Nicholson cites as ill-fitting to the exilic period is the portrayal of the relationship between Esau and Jacob. While Van Seters sees the rivalry between the two brothers as being reflective of the later relations of the Edomites and Israelites,33 this is unlikely for two reasons. The first, given by Nicholson, is the particular manner in which Jacob behaves toward Esau at the end of the narrative about these two men. In Genesis 33, Jacob and his entire house bows to Esau seven times. “It is difficult to believe,” Nicholson writes, “that an Israelite writer of the exilic period would have composed a narrative that describes Jacob, that is, Israel bowing before Esau, that is, Edom, which at that time became one of Israel’s most hated enemies, perhaps indeed its most hated enemy . . .”34 I add to this another reason. Although the relationship between Esau and Jacob is tumultuous, the former is portrayed as more dolt than villain – a fact that does not accord with the violent hostility toward Edom one finds in, for example, Ps 137:7 or Obad 9–14, both texts that clearly postdate the fall of Jerusalem. 29 30 31 32 33 34

Ibid., 60. Ibid., 60. Nicholson, Pentateuch, 170. Ibid., 171. Ibid., 159. Ibid., 159.

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The hundreds of Persian-period ostraca discovered in southern Palestine – the area that before the exile was southern Judah – point us in a similar direction. These ostraca demonstrate that, in the postexilic period, this region was occupied primarily by non-Judeans.35 As André Lemaire writes: It is a well-known fact that the patriarchal traditions about Abraham are centered around Hebron and Mamre, and those about Isaac, around BeerSheba. What we have to realize now is that, after 587 and for nearly five centuries, all of these places were outside Judea and inhabitated [sic] mainly by Edomites or North Arabian population. Because a literary composition of these traditions after 112 B.C.E. is obviously impossible, the bulk of them were probably written down during the First Temple Period.36

One of the classic rationales cited by Wellhausen and others for an early dating of J are the various narratives attributed to that source that speak of the establishment of altars at sites other than Jerusalem. To Wellhausen and most others writing after him, this feature is taken to show that J was writing before the deuteronomistic reforms. Yet Winnett argued instead that the narratives discussing the patriarchs’ building altars manifest “a deliberate avoidance of having the patriarchs take the next logical step, that of offering sacrifice. Instead they are said to have ‘called upon the name of YHWH’, i.e. to have invoked God under the name of YHWH.”37 Winnett takes this as proof that the J author lived around the time of P, who also avoids references to the patriarchs’ sacrificing.38 I agree with Nicholson, however, that this is weak evidence indeed for an exilic dating of J. Nicholson states: “It is difficult to see what difference the omission of specific references to offering sacrifice makes, however, since the very fact that altars were erected seems naturally to imply that sacrifices were offered, or at any rate were intended to be offered at them, whilst the priestly legislation, like Deuteronomy, recognizes the legitimacy of only one place of sacrifice.”39 Thus these narratives correspond with the Book of the Covenant in allowing for the multiplicity of sanctuaries.40 The arguments of Wellhausen on this and other issues relating to the date of the J narratives, despite having been put forth over a century ago, are still in 35 36

37 38 39 40

See Lemaire, “New Aramaic Ostraca,” 413–456; and Chapter 5 of this book. Ibid., 420. One does find sacrificial rites in Genesis 15, however, the bulk of which is normally attributed to J. Ibid., 133. Winnett, “Re-examining the Foundations,” 11. Nicholson, Pentateuch, 166. The issue of whether or not this collection was originally part of J will be dealt with later, though it may be said preliminarily that I do not find this idea convincing. That J and the Book of the Covenant correspond on this issue relates merely to the fact that both pre-date the Deuteronomistic reforms.

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many respects convincing – and certainly more so than those of Winnett in my view.41 Leaving aside the work of Nicholson, one finds in that of Alexander Rofé further evidence for the preexilic dating of the texts traditionally attributed to J.42 Oddly enough, Rofé provides this in arguing for the late dating of Genesis 24, a narrative normally assigned in its entirety to J.43 Rofé contends that various linguistic, legal, theological, and literary features of the passage, among them the use of the incontestably late epithet “the God of heaven” (Mym#$h yhl)) to refer to Yahweh,44 point to an exilic or postexilic setting.45 Yet, he goes on to say, this does not “favor the attribution of an exilic-postexilic date to large segments of the patriarchal narratives.”46 This is because the late features of Genesis 24 cause it to stand out among the texts usually attributed to J. “Consequently,” he writes, “the other patriarchal stories must be considered, unless otherwise proved, as preexilic.”47 And, as we have seen, compelling evidence for late dating of these narratives has not been forthcoming. Rofé’s argument does raise the question, however, of the utility of source criticism as it has traditionally been conceived. For if the J narratives, apart from Gen 24, are preexilic, how can that text be exilic and still be posited as coming from a continuous source that is otherwise preexilic? Others have asked similar questions. The first scholar to question the source-critical hypothesis while at the same time presenting what was at the time, and still is to some, a radical new alternative was Rolf Rendtorff. In 1977, Rendtorff published his Das überlieferungsgeschichtliche Problem des Pentateuch, or The Problem of the Process of Transmission in the Pentateuch, a monumental work putting forth a new paradigm. The main thrust of this work is that the Pentateuch as we have it is the product of a “deuteronomic”48 redactor who joined together originally independent complexes of tradition and thus arranged a history of Israel from the patriarchs to the settlement of the land. A Priestly writer subsequently added the primeval history in Genesis 1–11 to this. Each of the independent complexes, including the latter, developed separately from the others, and was joined only at a final stage. The complexes Rendtorff posits are the primeval narrative, as mentioned, the patriarchal 41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48

See Wellhausen, Prolegomena, especially 17–45. Rofé, “Enquiry,” 27–39. See, for example, Speiser, Genesis, 174, and Gottwald, The Hebrew Bible, 151. Rofé, “Enquiry,” 28. While not all of his arguments are convincing to me, I agree that on the whole the passage seems to be of an exilic or postexilic character. Rofé, “Enquiry,” 37. Ibid., 38. Rendtorff, Problem, 99, 203.

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narratives in Genesis 12–50 – though this complex has several smaller units within it49 – the narratives concerning Moses and the Exodus, the Sinai narratives, those telling of Israel’s wilderness wanderings, and those describing Israel’s entry into the land. Before Rendtorff, various scholars had noticed these distinct units of text, but had always tried to fit them into a sourcecritical schema. Rendtorff sees these efforts as misguided and as resulting from a uneasy marriage of source-critical approaches, which start from the final form of the Pentateuch and move backward, and form-critical ones, which start from the smallest units and move in the opposite fashion to the final form of the text. These two approaches are contradictory in his view. It was only the presupposition of sources that kept form critics of the Pentateuch from taking the approach to its logical conclusion, which Rendtorff sees himself as doing in his 1977 book. More relevant to my project is the issue of dating, but this is one that Rendtorff does not speak about at great length.50 After critiquing the speculative manner in which dating of pentateuchal texts has been carried out in the field of the Hebrew Bible by both maximalists and minimalists, he opines that the period of formation of the Pentateuch was a long one. Though he speaks of the matter with caution, he does state that “There are very sound reasons for setting the basic material of Deuteronomy in the eighth century BCE . . . This would mean that texts in the ‘deuteronomic’ style could occur already from this time on or even earlier, if one takes account of ‘early deuteronomic’ texts which are not dependent on Deuteronomy, but precede it and witness to ‘early stages of deuteronomic thought and language.’”51 This would place the deuteronomic joining together of pentateuchal narrative complexes in the same period, and the original composition of those narrative complexes, naturally, in an even earlier period. Erhard Blum is a student of Rendtorff ’s who adopts his teacher’s overall methodology while greatly elaborating upon that Rachel’s work.52 According to Blum, deuteronomists working in the early postexilic period reworked a preexilic Exodus cycle and combined it with a set of patriarchal narratives, also on the whole preexilic. This work, which Blum calls KD (K for Komposition), soon after was given a Priestly redaction, or KP. The result of 49

50 51 52

Namely, the Jacob narratives, the Isaac material, the Abraham narratives, those concerning Joseph, and various narratives that are more loosely connected with the surrounding texts– e.g. Genesis 14 and 24. See Rendtorff, Problem, 43–49, 183. He does address the matter briefly. See Rendtorff, Problem, 200–206. Ibid., 203. See Blum, Die Komposition der Vätergeschichte and Studien zur Komposition. See also Nicholson, Pentateuch, 98, 116–121, for a useful summary and analysis of these works.

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this was the Pentateuch in (roughly) its final form.53 Like Rendtorff, Blum sees within the patriarchal complex various smaller sets of narratives. The earliest of these was a small group of stories about Jacob (including the narrative of Bethel’s foundation and most of Chapters 25–33) dating to the foundation of the Northern kingdom under Jeroboam I.54 This was then joined with independent narratives about Joseph as early as the eighth century, was given a Judahite slant by the addition of certain stories after the fall of the Northern kingdom, then further expanded by the addition of the Abraham–Lot material sometime between 721 BCE and the destruction of Jerusalem a century and a half later.55 This entire set of narratives underwent still other additions in the exilic period, and also Deuteronomistic and Priestly redactions.56 Thus, for Blum, the formation of the Pentateuch was a complex process that took place over the course of many centuries – and looked almost nothing like what a traditional source critic would have posited. The last of the post-source-critical scholars whose work I will discuss is David McLain Carr.57 Carr’s approach is similar to Blum’s, though his (pentateuchal) work has focused mainly on Genesis. Carr, like Blum, posits a long period of transmission and expansion of pentateuchal texts. He quite convincingly likens the transmission of the book of Genesis specifically to that of the Gilgamesh Epic, about whose transmission history we know a great deal.58 Carr moves backward in his analysis of Genesis from the last layer of composition, added by Priestly circles, to the “layer of late scribal revision of earlier non-P materials” to “the earliest Genesis: a composition spanning the primeval history and all three patriarchs” to what he calls the “earliest reconstructible precursors to Genesis,” a composition comprised of a “non-P primeval history and Jacob-Joseph story.”59 Carr dates the bulk of P, and thus of the P layer in Genesis, to the exilic or postexilic period.60 The layer of late scribal revision, too, he places in the exile or later, stating that “this retouching 53 54 55 56 57 58

59

60

Nicholson, Pentateuch, 98. Blum, Vätergeschichte, 175–184, 202–203. Ibid., 204–263, 289–297; Nicholson, Pentateuch, 117–118. Blum, Vätergeschichte, 362–446; Nicholson, Pentateuch, 118. See Carr, Fractures. See Carr, Fractures, 16–17, and Jeffrey H. Tigay, Evolution of Gilgamesh Epic and “Evolution of the Pentateuchal Narratives,” 21–52. Interestingly, Tigay uses what we know concerning the transmission process of the Gilgamesh Epic to provide support for source criticism. Though Carr does not to my knowledge address this fact directly, we may infer that he rejects Tigay’s final conclusion, while accepting the utility of the comparative evidence he provides. In my view, Carr (and Blum to a great extent, as well) take the model put forth by Tigay to its logical conclusion. Carr, Fractures, 149–150, 233. Some of the words in these quotations were capitalized in their original context. Ibid., 133–139.

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apparently partakes of a more widespread tendency in exilic and postexilic Israelite discourse to draw on deuteronomistic themes and emphases in the process of articulating various viewpoints.”61 Carr is quite cautious in assigning a date to the “earliest Genesis” or “proto-Genesis” composition, arguing only that it dates to a time between the fall of the North and “somewhere in the exilic period.”62 The “earliest reconstructible layers of Genesis,” which precede those of the “proto-Genesis” composition, date to sometime before the exilic period, and most likely before the fall of the Northern kingdom. He includes in this earliest layer many narratives with Northern features, such as references to Northern shrines, and agrees with Blum that these references, and the focus on Bethel specifically, “presupposes an audience for whom this sanctuary was a living reality.”63 These features suggest a date “sometime during the Northern monarchy.”64

Dating the Source Material: The “Deuteronomistic History” Many of the scholarly reconstructions cited earlier, both the source critical and the post-source critical, see the hand of Deuteronomists in the Book of Genesis and elsewhere in the Tetrateuch; I have also cited some of their ideas regarding the Book of Deuteronomy itself. While several narratives in Genesis are relevant to this study, there is only one passage in Deuteronomy that refers to marriage gifts (namely, to bridewealth). Nonetheless, that one passage still necessitates that this chapter include a brief discussion of the issues that surround the dating of the Book of Deuteronomy. Also, because the dating of Deuteronomy is often tied to the dating of the former prophets, or the Deuteronomistic History as it is so often called, and more to the point, because there are three texts in that collection of books that refer to marital prestations, a discussion of the dating of the former prophets will be joined here to that of Deuteronomy. Since de Wette, the Book of Deuteronomy has commonly been identified with “the book of the law” of 2 Kings 22. While few scholars would today claim that “the book of the law” comprised the entirety of Deuteronomy, many still believe that the core of that pentateuchal book was already extant in the time of Josiah. We saw before that Rendtorff, while clearly a revisionist on certain issues, nevertheless holds the view that “deuteronomic” texts existed as early as the eighth century. Richard D. Nelson, whose commentary 61 62 63 64

Ibid., 149. Ibid., 227. Ibid., 265. Ibid., 266.

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on Deuteronomy is one of the most recent, argues for a seventh century date for the book, as does Moshe Weinfeld in his Anchor Bible commentary.65 The stance of these two scholars typifies much of the work on Deuteronomy, especially in the United States. As Mark A. O’Brien writes: “The majority [of historical-critical scholars] would still accept the seventh century BCE and the reform of Josiah as the most likely date for the origin of the book, or as a key stage in its composition.”66 Of course, there are those who argue either that the book is of exilic or even postexilic provenance, or that it predates the seventh century. The former position was argued by Martin Noth in his work Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien, or The Deuteronomistic History, where he famously put forth the idea that one exilic writer composed the Books of Deuteronomy through 2 Kings using various sources, which he joined together by means of his own insertions.67 More recently, Jon Levenson argued that the core of Deuteronomy was placed into the Deuteronomistic History in the exilic period.68 Others, too, doubt the traditional Josianic dating, questioning the authenticity of the 2 Kings 22 account.69 On the other hand, there are those who see Deuteronomy as predating Josiah’s reform by some time.70 Most scholars tie the dating of Deuteronomy to that of the Deuteronomistic History in some way. The most obvious example of this is, of course, Martin Noth, but there are numerous other examples. One is Brian Peckham, who sees two different layers in Deuteronomy.71 The first formed part of a Deuteronomistic History composed in the preexilic period. This history, which he calls the Dtr1 history, extended from the Book of Deuteronomy to the reign of Hezekiah in 2 Kings 20. The second layer, or the Dtr2 history, was composed in the exilic period. It spanned from Genesis to 2 Kings 25 and incoporated the earlier stratum of Dtr1.72 A. D. H. Mayes also examined Deuteronomy as part of a larger DtrH, which he saw as being written in the late preexilic period, then later revised during the exile.73 65 66 67 68 69

70

71 72

73

Nelson, Deuteronomy, 5–7, and Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomy 1–11, 17, 50–53. O’Brien, “Book of Deuteronomy,” 102. See Noth, Deuteronomistic History. Levenson, “Who inserted the book?” 203–233. For example, Diebner and Nauerth, “Die Inventio,” 95–118, and of course minimalists like Philip R. Davies. See later. The main examples are Rabin, “Discourse Analysis,” 171–177; McConville, Law and Theology and Grace in the End; and Wenham, “Date of Deuteronomy,” 15–20, and “Date of Deuteronomy, Part 2,” 15–18. Theirs is an unpopular position, however, and justifiably so, in my view. See Peckham, Composition. See O’Brien, “Deuteronomy,” 101, and McKenzie, “Deuteronomistic History,” II:164–165, for brief but on-target critiques of Peckham’s work. See Mayes, Deuteronomy, especially 81–107, and Story of Israel. He comments, however, that there is a “lack of redactional unity” throughout the corpus, with some books being

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One may correctly infer from the last paragraph that it is quite typical to posit more than one layer of composition in the DtrH, with at least the final layer added in the exilic or early postexilic period. Some scholars, while agreeing that there are various layers in the DtrH, see all of them as being exilic or later.74 Most American scholars, though, take a position similar to that of Frank Moore Cross, who argued for a Josianic version of the DtrH that comprised most of what we have now that was then updated in the exilic period in order to include an explanation for the exile itself, as well as an account of that event.75 A fuller discussion of issues relating to the DtrH and its dating would not be profitable here, however, for the different books contained in this larger work each have their own peculiar issues of composition and redaction. These will be dealt with later as they relate to individual passages. Let it suffice to say at this point that I share the view of most American scholars that the majority of the DtrH is late preexilic. Absent until this juncture has been any reference to the views of the extreme minimalists, whose ideas are exemplified by Philip R. Davies. While I did make reference earlier to scholars who see the Pentateuch or the Deuteronomistic History as being in their entirety exilic or postexilic, Davies takes a different, more all-encompassing approach. In his controversial work In Search of “Ancient Israel,” Davies puts forth the thesis that virtually the entire Hebrew Bible is the product of the Persian and Hellenistic periods and of an elite Judean scribal class who sought to legitimate themselves by propagating the fiction that they were descendants of exiles from preexilic Judah.76 Thus, the image of First Temple period Israel and Judah presented in the Hebrew Bible, or “Biblical Israel,” is a mythic story of origins that bears little if any resemblance to the actual historical Israel of preexilic times, of which Davies feels we know very little. I am sure it is apparent from various comments made here that I am not in agreement with such views. In this I stand with virtually all other biblicists, both in the United States and elsewhere. Untenable as the arguments of Davies are in themselves, the discovery and publication of the Tel Dan77 and

74

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comprised of more (and different) layers than others (Story of Israel, 136). For example, the books of Kings underwent three stages of composition/redaction (ibid., 106–132, 136–137). Examples are Smend, “Das Gesetz und die Völker,” 494–509; Dietrich, Prophetie und Geschichte; and Veijola, Die ewige Dynastie and Das Königtum. Cross, Canaanite Myth, 274–290. Richard Elliott Friedman and Richard D. Nelson each published studies bolstering Cross’s overall argument. See Friedman, Exile and Biblical Narrative, 1–43; and Nelson, Double Redaction, and “Double Redaction: Case Still Compelling,” 319–337. Philip R. Davies, In Search of “Ancient Israel.” On the former, see Biran and Naveh, “Aramaic Stele Fragment,” 81–98, and “Tel Dan Inscription,” 1–18; Rendsburg, “Writing of bytdwd,” 22–25; Wesselius, “First Royal Inscription,”

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Ketef Hinnom78 inscriptions make them all the more so. As Anson F. Rainey writes: The epigraphic material from [preexilic] Judah and Israel is admittedly scanty, but it reflects enough genres (administrative: Samaria ostraca; espitolary [sic]: Lachish and Arad letters and the ‘Ajrud graffiti; curses and imprecations: Silwan, Judean wilderness cave) to show that a wide range of literary form was practiced. That such libraries continued to exist in the Persian period is a natural consequence of a centuries old tradition. It belies the origin of biblical literature in the Persian period.79

The material remains of the Persian period, in contrast to those of Iron II, also belie such an origin. While I do not disagree with Charles E. Carter that the population of Yehud could have supported literary activity,80 the province’s population, by his own reckoning, was much smaller than that of preexilic Judah.81 The material culture of Persian Yehud shows an area still recovering from the devastation of the Babylonian military campaigns. If Persian Yehud could support literary activity, how much more so could have eighth-century Israel or Judah, which can only be said to have been thriving in contrast? It is quite clear at this point in the discussion that there is a wide range of ideas in the field regarding the dating of pentateuchal and other biblical texts.

78

79 80 81

163–186, and many others. Examples of weak attempts by minimalists to explain away the word dwd in this inscription as a reference to a deity and not in fact to a historical figure David may be found in Thompson, “‘House of David,’” 59–74; Lemche and Thompson, “Did Biran Kill David?” 3–22; Philip Davies, “‘House of David’ Built on Sand,” 54–55. A cogent refutation of this position is provided by Barstad and Becking, who convincingly show that there is no evidence for such a deity in Iron Age Palestine. See Barstad and Becking, “Deity Dôd?” 5–12. Ehud Ben Zvi calls for caution from both sides in this debate in: “On the Reading ‘bytdwd,’” 25–32. George Athas has recently put forth the proposal that dwdtyb refers to a toponym – namely, Jerusalem. See Athas, Tel Dan Inscription. While his reading is more plausible than that of the minimalists, Biran and Naveh’s proposal that the lexeme be rendered “House of David,” referring to “the dynastic name of the kingdom of Judah” and equivalent to such epigraphically attested terms as Bît Humri or Bît Agusi is still preferable (Biran and Naveh, “Aramaic Stele Fragment,” 93, passim). On the Ketef Hinnom inscription, see Barkay, “Priestly Benediction,” 37–76; Yardeni, “Remarks on the Priestly Blessing,” 176–185; Barkay, “Priestly Benediction on the Silver Plaques,” 139–192; Barkay, et al., “Challenges of Ketef Hinnom,” 162–171; among others. Rainey, “Uncritical Criticism,” 102. Carter, Emergence of Yehud, 285–288. See Carter, Emergence, 195–205, especially 199, where he estimates that the maximal population of Yehud during the Persian period was 21,700 persons. In contrast, Magen Broshi and Israel Finklestein have estimated that the population of the Northern kingdom in the eighth century was 350,000 and that of Judah 110,000. Even if the latter number were shown to be 50 percent too high, which is unlikely, the population of Judah in the eighth century would still have been more than twice as large as what it was in the Persian period. See Broshi and Finklestein, “Population of Palestine,” 47–60. This matter will be discussed in greater detail in Chapters 4 and 5 of this book.

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While the viewpoints of the maximalist and minimalist extremes clearly cannot be reconciled with one another, there is a degree of overlap in the center that controversial arguments such as those of Davies and the almost furious reactions that they inspire tend to obscure. On the issue of pentateuchal dating, or more properly, tetrateuchal dating, for I leave aside Deuteronomy for the moment, there are few scholars who see the Tetrateuch as having been composed out of whole cloth in the exilic or Persian periods. We saw that Rendtorff, despite his revisionist stance toward source criticism, places what he sees as the patriarchal narrative complex in the eighth century at the latest.82 Blum, though he sets both KD and KP in the postexilic period, sees both as having drawn upon preexilic material that in some cases dates to as early as the tenth century. Christoph Levin, who argues for an exilic dating of J, still sees the Yahwist as an exilic collector and redactor of preexilic written sources.83 Hans-Christoph Schmitt’s position is quite similar.84 Certainly, more traditional scholars such as Nicholson argue vehemently for a preexilic J (or JE).85 One might contend that agreements like this are incidental in the face of challenges to the source-critical project itself, but in fact the reverse is true for this book and others like it. Here, such agreements on dating matter far more than one’s particular construction of the formation of the Tetrateuch/ Pentateuch. While I will concede that I am partial to the approaches of Blum and Carr, it is that fact that is incidental to this project. If this is true for the patriarchal narratives, then it is all the more true for Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History, for there is certainly more agreement among scholars regarding the formation of these texts (or body of texts, in the case of the latter) than regarding the formation of the Tetrateuch. While there is a scholar or two who still follows Noth in seeing Deuteronomy through 2 Kings as the product of one exilic writer-compiler,86 that viewpoint is rare. What is the norm is positing two or more layers in the development of both Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History. No one contests that the final layer is exilic or even early postexilic, but those who would deny 82 83

84

85

86

This is based on his dating of deuteronomic sources. Levin, Jahwist, 34–35, 414, 429, and elsewhere. See also Nicholson, Pentateuch, 161–167 for a useful analysis of Levin’s position. Schmitt dates the earliest strand of the Joseph story to the Davidic-Solomonic period, the second to the late preexilic period, and the last strand, the Yahwistic layer, to the exilic or postexilic period. See Schmitt, Die Nichtpriesterliche Josephgeschichte, 150–156, 163, 169. He also discusses the implications of his findings for pentateuchal study as a whole on pp. 175–194. Nicholson, Pentateuch, 239–240. Also, see earlier. Richard Elliott Friedman, too, defends traditional source criticism in “Recession of Biblical Source Criticism.” De Pury cites various scholars who defend an early J, “Yahwist ‘J’ Source,” VI:1017. Hoffman, Reform, especially 15–21.

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that the compilers of the Deuteronomistic History drew on preexilic blocks of material are few as well.87 In a sense, the methods used on the Tetrateuch and on the DtrH have converged of late, as newer approaches to the former, too, emphasize layering, expansion, and the joining together of originally distinct blocks of material. When Rendtorff argued in 1977 for a revision of approaches to the transmission of the Pentateuch, he asked: [I]s it at all justified to use such completely different methods when dealing with the Pentateuch on one hand and the ‘deuteronomistic history’ on the other, as is generally done today? Now that earlier attempts to trace the ‘sources’ of the Pentateuch into the books of Kings have not prevalied [sic], a quite different way of looking at the historical books from Joshua to Kings has taken the foreground. Attention has turned to the larger complexes which were already available to the authors or redactors who established the final form of the text. It is a matter then of larger units which form the intermediary stage between the individual narratives and the final form of the text . . . We drew attention earlier to Noth’s study of the book of Joshua in which he encountered traditions of the occupation of the land as an independent larger unit. Something corresponding holds for the Samuel-Saul complex, the story of the rise of David, of the succession, and so on . . . I hold that it is very likely that, by turning away from the traditional manner of treating the Pentateuch, important insights for a fresh methodological approach can be gained from what has been learnt when dealing with the historical books.88

In some sense, then, what is perceived by many to be the rise of many divergent approaches to the study of the Pentateuch is actually the rise of a more homogeneous, a more unified approach, to the study of the books of Genesis through 2 Kings, and thus to much of the Hebrew Bible. And central to this

87

88

What scholars differ on is how much exilic deuteronomistic redactors changed this material. Examples of scholars who posit minimal change of preexistent documents by late redactors are Cross; McCarter, I-II Samuel, who posits an eighth century prophetic source that underlies much of the books of Samuel; Birch, Rise of the Israelite Monarchy; and Antony F. Campbell, Of Prophets and Kings, who like McCarter posits an early prophetic source. See also Antony F. Campbell and Mark A. O’Brien, Unfolding. In contrast, others see much more thoroughgoing editing of earlier sources by late redactors. See, e.g., Dietrich, Prophetie, and Veijola, Königtum and Dynastie. The position taken by Mayes, Story of Israel, is somewhere between the former and latter groups, though unlike the latter he does posit some preexilic redactional activity. Van Seters and Hoffman, taking the most minimalistic viewpoint, do not see these preexilic sources as recoverable. See Van Seters, In Search of History, and Hoffman, Reform. Van Seters even goes so far as to assert that narrative blocks such as the story of David’s rise or that of the succession “never had an independent existence of their own” (In Search of History, 355). Rendtorff, Problem, 200–201.

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approach is the idea of a final exilic or early Persian redaction/expansion of originally independent preexilic corpora of material.

Marriage Gifts in the Legal Material I shall begin my discussion of the biblical evidence with the legal material. One finds in the legal collections of the Hebrew Bible two references to a marital prestation, in both cases what is most likely bridewealth. This number is surprisingly small considering the number of attestations one finds in other ancient Near Eastern law codes, and corresponds to the relative paucity of biblical laws dealing with marriage in general, also in contrast to these law codes. The extrabiblical evidence will be dealt with in Chapter 3. Here I will deal only with the evidence from the biblical law codes, however limited. There is virtual unanimity among scholars that the Book of the Covenant found in Ex 20:22–23:33 is the oldest legal collection in the Pentateuch.89 In fact, Van Seters, the first scholar in recent memory to dispute the priority of this text, admits that his is the “sole exception to this view.”90 Van Seters attributes the Book of the Covenant to J and argues that it postdates and is dependent upon Deuteronomy. In doing so, he goes against the grain not only in making the latter assertions, but also in attempting to assign the Book to one of the traditional sources at all. While this was a typical move for scholars in the nineteenth century, as Brevard S. Childs writes, “from the time of Bäntsch’s monograph of 1892 a growing consensus had emerged that the Book of the Covenant was an older collection of laws which was independent of the usual critical sources.”91 Asserting the independence of this collection from the usual sources is only logical, since stylistic connections between the former and any of the latter are minimal. One of the few noteworthy ideological connections between the Book of the Covenant and one of the traditional sources, specifically J, is a shared belief in the legitimacy of multiple sanctuaries – or, to be more precise, a shared failure to problematize the existence of multiple sanctuaries. Most scholars see this merely as evidence that both this collection and the J narratives predate the deuteronomistic reforms – again, a logical conclusion, in my view. 89

90 91

On the Book of the Covenant, see, for example, Pfeiffer, “Transmission of the Book,” 99–109; Cazelles, Code de L’Alliance; Paul, Book of the Covenant; Bernard S. Jackson, Essays; Otto, Rechtsgeschichte and Das Deuteronomium, 236–238; and Westbrook, “What is the Covenant Code?” 15–36; Levinson, Deuteronomy, especially 11–13; Van Seters, Law Book. For a response to the last work, see Levinson, “Exilic Composition?” 272–325. Van Seters, Law Book, 177. Childs, Book of Exodus, 452.

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Yet one must still account for the similarities between certain laws in the Book of the Covenant and parallel laws in Deuteronomy, an example of which may be seen in the two laws that will be dealt with later. Naturally, most scholars see the laws in Deuteronomy as being in some way dependent on those in the Book of the Covenant. Nelson writes: “Deuteronomy restates or revises a number of laws from the Covenant Code . . . Because not all the laws of that earlier code are reformulated, it seems probable that Deuteronomy was not intended to supercede the Covenant Code completely or abrogate it.”92 Rofé has proposed a different explanation for the similarities between the two codes. After examining the family and sex laws in both legal collections, he concludes that these laws “originated in a common source, a single written document, from which they were then copied into the canonical books.”93 He dates this document to sometime before the seventh century.94 One also cannot dismiss the possibility that similarities between the two law codes might be due to a shared reliance on common or normative legal traditions that were not necessarily written. While this of course cannot be proved, it is no less plausible a hypothesis than that of Rofé, in my opinion. It should be noted, however, that issues of dependency only affect this book insofar as dating is concerned, and if one accepts the more compelling majority opinion that the Covenant Code predates Deuteronomy, then one must conclude that it is preexilic. Let us then move to a discussion of marriage gifts in these legal collections, beginning with the Book of the Covenant, which includes one mention of the mōhar (rhamo). Chapter 22, vv. 16–17 (Hebrew, 15–16) read: “When a man coerces95 a virgin who is not betrothed96 and lies with her, he shall surely give bridewealth (hnf@rehfm;yi rhomf) to make her his wife. But if her father refuses to give her to him, he shall pay an amount equal to the mōhar for virgins.”97 The 92 93 94 95

96

97

Nelson, Deuteronomy, 5. Alexander Rofé, “Family and Sex Laws,” 131. Rofé, “Family,” 156. The verb used in Exodus 22 is p-t-h (htp) in the piel, customarily translated as “seduce.” I have chosen to use instead the word “coerce” because I feel that it is closer to the sense of the Hebrew. While the word “seduce” in its more archaic sense may have sufficed, the more current use of the term has far less negative implications. This said, it bears noting that the semantic range of the piel of this verb is fairly broad; it can mean anything from “coax or persuade” (e.g., Judg 14:15) to “deceive” (2 Sam 3:25, Prov 24:28), apparently depending upon the context. The verb is a-r-ś (#or)), which has been translated by recent scholarship as “to be engaged” because the word “betroth” is archaic. I have chosen the latter term precisely for this reason; the biblical institution of betrothal is not equivalent to the modern custom of being engaged, but seems instead to have been far more rigid, as well as closer to actual marriage. (See my discussion later.) The use of the latter word is thus misleading. All biblical translations are my own, unless otherwise noted.

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parallel in Deuteronomy 22:28–29 reads: “If a man meets a young woman who is a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her98 and lies with her, and they are found, the man who lay with her shall give fifty shekels of silver to the young woman’s father, and she shall become his wife . . .”99 Both of these passages obviously concern the issue of what is to be done in the case of forced or coerced sex with an unbetrothed virgin. Though the passages are similar, they do differ in certain respects. The main difference is that Exodus uses the noun form of the root m-h-r (rhm), as well as the verb form of that same root in the qal, while Deuteronomy does not use either. The word mōhar has cognates in various Semitic languages: mhr in Ugaritic, mhr or mhr’ in Aramaic, mahrā in Syriac, mahr in Arabic.100 Though there is a possibility that in Aramaic and Syriac the word was just borrowed from Hebrew, obviously this was not the case with Ugaritic, and is quite unlikely to have been so with Arabic.101 These cognates do denote a type of marital prestation in each of these languages, though the picture is not as clear as we would like. In Ugaritic, mhr appears just three times, twice in the same text.102 While one of these texts does not concern marriage, the other does in fact discuss the marriage of Yarih~ to Nikkal. Interestingly, the word mhr appears there in close proximity with a verbal form from the root trh}, which is cognate with the Akkadian terh}atu, itself a type of marriage gift.103 The text reads: tn nkl [y]/rh}ytrh}.

Get me Nikkal! Yarikh would wed her,

ib t‘rbm b[bh]/th.

Let Ib enter his home!

watn mhrh la/bh.

Then I will give to her father, as her marriage price,

alp ksp.

One thousand shekels of silver,

wrbt h}/rh}.

And ten thousand shekels of gold (lines 17–20).104

98

99 100

101 102 103

104

The word used here is t-p-ś (#opt), unlike in v.25, which uses h[-z-q (qzx). Rofé writes: “The verb tps8, like its Akkadian cognate, s[aba tu " (“catch, seize”), particularly when applied to people, has the sense of holding by force, seizing someone who is trying to escape.” He cites various textual examples. See Rofé, “Family and Sex Laws,” 134, on this issue. See also Nelson, Deuteronomy, 273. Mayes feels that the law “is probably concerned with seduction rather than rape,” but I do not find his suggestion compelling (Mayes, Deuteronomy, 312). For a book-length analysis of Deut 22:13–21, see Locher, Die Ehre einer. See the entry for mōhar in Kohler-Baumgartner, HALOT. Also, J. Payne Smith, Compendious Syriac Dictionary, 27. Burrows, Basis of Israelite Marriage, 7–8. CAT 1.24:19 and 1.100:74, 75. Exactly which type of gift is a matter that will be discussed in Chapter 3, though it is usually taken to be bridewealth. Marcus, trans., “Betrothal of Yarikh and Nikkal-Ib,” 216.

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While the relationship between the words ytrh} and mhrh is not completely clear, the fact that the mhr is paid to her father does imply that it was bridewealth, though indirect dowry is also possible.105 In Aramaic, the word refers not to bridewealth but to indirect dowry.106 In Islamic law, mahr also denotes indirect dowry, but this is often not the case in practice among Muslims, and especially among Arabs, who in many regions exchange bridewealth instead and refer to this by the same term.107 This fact, together with evidence from old Arabic poetry, have led some to conclude that among pre-Islamic Arabs, mahr in fact denoted bridewealth.108 Because of the uncertainty and lack of uniformity in the meanings of these cognates, and also because cognates may have a different semantic range in the languages in which they are found, one cannot make the a priori assumption that mōhar refers specifically to bridewealth, but must ascertain that this is in fact so in a case by case fashion. Returning to the two legal texts at hand, then, it seems clear that both Exodus 22 and Deuteronomy 22 have in mind the same type of prestation. In the latter, the text explicitly states that the rapist must give a monetary sum to the father of his victim, a fact that points to one of the defining features of bridewealth: that it goes from the bridegroom (or the bridegroom’s family) to the father (or the larger kinship grouping) of the bride.109 In Exodus 22, the text does not make clear to whom the mōhar is paid. But, I feel that it may be inferred that the mōhar is in fact bridewealth, paid to the young woman’s family, and specifically to her father, because of the similarity of the parallel in Deuteronomy 22, and also because the father is mentioned in the passage. While one might argue that the prestation was only initially given to the father, and would later on be turned over to the bride herself – a fact that would characterize the gift as indirect dowry – there is no indication of this in the passages themselves. 105

106 107

108 109

Though Wyatt leaves mhr untranslated here, Wiggins renders it as “bride-price.” See Wyatt, “Some Problems,” 289; Wiggins, “What’s in a Name?” 764. See also Burrows’s discussion of this text, Basis of Israelite Marriage, 3–5. Interestingly, the words t;lh} and mlg appear in line 47 of the document, the former being rendered by Marcus as “parting gifts” and the latter, which is also used in Akkadian texts and appears in rabbinic literature (gwlm), as “dowry.” See Neufeld, Ancent Hebrew Marriage Laws, 112. This will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 2. See Motzki, “Bridewealth,” I: 258–259; Mir-Hosseini, “Mahr,” II: 424; and Peters, “Aspects of Bedouin Bridewealth,” 126–160. Though mahr is the most common word for bridewealth in Arabic, other terms are used in certain regions of the Arab world. See Peters, “Aspects of Bedouin Bridewealth,” 144, and Mir-Hosseini, “Mahr,” 424. This issue is discussed in more detail in Chapter 4. Motzki, “Bridewealth,” 258; Spies, “Mahr,” VI: 78. Moshe Weinfeld argues that in Deuteronomy 22, the fee paid is a fine and not mōhar, but I do not find this convincing because of the features of the passage outlined in this paragraph. See Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School, 285.

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Another difference between the two passages that merits discussion is the use in Exodus 22 of the phrase “mōhar for virgins” (tlow@tb@;ha rhamo). Based upon Deuteronomy 22:29, the rabbis understood this to be equal to 50 shekels.110 Apart from that parallel, we have only one piece of evidence on this matter. Though the exact phrase does not appear, the Middle Assyrian Laws do assume that there was a normative amount given as bridewealth for virgins. Law 55 states that if a man rapes an unbetrothed virgin who is living in her father’s house, the victim’s father shall take the wife of the rapist and “hand her over to be raped.” If the man has no wife, the law continues, the perpetrator shall give “ ‘triple’ (šalšāte) the silver as the value of the maiden to her father.” Law 56 reads: “If a maiden should willingly give herself to a man, the man shall so swear; they shall have no claim to his wife; the fornicator shall pay ‘triple’ (šalšāte) the silver as the value of the maiden . . .”111 One will notice that the rendering of šalšāte, “‘triple’” is itself in quotation marks here; this is because what is meant by the word šalšāte is unclear. Normally, the word means “third” (i.e., in rank, quality, etc.),112 and so whether the text here means three times the usual amount, an extra third of the usual amount, or even one third of what was usual is somewhat elusive.113 Nonetheless, it is clear that there was a customary sum given for virgins that the authors of the Middle Assyrian Laws had in mind.114 This was seemingly the case, too, with the author(s) of the Book of the Covenant, though we will see that there is no uniformity in the amount given as bridewealth in the biblical texts that mention this prestation. What is also clear is that in Exodus 22 and Deuteronomy 22, the giving of the mōhar is one of the main rituals that actualizes marriage. Whether it is the ritual that actualizes marriage is yet another of the uncertainties presented by these passages. Much of the problem in this case is our lack of clarity regarding the precise nature of betrothal itself, as well as the relationship of the mōhar to this status, though there certainly does seem to be some relationship between the two. Again, the paucity of biblical laws dealing with marriage is to blame. Seemingly, betrothal was a liminal period in marriage rites between the giving of bridewealth and the actual marriage – though what the latter consisted of,

110 111 112

113 114

Mek. 17; b. Ketub. 10a, 38b. Translations from Roth, Law Collections. I thank Emmanuelle Salgues for informing me on this matter (personal communications). Also, see CAD, vol.17/1:263. Cassuto, Book of Exodus, 289. It will become clear later in this chapter and in Chapter 3, however, that there were in all likelihood differences between marriage customs in ancient Israel and Mespotamia, differences that necessitate that the Mesopotamian evidence be used only carefully in illuminating marriage customs in ancient Israel.

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too, is rather unclear.115 Texts such as 2 Sam 3:14 and perhaps 1 Sam 18:17–19 make clear that betrothal and marriage were not the same status, that some length of time could pass between betrothal and actual marriage, and that a man, in both these cases David, who had become betrothed to a woman but had not yet married her, did have some legal right to her. Two sets of laws in Deuteronomy provide us with other information regarding betrothal. Daniel I. Block writes: “From the bride’s perspective, with [betrothal] the commitment to marriage was deemed so firm that a betrothed woman who willingly engaged in sexual intercourse with a man other than her husband was to be treated as an adulteress and stoned to death (Deut 22:23–27). From the vantage point of the groom, during the period of [betrothal] he was exempted from military duty (Deut 20:7).”116 These passages together demonstrate, as de Vaux puts it, that betrothal “was a recognized custom with juridical consequences.”117 That betrothal has many of the juridical features of marriage has led some to refer to it as “inchoate marriage.” This form of marriage, especially as it is legislated in the Mesopotamian sphere, will be discussed again in Chapter 3.118

Marriage Gifts in Biblical Narrative Texts Having exhausted the legal texts dealing with marriage gifts, it is appropriate to turn now to the narrative texts that are relevant to this issue. I shall begin with texts that use the word mōhar. 1 Samuel 18 is not the first of these in terms of its canonical order, but I shall begin with it because it presents a straightforward case of mōhar as bridewealth, perhaps even more so than the legal texts referred to earlier. But before I move to a discussion of the relevant content in this passage, I must return momentarily to the issue of dating. This passage is ascribed, and rightfully so in my opinion, to the predeuteronomistic layer of the book of 1 Samuel by McCarter. He and others include it in the set of stories referred to as the “History of David’s Rise,”119 “a 115

116

117 118 119

The actual marriage “ceremony” seems to have normally involved feasting (Gen 29:22–27; Judg 14:10); perhaps music (Ps 78:63); and special wedding attire (Isa 61:10; Ezek 16:8–13). Presumably, the festivities were normally followed by physical consummation, since the bloodstained sheets from the marriage bed may be submitted as evidence in the case of the husband’s later slandering his wife by claiming she was not a virgin when they married (Deut 22:13–21). See also Moore, Tobit, 232. Block, “Marriage and Family,” 58. An in-depth, though rather dated, discussion of betrothal is provided by Neufeld, Ancient Hebrew Marriage Laws, 142–147. See also Cazelles, Code D’Alliance, 74; and von Rad, Deuteronomy, 143, for brief treatments; and Yamauchi, “Cultural Aspects of Marriage,” 243–245; da Silva, “Condition of Women,” 52–58, for rather more detailed discussions. De Vaux, Ancient Israel, 32. On this subject, see particularly Westbrook, Old Babylonian Marriage Law, 29–38. For brief discussions of the history of scholarship on this set of narratives, see McCarter, I Samuel, 27–31; and Van Seters, In Search of History, 217, 265–271, though his assessment

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unified account of David’s career extending from I Sam 16:14 to II Samuel 5,”120 that, like the ark narrative and the Saul cycle, predates the eighth century.121 Campbell, too, sees 1 Sam 16 to 2 Sam 5 as being pre-deuteronomistic and, like McCarter, as part of a larger prophetic work. Campbell sets this work in the late ninth century.122 Many others concur with these two scholars that the “History of David’s Rise” is pre-deuteronomistic,123 and with good reason, for there are no signs of deuteronomistic language in these narratives. Moving now to the specifics of 1 Samuel 18, one reads in verses 20ff. that Saul has decided to give his daughter Michal in marriage to David, thinking that he might thereby bring about the young upstart’s downfall. David justifiably expresses surprise at this, calling himself a “poor and unimportant man.” Upon hearing of his reaction, Saul replies (v. 25): “Thus you shall say to David, ‘The king desires no mōhar save a hundred Philistine foreskins, so that he may take vengeance on the king’s enemies.’” David then kills one hundred Philistines124 and brings their foreskins to the king “that he might become the king’s son-in-law, and Saul gave to him his daughter Michal as wife” (v. 27). The NRSV translates mōhar as “marriage present” here. That it is such is clear, but the word could certainly be translated more specifically in this case as “bridewealth.” The groom-to-be, here David, presents to his father-in-law Saul a gift, and promptly receives Michal as wife. This text provides the most unambiguous example of giving bridewealth in the Hebrew Bible. Of course, it is not an unproblematic case, because one can not extrapolate from it too much regarding what would have been normal practice in ancient Israel, or to be more exact, what would have been normative at the particular time and place the text was written. Certainly, giving Philistine foreskins as bridewealth to marry anyone, never mind the king’s daughter, could not have been very common. Although the foreskins seem to serve as a substitute for money, one cannot state this with any certainty. Nonetheless, this narrative does tell us

120 121

122 123

124

of scholarship previous to his own is of course negative. See also McCarter, “The Apology of David,” 489–504; Vanderkam, “Davidic Complicity,” 521–539; Brettler, Creation of History, especially 99; White, “‘The History of Saul’s Rise,’” 271–292; and Römer, So-Called Deuteronomistic History, 95–97. McCarter, I Samuel, 27. McCarter posits a larger pre-deuteronomistic layer in 1 Samuel that he calls the “prophetic history.” The author(s) of this history, which he dates to the eighth century, drew on various sources that were even earlier, among them the collections of stories just named. See McCarter, I Samuel, 18–23. Campbell, Prophets, 1, 70. See Mayes, Story of Israel, 84, and the scholars cited by McCarter, I Samuel, 27–31, and Van Seters, In Search of History, 217, 265–271. The MT actually reads “two hundred,” against the preferred reading of the LXX.

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something important about what mōhar was and what it was not. While there are those who have made the argument that mōhar denoted indirect dowry rather than bridewealth in ancient Israel, this text serves to nullify such an argument, for its author(s) clearly assumed a prestation that was given to the father of the bride and not to the bride herself. Genesis 34 also contains an example of the giving of mōhar, or rather, of an offer to give this prestation. Source critics have traditionally assigned the core, if not the whole, of this chapter to J.125 And since it is the core of the chapter that concerns us, for the purposes of this book, the traditional source critics are in agreement about the attribution of the passage and thus about its preexilic dating. But what of revisionists such as Blum and Carr? The latter assigns the narrative in its entirety to what he calls the “Judean JacobJoseph Story.”126 He feels this composition dates to sometime between the fall of the North and the exile.127 Blum also dates this chapter to that same period, including it in the set of preexilic narratives he calls the Jakobgeschichte.128 Of course, there are those who see essentially the entire book of Genesis as dating to the exilic period, but their arguments have already been presented and critiqued. The preexilic dating of Blum and Carr, as well as that of most traditional source critics, is preferable. Moving to the narrative of Genesis 34, one reads of the violation of Jacob’s daughter Dinah by the Hivite Shechem son of Hamor.129 Despite having taken her by force, Shechem is consumed with feeling for Dinah and wishes to marry her. After his father Hamor speaks with Jacob and his sons in an attempt to convince them to give Dinah to Shechem, the latter speaks on his own behalf, stating: “Let me find favor in your eyes, and whatever you say to me I will give. Demand of me however costly a mōhar and mattān (Nt@fma), and I will certainly give you whatever you ask of me; only give me the girl to be my wife” (vv. 11–12). That the mōhar spoken of in this text is bridewealth in its strictest sense is fairly clear. The bridegroom states explicitly that he will pay an amount specified by the bride’s family, an amount that will be paid to her family. Nothing is said of a gift being given to Dinah herself, unless that is what the mattān denotes. Burrows does in fact suggest that the mattān may be a gift from the 125

126 127 128 129

“All critics are agreed that the core stems from J,” writes Speiser, Genesis, 266. This stands in contrast to the views of Westermann, Genesis 12–36, 537, who sees the passage as bearing similarity to P and thus late. Carr, Fractures, 340. Ibid., 303. Blum, Vätergeschichte, 204–263, esp. 210–224. For a seminal, if by now rather dated, anthropological analysis of this episode and of Mediterranean culture more generally, see Pitt-Rivers, Fate of Shechem, especially 126–169.

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bridegroom to the bride, and thus indirect dowry.130 This is highly unlikely, however, for the word mattān only occurs four other times in the biblical corpus, and none of these other occurrences relates to marriage. As Neufeld writes, “The term Matan is a very general term for a gift and is used in various senses.”131 Speiser takes the combination of these two Hebrew words as a hendiadys construction, and thus “not as two separate items but as one payment of the amount due the family for release of the girl.”132 His evidence for this, however, is tenuous. Should one infer from this text that it was normative or at least commonplace for the bridegroom to provide two separate gifts – the difference between them unclear from the narrative – to the bride’s family? I feel that doing so would be going too far. First, as was stated, the word mattān only appears in a context having to do with marriage this one time. Second, the LXX contains only one word for gift, marital or otherwise in this context,133 and not two, hence allowing for the possibility that one of these words was used to gloss the other, in which case it would be likely that mattān was used to gloss mōhar. If this was not the case, however, and if two separate gifts were envisioned, then this text may in fact point to a marriage custom, or a variant in marriage custom, that actually existed in ancient Israel.134 One final detail of Genesis 34 that merits comment at this time is that Shechem’s statement makes clear that there is a manifest relationship between his giving of a gift, or gifts, to the family and their giving of Dinah to him as a wife.135 In this, it is similar not only to 1 Samuel 18 but also to the relevant passages in Exodus and Deuteronomy. Though we have exhausted the small corpus of biblical texts that feature the noun mōhar 136 or a verb form derived therefrom, there are several other biblical passages that may speak of the phenomenon of giving bridewealth. 130

131 132 133

134

135

136

Burrows, Basis of Israelite Marriage, 46. Sarna suggests similarly that the mattān corresponds with the Akkadian biblum, “the ceremonial gifts to the bride’s family,” but naturally can provide no evidence for this (“Ravishing of Dinah,” 147). Andersen and Freedman make a connection between the mattān and the Akkadian nudunnû, “a special and apparently optional settlement of a husband on his wife,” for etymological reasons, but again can provide for no other evidence for this. See Hosea, 274. Neufeld, Ancient Hebrew Marriage Laws, 113. Speiser, Genesis, 265. The word used is phernē, a term that actually refers to dowry and not bridewealth. More will be said on this in Chapter 2. Other possible variants will be discussed later. Perhaps relevant to this text is that in ancient Mesopotamia, and in Old Babylonian sources specifically, one finds evidence for two forms of bridewealth being given: terh}atu and biblu. See Chapter 3 for more on this. The issue of marriage as exchange – i.e., of women for property – and women for women, will be discussed in more detail later. The final usage of a word deriving from the root m-h-r that exists in the biblical corpus is found in Ps 16:4. The verse, as it stands, reads: “They who pay bridewealth (wrhm) (for)

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One of these is found in Gen 29:14–30. This text is dated similarly to Genesis 34. Most source critics have attributed this passage to J, and thus dated it, traditionally, to the preexilic period.137 Carr attributes this passage to the earliest layer of Genesis, which was composed sometime before the fall of the Northern kingdom.138 Blum sees this passage as being even earlier – he includes it in what he calls the Jakoberzählung, which he sees as having been written during the time of Jeroboam I.139 While I think that might be going too far, I agree with both Blum and Carr that the set of stories of which this narrative forms a part is most compellingly dated to sometime before 722. In Genesis 29, we read of Jacob’s marriages to Leah and Rachel, the daughters of Laban. Before Jacob is given these women by his father-in-law to marry, he serves Laban seven years for each woman. While this type of “endowment through bride service,” or more simply “brideservice,” was not the most common form of bridewealth in the ancient Near East and is not so cross-culturally, it is a form practiced in some societies.140 Through it, rather than giving money or goods, Jacob gives his services to Laban for seven years. Goody writes: “. . . the father-in-law regards it as a way of increasing his supply of labour, which would be particularly important if the bride had no brothers.”141 Once Jacob’s term is complete, and his “sum” thus paid, he is first given Leah in marriage, and following another term of service – another “payment” – he is then given Rachel.142 Though bridewealth and brideservice are not exactly the same custom, I do believe this narrative portrays a scenario in which

137 138 139 140

141 142

another (god) multiply their sorrows; I will not pour out their drink offerings of blood, nor lift up their names upon my lips.” The meaning of the verb is obscure here, as is the entire verse. While it may have a figurative meaning – i.e., “they who put themselves in an intimate relationship with another god” or “they who give a gift in order to gain the favor or loyalty of another god” – the psalm as a whole has many textual problems, and so other readings have been proposed. The NRSV translates: “Those who choose another god multiply their sorrows.” They presumably base this translation on a correction of the problematic verb from wrhm to wrxb, a reasonable change. Other proposals have been made, but none as convincing. Thus, it seems reasonable to conclude that this final occurrence of the root m-h-r may not be an occurrence at all. Speiser, Genesis, 224–226; Westermann, Genesis 12–36, 464. Carr, Fractures, 265–266, 340. Blum, Vätergeschichte, 98–105, 202–203. Goody, The Oriental, the Ancient, 347; Goody, “Bridewealth and Dowry,” 22. Brideservice is the dominant type of marital transaction in roughly 10 percent of the world’s societies, with its being most common among North and South American native groups. Ibid., 347. Whether or not Laban had sons will be discussed later. Neufeld and Burrows argue, unconvincingly, that the arrangement described in this chapter is analoguous with the so-called errebu marriage that scholars such as Koschaker, writing in the first decades of the twentieth century, saw in some Akkadian sources. In this type of marriage, the wife continued to live in the house of her father, with her husband visiting her, thus the term errebu. See Neufeld, Ancient Hebrew Marriage Laws, 56–67, and Burrows,

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Jacob pays to his father-in-law a revised form of bridewealth, not money or goods but his labor, in order to marry. Another passage that may speak of bridewealth is Genesis 24. The dating of this passage has been discussed earlier, and I will not reiterate the major issues here, except to say that I agree with Rofé, as well as with Blum,143 that there are compelling reasons for dating this passage late. As Westermann says of the chapter: “There is nothing else like it in Gen. 12–36.”144 In the passage, Abraham sends his servant to his kinsman in Nahor in order to procure a wife for Isaac. There the servant finds Rebekah, the daughter of Bethuel, and negotiates with her father and her brother Laban for them to give her in marriage to Isaac. Once their discussions were finished, “the servant brought out ornaments of silver and of gold, as well as garments, and gave them to Rebekah145; he also gave to her brother and to her mother costly gifts (migdānôth, twndgm)” (v. 53). Like the previous text, if this passage does indeed speak of the giving of bridewealth, it does not do so in a stereotypical manner. First, the word migdānôth itself bears addressing. This word only appears three other times in the biblical corpus, and in none of those instances is it related to marriage.146 Unsurprisingly, these other usages do not shed much light on our passage, nor do the cognates of the word in Syriac, Palmyrene, or Jewish Aramaic.147 Second, in none of the previous texts has the bridegroom’s family, in this case through the messenger of Abraham, given property directly to the bride herself. Such a gift does not strictly qualify as bridewealth, but is instead

143

144 145

146

147

“Complaint of Laban’s Daughters,” 261–262. However, even at the time these men were writing there was a great deal of disagreement among scholars as to the precise nature of errebu marriage, with some denying that it was a distinctive type of marriage at all. Van Seters summarizes the scholarship on this matter and puts forth a cogent refutation of Neufeld in “Jacob’s Marriages,” 377–395. Because of the antiquated and uncompelling nature of the discussion, I feel that Neufeld’s analysis is best left aside in favor of that of Goody, which rests on more solid anthropological footing. Blum, Vätergeschichte, 383–389. In this, I disagree with Carr, who includes the chapter in the “proto-Genesis” composition, and thus dates it to between the fall of the North and the exile. See Carr, Fractures, 339, and above. Westermann, Genesis 12–36, 382. The servant had also given Rebekah gifts in v. 22 (a fact discussed also in v. 47). These gifts will be discussed in a later section. 2 Chr 21:3, 32:23; and Ezr 1:6. These are all late texts, as Rofé notes (“Betrothal,” 28). See also Neufeld, Ancient Hebrew Marriage Laws, 115–116, for more on this word and its use in this context, though in my view his comments are speculative and at times incorrect, and Burrows, Basis of Israelite Marriage, 18. See entry in Kohler-Baumgartner, HALOT. The singular form of the word seems to be dgeme (pace BDB), a word that appears several times in Deuteronomy and the Song of Songs and seemingly always refers to fruit or choice produce. The LXX, too, is unhelpful here, translating twndgm as i(matismon.

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indirect dowry. Also, none of the previous texts have described the mother of the bride, or the bride’s uncle, as receiving gifts. Features such as this one have led Nancy Jay to see in this text vestiges of a matrilineal system.148 It is not necessary to discuss the merits of her argument here, however, for, bridewealth may be, and is, given in either matrilineal or patrilineal systems.149 As was stated earlier, what is required in either system for a gift to be classified and to function as bridewealth is for property to be “tendered by the husband’s grouping to the kin of his wife.”150 Whereas in ancient Israel the father is by far the most common – and in an almost exclusively patrilineal society, the expected – recipient of bridewealth, that it is the uncle and the mother of Rebekah who receive gifts in this text does not change its status as this type of marital prestation. Additionally, the fact that Abraham’s servant gives gifts to Rebekah separately makes the characterization of his gift to her mother and uncle as bridewealth, rather than as some form of dowry, all the more certain. It is worth noting, however, that the use of the term migdānôth, rather than the more typical mōhar, may relate somehow to who served as the recipients of this particular gift. Of course, a gift is just a gift and not bridewealth unless the bestowing of it directly relates to the giving of a young woman in marriage to one who has given, or whose family has given, the gift. Like everything else in this text, the events do not proceed as one might expect. In verse 51, Laban and Bethuel say: “Look, Rebekah is before you, take her and go, and let her be the wife of your master’s son, just as the Lord has spoken.” Oddly, though, this proclamation comes before the giving of the (most substantial of the) gifts. This feature seems to stem, however, from the context of the narrative, for Abraham’s servant had just recounted a story detailing God’s intervention in the servant’s quest to procure a wife for Isaac. A few verses after the statement of Laban and Bethuel – after a night has passed, and after the giving of the main gifts – Rebekah finally goes with the servant, though not until she has been asked if she will go with him, her assent in the matter seemingly as important in this text as that of her father and uncle. These facts, it must be said, do blur the matter of determining the nature of the servant’s gift. Yet, all in all, it seems likely that his gift may be classified as bridewealth, for it is property tendered to the bride’s family, and it does seem to mark, though perhaps not to effect in this text, the change in Rebekah’s status from unmarried to betrothed woman. 148 149

150

See Jay, Throughout Your Generations, 94–111. Though it is much more common in patrilineal systems, bridewealth is sometimes exchanged in matrilineal ones, as well. See Comaroff, “Introduction,” 16. See Introduction to this book.

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Another passage that may contain a reference to bridewealth is that of Genesis 12. Like the text just cited, source critics have traditionally assigned the part of the chapter that concerns us, the so-called wife-sister story in verses 10–20, to J.151 Carr assigns the passage to the “proto-Genesis” composition, and convincingly so, in my view.152 In the passage, after Pharaoh is told of Sarai’s beauty and takes her into his house, the text reads in verse 16: “And for her [Sarai’s] sake, he [Pharaoh] treated Abram well, and he had sheep, cattle, donkeys, male and female slaves, she-asses, and camels.” Because Abram presented himself as Sarai’s brother and thus as her male guardian, it is possible that Pharaoh’s gifts to him were offered as bridewealth to make Sarai his wife. The text is far less than explicit about this, however, and so one can only speculate.153 A final biblical text that might discuss the giving of bridewealth is Hosea 3. Verses 1–2 read: “The lord said to me again, ‘Go, love a woman who has a lover and is an adulteress, just as the lord loves the people of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love raisin cakes.’ So I bought her (hfrek@;)ewF)154 for fifteen shekels of silver and a homer of barley and a measure of wine.”155 Joseph Blenkinsopp counts this passage among those biblical texts that discuss bridewealth (or, as he generally refers to it, the “marriage fee”). He states: “The fee could also be paid in kind, witness . . . the marriage price of fifteen shekels, together with barley and wine, paid by Hosea for Gomer.”156 There are various problems with this formulation, and indeed with the passage itself. First, there is the question of whether or not the woman spoken of in chapter 3 is actually Gomer, or a second woman that Hosea is told to marry. Some have argued the latter because the passage does not mention Gomer by name and is in the first person, while chapter 1, the chapter in which Hosea is commanded to marry Gomer, is in the third person. These features, however, could just as easily imply that Hosea 3 is a variant account of the events that transpire in Chapter 1.157 Yet, as Francis. I. Andersen and 151 152

153

154

155 156 157

Speiser, Genesis, 89, 91. Carr, Fractures, 192–193, 339. Source division of the chapter is problematic. See Westermann, Genesis 12–36, 472; Speiser, Genesis, 232–233. Interestingly, in the parallel version of this story in Genesis 20, Abimelech only gives gifts to Abraham after he becomes aware of who Sarah really is; Abimelech states that the gifts are proof of Sarah’s innocence. In the third wife-sister narrative (Genesis 26), there are no gifts at all. The form is odd. Though probably qal, the reason for the daghesh is elusive. See Rowley, “Marriage of Hosea,” 68–69; Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, 298, as well as Vogels, “Hosea’s Gift to Gomer,” 412–413. NRSV translation. Blenkinsopp, “Family in First Temple Israel,” 60. Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, 292.

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David. N. Freedman write, “Chapter 3 presupposes much that is in cc 1–2.”158 The word “again” (d(o) in 3:1 (“Yahweh said to me again”) is the main example of that fact, though it is possible that word was added later in order “better to link chapter 3 with chapter 1.”159 If Hosea 3 does in fact presuppose the first chapter, then the implication is that the actions undertaken in this chapter come after those in Hosea 1.160 I will entertain both of these possibilities – that chapter 3 is a variant account of Hosea’s marriage to Gomer or that the third chapter presupposes the first – in my analysis, but will leave aside the improbable suggestion that the chapter discusses a second woman. Blenkinsopp’s inclusion of Hosea 3 among the biblical texts that refer to bridewealth is more compelling if one takes this passage as a variant of chapter 1, but even then is not without problems. The first of these is that the stem k-r-h (hrk), “to purchase, buy, barter for,”161 is used in the passage rather than any word deriving from the root m-h-r (rhm). The former root does not refer to marriage in any of the other texts that it is used, although usage of it is not widespread. Such a fact in itself would not preclude the exchange from being bridewealth of course, for the use of k-r-h could have been purposefully coarse – a vulgar term for a vulgar woman. But one must still ask to whom this bridewealth would have been paid. This chapter, unlike chapter 1, does not refer to the woman as a “woman of prostitution,” or, perhaps more accurately, “woman of promiscuity,”162 but as one who “has a lover and is an adulteress.” It is unclear if one should infer that the woman has another husband against whom she has committed adultery and from whom Hosea procured her, or if she was unmarried, a mere “fornicator,” though this latter option is unlikely considering the usual semantic range of the verb used.163 If one nonethelesss considers this option for a moment, one must assume that if she were unmarried, Hosea gave the money and goods described in verse 2 to her father. In the more probable case that she was married, one might infer that Hosea paid the husband for her outright – certainly his gift could not be considered bridewealth in such a case, but could only be seen as a purchase. 158 159 160

161

162

163

Ibid., 292. Macintosh, Hosea, 96. This is the position taken by Rowley, who interprets Hosea 3 as a “sequel” to the first chapter of the book where he “buy[s] her back to himself ” (“Marriage of Hosea,” especially 89–90). See entry in Kohler-Baumgartner, HALOT. Some have suggested the root n-k-r (rkn) instead, to make sense of the daghesh, but this suggestion is not without its own problems. If the form is from n-k-r, then the word would have the sense “to recognize,” presumably as his wife. See Rowley, “Marriage of Hosea,” 68–69; Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, 299; and Vogels, “Hosea’s Gift to Gomer,” 413. For an excellent discussion of the meaning of hnz, see Phyllis Bird, “‘To Play the Harlot,’” 75–94, especially 75–80. The latter rendering is hers. Macintosh, Hosea, 97.

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Considering the lack of information in the passage, one can only speculate on this issue. Unfortunately, if one takes Hosea 3 as postdating the events of chapter 1, and thus as the description of Hosea taking back his adulterous wife, the issue of the function and recipient of the prophet’s gift or fee is not made any clearer. In such a case, it would be difficult indeed to see the exchange in this passage as bridewealth, for Hosea had already been married to Gomer. It is unclear why his taking her back after her adulterous actions would require a new mōhar; it is also unclear to whom this sum would have been paid.164 To her father? Such a fact seems highly unlikely. To her? This, too, seems unlikely, though some have suggested it.165 Because of the verb used and the total lack of information regarding the recipient of Hosea’s funds, some have suggested that the prophet was paying money to redeem his wife from slavery.166 There is also the possibility that, if she were a prostitute, “the price was the fee for acquiring exclusive rights with her over a long period of time.”167 To put the matter baldly: the fee was one paid to Gomer’s “pimp.” That the Arabic cognate of k-r-h means “to hire” might lend some support to this.168 In none of these scenarios, however, could Hosea’s sum be classified as bridewealth. One sees, then, that it is only if one takes the chapter as a variant of Hosea 1 and sees the amount described as being paid to the father of the woman described, who is sexually promiscuous but, being unmarried, is not committing adultery per se, that one may include this passage as one that discusses bridewealth. In any of the other possible scenarios, the exchange would fall outside of the definition of that term. And so, despite the fact that this passage provides us with so little information, probability leads one to rule against the interpretation of Blenkinsopp.

Biblical References to Marriage Gifts Other Than Bridewealth In addition to the texts cited earlier, there are several other biblical texts that discuss marital prestations other than the mōhar. One of them, Genesis 30, mentions the giving of something called zēbed (dbez'). In this chapter, which Carr assigns to the earliest stratum of Genesis,169 Rachel and Leah engage in a 164

165 166 167 168 169

G. I. Davies mentions various possibilities in Hosea, 101, some of which are not discussed here. Vogels, “Hosea’s Gift to Gomer,” 418–421. Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, 299; James Luther Mays, Hosea, 57–58; Wolff, Hosea, 61. Mays, Hosea, 57. Macintosh, Hosea, 100; Rowley, “Marriage of Hosea,” 68–69. Carr, Fractures, 340.

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contest of conception, each woman bearing more than one child in order not to have their status – and their husband’s affection – usurped by the other. After bearing her sixth son, Leah states, “God has endowed me (yndbz) with a fine zēbed; now my husband will honor170 me because I have borne him six sons” (v. 20). The NRSV translates zēbed as “dowry,”171 but this meaning is far from certain. Both the verb form and the noun form are hapax legomena. Yet there are Semitic cognates that have the more general meanings of “gift” or “to give,”172 and forms of the root appear in various biblical names, the great majority of them male.173 While the root does have the sense “to endow, give a dowry” in Syriac, in other Semitic languages, as in Hebrew, it often appears in male names.174 Thus it seems that the most common meaning of the root z-b-d (dbz) relates to the giving of non-marital gifts. Yet could the word as it is used here refer to the more specific gift of the dowry? The context makes this unlikely. Leah makes the statement cited after having had her sixth child. If she were referring to her dowry, she would have had that from the beginning; why provide that as a reason for her husband’s honoring her at that particular moment if that hadn’t been cause enough for him to honor her previously? Also, the author’s choice of this obscure term has more to do with its similarity to the name Zebulon, the son Leah had just borne, than with some hypothetical technical meaning.175 The rendering “dowry” therefore seems highly unlikely here, and even the translators of the LXX choose the simple word for gift, dōron (dwron), rather than that for dowry, phernē. In this case, it seems that they were more astute than the translators of the NRSV. 170

171 172 173 174

175

The word used is from the root z-b-l (lbz), which only appears in a verbal form in this one passage. Its noun form appears several times, however, and so its meaning is fairly certain. Blenkinsopp, “Family in First Temple Israel,” 60, also refers to it as such, as do some others. See Kohler-Baumgartner, HALOT. See 1 Kgs 4:5 (dw@bzf); 1 Chr 2:36 (dbfzf), and 8:19 (yd@ib;zf); among many other examples. On the Syriac, see Payne Smith, Compendious Syriac Dictionary, 109; and Brockelman, Lexicon Syriacum, 186–187, who helpfully provides citations. The root appears in quite a number of the names found on the Aramaic inscriptions from Idumea; see Lemaire, Nouvelles Inscriptions, Tome II, 269, and “New Aramaic Ostraca,” 430, 433, 438; Porten and Yardeni, “Social, Economic, and Onomastic Issues,” 463, 468–469; and Eph’al and Naveh, Aramaic Ostraca, 99. The names contain several different theophoric elements, possibly indicating different ethnic identifications (Lemaire, “New Aramaic Ostraca,” 416). Interestingly, Polybius mentions a Seleucid commander of Arab stock whose name is Zabdibelus, which seems to be a combination of the root in question with the theophoric element Ba’al. See Hengel, “Political and Social History,” 2:67. A name containing the root also seems to appear on a Palmyrene inscription (Fiema, “Inscription from the Temple,” 81–83). Such names are also found elsewhere, as well, including the New Testament. Speiser, Genesis, 229, where he points to the assonance of various words in this verse with the name.

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In addition to the word zēbed, there is another term that has often been translated as “dowry”: šillûh[îm (Myx?w@l@#Oi). This word obviously stems from the commonplace root š-l-h[ (xl#$)176 and appears three times in the biblical corpus, though in none of these cases is its meaning unambiguous. Its first occurrence is in Ex 18:2.177 This verse (and the first part of the one that follows it) reads: “Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, took back Zipporah, the wife of Moses, after he had sent her away (hfyxew@l@#$i rxa)a), as well as her two sons.” The NRSV translates this verse similarly, as does Brevard Childs in his commentary on Exodus,178 both seeing hfyxew@l@#$i as referring to Zipporah’s being sent away by Moses.179 Yet, others feel that the word refers to a dowry in this context. William H. C. Propp translates the verse: “And Jethro, Moses’ fatherin-law, took Zipporah, Moses’ wife since her marriage-gift, and her two sons . . .”180 Much of the problem lies in the line’s syntax, which, as Childs states, “is difficult.” He writes: “The noun šillûh?îm denotes both a ‘dismissal’ as well as a ‘dowry.’ The latter meaning does not fit the context, although some have suggested it.”181 I concur with Childs. Though the syntax is unclear, Jethro is clearly taking in Zipporah and her sons in this verse, and so it seems more natural for hfyxew@l@#$i to refer to Moses’ sending her away, rather than to the point at which “she became Moses’ wife: after the transfer of šillûh[îm,” as Propp suggests.182 Not only does the latter reading make less sense in the context, but it also presupposes that the giving of dowry was the act that effected marriage in ancient Israel, that it was, as it were, the sine qua non of marriage. Such a presupposition must be defended and not merely assumed, a fact which will be discussed in greater detail later. The second occurrence of the word šillûh[îm appears in 1 Kgs 9:16. In terms of dating, those who follow the double redaction theory of Cross would 176

177

178 179

180 181 182

Thus, BDB’s translation of “sending away, parting gift.” As stated earlier, the word t ;lh} appears together with mlg in line 47 of CAT 1.24 (t ;lh}h wmlgh). While the latter word is known from both Akkadian and rabbinic literature to signify “dowry,” the phrasing implies that two different gifts are meant, thus Marcus’s rendering of the former as “parting gifts” (“Betrothal of Yarikh and Nikkal-Ib,” 218). The source attribution of this chapter has been contested, mainly because of the alternation in it between the tetragrammaton and Myhl). But, since the likelihood that this passage actually contains a reference to dowry is so minimal, I will leave aside this debate. See Childs, Book of Exodus, 321–322, for more on the source issue. Childs, Book of Exodus, 318. The LXX translation is also quite similar, rendering hfyxew@l@#$i as αφεσιν αυτης, “her dismissal, letting go.” Propp, Exodus 1–18, 623. Childs, Book of Exodus, 320. Propp, Exodus 1–18, 629. Del Olmo Lete has suggested that the phrase be rendered “with her dowry.” He argues that rx) can be translated as “with” on the basis of Ugaritic parallels, but this meaning is rare in Biblical Hebrew. See del Olmo Lete, “ ‘ah[ar s]illu=he=h[a" (Ex. 18,2),’ ” 414–416; as well as Marvin Pope, “Enigmatic Bible Passages,” 114–117.

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assign virtually all of the material in the books of Kings up to 2 Kgs 23:25 to the Josianic edition of the Deuteronomistic History.183 Though a prophetic source, and possibly also other earlier sources, most likely underlie some of the material in Kings, there is no compelling reason to attribute this verse to one of these sources in particular. As Campbell and O’Brien write: “The association with Pharaoh (vv. 16–17a, in parentheses in the NRSV) could have been added to this material at any time . . .”184 On the other hand, there is also no compelling reason to attribute this short passage to the exilic stratum of the Deuteronomistic History, for there are no notably exilic features or concerns apparent in it.185 What one may conclude then is that this passage dates to sometime in the preexilic period. Verses 16–17a of 1 Kings 9 read: “Pharaoh king of Egypt had gone up and captured Gezer; he had burned it with fire, killed the Canaanites who lived in the city, and given it as šillûh[îm to his daughter, Solomon’s wife. So, Solomon rebuilt Gezer . . .” In this context, the word šillûh[îm does seem to denote “dowry”; it certainly denotes a gift of some kind, and it does seem to be property that Pharaoh’s daughter brings into the marriage with her, for Solomon does later have control over it, as the passage makes clear.186 The passage does not make absolutely explicit that the occasion for the giving of the gift was marriage, but it seems reasonable enough to infer this. The final occurrence of the word šillûh[îm appears in Micah 1:14. As this verse stands in the MT, it is almost completely incomprehensible. The NRSV translation depends mainly on the LXX, it seems, a text that is itself confusing due to the Greek translators’ predilection for attempting to translate Hebrew proper nouns. The NRSV reads: “Therefore you shall give šillûh[îm to Moresheth-gath; the houses of Achzib shall be a deception to the kings of Israel.” Even if one sees the use of the word in question as being a figurative one here, with the author playing on šillûh[îm meaning “dowry,” this occurrence is of virtually no use to us in determining what exactly this gift consisted of or signified in ancient Israel. Thus the one occurrence of the word zēbed and the three occurrences of the word šillûh[îm taken together scarcely lead one at all forward in the effort to determine whether or not these terms did in fact signify the specific marriage gift that we refer to as dowry. Only the usage in 1 Kings 9 seems to refer

183 184 185

186

Mayes, Story of Israel, 111. Campbell and O’Brien, Unfolding, 362. This passage is not attributed to the exilic redaction by Cross (Canaanite Myth, 285–289), Friedman (Exile, 25–26), or Nelson (Double Redaction, 5–6, 43–94). Unfortunately, the Greek does not clarify matters here, for it translates šillûh[îm as apostolaj, from apostolh (apostellw), “a sending off or away, despatching.”

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to such a gift; the other examples either clearly do not refer to dowry or are too ambiguous to be useful. Yet there are a few other biblical texts that may speak of dowry-giving, even if they do not use either of the two terms (šillûh[ îm and zēbed) that scholars have often translated with the word “dowry.” In Gen 29:24, 29,187 Laban gives his daughters Leah and Rachel a maidservant each when they marry. Raymond Westbrook sees in this a clear case of bestowing dowry: “There is little difficulty in interpreting these gifts as dowry.”188 While the matter is perhaps not as cut-and-dried as he feels it to be, I agree that Laban’s giving a servant to each of his daughters upon the occasion of their marriage may be classified as the giving of dowry, for the maidservants are property that is given by the bride’s (or in this case brides’) family and brought into the marriage with them. There may also be a case similar to this in Gen 24:59–61, where Rebekah takes a servant along with her when she leaves her home with Abraham’s messenger to wed Isaac.189 Josh 15:13–19 contains what may be another example of the giving of dowry. This passage is also found, with only minor differences, in Judg 1:11–15. Robert Boling has written that the latter passage is unlike anything else in the book of Judges and was inserted as a frame to the book as part of its exilic deuteronomistic redaction.190 However, he writes that “[the final editor’s] sources . . . were already ancient in his day.”191 The passage was in fact often assigned in the past to J.192 As we have seen, though, the tendency of late in pentateuchal studies has been a move away from source criticism, and so the effort to discern pentateuchal sources in the historical books seems now quite tenuous. Nonetheless one can only agree with Boling that the passage we speak of predated the redactor(s) who inserted it into its present contexts in Joshua and Judges, for the passage reflects no specifically exilic concerns or ideologies. There would have been little reason for the exilic deuteronomists to compose such a passage, and so it is more reasonable to conclude that the text was one already available. This of course leaves open the possibility that the passage 187 188

189

190

191 192

The dating of Genesis 29 has already been discussed. Westbrook, Property and the Family, 145. Neufeld sees the matter similarly. See Neufeld, Ancient Hebrew Marriage Laws, 111. Neufeld, Ancient Hebrew Marriage Laws 111. Westbrook feels that, based upon these cases, “the same status may then be presumed for Sarah’s maid Hagar” (Property and the Family, 145). While this may be the case, the text says nothing about how Sarah acquired her servant, and so I feel that Westbrook’s confidence is misplaced. Boling, Judges, 64. Other proposals regarding the insertion/redaction of this passage are mentioned by Soggin, Judges, 26–27. Boling, 63. Ibid., 63.

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could have been inserted as part of the Josianic or even pre-deuteronomistic collection and redaction of these texts. As Mayes writes: “[Regarding Joshua 13–19] a fairly good case can be made for the view that the collector responsible for the pre-deuteronomistic collection of traditions connected with the conquest also appended to this an account of the division of the land among the tribes.”193 Moving to the passage itself, we read in Josh 15:16–19: And Caleb said, “Whoever strikes Qiryat-Sefer and captures it, to him I will give my daughter Achsah as wife.” Othniel son of Qenaz, the brother of Caleb captured it, and so he gave to him his daughter Achsah as wife. And when she came (to him), she pressed him194 to ask from her father a field. Then when she got off (her) donkey, and Caleb said to her, “What do you want?”, she said, “Give me a blessing (hkrb). Since you have set me in the land of the Negeb, give me springs of water as well.” So he gave to her the upper springs and the lower springs.

Anderson and Freedman have proposed that hkrb or “blessing” here is a technical term for the groom’s gift to the bride, or indirect dowry.195 Yet there is no support for such a proposal either in this passage or in the dozens of others in the Hebrew Bible that use this term. Caleb’s gift to his daughter does seem to be characterizable as the bestowing of dowry proper, however, for the father of the bride transfers property to her on or around the occasion of her wedding. While Blenkinsopp takes this passage as evidence that the “bridal gift could include land,” I feel that to generalize based upon a text such as this with its peculiar narrative context is rather tenuous.196 Neufeld is more on target when he states that this case may be cited as one of a “dowr[y] which [was] really of a munificent nature,”197 for the passage seems to imply that asking for a dowry such as this, and perhaps any dowry at all, was something out of the ordinary. As Andersen and Freedman put it, “The special circumstances of this request are worth noting, since we can not assume that what is reported here happened at every marriage.”198 This translation and interpretation of the passage runs counter to those of, for example, Tikva Frymer-Kensky and Victor Matthews. Since ynttn bgnh Cr) in verse 19 may also be translated as “you have given me the land of the Negeb” rather than as “you have set me in the land of the 193 194 195 196 197 198

Mayes, Story of Israel, 54. Judg. 1:14 reads “he pressed her” instead. Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, 274. Blenkinsopp, “Family in First Temple Israel,” 60. Neufeld, Ancient Hebrew Marriage Laws, 111. Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, 273.

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Negeb,”199 Matthews has written, “Achsah publicly confronts her father over the quality of the dowry he supplies her since it consists only of arid land in the Negeb.”200 Frymer-Kensky and the JPS translation201 interpret the passage still differently, rendering the phrase in question as “you have given me away as Negeb-land.”202 That is, Achsah’s father has given her away as a woman without a suitable dowry. While Matthews’s translation is plausible enough, if less syntactically direct than mine (and that of the NRSV), the rendering of Frymer-Kensky’s and the JPS’s reads far too much into this verse, in my opinion. While it is true that word plays are often missed by translators, to assume them in the absence of other evidence is a tenuous interpretive move. One final feature of note in this passage is the very manner in which Achsah was given to Othniel, whose “military success,” Boling and G. E. Wright propose, functions as a substitute for bridewealth (or “the brideprice,” as they refer to it).203 If this is in fact the case, the passage presents us not only with another example of bridewealth, but also with one similar to that in 1 Samuel 18. One passage that does not discuss the giving of property but rather the absence thereof is Genesis 31. Regarding sources, Westermann assigns this chapter to J,204 and both Blum and Carr assign it (or in the case of Carr, the great bulk of it) to the earliest stratum of the book of Genesis.205 Turning to the chapter itself, one reads that Jacob has a dream in which God appears to him. After Jacob relates said dream to his wives, Rachel and Leah say to him (vv. 14–15): “Is there still any portion (qlx) or inheritance (hlxn) for us in our father’s house? Are we not regarded by him as foreigners? For he has sold us, and he has used up the money given for us.” While the latter part of this 199

200 201 202 203 204

205

Nelson translates the phrase in a way similar to the latter option, and states: “this translation assumes that the verb is taking a double object: a direct object (‘arid land’) and a ‘datival’ object (‘me’)” (Joshua, 184). Matthews, Judges and Ruth, 40. TANAKH Translation. Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake, 131. Boling and G. Ernest Wright, Joshua, 375. Westermann, Genesis, 490. There is, however, some debate over the chapter’s source attribution, with many assigning certain verses to J and others to E. See Speiser, Genesis, 248–249. Of course, with the existence of E increasingly in doubt, one can either assign the entire passage to J (or JE, if one wishes), or turn to the models of Blum and Carr. See Nicholson on the issue of E, who writes: “Though the view that E derives from an originally independent narrative has its modern champions, the trend in recent research, as we have seen, is to reject this and to regard E either as a stage on the way to J or, more usually, as additions to J” (Pentateuch, 237). Blum, Vätergeschichte, 117–131; Carr, Fractures, 340.

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quotation seems, if anything, to refer to bridewealth,206 the first question may refer to inheritance – the Hebrew words used clearly imply land – that would have been given to the women at marriage, and most likely then as dowry. This is certainly not clear from the way the question is phrased, however, for the wording seems to imply that the property could have been given at any time and does not make any explicit connection between the giving of this inheritance and marriage. Westbrook explains the issue of timing in the following way: “Normally the dowry accompanies the bride into her husband’s home and helps the young couple to establish a household. But, where, as in the case of Jacob, husband and wife are still living in the undivided household of the wife’s father, there is little rationale in separating out the dowry, even if it had been previously assigned.”207 While his point is certainly a fair one, Westbrook himself pointed out that the female slaves that were given to the women in Genesis 29 can be interpreted as dowry. Unless one dismisses the fact that the women had already received their dowry earlier as arising from a disparity in the sources, Westbrook’s statement makes little sense. Naomi Steinberg interprets the matter somewhat differently. She writes: . . . Genesis 29 reports that Leah and Rachel received the maidservants Zilpah and Bilhah as direct dowry from Laban. However, because Jacob worked for Laban in exchange for his wives, an indirect dowry may not have been given. Based on their remark in 31:15, the two sisters feel entitled to some material compensation from Laban in light of all that their father gained through Jacob’s work.208

While Steinberg’s suggestion is plausible, the atypical domestic arrangement in this passage makes the women’s question difficult to interpret. As Goody states, the type of arrangement in which Jacob and Laban were involved normally comes about as a result of the bride’s father’s lacking sons. However, Gen 31:1 does actually refer to the sons of Laban. This leaves us with three possibilities. As Burrows writes: “. . . verse 1 is by common consent attributed to J, and in the E-strand of the story there is no indication that Laban had any heir apart from his daughters.”209 This fact only complicates the matter, however, for Genesis 29, in which the domestic arrangement between the two men is originally discussed, has normally been assigned to J. Of course, 206

207

208 209

Though it seems to imply that the bridewealth should have gone to the women, in which case it would not be bridewealth, but indirect dowry. Westbrook, Property and the Family, 150. Westermann’s interpretation is similar: “It was obviously the custom that the rhm, what the father receives as ‘compensating sum’ when giving in marriage, be passed on at least in part to the daughters” (Genesis, 492). Steinberg, Kinship and Marriage, 106. Burrows, “Complaint of Laban’s Daughters,” 263.

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if one rejects the source hypothesis and adopts the methodology of Blum or Carr especially, one might see Genesis 29 and 31 as being part of the same collection of stories (though not necessarily products of the same author), with both presuming that Laban had no sons, and see Gen 31:1 as deriving from a later stratum that did not make the same presumption. In either case, if whoever was responsible for this narrative envisioned Laban as being without sons, it is possible that this fact might have brought about direct female inheritance. Num 27:1–11 and Job 42:15, though probably both later texts,210 do allow for the possibility of or make reference to female inheritance, and so one could not completely rule out the possibility that in Genesis 31, the women’s question relates to direct inheritance and not to dowry per se. If, however, the author(s) of this text did in fact see Laban as having sons, it is possible that he may have procured the services of Jacob because those sons, at the time the events of Genesis 29 transpired, were too young to contribute to household labor, or as Gordon suggests, that Laban had no sons at that earlier time, but by the time the events of Genesis 31 occurred, twenty years later, he did have sons.211 In either of these cases, one would have to infer that the women’s question refers to dowry, rather than direct inheritance. With Genesis 31 we exhaust the small corpus of biblical texts that discusses dowry in its strictest sense, but there is a handful of other texts that discuss a prestation that some have referred to as being dowry. As stated earlier, Gen 24:53 states that Abraham’s servant gives “jewelry of silver and of gold, and garments,” and not to her male relatives, but directly to Rebekah. Westbrook writes: “In terms of dowry, therefore, these items are a supplementary gift by the father-in-law.”212 Speaking strictly, gifts given to the bride from the bridegroom or his family are not dowry; as was said earlier, dowry is: “property which is brought to a union” and “provided by the bride’s family.”213 While the gift described in this text is related to dowry, it is not dowry proper, but is what Goody calls indirect dowry. Terminology aside, the gift in this text clearly fits into the agreed-upon definition of indirect dowry. Are there other cases of the giving of said prestation in the biblical corpus? Westbrook argues that one finds another example, albeit a figurative one, of indirect dowry (though he merely refers 210

211 212 213

On the Numbers passage, see Levine, Numbers 1–20 , 49, 101–105 and Numbers 21–36, 46; and Eryl W. Davies, Numbers, xlviii-l. Evidence for the dating of Job is inconclusive, though many favor a postexilic date. See Pope, Job, XXXII-XL; and Habel, Book of Job: A Commentary, 40–42. Cited in Burrows, “Complaint of Laban’s Daughters,” 263. Westbrook, Property and the Family, 146. See Introduction to this book.

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to the gift as dowry, despite the fact that it is provided by the groom) in Ezek 16:10–12. There, God comes upon a pubescent Jerusalem and clothes her with “embroidered cloth and with sandals of fine leather.” The text continues, in the first person, “I bound you in fine linen and covered you with a rich fabric. I adorned you with ornaments . . .” This is after God had entered into a covenant – within the metaphor, presumably of marriage214 – with Jerusalem. Westbrook writes: “The gift is not an act of disinterested generosity, but takes place on the occasion of a metaphorical marriage between God and Jerusalem . . . We may therefore conclude that the gift constitutes a dowry.”215 I feel that Westbrook is perhaps pushing the evidence a bit too far here. After all, the text is extremely metaphorical and, while metaphors must work on both the superficial and symbolic levels to have meaning, the author need not have had indirect dowry in mind when writing this text; he may have instead meant the gifts from God to Jerusalem to be just that, gifts.

Preliminary Assessment In the texts cited, then, we have seen cases of bridewealth, of dowry, of indirect dowry, and of a marital gift (mattān) that was of an unclear character. Many of these cases were dubious. Those texts that include reasonably clear-cut cases of bridewealth are the following: Ex 22:16–17; Deut 22:28–29; 1 Samuel 18; Genesis 34; Genesis 24; Genesis 29. In addition, we saw that Genesis 12, Hosea 3, and Joshua 15:16–19 contain possible cases of the giving of bridewealth. Those texts that include reasonably clear-cut cases of giving dowry are: 1 Kings 9; Genesis 29:24, 29; and Joshua 15:16–19. Adding to those are two possible cases of dowry in: Genesis 24:59–61; Genesis 31; as well as the highly unlikely case of Ex 18:2. We also saw one case of indirect dowry in Genesis 24 and three other possible cases in Genesis 31; Ezekiel 16:10–12; and Genesis 34, based only on the slim evidence that the word mattān is used, a word whose meaning in the context is highly uncertain. Thus, the clear-cut examples of bridewealth outnumbered those clear-cut cases involving dowry or indirect dowry. Even including dubious cases, there is a still a larger number of texts that deal with bridewealth than with any of the other marital prestations. In only two of the texts (Genesis 24 and 34) are two types of marital prestation mentioned together, and only in the case of Genesis 24 is it bridewealth and dowry (more specifically, indirect dowry), though one may perhaps add to this list Joshua 15. 214 215

Marriage is spoken of as a covenant in Prov 2:17 and Mal 2:14. Westbrook, Property and the Family, 145–146.

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What may one conclude from all of this? Most importantly, one can conclude that bridewealth was given in ancient Israel and that it was given in its strict sense – that is, it was not necessarily given to the bride. We may deduce this fact from 1 Samuel 18, Genesis 34, and Genesis 29, for in all three of these cases it would have been impossible or nonsensical for the bride to be given the payment that had been given to her father. While a text like 1 Samuel 18 clearly contains a peculiar example of bridewealth, one may glean from it nonetheless that there was an assumption by its author that the mōhar was something given by the bridegroom to the father of the bride and not later to the bride. In the case of Genesis 34, if the mōhar were given later to the bride and she brought it into the marriage with her, Shechem would most likely have had the power of usufruct over it.216 If this were the case, how would Shechem be penalized for having raped Dinah, and what difference would it have made how high Jacob set the mōhar? Logic tells us that the gift must have been bridewealth in that passage, as well as in 1 Samuel 18. (Genesis 29 uses different terminology, of course.) And if the word mōhar clearly signifies bridewealth and not indirect dowry in those two passages, it is not unreasonable to assume that it does so in the other passages in which that word is used as well. It is also not unreasonable to assume, then, that those passages that do not use that specific term but that seem to describe the giving of bridewealth do in fact describe just that and not some other prestation that biblical scholars deem less offensive to their sensibilities. In short, one may tentatively conclude from this that it was the giving of bridewealth that was the more prevalent marital prestation in ancient Israel, and that it was, at least to some authors, the normative prestation. Bridewealth, the evidence suggests, was often given alone, without the transfer of dowry. Dowry, however, was transferred in some of these texts, leading one to wonder if such a fact is due to a change, or development, over time. Are the texts that mention dowry later than those that discuss bridewealth? The answer to this question, as we have seen, is not an easy “yes” or “no,” for the dating of pentateuchal sources, and of biblical sources in general, has become increasingly contentious. Of the group of texts that mention bridewealth or dowry only one (Genesis 24) may be dated to the exilic or postexilic period, in my opinion. Certainly, the clearest case of dowry – that in 1 Kings 9:16 – is not postexilic, nor are the clearest cases of bridewealth. Thus one is left to conclude that both forms of prestation were exchanged in the preexilic period, though bridewealth seems to have been a more prevalent and a more wellestablished custom. We have seen that, except for Genesis 24, the one late 216

This fact will be discussed at greater length in Chapters 2 and 3.

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text, only one term is used to refer to this prestation. The evidence strongly suggests that the term mōhar was in fact a terminus technicus for bridewealth. On the contrary, the term šillûh[ îm is only used to refer to dowry once, and it is never once used by Judeans in the postexilic period – whether in Hebrew or in Aramaic in an etymologically equivalent form – to refer to dowry. This fact strongly suggests that the term, if it ever was a technical term in ancient Israel, was not a very well-established one. And since it is the closest approximation to a technical term for dowry that we have in biblical Hebrew, one can infer that the practice of giving dowry gifts was not well-established, either. In later chapters of this book, we will see that technical terms or phrases are very commonly employed in societies where dowry is exchanged, and also that one finds such words and phrases in postexilic texts. This does not nullify the fact that one finds a certain variety of practices in the biblical materials. On the contrary, one might say that such variety is unsursprising, for the biblical corpus as a whole includes texts written over the course of several centuries and by communities that sometimes differed widely from each other (e.g., urban vs. rural, Northern vs. Southern). We will see in the chapters that follow how wide these divergences were, not only geographically, but especially temporally. As Rendtorff writes: We should not imagine that life in the [sic] preexilic Israel was uniform and self-contained. Rather, we must reckon with the reverse, that in Old Testament literature much has been bound together in literary form which never existed together in the life of ancient Israel . . . One should not only think of the differences between north and south, which were undoubtedly considerable, but also of the differences between city (in particular, Jerusalem) and country, of local and regional. . .217

As we shall see, an Iron I village in Judah was not of one piece with an eighth century town in the Northern kingdom. That such very different places may well have had diverging marriage customs, and that these variations are preserved in the corpus of texts discussed above should not surprise us. Though the redactors who brought these texts together may have attempted to lend to them an air of synchronicity and of cultural uniformity, neither of these features was in actuality present in the texts themselves. 217

Rendtorff, Problem, 205.

2

0 Postexilic Evidence for Marriage Gifts

Introduction As stated in Chapter 1, none of the biblical texts that discuss bridewealth or dowry is definitively postexilic. The quintessentially Second Temple period texts in the Hebrew canon – Ezra-Nehemiah, Daniel, Esther, and so on – do not mention any sort of marital prestations. Yet, there is much postexilic evidence regarding this issue. This evidence is extrabiblical and is found in archives of marriage documents from Elephantine in Egypt and from the Judean desert, as well as in the book of Tobit, in some pseudepigraphic texts, and in texts by Philo and Josephus. Though the postexilic evidence, like that in the earlier, biblical material, is not always as straightforward as one might like, it is in many cases quite clear. As a whole, this evidence readily demonstrates that the situation concerning marital gifts was in many ways different from what it had been before the exile. While one finds a variety of marriage gifts in the Hebrew Bible, we saw that bridewealth was the most prevalent type of gift. In the postexilic evidence, however, the exact opposite is true: dowry has clearly become the predominant form of marital gift exchange. In fact, there is little evidence for bridewealth as it was known in the period before the exile.1

Epigraphic Evidence for Marriage Gifts: Elephantine Of the two sets of marriage contracts relevant to this issue – namely, that from Elephantine and that from the Judean desert – the former group is centuries 1

Whether or not the betrothal gifts of the Second Temple period are analogous to those of the First, and may thus be classified as bridewealth, is a subject that will be addressed later, as well.

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earlier, dating to the fifth century BCE.2 Many questions surround the community of Judeans living at Elephantine; for the purposes of this book, the most important questions are how profoundly they were influenced by their Egyptian milieu and, if their culture was still primarily Judean, is that culture best understood as reflecting pre- or post-exilic Judean cultural practices and norms? Unfortunately, these questions are yet to be settled since one can only speculate upon the precise date when these Judeans migrated or were brought to the area. However, the fact that they wrote in Aramaic, worshipped Yahweh, very often gave their children Yahwistic names,3 and maintained a relationship with Judah and with Judeans in Judah provide us with more than enough reason both for examining the Elephantine marriage contracts in detail and for seeing it as not unlikely that their marital practices correlated with wider Judean marital customs. Nine marriage documents survive from the community of Judeans at Elephantine, four of them virtually complete and five of them fragmentary.4 One of the former variety (TAD B2.6) involves Miptahiah daughter of Mahseiah and is part of a small collection of documents regarding transactions made by or involving this woman.5 Her marriage contract dates to 449 BCE and lists as the contracting parties her father and the bridegroom, Esh[or (later known as Nathan) son of Djeh[o.6 The text reads in lines 4–5: rhm Kl tbhy Ml( d(w hnz )mwy Nm hl(b hn)w yttn) yh4 . . . [)]klm ynb)b 5 Nlq# [Psk] hyx+pm Ktrb5 She is my wife and I am her husband from this day and forever. I gave you (as) mohar for your daughter Miptahiah: [silver], 5 shekels by the stone (-weights)s of [the] king.7

2

3 4

5

6

7

On the Judean community at Elephantine, see, e.g., Cowley, Aramaic Papyri; Vincent, Religion des Judéo-Araméens; Muffs, Aramaic Legal Papyri, 1–26, as well as Levine’s prolegomenon to that work, though both of these are more concerned with somewhat technical legal issues; Porten, Archives from Elephantine, the preface of which gives a brief history of the early scholarship done on the Elephantine texts; Porten et al., Elephantine Papyri in English; Porten and Yardeni, Textbook; and Porten, “Settlement of the Jews.” In well over half the cases, according to Zadok, Jews in Babylonia, 79. I include here TAD B3.11, a dowry addendum, and B2.5, what might be a fragment of a betrothal contract. See Porten, Elephantine Papyri, 152–202. On the date of this particular text, see Cowley, Aramaic Papyri, 44, though I adopt Porten’s date here. It bears noting that this woman’s name is written in some texts as Mipt[ah[iah, as is the case here, and other times as Mibt[ah[iah, e.g., TAD B2.4, though I have chosen to use the standard spelling of names found in Porten. For brief comments on Esh[or’s change of name, see Satlow, Jewish Marriage in Antiquity, 177 n.2. Porten and Yardeni, Textbook, 2:30, 33.

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Lines 6 and following read: 1 #rk hnwkt[ P]sk hdyb hyx+pm [Ktrb] yl tl(nh. . .6 ynb) (superscript: Nlq# 2) b+x tdx rm( yz 1 #bl hdyb yl tl(nh 10l 2r Psk )klm7 (superscript: 8) Nlq# 2 N#rk Psk hw# 5b 8 Nm) Kr) hwh Nydy (bc8 . . .)klm ynb)b9 [Your daughter] Miptahiah brought into me in (ERASURE: your) her hand: silver money, 1 karsh (superscript: 2 shekels) by the stone(-weight)s of the king, silver 2 q(uarters) to the 10. She brought into me in her hand: 1 woolen garment, striped with dye doubly-well (OR: two-toned), being (in) length 8 cubits by 5 (in width), worth (in) silver 2 karsh, (superscript: 8) shekels by the stone(-weight)s of the king. . .8

The text through line 15 describes the rest of the evaluated items comprising the dowry, the total value of which is given by the text: )psk lk. . .13 ynb) 10l 2r Psk 20 Nrlx 5 lq# 6 N#rk Psk )yskn ymdw14 . . . )klm15 All the silver and the value of the goods: (in) silver 6 karsh, 5 shekels, 20 hallurs, silver 2 q(uarters) to the 10, by the stone(-weight)s of the king.9

This stated amount is the equivalent of 65.5 shekels.10 In lines 4–5, then, the text states (in the first person) that the groom gave a mhr (rhm) of 5 shekels to the bride’s father.11 In the lines that follow, however, it also delineates what Miptahiah brought into the marriage as dowry.12 The text uses the phrase “she brought to me by her hand” (hdyb yl tl(nh), with a list of goods following to designate the latter gift. The goods brought into the marriage include such items as garments of wool, various bronze objects (a bowl, cups, and other items), a box of palm-leaf, and a bed of papyrus reed. Most of the items have their worth in shekels listed beside them.13 The 8 9 10 11

12

13

Ibid., 2:30, 33, though I have made some changes in the formatting of the translation. Ibid., 2:30, 33. See Porten and Yardeni, Textbook, 2:33. The vocalization of the word rhm is uncertain, though the definite form has been transliterated as muhrā and muhrâ by Burrows and Neufeld, respectively. See Burrows, Basis of Israelite Marriage, 7, and Neufeld, Ancient Hebrew Marriage Laws, 104, 106, passim. While Cowley argues that the verb in line 6 is best interpreted as indicating that it was in fact Esh[or who gave his wife these gifts as indirect dowry, I find the interpretation of Porten and Yardeni (and Satlow, for that matter; see Jewish Marriage in Antiquity, 94–95) more convincing. See Cowley, Aramaic Papyri, 47–48; as well as Chapman, “Marriage and Family,” 195. See lines 6–16, as well as Porten and Yardeni, Textbook, 2:33. The worth of several items goes unmentioned, presumably because they were of “known, standard value.” (See Porten,

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document also makes explicit that, in the case of divorce, these items would revert to being under the (sole) ownership of Miptahiah.14 Because she brings the goods into the marriage with her and retains some claim to their ownership, we find in this document a textbook case of dowry. One should note also the use of what appears to be a technical phrase to refer to the bringing of dowry, though not one found in any biblical texts. With Esh[or’s giving of mhr to Miptahiah’s father, we seem to find bridewealth and dowry in the same text, though, as we shall see later, the former gift may not be what it seems.15 A second virtually complete marriage document (TAD B3.3) concerns the marriage of Ananiah son of Azariah to Tamet, the slave of Meshullam son of Zakkur, to whom the document is addressed. Lines 4 and following describe the dowry brought into the marriage by the bride. The text uses the same phrasing as used in B2.6 – “Tamet brought to me by her hand” (hdyb tmt yl tl(nh). The goods listed – a woolen garment as well as a few other insignificant items – are worth a collective 7.19 shekels – a relative pittance.16 However, an addition to the document notes that Tamet actually brought in 15 shekels as dowry, which is still a rather small amount. As Porten notes, “Tamet’s dowry consisted of little more than the dress on her back.”17 Considering that the bride was a slave, it is an unsurprising fact that her dowry is far smaller than that of Miptahiah, who was of a prominent family. As far as bridewealth is concerned, the word mhr is not mentioned anywhere in the document, nor is there anything in the text that implies that the groom gave any sort of marital prestation to Meshullam. This might have to do with the fact that Tamet was a slave and that she was not freed by Meshullam until twenty years later, though one can not be absolutely certain.

14

15

16 17

Elephantine Papyri, 180.) However, these items are listed below both the evaluated items and the statement of the total worth of the dowry, given on lines 14–15 and equivalent to 65.5 shekels, and were thus not counted towards this listed sum. This would be the case even if she initiated divorce proceedings: “Tomorrow o[r] (the) next day, should Miptahiah stand up in assembly and say: ‘I hated Esh[or my husband,’ silver of hatred is on her head. She shall PLACE UPON the balance-scale and weigh out to Esh[or silver, 6[+1] (= 7) shekels, 2 q(uarters), and all that she brought in in her hand she shall take out, from straw to string, and go away wherever she desires, without suit or without process” (lines 22–26; Porten and Yardeni, Textbook, 2:33, with a few formatting changes). We also have a fragment of what seems to be a betrothal contract for Miptahiah (TAD B2.5), although it is unclear if it concerns her betrothal to Esh[or or to her first husband Jezaniah son of Uriah. As Porten writes, “All that remains of the reconstructed contract is a penalty clause – a promise by the groom to pay the father a sum of money if he backs down on his promise to take the daughter . . . in marriage.” See Porten, Elephantine Papyri, 176. Porten and Yardeni, Textbook, 2:63. Porten, Elephantine Papyri, 209 n.12.

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The third and final virtually complete document (TAD B3.8) concerns the marriage of the daughter of Tamet and Ananiah, Jehoishma, confusingly enough, to another Ananiah, this one the son of Haggai. The parties to the text are the bridegroom and Zakkur son of Meshullam, the master of Tamet. It seems that Meshullam adopted Jehoishma, who was his slave, despite having a free-born father.18 However, unlike his father, Jehoishma’s brother-byadoption was apparently quite generous, providing Jehoishma with a far greater dowry than her mother had had. This dowry consisted of numerous items, including various garments, bronze vessels, and furniture, and was worth over 78 shekels. The phrase used to describe the bringing of dowry is quite similar to those in the previous two texts: ytybl Ktx) (m#ywhy yl tl(nh (line 5). Also unlike the marriage document of her mother, this one discusses the payment of a mhr, amounting to 10 shekels. Interestingly, the text states explicitly that the mhr is to be included in the dowry when it states the total worth of the dowry in lines 15–17: )rhmw )tn[w]ktw[ )]#x[n yn)mw )y#bl lk. . .15 ynb)b 5 Nrlx 8 wh hynmt N[l]q[# 7 ] wh h(b# N#rk Psk16 . . . )tr#(l zwz Psk )klm17 All the garments and br]onz[e vessels] and mo[n]ey and the mohar: (in) silver seven karsh, that is [7], eight [she]ke[l]s, that is 8, 5 hallurs by the stone(-weight)s of the king, silver zuz to the ten.19

Although the Miptahiah document (B2.6) does not state that the mhr there formed part of the dowry, this may have also been the case with that marriage, for there is a discrepancy in the document between the values provided for each dowry item (which amount to 60.5 shekels) and the total value of the dowry that is stated by the text (the equivalent of 65.5 shekels). If one adds the mhr, worth 5 shekels, the discrepancy is accounted for.20 Thus, in one and possibly both of the complete marriage documents that include payment of a mhr, the prestation may not be bridewealth at all but rather indirect dowry. Perhaps even more interesting than the inclusion of the mhr in Jehoishma’s dowry is the existence of B3.11, an addendum to her dowry issued in 402 bce, eighteen years after her marriage. Unlike in her initial marriage contract, where her brother-by-adoption apparently provided the dowry, here it is her father who gives her a house expressly as a tr#sp, an “after-gift,” 18 19 20

See TAD B3.6 and Satlow, Jewish Marriage in Antiquity, 95. Porten and Yardeni, Textbook, 2:78, 83. Bezalel Porten, Archives from Elephantine, 253.

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to her marriage document (line 7).21 Porten and Szubin make the following comment about this bequeathal: Jehoishma’s document of wifehood was not drawn up between the groom and her biological father but between the groom and her adoptive brother, Zaccur b. Meshullam. It is he who gave her a handsome dowry totaling 78 1/8 shekels . . . which she brought in 420 B.C.E. to her husband’s house and which he was obligated to give back to her in case of divorce . . . Now, in 402 Anani is in essence saying to his daughter “Though I did not give you much of a dowry at the time of your marriage, I did give you a gift in contemplation of marriage, albeit restricted to usufruct (K 6).22 Now I am giving you an additional gift that will be just like dowry.”23

Their reconstruction of the motivation behind this gift, while of course speculative, seems plausible enough. In either case, Jehoishma was clearly a woman well-endowed by the men in her life. The four remaining marriage documents from Elephantine (TAD B6.1–4), as stated before, are all fragmentary. The first of these (B6.1) contains the beginning of a marriage document. Unfortunately, the names of the parties are not preserved, nor is much of the information regarding the dowry, though it is clear that there was one. This is the case because one finds a fragmentary list of dowry items, though the signature phrase, “she brought to me . . .” is missing. Porten and Yardeni’s reconstruction of lines 3–9 reads:24 l Knm ]t[l])#w Ktybb Kyl( tyt) hn). . .3 [yttn) yh yl htbhyw Psk Ktrb rhm Kl tbhyw M]l( d( hnz )mwy Nm hl(b hn)w4 [ynb)b 1 #rk yl tl(nh wgb Kbbl by+w Kyl( l( 1 #]rkl 2 r Psk )klm5 [yz hnwkt Ktrb [ Nm)l tdx rmq yz 1 #bl #r]k Psk6 [by+x ].[. . ...].[ Psk hw# ]7 [ ]. 1 #r[k P]sk hw# 1 Mpl 1 [K#p Nydy (bc]8 [ Ny]dy (bc by[+x ]9 wtn)l Ktrb

I came to you in your house and as[k]ed [you for PN, your daughter, for wifehood and you gave her to me. She is my wife] and I am her husband from this day forev[er. And I gave you (as) mohar (for) your daughter PN: silver 1 karsh 21 22 23 24

See Porten and Szubin, “Dowry Addendum,” 234, for the etymology of the difficult tr#sp. K 6 = TAD B3.7. Porten and Szubin, “Dowry Addendum,” 234. I have tried to give a sense below of the amount of space found in the different lacunae, but the number of letter spaces is not exact.

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by the stone(-weight)s of] the king, silver 2 q(uarters) to [1] kar[sh. It came into you and your heart was satisfied herein. PN, your daughter, brought into me: money in] silver [x] k[arsh. . .; 1 new woolen garment, x cubits by y cubits, wroth (in) silver. . .; 1 new woolen garment, x cubits by y cubits, striped with dye, doubly-well (OR: two-toned)], (for) 1 [handbreath] on each edge, worth (in) silv[er] 1 [ka]rsh. . .; [1 new woolen garment, x cubits by y cubits, st]riped with dye doubly[-well] (OR: [two-toned), . . .25

According to the reconstruction of Porten and Yardeni, the document contains fragmentary information on a mhr, but this is less than clear, in my opinion.26 Porten and Yardeni place the word in their reconstruction of the lacuna at the end of line 4, and feel quite certain about its presence.27 I assume this is because the wording in lines 3–4 follows closely the sections in B2.6 and B3.8 that directly precede discussion of the mhr and because the lacuna in 6.1 is of sufficient size to allow for such a discussion, as well. Naturally, however, one can only hypothesize as to the content of such lacunae. The second of the fragmentary documents (B6.2), unlike the first, does not contain any of the beginning section of the marriage document. One finds instead part of the list of items included in the dowry, in a state rather less fragmentary than B6.1. For example, the end of line 4 through the middle of line 6 reads: [yz tdx 14 Nm) yz tdx 1 +yb# 3 Nlq# Psk ymd 4 Nk#pw 3 b 4 Nk#p 5 Nm) 5 . . .20 Nrlx 4 Nlq# Psk ymd trzw 4 b 7 6 1 new garment, of] cubits 5 (and) 4 handbreadths by 3 and 4 handbreadths, valued (in) silver (at) 3 shekels; 1 new SHAWL, of cubits 7 by 4 and a span, valued (in) silver (at) 4 shekels, 20 hallurs. . .28

Though one can not even be completely sure that this is in fact a dowry list, its contents do lead one in that direction, including as they do various garments, a bronze cup, and a bronze jug (the latter two in lines 7 through 8). If these items were part of a dowry, that dowry was worth at least 38 shekels, and probably more. 25

26 27

28

Porten and Yardeni, Textbook, 2:132, 133, though I have changed the formatting on the translation. See Porten and Yardeni, Textbook, 2:132 , or Porten, “Five Fragmentary Documents,” 86. See Porten and Yardeni, Textbook, 2:132–133, and Porten, “Five Fragmentary Documents,” 86. Their certainty is indicated by the fact that in their translation of the text, “mohar” is written in unitalicized print, as opposed to the rest of the reconstruction, which is italicized, even though the word is certainly not present on the fragments themselves. Porten and Yardeni, Textbook, 2:134, 135, with changes in formatting.

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The last two fragmentary texts (B6.3–4) contain only the final sections of two different marriage documents, and so are not very useful for the purposes of this book. B6.4 does seem to allude to a dowry in lines 6–8 and B6.3 might allude to the same in lines 1–3, but more than that one cannot say. In addition to these, we also have what might be a fragment of a betrothal agreement (TAD B2.5). All that remains is a penalty clause in which the groom agrees to pay a penalty if he does not follow through on his promise to marry the other man’s daughter. Lines 1 and 2 read: [

[hyx+pm l( ty]tS) )lw )l( Nm bytk yz hnz )SpSsSk1S N#rk Psk] hysxml Ntn) wtn)l hxqlml Ktrb2

[. . . And if I do not give you] this silver which is written above and I do not co[me to Miptahiah] your daughter to take her for wifehood, I shall give to Mahseiah [silver, x karsh . . .]29

This fragment might contain a reference to a marriage gift, for the word “silver” ()psk) seems to be present, and if so, it would precede mention of the penalty.30 More than that one cannot say, however. Of the five documents from Elephantine that make clear reference to at least one type of marital prestation, then, all five include a discussion – and when fully preserved, a very detailed discussion – of the contents of a dowry. Two also include the payment of a mhr, and a third may make reference to said prestation as well, though it is unclear. Thus there exist two texts in which both a dowry and a mhr were paid, but in both cases the amount of the mhr is insignificant (in the case of one text, ten shekels, and in the other, a mere five) and is far outstripped by the value of the dowry. And in one, if not both of these texts, the mhr, which in the preexilic period always designated bridewealth, goes from the bridegroom to the bride herself, in effect becoming dowry, and more specifically, indirect dowry.

Epigraphic Evidence for Marriage Gifts: The Judean Desert The second set of contracts relevant to this issue is that from the Judean desert, a group of texts that dates to the early second century CE. This set actually consists of two small groups of documents, the Babatha archive and the Salome Komaïse archive, as well as a few other unrelated and very 29 30

Ibid., 2: 29. Porten and Yardeni reconstruct the word on the basis of four partially preserved letters. See Textbook, 2: 28.

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fragmentary marriage documents. 31 The Babatha archive pertains, unsurprisingly enough, to the legal activities of a fairly affluent woman named Babatha. The archive contains a marriage document (P. Yadin 10), seemingly for her second marriage, to a man named Judah son of Elazar Khthosion. Unfortunately, the first few lines of the document, and thus the date and the names of the people involved, are lost. Nonetheless, Babatha’s signature is partially preserved on the verso of the document, and the script on the document itself is “known from other documents in the Babatha archive to be the handwriting of Yehudah . . . Babatha’s second husband.”32 In this Aramaic contract, the groom states: KlS(S) 33KtSbStSkSbw. . .5 . . .h)m Nyr[w]c Nwn) hmS hS)Sm (br) Nyzwz Psk yl( Kl>(< Myqw 6 And I will bring you (into my house) by means of your ketubba, and I owe you the sum of four hundred denarii (zūzīn) which equal one hundred tetradrachms (sōrīn). . .34

What exactly kethubba means here is a matter of some debate, as is the nature of the four hundred denarii.35 In later rabbinic literature, the word generally refers to the endowment pledge, or divorce penalty, made by the husband to his wife and paid in the event of divorce. Yet as Mordechai Friedman writes, “The dowry is sometimes itself called ketubba [in rabbinic texts]. But since the word ketubba is used also for the marriage gift(s) given by the husband and for the marriage document, it is not always clear what is meant by the term.”36 Despite this occasional ambiguity even in the rabbinic literature, many scholars have taken the term to refer in P. Yadin 10 to an endowment pledge by the husband, seemingly basing this on the most 31

32

33

34

35 36

On these archives, see Benoit, Milik, and de Vaux, Grottes de Murabba‘at; Yadin et al, eds., Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period, especially vols. 2 and 3.1; Yadin, Greenfield, and Yardeni, “Babatha’s Ketubba,” 75–101; Friedman, “Babatha’s Ketubba,” 55–76; Cotton, “Archive of Salome Komaise,”171–208; Cotton and Yardeni, Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek Documentary Texts; Satlow, Jewish Marriage in Antiquity, especially 97–100, 201–202; Katzoff and Schaps, eds., Law in the Documents, and others. Yadin, Greenfield, and Yardeni, “Babatha’s Ketubba,” 76. On the issue of whether or not Judah is in fact the groom in this document, see also ibid., 77, and Friedman, “Babatha’s Ketubba,” 60, though I do not find his conclusion very convincing. A certain reading of Ktbtk is found in line 16 of the document and a partially reconstructed reading on line 11. Yadin, Greenfield, and Yardeni, “Babatha’s Ketubba,” 78–79. Yadin et al, Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period, 3:126–127, propose reconstructing a transliteration of the Greek φernh as hnrp in lines 7 and 9 of the document, but this reconstruction has not been accepted by most others, including Greenfield and Yardeni in the publication of the text just cited. See Satlow, Jewish Marriage in Antiquity, 303–304 n.45. Friedman, Jewish Marriage in Palestine, 292.

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common rabbinic usage of the word kethubba, as well as on the document’s repeated assertions that the groom owes the bride her kethubba money (lines 6, possibly 8, 11).37 In that case, it would represent a sort of potential indirect dowry on the part of the husband. It is not clear from this text alone, however, that this is in fact what was meant. As Satlow states: “Judah owes Babatha this sum of money (lines 6, 8) but it is not clear whether this represents Babatha’s dowry or just his future obligation on the dissolution of the marriage.” Satlow continues: Nearly all scholars have interpreted this as the mohar, an endowment pledge, due to Babatha from Judah. [B]ut this leaves . . . no reference to a dowry. It is hard to imagine that she did not have a dowry, or that the document that recorded it – one of the most important economic documents to a widow or divorcee – would be missing from her archive. On the other hand, the troublesome (from the standpoint of rabbinic law) clause at the end of line 16 (yl rm[t y]d Nmw lkbw) in P. Yadin 10 is paralleled in later Greek marriage contracts that contain a donatio propter nuptias, lending some support to the notion that the money to which P. Yadin 10 refers too was coming from the groom.38

As we will see, it is true that the absence of a dowry would be very peculiar for this period. Yet such a fact would not be the only peculiarity of this document.39 Also, it is conceivable that the absence of a document recording the dowry from the Babatha archive could be merely an accident of history. One detail of note is that in lines 15–16, the document states that if Judah should die before his wife, his children would owe her her kethubba money. This could conform, too, with the divorce penalty as it is known from rabbinic sources, where the sum is payable to the wife in the case of divorce or upon the death of the husband.40 In countering this fact and arguing that the term refers to dowry here, Satlow states: “. . . the clause ‘bring you (into my house) by means of your ketubba’ makes little sense if Judah is supplying the ketubba.”41 Regardless of whether kethubba refers here to dowry or to a divorce penalty, it should be noted that kethubba in no way refers in this instance to bridewealth, the preexilic mōhar, for it is an amount owed to 37 38

39

40

41

See, e.g., Friedman, “Babatha’s Ketubba”; and Yadin, Greenfield, and Yardeni, “Babatha’s Ketubba.” Satlow, Jewish Marriage in Antiquity, 303–304 n.45. Satlow, in the same note, discusses also the one point in favor of seeing the money as coming from the groom. Certain phrases in the text are without parallels in other marriage documents from the period. See Yadin, Greenfield, and Yardeni, “Babatha’s Ketubba,” 87. See Satlow, “Marriage Payments,” 58; Yadin, Greenfield, and Yardeni, “Babatha’s Ketubba,” 94; and Friedman, “Babatha’s Ketubba,” 73–74. Satlow, “Marriage Payments,” 59.

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Babatha, not one given to her father.42 Another aspect of this text upon which various scholars have commented is the particular amount of the kethubba payment. Yadin, Greenfield, and Yardeni state: That this ketubba was written for Babatha’s second marriage may be discerned from the sum of 100 sil‘īn (tetradrachms) . . . that is listed as the ‘bride price.’ This follows the well known rule, enunciated in the Mishnah, that 200 (sil‘īn) was the bride price for virgins and 100 for widows and divorcées (Ket. 1:2; 4:7; 5:1). It is known from other documents that Yehudah son of El‘azar Khthousion was Babatha’s second husband, and thus the bridegroom.43

While the latter statement is valid and widely agreed upon, those that precede it display problematic reasoning. The first problem is that the amount given for the kethubba in this text does not in actuality accord with the amount stipulated for a widow in m. Ketub. 1:4 (and elsewhere), which states that one maneh is the amount to be given for a widow. As Friedman writes: The purported 200 sil‘īn rule, however, is not to be found in the Mishnah. The latter . . . defines the bride money as ‘200 for a virgin and one mane for a widow [or divorcée].’ In tannaitic sources in general, and in those referring to the ketubba in particular, a mane is always equivalent to 100 zūz (denarii); and where specified (both in tannaitic and amoraic sources), the sum of 200 for the ketubba is likewise invariably identified – explicitly or implicitly – as zūz (denarii), e.g. M. Ket. 1:5, 4:7, 5:1. . .44

Of course, this leaves Friedman with another problem: the 400 denarii given for Babatha is far more than the mishnaic kethubba payment for divorcées. This leads him to argue that this was in fact Babatha’s first marriage, since rabbinic law allows a man to give more than 200 for the kethubba of a virgin, which would render the problem of the kethubba payment here moot.45 Friedman’s suggestion has been accepted by few, however, because the handwriting in this document has been identified as that of Judah son of Eleazar Khthousion, who is known to have been Babatha’s second husband. In the end, then, one is led back to the same place – to a kethubba amount in no way problematic except for the fact that it does not accord with rabbinic law. In response to the general tendency of some scholars to try and reconcile the 42

43

44 45

Yadin had in fact proposed placing the word mōhar in the reconstruction of line 5: K[rh]m Kl hn[bhy]w. However, this reconstruction was rejected by Greenfield and Yardeni in favor of: K[sk]mw Kl hn[n)z]w. See Yadin, Greenfield, and Yardeni, “Babatha’s Ketubba,” 87. Yadin, Greenfield, and Yardeni, “Babatha’s Ketubba,” 77. Their use of the term “bride price” is not only outdated, but inaccurate, considering that the gift wasn’t bridewealth, or “bride price,” at all. Friedman, “Babatha’s Ketubba,” 57. Ibid., 56–60.

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monetary amounts found in Roman-era Judean marriage contracts with what is stipulated in rabbinic texts, Hannah Cotton and Yardeni so aptly write: Since in all these texts it is the dowry and not the ketubbah which is being acknowledged, it seems idle to dwell on the fact that the sum of two hundred denarii in P. Yadin 18 and Mur 115 tallies with the minimum ketubbah stipulated in Jewish sources as the bride-price of a virgin; it is merely coincidence, as demonstrated by the five hundred denarii of [XH[ ev/Se Gr. 2 = P. Hev. 69] and the ninety-six denarii of No. 65. Nor is there a need to explain the discrepancy between the four hundred zuzin (= denarii) of Babatha’s ketubbah in P. Yadin 10 and the one hundred denarii stipulated for a widow in rabbinic sources.46

Returning to the issue of the dowry itself, however, we do have another document from the Babatha archive that refers to Babatha’s dowry from this marriage – whether or not it is in fact dowry or a divorce penalty that is described in the Aramaic text cited earlier. The document (P. Yadin 22) was written in Greek in 130 ce, after the death of Judah, and states that Babatha sold the date crop of the orchards belonging to her late husband in place of her dowry and the debt (a0nti_ th=v pro{o>iko/v [sic] mou kai_ o0φi??l?h=?v?) owed her (lines 7–10).47 There are various documents in the archive attesting to quarrels and litigation over the property of Judah between Babatha and Judah’s other wife Miriam, as well as with the guardian of Judah’s nephews, the sons of his late brother Jesus.48 This is obviously one of those texts, but is more important for the purposes of this book for the line just quoted: using a common Greek word for dowry, it most likely attests that Babatha did in fact bring property of some kind into her marriage with her. Unfortunately, one can not be unequivocal in the case of this document, either, because it is possible that proix (proic) might denote here the very divorce penalty that others have seen in Babatha’s marriage contract, since that custom was foreign to the Greek culture and language. We will see, however, that various other Judean desert documents use this term without it ever having this meaning, and so it is far more likely that the text refers to dowry proper. The Babatha archive also contains a marriage document (P. Yadin 18), dating from 128 CE, concerning the union of Babatha’s second husband’s daughter from his first wife, Shelamzion. This document, written in Greek and largely complete, is thankfully less ambiguous regarding the issue of dowry 46 47

48

Cotton and Yardeni, DJD XXVII, 268. Lewis, Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period, 98. On the atypical spelling of the word for dowry found here, see ibid., 13, where he discusses false syllabification. This spelling is also found in P. Yadin 18 and 37. See P. Yadin 23–26.

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than those of the bride’s stepmother. In lines 40–49, the text states clearly that the bride brought into the marriage: 40

~

ei0j lo/gon prosφoraj kosmi/an gunaiki/an e0n a0rgu/rw[ ka[i_ ~ ~ | kai_ i(matismw | diatetei<mh>me/n~ hn e0n a0llh/loij, wj ( χrusw le/gousin oi( a)mφo/teroi, a)cioxre/an einai ) a)rguri/ou dh?[nari/wn diakosi/wn, h(/n teimo?g[r]a?φi/an wmolo/ ( ghsen o( gh/m?[aj'Iou/daj o( kalou/menoj Ki/mbe?r? a)peilhφe/nai par’ au)th[j dia_] x[e ~ ~ 45 ro_j paraχrhma para\ ’Iou/dou patro_j au)thj kai_ o)φe?i/?l?[ein ~ ~ ~ au)to\n t h| au)t h| Selamyiw/nh| gunaiki\ au)tou a/( ma dh?[na~ ~ ri/wn a!llwn triakosi/wn a/( wmolo/ ( ghsen dounai au)?[th| ~ ~ ~ pro_j ta_{ta} th j progegramme/nhj prosφoraj [a]u?t[h j ~ pa/nta ei)j lo/gon proi{o}ko_j49 au)th j. . . on account of bridal gift feminine adornment in silver and gold and clothing, appraised by mutual agreement, as they both say, to be worth two hundred denarii of silver, which appraised value the bridegroom Judah, called Cimber, acknowledged that he has received from her by hand forthwith from her father, and owes to the said Shelamzion, his wife, together with another 300 denarii which he promised to give her, in addition to the sum of her aforestated bridal gift, all accounted toward her dowry.50

This document contains, too, a brief Aramaic subscription that also discusses the receipt of the dowry by Judah Cimber. It states: yttn) Nwycml# nrp h)m #[mx] Nyrnd Psk tbwxb hn) ydm I acknowledge the debt of silver denarii [fi]ve hundred, the dowry (phernē) of Shelamzion, my wife (lines 70–71).51

The word nrp is clearly a transliteration into Aramaic characters of the Greek fernh, a common word for dowry that is not present in the actual Greek portion of the contract. Setting aside that fact for the present, one can summarize about the marriage gifts discussed in this document as follows: Shelamzion receives a dowry from her father, and is promised an even larger sum in indirect dowry from her husband. The classification of these gifts is clear enough, since the text states explicitly that Shelamzion brought the goods that comprise the dowry into the marriage with her, and that her husband promised to give her an additional amount. While the text is not explicit about whether or not Judah Cimber would only pay the three hundred denarii in the case 49 50

51

On the use of proix versus phernē, see below. Text and translation in Lewis, Katzoff, and Greenfield “Papyrus Yadin 18,” 233, though I have added punctuation to facilitate reading. Ibid., 247.

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of divorce or merely at a later time, it is clear that he owes Shelamzion an amount equivalent to the worth of her dowry if they do divorce.52 It is also clear that the gift from the bridegroom would go to the bride herself and not to her father, as was also the case in the marriage contract of Babatha.53 Despite the clarity of this text, the Greek words it uses for these prestations nevertheless warrant some attention, for as we have seen, three different words are used, one of them albeit in transliteration. Katzoff summarizes the history of these terms as follows: In classical Greek there are two terms for dowry, proix and pherne. Only proix was used for dowries of Greek people in real life; pherne was used only in myth or for foreigners. In the Hellenistic period, however, proix disappeared and only pherne remained. With only two exceptions, Hellenistic Greek papyri from Egypt use pherne; the Aramaic dialects of Palestine, Syria and Babylonia [too] absorbed pherne . . . Proix and pherne are not synonyms. Classical proix included only land, slaves, and cash; Hellenistic pherne could include cash and objects like clothing and jewelry, but never land or slaves. Proix, then, includes goods of production, and is intended as a transfer of capital through the female line; pherne includes goods of consumption, and is intended to contribute to the support of the new couple.54

Yet P. Yadin 18 renders moot the generalizations Katzoff draws. As we saw, this document uses both the terms proix and phernē, the former in Greek characters, the latter transliterated into the Aramaic alphabet. In addition, proix is used here to refer to goods of consumption, as Katzoff himself admits.55 He states: “This of itself may be a Romanism. In Roman Egypt proix reappeared occasionally, not in its original sense but only as a synonym for pherne . . . It is said that this happened under the influence of Romans who translated the Latin dos with the classical Greek dictionary word proix.”56 Complicating the picture yet further is the fact that one other term is used in the document: prosphora. In Roman Egypt, this term was used for gifts to the bride of 52

53

54

55 56

See Lewis, Katzoff, and Greenfield, “Papyrus Yadin 18,” 243–247, for comments on the issue of whether this document assumes a woman’s right to divorce on demand. Katzoff comments that: “. . . the most uniquely Jewish (or at any rate, not Greek or Roman) feature [of this document] is that the husband adds to his wife’s dowry” (ibid., 242). See also Katzoff, “Donatio ante nuptias,” 231–244, for a fuller discussion of this phenomenon. Lewis, Katzoff, and Greenfield, “Papyrus Yadin 18,” 239. See also Katzoff, “Hellenistic Marriage Contracts,” 38–39. Yiftach-Firanko, “Judaean Desert Marriage Documents,” 81–82 also contains a brief discussion of the usage of these terms in the document at hand as compared with Roman Egypt. In Marriage and Marital Arrangements, Yiftach-Firanko discusses late Egyptian dowry customs in great detail. Lewis, Katzoff, and Greenfield, “Papyrus Yadin 18,” 239. Ibid., 239.

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land or slaves. Here, however, it is used for evaluated jewelery, “which in contemporary Egypt was called pherne.”57 One way to conceive of the terms used here is that proix and phernē are indeed used interchangeably, though they do not appear together in either the Greek or Aramaic portion of the contract. Both of these terms refer to the dowry as a whole, including both what the bride brings into the marriage – which is referred to here as prosphora – and the indirect dowry that she receives from her husband. Thus the terms seem to have more to do in this text with the source of the dotal gifts rather than with their content. In addition to the text cited here, four other Greek marriage documents were found in the Judean desert, documents unrelated to the Babatha archive, but clearly involving Judeans. Each of them contains one of the Greek technical terms for dowry. XHev/Se 65(= P. Yadin 37), dating to 131 ce, is part of the Salome Komaïse archive and pertains to her marriage to Jesus son of Menah[em. In this document, the dowry consists of ninety-six denarii (lines 6–7). As was the case earlier, a form of the word proix is used, with the dowry again consisting of evaluated movables. No indirect dowry is discussed in this contract. Interestingly, proix seems in this text to refer to what was brought into the marriage by the bride (called prosphora in P. Yadin 18): 6

. . . th2| au)th2| Koma?i?s?[h| th_]n? proi2{o} ka au)th1j a0r[g]uri/ou dhna/ria e0nanh/konta e/( c, [ a/( w(mologh/sato o g ( h/maj (superscript: o( au0]toj Ihsouj?) [a0p]e?sχhk?[e/n]ai par?’ a?ut ) h2j th|1 [ 0ou/]sh| h( me/ra

7

. . . the above-mentioned Komaïse, as her dowry, ninety-six denarii of silver, [which the bridegroom], the above-mentioned Yeshu‘a, [acknowledged] to have received from her on the present day. . . 58

One must consider, though, that if there was an absence of indirect dowry, what was brought by the bride and the total dowry would be one and the same. XH?e? v/Se Gr. 2 (P. Hev. 69), a document dating to 130 CE and seemingly unrelated to the previous archives, also mentions a dowry, this time of an impressive 500 denarii (lines 6–9). Yet again, the document uses the word proix, and in the same fashion as XH[ ev/Se 65. Indirect dowry is not mentioned here either, although this text is quite fragmentary. The situation is precisely the same with P. Mur 115, which dates to 124 ce, and discusses the remarriage of a couple who were previously married and divorced. This document mentions a dowry of 200 denarii, again using the term proix to refer only to what the wife 57

58

This is because in Roman Egypt, “dowries were divided into three parts: pherne for evaluated goods, parapherna for unevaluated goods, and prosphora” for the gifts mentioned above. See ibid., 239. DJD XXVII: 231–232.

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has brought as dowry, though my comment regarding XH[ ev/Se 65 also applies here.59 P. Mur. 116 is the final Greek marriage document that we have from the Judean desert, and it is quite fragmentary. “Dowry” is the more typical phernē here (line 6). The amount of 2,000 denarii is found later in the document, with lacunae before and after it, and must refer either to the amount the bride brought into the marriage or to a divorce penalty, what I have called potential indirect dowry, on the part of her husband. Such an amount is enormous, however – a few hundred denarii was easily enough to buy oneself a date grove – and it is almost inconceivable that any bride could or would have brought such a sum into the marriage or been promised it by her husband.60 One wonders if the amount, or perhaps the monetary unit, is in error. Unfortunately, the issue of marital prestations is less clear in the two remaining Aramaic marriage contracts from the Judean desert, both unrelated to either the Babatha or Salome Komaïse archives, than it was with the texts cited earlier. Both of these texts are very fragmentary. The first (P. Mur. 20) contains the words “silver zuzîn” (Nyzz Psk) in line 5, but a lacuna follows, and it is impossible to state whence the amount came and to whom it was given. The second (P. Mur. 21) is extremely fragmentary for the first nine lines – precisely those in which the amount of dowry or of any other marital prestation given would be stated – but does contain the word Kytbtk in line 13, and part of the same word in lines 10 and16. This term seems to refer to dowry here, for line 10 reads: ym[( yd Kyl](Y lk M(Y Kytbt[k Psk K]nSbt)], “and I will return [to you the money of your ke]thubba with all that is yo[urs that is wi]th me.”61 The text also states on line 13 that any sons that the future couple might have would inherit the mother’s kethubba. Such statements, even if partially reconstructed, intimate at some of the most common features of dowry, and so it seems reasonable to conclude that the term does in fact refer to dowry, and also that the amount of the dowry had been enumerated in the part of the text that is now lost.62 In addition to the marriage contracts just discussed, there is other epigraphic evidence from the Judean desert that may attest to the giving of marriage gifts. The first of these is the questionable case of P. Mur. 19, a divorce document in which a Joseph son of Naqsan repudiates his wife, Miriam daughter of Jonathan. The document dates perhaps to 111 BCE, and survives in duplicate.63 In line 8, one reads: )nbhy )Sq[ ] Nydb. Because the text 59 60

61 62 63

See lines 5–6, 12. See P. Yadin 2 and 3, the latter of which states that in 99 CE, Babatha’s father bought a date grove for 168 sil‘īn, the equivalent of 672 denarii. Reconstruction by Benoit, Milik, and de Vaux, Les Grottes de Murabba‘at, 115. Translation mine. Benoit, Milik, and de Vaux do in fact translate the word as “dot.” See DJD II:116. Ibid., 104.

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then proceeds to discuss Joseph’s restoring damaged property to his wife and repaying her fourfold, Benoit, Milik, and de Vaux have proposed restoring the lacuna in the line as: )qymg, that is, gamika, here meaning “dowry,” or possibly )qyrp, “ce que serait un emprunt au grec proi/c, analogue à )rnp représent fernh/.”64 We saw an example of such a case of transliteration in P. Yadin 18, and it would make sense in the context here, but their proposals remain in the realm of speculation.65

One finds the word gamikon, written in actual Greek this time, in P. Yadin 5, a very fragmentary text the legal nature of which is unclear because of its poor state of preservation. This text contains a reference to some form of marriage gift, most likely dowry. Lines 14–16 of fragment a, col. I, read: 14

. . . (u?pe_r a)rg?uri/ou me?/l?anav? e(pt?akosi/ouj kai\ de/ka o( u\v ei!lhφen h( mh&th?r sou a)?r16 g?u?/r?i?o?n gamiko_?n?. . . 15

. . . over and above seven hundred and ten “blacks” of silver which your mother has received as [repayment of] her wedding money.66

This text is referring not to the receipt of wedding money by the party’s mother at the time of her wedding, but to the repayment of wedding money to his mother. Naturally, the lack of something more technical than “wedding money” precludes one from making definitive statements about the nature of this gift, but it seems to be dowry. One also finds P. H[ ev. 13, dating from 134 or 135 ce, another text the nature of which is unclear. Milik believed this text to be a divorce document, but Cotton and Yardeni have called this into question.67 The precise nature of the document is of less interest here than the possible reference, however indirect, it might contain to dowry. This occurs in line 8, where the divorced woman, Shelamzion daughter of Yehosef surnamed N#bq, states that “she has no monetary claims against the man who was her husband, i.e. that she has received the value of her ketubbah,” as Cotton and Yardeni put it.68 While 64 65

66

67

68

Ibid., 108. One finds the term Nqymg with the meaning of “marriage contract” in the Pesikta de Rav Kahana 52b-53a, and it and other terms deriving from the Greek γαμικα also appear in various other rabbinic texts. See Sperber, Dictionary of Greek and Latin, 74–76. Terms deriving from φernh also appear in rabbinic material, though )qyrp does not. See ibid., 161–163. Lewis, Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period, 37, 39. On this monetary unit, see Lewis, Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period, 35–36, and “Again, the Money Called Blacks,” 399– 401; and Cotton and Yardeni, DJD XXVII: 171. See DJD XXVII: 65, as well as Cotton and Qimron, “XH[ ev/Se ar 13 of 134 or 135 C.E.: A Wife’s Renunciation of Claims,” 108–118. DJD XXVII: 65.

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they assume a lot in that reading, it is certainly a plausible one, and so this text, too, might attest to the practice of giving dowry. Another potentially relevant set of material involves property bequeathed to daughters through deeds of gift. One finds several examples of this phenomenon in the epigraphic corpus. It seems tenuous, however, to consider such gifts dowry unless they are called such or explicitly connected with marriage.69 After all, for a gift to be dowry and not just a gift it must be connected with marriage in some way. One text that might be relevant is P. Yadin 19, dated to 128 ce. In this text, Judah son of El‘azar Khthosion bequeaths to his daughter Shelamzion all his property in En-Gedi, half of which is to be transferred to her immediately, the other half upon his death. Nowhere in this text is this gift referred to as dowry, nor is Shelamzion’s marriage mentioned. What is noteworthy is that this document was drawn up a mere eleven days after her marriage, making one wonder if there was in fact some relationship. Lewis points to a parallel in the book of Tobit, where the bride’s father promises to Tobias and his daughter all that he possesses, half of which is to be given at the time of their marriage and the other half upon the bride’s parents’ deaths.70 Lewis remarks that, “Perhaps, then, Judah in [P. Yadin] 19 was observing an established Jewish tradition. Alternatively, it is possible to suspect that Judah was ailing: nowhere in the archive is there an explicit statement to that effect, but it is evident from later documents that Judah died some time within the next two years, and possibly soon after [P. Yadin] 19 was written.”71 Of course, either of these explanations is uncertain, and one could easily argue that the Tobit passage is far too atypical in itself to be used for evidence of what was established Jewish tradition. There are of course other deeds of gift to females that survive, but the others contain no evidence that they are or might be connected to marriage. They do not necessarily contain evidence against that fact; they merely lack evidence for it. This despite the following statement by Cotton and Yardeni: “. . . it was suggested that P. Yadin 7 (120 ce) – the deed of gift in favour of Babatha’s mother – was written on the occasion of Babatha’s marriage to her first husband, when Babatha herself received, in a deed of gift which has not survived, the orchards which she declares in P. Yadin 16 (127 ce).”72 Neither 69

70

71 72

Issues of female inheritance and its relationship to dowry will be discussed in Chapter 3. Chapman suggests that fathers may have given property to their daughters through deeds of gift “in order to avoid it being considered part of the dowry controlled by the husband” (“Marriage and Family,” 238–239). See Tobit 8:20–21 and 10:10. This gift – which is not at all a normal case of dowry – and its oddities will be discussed later in this chapter in the section on “Literary Evidence Concerning Marriage Gifts”. Lewis, Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period, II:83. DJD XXVII: 203–204.

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P. Yadin 7 or 16 contain any evidence for this, however.73 Satlow makes similar comments, though he admits in a footnote that “There is no direct evidence for this transfer, its timing, or the date of Babatha’s marriage.”74 Yet he goes on to remark that “Babatha, Shelamzion, and Salome Komaïse all received at least part of their inheritance by means of a deed of gift given around the time of – I presume shortly after – their marriages.”75 While this was certainly true for Shelamzion, we have already seen that there is no evidence for it in the case of Babatha. In the case of Salome Komaïse, too, there is no actual evidence. The latter received property from her mother in 129 CE (P. Hev. 64). Her marriage contract, however, dates from 131 ce. While it is true that the contract states that she and the groom had been living together in a so-called “unwritten marriage” prior to this, we do not know when this state of affairs came into being.76 This was her second marriage; sometime in or before 127 ce, she was married to Sammous son of Simeon.77 Thus, she was divorced or widowed and entered into an “unwritten marriage” sometime before the actual marriage contract was drafted in 131 ce.78 This is all the information we have on the matter. Assertions such as those of Satlow and Cotton and Yardeni come, in my opinion, out of a scholarly desire to connect these bequeathals with marriage and with dowry, a tendency that is not unfounded, but which unfortunately is not supported by the deeds of gift themselves.79

Literary Evidence Concerning Marriage Gifts In addition to the contractual evidence above, various other Second Temple period texts contain evidence that pertains to the issue of marital gifts. One 73

74 75 76

77 78

79

The suggestion to which Cotton and Yardeni refer was made in an article by Cotton and Greenfield (“Babatha’s Property,” 211–224.) Their argument is based almost entirely on a series of speculations and inferences, and in my opinion should be regarded as nothing more than plausible guesswork. See “Marriage Payments,” 53. Ibid., 62. On the issue of “unwritten marriage,” see Lewis, Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period, II: 130; Tal Ilan, “ Premarital Cohabitation,” 247–264; Cotton and Yardeni, DJD XXVII: 227– 229; and Ranon Katzoff, “On P.Yadin 37=P.Hever 65,” 133–144. On the identification of this man as her first husband, see DJD XXVII: 160. Cotton and Yardeni write: “Divorce is less likely than death to be the cause for the termination of Salome’s first marriage, since two of Sammous’s documents . . . were found together with the rest of her archive” (ibid., 162). This is a reasonable inference, in my opinion. It should be noted that Sammous was still alive in November 129, since he is named as one of the abutters of the property given to Salome by her mother in the actual deed of gift (P. Hev. 64, line 35). If Cotton and Yardeni are correct that death parted Salome and Sammous, then clearly the gift to her by her mother had nothing to do with her marriage. Where this tendency in fact comes from will be discussed in Chapter 3.

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of these is the book of Tobit, which is dated by most scholars to between 250 and 175 bce.80 This text is most likely the earliest reference to marriage gifts that survives in postexilic literature, but the marriage gift it describes is quite atypical. In chapter 8 of the book, Raguel, Tobias’ father-in-law makes a very generous offer to his new son-in-law. 8:21 reads: “And what I own, take half half of it now and go off safely to your father; the other half will be yours when my wife and I die. . .”81 Thus, rather than Raguel’s giving his daughter a dowry that she takes into marriage with her, or Tobias’s giving Raguel bridewealth, Raguel in fact gives his property to Tobias. Technically speaking, this gift would be classified as a rare case of what anthropologists would refer to as groomwealth, which is essentially the opposite of bridewealth, or, to be even more exact, as an indirect form of dower, the opposite of dowry.82 While it is theoretically possible that this type of gift may have occasionally been given in certain postexilic communities – or at least the one that produced this text – I feel this gift is best interpreted as one that was written into the story to add narrative flourish, and for no other reason. As Burrows writes: Tobit 8:21 (cp. 10:10) is sometimes cited as exemplifying the same practice [i.e., dowry], though in this case the goods are not given to the bride but to the bridegroom, and it is hardly to be supposed that it was ever customary for fathers to give half of their property to their daughters’ husbands at the time of the wedding, with a promise of the other half at the death of the bride’s parents. On such terms a father with several daughters would be in difficulty.83

One might choose to attribute merely the hyperbolic nature of the gift, and not the type of gift itself, to the author’s sense of melodrama, but to do so one would have to ignore the fact that this text is the only evidence we have for such a gift in either First or Second Temple period Palestine, and perhaps even in the ancient Near East as a whole. Luckily, the literary material leaves us with a plethora of far more straightforward evidence regarding marriage gifts. In each of them, it is dowry that is discussed.84 Pseudo-Phocylides states: “Do not bring as a wife into your home 80

81

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Moore, Tobit, 40. Fitzmyer writes: “A widely held dating of the Book of Tobit situates it rather somewhere between 225 and 175 B.C.” (Tobit, 51). This is a translation of the Sinaiticus text; the Vaticanus/Alexandrinus text of verse 21 is shorter and partially in the third person. 4Q197 5:6 preserves part of this verse, but unfortunately not the part describing the gift to Tobias. See Comaroff, “Introduction,”4. For the increase in incidence of groomwealth, or “bridegroom price,” in contemporary India, one of the few places in the world where groomwealth is fairly widespread, see Caplan, “Bridegroom Price,” 216–234. Burrows, Basis of Israelite Marriage, 42. There is, however, a text in Josephus that might refer to bridewealth; it will be discussed later.

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a wicked, very wealthy woman; you will be a slave to (your) spouse on account of the baneful dowry (φernhj)” (lines 199–200). Ben Sira and Josephus make similar admonishments.85 The Testaments of Judah and Joseph both clearly refer to the giving of dowry, as well.86 Also, Philo seems to assume that, as Satlow puts it, “a dowry was an essential part of a respectable Jewish marriage,” going so far as to say that providing poor girls with an ample dowry was an act of charity, together with contributing freely to needy friends, and making generous gifts to one’s country.87 Concerning the question of bridewealth, not one text of this period refers to it directly. In fact, the translators of the Septuagint seem not to have even known what it was, for they translate the word mōhar as phernē or render it with a general word for gift.88 Philo, in discussing the legislation of Ex 22:16–17 and Deut 22:28–29, translates mōhar as proix, saying that if the rape victim’s father refuses to give her in marriage to the assailant, the latter must give the ~ girl a dowry (proikize/tw th_n pai da o9 φqoreu_v).89 Satlow remarks that “. . . Greek-speaking Jews during the Hellenistic period appear to have dispensed with [the mohar] altogether.”90 While K. C. Hanson and Douglas Oakman have asserted that bridewealth continued to exist in Roman Palestine, their treatment is brief, nonspecific, and assumes that whatever is given to the bride’s family by the groom’s is channeled directly into purchasing immovables for 85

86 87 88

89 90

25:21–22 and Contra Apion, 2.200, respectively, though the reference in Josephus is far more direct, using the term proic. The corpus of texts by Josephus contains many other references to dowry, but all the others are in the context of political marriages, some between Seleucids and Ptolemies, and so it is difficult to infer anything from them about what was customary among Judeans. See Ant. 12.154, 13.82, 16.228, 17.11; Jewish War 1.483, 1.553. 13:4 and 18:3, respectively, though neither uses a technical term. Satlow, Jewish Marriage 201. See Philo, Fug. 29; Spec. Leg. 2.125. As Bickerman and Satlow have pointed out. See Bickerman, “Two Legal Interpretations,” I: 210; and Satlow, Jewish Marriage in Antiquity, 200. For examples of the word being translated as phernē, see Gen 34:12; Ex 22:15–16. On the second phenomenon, see 1 Sam 18:25, where mōhar is translated simply as doma. The appropriate Greek term for bridewealth would be ‘ednon or ‘edna. One finds an interesting occurrence in Ex 18:2. Bickerman writes: “Exodus 18, 2 says that Moses, before returning to Egypt, sent his wife away (to his father-in-law). Some readers interpreted the passage as referring to Moses’ divorce. Accordingly, an unknown ~ n proi~ ka” (“Two Greek translator rendered the Hebrew expression by the phrase: meta_ th Legal Interpretations,” 210). We saw in the last chapter that Ex 18:2 is ambiguous even in the Hebrew. Spec. Leg. 3.7. Satlow, Jewish Marriage, 200. One even finds a later rabbinic tradition that explicitly identifies the biblical mōhar with the rabbinic kethubba, in this case an endowment pledge. The Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael states that “there is no mohar except kethubba” (hbwtk )l) rhwm Ny)). Quoted in Friedman, Jewish Marriage, 239. See also y. Ketub. 3.5, 27d, and Satlow, Jewish Marriage, 213–216. On the dating of the Mekhilta De-Rabbi Yishmael, which is contested, see Strack and Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud, 253–255, who summarize the issues.

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the new couple, and thus into dowry.91 Though they provide little evidence for any of this, I presume that what they are interpreting as bridewealth are the betrothal gifts that the groom gives to the bride’s family. These gifts constituted the mōhar in the biblical period, and were normally given without the bestowal of dowry. Yet there is virtually no evidence for betrothal gifts in the postbiblical evidence. The documents from the Judean desert do not attest to them, and even from Elephantine we have only a very fragmentary text that might be a betrothal contract and that might contain a reference to a betrothal gift given by the groom. There is also one relevant text from Josephus. In his recounting of 1 Sam 18, Josephus has Saul state: “For to me no gift could be more desirable or magnificent than that, and to my child it would be far more ~ enviable than the customary wedding presents (tw n nenomisme/nwn e/(dnwn) to live together in marriage with such a husband who has the credit for defeat of (our) enemies (Ant. VI: 202).” Of course, these words are said to come from Saul, and Josephus is attempting to reinterpret a biblical tradition, so this statement does not serve as very helpful evidence. An examination of the Septuagint’s treatment of biblical betrothal is not only interesting, but suggestive as to why there is such a paucity of evidence regarding betrothal gifts. Satlow writes: The closest translation of [the] Hebrew term [’rš] would be enguē. But the Septuagint never translates the Hebrew ’rš with enguē. The Septuagint almost uniformly uses another Greek word to translate ’rš, mnēsteuō. This word most frequently means “woo, suit,” and as a passive means “be promised.” The force of this word is along the lines of enguē (an agreement between two men), but has even less legal nuance. Not fully understanding the biblical notion of inchoate marriage, the Septuagint’s translators replace it with a word denoting a semiformal agreement that marriage will take place.92

In the preexilic period, betrothal was the time between the giving of bridewealth and the actual marriage. Betrothal was not equivalent to our contemporary engagements, but was a far more binding agreement with juridical consequences. If by the Hellenistic period, betrothal itself was more fluid and had few legal consequences, if any, then it only follows that the gift that had previously brought that state into being would also wane in importance.93 While Matt 1:18–19 suggests some Judeans did practice a form of betrothal that was analogous to biblical betrothal, the evidence as a whole from this era 91 92 93

Hanson and Oakman, Palestine, 41–43. Satlow, Jewish Marriage in Antiquity, 70. We will see in later chapters that things perhaps went in the opposite direction, but in any case, there is a direct relationship between the two.

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can only lead one to the conclusion that betrothal, and thus betrothal gifts, did not have the importance they once had in the region. This is not to argue that the bridegroom gave no gifts to the bride’s family, but only that those gifts were clearly less significant in this period than was the property the bride brought into marriage with her, or even than what the groom gave directly (or promised to give) to the bride.

Bridewealth in Tannaitic Sources There is another set of postbiblical texts that warrants discussion here. In fact, the postbiblical texts that devote the most attention to betrothal and bridewealth are rabbinic texts. Most of these, of course, fall well outside the parameters of this book chronologically, but this is not the case for the Mishnah and the Tosefta.94 Certainly, the marriage gift that receives the most attention in these latter texts is the divorce penalty, or endowment pledge, which is addressed at length in tractate Kethubbôth.95 One also finds various references to dowry – for example, m. Ketub. 6:3 and t. Ketub. 6:5–6, which stipulate the appropriate ratio of amount of dowry to amount of kethubba,96 and m. Ketub. 6:5 and t. Ketub. 6:7, which prescribe the minimum dowry a father must give his daughter.97 By this point, however, the prevalence of dowry and indirect dowry in this period should be more than clear. Far more important is whether or not these tannaitic texts provide us with any evidence for bridewealth. According to Satlow, tannaitic law assumes just “two kinds of marriage payments, the dowry and the kethubba” (endowment pledge).98 Yet Satlow himself argues that rabbinic texts from the Mishnah onward resurrect the institution of inchoate marriage as qiddûšîn, a status that can be effected by the transfer of money, as m. Qidd. 1:1 and t. Qidd. 1:1 delineate. 99 Thus, it 94

95

96 97

98 99

For useful summaries of the issues regarding the redaction and dating of these texts, as well as bibliographical references and brief histories of scholarship, see Strack and Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud, 129–139, 152–158. On the endowment pledge in rabbinic sources, see Epstein, Jewish Marriage Contract, 53–77; Friedman, Jewish Marriage, 239–287; Michael Satlow, “Reconsidering the Rabbinic ketubah,” 133–151, and Jewish Marriage in Antiquity, 78, 107, 199; Brody, “Is the Ketubbah”; and others. M. Ketub. 6:3 reads: . . . hnm r#( h#mh Ndgnk qswp )wh rnyd Pl) wl synkhl hqsp. One does not generally find technical terms for dowry in tannaitic sources, e.g. the talmudic term )ynwdn is absent in earlier rabbinic texts. However, in t. Ketub. 4:17, we do find the term Ntsnrp, with the meaning “their dowry.” One finds a verbal form of this word in m. Ketub. 6:5 and t. Ketub. 6:7 (Nysnrpm). That it means “provide with a dowry” may be inferred from context in these two texts. On dowry in rabbinic texts, see Epstein, Jewish Marriage Contract, 89–106; Friedman, Jewish Marriage, 288–311; and Satlow, Jewish Marriage in Antiquity, 202– 204, 207–213, and elsewhere. Satlow, Jewish Marriage in Antiquity, 202. Ibid., 73–77. The other two ways are through a contract or through intercourse.

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seems counterproductive not to include payments made on the occasion of inchoate marriage, or betrothal, in a discussion of marriage payments. What, then, was the nature of such qiddûšīn payments? M. Qidd. 3:2 states: “If one says to a woman, ‘now, you are betrothed to me on the condition that I give to you two hundred zûz,’ then she is betrothed, but he must give (it to her).” This text and others make clear that the money (or goods) through which one effected qiddûšîn went to the woman herself, thus constituting a form of indirect dowry rather than bridewealth.100 It was not lost on the rabbis that there were differences between the marriage gifts described in the biblical corpus and those required by their own texts. In the Tosefta, one in fact finds an etiology for the change from the biblical mōhar to the kethubba payment of rabbinic texts. T. Ketub. 12:1 states: “In earlier times, when her kethubba was with her father, it was easy in [her husband’s] eyes to divorce her. Simeon ben Shetahi established that her kethubba should be with her husband, and he should write for her, ‘All property which I have is surety and obligated for your kethubba.’”101 Along these lines, Friedman writes: “. . . the Jewish roots of an immediate cash payment to the bride may be traced to antiquity in the Biblical mohar institution. That institution was transformed in early Jewish law, crystalized in the enactment of Simeon b. Shetahi, from an immediate payment to a postponed one; and the qiddushin minimum became a nominal payment of one perut ai .”102 As I have argued, though, the biblical institution of mōhar did not consist of an immediate payment to the bride, but of one to her father, as 1 Samuel 18 and other texts make abundantly clear. And this institution is one that lost its prominence well before Simeon b. Shetahi, who lived in the first century ce.103 Examining these texts, then, one gets the impression that bridewealth is absent in rabbinic sources – and it is in fact the case that none of the formal gifts required by tannaitic materials may be characterized as that prestation. There is, however, some evidence in these materials for the bestowing of informal gifts upon the occasion of betrothal, and it is with these that one perhaps finds evidence for bridewealth. These gifts are called siblônôth (twnwlbs), and while neither tannaitic nor even talmudic texts say a great 100 101

102

103

See also m. Qidd. 2:1, 2:7; t. Qidd. 1:1, 2:1, 2:7, and elsewhere. Other versions of the tradition are found in y. Ketub. 8.32b-c and b. Ketub. 82b. On this passage, see also Friedman, “Minimum Mohar Payment,” 149–157; and Satlow, “Reconsidering the Rabbinic ketubah.” The latter contains an extensive bibliography on this passage. Friedman, Jewish Marriage, 284. Satlow, too, refers to the “groom’s payment to his prospective wife upon their betrothal” (Satlow, Jewish Marriage in Antiquity, 203). Satlow, Jewish Marriage in Antiquity, 213.

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deal about such gifts, what they do say is informative. These gifts are discussed primarily in the tractate Baba Bathra. The issue that concerned the rabbis is in which situations these gifts must be returned to the bridegroom in the case that the betrothal was dissolved prior to the formal wedding (niśśû’în). M. B.Bat. 9.5 reads: If one sends wedding gifts (twnwlbs) to the house of his father-in-law, (even if) he sent a hundred maneh, and ate there a groom’s meal worth (just) a dinar, they may not be reclaimed. (If) he did not eat there a groom’s meal, in that case they may be reclaimed. (If) he sent many wedding gifts (twnwlbs), (on the understanding) that they return with her to her husband’s house, in that case they may be reclaimed. (If he sent) limited gifts (with the understanding) that she will make use of them in her father’s house, they may not be reclaimed.

The parallel passage in the Tosefta (B.Bat. 10:10) provides further stipulations, but both texts leave one with the same inferences. First, the texts strongly imply that there is some variability in the practice of giving these gifts. This variability is not only in the amount of the gifts or in the type of the gifts,104 but also in whether or not the gifts stay at the father-inlaw’s house or return with the bride as indirect dowry.105 In cases where the former occurs, these gifts may in fact be classified as bridewealth. Even when they return with the bride, though, siblônôth are not equivalent to qiddûšîn payments.106 “Jewish marriage laws,” writes Satlow, “are more valuable to modern scholars as a reflection of how their framers idealized marriage than they are as a guide to how people actually behaved.”107 Certainly, Satlow is not alone in recognizing the difficulties that the rabbinic corpus poses for social historians of antiquity and late antiquity. In the case of the divorce penalty, for instance, tannaitic texts do devote far more attention to this payment than one would expect considering its near absence from the Judean desert material, or even from the other literary material of this period. On the other hand, the rabbinic and nonrabbinic evidence is in agreement regarding the centrality of dowry. And because siblônôth are not gifts required by rabbinic texts and thus are of little importance to their system of law, it is in my opinion fair to 104 105 106

107

The Tosefta passage speaks more to the latter. A later texts imply that there were regional variations also. See b. B.Bat. 145a. This seems to be the implication of m. Qidd. 2:6 and t. Qidd. 4:4. The issue of whether or not siblônôth may in fact constitute the qiddûšîn payment is discussed in b. Qidd. 50a-50b, though this is a later text, of course. Satlow, Jewish Marriage in Antiquity, 68.

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assume that the rabbis did not invent such gifts. This leads one to the conclusion that bridewealth was sometimes given in the form of siblônôth during the Roman period. Just how prevalent these gifts were and how often they constituted bridewealth rather than indirect dowry is a matter about which one can only speculate.

Preliminary Conclusion Despite certain ambiguities, the Second Temple period evidence taken as a whole paints a clear picture: dowry had become the predominant marital prestation, overriding all others. The only other marital gift that the marriage contracts themselves attest to is indirect dowry, and even that is a form of dowry. From Elephantine, we have three marriage contracts that clearly refer to dowry (TAD B2.6, 3.3, 3.8), a dowry addition (B 3.11), and two fragmentary texts that most likely contain remnants of dowry lists (B 6.1, B6.2). While two of the documents from Elephantine also mention the giving of mhr (B 2.6, 3.8), the amount mentioned is not only insignificant, but in one, and in all likelihood both of them, it went directly to the bride, thus constituting not bridewealth but indirect dowry. From the Judean desert, we have six documents that clearly refer to dowry (P. Yadin 22, P. Yadin 18, P. Yadin 37, P. Hev. 69, P. Mur. 115, P. Mur. 116), and five others that probably do (P. Yadin 10, P. Mur. 21, P. Mur. 19, P. Yadin 5, P. Yadin 19). We also have one and perhaps two cases of indirect dowry (P. Yadin 18, P. Yadin 10). The literary evidence, too, contains overwhelming evidence for the centrality of dowry in this period. Thus, by the early to mid-Persian period, dowry had become the most significant form of marriage gift among Judeans. Granted, the Persian-era Judeans for whom we have evidence were not actually living in Judea and may well have had differing customs from those who did.108 Even if this were so, the extrabiblical Hellenistic period texts discussed here, as well as the Roman-era marriage contracts, amply attest to the fact that by the Hellenistic period at the very latest, dowry replaced bridewealth as the most important bridal gift among Judeans. While bridewealth may still have been given by some, it is more than likely that that prestation had 108

The fact that wife-initiated divorce is attested in the Elephantine documents might be an example of one of these, though Satlow argues that this practice was typical among Judeans in the prerabbinic period more generally. See ibid., 214, 352–353. This subject is the focus of a good deal of scholarly debate, however, as the contrasting viewpoints cited by Satlow demonstrate.

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lost its ability to effect juridical status, as the mōhar of the preexilic era had clearly done, for one does not find it in even one legal document from these periods. Even the literary texts are virtually silent on the issue of bridewealth, while they mention the giving of dowry again and again and repeatedly assume that it is perhaps the central ritual in the contracting of a respectable marriage.

3

0 Anthropology and the Study of Marriage Gifts

Introduction In the Introduction to this book, I provided brief, but widely agreed upon definitions of bridewealth, dowry, and indirect dowry in order to make possible the taxonomic discussions of Chapters 1 and 2. It is now appropriate and necessary to address not just what such marriage gifts are in a very strict sense, but what they do – that is, why societies even bother giving such prestations to begin with. Only by answering the latter question can one explicate the shifting emphasis from bridewealth, the most commonly mentioned prestation in preexilic sources, to dowry, the marriage gift that was unquestionably predominant in the postexilic period. Since the inception of anthropology as a discipline, ethnographers and other anthropologists have devoted much energy to the study of marriage and kinship, and in doing so have quite often discussed and interpreted the gifts surrounding marriage. In fact, no other discipline has generated so much analysis of these gifts, and so it is not only fitting but productive to look to anthropology in order better to understand the changes in marriage gifts in ancient Palestine. Unsurprisingly, anthropologists have approached the study of marriage gifts from very different perspectives, both methodological and otherwise. For example, while some have approached marriage gifts within the wider context of ritualized gift-giving,1 many if not most others have examined such gifts within the context of marriage, and through that lens, of kinship and social alliances. I will focus on the latter type of approach here, for it is 1

The two most important examples of this are Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory, especially 54–56; and Godelier, Enigma of the Gift, 35, 41, 147–9. The latter work will be discussed in more detail later. Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 147–161, is also relevant, though he approaches the matter rather differently there, examining these gifts in the context of wider matrimonial strategies, specifically those of the inheritance system of Béarn.

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the most prevalent within anthropology – and in my view the most fruitful for the study of ancient Palestine – but will address the former when it is relevant. Even within the latter approach, scholars have utilized very different anthropological methods in examining these gifts, and I will review here the results of these efforts. In the first half of the twentieth century, numerous functionalist scholars concerned themselves with the nature of bridewealth especially, normally examining this prestation in the wider context of kinship studies, an area with which functionalism preoccupied itself immensely. Around mid-century, other methods began to emerge in anthropology, the most prominent of which was structuralism. Structuralists from Claude Lévi-Strauss onward revised and critiqued functionalist analyses of kinship, and with them, functionalist ideas concerning marriage gifts. Marxist anthropologists, too, have tried their hand at interpreting these gifts, as have other scholars employing still different approaches. In this chapter, I will summarize these various approaches to the study of marriage gifts, as well as the ways in which each has been critiqued. Naturally, my treatment cannot be exhaustive, for to cover this topic comprehensively would require a book-length study of its own; instead, I will address only the most important scholars and the most important anthropological interpretations of marriage gifts. In this chapter, I will also discuss in some detail the research of anthropologist Jack Goody, a scholar whose work draws its strength from combining differing methodologies. Goody’s approach is not only synchronic and concerned with kinship, as is that of functionalism, but also diachronic and concerned with economic issues and economic changes, as is that of Marxism. He combines also a focus on descent with one on alliance, drawing on both functionalism and structuralism in doing so. Goody’s approach, too, is quite consciously comparative and cross-cultural in its orientation, as well as consciously historical. Although his work is not without its flaws, his nuanced and multifaceted methodology is in my view the anthropological approach most sensible and most productive to apply to the study of marriage gifts in ancient Palestine. His work will in large part form the basis of the chapters that follow, and so will be treated at length. It will also form the basis for the second part of this chapter, which will review some important cross-cultural examples of marital gift exchange, including bridewealth in sub-Saharan Africa and dowry in northern India. A discussion of this comparative material will illustrate the strength of Goody’s methodology, and why it has important implications for the study of marriage gifts in ancient Palestine. More specifically, such a discussion will demonstrate that differing levels of social stratification and different types of social structures lead

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societies to very different marital practices, and consequently to exchanging different types of marital prestations.

Functionalist Approaches to the Study of Marriage Gifts As was stated earlier, functionalists have had a great deal to say about marriage2 and marriage gifts. John Comaroff goes so far as to state that “functionalism has unquestionably been the major source of both descriptions and explanations of marriage payments, and many of the generalizations which have flowed forth from them have gained the status of received wisdom.”3 Although Comaroff was writing over twenty-five years ago, and functionalism no longer holds the place in anthropology it once did, there is no contesting the influence of functionalism on the study of marriage gifts, or on the field of anthropology more generally. In functionalist analyses, explications of marriage gifts have often been tied to the study of kinship, a favorite topic of most functionalist scholars. In looking at both these issues, functionalism tends toward a synchronic view of society and social institutions. Such a tendency stems back to the ideas of Durkheim, who had an important influence on the functionalists, and upon A. R. Radcliffe-Brown especially. Radcliffe-Brown, who began writing in the 1920s and was a foundational figure in the development of functionalist methodology,4 framed his work in conscious refutation of the evolutionism and diffusionism so prominent in the scholarship of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, theories that he even referred to as “pseudo-history.”5 Radcliffe-Brown and other functionalists were thus not so 2

3

4

5

Some have criticized the broad application of marriage as an analytical category. See Leach, Rethinking Anthropology, 105–113, where the discussion of polyandry serves as a catalyst for one on the definition of marriage; Needham, “Analysis of Kinship and Marriage,” 5–8; Rivière, “Marriage: A Reassessment,” 57–74, in the same volume; and Comaroff, “Introduction,” 2, who briefly reviews some of the criticisms. While these critiques have some merit, to jettison this category would be rather foolhardy and extreme, for it would make cross-cultural comparisons almost impossible and needlessly muddy the waters of scholarship. In addition, the social arrangement in ancient Palestine that one would refer to as marriage is analogous enough to our own to render cumbersome and unnecessary any circumlocutions that one might coin. Comaroff, “Introduction,” 3. Mair, in her book entitled simply Marriage, 48–73, provides a typically functionalist description of marriage gifts and why they are given. Though Radcliffe-Brown may have referred to his method as “structural-functionalism,” in contradistinction to the “functionalism” of Bronislaw Malinowski, the work of both these men, and of their many students, is generally referred to with the blanket term “functionalism,” perhaps to more easily distinguish it from the “structuralism” of Lévi-Strauss and his followers. Radcliffe-Brown, “Introduction,” 1–2. Scholars adhering to these “pseudo-historical” theories, and especially those of an evolutionistic bent, did sometimes have things to say about marriage gifts. Most notable is Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, vols. 1–3. The second volume

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concerned with how societies got to be the way they are – information which they felt could not truly be known for most groups – but with how specific societies function as they do at any given time. This synchronic approach has naturally affected functionalist interpretations of marriage and marriage gifts, as well. “Marriage,” writes RadcliffeBrown, “is a social arrangement by which a child is given a legitimate position in the society, determined by parenthood in the social sense.”6 This statement reveals an approach to the study of marriage that is not merely synchronic, but also more specifically jural. Concerning sub-Saharan African societies, Radcliffe-Brown wrote that marriage payments are the “objective instrument by which a ‘legal’ marriage is established.”7 By “legal,” he of course means legitimate, or socially (rather than governmentally) recognizable, and the marriage payments to which he refers are primarily bridewealth, the “most important” type of marriage gift in virtually all African societies.8 In these societies, “where the marriage payment [i.e., bridewealth] is considerable in amount and there is a much smaller counter-payment, or none at all, we must interpret this as meaning that the bride’s family is conferring a specific benefit on the bridegroom by giving him their daughter in marriage, a benefit that is shared by his kin, and that the marriage payment is in return for this.”9 That is, bridewealth is in many cases an “indemnity” or payment of compensation to a group, whether a family or an extended kinship grouping such as a clan, that loses a member.10 He notes that in societies where bridewealth is of considerable value, it is quite often used to “replace the daughter by obtaining a wife for some other member of the family, usually a brother of the woman who has been lost.”11 In writing on bridewealth and other prestations, Radcliffe-Brown notably remarks: “It is characteristic of a transaction of purchase and sale that once

6 7 8

9 10

11

is most relevant to our purposes, discussing so-called “marriage by purchase” among various groups. Also relevant is Koschaker, Rechtsvergleichende Studien, 111–235, and “Eheschließung und Kauf,” 210–296, who draws on Westermarck’s ideas and argues that the Mesopotamian terh}atu effected marriage by purchase. For more information on, and a more compelling interpretation of the terh}atu, see what follows. Radcliffe-Brown, “Introduction,” 5. Ibid., 53. Radcliffe-Brown, “Introduction,” 47. Radcliffe-Brown does note, however, that “marriage in many, if not most, African societies involves a whole series of prestations.” He also states that “dowry does not exist in Africa” (46). The latter issue will be addressed later. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 50, 53. See also Radcliffe-Brown, “Bride-price, Earnest or Indemnity,”131–132; and Tambiah, “Bridewealth and Dowry Revisited,” 414. Radcliffe-Brown, “Introduction,” 50.

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it has been completed it leaves behind no obligations on either the buyer or the seller . . . In an African marriage the position is very different.”12 He thus soundly rejects the hypothesis, common not only among evolutionistic thinkers such as Westermarck, but also Westerners in general, that marriage by bridewealth is somehow equivalent to marriage by purchase. Marriage accompanied by bridewealth does not effect the sale of a woman to the bridegroom. What it does instead is transfer to the husband rights in relation to the woman, as well as to the children she will bear.13 These rights vary somewhat from society to society. They may be rights in personam, whereby the wife is expected to perform certain duties towards her husband. They may also be rights in rem over his wife, whereby “if anyone kills or injures her, or commits adultery with her, he may claim to be indemnified for the injury to his rights.”14 Perhaps the most important rights transferred are those hinted at here in Radcliffe-Brown’s definition of marriage: rights over the children the wife bears.15 Bridewealth, in establishing the legitimacy of the union, also establishes the husband’s position as pater, or social father, over the children his wife bears during the course of their marriage.16 This prestation, in his view, also affects the affiliation of children, – that is, whether children are affiliated to the lineage of the mother or that of the father. This occurs in societies that have two kinds of marriage: one in which the full bridewealth is paid, and one in which no bridewealth, or only a small amount, is paid. In the first case, the children belong to the lineage of the father, while in the latter case they belong to the lineage of the mother and her kin.17 This implies, of course, that even in societies where there is only a single type of marriage, one in which bridewealth must be paid, this payment not only establishes social paternity, but affiliates children to the father’s line. Such an inference finds confirmation in the fact that bridewealth is either low or absent in most matrilineal or bilateral systems. The prominent anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, too, discussed the practice of giving bridewealth, and in a fashion similar to Radcliffe-Brown. Evans-Pritchard, a younger contemporary of Radcliffe-Brown, in fact coined the term bridewealth, offering it as an alternative to “bride-price,” which of 12 13 14 15

16

17

Ibid., 52. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 50. “Brideprice is childprice,” as some have put it, a summation not unlike the Zulu saying, “Cattle beget children.” See Mair, Marriage, 51–52, 58–63; and Tambiah, “Bridewealth and Dowry Revisited,” 415. For a discussion of the differentiation between pater and genitor, see Radcliffe-Brown, “Introduction,” 4; Mair, Marriage, 59; Barnard and Good, Research Practices, 183–184. Radcliffe-Brown, “Introduction,” 51.

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course has problematic connotations.18 In writing on the Nuer, he too comments on the rights that the transfer of bridewealth brings to the husband: the husband has the right to claim damages for adultery; he has sexual rights in his wife; he has rights to her domestic services; and he has rights in any children his wife may bear. Concerning the latter point he says, “But the children are not only his. They are children of his lineage.”19 This is because “[w]hen a woman is married she is transferred from one lineage to another,” and “[c]hildren are attached by payment of bridewealth to the lineage of their father.”20 Furthermore, “[t]he man in whose name the [bridewealth] cattle were paid is always their pater, the legal or lineage father, whether he is their genitor or not.”21 To Evans-Pritchard, then, bridewealth has not only jural but structural functions. It acccords rights to the husband, and by extension to his lineage, but also has an important role in determining lineage affiliation. Related to the latter, bridewealth is a “means of organizing personal relations between the husband and his people on one side and the wife and her people on the other side.”22 Evans-Pritchard even goes so far as to state that the two most important functions of bridewealth are structural in nature. That is, “its role in creating new social ties between persons and of regulating the interrelations between these persons till such time as their relationships become assimilated to kinship patterns – broadly speaking its role in the kinship system – and its structural role in interlineage relations.”23 Evans-Pritchard also discusses an important feature of bridewealth as it is given among the Nuer, and among many other groups cross-culturally: that it is “not a single payment but a succession of payments in response to the changing status of the wife and the increasing maturity of the union.”24 He says also, “It is necessary to see [bridewealth], as Nuer themselves do, as a series of transactions, and to perceive furthermore in an exchange of cattle for a wife an exchange of a daughter for a wife.” The wife’s family and lineage is thus compensated by bridewealth for its loss.25 Although Evans-Pritchard was writing specifically on the functions of bridewealth in Nuer society, his analysis of this group have been applied far more broadly, and is highly significant for that reason. 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Evans-Pritchard, “Alternative Term for ‘Bride-price.’” Evans-Pritchard, Kinship and Marriage, 97. Ibid., 97, 98. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 97. Ibid., 98–99. Ibid., 97. Ibid., 97.

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Meyer Fortes, too, emphasizes the jural nature of bridewealth, but proposes an added dimension to the study of this and other marriage gifts. He suggests that marriage payments consist of two parts: the “Prime Prestation” and “Contingent Prestations.” He writes: The Prime Prestation is stipulated by the marriage laws. It is normally fixed in kind and amount, and is often restricted to the context of marriage as regards its disposal by the recipient (e.g. it is earmarked for the bride-price of the brother of the girl for whom it is given or is offered as a sacrifice to ancestors to announce the marriage). It is the part of the marriage payments which constitutes the sine qua non for lawful marriage and which is, therefore, strictly speaking, the sole jural instrument for the transfer of marriage rights. Thus it is the part of the marriage payments which stands for the nuclear sexual and parental rights and relationships of the spouses and thus corresponds to the Capital Value in marital rights . . . no matter what its economic worth may be its significance lies in its binding power as a jural instrument.26

The “Contigent Prestations” serve a different function, however. These gifts “are the medium through which affinal relations are established and maintained.”27 This is why they are often “open to bargaining and may be partly or wholly counterbalanced by reciprocal gifts or services from the recipients.”28 Fortes then maintains the jural element inherent in so much functionalist analysis, while adding a new dimension to the analysis of marriage gifts. We will see later in the section on structuralism, however, that this contribution was not entirely his own.29

Marriage Gifts in Malinowski’s Functionalism Before I move to a discussion of certain critiques that have been mounted against these ideas, I must backtrack somewhat to the work of Bronislaw Malinowski. Malinowski stands alongside Radcliffe-Brown as one of the foundational figures not only of functionalism but of anthropology itself. Strictly speaking, he is the originator of functionalist methodology, while his contemporary Radcliffe-Brown was the founder of structural-functionalism, 26 27 28

29

Fortes, “Introduction,” 9–10. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 10. These counter-gifts are not considered dowry by most scholars, and should not be, in my view. This matter will be discussed in detail later. In tying these gifts to affinal relations, Fortes displays a structuralist influence, though he in fact critiques certain structuralist ideas about marriage. I will return to his (and others’) critiques of structuralism in the section in this chapter on “Critiques of Structuralist Interpretations of Marriage Gifts.”

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but time and convenience have conflated these two categories under the heading of functionalism. Malinowski’s work as a whole stands on a different end of the functionalist continuum than does the work of the three scholars just discussed, and this generalization also applies to his analyses of marriage gifts. Malinowski’s analyses have not been nearly as influential as those of the functionalists above, and especially those of Radcliffe-Brown and EvansPritchard, but they nevertheless merit brief attention. Like Radcliffe-Brown, Malinowski rejects the view of bridewealth that sees it as effecting “marriage by purchase.” He is also suspicious of evolutionistic theories regarding marriage. He writes: “The term ‘marriage by purchase’ applied to [marriage gifts, especially when given by the husband] usually serves to isolate them from their legal and economic context, to introduce the concept of a commercial transaction, which is nowhere to be found in primitive culture as a part of marriage,30 and to serve as one more starting point for fallacious speculations about the origin of marriage.”31 Malinowski’s explanations of these gifts are not jural, however. He sees them as forming just one part of an “exchange of obligations” that “embraces not only the husband and wife, but also the children . . . The family and clan of the wife, and more rarely the husband, also become part of the scheme of reciprocities.”32 Marriage gifts thus bind together two social or kinship groups and can only be correctly understood, in his view, “against the background of the wider economic mutuality of husband and wife.”33 In addition, in societies such as those of the Bantu of Eastern Africa where wives and children are seen as a “definite economic and sociological asset,” bridewealth (the most important marriage gift among those groups) is a “symbolic equivalent representing the wife’s economic efficiency.”34

Critiques of Functionalist Interpretations of Marriage Gifts Though Malinowski’s views on marriage gifts are not widely cited, ironically they contrast with some of the aspects of Radcliffe-Brown’s family of interpretations that have been criticized, even if they do mirror certain other aspects. 30

31 32 33 34

He is being rather apologetic here, in my opinion. See Tambiah, “Bridewealth and Dowry Revisited,” 415. Malinowski, “Marriage,” 14: 943–944. Also found verbatim in Sex, Culture, and Myth, 14. “Marriage,” 944; and Sex, Culture, and Myth, 14. “Marriage,” 944; Sex, Culture, and Myth, 15. “Marriage,” 944; Sex, Culture, and Myth, 15. This rather exchangist interpretation of bridewealth seems to show the influence of Mauss, who is cited several times in Sex, Culture, and Myth, and whose Essai sur le Don was first published in 1924. For an English translation, see Marcel Mauss, The Gift.

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For example, one feature of the latter style of analysis that is less prominent in Malinowski’s treatment of marriage gifts is its tendency toward androcentrism. John U. Ogbu states: “In surveying the literature on African marriages, especially the aspects dealing with bridewealth, one finds, indeed, that these matters have been studied primarily from the point of view of what is important to men.” “In fact,” he writes, “contemporary anthropologists [article published in 1978] are more likely to see African women as commodities of exchange than as marriage partners with reciprocal rights and obligations.”35 Ogbu’s criticism is not without merit. In a sense, it is fascinating that, despite their explicit rejection of the concept of marriage by purchase, functionalists on the whole have continued to presume that if valuable goods are going to the family of the bride from the groom and his kin, and that if no goods move in the opposite direction (or if those goods are clearly of lesser economic value or importance), then the groom must be receiving something in return. Since it is clearly inaccurate to see him as receiving the woman herself, then he must be receiving rights in the woman, and in the children she will bear. One could then see this position as merely a revision of the old idea of “marriage by purchase.” Ogbu does not contest the fact that men receive certain rights through marriage – though not through bridewealth – but argues that women, too, receive rights in their husbands through marriage. That this is the case may be seen in the reasons given by women in many African societies for divorcing their husbands. For example, among many African groups a woman may divorce her husband for adultery, laziness, cruel behavior, and so on, a fact that necessarily means that a husband is expected not to act in such ways, and thus that the wife, too, has rights in her husband.36 Ogbu’s analysis is intriguing, but raises the question of why bridewealth is given at all. This is a question he does answer, and, interestingly enough, in a manner that is in many ways similar to the earlier functionalists. In his conclusion, he writes that “the primary function of the bridewealth payment is the legitimation of marriage.”37 And, “In legitimation of marriage, bridewealth elevates the man to the status of husband and the woman to the status of wife.”38 These 35 36

37 38

Ogbu, “African Bridewealth,” 242. Ibid., 253, elsewhere. There is the question of how long women have been thought of as holding such rights in these societies: is the conception of reciprocal obligations a longstanding one, or is such a conception the product of the colonial or postcolonial periods? Ogbu can only say: “The changes that have taken place in bridewealth payment and women’s status since the end of the colonial period are not easy to assess. More legal changes appear to be taking place in the former French colonies than in the former British colonies” (ibid., 258). Ibid., 258. Ibid., 256.

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statements echo Radcliffe-Brown. He also reaffirms the functionalist idea that bridewealth is correlated with the affiliation of children to the father’s lineage, saying that there is “a strong relationship between bridewealth payment and the affiliation of children in patrilineal societies, some relationship in doubleunilineal descent and bilateral societies, and none in matrilieal societies.”39 As stated earlier, bridewealth payments are normally largest and most important in patrilineal societies. When bridewealth is given in nonpatrilineal societies, this is done “not primarily to secure the rights of fathers over children born to the marriage but to legitimate the marriage itself.”40 Thus, Ogbu’s treatment reinforces some of the most important functionalist interpretations of marriage gifts, just as it rejects the argument that bridewealth confers rights (only) to the husband and/or his kin. While Ogbu is right to point out the androcentrism present in functionalist analysis of marriage, his argument suffers from being somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, he argues that bridewealth does not confer to the husband rights over his wife, but on the other, he asserts that it does confer rights over the children borne to the marriage. Is this not equivalent to transferring to the husband rights over his wife’s reproductive abilities? In addition, Ogbu’s objective seems to me apologetic. He seems not to consider that at least some of the androcentrism one finds in functionalist ethnographies and analysis might stem from the African societies themselves. After all, Tallensi men say that they “own” their wives, and Gusii women say that they are “bought like cattle.”41 Such examples of male dominance do not necessarily imply that women have no rights in these societies, but do demonstrate that a certain degree of androcentrism is present in them. They also point in the direction of internal societal contradictions related to bridewealth, a topic that we will return to below. J. L. Comaroff ’s criticism of functionalist views regarding marriage gifts is wider in scope than that of Ogbu: he finds fault with the jural approach more generally, suggesting that it is an “analytical artifice” too firmly rooted in Western legal conceptions.42 He uses the example of the Tshidi to argue against the idea that bridewealth legitimates unions, for among them that prestation “has little to do with” validating marriages.43 He also states that among that group and certain others it is difficult to distinguish between what Fortes called “experimental” marriage and marriage proper, which 39 40 41 42 43

Ibid., 249. Ibid., 251. See Fortes, Web of Kinship, 103; and Tambiah, “Bridewealth and Dowry Revisited,” 415. Comaroff, “Introduction,” 20. Ibid., 19.

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there “surely must be if marriage is to have any jural force.”44 Naturally, where the boundary between marital and other types of conjugal unions is blurred, “there is no mechanical link between the passage of prestations and rights.”45 Even where marriage has been observed to have jural properties, these are not necessarily absolute. As Fortes himself admits, among the Tallensi, the jural aspect of marriage only “gives the husband a weapon with which he can try to assert his rights to and over his wife. It does not give him an absolute guarantee of these rights nor does it ensure the stability of the marriage.”46 But, “[w]hat can ‘right’ mean here?” asks Comaroff, “In what sense are properties jural if they neither really convey ‘rights’ nor make them enforceable?”47 Finally, Comaroff cites the Melpa and Wiru of highland Papua New Guinea to counterargue Fortes’s hypothesis regarding prime and contingent marital prestations and their respective functions. Among those two groups, it is not the legal aspect of bridewealth, which according to Fortes is associated with the prime prestation, that is primary; instead it is the “so-called contingent aspect – the production of affinal exchange linkages – which represents the dominant value motivating the alienation of prestations.”48 Yet Comaroff ’s argumentation has its own problems. The first of these is that, as he himself states, neither the Melpa and Wiru nor the Tshidi conform to the classical African segmentary lineage model.49 These examples can only serve, then, to show that the functionalists may have overstated their case regarding the jural role of marriage payments, but they cannot delegitimate their position overall. A more powerful example is that of the Tallensi, who do fit the lineage model.50 But still, one must ask the question of whether or not it is appropriate to use isolated examples to undo an entire theoretical model. Comaroff puts forth such examples as if they were a magic key able to undo the whole functionalist enterprise, but does not in fact demonstrate that the jural approach is ill-suited to explain marriage prestations in most African societies. Comaroff ’s examples are suggestive, but by themselves inadequate for undermining the jural approach to marriage gifts. Inadequate, too, is Comaroff ’s critique of functionalist ideas regarding the relationship between marriage gifts and the structural arrangement, or 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Ibid., 20. Among the Tshidi, too, it is difficult to tell if a couple is “married” or not. Ibid., 19. Fortes, Web of Kinship, 86. Comaroff, “Introduction,” 20. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 19. We will see later that the Tallensi, contrary to what one might gather from Comaroff, do not fall completely outside functionalist models. Perhaps more importantly, however, they fall well within the schema proposed by Goody.

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rearrangement, of societies. As Comaroff writes, “Generally speaking, bridewealth is viewed as a transfer made between corporate (usually unilineal) groups, or their lower order segments.”51 This way of seeing bridewealth is evident in statements such as these of Evans-Pritchard, quoted earlier: “When a woman is married she is transferred from one lineage to another”; and “Children are attached by payment of bridewealth to the lineage of their father.” Evans-Pritchard also states that two of the most important functions of bridewealth are “its role in creating new social ties between persons and of regulating the interrelations between these persons . . . and its structural role in interlineage relations.” But what does that structural role specifically consist of? Comaroff summarizes functionalist thinking on the matter as follows: “In the course of exchanging prestations and rights in women, these units create relationships of affinity and debt with each other, affirming their own internal solidarity and mutual interests in the process.” He says also that “the segmentary lineage model, and its grounding in the corporation, looms large in our understanding of these marriage payments.”52 In problematizing that understanding, Comaroff writes, “the studies [in this volume] demonstrate that bridewealth does occur in non-unilineal contexts, and sometimes is associated with intra-descent group marriage.”53 His argumentation here resembles that with which he disputes the jural approach to marriage gifts, and is weak for the same reason: the fact that bridewealth is given in some societies with non-unilineal descent does not mean that it is not normally associated with the opposite type of descent, or that it does not serve certain functions in societies with unilineal descent that it might not serve in societies with non-unilineal descent. Like his argument earlier, it suggests only that functionalists may have overstated their case. As Comaroff himself admits, anthropological understandings of bridewealth that are rooted in the segmentary lineage model do “not lack prima facie empirical support.” He continues: Bridewealth, at least in Africa, is common in patrilineal societies, and usually absent or insubstantial in matrilineal and so-called bilateral societies. Where marriage with bridewealth is one option among several, moreover, its non-payment usually entails reduced control over the bride on the part of her husband’s kin, the affiliation of her children to her own natal unit, nonagnatic devolution and, perhaps, non-virilocal residence.54 51 52 53

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Comaroff, “Introduction,” 15. Ibid., 15–16. Ibid., 16. The essays most relevant to his argument are Turton, “Economics of Mursi Bridewealth,” 67–92; and Barnes, “Marriage, Exchange,” 93–124. Comaroff, “Introduction,” 16. See also Goody, “Bridewealth and Dowry,” 14; Mair, Marriage, 61–63; Ogbu, “African Bridewealth,” 249–251; pace Kressel, “Bride-Price Reconsidered,” 442.

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An affirmation of functionalist ideas, if there ever was one. Comaroff ’s most interesting critique of functionalist approaches to marriage gifts is perhaps his suggestion that bridewealth transactions are sometimes part of what constitutes unilineal corporations to begin with, contra the functionalist assumption that unilineal groups, already constituted, then exchange bridewealth with one another.55 He quotes R. H. Barnes, who states: “Where unilineal descent, affinal alliance and marriage exchanges occur together, they all have an essential part in the constitution of corporations, but each of these features may be present or absent independently of the others.”56 Such a suggestion is intriguing, and potentially points to a shortcoming not only of functionalist analyses of marriage gifts, but also of functionalist ideas concerning kinship more generally. 57 There are several problems with functionalist treatments of marriage gifts that go unaddressed by either Ogbu or Comaroff, and that are quite pertinent to the subject of this book. One of these is the paucity, quite striking to my eye,

55 56 57

Mair writes, “. . . whereas one can say that all patrilineal peoples have (more or less) the same marriage arrangements, every matrilineal society seems to be unique” (Marriage, 61). Comaroff, “Introduction,” 17. Ibid., 17. Germane to the latter topic is David Schneider’s Critique of the Study of Kinship, in which Schneider calls into question the entire study of kinship as it has been formulated and undertaken by functionalists and other anthropologists. Schneider accuses anthropologists of importing European categories into the study of kinship in such thoroughgoing fashion that all of the classical ideas (or assumptions, in his view) of kinship studies must be thoroughly reevaluated if the study of kinship in non-western studies can continue at all. He in fact suggests that such study has been so wrongheaded in its approach that it may have to be abandoned. In his view, despite the fact that scholars from Durkheim onward have differentiated between kinship, which is a social phenomenon, and consanguinity, which is biological, they were never able to provide a definition of kinship free of biological referents (101). Schneider mentions, for example, the work of Harold Scheffler and Floyd Lounsbury, who he says “rest the distinction between physical and social kinship on the cultural conception of the processes of human reproduction, and this is the defining feature for their understanding of kinship” (111). Such an approach to kinship ill-fits the native categories and conceptions of many societies and leads anthropologists to distortion in their descriptions of these societies. It also leads to descriptions that, in leaving out cultural features that are too unique to fit preformed anthropological categories of kinship or forcing such features to fit into those pre-formed categories, are inadequate and misleading. Schneider thus problematizes the use of such terms as “patrilineal,” “patrilocal,” and “corporation,” which he sees as leading to more harm than good in anthropological analysis. Schneider even questions the translation of basic kinship terms into the English “father” or “mother,” speaking at length on the Yapese, who use classificatory kinship terminology, which to put the matter simply involves referring to relatives of the male line (and certain other persons) as “father” and relatives of the female line as “mother.” Translating the native Yapese terms, citimangen and citiningen, into English in such a manner that conforms them to our ideas of kinship only distorts Yapese cultural conceptions. Schneider is thus suspicious of the tendency of scholars to set aside certain native uses of kinship terms – normally those that do not conform to Western cultural conceptions – as metaphorical, and argues instead that such uses must be given equal weight when describing

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of functionalist research on dowry. As stated before, the classic functionalist works focused on simple societies – for example, those of sub-Saharan Africa, Australia, the South Pacific islands, and so on. More complex societies such as those of India, China, the Middle East, or Japan received less attention, and western societies were left to sociologists to study.58 Because dowry is relatively rare cross-culturally and is found almost exclusively in more complex societies, dowry was left out of the functionalist picture almost by accident. When latterday functionalists have addressed dowry, they have often written in reaction to the ideas of structuralism. At the very least, structuralist ideas precipitated their belated attention to studying that form of marriage gift – and in some ways, even to examining at all those societies that exchange it. Neglecting the study of dowry has, unsurprisingly, led functionalists to ignore issues surrounding the cultural distribution of dowry versus bridewealth. Why do some societies exchange dowry, whereas others exchange bridewealth? Why, as RadcliffeBrown wrote, does “[t]he dowry or dower not exist in Africa,” while it bears such cultural importance in places such as North India or China? Few functionalists have even asked such questions, much less addressed them.

58

and analyzing a culture. Schneider’s critique is pointed and, often enough, on target. Over time, anthropological studies of kinship grew so formalistic and riddled with jargon that falling into the trap of making prima facie categorizations of a society grew only too easy. At the same time, clear definitions and, more important, reassessment of the basic concepts of kinship studies was too often lacking. Schneider is, in my view, correct in making these points, and reasonable in calling for anthropologists to keep an eye toward the specificity of cultural categories. Yet Schneider also overstates his case on the latter point, and in many other areas. While certain cultures may conform very poorly to traditional anthropological conceptions of kinship, there is a great deal of overlap between those conceptions and the conceptions and structures of most societies in the world. There is also a far greater overlap between conceptions of consanguinity and kinship than Schneider would like to admit. His equation of metaphorical with primary usages is also problematic. In addressing Schneider’s claim that “meaning and value cannot be omitted from any definition of kinship,” Scheffler writes: “Meaning, in Schneider [sic] usage, as in that of many other self-proclaimed practitioners of ‘symbolic anthropology,’ is a vague, omnibus expression that both covers and tends to confound the definition of a type (category) designated by a word (say mother) with the culturally-constructed forms of significance or value of being a token of that type. Muddling together under the oxymoronic banner of ‘alternative distinctive features’ those features of meaning commonly dealt with in terms of connotation, metaphor, and so on, does not enhance, but to the contrary, definitely diminishes our understanding of American culture. By making no room for metaphor, irony, indexicality, or any other kind of figure of speech, it does not carefully follow but artificially flattens out the richly contoured landscape of American languages and cultures of kinship. Applied in many other ethnographic contexts, Schneider’s concepts and methods have produced similarly specious ethnographic results” (“Remuddling Kinship,” 165–166). While one may then embrace Schneider’s call for caution in analyzing the kinship system of any individual group, one must reject the approach that he himself proposes as a substitute for more traditional forms of analysis. Though this is generally no longer the case, with the (welcome) encroachment of anthropology on areas previously studied by sociologists in the past few decades.

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Another problematic feature not only of functionalist treatments of marriage gifts, but of the functionalist approach in general, is its inadequacy for explaining social change.59 This stems from the strictly synchronic focus of most functionalists, a focus that was consciously formulated by RadcliffeBrown and others to contrast with the “pseudo-history” of evolutionism and diffusionism. Such a stance was understandable in the intellectual context of the early twienth century, and led to the development of a novel approach that contributed greatly to the Western scholarly tradition. However, this approach, in presuming that societies normally exist in a state of equilibrium and ideal functionality, also failed to ask many questions, such as: by what mechanisms do social customs and norms persist over time, both in specific societies and more generally, and by what mechanisms do they change? Functionalism left us few answers to these questions, because, devoted as it was to synchronic analysis, it neglected even to pose them at all.

Structuralist approaches to the Study of Marriage Gifts While structuralism, too, leaves unanswered many of the questions posed here, as an anthropological approach it differs from functionalism in many of its foci and stances regarding the study of marriage gifts. Within anthropology, the structuralist approach was originally formulated by Claude LéviStrauss, whose first major writings were published in the 1940s. Lévi-Strauss is a man of eclectic influences. While the structural linguistics of the Prague school is perhaps the most obvious of these, he also draws upon the work of Freud, Mauss, the British functionalists, and many others.60 His contributions to the study of marriage and marriage gifts are particularly indebted to Mauss, and to the latter’s seminal work on gift exchange. They are also indebted to the work of the functionalists, for like them, Lévi-Strauss’s ideas about marriage gifts are interwoven with his ideas on marriage and kinship, many of which are put forth in his The Elementary Structures of Kinship, first published in 1949.61 That work is a complex one, and a thorough review of the models proposed within it and their relationship to the study of marriage gifts would be impossible to undertake here. Instead, I shall provide a brief summary of the relevant points. 59 60 61

Håkansson, Bridewealth, Women, and Land, 16. See Edmund Leach’s useful and entertaining biography, entitled simply Claude Lévi-Strauss. As Les Structures élémentaires de la Parenté. It should be noted that Lévi-Strauss made some significant revisions in the 1967 edition (English translation, 1969).

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Lévi-Strauss, like Freud, holds that the incest taboo is the foundation of all human societies, for it necessitates that people must form relationships with those outside their immediate families in order to marry and reproduce. That such a rule everywhere exists belongs in the category of nature; it is universal.62 But the particulars of the rule – that is, who exactly counts as a close relative – are variable, and thus belong in the category of culture, a category that stands in opposition to nature.63 Incest rules must exist because women are both necessary and scarce, a fact that necessitates that social regulations be engendered in order to maximize and facilitate access to them.64 Exogamy, or the exchange of women between clans, thus becomes one of the major types of exchanges in human societies, the others being the exchange of goods and services, and the exchange of messages – that is, communication. Lévi-Strauss in fact considers the exchange of women to be the most elementary of all forms of exchange.65 Inherent even in Lévi-Strauss’s ideas concerning the incest taboo is a focus on the alliances humans make with one another in marriage, alliances made between nonconsanguineal relatives – or affinity. Such alliances, in his view, are the basis of human society. This contrasts with the functionalist concern with descent structures and how these organize societies: how lineal descent is reckoned, whether through men or through women,66 what happens to the lineal descent of women at marriage (in patrilineal systems), how the affiliation of children is determined, and so forth. It is not that Lévi-Strauss rejected the idea of descent, only that he focused his attention on an aspect of human societies that functionalists had often ignored. Furthermore, he examines not only how marriage fits within the dual contexts of kinship and affinity, but also places it within those of exchange and gift-giving, an approach that differs markedly from the jural interests of the functionalists. Lévi-Strauss’s differing ways of seeing marriage necessarily lead to differing ways of seeing marriage gifts. In speaking of lobola, or bridewealth, in the Bantu-speaking societies of Africa, he relates this prestation to both the incest 62

63

64 65 66

Clearly, the marital practices of the ancient Egyptians violate this “universal” rule. See Hopkins, “Brother-sister Marriage,” 303–354, and Goody, The Oriental, The Ancient, 319– 341, on the extremely close endogamy practiced by a large percentage of Egyptians in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. An example of close endogamy from the Israelite sphere may be seen in the union of Abraham and Sarah, his half-sister according to Gen 20:12. One sees here Lévi-Strauss’s love of binary oppositions, a love he shares with the Prague school. See Korn, Elementary Structures Reconsidered, 9–10. Leach, Lévi-Strauss, 112. Or some combination of the two – though much of early or “classic” functionalist research was focused upon societies with unilineal descent structures.

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taboo and exchange. He also speaks of it as “marriage by purchase,” though he writes: The lobola is neither a dowry – since it does not accompany the bride, but goes to the bride’s family – nor a payment; indeed, the woman is never subject to appropriation; she cannot be sold, nor can she be put to death . . . What then is lobola? In South Africa it consists above all of cattle, and for the Bantu, ‘cattle are the most important medium for all ritual relations between human groups’ . . . By the terms of the prohibition of incest, a woman cannot have children in her own group. Accordingly, either she must be transferred to a neighbouring group or a man from another group must come to her. Whether descent is matrilineal or patrilineal . . . both groups, owing to the prohibition of incest, are placed in a state of reciprocal interdependency. The transfer of lobola does not represent a unilateral purchase. As the counterpart to the daughter, it affirms the bilaterality of the link.67

He continues: But, at the same time, it is more than than this. The completion of the marriage rites does not put an end to reciprical obligations between the groups. The reality of the alliance is attested to during the whole marriage by a series of services offered and rendered, and of gifts demanded and received. But once lobola is received it immediately commences a new cycle.68

These gifts, however, are not themselves objects of exchange, but are rather tokens used in the exchange of women for women.69 As Comaroff writes, to Lévi-Strauss: “Bridewealth . . . is a symbolic currency which may mediate the cycle of reciprocities where, in separate transactions, a unit alienates women in one direction and obtains them from another.”70 Clearly, Lévi-Strauss does not emphasize the fact that the gifts given by the bridegroom’s side outstrip in value those given by the bride’s in Bantu societies,71 but emphasizes instead that, as Radcliffe-Brown noted, “marriage in many, if not most, African societies involves a whole series of prestations.” The fact that prestations are often given by both sides is what interests Lévi-Strauss and what figures in his exchange-centered conceptions of both marriage and marriage gifts. Lévi-Strauss’s albeit brief treatment of dowry, too, takes place in the context of discussing alliance and exchanges. Contrary to the concept of marriage’s involving bridewealth, or “marriage by purchase,” he refers to marriage 67 68 69 70 71

Lévi-Strauss, Elementary Structures, 466–467. Ibid., 467. Ibid., 238. See also Comaroff, “Introduction,” 27. Comaroff, “Introduction,” 27. See Kuper, Wives for Cattle, and following.

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involving dowry as “marriage by gift.”72 Lévi-Strauss notes that Sanskrit law, specifically the Code of Manu, privileges “marriage by gift” and states: ‘According to Hindu ideas, marriage is a gift, and it loses a part of its value if the gift is not voluntary, but solicited.’73 This statement . . . holds our attention . . . it is very surprising that all the forms of marriage sanctioned by Manu are of the ‘marriage by gift’ type. In fact, this type is unknown to sociologists, and Lowie, for example, makes no mention of it in his analysis of ‘means of acquiring a mate’. In the literal sense of the term, marriage by gift would be a marriage without reciprocity and it cannot be seen how human society could function under the conditions that it presupposes.74

Lévi-Strauss all but admits here that traditional “Hindu” conceptions of marriage are problematic for his exchange-centered view of marriage. Rather than addressing this issue directly, he makes the claim that marriage by gift does not actually occur, a claim that he does not explicate. (Does he mean that marriages involving dowry do not occur, or rather that marriages involving only dowry without counterprestations from the groom’s side do not occur? One assumes the latter, but it is unclear.) He then returns to his discussion of generalized versus preferential marital exchange systems, a matter in which he has greater interest, but unfortunately he does not return to the question of dowry. Thankfully, the structuralist Louis Dumont, an indologist by profession, has more to say regarding dowry than does Lévi-Strauss. Dumont shares Lévi-Strauss’s exchangist view of marriage, emphasizing the reciprocal nature of gift-giving among Indian groups. He writes: What is the most salient feature of the marriage ceremonies among the groups referred to? . . . As a sign of union between the two families, I think we may say that [a common meeting of the relatives of both sides, which is conspicuously absent] is replaced by the long series of alternate shiftings of the couple from one place to the other and back again, which takes place from the marriage onward and is accompanied by gifts in one direction and increased gifts in return. This chain of gifts, or “prestations” and “counterprestations,” symbolizes the alliance tie and is the most important feature of marriage ceremonies from the point of view of the relation between the two families.75

Because of the ongoing and reciprocal nature of the gift-giving, Dumont thinks it misleading to single out certain gifts and refer to them as “bride-price” 72 73 74 75

In doing so, he is drawing on the terminology of evolutionists such as Westermarck. Lévi-Strauss quotes G. N. Banerjee here. See Hindu Law, 78. Lévi-Strauss, Elementary Structures, 398. Dumont, Affinity as a Value, 80.

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or “dowry.”76 Dumont does note, however, that among some groups the exchanges are not actually symmetrical in terms of their value. He states: When the Pramalai Kallar state that “gifts sent to the bride’s house return increased,” this is roughly true of one individual present, but it is still truer of the whole series . . . There is certainty about increase, because increase is the law of the whole cycle. One knows very well that masculine gifts [that is, gifts given by the groom’s side to the bride’s] will decrease as time goes on, while feminine gifts will increase; the latter are substantial, the former initiatory and provocative. Generosity lies on the girl’s side, but it has to be set in motion; a pledge to protracted, manifold, and mainly unilateral gifts is obtained by a formal exchange.77

Dumont refers to marriage gifts, whether symmetrical or asymmetrical, as “affinal ceremonial prestations” and “alliance prestations,” and says that “[m]arriage does not consist only in the consecration of conjugal union and the establishment of a new family, for this family is as inseparable from the alliance prestations as it is from the local lineage affiliation.”78 Such a statement relates to Dumont’s ideas regarding alliance and affinity, and his rejection of the functionalist assumption that descent is primary and affinity secondary. Commenting specifically on societies with positive marriage regulations – those that enjoin or encourage individuals to marry people with certain relationships to them, such as cross-cousins – he says: . . . it is almost unnecessary to recall that marriage cannot in general be considered as a secondary product of other institutions such as descent, which are then taken as being primary; there is rather an interrelation in the complete make-up. Still less is it possible to reduce the content of the marriage regulation to the codification of an individual affair, which marriage is not. Consequently, the regulation should not be considered as consisting of a relation between consanguineous ties and affinity, but as a feature of affinity itself.79

Dumont thus observes a diachronic element in the marital practices of some societies, where marriage is “part of a marriage alliance institution running through generations.”80 Though Dumont is speaking here of a certain class of societies, one sees in his comments a more general approach: that the ties created by marriage are not in fact a “secondary product” of descent but are 76 77 78 79 80

Ibid., 83. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 84–85. Dumont, Hierarchy and Marriage Alliance, 24. Ibid., 25.

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equally if not more important than descent. After all, if legitimate progeny come from legitimate marriages, then alliance must precede descent, or at the very least be interwoven with it. Moreover, social alliances are what produce marriage and thus affinity, or the kinship ties created by marriage. These ideas are the very core of structuralist “alliance theory,” as opposed to the “descent theory” of the British functionalists. If, however, marriage gifts are affinal in nature and the exchange of such gifts produces affinity, why are certain exchanges asymmetrical, with the gifts from the bride’s kin being, among various Indian and other groups, so much more substantial than those from the groom’s? Dumont explains this asymmetry in light of the extremely stratified nature of Indian society – that is, through its caste system. Dumont refers to the marital pattern that is frequently seen in northern India in which the bride’s family has (somewhat) inferior status to the bridegroom’s – what is referred to as hypergamy. He says that: . . . in the hypergamous pattern the superior status of the bridegroom’s family makes it more demanding about the prestations it receives with the girl, as if it would only accept marriage into an inferior family on condition of receiving hard cash; but this precisely squares with the pattern of the gift: one gives a daughter and goods to a superior in exchange, not in this case for spiritual merits, but for something similar, namely the prestige or consideration which results from intermarriage with him.81

This pattern does not generally hold for south Indian groups such as the Pramalai Kallar, who have a preference for cross-cousin marriage and are generally isogamous.82 How, then, might the asymmetry of northern Indian marital exchanges best be explained? Dumont does not address the matter directly, but seems to explain it as follows: “If ceremonial gifts are essentially affinal and if they are important, it should follow that, in societies with male predominance, property is transmitted from one generation to the next under two forms: by inheritance in the male line, and also by gifts to in-laws, namely from father-in-law to son-in-law.”83 Thus, one sees that Dumont expands upon Lévi-Strauss’s exchangist view of marriage by providing a close analysis of the marital practices of India, and discussing the relationship of those marital practices not only to social hierarchies but to systems of inheritance. 81 82 83

Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, 117. Ibid., 116. Dumont, Affinity as a Value, 79.

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Critiques of Structuralist Interpretations of Marriage Gifts Structuralist ideas regarding kinship and marriage were in many ways a major departure from functionalist stances, and so it is unsurprising that some of the most vehement critiques of Lévi-Strauss and his followers came from functionalist quarters. 84 Functionalists were not alone in critiquing the work of Lévi-Strauss, however; even certain scholars who are themselves normally considered structuralists have found fault with some of Lévi-Strauss’s ideas on kinship. The combined critiques of these two groups of scholars addressed virtually every hypothesis put forth by Lévi-Strauss (and to a much lesser extent, by Dumont). Naturally, we can only address the more pertinent rejoinders here. The first of these rejoinders concerns the starting point for Lévi-Strauss’s entire theory of kinship: the incest taboo itself. The hypothesis that a prescription against incestuous relations forms the cornerstone of all human societies, and in fact of human civilization itself, is one that many have found problematic. Firstly, although Lévi-Strauss would of course claim that the evidence for this theory comes from the omnipresence of incest rules in human societies, it is nonetheless an untestable explanation of the origin of human alliances, lying in the evolutionistic realm of “pseudo-history,” to use Radcliffe-Brown’s terminology.85 In addition, various scholars have been critical of Lévi-Strauss’s characterization of the incest taboo as the converse of exogamy, arguing that it glosses “over the essential distinction between rules governing sexual relations and those governing marriage.”86 Edmund Leach, a maverick structuralist but a structuralist nonetheless, goes so far as to say that this “error is rudimentary.”87 Robin Fox writes: “The distinction between incest and exogamy . . . is really only the difference between sex and marriage, and while every teenager knows these are different, many anthropologists get them confused.”88 Clearly these scholars see Lévi-Strauss as one of the confused. A final, but not insignificant, problem is that Lévi-Strauss “brushes aside the substantial evidence that there have been numerous 84

85

86 87 88

See Scheffler, “Kinship, Descent, and Alliance,” 747–793, particularly 780–786, for a review of many of the relevant issues, as well as Barnard and Good, Research Practices, 67–70, 104; Eriksen and Nielsen, History of Anthropology, 107–108; among others. For a discussion of the similarities between this theory and Tylor’s ideas regarding incest and the evolution of societies, see Leach, Lévi-Strauss, 110–111. Scheffler, “Kinship, Descent, and Alliance,” 781. Leach, Lévi-Strauss, 111. Fox, Kinship and Marriage, 54.

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historical societies in which ‘normal’ incest taboos did not prevail.”89 That these societies, of which ancient Egypt was one, could function or even continue to exist as societies without an incest taboo calls into question the basis for much of Lévi-Strauss’s overall theory of marriage.90 Another important aspect of this theory of marriage that has been called into question is the concept that marriage consists of the exchange of women for women. This conception is at best androcentric and at worst, bluntly sexist, for it assumes a complete lack of agency on the part of women. As LéviStrauss puts it: “In human society it is the men who exchange the women, and not vice versa.” 91 Clearly, one need not look too far to find societies in which “marriages are arranged solely by the would-be spouses, and it is therefore difficult to see how the notion of marriage as exchange applies to them.”92 And this is true not only of most industrialized societies but of various traditional ones as well.93 As Scheffler writes, “It has been a popular anthropological misconception since the time of Tylor . . . that marriage in ‘primitive society’ is a family or group affair . . . In some [societies] the union that constitutes marriage is solely the result of an agreement between the man and the woman concerned . . . and only informally entails any social relationships between the families or other kin of the principals.”94 A related problem with Lévi-Strauss’s exchangist view of marriage is that it essentially requires that societies have unilineal descent groups that exchange women with each other.95 Leach writes that “Lévi-Strauss’ discussion of marriage rules in Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949) was distorted by his erroneous belief that the great majority of primitive societies have unilineal descent . . . The reader needs to appreciate that the great majority of what are usually considered to be ‘ultraprimitive’ societies (e.g., Congo pygmies and Kalahari Bushmen) do not have systems of unilineal descent.”96 And because Lévi-Strauss derives his ideas on the complex kinship structures of many of the world’s societies from the elementary structures of these 89 90

91 92 93 94

95

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Leach, Lévi-Strauss, 110. While I may have argued earlier that a small number of exceptions can not necessarily disprove an entire explanatory schema, Lévi-Strauss’s very claim for the universality of the incest taboo is what makes it particularly vulnerable to the mustering of such exceptions. Structural Anthropology, 47. See also Leach, Lévi-Strauss, 109. Scheffler, “Kinship, Descent, and Alliance,” 783. Ibid., 782–783. Ibid., 784. Maurice Godelier offers a rather different critique of Lévi-Strauss’ views on this issue; it will be dealt with later. Societies with unilineal descent are those that reckon kinship either patrilineally or matrilineally. Leach, Lévi-Strauss, 112–113. See also Scheffler, “Kinship, Descent, and Alliance,” 782–784.

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“primitive” groups, again, much of his overall theory of kinship and marriage is thrown into doubt. Even some of the those scholars who accept Lévi-Strauss’s exchangist view of marriage call into question that approach as he formulates it. The neoMarxist anthropologist Maurice Godelier writes: As far as Lévi-Strauss’ thesis on kinship is concerned . . . the prohibition of incest did not necessarily, as Lévi-Strauss claimed, bring about the exchange of women among men. The prohibition of incest opens up three logically equivalent possibilities. Either men exchange their sisters among themselves, or women exchange their brothers among themselves, or groups exchange men and women. Lévi-Strauss retained only one of these three possibilities when he posited the exchange of women among men as the crux of kinship and therefore as universal fact. Yet all three possibilities exist sociologically. Women exchange men among the Tetum of Indonesia, the Joraï of Vietnam and in a few other societies. . .97 The third logical possibility, the exchange of men and women by family groups, is obviously more common: it is practiced by the present-day societies of Europe and by many cognatic societies in Polynesia, Indonesia, the Phillipines, and elsewhere. In any event, the exchange of women is not a universal fact, as Lévi-Strauss claims. It is merely the most statistically frequent form of matrimonial exchange.98

Thus, in Godelier’s view, the exchange of women in marriage is not inscribed into the natural order, as Lévi-Strauss characterizes it as being, but is merely one option among several. One of the more intense debates between Lévi-Strauss and his followers and the functionalists has centered on the topic of whether or not alliance or descent should be privileged in examining a group’s social structure, and relatedly, whether alliance produces affinity, or vice versa. As Jack Goody puts it, “Where Radcliffe-Brown had emphasized the filial, Lévi-Strauss stresses the affinal.”99 This difference in viewpoint stems in part from which generation of a group is stressed – the senior or the junior.100 That is, Lévi-Strauss “emphasizes the interrelationships of the senior generation and thus gives a

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Despite this fact, this practice, and its accompanying prestation, groomwealth, are very poorly attested cross-culturally. Comaroff goes so far as to write that groomwealth “has no clearly recorded empirical instances” (“Introduction,” 4). 98 Godelier, Enigma of the Gift, 35. 99 Goody, “Mother’s Brother,” 64. 100 One can think of this difference in terms of whether or not ego’s parents’ generation is the departure point for analysis, or the generation of ego himself (or herself).

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primacy to affinity. . .”101 In Goody’s view, this emphasis is not so much wrong as misguided. He writes: The assumption that ‘kinship is built through marriage’ dominates much of the writings of Lévi-Strauss and it carries the corollary that the relationships between kingroups are primarily affinal. Here he seems to fall into a chicken-and-egg fallacy . . . Of course every filial relationship is dependent upon a marriage; but the opposite is equally true. It is clear that, both from the actor’s and the observer’s point of view, relationships of affinity and kinship, relationships within and between generations, coexist within the social system at any one moment in time.102

Goody’s analysis here is certainly persuasive, but it implies that functionalists were just as prone to falling into the same chicken-and-egg fallacy by emphasizing descent over and above affinity. If nothing else, the writings of Lévi-Strauss forced functionalists, and the field of anthropology in general, to correct this imbalance.103 Nonetheless, this criticism, as well as those of other functionalists, has implications for some of the more specific views of structuralists on marriage and marriage gifts. Returning now to the work of Dumont, as we saw earlier, he argued that in prescriptive marriage systems, marriage is “part of a marriage alliance institution running through generations.” Fortes and others have critiqued this stance, stating that what it actually postulates is that affinal relationships lead to marriage and not the other way around. Fortes writes: Recent studies of South Indian kinship and marriage institutions . . . have been concerned with the relative significance of affinal status and kinship in adherence to rules of cross-cousin marriage . . . To my mind what emerges clearly . . . is that, in dynamic terms, it is marriage which generates affinal relationships and not vice versa . . . In formal terms, marriage is the bridge between the kinship side and the affinal side of the dichotomy that is of necessity built into the total genealogically defined domain of social relations which we find in every social system . . . In other words, there would be no point to marriage ceremonies and legal instruments if the pre-marital status of the spouses in relation to each other and to their relevant kin were already affinal in character.104 101 102 103 104

Ibid., 64. Ibid., 65. For more on Goody’s views on this issue, see following. Fortes, “Introduction,” 2. This corresponds with Fortes’s view of contigent marital prestations, which he sees as the “medium through which affinal relations are established and maintained” (ibid., 10). While Fortes does point here to a weakness in Dumont’s analysis, one wonders if he does not exaggerate the latter’s views somewhat in order to bring into sharper relief the differences between Dumont’s views and his own. Though Fortes sees only contingent

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A related and perhaps more serious problem regarding alliance theory is its presumption, stemming from the writings of Lévi-Strauss, that marriage necessarily leads to alliance. While this is of course generally true, it is not always the case that groups or families related by marriage ally with one another. In fact, in some societies, affines display avoidance behaviors toward one another, and women who marry are expected to cut off virtually all ties with their natal families.105 Such societies need not practice either repetitive or reciprocal marriage alliances, or even reciprocal social behaviors.106 This brings us back to Lévi-Strauss’s wonderment over the view of dowry found in the Code of Manu: “In the literal sense of the term, marriage by gift would be a marriage without reciprocity and it cannot be seen how human society could function under the conditions that it presupposes.” Yet, human societies sometimes do function in such a way, and it is difficult in those cases to see bridewealth as a token of reciprocal exchange, dowry and other marital prestations as purely affinal, or even marriage as alliance. Even where marriage does lead to alliance, it is in fact inequality in prestations that often engenders and maintains such a relationship, “since indebtedness sustains alliance and affinal complementarity.”107

Marxist Interpretations of Marriage Gifts One group of scholars that has unsurprisingly placed inequality at the forefront of its analyses of marriage and marriage gifts is neo-Marxist anthropologists. Although there have been few noteworthy attempts by neo-Marxists to explain marriage gifts – and even these tend to draw as much from structuralist ideas as from traditional Marxist ones, a feature that is in fact typical of much neo-Marxist writing – those of Claude Meillassoux and Maurice Godelier are worth exploring. The work of Meillassoux treats bridewealth arrangements mainly in the context of analyzing the economy of the Guro (Côte d’Ivoire) and other West African groups.108 In his Anthropologie Économique des Gouro de Côte d’Ivoire, he states that, among the Guro, the goods that constitute bridewealth are under the control of elders. These elders, in order to retain

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prestations as being affinal – as opposed to the primary prestation, which is jural in nature – his interpretation of those prestations is similar to Dumont’s view of marriage prestations in general, a fact that is unsurprising considering that it was seemingly based upon the work of Dumont. See Tambiah, “Dowry, Bridewealth and Property Rights,” 95. See Scheffler, “Kinship, Descent, and Alliance,” 783–784, for comments relevant to this issue. Comaroff, “Introduction,” 21. See also Sahlins, “Sociology of Primitive Exchange,”177; and Meillassoux, Maidens, Meal, and Money, 66. See Meillassoux, Anthropologie Économique, especially 214–220, 223–225, and also Maidens, Meal and Money, 68–74, 83–84.

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the labor of the younger generation and also to perpetuate the dependent position of the latter, delay the marriages of young men. The elders cannot maintain their dominant position by physical force over the means of production, and so it is in the area of marital arrangements that their “power of command is really grounded.”109 It is in fact through their control over marriage and bridewealth, and through the processes by which the latter is exchanged, that the social structures that assign them supremacy are reproduced.110 In Meillassoux’s later writings on marriage and bridewealth, a more pronounced structuralist influence emerges. He writes: In the matrimonial collectivity constituted by the alliance of several communities, the reproduction of each is ensured by an even distribution of available pubescent women among them. The basic purpose of this redistribution is reproduction, of which women are the means . . . Given that women do not procreate in their own communities . . . they move to other communities; but transfer can only take place on the conditions of absolute reciprocity, since the only functional equivalent of one pubescent woman is another pubescent woman.111

Bridewealth is instrumental in this transfer of women, for it “mediates between the two sides of an identical exchange, a bride (now) for a bride (later).”112 To put the matter in structuralist terms, bridewealth is a token in the exchange of women for women: “Now the continuous cycle of bridewealth transactions transforms a community issuing bridewealth payments into a claim-holding community every single time the circuit of advancing and returning women is completed.”113 Yet Meillassoux’s later writings on bridewealth are not without a strong Marxist component, as well. He states: Bridewealth goods must demonstrate the social prerogatives of those who control them and their capacity to undertake matrimonial transactions. A bridewealth portion should be associated in kind and in composition with the social qualities of the elder who, at the apex of the circulation of goods produced by the community, has alone the social and rightful capacity to accumulate. Matrimonial goods will therefore usually be products that testify to the concentration of the human energy that, either in quantity or in quality, only an elder – because of his social position – can acquire.114 109 110 111 112 113 114

As Comaroff puts it, “Introduction,” 22. Meillassoux, Anthropologie Économique, 223. Meillassoux, Maidens, Meal, and Money, 61. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 70. Ibid., 64.

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A Marxist approach is also evident elsewhere in his analysis. Though Meillassoux uses the structuralist idea that bridewealth is a token in the exchange of women for women, he also problematizes that very idea, seeing this function of bridewealth as one of several “latent contradictions in the bridewealth system.”115 For if bridewealth were merely a token in the exchange for women, it would merely “be held in custody by the person who handed over the bride until, on receipt of a wife as a counterpart, he returned it to the debtor.”116 But clearly the system of bridewealth payments does not function in such a simplistic fashion as that. To overcome this and other contradictions, “and prevent exchange value from creeping into [the circulation of bridewealth], it is necessary that either some central power produces bridewealth and regulates its circulation, or that bridewealth payments be destroyed when their claims are extinct, that is, on their return to the person who put them into circulation.” In an acephalous society, the first option is impossible. Recourse to the second option is “sporadic and haphazard.”117 Thus, it becomes possible for some people to manipulate the system to their advantage and accumulate goods, and Meillassoux in fact suggests that bridewealth payments may “assist the emergence of a ruling class.”118 Maurice Godelier, who has done extensive research in Papua New Guinea, and especially among the highland Baruya, also analyzes bridewealth in the context of social change. The Baruya, like various other societies in the world,119 do not in fact exchange marriage payments on a regular basis, and instead practice the direct exchange of women. In such a system, one family gives a daughter to another family’s son while receiving another woman for their own son, either at the same time or later on.120 This practice is sometimes called “sister-exchange.” Yet, many groups in Papua New Guinea do give marriage prestations, and they also take part in potlatches, or competitive ritualized gift-exchanges. Godelier not only sees these two things as being related to one another, but in fact postulates that the giving of bridewealth is necessary for the emergence of potlatch societies.121 In his comments on this 115 116 117 118 119

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Ibid., 71, also 68–74. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 73. This viewpoint is echoed by Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Political Economy,” 95–96. This type of marriage is most common in the insular Pacific, though it is found in a few African societies. It is not a very common form of marriage cross-culturally, however. See Goody, “Bridewealth and Dowry,” 22. See Godelier, Making of Great Men, 20–27. He writes: “For potlatch societies to appear and develop, two conditions are necessary. First of all, in the area of kinship, marriage must no longer be implemented through direct exchange of women, and bridewealth must, for the most part, have replaced ‘sister’ exchange. Secondly, a portion of the political-religious power has to exist in the form of titles, ranks, names and

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phenomenon, an important aspect of – and an analytical and social problem with – bridewealth emerges. Since the number of exchangeable “sisters” is of course always limited, one cannot accumulate wives, or amass wealth through exchanging wives.122 But: The problem vanishes when, in exchange for a concrete person, wealth is given – valuables or pigs that are raised not for consumption but for exchange. The elements of the problem are completely different: on the one hand, we have a woman, on the other, valuables or pigs which can be multiplied by producing more or by procuring them by other means. On the one hand, we have persons, on the other, all sorts of “things” which function as substitutes for these persons. When a woman is exchanged for a woman, it is an exchange of two beings of the same nature, whose social value is presumed, a priori, to be equivalent. . . But when a woman is exchanged for wealth, the equivalence takes on another, more abstract character. Persons are equated with things, things with persons. But the two terms of the equation do not share the same mode of existence. Persons are produced in the framework of kinship relations, wealth is produced in the framework of the social relations which organize production and exchange. Once women can be exchanged for wealth, “a veritable political economy of kinship” becomes possible. Wealth procures women, and women procure wealth. Women themselves become a form of wealth.123

Thus, an equivalence is established between women and wealth, but it cannot be a true equivalence, for women and goods are inherently dissimilar. There is, however, a rationale to this pseudo-equivalence: “Wealth, pigs, and shells are transferred without a return payment, both to sever (in part) the bonds that connect the young woman to her family and to gain access to her sexual (and other) services.”124 At the same time, the pigs that are then exchanged between both lineages function to “make the affines into [potlatch] partners.”125 Godelier’s analysis reflects various influences. It has a Marxist component, but also a structuralist and even a functionalist one. The latter is reflected in Godelier’s view that bridewealth functions to sever “the bonds that connect the

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emblems placed in competition and open to those who successfully establish their superiority over others through prodigal giving, by amassing more wealth than others in order to outdo their rivals in gift-exchange” (Enigma of the Gift, 147). Ibid., 147. Ibid., 147–148. Ibid., 148. Ibid., 148.

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young woman to her family,” as well as to give the husband access to her sexual and other services – in other words, to transfer her to the husband’s lineage, and to transfer to him rights over her. A structuralist influence is reflected, of course, in his exchangist approach to marriage. Like Meillassoux, Godelier adds an important element to the scholarly conversation on bridewealth by highlighting the contradictions inherent in bridewealth-exchange, though Godelier focuses on the inherent symbolic instability of that prestation.126

Critiques of Marxist Interpretations of Marriage Gifts In adopting a structuralist approach to marriage, these neo-Marxists run the risk of committing the same errors for which Lévi-Strauss and his followers have been critiqued. They largely avoid this problem, however, by criticizing and reformulating the work of Lévi-Strauss themselves. Both Meillassoux and Godelier have rejected certain features of Lévi-Strauss’s exchangist view of marriage, just as they have adopted others. Godelier, of course, criticizes the universalizing fashion in which Lévi-Strauss characterizes the exchange of women in marriage. Meillassoux has faulted Lévi-Strauss’s notion of reciprocity as “intuitive” and his application of it as unscientific.127 He takes to task other structuralists for applying it to “societies in which reciprocity does not operate” and for extending this notion even “to relations of exploitation.”128 It is this ideological and analytical focus on exploitation and relations of power that gives the work of neo-Marxists a very different color from that of structuralists even when they do interpret marriage as the exchange of women by men. For they do not see the latter as something “natural,” but intead as exploitative, a feature that is central to both of their analyses and stems directly from Marx himself, who believed that women were the first oppressed social class.129 126

127 128 129

The ideas of Bourdieu and Louis Althusser are relevant here. Bourdieu posited that there is an inherent “misrecognition” involved in ritual. Writing on gift-exchange specifically, he states: “. . . because the operation of gift exchange presupposes (individual and collective) misrecognition (méconnaissance) of the reality of the objective ‘mechanism’ of the exchange, a reality which an immediate response brutally exposes: the interval between gift and counter-gift is what allows a pattern of exchange that is always liable to strike the observer and also the participants as reversible, i.e., both forced and interested, to be experienced as irreversible” (Outline of a Theory, 6). Althusser’s notion of “oversight” is similar: the “blindness” and the “oversight” of ritual or practice “lie in this misunderstanding, between what it produces and what it sees, in this ‘substitution,’ which Marx elsewhere calls a ‘play on words’ (Wortspiel) that is necessarily impenetrable to its author” (Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, 24). See also Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, 82–88, 114–117. Meillassoux, Maidens, Meal, and Money, 66. Ibid., 66. Ibid., 66.

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Though Godelier and Meillassoux cannot be accused of androcentrism, the work of the latter has been faulted on other grounds. His assessment that control of bridewealth by elders serves as a major way of asserting their domination over young men has been called naïve and egocentric, in that “it reduces a system of relations to an epiphenomenon of the voluntaristic and subjective calculations of elders.”130 Comaroff also sees this analysis as “reducing marriage exchanges to an expression of intergenerational conflict and the simple logic of dominance and, secondly, . . . conflating the roles of elder and father.”131 While these criticisms are valid ones, Meillassoux’s observations that marriage prestations might be linked to the formation of social classes and to the reproduction of social structures are at the very least intriguing. Such ideas are similar to those of Godelier regarding the relationship between bridewealth and the development of potlatch societies, a fact that is in itself suggestive. Nonetheless, Meillassoux’s claim that such class formation is achieved through the accumulation of bridewealth payments is contradicted by the work of Goody, who argues instead that bridewealth has a levelling function economically, a contention that will be examined in detail later. In addition, neither Godelier nor Meillassoux go as far with their work on marriage payments as they might. Godelier’s work is firmly rooted in his research on the Baruya and Papua New Guinea, and that of Meillassoux in his research on certain West African groups. Neither one looks at the issue of marriage gifts more broadly, and so many questions are left unanswered. For example, what is the relationship between marriage gifts other than bridewealth – dowry, for instance – and the development and reproduction of social structure? Are different sorts of marriage payments associated with different types of social structures? Godelier and Meillassoux are silent on these issues.

The Comparative Study of Marriage Gifts The foregoing discussion makes abundantly clear that few scholars have examined marriage gifts with an eye to comparative issues – for example, why one finds different types of prestations in different societies, how one type of marriage gift functions as compared with other gifts, and other related questions. Instead, anthropologists have largely focused their analyses on either bridewealth or dowry – and normally on the former – or on marriage 130 131

Comaroff, “Introduction,” 22. Ibid., 24.

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prestations in only one society or region, leaving broader comparative questions unanswered. This is not true of all scholars, however. There are two who have made noteworthy attempts to explain why some societies give certain marriage gifts and not others. One of these is the functionalist anthropologist Melford Spiro.132 Spiro distinguishes between four types of prestations, dowry and dower, bridewealth and groomwealth. As was discussed in the Introduction, the first two consist of property that is brought to a union, dowry being provided by the family of the bride, and dower by that of the groom. Bridewealth, on the other hand, involves property given to the wife’s family or kin group by the family of the husband, and groomwealth property given to the husband’s family by that of the wife. With these latter two, the property is not brought into the marriage to be used by the new couple, as it is with dowry and dower.133 In an analysis that is rooted, and perhaps overly so, in his research on the Burmese, Spiro explains the incidence and distribution of these prestations in terms of cost-benefit analysis. He writes: “These costs and benefits comprise two broad categories – material (economic), and social (prestige); whether one or the other, they may be actual (inherent in marriage) or potential (a possible consequence of marriage).”134 Thus, marriage prestations only occur where one party is disadvantaged by marriage, whether the bride, the groom, the bride’s family, or the groom’s family. Bridewealth exists, then, where the bride’s grouping loses access to her “productivity and/or reproductivity,” and is thereby disadvantaged by her marriage.135 Dowry, on the other hand, occurs where the groom himself is disadvantaged by the marriage. While Spiro’s explanation might work for some societies, his simple – or simplistic – economistic approach does not work well for others.136 Even with many of those to which his schema might seem to apply prima facie, upon second glance it only raises further questions. For example, Spiro would explain the existence of dowry in northern India in light of the hypergamy that is also associated with that society: because the bride’s family is of lower

132 133

134 135 136

See Spiro, “Marriage Payments,” 89–115, and Kinship and Marriage in Burma, 192–209. Groomwealth is quite rare cross-culturally. See note 97, as well as Spiro, “Marriage Payments,” 90–91, and Comaroff, “Introduction,” 4. Though “dower” is somewhat rare, as well, Spiro argues that dower is often misclassified as either dowry or bridewealth. Goody refers to “dower” as “indirect dowry,” a usage I have adopted here. Spiro’s term is problematic because it does not distinguish between property brought into the marriage by the husband (dower, strictly speaking) and property given by the husband to the wife (indirect dowry). Spiro, “Marriage Payments,” 107. Spiro, “Marriage Payments,” 112. See Comaroff, “Introduction,” 5–7, for examples of the latter.

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status than the groom’s, the former must endow their daughter with property at marriage in order to compensate the groom for marrying a lower-status woman. Yet virilocality is the norm in that society, as well, as is at least some degree of patrilineality,137 and one wonders then why the groom’s disadvantage is not tempered by that of the bride’s family – or why hypergamy even occurs to begin with. After all, the groom could marry a woman of the same social rank and thus eliminate his disadvantage in “marrying down.” In addition, one finds dowry, too, among South Indians, who tend to marry isogamously. For what, then, are South Indian grooms being compensated? Is it the fact that women in the upper strata of Indian society, those strata in which dowry is most emphasized, do not contribute as greatly to household production as do women in most African societies,138 burdening their husbands by having to provide for them? If so, that fact only raises the question of why it is that Indian women tend to contribute less to production than their African counterparts in the first place. Furthermore, one wonders how Spiro would explain the fact that in most dowry-exchanging societies, women receive back their dowries in the case of divorce, and that in many societies, even among the lower strata in India, husbands contribute to their wives’ dowries in the form of indirect dowry payments. With all of this in mind, one can only conclude that the simple cost-benefit analysis of Spiro cannot account for the complex interrelationship between marriage gifts and other variable social features, such as mode of production and patterns of social stratification, and is thus inadequate for explaining the distribution of different types of marriage gifts cross-culturally.139

Jack Goody and the Comparative Study of Marriage Gifts This brings us at last to the work of Jack Goody. Goody is a prominent British anthropologist who taught for many years at Cambridge University. He was a student of Meyer Fortes’ and, like Fortes, did fieldwork in West Africa, researching such groups as the Gonja and LoDagaba in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Unsurprisingly, Goody’s early work was quite strictly functionalist, and it retained a functionalist bent throughout his career. In the 1970’s, however, 137

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For example, dowries do not include land in northern India, and so land is passed down through the male line. See Tambiah, “Dowry, Bridewealth,” 68, and Sharma, Women, Work, and Property, 13–15. More on this later. However, Harrell and Dickey argue against a correlation between the giving of dowry and female productivity (“Dowry Systems,” especially 109–111). See also Comaroff, “Introduction,” 4–7 for a critique of Spiro’s schema.

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Goody became interested in different sorts of issues than those normally explored by functionalists – issues of social change, of development, and of comparison. Among these, his work on systems of marriage figures prominently.140 In 1973, he published a short book with Stanley J. Tambiah entitled Bridewealth and Dowry, his contribution to which was called, “Bridewealth and Dowry in Africa and Eurasia.” The title itself is a demonstration of the provocative turn Goody’s work would take over the course of the next twenty-five years, for no traditional functionalist, and in fact few anthropologists, would endeavor to compare marriage gifts over such immense and widelyranging areas as Africa and Eurasia. And this work was only the first, the briefest, and the most narrowly focused of several comparative studies that Goody would go on to produce. In Bridewealth and Dowry, Goody argues that since those prestations “involve the transmission of property at marriage,” they “must always be seen in the context of the wider movement of property and its exploitation for productive and other social purposes.”141 In terms of how these prestations should be defined, Goody says, “Dowry can be seen as a type of premortem inheritance to the bride, bridewealth as a transaction between the kin of the groom and the kin of the bride.”142 Goody also deals with a third type of transaction, which he calls “indirect dowry,” concerning which he writes: . . . [I]n a good number of societies in Europe and Asia, the marriage prestations are made by the groom or his kin, and are consequently often classified as bridewealth (or brideprice). But the ultimate recipient of these gifts is the bride and not her kin. It is true that the gifts from the groom sometimes go first to the girl’s father, who may indeed take a cut . . . but the bulk goes to the bride herself and thus forms part of a joint (or sometimes separate) conjugal fund rather than a circulating societal one. Rather than employ the misleading term bridewealth . . . I would refer to such transactions as ‘indirect dowry.’143

Goody goes on to provide an interpretation of bridewealth that draws heavily on the functionalists; he sees that prestation as transferring rights to the husband (and his lineage) and relates the size of the payment to the “quantum of rights transferred.”144 He thus associates larger payments with patrilineal 140

141 142 143 144

Also noteworthy is his work on literacy, see Logic of Writing; Interface; Power of the Written; and others. Goody, “Bridewealth and Dowry,” 1. Ibid., 1. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 3.

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systems. Bridewealth, he says, “passes from the kin of the groom to those of the bride; it forms a societal fund, a circulating pool of resources, the movement of which corresponds to the rights over spouses, usually women.”145 Dowry, on the other hand, as part of a “familial or conjugal fund,” is “part and parcel of the transfer of familial property, but a process of transfer that includes women as well as men.”146 In all of this work, and then in greater detail in Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain and in the rather sarcastically titled The Oriental, the Ancient, and the Primitive: Systems of Marriage and Family in the Pre-Industrial Societies of Eurasia, Goody presents a novel interpretation of differences in marriage gifts, and one that follows directly from his observation that dowry serves as a mode of inheritance in those societies in which it is present. The latter point is an important one, for dowry is not present in most societies; it is in fact far rarer than bridewealth, and more rare even than brideservice, where the groom serves his father-inlaw to receive his daughter as bride.147 Dowry is found in less than 10 percent of the world’s societies, while bridewealth is found in roughly half.148 According to Goody, this distribution is far from random, and instead correlates with certain social features: mode of production, patterns of inheritance, and level of social stratification.149 Here he focuses on differences between sub-Saharan Africa and the major societies of Eurasia. In sub-Saharan Africa, hoe agriculture is the norm, the plow not having been used before European colonization. Because the hoe cannot produce high yields per acre, and because land is abundant, one finds extensive rather than intensive agriculture. This system of agriculture requires a great deal of labor, and so women’s labor is heavily utilized, and land ownership (where it is present) is often corporate – that is, land is collectively owned by the lineage rather than by individuals or nuclear families. Herds, too, may be collectively owned. Relatedly, inheritance is homogenous, or sex-linked: men inherit from men, and women from women. This is the case whether the group is patrilineal, matrilineal, or even bilateral.150 Inheritance, too, tends toward the collateral; if an heir is needed, one looks sideways to male members of the same generation, to a brother, for 145 146 147 148

149

150

Ibid., 17. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 50. See Chapter 1 for more on brideservice. Ibid., 50, and also Schlegel and Eloul, “Marriage Transactions: Labor,” 291–309, especially 295. The latter argument is utilized and developed by Schlegel and Eloul, “Marriage Transactions: Labor.” Goody, Production and Reproduction, 7.

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instance; vertical inheritance, where inheritance goes from father to son, is not emphasized. The use of extensive agriculture relates to two other important characteristics. The first of these is that because labor requirements are high, this form of agriculture encourages polygyny. In much of sub-Saharan Africa, men are responsible for tending livestock, while women are in fact the ones primarily responsible for agricultural work, and so having more wives means more hands to work the fields. Second, extensive agriculture with the hoe does not lead to large surpluses, and without surpluses, socioeconomic stratification remains minimal. The amount of wealth held by one individual or even one lineage does not vary greatly. Among groups using traditional farming methods, one finds “relatively equal holdings, at least in acephalous (‘tribal’) societies.”151 “Even in a centralized society in Africa,” Goody writes, “the variance is not great; and perhaps of greatest significance is the fact that there were no ‘landless labourers’, no ‘rural proletariat.’”152 In the major societies of Eurasia, however, the invention of the plow and of large-scale irrigation techniques led to a very different sort of agricultural system. The maximum yield per acre of the plow is much greater than with the hoe, and so fewer hands are generally required.153 Yet, where one finds the plow, one normally finds draft animals, and perhaps related to a general pattern of male dominance in pastoral activities, men are typically the primary agricultural laborers where plow-based agriculture is utilized.154 This technology, with the higher yields it affords, leads to various social changes: it allows for population expansion, and thus can lead to scarcity of land;155 it allows for surpluses, which lead to the accumulation of both wealth and land in the hands of some people over others; and it encourages, or is at least associated with, the ownership of land and other property by nuclear families rather than by corporate family groups. Ownership of land by nuclear families, in turn, leads to an emphasis on vertical rather than collateral inheritance. Increasing concentration of land, where some own more and others less – or 151 152 153 154

155

Goody, “Bridewealth and Dowry,” 23. Ibid., 24. Goody, Production and Reproduction, 20. Female labor is not necessarily uncommon among the lower classes, however. See Sharma, Women, Work, and Property, 29, 92. Goody, Production and Reproduction, 20. This runs counter to the argument of Ester Boserup that population expansion is what leads to technological invention (Conditions of Agricultural Growth). See also Maisels, Emergence of Civilization, 31–39. While I agree with Goody on this matter, it is clear that technological advancement and population growth are to at least some degree in a symbiotic relationship with each other.

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potentially no land at all – directly results in class stratification, and is thus a major ingredient in the development of complex societies.156 In Goody’s view, the distribution of bridewealth versus dowry relates directly to these differing systems of agricultural production and social organization. Bridewealth as a prestation fits with a system of extensive agriculture and corporate land ownership in various ways. In many African societies, bridewealth consists of cattle or other livestock; it never consists of land. Therefore, one man’s marriage does not affect the land ownership of the lineage. Furthermore, the entire lineage may benefit from the additional labor provided by a male member’s new wife. Also, the bridewealth that is received upon the marriage of the daughters of a lineage is used to provide bridewealth for its sons. This circulation of bridewealth, therefore, does not concentrate wealth but in fact distributes wealth through the lineage, just as it brings in wives and their labor to compensate for the loss of labor that occurs when female members of the lineage wed. Even the lineage with many daughters, who may potentially accumulate wealth in cattle when they marry, simultaneously loses laborers for its land, and the lineage with many wives might have many laborers, but simultaneously loses wealth in cattle. As Goody notes, “. . . it is essential to stress that in economic terms bridewealth has a levelling function . . . By entering into marriage alliances, bridewealth achieves a double dispersal of property. Not only do cattle pass in the opposite direction to brides, they also bring in additional children who will divide whatever remains” when they marry.157 This kind of circulating marriage fund, conversely, has no real place in a society without corporate land ownership; a marriage gift that homogenizes is of little value in a system where social stratification is pervasive, and the accumulation of wealth strongly desired. It is in such systems where one finds dowry. Dowry is a gift associated with the nuclear family, with vertical inheritance, and especially with stratification – both socioeconomic and otherwise. In complex societies, families wish to maintain their wealth and status and that of their children. This leads to monogamy and smaller families, for large families drain a family’s resources and may necessitate the division of the estate into parcels of land too small to support a family. In most complex societies, sons can inherit directly from their fathers at their death, but daughters inherit in another way, one that allows them to maintain their status even after marriage.158 By providing their daughter with a 156 157 158

Goody, Production and Reproduction, 20. Ibid., 13. Harrell and Dickey have connected dowry not just with status but with status displays in complex societies. See “Dowry Systems.”

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dowry, parents can attract a suitable male to marry her, and thereby protect both her social standing and their own.159 Furthermore, in an agricultural system where women do not generally contribute to production,160 dowry forms part of a conjugal fund that helps establish the new couple.161 In the case of divorce or childless widowhood, the dowry also ensures that the woman will have a fund to provide for herself, for a woman normally maintains the right of ownership over her dowry; the husband merely holds the right of usufruct over it until it passes to their children, or it reverts to the wife in case of divorce. Goody tests his theses with empirical, statistical analysis.162 Using the data in George Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas, he checks for positive associations between such cultural traits as diverging devolution, where both sons and daughters inherit (the latter either directly or through dowry) family property, and monogamy; diverging devolution and plow agriculture; and polygyny and female agricultural work. The results of this analysis on the whole strongly support Goody’s theories, and add a demographic element to his already diverse methodology. As this summary makes clear, Goody’s work has a strong functionalist element, and is characterized as functionalist by some anthropologists.163 But there are others who call his work Marxist, a fact that is unsurprising in light of its materialist focus and attention to mode of production and social stratification.164 Goody is less influenced by structuralism, but does share with structuralists an interest in marriage as alliance. Either way, he rejects the stark contrast between “descent theory” and “alliance theory” that, for at least three decades, was so often drawn in anthropological studies of marriage, attributing this divide to a failure on the part of anthropologists to differentiate between types of social systems. He asserts that “it is significant that so-called ‘descent theorists’ have generally worked with systems of homogeneous devolution and the ‘alliance theorists’ with systems of diverging devolution.”165 Goody, then, is self-conscious in blending different approaches and methodologies in his work on marriage and marriage gifts. 159 160

161 162 163 164

165

Ibid., 20. Ester Boserup, too, connects dowry with agricultural systems where women’s contribution to labor is relatively small. See Woman’s Role, but also see Harrell and Dickey, who deny this connection (“Dowry Systems,” 109–111). Ibid., 6. He does this primarily in Production and Reproduction. Such as Comaroff, “Introduction,” 4–11. See, for example, Peletz, “Kinship Studies,” 357, where he discusses “Goody’s modified Marxist perspective.” Responses to Goody’s work will be discussed in greater detail later. Goody, Production and Reproduction, 22. See also “Bridewealth and Dowry,” 34–38.

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Case Studies: Africa: The Nuer of North-Central Africa, the Tallensi and Gonja of West Africa, and the Lovedu of Southeastern Africa166 The above offers only a brief summary of Goody’s views regarding the relationship between marriage gifts and such social features as mode of production or level of social stratification. Examining several case studies will make evident some of the more nuanced points of his argument, in addition to illustrating how that argument may be applied to individual societies. As was stated above, Goody has done extensive fieldwork in Africa, and his theses on bridewealth are primarily based on the societies of that continent. It is nonetheless valuable to turn to a few of these societies in order to place Goody’s theses in more specific cultural contexts. I begin with the Nuer of Sudan, not because Goody treats them at any length in his works but because several of their customs relating to bridewealth were described above, and because they are in many ways a paradigmatic case for functionalist conceptions of bridewealth and marriage in Africa.167 The Nuer are an acephalous168 group that not only practices but privileges the pastoral lifestyle. Though they do practice some horticulture, mainly with millet, they see farming as secondary to pastoralism – an unpleasant but necessary supplement to the herding of cattle.169 Cattle, which are owned by extended families,170 have many uses among the Nuer, and one of these is in providing bridewealth. Though some Nuer tribes have more cattle than others, cattle “are everywhere evenly distributed. Hardly any one is entirely without them, and no one is very rich.”171 Evans-Pritchard continues: Although cattle are a form of wealth that can be accumulated, a man never possesses many more beasts than his byre will hold, because as soon as his herd is large enough he, or one of his family, marries. The herd is thereby reduced to two or three beasts and the next few years are spent in repairing its losses. Every household goes through these alternating periods of poverty and comparative wealth. Marriages and epidemics prevent accumulation of 166

167

168 169 170 171

My treatment of these groups will be more synchronic than those on North India and ancient Babylonia later, not because these African groups are without histories or because their practices were unchanging, but merely because their cultural histories are much more difficult to reconstruct because of the absence of written records in these societies. For a treatment of changes that have more recently occurred in Nuer conceptions of kinship and marital practices, see Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas, and “Identity and Substance,” 55–72. That is, they lack any centralized state or leadership structure. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer, 80. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 20.

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cattle and no disparity in wealth offends the democratic sentiment of the people.172

The Nuer are organized according to a complex lineage system comprising minimal, minor, major, and maximal lineages, and into clans. Yet these divisions are unimportant for land ownership: “[t]here is enough land for everybody on the Nuer scale of cultivation and consequently questions of tenure do not arise.”173 The Nuer farm using the hoe and do not practice crop rotation; once the land near their homestead is exhausted, they merely change the site of their homestead. Evans-Pritchard summarizes the Nuer agricultural system as follows: “(1) [the] Nuer cultivate only enough grain for it to be one element in their food-supply and not enough to live on it alone; (2) . . . with their present climate and technology considerable increase in horticulture would be unprofitable; and (3) . . . the dominance of the pastoral value over horticultural interests is in accord with oecological relations which favour cattle husbandry at the expense of farming.”174 Even this brief summary of Nuer society makes clear that the Nuer are an unstratified group practicing subsistence agriculture. The Nuer are polygynous and patrilineal, and bridewealth functions, among other ways, to transfer, or mark the transfer, perhaps, of a woman from her natal lineage to that of her husband, and to affiliate the children she bears to the line of her husband. From Evans-Pritchard’s description, it is also clear that the transfer of bridewealth has the very levelling effect of which Goody spoke: any accumulation of cattle is dispersed by the paying of bridewealth. The features of Nuer society spoken of here are found, too, among many other acephalous, patrilineal groups in sub-Saharan Africa, even those that are geographically quite remote from the Nuer. It would be impossible to list all of these, of course, but a useful example may be found in the Tallensi of Ghana, another acephalous group with agnatic lineages. As one would expect, this group does differ from the Nuer in certain important ways: they have (non-hereditary) chiefs, while Nuer society essentially lacks this position;175 they are sedentary (as compared with the semi-sedentary lifestyle of the Nuer) and place less emphasis on pastoralism; and their society may perhaps have more bilateral elements.176 Nonetheless, one finds many similarities 172 173 174 175

176

Ibid., 20. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 81. There is the so-called “leopard-skin chief ” (kuaar twac) among the Nuer, though that position has a primaily ritual function and Evans-Pritchard expresses some reservation about translating the term as “chief ” (The Nuer, 172–173). Fortes, Web of Kinship, 4, 321.

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with the Nuer. As with the Nuer, bridewealth is necessary for the formation of marriage among the Tallensi,177 polygyny is common, and wives have an important role to play in household production.178 Though the Tallensi do not stress pastoralism as greatly as do the Nuer, gifts of livestock are still the preeminent form of bridewealth. These gifts transfer many rights to the husband over his wife; indeed, as was stated earlier, the Tallensi even speak of men as “owning” their wives.179 In addition, Tallensi society, like that of the Nuer, is essentially unstratified, at least socioeconomically. Though land is under the jurisdiction of the lineage, Fortes states: [t]here is no intense competition for the possession of land. Owing to technical and economic limitations there is no inducement to accumulate land. Wealth – that is, property acquired by saving, or in exchange for surplus grain or cash – consists pre-eminently of livestock; and the use to which livestock is principally put is in acquiring wives, performing sacrifices, celebrating funerals, and, to a much lesser extent, competing for certain politico-ritual offices. Such wealth is, therefore, really equivalent to provision for delayed consumption or special forms of consumption arising out of ritual obligations or differences in status. It has no durable productive value. Compared with livestock, the purchase of farmland is insignificant as a form of investment, if such it can be called. Indeed, over most of Taleland the buying and selling of farm-land is ritually prohibited.180

Fortes even goes so far as to say that “Tale standards of wealth are extremely low.”181 Thus, one sees borne out again Goody’s arguments concerning the connection between bridewealth, social stratification, and mode of production.182 According to Goody’s argument, geography should be of secondary importance to social features in determining the form of marital prestations in that society. An example that demonstrates this is the Gonja, also of Ghana. Goody has himself done fieldwork among the Gonja, and his wife, anthropologist Esther Goody, has researched them extensively. The Gonja, though geographically not very far from the Tallensi, present a very different case from that group. Before European colonization, the Gonja state was an 177

178 179

180 181 182

Though Comaroff questions this fact, I find his argument unconvincing (“Introduction,” 19–20). Fortes, Web of Kinship, 65, 101–102. Ibid., 103. It is clear from his account, however, that wives do have expectations for their husbands and do sometimes leave them; see, ibid., 104–109. Ibid., 82–83. One is reminded here of the Israelite concept of the nah[ălah. Ibid., 82. The Tallensi, too, farm with the hoe (ibid., 337).

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important one in West Africa, occupying almost 15,000 square miles. Even today, one of its three major social groups is the royal or ruling one, the others being commoners and Muslims.183 The “ruling estate,” as it is called, is distributed among the different political divisions of the area, each of which has a chief as its head. These positions are not hereditary, but are competitive among the ruling estate of that district. In a similar fashion, the paramount of all the Gonja, the supreme chief or king as it were, is appointed from among the divisional chiefs. There are also certain offices, mainly ritual or ceremonial, that are held specifically by commoners. 184 Gonja society, then, is comprised of at least three classes, a fact that differentiates them from the Nuer and the Tallensi. Another is that “descent groups are of little importance” to the Gonja.185 In fact, the Gonja are bilateral: while agnatic descent is important in determining eligibility to the highest political offices, domestic relations are organized bilaterally, with both matrilineal and patrilineal ties playing important roles. As Esther Goody states: “The institutions which proved to be fundamental to domestic and kinship relations [among the Gonja] are all, in some way dependent upon both parents.”186 Unsurprisingly, then, marriage does not effect the transfer of rights over a woman and the children borne from the union to the husband’s lineage, as it would in a patrilineal system. In fact, “the kin of each spouse have rights in the offspring of a marriage.”187 Polygyny is found among the Gonja, but is rarer than among many other African groups, partially because they do not practice widow inheritance, or levirate marriage, as many groups do.188 Also in contrast with many groups, the Gonja consider farming to be men’s work. While women certainly contribute to agricultural labor, it is men who do most farm work, which is hoe-based, and involves regular crop rotation. In addition, men also trap and hunt, but herding is not as important as among some groups.189 One feature that the Gonja do share with many other African groups is that there is little economic stratification among them, primarily because farming with the hoe precludes the accumulation of large surpluses. Esther Goody 183

184 185 186 187 188 189

In the past, there were also slaves in the society. There were then, and are now, some “strangers.” See Goody, “Over-Kingdom of Gonja,” 186; and Esther N. Goody, Contexts of Kinship, 9. Esther Goody, Contexts of Kinship, 5, 8–9; Goody, “Over-Kingdom of Gonja,” 188. Goody, Contexts of Kinship, 1. Ibid., 306. Ibid., 105. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 20–21, 24.

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writes: “By and large the impact of economic differentiation was slight. Nearly everyone depended on cultivation of the land by the hoe and the limited technology was associated with a limited difference in styles of life.”190 Though there exist some differences in wealth between the social classes, these are not great and “on the whole wealth is not nowadays a criterion by which the three estates may be distinguished in this poor central area.”191 Relatedly, land ownership does not distinguish social groups, since the area is sparsely populated enough that land is readily available for farming.192 Another aspect of Gonja society that militates against the existence among them of social strata is that members of these strata intermarry “with great frequency.”193 Thus the Gonja classes are in no way castes. How, then, do all of these features affect their system of marriage payments? According to Goody’s schema, as well as the observations of other anthropologists, one would expect bridewealth payments to be low or even nonexistent in light of the bilateral nature of the society and the unimportance within it of descent groups. The fact that men are the primary agricultural laborers also would contribute to this expectation. Conversely, one does find social differentiation, a feature more associated with dowry systems.194 This differentiation, however, is not socioeconomically rooted, and so one returns again to bridewealth. In fact, bridewealth, and limited bridewealth at that, is what one finds. Bridewealth is variable, with royals giving more than commoners, but does not consist of livestock. Instead, the minimum amount for a marriage to be recognized is the “presentation by the groom’s representative of twelve kola nuts and twelve shillings.”195 Among royals, 500 kola nuts are often given to the bride’s kin on top of this.196 In addition, there are courting gifts given by the prospective groom, but these are given directly to the girl of choice during the period of his wooing her, when the two might become lovers.197 As stated earlier, such a pattern of low 190 191

192 193 194

195 196 197

Ibid., 18. Ibid., 24. This may well have changed since the 1950s and 1960s when Goody researched this group, but that fact would be superfluous to this analysis, which is based on social differences brought about by traditional modes of living. Of course, the Gonja state may well have been wealthier before colonization, when raiding was practised and trade caravans passed through the region, but exploration of whether or not such was so is beyond the purview of this book. See Jack Goody, “Over-Kingdom of Gonja,” 183–184. Esther Goody, Contexts of Kinship, 20. Ibid., 11. Bridewealth is common in societies with two social classes, but relatively rare in those with three or more. See Schlegel and Eloul, “Marriage Transactions: Labor,” 297. Esther Goody, Contexts of Kinship, 94. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 65–68.

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or unimportant bridewealth payments is not uncommon in both bilateral and matrilineal systems.198 An issue that bears addressing is the disputes among anthropologists over what in particular characterizes an African society, or any society perhaps, as “stratified.” We saw that while the Gonja have at least three social classes, they are relatively unstratified socioeconomically. One finds similar cases among other African groups, including the Lovedu, or Lobedu (or Balobedu), a Bantu people of South Africa. Many of the Bantu peoples have a royal line, and this is true also of the Lovedu, although in contrast to other Bantu groups, their society is always headed by a queen. Lovedu territory is divided into various political units, each of which is led by a headman. Many of these headmen descend from an original line of Lovedu that migrated south from what is now Zimbabwe several centuries ago and incorporated some of the native Sotho to form what is today the Lovedu people. Thus the group is composed of ruling and non-ruling classes. Despite being ruled by a queen, the Lovedu are patrilineal and marriage is patrilocal.199 The patrilineal nature of their society is not thoroughgoing, however; some have questioned the importance of lineages among them, and even of the appropriateness of the lineage model to the Southern Bantu as a whole.200 Moreover, Eileen Krige states that among the Lovedu, “cognates, agnates, and affines are not segregated into distinctive groups; each category overlaps to such an extent with the others, through cross-cousin marriage and other factors, that both structurally and functionally it is the bilateral groups that are significant.”201 As this statement implies, cross-cousin marriage is important among this group, and Edmund Leach, as part of a larger argument about the relationship between hypergamy and cross-cousin marriage, argued that hypergamy is present among the Lovedu, with wife-givers being lower in status than wifetakers – that is, the husband’s side is of higher social status than the wife’s.202 198

199 200

201 202

It is for this reason that I do not include an example of a specifically matrilineal system here. In addition, the ancient Israelites were patrilineal, and so it is patrilineal societies that concern us more. Whether or not postexilic Judean society was patrilineal or bilateral will be discussed in Chapter 5, though again, because dowry was clearly predominent in the Second Temple period, bilateral or matrilineal bridewealth-exchanging societies are of less interest here. Krige, “Property, Cross-Cousin Marriage,” 155–157. Kuper, Wives for Cattle, 49–50, 74. According to Kuper, Krige no longer thinks it appropriate to speak of lineages among the Lovedu, though she does use this term in the works I cite here. Krige, “Lovedu of the Transvaal,” 56. Kuper, Wives for Cattle, 73; and Leach, in Chapter 3 (“The Structural Implications of Matrilateral Cross-Cousin Marriage”) of Rethinking Anthropology, 95–99. (This chapter is a reprint of an article originally published in 1951 in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.)

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Eileen Krige strenuously objected to this characterization, stating that “there are no ranked local groups in Lovedu society”; and “Lobedu society is, moreover, not a stratified society though the royal lineage enjoys great prestige.”203 To the contrary, status and wealth “relate to the personal position of the individuals and bear no relation to any class structure in Lovedu society.”204 “Part of the disagreement” between Leach and Krige, writes Kuper, “seems to hinge upon different notions of what constitutes ‘stratification.’ Among the Lovedu economic differences are not great, and wealth in itself is not sought after . . . Yet there are important differences in status and power.”205 While Kuper is certainly right that stratification may be defined differently, for the purposes of Goody’s schema, and of this discussion, it is distinctions in wealth that are of primary importance. And on that score, Lovedu society is characterized mainly by subsistence, their economy being one of mixed hoe-based agriculture and cattle-raising. Considering the juxtaposition of bilateralism, ruling and non-ruling social classes, and subsistence agriculture, one might expect bridewealth to be unimportant among the Lovedu, as it was among the Gonja, but this is in fact not the case. In fact, bridewealth is comprised of cattle payments and is quite important in Lovedu society. There are several likely reasons for this. The first is that the patrilineal elements in Lovedu society may be more prominent than among the Gonja; that this is so is hinted at by the presence of the custom of widow inheritance among the Lovedu, a feature associated with patrilineal societies. Also, Lovedu women are responsible for most agricultural work. Worth considering, too, may be the fact that while cattle may not be as important among the Lovedu as they are to other neighboring Bantu groups, it is still an important part of their society.206 Most important to understanding bridewealth among the Lovedu, however, might be the central role of bridewealth in personal relations. The concept of “cattle-linked” brother and sister is very important to this group. That is, if the bridewealth brought in for a sister is used to arrange a marriage for her brother, the two are linked, and he in fact is in debt to her. To alleviate this, he is expected to provide a daughter for his sister’s son to marry (in cross-cousin marriage). This idea is so important that if she has no son, then she herself will marry her brother’s daughter in what is referred to as “woman-woman marriage,” using bridewealth brought in by her own daughter.207 Bridewealth and cross-cousin 203 204 205 206 207

Krige, “Property, Cross-Cousin Marriage,” 164. Krige, “Asymmetrical Matrilateral Cross-Cousin Marriage,” 234–235. Kuper, Wives for Cattle, 73–74. On the “cattle complex” of the Bantu, see ibid., 10–13. Krige, “Property, Cross-Cousin Marriage,” 164–165. Woman-woman marriage is even practiced by the queen herself, who is regularly given girls to marry.

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marriage, then, work together among the Lovedu to perpetuate existing marriage patterns,208 and to cement the ties between brother and sister. In conclusion, the Lovedu case presents no special challenge to Goody’s schema, for the group is socioeconomically unstratified, practices hoe agriculture, emphasizes female productive labor, and though possibly lacking in a meaningful lineage structure, does have certain patrilineal features. What this case does demonstrate, though, is that a bridewealth system may take on features particular to a certain society, and that these features may be examined in conjunction with those cross-cultural characteristics emphasized by Goody, and with his comparative model as a whole.

Case Study: North India Having just examined four cases of bridewealth-giving societies, it is now reasonable to turn to a dowry-giving society, that of North India. North Indian society is itself composed of many different groups, whether linguistic, castebased, or otherwise, and so it is of course fallacious to conceive of North India as one would of a far more homogeneous and geographically limited group such as the Tallensi or even the Gonja. Nonetheless, because various researchers have found it appropriate to generalize about North Indian marital practices, and among them the giving of dowry, I will do the same here. Though Goody has himself done some fieldwork in North India (specifically, Gujarat) and writes on North Indian marriage in The Oriental, the Ancient, and the Primitive, it is appropriate to begin with the work of Stanley J. Tambiah, who wrote the second half of Bridewealth and Dowry, an important essay entitled, “Dowry and Bridewealth and the Property Rights of Women in South Asia.” Tambiah’s study is varied, examining inheritance patterns and marriage payments not only throughout India, but also in Sri Lanka and Burma, as well as analyzing conceptions regarding dowry and other marriage gifts in the traditional “Hindu” law codes.209 Tambiah does not concern himself with proving or even ascertaining the stratified nature of Indian society, but it quickly becomes clear that the customs relating to dowry in India, and especially in North India, are inextricably linked with the stratified nature of the society. This stratification is not a new 208 209

Kuper, Wives for Cattle, 75. The idea of Hinduism as a unified religion comparable to Christianity or Islam has been criticized of late. See King, Orientalism and Religion, especially chapter 5, “The modern myth of ‘Hinduism,’” 96–117. What Tambiah addresses are such Sanskrit legal texts as the Dharmashastras and Smritis. See Tambiah, “Dowry, Bridewealth,” 73–74, for a brief history of these texts.

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feature in the region, but one that has existed for millennia. For example, the Harappan culture (or “Indus civilization”) that flourished in Pakistan beginning in roughly 2300 bce has left evidence of such complex social features as writing, trade with areas as far-flung as Ur in Mesopotamia, the smelting of copper and bronze, the wheel, and the plow.210 By roughly 2200, this culture had spread into western and northern India, leaving evidence in many sites, and while the Harappans fell from dominance ca. 1900, those cultures that took their place, too, left evidence of pronounced social complexity. For example, there is much evidence that the plow was used in the later Vedic period (1000 to 600 BCE). Even more important is the development in this period of the still-extant Indian caste system.211 It is unsurprising, then, that such long-standing patterns of social stratification and complexity would influence Indian marital customs. As Tambiah states: The conception which is ideologically central in India eminently lends itself to hypergamy whereby a family of lower status but not necessarily inferior wealth attempts to raise its position and its prestige by contracting a superior marriage for its daughters and sisters. Here there is an exchange of status for wealth, and no doubt the dowry-givers can themselves get their return by demanding higher dowries from their own wife-givers. . .212

Looking specifically at North India, one finds that hypergamy is especially valued. It is the bride’s family that seeks out the groom for marriage, and not vice versa, and while both sides give gifts, it is the gifts from the bride’s family that are more numerous, more elaborate, and more expensive. “In the North Indian context, where hypergamous tendencies prevail,” writes Tambiah, “this asymmetry in payments serves to buttress the status superiority of the wife-takers over the wife-givers.”213 This superiority is shown, too, in the fact that wife-givers are expected to continuously give gifts and be generous hosts, though the wife-receivers refrain from intimate contact with their in-laws, 210

211

212 213

Randhawa, History of Agriculture in India, I: 130, 137–138, 156. See also Agrawal, Archaeology of India, 135–192, 265; Fairservis, Roots of Ancient India, 240–295; and Jha, Early India, 33–37. To what extent the Harappans engaged in international trade is a rather controversial subject, however; see Agrawal, Archaeology of India, 152, Fairservis, Roots, 296–298, and Jha, Early India, 37. Fairservis denies that they engaged in international trade in any consistent fashion, and Jha largely agrees, stating that there is some evidence of trade with West Asia, but that it “is not very impressive.” Randhawa, History of Agriculture, 308; Jha, Early India, 51–52, 56–58. The evidence provided by Dutta, Land System in Northern India, makes clear that pervasive stratification continued into the period of late antiquity. Tambiah, “Dowry, Bridewealth,” 64–65. Ibid., 95.

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“as that would smack of equality.”214 In addition, whatever gifts are given by the bridegroom’s family are for the bride’s use, constituting what Goody calls indirect dowry, because “the bride’s father makes it a point of honour not to receive anything in exchange [for the dowry and other gifts] other than the reflected glory of his son-in-law’s family, which will be higher than his own.”215 But what of families that cannot afford to lavish expensive gifts on their daughter’s husband and his family? As one might expect, the shape and value of marriage payments depends to a certain degree on the means and social class/caste of the families involved. While it is the dowry that is “publicly and ideologically and morally validated,” gifts from the bridegroom’s family to the bride’s family predominate among the poorer castes.216 Yet, because the latter type of gifts are seen as a “degraded” and “immoral” form of marriage prestation, there is always pressure to return these gifts as indirect dowry. As Tambiah puts it, wherever bridewealth “is given there is pressure on the bride’s parents to redirect it in part or full as dowry accompanying the bride to form the nucleus of her conjugal estate.”217 But who has ownership of the wife’s portion of the conjugal estate – the wife or her husband (and his family)? Tambiah writes that one of the main principles that supports the institution of dowry is that it “connotes female property or female right to property which is transferred at a woman’s marriage as a sort of pre-mortem inheritance.”218 Central to this is that upon the dissolution of the marriage, the wife takes with her the dowry property “which has always remained legally and formally in her possession.”219 That the woman continues to have the right of ownership over her dowry after marriage is asserted in numerous classical law codes, though the treatment of bridal property in these codes is fairly complex.220 As stated earlier, Goody, too, examines customs of marital gift exchange in North India. Goody treats Indian customs in detail in part II of The Oriental, the Ancient, and the Primitive, where he carefully examines how social divisions affect marital and other customs. This is especially the case in chapter six, “Marriage and the Family in Gujarat” (written with Esther Goody), and chapter seven, “The High and the Low.” In the first of these chapters, he looks 214 215 216 217 218 219 220

Ibid., 95–97. Ibid., 97. Ibid., 69, 71. See also Karve, Kinship Organisation in India, 132. Tambiah, “Dowry, Bridewealth,” 71. Ibid., 64. Ibid., 64. Ibid., 85–86. Some, however, have contested the idea that the wife does not in practice retain ownership, at least not in contemporary India. This issue will be discussed later.

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specifically at the village of Nandol in Gujarat, where he and his wife have done fieldwork. There are many points in his description where he addresses the extremely stratified nature of life in this village, for example: The orthodox hierarchy of the village consisted of Brahmins at the top, those specialists of ritual and literate activity, some few Rajput families from further North, the Patels who were the main farmer caste, the service castes such as Barbers, Goldsmiths, Potters and the like, then the main caste of landless laborers, the Thakorda, and finally the Harijan or ‘Untouchable’ castes. The nature of distribution of castes in a village or small town is of course not random but related to (not determined by) the nature of livelihood activities within the village and between village and town . . .221

Thus, one sees that there is unequal distribution of land among villagers, with some groups, the Patel caste especially, being major landowners, and other groups owning no land at all. The Patels also own many water buffalo, which they use “for milk, dung, and traction.”222 This is not to imply corporate land ownership, however, for these groups do not own land collectively; instead, it is a matter of different social strata, in this case social castes, being associated with and given access to different professions and different levels of wealth and social status, a fact that allows some groups to compete for and accumulate more land, wealth, and status.223 In terms of marriage, non-Muslim North Indians must marry outside their lineages.224 However, they do practice caste endogamy, “though occasionally a union may take place between a woman and a man of a higher group.”225 Goody’s discussion of marriage and marriage gifts in this region mirrors that of Tambiah to a great extent. One sees that dowry is the most important gift, but that there are gifts in the opposite direction. Most of these are what Goody calls indirect dowry, going from the groom’s family to the bride herself. In addition, Goody echoes Tambiah in stating that one finds more dowry and less indirect dowry among the upper castes, and less dowry and more indirect dowry among the lower castes. Yet Goody goes beyond Tambiah in discussing other marital features that relate to relative caste position, arguing that among the upper castes, one finds not only a greater emphasis upon dowry, but also condemnation of remarriage, prohibition of divorce, more complex domestic groups,226 more constraints upon female behavior, and adoption 221 222 223

224 225 226

Goody, The Oriental, the Ancient, 162. Ibid., 161–162. There is a well-known connection, too, between caste and ritual status, as the quote here implies. Ibid., 157. Ibid., 167. These are normally joint families, not the corporations of Africa.

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as a strategy of continuity when male heirs are wanting. Among the lower castes, one finds a more permissive attitude toward divorce and remarriage, more nuclear family households, fewer constraints on female behavior, and the levirate as a strategy of continuity when male heirs are lacking.227 These differences arise, in the case of the poorer groups, primarily out of necessity: members of the lower castes generally do not have the means to provide their daughters with large dowries, and because of this, women who find themselves widowed do not have this prestation to provide for themselves. Though remarriage is frowned upon culturally and also nullifies a woman’s right to the indirect dowry she was given at marriage – and often to other property that had come under her control – to those without large assets or holdings, remarriage lacks such monetary consequences and may be the best option available. Among some groups, whatever remarriage occurs will be with the dead husband’s brother, a practice condemned by traditional texts but more financially tenable for the poor than adoption, which may bring in an heir but also another mouth to feed. Similarly, complex family units exist “when economic factors favor such families.”228 This is normally when maintaining the family’s wealth relates to keeping family holdings intact. For poorer groups without landholdings, there is no impetus to maintain complex households with their inherent tensions, lack of flexibility, and greater need for resources (i.e., providing food and clothing for a larger number of individuals). Complex households also require more space, a luxury the poorer castes may not have available to them.

Case Study: Ancient Babylonia Because Goody’s work has a strongly historical component, and because the primary subject of this book is the premodern society (or societies) of ancient Palestine, it makes sense to shift attention at this point to examining the marriage customs of an ancient society. While Goody spends much less time discussing the customs of ancient Mesopotamia than those of Rome, ancient Egypt, or even ancient Israel,229 debates over the relative similarity or difference of ancient Israel’s religion and culture from those of Mesopotamia have long been a mainstay of biblical scholarship; thus, an examination of Mesopotamian customs regarding marital prestations, and an application of 227 228

229

Goody, The Oriental, the Ancient, 179–214, especially 182. Ibid., 213, where he quotes Mandelbaum, Human Fertility in India, 54. See also Shah, Household Division, on the relationship between caste/socioeconomic status and household complexity. Goody’s largely erroneous views on the marriage customs of ancient Israel will be discussed in the beginning of the next chapter.

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Goody’s approach to that region, are warranted. Mesopotamian social history is long and complex, however, and for the sake of facility, I will focus this treatment upon the laws and customs of Babylonia. There is no question that ancient Babylonia was a complex society. As early as the sixth millennium bce, Babylonian sites show signs that a complex mode of production was in the process of development. This is primarily at Choga Mami and Tell es-Sawwan, where evidence for artificial irrigation has been found, despite the sites’ being small.230 A few centuries later, the ‘Ubaid culture flourished in southern Mesopotamia, and was responsible for the construction of a series of sanctuaries at Eridu. In addition, this culture seems to have spread its influence throughout the area, possibly through taking control of the region’s already extant trade routes.231 The Uruk culture (ca. 4000–2900 bce) which succeeded the ‘Ubaid is associated with further developments: the use of the wheel, an increase in metal production, and “the development of stone-working for vessels.”232 Between ca. 3500 and 3200, the first written records appear, consisting of pictograms. A few centuries later, one finds Sumerian written in cuneiform. “At the same time,” writes Amélie Kuhrt, “there appear immense ceremonial complexes at the sanctuary sites of Eanna and Anu in Uruk: they are set on large platforms, with elaborate approaches and layouts, and some are built of stone.”233 Excavators have found similar constructions at other sites in the region dating to the same period. They have also found elaborately sculpted objects, as well as intricate stelae. And what of Goody’s all-important indicator, the plow? Because plows were constructed of wood, few if any material remains of the tool in its earliest forms have survived, and so it is difficult to know precisely when the first plows were used. Nonetheless, based on evidence from pictograms and drawings, it is clear that the plow was introduced in Mesopotamia well before 3000 bce.234 Kuhrt states: “What does this evidence add up to? The appearance of writing, the elaborate buildings, the use of imported materials, sophisticated art-works and the population increase reflected in the size of settlements, all signal the emergence of substantial urban communities with

230 231 232

233 234

Kuhrt, Ancient Near East, I:21. Ibid., I:22. Ibid., I:22–23. Some have argued that the Uruk phase coincides with the arrival of the Sumerians, though Kuhrt is not persuaded by this argument. See Kuhrt, ibid., I:23; Jones, Sumerian Problem; Oates, “Ur and Eridu,” 32–50; Roux, “Did the Sumerians Emerge?” 3–23; among others. Kuhrt, Ancient Near East, I:23. Hodges, Technology in the Ancient World, 83, 88–89.

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developed socio-economic structures. Nothing else can explain the materials, techniques and scale of buildings.”235 Thus, southern Mesopotamia showed myriad signs of social complexity more than one thousand years before the compilation of Hammurapi’s Code. This law code, together with the Laws of Eshnunna and the plethora of archaeological and literary evidence that exist from the third and second millennia, attest even further to a characteristic endemic to virtually all complex societies: social stratification. Mentioned in the law codes are several classes of individuals, among them the slave, the awīlum (or awīlu), the muškēnum (or muškēnu), and various types of temple functionaries.236 The awīlum is certainly a free person, and the term muškēnum denotes some relationship of dependence, in all probability royal, though what exactly these terms mean is a matter of some debate.237 Igor M. Diakonoff writes: In my opinion, OB society was divided (apart from slaves) into (a) people whose patriarchal family heads enjoyed full citizenship rights in the communities, including property rights to land and right of self-government; such men belonged under the jurisdiction of the community self-government organs; and (b) royal servants enjoying only the use of land allottments granted by the king on condition of service; áll [sic] the royal servants, from paterfamilias to minors, were under the patriarchal power of the king and under the jurisdiction of the royal administration. These two categories into which the society was subdivided were the “men”, awīlū, and the “prostrated in submission (sc. before the king)”, muškēnū. This explains both why the muškēnū are bracketed together with the palace, and why some of the most important crimes against the awīlū are not mentioned in the laws [which] were probably written for the royal courts of justice . . . such as murder of an awīlum or theft from such. . .238

Westbrook sees the matter rather differently: The difficulty is to know what [the terms muškēnum and awīlum] mean . . . As regards the first, the term muškēnum has been the subject of a long and controversial discussion. The whole question has been reviewed by Kraus, 235 236 237

238

Kuhrt, Ancient Near East, 25. For example, the šugītu, the nadītu, and the ugbabtu. See Diakonoff, “Structure of Old Babylonian Society,” 24–25, who cites some of the earlier scholarship; Westbrook, Old Babylonian Marriage Law, 67–68; Kuhrt, Ancient Near East, I:114; Roth, Law Collections, 58, 72–73. According to the latter there are, in addition to these two classes, three other classes of individuals mentioned in the Laws of Eshnunna “whose status is uncertain but who occupy a place outside of the usual social order: the ubaru, the napt[aru, and the mudû” (ibid., 58). Diakonoff, “Structure of Old Babylonian Society,” 25–26.

140 MARRIAGE GIFTS AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN ANCIENT PALESTINE whose view we share insofar as (i) muškēnum is a relative term and not the description of a separate fixed category of persons, (ii) when used in conjunction with ekallum, the intention is to contrast the palace not with a special class but with the rest of the population, and therefore (iii) warad muškēnim in CH 175(-6) is the slave of a private person, as opposed to a palace slave . . . The term awīlum is generally agreed to be used in three senses in CH: (i) a man (i.e. a person in general), (ii) a free man (as opposed to a slave), (iii) a nobleman.239

Neither of these viewpoints has risen to the status of consensus, and so the matter remains open.240 Regardless of how one understands these terms, however, it is clear that Babylonian society was divided into at least three strata: slaves; free persons; those connected with the palace, either as royals or as dependents; and, perhaps also, nobles. Implied in these categories is the issue of wealth and its uneven distribution throughout the society. While some slaves were foreign captives brought to Babylonia, a large number were sold into slavery, or sold themselves, in order to pay off debts, a fact that in itself demonstrates that wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few.241 The existence of usury in the society attests to this also.242 Though the issue of whether or not familial lands could be sold is a disputed one,243 it is clear nonetheless that individuals/families could accumulate land,244 which naturally constituted a major form of wealth in the region.245 The law codes, including those laws that deal with marriage gifts, too attest to individuals possessing differing levels of wealth, as do the marriage contracts themselves, matters that will become apparent in the discussion to follow. 239 240 241 242 243

244

245

Westbrook, Old Babylonian Marriage Law, 67. Kuhrt, Ancient Near East, I:114. Kuhrt, Ancient Near East, I:62; Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia, 75. See Silver, Economic Structures of Antiquity, 110–115, and Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia, 88. See Kuhrt, Ancient Near East, 60, 62, who cites relevant scholarship; Jakobson, “Rise of Landed Property,” 33–38; and Diakonoff, “Structure of Old Babylonian Society,” 17–20. The latter two argue that alienation of family property was very rare in the early periods. Silver offers some evidence for the accumulation of land in the hands of certain individuals in Larsa in the early second millennium, as well as in Nippur (Economic Structures, 188–189). One manner of accumulating land was through royal grant. See Kuhrt, Ancient Near East, I: 36; Diakonoff, “On the Structure,” 23. Sale documents clearly demonstrate, too, that orchards and houses could be sold, and thus accumulated. See Kuhrt, Ancient Near East, I:62. Although it seems that land was often inexpensive to purchase, because it was normally alienated only under duress, it seems likely that the low prices for land found in many deeds of sale may be explained by the unequal relationship between buyer (creditor) and seller (debtor) inherent in these transactions, as Jakobson has suggested. See Jakobson, “Rise of Landed Property,” especially 37.

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All of this evidence together demonstrates that Babylonia was a complex, stratified society from a very early period. By the time the Old Babylonian law codes of Eshnunna and Hammurapi were compiled in the Eighteenth century bce, the society had shown signs of complexity and stratification for roughly two millennia. Unsurprisingly, the complexity of the society is reflected in its marriage customs and laws. One finds in the laws of Eshnunna (LE) and Hammurapi (LH) numerous laws having to do with marriage and marriage gifts. These laws attest to the exchange of various types of gifts. LE does not mention dowry explicitly, but does mention bridewealth, which it calls terh}atu. This law code, like other codes of law, does not have as its purpose to delineate or describe what was normative marital custom, but rather to regulate what should occur in cases where typical patterns are breached or challenged by circumstance. This is clear in the sections dealing with marriage gifts; for example, one reads in LE 17–18: ¶17 Should a member of the awīlu-class [mār awīlim]246 bring the bridewealth [terh}atam] to the house of his father-in-law – if either (the groom or bride then) should go to his or her fate, the silver shall revert to its original owner. . . ¶18 If he marries her and she enters his house and then either the groom or the bride goes to his or her fate, he shall not take out all that he had brought, but only its excess shall he take.247

Westbrook, who interprets the law correctly, in my view, provides the following commentary on LE 17: Thus if an inchoate marriage is frustrated by the death of the bride or the groom, the terhatum is to be returned (by the bride’s father, who received it) to “its owner.” This will be the father of the groom if it is the latter who dies – he is termed “the son of the man” in the protasis to make this point clear – and presumably the groom himself if the bride dies (although it is possible that the father was still considered owner of the money that he had given his son for this purpose).248

This law, together with LE 18, not only demonstrates with what types of marital situations the law codes generally deal, but also provides us with 246

247 248

Westbrook renders this phrase in a more literal fashion . See Old Babylonian Marriage Law, 47, and following. Roth, Law Collections, 61. Westbrook, Old Babylonian Marriage Law, 47. This is in contrast to the interpretation of Roth, which is implicit in her translation of the latter part of the law: “[I]f either (the groom or bride then) should go to his or her fate, the silver shall revert to its original owner (i.e., the widower or his heir).”

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indirect but clear evidence regarding customary practice. From these two laws, we can infer that it was typical for the groom to bring bridewealth to his father-in-law, but that this fact alone was not enough to constitute marriage; instead it effected the intermediary state of betrothal or inchoate marriage.249 The parameters of inchoate marriage are sometimes hard to define, but Westbrook argues, using LE and LH, as well as other sources, that the status of inchoate marriage was one in which, vis-à-vis the bride’s parents, the groom had the right to perform the action(s) necessary to effect actual marriage.250 Vis-à-vis third parties, however, it was as if these actions had already been performed.251 This is why, during the period of inchoate marriage, both the bride’s parents and the groom can still keep the actual marriage from taking place,252 while sexual offenses committed with or against the bride during this period are punished in the same manner they would be if the actual marriage had already commenced.253 What action(s) effected the state of actual, rather than inchoate, marriage? From LE 18 and other laws, one can infer that it was normally the rite of in domum deductio, as Westbrook would say, although sexual intercourse alone may have been an alternative.254 Because the giving of bridewealth allowed the groom to perform the rites of consummation and gave him the standing of husband with relation to the woman in the eyes of third parties, Westbrook has concluded that the terh}atum gave the groom “the right to control over the bride.” Koschaker, too, argued several decades ago that this gift gave the groom rights over the bride, and while his overall argument that the terh}atum was evidence that the Mesopotamians practiced marriage by purchase must be rejected, one can only conclude that he and Westbrook are correct in their interpretation 249

250 251 252

253 254

Ibid., 29, 34, and elsewhere. Westbrook rather confusingly differentiates between these terms, using “betrothal” to signify what we would perhaps call engagement, though the state does have some legal consequences in his view, and “inchoate marriage” to refer to the state between the giving of bridewealth and actual marriage. (See ibid., 29–34.) I, on the other hand, use betrothal and inchoate marriage interchangeably, as is typical for biblical scholars. That is, to perform ah}āzum. See Westbrook, Old Babylonian Marriage Law, 10–16, 34, 48–53. Ibid., 34–35. Though each side must pay a penalty, with the groom losing the bridewealth, and the bride’s family being forced to give the groom twice the amount of the bridewealth he had brought. See LH 159–161. See LE 26 and LH 130, as well as Westbrook, Old Babylonian Marriage Law, 35–36. Some have argued that sexual intercourse could replace taking the bride into one’s house as the effective act of marriage (that is, if the bridewealth had already been paid) – for example, Landsberger, who uses UET 5 636 as evidence (cited in Westbrook, Old Babylonian, 52). LH 155–6 seems to provide evidence for this, as well. In addition, Greengus has argued convincingly that verba solemnia “either alone or with accompanying symbolic rites, would be a key ingredient in the formation of the contract of marriage” (“Old Babylonian Marriage Contract,” 514–520).

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of this matter, which at any rate is in line with that of the functionalists.255 Unlike in most African societies, however, bringing bridewealth, while certainly customary in the Old Babylonian period, was not necessary to the formation of marriage. As Westbrook states: “. . . whereas both CH and CE state that the contract is a sine qua non of marriage, neither suggests that the terhatum is a necessary condition, and in the case of CH, one paragraph (139) clearly implies the existence of a valid marriage without it.”256 Furthermore, one sees in the surviving marriage contracts from the Old Babylonian period that the bridewealth, though variable, was often a rather small amount – normally between five and ten shekels, an amount too small to purchase a slave.257 One can see from these marriage contracts that wives sometimes came into marriage wearing jewelry worth more than the amount of the typical terh}atum.258 Such jewelry would of course form part of the woman’s dowry, and both the extant marriage contracts and the law codes attest to the prevalence and importance of dowry in the Old Babylonian period. Beginning with the law codes, though one finds no mention of dowry in the Laws of Eshnunna, it is repeatedly referred to in the only slightly later, but much longer Code of Hammurapi. For example, LH 138 reads: “If a man intends to divorce his first-ranking wife who did not bear him children, he shall give her silver as much as was her bridewealth and restore to her the dowry [šeriktam] that she brought from her father’s house, and he shall divorce her.”259 LH 163 states further that: “If a man marries a wife but she does not provide him with children, and that woman goes to her fate – if his father-in-law returns to him the bridewealth that that man brought to his father-in-law’s house, her husband shall have no claim to that woman’s dowry [šerikti]; her dowry belongs only to her father’s house.”260 Yet LH 167 makes clear that when a woman did bear children, those children – and only those children, not the husband’s children by other wives – would inherit their mother’s dowry. Thus the dowry does not become the property of the husband but remains the property of the wife, or of her natal household in the case of her death (LH 163). It is, though, a special type of property, for, as LH 171 legislates, while the wife may live off of her 255

256 257

258

259 260

Koschaker argued more specifically that the rights were in rem. See Koschaker, “Eheschließung und Kauf,” 216–228. Westbrook, Old Babylonian, 30. Ibid., 55. Among the Old Babylonian marriage contracts containing record of the terh}atum are CT 87b, CT 33 34, CT 47 40, CT 48 51, CT 48 52, and many others. See, for example, BE 6/1 84, where the woman is wearing jewelry worth twelve shekels; CT 8 2a, though the jewelry is only worth two and a half shekels there; YOS 8 154. Roth, Law Collections, 107. Ibid., 112.

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dowry in the case of widowhood, she may not sell it – “her own estate shall belong (as inheritance) only to her own children.”261 Not all marriage contracts from this period mention dowry, but a large number do, and these demonstrate that dowry could consist of a wide range of things, including slaves, furniture, kitchen implements, jewelry, and consumables. Many of these marriage contracts are for female religious functionaries, and it seems that these women were sometimes lavishly endowed. For example, BE 6/1 84 states that the dowry of Liwwir-Esagila, nadītum of Marduk and kulmašītum, daughter of Awil-Sin, included two slaves, jewelry worth twelve shekels, ten garments and various other items of clothing, an ox, two cows, thirty sheep, a copper kettle, two millstones, various baskets, and seventy liters of oil, among other items! Clearly Awil-Sin was a very wealthy man. Dalley, Cat. RSM 15 contains record of a much more modest dowry, this one of a laywoman, Belessunu, daughter of Ibni-Amurrum, a zazakum-scribe; it consisted of a copper-kettle, two millstones, two beds, six chairs, various baskets, a table, various kitchen implements and utensils, and a wooden box “containing a haematite seal, together with the weights that she possesses.”262 One imagines that such a dowry is more in line with what would have been typical for a woman to receive. A striking attestation of what dowry might consist of is found in CT 48 50, which reads: “Her father Ibbatum has given Sabitum daughter of Ibbatum into the house of Ilshu-ibni his in-law for his son Warad-kubi for marriage . . . Ibbatum has received 10 shekels of silver, her terhatum, has kissed (it/ her?) and bound it in the hem of his daughter Sabitum – it has (thus) been returned to Warad-kubi.”263 In this text, then, the father returns the bridewealth he receives as dowry – a practice common in North India, and also found in the Elephantine marriage contracts. While this, to my knowledge, is the only Old Babylonian marriage contract that contains evidence for this practice, it is of course possible that it was more common than the evidence implies.264 261

262 263 264

Ibid., 114. There are also laws in Hammurapi’s Code that pertain even more directly to Goody’s argument that dowry is premortem inheritance, such as LH 180: “If a father does not award a dowry to his daughter who is a cloistered nadītu or a sekretu, after the father goes to his fate, she shall have a share of the property of the paternal estate comparable in value to that of one heir; as long as she lives she shall enjoy its use; her estate belongs only to her brothers” (ibid., 118). Yet, all of the laws of this kind (LH 178–184) explicitly deal with women who are religious functionaries of various kinds, not with laywomen, and so it is unclear what the situation would be with such women. Westbrook, Old Babylonianm Marriage Laws, 125. Ibid., 122. LH 138–139 may also indirectly attest to this practice.

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In addition to bridewealth and dowry, there are two other marriage prestations mentioned in the Old Babylonian law codes, both of which originate with the groom/husband’s side. The first of these is the biblum, which is mentioned in LH 159–161, as well as in UET 5 636 and PBS 8/2 183, though it is still imperfectly understood. On the basis of UET 5 636, Johannes Renger argues that the biblum is part of a mutual exchange of gifts between families on the occasion of marriage that occurs subsequent to the groom’s giving of bridewealth.265 Westbrook, drawing on Renger’s proposal and those of others, concludes that the biblum “is a gift of various items other than money made on the occasion of ‘marriage’ celebrations by members of the groom’s family to members of the bride’s family. We do not consider that it was necessary to the validity of the marriage or had any role like the terhatum of changing the nature of the legal relationship. . .”266 One strong reason for this conclusion is that biblum is not mentioned in any marriage contracts from this period.267 The second gift, mentioned in both marriage contracts and the legal corpora, is that of indirect dowry.268 One reads, for instance, in LH 150: “If a man awards to his wife a field, orchard, house, or movable property, and makes out a sealed document for her, after her husband’s death her children will not bring a claim against her; the mother shall give her estate to whichever of her children she loves, but she will not give it to an outsider.”269 In LH 171, too, a law concerning the position of children born to a slave mother, one finds evidence of indirect dowry: “. . . The first-ranking wife shall take her dowry [šeriktaša] and the marriage settlement [nudunnâm] which her husband awarded to her in writing, and she shall continue to reside in her husband’s dwelling; as long as she is alive she shall enjoy the use of it, but she may not sell it; her own estate shall belong (as inheritance) only to her own children.” The evidence here for indirect dowry is fairly straightforward; the terminology used, however, is not. We have seen that the term used in LH for dowry is šeriktum, and the word for indirect dowry, nudunnûm. The problem lies in the fact that in the marriage documents themselves, it is the latter term that is used for dowry, and not for indirect dowry; the term šeriktum is not used at all. Later use of these terms only further complicates matters: as Westbrook writes, “[e]vidence from a Middle Babylonian kudurru shows the 265 266 267

268 269

Renger, “Who Are All Those People?,” 259–273. Westbrook, Old Babylonian Marriage Law, 101–102. Mentioned in only one OB source (Riftin 48) is the zubullûm, which “appears to be a gift in connection with marriage in the nature of the biblum” (Westbrook, Old Babylonian Marriage Law, 42). In the Middle Assyrian Laws, it is in fact “used to gloss biblum” (ibid., 42). For examples of indirect dowry in marriage contracts, see BE 6/1 95 and CT 8 34b. Roth, Law Collections, 110. That the wife may pass on property given by her husband to whichever of their children she wishes is found, too, in CT 8 34b.

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term nudunnû continues to be used in practice for dowry, while the Middle Assyrian Laws follow the schema of CH – širku for dowry and nudunnû for marital gift [i.e., indirect dowry].”270 Furthermore, in the Neo-Babylonian Laws (LNB), a scribe “seems to have found their usage too illogical and reversed it – nudunnû for dowry, as in practice, šeriktu for marital gift – a use nowhere else attested.”271 Different proposals have been made to explain these inconsistencies; that of Westbrook is reasonable: “The term nudunnûm means a wife’s marital property, comprising the dowry given to her by members of her own family and gifts from her husband. The term can refer to either of the individual components or both together. In CH, one of these components, the dowry is referred to by a special term: šeriktum. It is thus distinguished from the rest of the nudunnûm, namely ‘the nudunnûm that her husband gave her’ (172).”272 LH’s usage of the term šeriktu is thus analogous to that of the term mulūgu, which is used from the Middle Babylonian period onward, and the mishnaic melūg (gwlm).273 Whatever the explanation of LH’s usage of these terms, the practice of giving indirect dowry in the Old Babylonian period and onward is adequately attested both in the law codes and in the extant marriage documents.274 A practice attested in the law codes and throughout the OB marriage documents is that of husbands’ having to furnish a penalty to their wives if they divorce them. For example, LH 138–139 read: ¶138 If a man intends to divorce his first-ranking wife who did not bear him children, he shall give her silver as much as was her bridewealth and restore to her the dowry that she brought from her father’s house, and he shall divorce her. ¶139 If there is no bridewealth, he shall give her 60 shekels of silver as a divorce settlement.275 270 271 272

273

274 275

The text is BBSt. IX, specifically lines 15–18. See Westbrook, Old Babylonian, 24. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 25, where Westbrook also summarizes the proposals of other scholars. Although I find Westbrook’s proposal reasonable, his explanation for why LH makes this distinction is speculative: he believes that that the dowry and the indirect dowry follow different paths of devolution. The dowry, of course, returns to the woman, but the indirect dowry, according to Westbrook, does not remain in her possession. His evidence is almost exclusively LH 138, which states that the dowry reverts to a childless wife upon divorce, but does not refer to indirect dowry “thereby impliedly excluding marital gifts” (ibid., 97). This evidence is not, in my view, strong enough to come to a definitive conclusion on the matter. Westbrook, Old Babylonian Marriage Law, 27, though Westbrook’s understanding of the word mulūgu may be overly reliant on the usage of its mishnaic cognate. See, for instance, CT 6 38a, PBS 8/2 155, and seemingly VAS 18 101. The 60 shekels legislated by this text are of course far more than the average amount recorded for bridewealth payments in the marriage documents. See Roth, Law Collections, 107.

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Clauses prescribing such a divorce penalty abound in the marriage documents, and make no mention of the fact that such a penalty amount would only be given to a divorcée who had not borne children. BE 6/2 48 is typical: “If Awiliya says to his wife Naramtum, ‘you are not my wife,’ he shall pay half a mina of silver.”276 The amount given for the divorce penalty here is perhaps the most common in these documents, though one-third a mina of silver appears frequently, as well. Therefore, one finds in the Old Babylonian period a practice very similar to that of the divorce penalty (or endowment pledge, as it is also called), payable in the case of divorce or the death of the husband, that we have already seen amply discussed in the Tannaitic laws. Unfortunately, the Middle Babylonian period has left us fewer pieces of evidence, not only concerning marriage but more generally. During this period Babylonia was dominated by the Kassites, a non-Semitic group with uncertain origins.277 The Kassite dynasty reigned for about four hundred years, from ca. 1530–1155 bce. Kuhrt writes: “Records for the period before the thirteenth century are very sparse . . . limited to terse votive and building inscriptions by kings, and inscribed cylinder seals . . . The majority of dated documents, which provide insight into the economic and social life of the region, come from the later fourteenth to thirteenth century,” though even with those there are certain problems.278 Mentioned earlier was a kudurru inscription that used the term nudunnûm to refer to dowry. In that text, a father gives to his daughter a field on the occasion of her marriage. In addition, there exists another kudurru with similar content: a father states that he gave land to his daughter when she married.279 These texts show, if nothing else, that dowry continued to be given in this period, and that dowry could consist of immovable property. Not all the evidence regarding marriage gifts in Kassite Babylonia is continuous with the previous period, however. CBS 12917 contains record of the “purchase” of a small girl, possibly an infant, to be the future bride for the buyer’s son. It reads: One young girl, a native of Babylonia, one-half cubit in size, by the name of U4.9.KAM-belet. Rabâ-sha-Ninimma, son of Ili-Shamash, the merchant, bought her for daughter-in-law-ship (i.e. wife) for his second son, Nimmazera-shubshi, from her father, Kidin-Shumaliya, son of Kiautu, a Kassite from the town of Hurad-Hamatir, (and) from her mother, Agargarutu, daughter of Sin-epiranni. As her purchase price, Rabâ-sha-Ninimma gave 2 fine muhtillû-garments, worth 2 shekels of gold, to Kidin-Shumaliya 276 277 278 279

Westbrook, Old Babylonian Marriage Law, 115. Kuhrt, Ancient Near East, I:333–334. Ibid., I:335. The text is Caillou Michaux. See Slanski, Babylonian Entitlement narûs (kudurrus), 315.

148 MARRIAGE GIFTS AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN ANCIENT PALESTINE and Agargarutu, his wife; and for the rest of the purchase price, Rabâ-shaNinimma shall provide Kidin-Shumaliya and Agargarutu.280

The practice of buying young girls for a future marriage, a sort of slave purchase-meets- infant betrothal, is found, too, in contemporary Nuzi, and in Neo-Assyria, but is not known from Babylonian sources of either the earlier or later periods, even though those sources are fairly abundant.281 One may conclude with some certainty, then, that this practice was a Kassite import into Babylonia. In terms of legal sources, there is no Middle Babylonian law code analoguous to the Laws of Hammurapi or of Eshnunna. The closest thing available is the Middle Assyrian Laws (MAL), which like the text referred to earlier, presents certain problems. While there are certainly points of similarity between MAL and the Babylonian law codes, there are also major differences. One of these is that the former is extraordinarily brutal in its penalties, legislating mutilation, rape, sodomy, and execution so frequently as punishment for offenses that it makes Hammurapi’s Code seem positively humane by contrast. Similarly, although this law code contains the same range of marriage gifts found in the OB sources, on the whole it is much less sympathetic toward women, affording them less control over their property while simultaneously affording men greater liberties in their treatment of women in both marriage and divorce.282 For example, while LH legislates that a man must pay his wife a penalty if he divorces her, a practice also demanded by many of the OB marriage documents, MAL A ¶37 states: “If a man intends to divorce his wife, if it is his wish, he shall give her something; if that is not his wish, he shall not give her anything, and she shall leave empty-handed.”283 MAL even states that a husband may take control of his wife’s dowry in certain cases; A ¶29 states: “If a woman should enter her husband’s house, her dowry and whatever she brings with her from her father’s house, and also whatever her father-in-law gave her upon her entering, are clear for her sons; her father-in-law’s sons shall have no valid claim. But if her husband intends to take control of her, he shall give it to whichever of his sons he wishes.”284 While the “full legal implications of this action are unclear,”285 what is clear is that MAL deviates from the OB codes with respect to marriage laws in certain important ways. 280 281 282 283 284 285

Kuhrt, I:335–336. Ibid., I:337 On the prescribed treatment of women in this law code, see Saporetti, Status of Women. Roth, Law Collections, 166–167. Ibid., 163–164. Ibid., 193.

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This brings us, then, to the Neo-Babylonian period, one thankfully better attested than the previous epoch. Among the evidence providing us with information concerning marriage gifts in this period are over forty marriage documents and a law code, the Neo-Babylonian laws (LNB). LNB is not preserved in its entirety – a large portion of the beginning and the majority of the colophon are missing – but does contain some relevant evidence. As stated earlier, the scribe who compiled this code switched the usage of nudunnû and šeriktu, applying the former to dowry and the latter to indirect dowry. Other than that change, the laws regarding these two gifts do not deviate from the OB law codes to any great extent. What is noteworthy is the absence in LNB of any mention of terh}atu. With the poorly preserved state of this text, one might reasonably conclude that this absence was just an accident of history, if it were not for the following: terh}atu is strikingly absent from the extant marriage documents, as well.286 The term is not used even once, and one in fact finds only three cases of bridewealth in these documents; in two, nos. 34 and 35, the word biblu is used to refer to the prestation, and in one, BMA no. 4, no technical term is used. It does not seem that in any of these the gifts have a jural function, appearing instead to be similar to the biblu of earlier sources.287 In contrast to the paucity of texts attesting to bridewealth, one finds an abundance dealing with dowry. These texts demonstrate that dowry could consist of movables such as jewelry, furniture, or kitchen implements, of slaves, or, as in the Middle Babylonian sources, immovable property. One finds seven marriage contracts that detail dowry gifts of fields, orchards, and in one case, part of a house.288 In one particularly generous gift, a father endows his daughter with “a three-pānu orchard planted with date palms in the district of . . . in the grove of his arable land, . . . a four-pānu orchard in the district BI+DUB+a-s[u-šu-du, . . . a two-kurru, one-pānu orchard, planted with date palms, . . . and a one-kurru cultivated field,” as well as two slaves, and household goods (no. 22).289 Perhaps more typical is the dowry in BMA 286

287

288

289

As Van Seters states: “From the time of the Middle Assyrian Laws onward the practice of giving a bride-payment, terh}atu, seems to be in rapid decline” (“Jacob’s Marriages,” 393). Van Seters claims, however, that this gift is replaced by dowry or indirect dowry, which is not exactly correct, since, as we saw, bridewealth and dowry coexisted in the Old Babylonian period. This being the case, it is odd that Roth should suggest that biblu is not a Babylonian tradition, but one that “derives from Egyptian or Persian practice” (Babylonian Marriage Agreements, 11). These are BMA nos. 9, 15, 18, 21, 22, 24, which describes the gift of part of the house, 33, and 43. Roth, Babylonian Marriage Agreements, 80.

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no. 26, where a brother and mother endow their daughter/sister with jewelry worth one and a half shekels, an “Akkadian bed,” five chairs, a table, a goblet, and a platter of bronze.290 It must be said, however, that many of the extant documents describe dowries that are far more lavish. In addition to finding bridewealth and dowry, one also finds record of indirect dowry, though in only one document (BMA no. 1), and of the same divorce penalty that was prevalent in the OB period. In the later period, however, there is one important variation in the terms of this penalty: in these documents, it is usually connected not just with divorce, but with the husband’s taking another wife. The divorce clause in document BMA no. 26 is fairly typical: “Should Gūzanu release fKašša and take a second wife in preference to her, he will pay her six minas of silver, and she may go back to her paternal home.”291 Interestingly, BMA no. 25 fines the husband one mina if he should merely take another wife, saying nothing about divorce. One surmises from these and the many other documents that contain such clauses that polygamy had grown less socially acceptable, and thus in all likelihood less common, in the Neo-Babylonian period. In addition to this important social change, one finds in the Neo-Babylonian sources some evidence for another marriage gift that would point to yet further reconfigurations in marriage and family life: dower, or property given to the husband by his own family to bring into the marriage. The evidence for this gift, called nungurtu, comes from LNB 8, which “assumes that as part of the marriage negotiations, both the husband’s father and the bride’s father committed themselves to providing certain properties to the couple,”292 and from two marriage documents, BMA nos. 1 and 8, which refer to the husband’s having nungurtu, “assigned property,” that is separate from his inheritance.293 Roth states: Although most men did not marry until after their fathers’ deaths, when they would realize their inheritances, some men married earlier. The marriages of these grooms with living fathers generally differed from other marriages in one important point: the fathers received the dowries of their sons’ wives. The two major sources of financial independence for the new couple – the bride’s dowry and groom’s inheritance – were therefore not available, and the new couple remained economically (as well as socially and legally) dependent upon the groom’s father. However, there is some evidence that as part of the marriage negotiations between the husband’s and 290 291 292 293

Ibid., 93. Ibid., 93. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 10, 37–38, 50–51.

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the wife’s fathers, the husband’s father could make a pre-mortem settlement on his son. This settlement, along with the bride’s dowry, would enable the couple to establish an independent household.294

Roth’s argument is unfortunately rather confused here. First, how could the nungurtu, “along with the bride’s dowry,” allow the couple to establish their household if, according to Roth, the very reason for giving nungurtu is the fact that the dowry would be in the control of the husband’s father? The second problem is that she provides no evidence that the father-in-law would in fact be the one who controlled the dowry. If the husband and wife were still living in the husband’s natal home as part of a joint household, this would not be unsurprising, but Roth provides no evidence that this was normative.295 Furthermore, even if this were normative practice and the new couple were living in the husband’s natal home, they would not, it seems, be establishing an “independent household,” and nungurtu would thus be unnecessary. Contra Roth, it appears reasonable to conclude that nungurtu is necessitated by a lack of access not to the dowry, but only to the groom’s inheritance, and implies neolocality, where the new couple leave both their parents’ houses and start a new household of their own. With the lack of evidence regarding this prestation, however, one can only speculate. Babylonia, as we have shown, was a complex, stratified society from as early as the third millennium bce. It is no surprise, then, that one finds dowry even in Old Babylonian sources, and that the Babylonian version of dowry conforms perfectly with Goody’s theses: it is premortem inheritance passed down from a father to his daughter and her children, his grandchildren, that may be managed by her husband but never becomes his property, given in a stratified society where wealth is concentrated, and where families and individuals seek to maintain their wealth. Yet one also finds bridewealth in the Old Babylonian period. This is not necessarily surprising, for bridewealth is found along with dowry in India, a society where dowry is clearly the normative marital prestation.296 Yet there is no evidence that in early second millennium Babylonia, terh}atu was associated mainly with the lower classes; it was instead a marriage gift with jural force, effecting the status of inchoate marriage. A thousand years later, however, it seems that terh}atu had fallen into obscurity. Bridewealth as jural instrument seemingly no longer existed. Polygamy, too, was falling away, and the neolocal, nuclear family was 294 295

296

Ibid., 9. Driver and Miles assume this was normal practice, but one wishes they, too, had provided a bit more evidence. See Babylonian Laws, I: 334–335. As was stated earlier, though, in India bridewealth normally is sent back as indirect dowry.

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seemingly gaining in importance, a fact reflected in the practice of endowing sons with nungurtu. Though Goody did not to any great extent base his ideas concerning dowry and the societal features with which it is associated upon the customs of ancient Babylonia, he may as well have. In light of Goody’s ideas, it is not the absence of terh}atu in the NeoBabylonian period that requires explanation, but its presence in the Old Babylonian period. That fact, in my view, can be explained by the nascent status both of dowry and of the written marriage contract.297 Clearly, dowry had not always been in existence any more than agriculture, writing, land ownership, or even animal husbandry had been. Such features of human civilization, however endemic to societies they might seem today, developed over time. Dowry, too, must have developed over time in conjunction with complex agricultural methods and the new forms of social organization these methods engendered. Bridewealth, too, developed over time, but served different functions, legitimating marriages and transferring control over women and their issue from one family group to another. One can of course only speculate as to the early histories of these prestations, but it seems likely that bridewealth predated dowry in ancient Mesopotamia, and that it slowly fell out of usage as the stratified nature of the society gradually grew calcified. After all, if the former is associated with less complex social forms, would it not have developed at an earlier historical, or pre-historical, moment?298

Critiques of Goody’s Approach to Marriage Gifts With a body of work as far-reaching and ambitious as that of Goody, it is no surprise that some scholars would find fault with some of his methods or conclusions. For example, Goody’s work has drawn fire for raising just the sort of evolutionistic questions posed above. Jane Guyer has referred to Goody and Tambiah’s Bridewealth and Dowry as an “implicitly evolutionary” work. Since the early twentieth century, when Radcliffe-Brown dismissed evolutionistic schemata as “pseudo-history,” many anthropologists have tended to adopt a suspicious attitude toward ideas with evolutionist underpinnings or implications, and with good reason. With the Marxists 297

298

Concerning the latter, Goody briefly addresses the implications of writing, or written marriage, on marriage in general in Logic of Writing, 158. Jackson and Romney make this very suggestion. See “Historical Inference,” 517–520. Van Praag made a similar suggestion three decades earlier, positing that bridewealth, which was originally used to establish a union as a legitimate marriage (rather than merely simple cohabitation), became unnecessary once written marriage contracts began to be commonly used for the selfsame purpose. See van Praag, Driot Matrimonial Assyro-Babylonien; and Grosz, “Bridewealth and Dowry,” 197.

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being a noteworthy exception, most of those who espoused evolutionistic ideas were concerned primarily with demonstrating the superiority of their own society over that of their only half-civilized colonial charges: at the end of every evolutionistic teleology stood the boiled meat-eating and port wine-drinking Englishman, superior not only in culture but in morality and temperament as well. Radcliffe-Brown was right to condemn such tendencies in his compatriots, but his complete lack of attention toward historical issues left gaping lacunae in the field of anthropology that have in many ways persisted to this day. More than a half-century after Radcliffe-Brown, our knowledge of human prehistory and early history is far vaster than what it was, and so one can now make assessments regarding the development of human societies that are more than just speculation. Goody has done just this. As Marc J. Swartz has written: “Goody’s accomplishment in [Production and Reproduction] is a substantial one. He has gone far beyond the early evolutionists and even the more modern ones both in the clarity of his theory and the quality of empirical support he has been able to marshal with the help of new statistical techniques.”299 Despite Swartz’s ringing endorsement of Goody’s methods, other scholars have in fact found fault with Goody’s use of evidence, and with his use of the Ethnographic Atlas, specifically. Lynne Brydon, for example, states that “one cannot stress too strongly the care needed in using data from the Ethnographic Atlas.”300 Yet, many do not share Brydon’s negative attitude towards this collection of data,301 and even if her sense of caution is warranted, several factors mitigate her critique: the first is that Goody relies only in part on data from the Atlas in making his arguments; another is that Goody exercises some care in his use of data from this source; and a third is that Alice Schlegel and Rohn Eloul, using revised collections of cross-cultural data that were developed after the publication of Production and Reproduction,302 have confirmed Goody’s results almost entirely.303 Another criticism that has been mounted against Goody is that he stereotypes evidence from African societies, characterizing sub-Saharan African groups as being more homogeneous than they actually are. Trudeke Vuyk writes: “. . . I object to the reduction of the enormously varied African 299 300 301

302

303

Swartz, review of Jack Goody, Production and Reproduction, 797. Brydon, review of Jack Goody, Production and Reproduction, 394. See, for example, Gaulin and Boster, who base their argument on data from the Atlas in “Dowry as Female Competition,” 995–1005. That is, Barry and Schlegel, eds., Cross-Cultural Samples and Codes; and Schlegel and Eloul, “Marriage Transactions: A Cross-Cultural Code,” 118–140. Schlegel and Eloul, “Marriage Transactions: Labor.”

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ethnography to a system characterized by patrilineally-related, landcontrolling, polygamously married men.”304 Yet, like Brydon’s critique earlier, that of Vuyk is undone by several factors. One of these is that Vuyk, in criticizing Goody for oversimplifying Africa, oversimplifies the work of Goody, who as an Africanist is far from ignorant of the different forms that African societies can and do take. In addition, the case studies given have demonstrated that Goody’s ideas may be readily applied even to such “atypical” African societies as the Gonja and the Lovedu. Another factor that challenges Vuyk’s criticism of Goody is the failure of Vuyk and others to find meaningful examples of the social characteristics that Goody identifies as Eurasian in sub-Saharan Africa, leaving one to conclude, as Whyte puts it, that “[t]he family patterns of subsaharan Africa and Eurasia in general are qualitatively very different, as Goody claims.”305 Furthermore, while there is certainly an element of generalization in Goody’s work, this is because such generalization is necessary in order to carry out a comparative enterprise on the scale of Goody’s. Tambiah, in responding to Alma Gottlieb’s criticism of the generalizing tendencies of his own work, states: “Gottlieb is welcome to ‘celebrate . . . messy ethnographic complexities,’ but my comparative exercise requires seeing beyond the trees to the woods.”306 If this is the case for the work of Tambiah, which focuses largely upon South Asia, how much more so for that of Goody. Another criticism of Goody’s work is that it does not devote sufficient attention to the issue of women’s subordination. This criticism, as it is formulated by Ann Whitehead and others, strikes me as being misplaced: Goody does in fact devote a great deal of space in his works to discussing, among other issues, women’s roles in different agricultural systems, women’s ability to inherit property, differing marital forms, and so forth.307 What he does not do, to the chagrin of Whitehead, is consistently analyze these features within a certain ideological framework. More reasonable are the criticisms of Nancy Chodorow, who faults Goody for being inconsistently ideological – that is, for treating some practices having to do with women and not others as problematic, and for presenting too rosy a portrait of women’s status in Eurasian societies.308 While the latter tendency arises from Goody’s desire to dispel orientalist stereotyping of women in Asian societies, I agree with Chodorow that Goody sometimes goes too far in the opposite direction. Nonetheless, 304 305 306 307 308

Trudeke Vuyk, comments on Tambiah, “Bridewealth and Dowry Revisited,” 432. Martin King Whyte, review of Jack Goody, The Oriental, the Ancient, 1209. Tambiah, “Bridewealth and Dowry Revisited,” 433. See Whitehead, review of Jack Goody, Production and Reproduction, 151–159. See Nancy Chodorow, review of Jack Goody, Production and Reproduction, 207–208; and Faubion, “Kinship is Dead,” 73–75.

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because Goody’s project is not at bottom an ideological one, his optimism concerning women’s rights in Eurasian societies and his inconsistent application of feminist ideology do not in the majority of cases affect the strength of his analysis or the weight of his conclusions. The final critique of Goody’s work that will be addressed relates to the issue of one type of marriage gift specifically. Some anthropologists have called into question Goody and Tambiah’s view of dowry as the premortem inheritance and property of the bride. Tambiah, taking into consideration such critiques, has written in a subsequent article: The concept of premortem inheritance insofar as it minimally suggests that all daughters in a family should receive “equal shares” vis-à-vis one another is contradicted by the fact that the dowries given could vary between sisters, their values being linked to the status of the bridegroom and other “hypergamous” considerations and modern educational attainments. Even more important, the notion of a woman’s dowry being her property and going to constitute a ‘conjugal fund’ is put in serious question.309

The latter is because among some Indian groups, the dowry becomes the property of the groom’s joint household and is under the control of his parents. Regarding the issue of premortem inheritance, it is unclear to me why equality of shares is such a critical criterion in determining whether or not dowry may be characterized as early inheritance for women. After all, in many societies, male shares too may be unequal. According to various ancient Near Eastern sources, for instance, including various biblical texts, the first-born was to receive a double portion of property. The Babylonian law codes state further that a mother may choose to which son she wishes to transfer her indirect dowry. Such a decision would presumably be based upon preference, and thus upon personality, appearance, and so on. If birth order and personality can affect the size of a share of male inheritance, why can’t other factors influence the size of a share of female inheritance? Though Tambiah does not utilize this particular reasoning, in the end he concludes too that dowry can only be seen as part of a system of diverging devolution wherein both males and females are endowed with property by their families.310 Regarding the issue of whether or not dowry is the property of the bride, even among those Indian groups where the groom’s family controls much of the dowry, the bride still keeps in her possession a large portion of the goods she brought in marriage.311 In addition, the fact that the groom’s family 309 310 311

Tambiah, “Bridewealth and Dowry Revisited,” 420. Ibid., 421–422. Ibid., 425.

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controls some of the dowry may be related to several factors: the increasing incidence of groomwealth in modern India; the prohibition on divorce that exists among the upper castes in India; and the prevalence of joint households among the same groups.312 As Tambiah writes: “It cannot be denied that the normative and stereotype [sic] notion of dowry may in the face of contemporary developments in India and Ceylon show a further shift whereby it may amount to a ‘sale’ of the son in marriage.”313 Further, it should be noted that whether or not the whole of the dowry remains the property of the woman in modern India, it is clear that it remained so in Roman Palestine, ancient Mesopotamia, and elsewhere, for if the husband divorced his wife or left her a widow, she received back whatever property she had brought into the union. Nonetheless, it is worth bearing in mind that the dowry is as much a transfer of heritable property from the bride’s father to the bride as it is one from the bride’s father to his grandsons through the bride. In actuality, however, this does not make dowry very different from property passed from fathers to sons, for even in that case there is always the assumption that the sons will pass on this property to their own sons, ad infinitum. Although Goody’s work has its detractors, it is also lauded by many. Exemplary of this latter group is Michael G. Peletz, who writes of The Oriental, the Ancient, and the Primitive: Similarities and differences between Eastern and Western kinship systems are among the major foci of the most ambitious study of kinship in late twentieth-century anthropology. I refer in detail to Goody’s . . . The Oriental, the Ancient, and the Primitive, which is both the definitive treatise on systems of kinship and marriage in the preindustrial societies of Eurasia as well as an exemplary model of transdisciplinary research informed by a global sense of variation in space and time reminiscent of social theorists like Marx and Weber.314

When one considers the scope and ambitiousness of Goody’s work, not only on marriage but on other issues such as writing and literacy, and the quality of his ideas, such an elegy seems not hyperbolic but wholly accurate.

Conclusions It is clear, then, that Goody’s ideas on marriage provide the best framework in which to examine marriage gifts, both cross-culturally and in the more 312 313 314

See Caplan, “Bridegroom Price.” Tambiah, “Dowry, Bridewealth,” 63. Peletz, “Kinship Studies,” 356.

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specific context of ancient Palestine. The connections drawn by Goody between marriage gifts and such social features as mode of production and level of stratification most compellingly explain the predominance of certain gifts over others in specific societies. Other scholars have fallen short in their explanatory schema regarding marriage gifts by failing to look at such gifts cross-culturally; by focusing exclusively on the analysis of one gift, normally bridewealth, while ignoring other varieties of marriage gifts; by providing explanations that fail to account for historical change; or by basing their analyses on assumptions so flawed that their entire schema topples over under close scrutiny.315 Goody’s ideas are plagued by none of these problems. It is certainly the case, however, that Goody drew upon earlier ideas and methodologies in forming his ideas on marriage gifts, and particularly on those of the functionalists and the Marxists. While the ideas and assumptions of the functionalists have drawn fire in the past two or three decades, there is no questioning the influence of functionalism not only on the study of marriage gifts, but on virtually all areas of anthropology, however much the field has changed in the past twenty years. Though some have argued that the functionalists were too wooden in their classification of societies as patrilineal or matrilineal, and overzealous in their application of kinship categories such as the lineage, it is difficult to argue that such categories are unimportant to societies such as the Nuer or the majority of other acephalous societies of sub-Saharan Africa. Even among some of the more complex African societies, not to mention among many other societies throughout the world, lineages and other kinship categories are important, as are marriage gifts such as bridewealth. Though John Ogbu attempted to argue that bridewealth does not transfer rights to a man and/or his lineage, he seems to have fallen prey to the misrecognition that is inherent in so many ritual activities: of course women are not merely objects to be transferred, quasi-slaves whose wombs and labor might be bought and sold, but bridewealth gives the impression that they are, not only to outside observers such as functionalist anthropologists, but to men in those societies, who may rest assured that they are in fact in control of their womenfolk, though the women and the men themselves know that this is not actually the case.316 In that sense, both Ogbu and the functionalists were right about bridewealth: it does and does not transfer rights over women. They were both right, too, that bridewealth legitimates marriages, that it effects a change in status.317 That it normally functions thus 315 316 317

Lévi-Strauss serves as the main example of the last phenomenon. Godelier’s comments on bridewealth pointed in this direction. Moreover, one should also consider that the very misrecognition and ambiguity inherent in bridewealth exchanges might itself play a role in the creation of a sense of debt, and of

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is clear not only from African societies, but from the role of terh}atu in the Old Babylonian law codes. Naturally it would be foolish to argue that bridewealth always functions in the exact same way in every society, but, considering the similarity in the way bridewealth functions in so many societies, it would be equally foolish not to keep in mind marital legitimation or the transfer of rights over women and future progeny as probable functions of bridewealth when examining the practices of specific bridewealth-giving societies. Regarding dowry, it seems more than clear, both from the highly selective distribution of dowry throughout Eurasian societies, and from its relationship to the devolution of property, that dowry is closely linked to social stratification and complex forms of agriculture, just as Goody argued. Again, while one might cite isolated examples of dowry functioning in other ways, that it functions so similarly in such widely disparate societies as North India and ancient Mesopotamia is a fact that speaks for itself, and one that must be considered in examining specific dowry-giving societies. Furthermore, in societies where the predominant gift changes over time, one must question why, and one must uncover whether or not such changes are related to other social changes, such as an increase in social stratification or a decrease in the importance of lineages, as we will do throughout the rest of this book.

ongoing connection, between those who give and those who receive bridewealth. That is, if it is unclear what exactly bridewealth does – does it “buy” a wife, does it transfer rights over a woman from father to her husband? – then it is equally unclear when exactly the debt between son-in-law and father-in-law (or between their lineages) has been paid.

4

0 The Social Structure of Ancient Israel from Iron I to the Babylonian Exile

Preface: Jack Goody on Israelite Marriage Gifts This chapter examines the social structure of ancient Israel from the time of its emergence at the beginning of the Iron Age to the downfall of the kingdom of Judah in the sixth century bce. By social structure, I refer to such social features as residential patterns, structures of kinship, modes of production, and patterns of social stratification. Such an examination is necessitated by the work of Jack Goody, which was treated at length in the previous chapter, and his thesis that different types of social structure will result in the exchange of different forms of marriage gifts. It is in light of this thesis that he explains the particular distribution of various marital prestations throughout Africa and Eurasia. This examination is necessitated, too, by a part of Goody’s work that was not addressed in the previous chapter – the brief treatment of ancient Israelite marriage customs found in The Oriental, the Ancient, and the Primitive.1 This treatment is one of the weakest in the entire book, lengthy as that work is. In it, Goody muddles together citations and assessments of a rather random assortment of scholarly works on Israelite marriage customs with his own exegesis of certain relevant biblical passages. He also adds to the mélange a plethora of generalizing statements about Israelite practices in which he conflates the biblical evidence with later Jewish law, as well as with other nonbiblical sources. Because the origin of these generalizations is too often unclear, one is left to surmise that they too must derive from his own analysis of the biblical evidence, an analysis that is too often uninformed and peculiar. In fact, at the beginning of his treatment of Israelite marriage customs, Goody presents the reader with a caveat: “The nature of marriage transactions 1

See chapter 11 of that work, entitled “Jacob’s Marriages.”

159

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in ancient Israel is by no means clear, since the time-span is great, the evidence small and what exists often prejudged by attempts to apply such overdetermined schemes of development” from bridewealth to dowry.2 While the course of Israelite history is indeed long, one wonders why Goody makes it even lengthier by subsuming it into later Jewish history, treating biblical texts and eastern European Jewish practices in the same short chapter! Also, though the biblical texts that deal with marriage gifts are somewhat limited, Goody makes the situation far worse by underutilizing the biblical evidence that is available: there are several texts that he is either unaware of or chooses to ignore – for example, Joshua 13, Genesis 24, 1 Kings 9, and others. What is more, he misconstrues some of the texts he does treat. For example, he states that in 1 Samuel 18, Saul asks for 100 Philistine foreskins “in place of a mōhār [sic] (an indirect dowry),” when the text in fact states that the leader demands the foreskins as the mōhar.3 In this text, as well as in Genesis 34, the term mōhar must logically refer to bridewealth rather than to indirect dowry, as Goody would like. Examining these and other cases, Goody makes it clear that he is just as eager to fit the biblical evidence into a predetermined schema as were those scholars he criticizes. Rather than assuming a development from bridewealth to dowry as they do, he instead forces the biblical evidence to fit his Eurasian model by assuming no development over the long course of Israelite history. Goody takes for granted that Israelite society was always complex, always stratified, always similar to that of its neighbors – except of course when it was consciously differentiating itself from them.4 Goody not only makes the error of assuming that Eurasian societies always exchange either direct or indirect dowry rather than bridewealth, a generalization that is very much untrue5 – and unsurprisingly so, in light of his own 2 3 4

5

Goody, The Oriental, the Ancient, 344. Ibid., 347. The opening sentence of the chapter reads: “Mosaic law about marriage was formulated in opposition to that of the Egyptians” (ibid., 342). Goody takes the biblical account at face value here. G. Robina Quale, who, like Goody, has written on the development of the family in various societies throughout the world, makes the same mistake in A History of Marriage Systems. Quale’s treatment of marriage among the Israelites is flawed in several ways. While she does not generally make the mistake of assuming that Israelite society was unchanging, as does Goody, the changes she posits are based upon an assumption of the historicity of the patriarchal narratives of the Hebrew Bible (see, for example, ibid., 39, 83–84). She also makes certain factual errors (as in ibid., 84, where she states that firstborn sons were only recognized as having the right to a double portion of family property after 70 ce), and, perhaps most frustrating, she provides no footnotes or citations to support the statements she makes, with the result that it is often impossible to know what evidence lies behind her assertions. For example, Bedouin groups, who will be discussed further below, normally exchange bridewealth, as do some Asian groups – for example, the Kachin. Goody falls into this error presumably not through a lack of knowledge of these groups, but through his tendency to treat

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overall arguments – but he also fails to consider whether or not Israelite society was socially stratified or in other ways comparable to the various dowryexchanging societies of Eurasia. He certainly does not address the issue of whether or not the nature of Israelite society changed over time. It is precisely these issues that will consume us here. What were the salient features of Israel’s social structure? This chapter utilizes both archaeological and textual evidence to make this determination, and addresses questions that the previous chapter showed directly relate to the exchange of marriage gifts, the most important of which was whether or not ancient Israel was a society characterized by social stratification or marked differentiations of wealth. This examination will clearly demonstrate that ancient Israel did undergo various social changes from the time of its emergence in Iron I to the time of the exile; the chapter that follows will show that the region underwent yet further changes from the period of the exile to the time when Babatha stowed away her marriage documents for safe keeping six centuries later. Although Goody may have been ignorant of such changes, these two chapters will make evident that they not only bear strongly upon the issue of marriage gifts, but in fact dramatically influence one’s interpretation of the relevant biblical and postbiblical evidence.

Social Stratification in Preexilic Israel: Iron i As Chapter 3 of this book made clear, the presence or absence of marked social stratification in a society – and more specifically, stratification that is socioeconomic in nature – is the most important corrolate to what type of marriage gift will predominate in that society. Thus, an examination of levels of stratification in preexilic Israel is not only warranted, but necessary. Such an examination must begin with the earliest period of Israel’s history, the time of its emergence in Iron I, and proceed through the centuries to the moment of Judah’s downfall. In the past few decades, the topic of Israel’s emergence has spawned countless theories, monographs, and debates both large and small. A thorough review of this material will not be conducted here, for it would require a book-length study of its own, and would only repeat what the plow as a magic wand that always produces social complexity just by its mere presence. While it is true that the plow is strongly correlated to the features that characterize such complexity, one does find subsistence societies that utilize the plow and extremely complex societies that do not. A prominent example of the latter was the Aztecs, who built one of the world’s great premodern empires by constructing extensive irrigation systems, terraces, and even artificial islands for transforming swamps into usable farmland, but never developed the plow.

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more than capable hands have done already.6 Instead, I will focus only upon those aspects of Israel’s emergence that directly relate to the subject at hand. In order to determine whether or not Israel was a stratified society in its earliest period, one must first set the parameters of what “Israel” was in this period. As is well-known, one finds the first reference to Israel on the late thirteenth century Merneptah stela.7 Around the same time, the great Late Bronze city-states of Canaan fell into disarray, the Philistines settled in the coastal plain, and numerous villages emerged in the highlands.8 Identifying clear ethnic markers for these hill country sites has been for the most part difficult. Earlier proposals setting the four-room house, collared rim pithoi, and slaked-lime cisterns as incontravertible evidence for the presence of “Israelites” have come under fire: however common these may have been at hill country sites, their presence is not limited to these sites, nor is it clear that their near ubiquity in the hill country is due to ethnic or cultural factors rather than to the specific environmental and agricultural necessities of highland life.9 One is left, then, with literary evidence – evidence that is either too early or too late. The Amarna letters make clear that inhabitants of the Canaanite city-states are not Israelites; these letters give little and ambiguous evidence regarding the ethnic identification of the highland population, 6

7

8

9

See, among others, Lemche, Early Israel, especially 1–79; idem, “Early Israel Revisited,” 9–34; Coote and Whitelam, Emergence of Early Israel, 11–26; Finkelstein, Archaeology, 295–314; Dever, “Archaeology and the Israelite Conquest,” 3:545–558; Gottwald, “Recent Studies,” 163– 189; idem, “Triumphalist versus Anti-triumphalist Versions,” 15–42; Dever, “Revisionist Israel Revisited,” 35–50; idem, “Biblical and Syro-Palestinian Archaeology:,” 91–116; Stager, “Forging an Identity,” 123–75; and McNutt, Reconstructing. On the Merneptah stela, see, for example, McNutt, Reconstructing, 35, 44–45; Stager, “Merenptah, Israel and Sea Peoples,” 56–64; Ahlström and Edelman, “Merneptah’s Israel,” 59–61; Bimson, “Merenptah’s Israel,” 3–29; Hasel, “Israel in the Merneptah Stela,” 45–61; idem, “Merneptah’s Inscription,” 19–44; Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites?, 201–208; and Killebrew, Biblical Peoples, 56, 154–155. For general works on the period, see Killebrew, Biblical Peoples; Amihai Mazar, Archaeology of the Land; Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel; Ahlström, History of Ancient Palestine; Kuhrt, Ancient Near East; among others. See Stager, “Archaeology of the Family,” 10, 17, who provides evidence for the use of limed cisterns at LB sites, as well as for pillared houses at LB or non-Israelite Iron I sites, though the houses were rare at such sites; Holladay, “House, Israelite,” 3:310, also discusses the origins and distribution of pillared houses, as does Finkelstein, Archaeology, 254–259. Faust, “Social and Cultural Changes,” 163–165, and Faust and Bunimovitz, “Four Room House,” argue, however, that the four-room house was primarily an Israelite phenomenon (in Iron I-II). On the collarrim storejars, see ibid., 281–282; Moawiyah Ibrahim, “Collared Rim Jar,” 116–125; and Dever, “How to Tell a Canaanite,” 43–44. London, “Comparison of Contemporaneous Lifestyles,” 37–55, suggests that differences between hill country and lowland sites are not rooted in ethnicity, but in an urban/rural dichotomy. For a recent discussion of the evidence on these issues, see Bloch-Smith, “Israelite Ethnicity in Iron I,” 401–25, especially 407–409.

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a fact that is unsurprising considering the paucity of sites one finds in this region throughout LB.10 Conversely, the highlands are clearly presented by biblical texts as the the homeland of the Israelites: they are the setting for the premonarchic narratives, and the rise of the Israelite and Judean kingdoms. Putting this together with the text of the Merneptah Stela, which seems to imply a highland setting for Israel,11 one can only conclude that the denizens of the hill country sites were “Israelites,” though we have no contemporary literary evidence for this group. Our only Iron I evidence for them is archaeological, and the ineffectiveness of that data for answering questions of ethnicity has led to the application by some scholars of such cautious labels as “Proto-Israel.”12 While such a rhetorical move is reasonable enough, so is Robert D. Miller’s conclusion that “it makes no difference what the Iron I highlanders called themselves: they were the direct antecedents of Iron II Israel and, thus, ‘Proto-Israel.’” He continues: There is direct continuity from the Iron I highlands to Iron II Israel and Judah in pottery, settlements, architecture, burial customs, and metals . . . So whatever the Iron I highlanders called themselves, by their continuity with Iron II they were nevertheless “those elements that were not yet Israel, but which went into or led up to the creation of Israel” . . . Yet since the Merneptah Stele records that the name of this community, or at least part of it, was Israel, once archaeology has established the continuity to Iron II, there is no reason to retain the prefix ‘Proto-.’13 10

11 12

13

On the Amarna letters, see Killebrew, Biblical Peoples, 12, 32–33, 57; Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel; Moran, Amarna Letters; idem, Amarna Studies; Na’aman, Canaan in the Second Millennium; among others. The Amarna letters of course make reference to the ‘Apiru and Shasu; on the relationship between the former and the early Israelites, see Killebrew, Biblical Peoples, 182–183, who gives a brief history of scholarship on the issue; McNutt, Reconstructing, 45–46; Alt, “Settlement of the Israelite Tribes,” 173–221; Moshe Greenberg, The Hab/piru; Gottwald, Tribes of Yahweh, 401–409, 419–425, 474–497, who greatly elaborates upon the work of George Mendenhall; Chaney, “Ancient Palestinian Peasant Movements,” 73–83; Lemche, Israelites in History, 57–62, 144–145; among others. On the Shasu, see, for example, McNutt, Reconstructing, 46; Hasel, “Merneptah’s Inscription,” 28–32, 36; Giveon, Bédouins Shosou; Weippert, “Semitische Nomaden,” 265–80, 427–33; Rainey, “Unruly Elements,” 481– 496; and Ahituv, “Origins of Israel,” 135–40. On the paucity of LB sites in the highlands, see Gonen, “Late Bronze Age,” 215, 217, and “Urban Canaan,” 61–73, who demonstrates that settlement of Palestine in the LB period was sparse overall, with only about 100 LB sites attested. In fact, the Arad and Beersheba valleys were not inhabited at all in LB, according to Amihai Mazar, “Iron Age I,” 286. See also Bunimovitz, “Edge of Empires,” 320–331, especially 324. According to some; see particularly, Ahlström and Edelman, “Merneptah’s Israel.” This is the terminology used by Dever (see especially Who Were the Early Israelites? 194–200). Miller, Chieftains, 2.

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While Miller may perhaps come to this conclusion too easily, I too will refer to the highlanders as “Israelites,” not because I believe Israelite ethnicity to have been fully fledged in Iron I – nor that it was ever anything apart from a continuously contested and evolving set of norms and ideals, as ethnicity always is – but only for the sake of facility.14 In addition, the lowland sites will be left out of this discussion of early Israel – as is typical – though borderline sites such as ‘Izbet S[artah[ will be addressed where relevant. Biblical scholars and archaeologists alike have repeatedly referred to the poverty and homogeneity of the highland sites. In the late 1950s, William F. Albright wrote: “Early Israelite strata show no signs of the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few; the palaces of Canaanite towns are replaced by large and small rustic enclosures and huts.”15 While the amount of archaeological data on Iron I is many times greater than what it was in the 1950s, more recent characterizations of the highland sites have on the whole deviated little from that of Albright. For example, Robert B. Coote and Keith W. Whitelam refer to the “almost uniformly poor material culture of [the] Iron I sites.”16 William G. Dever states that “[t]he picture we get in these early Israelite hill-country villages is of a very simple, rather impoverished, somewhat isolated culture with no great artistic or architectural tradition behind it.”17 Paula McNutt remarks in a similar fashion that the “meager ceramic repertoire” of the early Israelites “suggests a subsistence economy.”18 Early Israel’s ceramic wares, important as they are for determining who this group was and how they lived, merit further discussion. Amihai Mazar summarizes the ceramic evidence as follows: [T]he pottery assemblage of the hill settlements reflects a poor material culture that limits itself only to the most basic forms. The great pithoi were indispensable for the storage and preservation of water and food in the hill zones. The range of forms indicates the influence of Canaanite traditions; it would appear that the settlers lacked an independent pottery-making tradition, and it is conceivable that at first they procured vessels from their Canaanite neighbors and went on to produce pottery in a similar tradition. 14

15 16 17 18

For recent discussions of ethnicity in ancient Israel, see, among others, Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites?; Killebrew, Biblical Peoples, and idem, “Emergence of Ancient Israel,” 2:555– 572; Finkelstein, “Ethnicity and Origin,” 198–212; McNutt, Reconstructing, 33–36, 40–41, 51–53, and elsewhere; Lemche, Israelites in History, 8–21, 107–132; Thompson, “Defining History and Ethnicity,” 166–187, though his and Lemche’s views are rather extreme; Bloch-Smith, “Israelite Ethnicity in Iron I”; and Raz Kletter, “Can a Proto-Israelite,” 2:573–586.; among other works. Albright, Stone Age to Christianity, 285. Coote and Whitelam, Emergence, 124. Dever, “How to Tell a Canaanite,” 42. McNutt, Reconstructing, 67

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Nevertheless, various Canaanite forms and an entire range of ceramic decoration find no expression in the Israelite repertoire.19

Mazar’s comments, in addition to falling in line with the characterizations here of early Israel’s material culture, occupy a middle ground in the wellknown, rather vociferous, and arguably counterproductive debate between William Dever and Israel Finkelstein on the nature of the Iron I pottery. Dever, on the one hand, emphasizes the continuity of this pottery with LB Canaanite forms, while Finkelstein has stressed the dissimilarities between the two assemblages.20 Setting aside the often shrill tone of this academic dispute, it is not difficult to see that Dever and Finkelstein are largely in agreement: both see the Iron I highland pottery as being within the same family, if you will, as that of the earlier period – as opposed to the Philistine wares, which clearly have their origins outside of Palestine – yet both also see the Iron I repertoire as being more limited than that of LB. As Dever writes: “The ceramic repertoire of our Iron I villages shows many overall continuities with that of the Late Bronze Age II, but it contains far fewer individual forms.”21 Finkelstein: “Indeed, certain Iron I highlands types of pottery do resemble Late Bronze Age vessels. But at the same time, there are some fundamental differences; the Iron I highlands assemblages are poor and limited compared to the rich, decorated and varied assemblages of the Late Bronze Age.”22 As Mazar, Dever, and Finkelstein all state, the highland pottery was limited almost entirely to utilitarian forms. At Shiloh, for instance, 40 percent of the ceramic remains came from collar-rim storejars, another 15 percent came from other types of storejars, and 17 percent came from jugs. At Giloh, too, 76 percent of remains came from storejars and cooking pots. And neither of these sites is in any way atypical in their ceramic assemblages.23 Early Israelite pottery was also generally lacking in painted decoration, with only simple forms of adornment, such as incised or impressed decoration, being at all common.24 Dever goes so far as to call the “aesthetic tradition” of the early Israelites “barren indeed.”25 Perhaps more importantly, one finds in the hill-country sites a “near-total absence of any imported wares.”26 Strikingly, 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26

Mazar, “Iron Age I,” 292. See Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites?, 118–125; idem, “Archaeological Data,” 77–90; Finkelstein, Archaeology, 270–291; idem, “Ethnicity and Origin”; as well as other works by the two scholars Dever, Who Were the Israelites? 120. Finkelstein, Response to “How to Tell an Israelite,” 65. Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites? 120. Mazar, “The Iron Age I,” 290. Dever, Who Were the Israelites? 126. Ibid., 120.

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ceramics specialists have also found that the Iron I pottery, even if it resembled the LB wares, was generally produced in a very different fashion. As Dever states: “Iron I pottery generally reveals fewer wheel-forming techniques, except in its finishing. The shift to hand-made vessels would seem to indicate a change from large-scale production to cottage industry.”27 Thus, virtually every aspect of highland ceramics, from its emphasis on utilitarian forms to its absence of painted decoration to the way it was constructed, is evidence that early Israel was a rural subsistence society. Apart from ceramics, another type of archaeological evidence – the remains of residential structures – may also serve as evidence for social stratification, or the lack thereof. As was noted earlier, the hill country sites are quite homogeneous in their material remains. Though the number of Iron I sites in the hill country now stands at well over 200,28 at virtually none of these sites does one find evidence of monumental remains or cultic installations.29 In fact, most of the highland sites were not even fortified.30 Most of the sites, too, were quite small. Finkelstein, in his survey of Ephraim, or Southern Samaria, found that 70 percent of the sites in this region occupied between .1 and .3 hectare (or between one and three dunams) in Iron I, 20 percent occupied between .4 and 1 hectare, 10 percent between 1.1 to 2 hectares, and that none of the sites in this region was larger than two hectares.31 If one uses a density factor of 25 persons per dunam, or 250 persons per hectare, as Finkelstein does, this would mean that none of the sites in Southern Samaria had more than 500 residents, and that the great majority had less than 75!32 Adam Zertal’s survey of Manasseh, a more hospitable region than Ephraim, revealed similar patterns for that region: of the 96 Iron I sites, 22 (23 percent) were larger than 1.5 hectares, 59 (61 percent) were between .5 and 1.5 hectares, and 13 (14 percent) were between .1 and .2 hectares.33 Thus, the sites in Manasseh, the most “aggressively settled” region of the hill country, were somewhat larger on average, but most still would have had fewer than 300 residents. If one 27 28

29

30

31

32 33

Ibid., 118. Finkelstein, “Great Transformation,” 355. Miller in fact lists the number of sites as 453 (see the charts on pp. 127–136 in Chieftains). Mazar, “Iron Age I,” 289. Tel Masos seems to show evidence of public buildings, but it is unclear whether this site was “Israelite.” See ibid., 286; Hopkins, Highlands of Canaan, 141; and following. Hopkins, 142–143, discusses what might be other examples of public architecture at other sites, as does Mazar, “Iron Age I,” 285–286. Hopkins, Highlands of Canaan, 140. Mazar discusses which sites had or may have had defensive walls (“Iron Age I,” 287–288). Finkelstein and Zvi Lederman, Highlands of Many Cultures, II: 894–897; Schloen, House of the Father, 155. Finkelstein, Archaeology, 193. Cited in ibid., 89.

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looks at the highlands as a whole, the mean village population was only about 125 persons.34 But what of the types of remains found at these sites? As one would expect from the importance assigned to it, the “four-room” or “pillared” house, and its smaller two and three-room variants, were very common building types in Iron I, and continued to be even in Iron II.35 These houses were often clustered together in a haphazard fashion throughout a settlement,36 as opposed to following a specific village plan, though at some sites, houses seem to have been placed in a “peripheral arrangement of dwellings along the perimeter of the site,” perhaps as a rudimentary form of defense.37 The houses naturally do show some differences in building plan and construction method,38 but were invariably built of local materials. As Holladay states: “Regional availability of materials dictated variability in details.”39 The major features of the houses were of course their hallmark pillars, hewn from local caprock in the central hill country and elsewhere, or of chert or limestone in the Negeb, and walls founded upon stone and built of mudbrick, plastered both inside and outside with mud-chaff plaster.40 One finds staircases at many sites, which implies the existence of an upper story. The rooms of the ground floor, including the broadroom, normally had beaten earth floors, though one does find some stone paving in the aisles or siderooms.41 This first floor seems to only have been between one and two meters high, and one sometimes finds small archways that were even lower.42 Features such as these have led many to think

34

35

36

37

38

39 40 41 42

Schloen, House of the Father, 155. Schloen is utilizing data from both the Iron I and II periods, a fact that makes this estimate all the more striking considering the general increase in population one sees at Iron II sites. See Stager, “Archaeology of the Family,” 11; Hopkins, Highlands of Canaan, 143; Mazar, Archaeology of the Land, 343–344; Fritz, City in Ancient Israel, 73–74; Barkay, “The Iron Age II-III,” in Archaeology of Ancient Israel, 332; among others. Pace Frank Braemer, L’Architecture Domestique du Levant, who rejects “four-room” typology, though he is in the minority. Or what seems prima facie to be thus. Stager has convincingly argued that the clusters of buildings housed extended families, and this position has seemingly become the consensus viewpoint. See Stager, “Archaeology of the Family.” Mazar, “Iron Age I,” 287–288. One of these sites is ‘Izbet S[artah? Stratum III, according to Finkelstein and others. See Finkelstein, ‘Izbet S[artah?, 106–108; Finkelstein, Archaeology, 238–239. Dever contests Finkelstein’s reconstruction, however; see Dever, “How to Tell a Canaanite,” 44–45. Hopkins, Highlands of Canaan, 144; Mazar, “The Iron Age I,” 288. These relate primarily to such features as number of rooms, whether rooms were separated by solid walls versus pillars, and in what manner pillars were constructed. Holladay, “House, Israelite,” 3:309. Holladay, “House, Israelite,” 309. Ibid., 308–309; Stager, “Archaeology of the Family,” 12. Holladay, “House, Israelite,” 309; Stager, “Archaeology of the Family,” 12.

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that the first floor of Israelite houses was in all likelihood used to stable animals, which would have had a very practical function: “In winter, warmth radiating from the animals up to the bedrooms or sleeping lofts would have provided an effective, if malodorous, heating system,” as Stager puts it.43 In an overwhelming number of cases, luxury items are absent from the houses; instead, one finds an abundance of implements for processing foodstuffs, such as querns, mortars, pestles, and sickles, as well as other quotidian items.44 Faunal remains are also pervasive throughout the sites. Stager concludes: “The widespread distribution and frequency of all of these . . . items make it clear that these were the homes of farmers and herders.”45 While these features give one little impression that the early Israelites were anything other than subsistence farmers, a few scholars have seen, or tried to see, evidence for social stratification of some kind. The most prominent of these is perhaps Jack Holladay. While Holladay admits that the Israelite sites are marked by an “essential equality in habitation type and size,”46 he attempts to play down this fact by stating that “wealth distinctions . . . may only poorly be reflected in domestic architecture.” This is in contrast to what he calls “class distinctions,” which would be observable archaeologically “in the form of distinctive residences, preferred location of residence within the settlement, or non-uniform distribution of elite goods – none of which have, as yet, been noted.”47 While “class distinctions” are primarily what concern us here – since 43 44

45 46

47

Stager, “Archaeology of the Family,” 12. Stager speaks of the many examples of these items found at Raddana and ‘Ai specifically. See “Archaeology of the Family,” 11–12. Stager, “Archaeology of the family,” 12. In contrast, Miller, Chieftains, especially 73–75, argues that residential hierarchy, marked by differences in construction materials, may be seen in early Israel, but I find the differences to which he points to be of little significance and his argument as a whole unconvincing. Holladay, “Kingdoms of Israel and Judah,” 377. One returns, then, to the issue discussed briefly in Chapter 3 regarding how one chooses to define social stratification. Holladay differentiates between wealth distinctions and “class distinctions,” or “class stratification.” He does not define this terminology very clearly, however. One problem is that he seems to use these categories dichotomously, though it is clear that wealth distinctions are inherent in many, if not most, forms of social stratification. As Gerhard E. Lenski writes: “The confusion surrounding [the] term [‘class’] is largely a result of the complexity of the reality it represents and of the tendency of scholars to oversimplify . . . [S]tratification is a multi-dimensional phenomenon. Human populations are stratified in various ways, and each of these alternative modes of stratification provides a basis for a different conception of class. Thus, although one may legitimately analyze the population of a given community in terms of prestige classes, this does not exhaust the subject of stratification. The same population can also be analyzed in terms of power classes or privilege classes. Analytically each of these is quite distinct, though empirically there is a substantial measure of overlap. . .” (Power and Privilege, 74). Though Lenski’s analysis is clearly pre-Foucauldian, the overall thrust of this cautionary note is certainly reasonable, and calls into question the distinct opposition that is assumed by Holladay. For the sake of facility, however, I will engage Holladay’s argument on his own terms, though it

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the presence of socioeconomically rooted class distinctions are strongly correlated with dowry systems – it is nevertheless worth pursuing the question of whether or not one does find evidence for what Holladay calls wealth distinctions at Iron I sites. Naturally, such distinctions would be inherent in the type of class stratification that is relevant to this book, even if those distinctions had not yet concretized into fully fledged social stratification. Not finding meaningful differentiations in the domestic archictecture of Iron I, Holladay is left to look elsewhere for evidence of wealth distinctions.48 He finds such evidence in household storage methods, arguing that high concentrations of pit silos49 at Iron I sites demonstrate that “a pattern of accumulation of agricultural surplus on considerably more than a ‘subsistence’ basis” was present.50 Pit silos are one of the most common features of Israelite sites in the late Iron I period.51 They were used for storing grain and have been found at virtually every site excavated. Most were dug into the ground and lined with stones, but where the bedrock was soft, silos were sometimes hewn into the rock itself.52 Holladay focuses on the silos at two sites, ‘Izbet S[artah[

48

49

50 51

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should be stated that what Goody had in mind when arguing that the distribution of marriage gifts was tied to social stratification was a fully fledged class stratification that is based upon socioeconomic differentations, as one finds in Europe, India, Mesopotamia, and elsewhere. That is, in such a system one finds social strata that hold unequal amounts of wealth, and based upon this economic inequality, and often upon other types of social inequalities as well, these strata are accorded different levels of prestige that correlate with their different levels of wealth. For more on social stratification, see Lenski, Power and Privilege; Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus; Fried, Evolution of Political Society; Fallers, Inequality; Wason, Archaeology of Rank; Scott, Stratification and Power; among others. It is worth keeping in mind that even if marked variation in house sizes were found, such variation alone would not necessarily evidence either “wealth distinctions” or “class stratification.” Instead, as Schloen has persuasively argued, differences in the size of residential structures would in all likelihood correlate primarily with differing family sizes and with the vagaries of the domestic cycle. That is, because of high rates of death and birth, family sizes would have varied not only in terms of how many children were born to a family or how many of a family’s children survived infancy, but also in terms of how large a family was at any given time. In other words, while at one specific point a family might consist of two parents, three children, and a grandparent, at some later time it might consist of only one parent and one or two children, as people succumbed to old age, disease, and so on. (On the domestic cycle, see Laslett, “Introduction: History of the Family,” 5–85; and Goody, “Evolution of the Family,”103–124.) Schloen bases this thesis on evidence from premodern sources from societies as varied as Roman Egypt, Renaissance Tuscany, and Ottoman Syria, as well as on demographic models. See Schloen, House of the Father, 122–133. Holladay seems to use the terms grain pits and silos interchangeably, though Borowski, Agriculture, 72, has proposed differentiating between the two. I follow Holladay’s seemingly more conventional usage here. Holladay, “Kingdoms,” 378. Holladay, “Kingdoms,” 377; Finkelstein, Archaeology, 264–269; Currid and Navon, “Iron Age Pits,” 67–78. Finkelsten, Archaeology, 264.

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(Strata III-II) and Tell Beit Mirsim (B1–3), which “probably provide the best presently available Iron I to Iron II grain pit series.”53 Tell Beit Mirsim is a site in the southern Shephelah, whose B strata have been dated to the Iron I period. Raphael Greenberg has dated the occupation of the B1–2 strata in particular to roughly 1225–1000 bce.54 One finds at this site roughly 34 silos, capable of holding approximately 57 metric tons of grain (assuming an average capacity of one metric ton per silo).55 This number seems extraordinary – until one takes account of how much grain is needed to support a family and its livestock. According to Holladay, “a family of five and their animals would have required ca. 1800 kg of wheat and 1080 kg of barley,” or about three metric tons of grain, per year.56 The silos at Tell Beit Mirsim, then, would provide enough storage for no more than 20 families of 5, or 100 persons. Using a different measure that estimates each person would consume between 250 and 350 kg of grain per year,57 the silos could hold enough grain for between 160 and 225 persons, not including grain needed for animal feed. The 57 tons of storage estimated by Holladay of course represents the maximum amount of storage the silos could have provided for the site. Realistically speaking, not all of the silos would have been used for the entirety of the B strata occupation, a period spanning about two centuries. In addition, some of the silos seem to overlap with another, a fact that also strongly implies that they were not all in use at once.58 Holladay himself concedes all this: “Unfortunately, we do not know the length of time any one silo was in active service, nor, except for the relative dates of their backfilling, which ones were contemporary.”59 Nonetheless, this analysis does raise the question of how many people lived at Tell Beit Mirsim during Iron I. Unfortunately, however, this is not a question that one can truly answer, for many of the site’s remains are very poorly preserved and, as it stands, incoherent. There is one well-preserved house that measures roughly 10 × 15 meters, or 150m2, which could have housed about 15 people, using the usual density coefficient of 10m2/person (and not accounting for an upper story or for areas on the ground level which were most likely not used for human habitation).60 Holladay argues that at least 19 53 54 55 56 57

58

59 60

Holladay, “Kingdoms,” 377. Greenberg, “New Light,” 78. Holladay, “Kingdoms,” 377. Ibid., 387. Schloen, House of the Father, 144, who cites Schwartz, “Rural Economic Specialization,” 25. This estimate is based upon Near Eastern textual evidence. Finkelstein wonders, however, if the silos were truly overlapping, or just leaning up against one another. See Finkelstein, Archaeology, 54. Holladay, “Kingdoms,” 378. While this house might seem quite large, Avraham Faust has found that house sizes at rural sites in Iron II averaged about 120m2, while urban dwellings tended to be much smaller. A

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of the silos, with a storage capacity of around 31 metric tons of grain, belonged to this house. These silos could have held enough grain to support roughly 50 people, as well as their livestock, a fact that by itself might imply that its residents were able to acquire an agricultural surplus. Yet, considering our inability to demonstrate how many of the silos were used at once, or how large the settlement was as a whole, Holladay’s thesis remains a difficult one to prove for Tell Beit Mirsim. The other site to which Holladay devotes some attention is ‘Izbet S[artah? III-II. While Stratum III includes remains of only seven or so silos, Stratum II abounds in grain pits. One finds 43 of them, which again seem to be clustered near one large house with outer dimensions of about 12m × 16m.61 Unlike at the previous site, one does find clear remains here of two other smaller houses, and more poorly preserved remains of several other structures. Baruch Rosen has estimated that this site’s grain pits could have held roughly 150 cubic meters. If each person were consuming 250 kg per year, the site could have supported 150 individuals.62 Again, this raises the question of how many people resided at the site, and for ‘Izbet S[artah[, a population estimate can reasonably be made: Finkelstein sets it at about 100 persons.63 As with Tell Beit Mirsim, this discrepancy between the number of people who most likely lived at the site and the amount of grain that its silos could hold might by itself be evidence of the accumulation of surpluses, were it not for the same

61 62

63

household of fifteen people would be atypical, though not impossible, if it were an extended family with multiple wives and/or slaves. Also, it is quite possible that at unwalled, rural sites, people were simply allotted more living space – as the average given by Faust certainly implies. See Faust, “Rural Community,” 19, and “Differences in Family Structure,” 233–252, especially 239 and 242. On the coefficient of 10m2 per person, see Stager, “Archaeology of the Family,” 18. Holladay, “Kingdoms,” 378; Finkelstein,‘Izbet S[artah[, 14. Baruch Rosen, “Subsistence Economy of Stratum II,” in ‘Izbet S[artah[, 172–173. However, Rosen utilizes yet another estimate of how much grain, or in this case specifically wheat, each person would consume per year: 150–250 kg. If each individual were consuming only 150 kg of grain per year – which would have been the case only if his or her diet were heavily proteinbased – the settlement could have supported 250 individuals. Yet, such a protein-heavy diet would necessitate larger herds, and these herds would have required more feed, which itself would need to be stored. An estimate of 250 thus seems to me unlikely. Rosen approximates that the average weight of wheat stored at the site to have been 53,900 kg, and of barley, 21,350 kg. (These average weights are 70 percent of the maximal amount that the siloes could have held.) Using Holladay’s estimate that a family a five would require 1800 kg of wheat per year and 1080 kg of barley, the site would have stored on average enough wheat for 150 persons and enough barley for 100 persons. However, Rosen puts the amount of cereals available for consumpton at only 70 percent of the (average) amounts stored, due to storage waste and other factors. This lowers the amount of grain available to 37,730 kg of wheat and 14,945 kg of barley. Using the estimate of 250 kg of wheat per person, 150 persons would be supported by the site. Ibid., 174.

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problem being present. As Rosen puts it: “It should be remembered that the storage capacity exposed in the excavations represents the maximum volume of silos used by the inhabitants during the life-span of Stratum II. There, not only new silos that were dug in years of maximum yield but those that went out of use for one reason or another would have been counted by the excavators as ‘silos in use.’”64 In contrast to Tell Beit Mirsim B, however, the lifespan of Stratum II was only one or two decades,65 rather than two centuries, a fact that perhaps works in favor of Holladay’s argument, as does the fact that Rosen attempted to correct for the discrepancy in his calculations.66 What does not work in favor of Holladay’s argument, conversely, is that the sites just examined are not typical of early Israelite settlements in two important ways. While it is certainly true that pit silos have been found at most early Israelite sites, both Tell Beit Mirsim and ‘Izbet S[artah[ are noteworthy for their very large number of silos. In addition, the ethnic identification of both Tell Beit Mirsim B and ‘Izbet S[artah[ has been disputed. The former is problematic not only because of its location outside the central hill country, but also because the site’s earlier stratum was a “Canaanite” city destroyed by fire in the thirteenth century bce. W. F. Albright, the site’s original excavator, originally explained the site’s atypical ceramic remains by proposing that C2 was a “Canaanite” site that was destroyed and resettled by the Israelites (B1), then overrun by the Philistines (B2), and finally retaken by the Israelites (B3) during the period of the United Monarchy.67 Greenberg has more recently given a different interpretation, arguing that stratum B is a continuation of “Canaanite” occupation. Noting the similarities between the site’s pottery and that found at Lachish, he suggests that the residents of the latter city fled to Tell Beit Mirsim after Lachish was destroyed around 1150. Though some Philistine ware was found at the site, Greenberg argues that the amount was negligible and that the site was most likely not Philistine. He also states: Despite the superficial similarities (rural economy, poor architecture, pits) neither the architecture nor the material culture of Tell Beit Mirsim Iron I is comparable with those of the presumed Israelite sites: three- and four-room houses and pillar construction . . . are not present; jars and pithoi form but a small proportion of the pottery assemblage. . .; the common decoration on the Tell Beit Mirsim pottery – particularly the ibex and palm-motif. . . – is foreign to the decorative tradition of the new settlement sites.68 64 65 66 67 68

Ibid., 171–172. Finkelstein, ‘Izbet S?artah?, 201. Baruch Rosen, “Subsistence Economy of Stratum II,” in ‘Izbet S?artah?, 171–173. Albright, Excavation of Tell Beit Mirsim, III:36–37. Greenberg, “New Light,” 76.

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While Gloria London might interpret such differences, or at least the first two, as being indicative of an urban-rural dichotomy, rather than of ethnic differences, it is difficult to see this site’s B stratum as urban.69 This explanation, too, would be ill-suited to explaining why, in Stratum A, “the character of the pottery changed, becoming indistinguishable from that of the other regions of Judah incorporated in the Israelite Monarchy”70 – and this precisely at the time when the site was becoming more urbanized. In any case, it seems unwise to use Tell Beit Mirsim Stratum B to argue that wealth distinctions were present in early Israel. Moving to ‘Izbet S[artah[, one finds similar problems. The first issue is that this site is located only 3 km from Aphek, a “Canaanite city that subsequently became an important Philistine center.”71 Among the ceramic remains of ‘Izbet Sart iahi Stratum III, one finds a jar in the style of Late Mycanaean IIIB, a fragment of a krater decorated in the same palm-and-ibex style that one finds at Tell Beit Mirsim B, and various other wares “manufactured in the ceramic tradition of the Late Bronze period.”72 The pottery types found in Stratum II are more uniform and are similar to those found at other sites in the region, many of which are Philistine.73 Finkelstein seems to minimize the latter fact, perhaps because he wishes to interpret the site as being Israelite. “Although there are some ceramic differences between ‘Izbet S[artah[ and the Iron Age hill country sites,” he admits, “these should be evaluated in a regional context.”74 While this may be true, and while determining the ethnicity of Iron I sites is in general a tricky business, I reiterate that it seems imprudent to use a site like ‘Izbet S[artah[ to make determinations about early Israelite social structure. A site with interesting, and equally damaging, implications for Holladay’s thesis is Tel Dan. Dan was a site far surpassing most early Israelite sites in area, occupying roughly 100 dunams.75 Interestingly, one finds few remains of 69 70 71 72 73

74 75

See London, “Comparison of Two Lifestyles.” Greenberg, “New Light,” 76. Finkelstein, Archaeology, 74. Ibid., 75. Finkelstein,‘Izbet S[artah[, 76, 86, 88. Amihai Mazar comments: “The eleventh-century assemblage of ‘Izbet Sartah . . . is more variegated than that of the hill sites and closely resembles that of the contemporary Philistine strata at Tell Qasile” (“The Iron Age I,” 291). Ibid., 205. Mazar, “Iron Age I,” 285. Avraham Biran sets the site’s size at an even larger 50 acres (“Dan,” I:323). While the identification of Tel Dan as an early Israelite site generally goes unchallenged, its size is not its only atypical feature. During MBII, the site was an important fortified city, but its remains for the LB period are limited to a tomb in which many Mycenaean vessels were found (Finkelstein, Archaeology, 102). Some “Tyrian” or “Galilean” pithoi were also found among the Iron I remains, and the region “may have been the scene of TyrianPhoenician settlement activity, as evidenced in the construction of the fortress of Har Adir”

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permanent structures in its earliest Iron I strata (VI-V), despite the size of the settlement. What one does find instead are dozens of pit silos. This site is perhaps even more challenging to Holladay’s argument than the two discussed earlier, for one can infer from its peculiar set of remains, as Finkelstein has, “that the people active in this region were in the early stages of the transition to complete sedentarization.”76 Finkelstein in fact addresses the issue of grain pits directly, not just for Tel Dan, but for early Israel as a whole: What is the meaning of this veritable explosion of silos in the period of Israelite Settlement? In the preceding Late Bronze period, only isolated silos were found at a limited number of sites . . . The phenomenon was similarly scarce during the succeeding Iron II period. The explanation is quite simple. A proliferation of silos generally characterizes groups in the process of sedentarization or societies organized in local rural frameworks. This phenomenon can be observed today in the settlements of newly-sedentarized Beduin at the edge of the Judean Desert and in the Negev, where the first structures erected were for the storage of grain and straw . . . Silage is the first problem for which such societies must find a permanent architectural solution. On the other hand, in urban societies or under governmental organization, small silos are not enountered because better storage solutions have been found.77

Finkelstein thus offers an explanation for the number of grain pits at Iron I sites that differs markedly from that of Holladay. One may conclude, then, that while Holladay’s argument regarding early Israelite silage is not completely without merit, it is on the whole unsatisfactory. That being the case, it is worth asking where else one might turn to determine whether or not early Israelite society was marked by distinctions in wealth. We have just examined three atypical Iron I sites; we will now turn to a fourth, Tel Masos, which has received a fair amount of scholarly attention.78 Tel Masos was the most important Iron I site in the Beersheba valley, being ten times larger than other sites in this region, as well as three times larger than the typical hill country site, according to Finkelstein.79 In contrast to those sites, the ceramic

76 77 78 79

(Mazar, “Iron Age I,” 286; Finkelstein, Archaeology, 102; Biran, “Dan,” 326). Finally, a group called the Denyen (Danuna) are listed among the Sea Peoples in Egyptian sources (Mazar, “Iron Age I,” 263). Based upon this evidence, some proposed that the tribe of Dan were originally related to or derived from the Sea Peoples; see Yadin, “And Dan?” 9–23; and Margalith, Sea Peoples, particularly chapter four. Finkelstein, Archaeology, 108. Ibid., 266. See the bibliography in Kempinski, “Masos, Tel,” III: 989. Finkelstein, Archaeology, 45; McNutt, Reconstructing, 67. This characterization seems inaccurate, however, in light of the data provided more recently in Finkelstein et al, Highlands,

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remains from Tel Masos include both Phoenician and Midianite wares and provide evidence that the settlement had trade relations with other areas.80 One also finds what seem to be public buildings at the site, including a building that was presumably used for cultic purposes, for it contained a basin and many cultic vessels, and a fortress with a watchtower in its latest stratum (late eleventh to early tenth centuries).81 All of this can be interpreted as evidence that a more complex social structure, and thus in all likelihood social stratification, existed at this settlement.82 As was the case with Tell Beit Mirsim and ‘Izbet S[artah[, however, the identification of this site as Israelite is problematic – in fact, most scholars question such an identification. One does not have to search very hard for why this is so: among the public buildings that one finds at the site is a “fortresslike structure” built in Egypto-Canaanite style.83 Taken together with the evidence for foreign trade and the public buildings, it becomes very difficult to include Tel Masos in the category of early Israelite sites. As Finkelstein puts it: “Practically every feature of Tel Masōs [stands] in complete contrast to the characteristics of Israelite Settlement sites in the hill country.”84 Despite the problems with utilizing any of this information in arguing for either wealth distinctions or class stratification in early Israel, Holladay is not alone in seeing this group as having been socially differentiated. For example, Robert D. Miller has argued that Iron I Israel was in fact a ranked society (contra Holladay). Though Holladay and other archaeologists have failed to identify meaningful differences in residential size or quality, Miller argues that such differences are present. In his view, not only are certain sites more prosperous than others, but certain houses within the sites are larger and made of better materials. Among the examples he cites is Khirbet Raddana (Phase 2), where one finds a “residential hierarchy: the central, hewn-pillared, three-room pier house in Site S has taller pillars and more storage and is bigger (16 x 5 m.) than the 14 or so houses in Site R or the houses in Site T.”85 Elizabeth Bloch-Smith has also used this site to disprove the proposal that Israel was “very poor and ‘egalitarian,’”86 stating that it was “home to an

80

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894–897. There is no doubt that Tel Masos was larger than other sites in the area, but whether or not it was ten times larger than any other site in the region is now quite dubious. Finkelstein, Archaeology, 42; Kempinski, “Masos, Tel,” III: 988. On the so-called Midianite wares, see Amihai Mazar, Archaeology of the Land, 286; and Rothenberg and Glass, “Midianite Pottery,” 65–125. Kempinski, “Masos, Tel,” III:988. Finkelstein in fact argues that a chiefdom centered at Tel Masos briefly existed in the Negev at the beginnning of Iron I. See “Arabian Trade,” 241–252. Ibid, 986; Finkelstein, Archaeology, 45. Finkelstein, Archaeology, 46. Miller, Chieftains, 65. She quotes Raz Kletter, “People without Burials?” 36, against whom she argues in particular.

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economically, and probably therefore socially, stratified, rather than egalitarian, group of people.”87 Like Miller, she points to the large Site S houses. Yet the house cited by Miller is only 80 m2, and is thus fairly unimpressive when compared with the largest house at ‘Izbet S[artah[, which measured 12 m × 16 m. Bloch-Smith has herself written elsewhere: “The interior ground floor space of pillared houses at ‘Ai and Raddana ranged from 42–80m2. Estimating 10m2 of roofed space per person, the structures would have housed 4–8 people.”88 These are not very impressive dimensions to begin with, but when one takes into account Schloen’s argument that differences in the size of houses correlate more directly to family size than to wealth, they become insignificant.89 More important than size, perhaps, is the fact that the Site S houses of Khirbet Raddana are of higher quality of construction, and that, as Miller points out, a few luxury items were found at the village. In addition, one finds evidence of bronze-working, such as “slag-encrusted crucibles,” at Khirbet Raddana.90 Two other sites described as bearing witness to social complexity in Iron I are Tel ‘Ein Zippori and Tel el-Wawiyat, both located in the region of the lower Galilee. Each of these sites contains a building complex whose size has repeatedly been emphasized by their excavators. J. P. Dessel calls the “large” building at ‘Ein Zippori “striking evidence for rural complexity.”91 While it is noteworthy that this building may have had a public use, its construction at the close of Iron I or early days of Iron II seemingly makes it relevant for analysis of social stratification in Iron II (or to be more specific, Iron IIA), and in that period, a building measuring 11 × 15 m would not in fact have been so noteworthy.92 Certainly, the palaces dating from later in Iron II or from the Persian and Hellenistic periods were many times larger. An earlier stratum at the site also contained a relatively large building that, while still utilized in Iron I, was clearly constructed in LB II. Imported pottery was found in this latter building, but the pottery, like the building, does not date to Iron I.93 Wawiyat, on the other hand, does contain a “large building” constructed in Iron I.94 The edifice in question measured 9.5 × 8.5 m, and was thus equivalent in size to the largest building at Khirbet Raddana.95 Yet, as was just stated, it is 87 88 89 90 91 92

93 94 95

Bloch-Smith, “Resurrecting the Iron I Dead,” 87. Bloch-Smith and Nakhai, “Landscape Comes to Life,” 75. See Schloen, House of the Father, 122–133, and note 48. Callaway, “Raddana, Khirbet,” IV:1253. Dessel, “Tell ‘Ein Zippori: Village,” 30. These are the measurements provided by Carol Meyers, “Sepphoris and Lower Galilee,” 18. Elsewhere, the building’s measurements are stated to be “at least 13 x 12 m” (Dessel, Eric Meyers, Carol Meyers, “Tell ‘En S[ippori, 1996,” 268). Meyers, “Sepphoris and Lower Galilee,” 17. Nakhai, “Wawiyat, Tell El-,” 333. Nakhai, Dessel, Wisthoff, “Wawiyat, Tell El-,” 1501.

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debatable how noteworthy such dimensions actually are. More important for our purposes were the unusual objects found at the site in another building, originally constructed in LB II but still used in Iron I. Beth Alpert Nakhai writes that the “building complex, with these unusual objects suggestive of elite status, had a specialized, possibly cultic function.”96 Due to the reusing of the complex, however, these objects might attest better to the social structure of the Late Bronze period than to that of Iron I. It would be foolish to dismiss out of hand the importance of all of the sites that do not fit the stereotypical Iron I village mold. Yet the fact nonetheless remains that sites such as these were few and far between in this period of earliest Israelite history. Citing the evidence from ‘Izbet S[artah[, Avraham Faust makes a germane comment: “It is clear that the highland society was not really egalitarian . . . as such a society does not exist.”97 Ironically enough, however, Faust then goes on to enumerate all of the features of highland material culture that have led the majority of scholars to see early Israelite society as being essentially unstratified: absence of pottery decoration, limited repertoire of ceramic wares, lack of imported pottery, absence of cultic installations (i.e., monumental architecture), the non-hierarchical building plan of four-room houses, and so forth. He cites this evidence not to support the consensus, but to argue that these features are evidence of early Israel’s egalitarian ideology. Thus, while inequalities were present in Israelite society, these inequalities were not reflected in the material culture for ideological reasons. Surely, though, such an argument violates the principle of Occam’s razor. While there is no disputing Faust’s assertion that no society is truly egalitarian, to move in the converse direction by arguing that all societies are stratified is equally unsatisfactory. Certainly, it is true that luxury items were found at a few Iron I sites and that one finds occasional evidence for social complexity, but the number of luxury items is on the whole strikingly small (as Faust himself concedes) and the evidence for social complexity quite minimal. If it is true that no societies are in actuality egalitarian, it is equally true that some societies are much less stratified than others. Most scholars see Iron I Israel as having been a minimally stratified one, and with good reason: the overall picture is of a poor, subsistence economy, and a poor, subsisting group of people. There is one final aspect of early Israelite material culture that is relevant to arguing for either wealth differentiation or class stratification, and that is mortuary evidence, a topic with which Miller, Bloch-Smith, and Faust 96 97

Nakhai, “Wawiyat, Tell el-,” 334. Faust, “Mortuary Practices,” 177.

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all concern themselves. This is the case because a group’s burial customs will normally evidence such characteristics if they are in fact present in the society.98 Unfortunately, however, the evidence here is wanting, as the title of Raz Kletter’s recent article, “People without Burials? The Lack of Iron I Burials in the Central Highlands of Palestine,” makes abundantly clear. In the words of Robert D. Miller II: “The catalogue of mortuary evidence from the Iron I highland settlement is meager. There are no cases where it can be determined if distinctions of sex, age, or rank are made by including different kinds of objects.”99 According to Miller, if one sets aside empty tombs and graves of questionable dating, one is left with a mere eight burial sites.100 Bloch-Smith and Kletter arrive at even smaller tallies.101 With such a small sample size, it is difficult to generalize from this evidence, but a brief summary is nonetheless warranted. At none of the Iron I burial sites does one find a simple pit grave; all of the burials are communal, with some in caves and some in rock-hewn chambers. An example is the large Iron I burial found at Dothan (Level 1), which included at least twenty-seven skeletons and hundreds of ceramic vessels.102 Despite the large number of vessels in the burial at Dothan, there was a notable scarcity of imported ceramics found among the remains, a fact that typifies the Iron I burials as a whole.103 While some of the early Israelite burials in fact contained only pottery, one does find non-ceramic items at a few of the gravesites; these items include an ivory pendant, scarabs, two alabaster spindle-whorls, arrowheads, Mediterranean cowry shells, and various rings.104 98

99

100 101

102 103 104

See Dever, “Social Structure in Early Bronze,” 295, who states that the “value of theoretical studies of social structure based on mortuary practices is widely accepted in recent archaeological literature.” See also Wason, Archaeology of Rank; and Miller, Chieftains, 18. Though Faust (“Mortuary Practices,” especially 178–79) gives examples of groups whose burial practices do not reflect the social stratification in the society, such cases are clearly the exception and not the rule. Miller, Chieftains, 69. Miller summarizes what little evidence there is for Iron I burials on pp. 69–73. (See also Bloch-Smith, “Resurrecting,” and Kletter, “People Without Burials?”) Miller’s statement makes clear that this evidence is of no use to him in making his claim that achieved rank was present in early Israel. (For a succinct description of how “achieved rank” differs from “ascribed rank,” see Olyan, Rites and Rank, 8–9.) This is the case not only because of the paucity of evidence, but also because the very fact that the burials were communal suggests a lack of achieved rank in the society. Wason suggests that communal, as opposed to individual, burial is not normally associated with achieved rank (Archaeology of Rank, 89–92). Miller, Chieftains, 70. See Bloch-Smith, “Resurrecting,” and Kletter, “People without Burials?” Their lists of sites correspond fairly well with each other, though not as well with that of Miller. Bloch-Smith, Judahite Burial Practices, 168; Kletter, “People without Burials?” 32–33. Miller, Chieftains, 71. Ibid., 71–73. Some of these items derive, however, from burials that are not included by Bloch-Smith or Kletter among the group of Iron I burials.

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What is one to make of the paucity of Iron I burials? As Miller writes: “The obvious question is: Where was everyone else buried?”105 Bloch-Smith denies that Iron I Israel is unique in its dearth of mortuary evidence. She points out that the number of LB burials from the highlands is roughly equivalent to that from Iron I.106 Yet, it is well known that the number of Iron I sites in the highlands far outstrips that in LB, rendering Bloch-Smith’s argument unconvincing. She is in fact alone among scholars in her lack of surprise over the small number of burials found; others have seen this lack as a datum in need of explanation. Kletter, in particular, considers various possibilities, suggesting in the end that invisibility of burials might be the answer: The Iron Age I highland burials can be “invisible” to us, if they were shallow, simple graves outside settlements, without grave goods. Such graves are easily destroyed, the bodies decay, and we would not be able to date them archaeologically. Similarly, natural caves could be used, and without grave goods, it would be impossible to date such burials. With due caution, the lack of Iron I highland burials can be related with social factors, though this remains hypothetical. The lack of burials may indicate a relatively poor society, without a developed class structure and consolidation of wealthy, upper classes. It does not mean complete lack of classes, only that distances between ranks were not large. Most of the people had little or no surplus to afford for [sic] grave goods, hence there are no burials with large assemblages of artifacts, nor burials of an “aristocracy.”107

While Faust accepts Kletter’s suggestion that the paucity of burials is due to most Israelites in Iron I being buried in simple graves, he does not accept Kletter’s reasoning for why this was so. Instead, he turns his argument on its head and alleges that the Israelites buried their dead in simple graves for ideological reasons. As stated earlier, however, when taken with the other material evidence from Iron I, virtually all of which points to a surprisingly homogeneous society, Faust’s hypothesis seems forced. Rather than Israel burying its dead in pit graves out of a puritanical regard for simplicity, it is far more logical to see the lack of burials as yet one more piece of evidence that early Israel was essentially unstratified as a society.

Social Stratification in Preexilic Israel: Iron II Perhaps the most conclusive piece of evidence that Israel was not in fact a stratified society in Iron I is how clear it is from Iron II remains that it was 105 106 107

Miller, Chieftains, 73. Bloch-Smith, “Resurrecting,” 83. Kletter, “People without Burials,” 39.

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later on.108 In the past, it was common to speak of changes in Israelite society as having come about very rapidly, almost spontaneously, with Israel shifting over the course of only a few decades from a rural, subsistence society into an urban, fully fledged kingdom. Such a reconstruction was clearly very reliant on biblical narratives, and has recently been challenged. When did early Israel go through the chiefdom “stage” of state development? Was the United Monarchy truly a monarchy? Did the United Monarchy ever actually exist? While all of these questions are still being vociferously debated among biblical scholars, it is not necessary to my argument that they be answered definitively here, or even addressed in any depth. After all, none of these issues impinges on the question of marriage gifts in any significant way. Instead, I will focus upon the issues that do, which are whether or not one finds, minimally, evidence of wealth differentiation or, more importantly, whether or not full-fledged social stratification can be discerned. As was the case with the dating of sources in Chapter 1, exact dates are unimportant here; what matters in a longue durée study of this kind are generalities: when, roughly speaking, does one begin to see evidence of social stratification in ancient Israel, and how pervasive was this stratification? As we saw earlier, there is virtually no evidence for social stratification in early Israel; even the evidence for wealth distinctions is limited and equivocal at best. This is not the case, however, for Iron II. One of the major pieces of evidence for social stratification in Iron II is that, instead of a plethora of homogeneous and materially impoverished sites, one sees in this period the development and crystallization of a three-tier site hierarchy, with a few large administrative and economic centers becoming apparent, a greater number of mid-sized sites, and many, many small villages and farmsteads.109 Among the large centers, one finds Dan, Samaria, and Jerusalem, as well as regional centers such as Hazor, Megiddo, Gezer, and others. Dever writes: These sites tend to exhibit such features as a highly centralized, planned layout; impressive city walls and multiple entryway gates; a palace-administrative complex near the city gate and/or elsewhere; monumental, wellengineered water systems to defend against siege warfare; large colonnaded buildings that are best understood as government storehouses; and other distinctive features that set these sites apart from ordinary cities, even those of the same size.110 108

109 110

I use the following periodization, which seems to me the most commonly employed: Iron I – 1200–1000 BCE; Iron II – 1000–586 BCE, with the latter broken down further into Iron IIA – 1000–900 BCE, Iron IIB – 900–700, and Iron IIC – 700–586 BCE. (See Levy, “Preface,” xvi.) Naturally, none of these dates should be taken as absolute. Dever, “Social Structure in Iron II,” 418. Dever, “Social Structure in Iron II,” 419.

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Clearly, these centers display features found at none of the Iron I sites, not even at a comparatively large and well-developed site such as Tel Masos. Related to the development of this site hierarchy is a general increase in population in Iron II, and an increase in the number of sites found in areas, particularly those in Judah, that had only been sparsely populated in Iron I.111 Magen Broshi and Israel Finkelstein in fact argue that, in the first half of the eighth century, the population of Palestine reached almost 500,000, with approximately 350,000 people in Israel and over 100,000 in Judah.112 Only in the Roman and modern periods would the population be higher. These numbers are in stark contrast to estimates setting the population at the beginning of Iron I at only 60,000–70,000.113 Taking into account population growth and the veritable explosion of monumental architecture alone, it is clear that Israel underwent profound changes in the Iron II period. Yet there is a heated debate among archaeologists over when all of these changes took place. If Israel in Iron I was a collection of many small villages that display no evidence of social stratification or a centralized state apparatus, as the great majority of scholars think it was, it would be unreasonable to assume, therefore, that the situation would change as if by magic once one hit the year 1000, the putative beginning of the Israelite kingdom. Israel Finkelstein has in fact argued that the archaeological record attests that social changes occurred slowly and unevenly throughout the region. In the previous section, we saw that the sites in Manasseh were larger on average than those in Ephraim, and that sites in both regions were larger than those in the Beersheba Valley. These differences are part of a larger trend within Iron I Israel: the comparatively fertile northern regions are generally more densely populated than the dry, less hospitable south. In actuality, the number of sites in Judah as a whole is quite small for Iron I, with less than twenty sites in the Judean Hills, and virtually no sites with permanent occupation in the Judean Desert.114 Settlement in the Beersheba Valley, too, was “surprisingly sparse,” with only a handful of sites present.115 The situation changed very gradually, Finkelstein argues, and it is only in the eighth century that one sees clear archaeological evidence in the south for either social stratification or a centralized state. As one would expect, the northern regions show evidence of stratification at an 111

112 113

114 115

At the end of Iron I, there were fewer than twenty sites in Judah. By the ninth century, that number had risen to thirty-four. See Finkelstein, “Rise of Jerusalem,” 93. Broshi and Finkelstein, “Population of Palestine,” 47–60. Broshi, “Population of Iron Age,” 14–18. This estimate includes the more densely populated, and non-Israelite, lowland regions. Finkelstein, Archaeology, 51, 53. Ibid., 46.

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earlier point, but in his view still only in the ninth century.116 While Dever and most others date the strata of sites such as Gezer and Megiddo within which one finds monumental architecture to the tenth century, Finkelstein instead dates them to the ninth century, believing that it was the Omrides, rather than Solomon, who were responsible for the construction projects at these sites. This proposal accords with the paucity of sites in Judah in the tenth century, a paucity that is seemingly contested by no one, and with the dearth of archaeological evidence for Jerusalem dating from before the late eighth century. After all, if the evidence implies that Jerusalem was not an economic or political center until after the fall of the Northern Kingdom, when an influx of refugees flooded Judah, how can one attribute the construction and planning of sites such as Megiddo and Gezer to a Solomonic kingdom, and if Solomon was not responsible for them, then who was, and when? Dever and others protest that the lack of evidence for Jerusalem exists only because of well-known problems with excavating that site. Apart from constraints on excavation having to do with the present-day occupation of Jerusalem, there are other issues, including those related to discerning site strata. In contrast to the situation with most tells, Jerusalem’s strata lack uniformity and can be difficult to differentiate. This is due to the practice of builders in different periods having attempted to found structures directly on bedrock, thus often damaging other strata.117 In addition, Kenyon lamented that: “Roman quarrying and Byzantine buildings have destroyed all earlier structures and earlier occupation.”118 Surely, however, there is an element of hyperbole in this statement, and in other scholars’ descriptions of the woes of excavating Jerusalem. While no one would argue that the obstacles to properly excavating this site are not indeed noteworthy, archaeologists have found clear evidence in Jerusalem for the MB and late Iron II periods (not to mention for the EB and postexilic periods). In the MB period, Jerusalem was fortified and equipped with two monumental towers and a public water system. In Iron IIC, as well, Jerusalem was heavily fortified, furnished with a large tower, and expansively settled.119 It is only from LB to early Iron II, therefore, that evidence is limited essentially to potsherds, and to the highly contested stepped stone structure that an increasing number of archaeologists now date to the ninth century.120 In the words of Margreet Steiner, “As the truism goes, 116

117 118 119 120

In the words of Gottwald, “the archaeological record is rather equivocal concerning a strongly centralized state in the north before the ninth century or in the south prior to the eightth [sic] century” (Gottwald, “Triumphalist Versus Anti-triumphalist,” 34). Cahill, “Jerusalem at the Time,” 25. See Kenyon, Digging Up Jerusalem, 94; and Cahill, “Jerusalem at the Time,” 18. Killebrew, “Biblical Jerusalem,” 333–337. See Finkelstein, “Rise of Jerusalem,” 84–86; Margreet Steiner, “Evidence from Kenyon’s Excavations,” 351–361, especially 358. Cahill refers to this structure as a “stepped rampart”

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‘absence of evidence is no evidence of absence.’ This may be so, but the investigator should remember that neither is it ‘evidence of presence.’”121 The perhaps more moderate Ann E. Killebrew summarizes the growing consensus on Jerusalem as follows: The accumulative archaeological evidence categorically indicates that the ancient city was prominent during two periods – the Middle Bronze Age II (ca. 1800–1550 B.C.E.) and the Iron Age IIC (late eighth-seventh centuries B.C.E.). During the intervening periods (the Late Bronze and the Iron Age I and IIA/early IIB periods), Jerusalem was a far more modest settlement. The most contested period of time, both archaeologically and biblically, relates to our understanding of Jerusalem during the tenth century, specifically the reigns of David and Solomon. Thus far no physical remains have been found in over a century of excavations that come near to matching the biblical magnificence of the Solomon’s Jerusalem that served as the capital of a ‘united monarchy.’122

The situation with Jerusalem brings into sharp relief the differences between hill country life in Iron I and life in the same area in Iron II, and especially Iron IIB and C. Beginning in the tenth century – if one follows Dever and others – or in the ninth century – if one follows Finkelstein – and continuing until the time of Jerusalem’s destruction, there is clear evidence for monumental and public building at some sites – and thus for a centralized state – and for a sharp increase in population. One additionally finds, in Jerusalem and throughout the region, yet other evidence that life in Israel changed, perhaps drastically, in Iron II. It was mentioned earlier that among the monumental remains that one finds at regional centers such as Megiddo were palaces. These are relevant here less because they evidence a state apparatus than because they attest to a residential hierarchy: no longer did Israelites live in houses that were all roughly the same size, as they had in

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and believes that the terraces found beneath it comprise its “substructure” and are contemporaneous with it; she dates the entire structure to the end of LB/ the beginning of Iron I, and thus sees Jerusalem as having been a fortified settlement throughout Iron I. (See Cahill, “Jerusalem at the Time.”) Finkelstein, on the other hand, argues in a much clearer fashion that the two structures were most likely built separately and that the stepped stone structure, based on the layering of ceramic remains, can only be dated to the 9th century. Steiner, too, sees the two structures as being separate and feels the stepped monument is later than the terrace system. Considering all this, David Ussishkin’s characterization of the stepped structure as “strange and unique,” and conclusion that its original function was unclear, seem apt (Ussishkin, “Solomon’s Jerusalem,” 107). Steiner, “Evidence from Kenyon’s Excavations,” 349. Killebrew, “Biblical Jerusalem,” 332. Recently, Eilat Mazar claims to have found evidence of a Davidic/Solomonic structure, or structures, in the Ophel area of Jerusalem (“Solomonic Wall in Jerusalem,” 2:775–786, and “Did I Find King David’s Palace?” 16–27, 70), but until a full excavation report is published, one cannot properly assess her findings.

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Iron I. On the contrary, one finds at Megiddo alone evidence of two different palaces, both built of fine ashlar masonry, that by themselves comprise more than 20 percent of the city’s area.123 These two palaces were later replaced by one even larger presumably official residence.124 Another palace was found at Lachish; it was built upon a massive square podium that measured 31.5 × 32 meters, making it almost three times as large as the central houses in ‘Izbet S[artah[ and Tell Beit Mirsim examined above.125 There was also a royal precinct at Samaria, built by Omri in the early ninth century and measuring 89 × 178 meters. Within it were found several residences, not to mention clay bullae and several hundred ivory furniture inlays, the former of which attests to the existence of royal archives and the latter to extensive foreign trade.126 As Gabriel Barkay writes, “The ivories found in the Land of Israel, and particularly those of Samaria, are not of local manufacture. Though odd pieces of raw ivory do turn up now and then, ivories were on the whole imported from workshops that supplied the royal houses throughout western Asia.”127 One also finds evidence in Iron II of houses that, while not palaces per se nor on the scale of such buildings, were still exceptionally large. For example, at Hazor, Shechem, and Tell en-Nas[beh, one finds homes that were larger and more elaborate than other buildings at the site.128 At Tell el-Far‘ah, where tenth-century houses were “of almost identical size and plan,” in the ninth century they began to show variations in size.129 Among the eighth and seventh century remains of Jerusalem, too, excavators have found on the eastern slope of the City of David houses that seem to have belonged to the city’s “more affluent residents,” for they were larger and better-built than other houses nearby, and, perhaps more importantly, contained imported CyproPhoenician pottery.130 Dever writes of domestic architecture in Iron II: “Most of [the four-room] houses are rather ordinary; but some are so spacious and well laid out that they could be regarded as villas, no doubt of the upper classes.”131 123 124 125 126 127 128

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Gabriel Barkay, “Iron Age II-III,” 310. Ibid., 314. Ibid., 310. Ibid., 312, 320. Ibid., 322. Amihai Mazar, Archaeology of the Land, 487. On the distinctive houses at Tell en-Nas[beh, see Schloen, House of the Father, 176, who refers to them as “unusually large and well built.” Faust even argues that the archaeological evidence from Hazor stratum VI attests to the existence of different social classes, although the terminology he utilizes to describe these classes is rather problematic (for example, his application of the term “lower-middle class” to the Israelites). See Faust, “Socioeconomic Stratification.” Amihai Mazar, Archaeology of the Land, 487, where he writes that this “perhaps reflect[s] increasing social differentiation.” Cahill, “Jerusalem at the Time,” 56, 72; Killebrew, “Biblical Jerusalem,” 335. Dever, “Social Structure in Iron II,” 423.

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While David Schloen and Jack Holladay speak more cautiously of residential size variations,132 there is no disputing that palaces are residences, and where one finds such clear evidence of a centralized state, urbanization, and a ruling class as one does for Iron II, one would expect to see at least some variations in residential quality and in wealth at the local level, and this is in fact what one finds, according to Dever and others. One of the most telling local examples of centralization in Iron II are the “lamelekh” storage jars, which have been found throughout Judah in sites as distant from one another as Bethel, Tel Miqne, and Tel ‘Ira.133 The handles of these jars are stamped with seals containing the inscription Klml, “for the king” or “belonging to the king,” as well as either a four-winged scarab or a winged solar disk, and were all manufactured at a single location.134 The jars were often large, about sixty centimeters high, seemingly held liquids rather than dry goods, and probably date to the reign of Hezekiah.135 Though there is some debate over what these jars were used for, many scholars believe the jars were used “to gather taxes in the form of agricultural produce (wine, oil, etc.).”136 Regardless of their exact function, it is clear that they were linked to a centralized government, and they demonstrate that this government’s influence and authority reached to every sector of Judah. The lamelekh storage jars are not the only new form of pottery that one finds in Iron II. As a whole, the ceramic evidence from this period is much more varied than that for Iron I. In addition to utilitarian household wares, one finds many “black juglets,” small juglets that were used to hold perfume, flasks consisting of two asymmetrical bowls, and elaborate cultic vessels. One also finds Cypro-Phoenician wares that were manufactured on Cyprus and exported to different parts of the Mediterranean, including Israel, and seem 132

133 134 135 136

As stated earlier, Schloen argues that these variations generally have more to do with differences in the size of families than differences in wealth. Holladay downplays these differences by stating that, “[a]side from palaces and clearly governmental residences . . . no residence from Iron II Palestine outstrips the average ‘four-room house’ by much more than a factor of two, or three at the outside.” See Holladay, “Kingdoms of Israel and Judah,” 392. Barkay, “The Iron Age II-III,” 348. Ibid., 346, 354. Ibid., 348. Ibid., 348. Barkay summarizes the different theories on these jars on pp. 346–349, though unfortunately he provides no bibliography. On the lamelekh jars, see also McNutt, Reconstructing, 150, 158, 245; Dever, “Social Structure in Iron II,” 425; Lapp, “Late Royal Seals,” 11–22; who proposes that the jars are related to a system of royal vineyards; Ussishkin, “Destruction of Lachish,” 28–60; Mommsen, Perlman, and Yellin, “Provenience of the lmlk Jars,” 89–113; Na’aman, “Hezekiah’s Fortified Cities,” 5–21; Borowski, Agriculture, 28–29; Silver, Prophets and Markets, 29–34, who unconvincingly interprets the jars as evidence for private brands of wine, oil, and other products as part of his overall argument that ancient Israel had a market economy; and other works.

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to have been imported partially for their aesthetic value.137 Notably, one also finds local imitations of Assyrian palace ware bowls.138 The latter two types, like the Samaria ivories, demonstrate that Israel and Judah were no longer the isolated regions they had been earlier. In addition, the Cypro-Phoenician ceramics, like the Samaria ivories and various other pieces of evidence from Iron II, demonstrate there was a market for luxury goods in the area, and thus those who could afford them. In contrast to Iron I, a sizable amount of mortuary evidence exists for Iron II, and this evidence, like that described, clearly attests to social stratification.139 Burial in caves or in chambers hewn from rock were by far the most common forms of burial in the highlands.140 Gabriel Barkay and William Dever both suggest that it was the wealthy who were buried in such chambers, for “only the well-to-do could afford to purchase a plot of land and cut a tomb cave,” and that most non-elite persons were buried in “simple pit-graves, which survive so infrequently that they are scarcely attested in the archaeological record,” as Dever puts it.141 Yet, this does not quite explain why one finds a much larger number of pit or cyst graves in the lowlands, which were by now under Israelite control, and where those forms of burial were most common.142 Presumably, there were far more naturally occurring caves to be found in the highlands than in the plains of the low country, and it is that fact that may better explain differences both in highland burial practice and in the mortuary evidence from the highlands that is available to us. In either case, however, there is little question that many of the tombs that have survived are quite elaborate. The tombs themselves are sometimes large and ornate, “with a central arcosolium, several chambers, and well-cut doorways.”143 At times, one finds benches and carved head and foot niches for the dead.144 In a few tombs, one also finds Hebrew inscriptions that identify or bless the deceased.145 Perhaps the most ostentatious burial sites from this period are the monolithic tombs found in the Silwan cemetery. As Bloch-Smith writes, “These tombs incorporated distinctive Phoenician and Egyptian features such as gabled ceilings, stone coffins, funerary inscriptions carved into tomb facades, and a crowning pyramid atop a monolithic aboveground structure . . . These magnificent structures surely housed the 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145

Barkay, “Iron Age II-III,” 338. Ibid., 354. This evidence is treated at length in Bloch-Smith’s Judahite Burial Practice. Bloch-Smith, “Bronze and Iron Age Burials,” 110. Dever, “Social Structure in Iron II,” 421; Barkay, “Iron Age II-III,” 359. Bloch-Smith, “Bronze and Iron Age Burials,” 110. Dever, “Social Structure in Iron II,” 421. Ibid., 421. Ibid., 421; Barkay, “Iron Age II-III,” 360.

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wealthy and eminent members of Jerusalem society, such as Shebna (Isa 22:15–16).”146 In addition to sometimes possessing such ostentatious features, cave and chamber burial sites throughout the region were communal, and within them one finds evidence of secondary interment, with bones being pushed back in the tomb to make room for new corpses, as well as many funerary items. For example, a series of tombs from Iron II have been excavated at Lachish (Tell ed-Duweir); in one tomb alone (Tomb 218), a large number of Egyptian objects were found, including several scarabs and various faience amulets, Cypriote and other pottery, jewelry made of gold, silver, bronze and bone, iron lanceheads and arrowheads, among other finds.147 Clearly, many of these objects would be classified as luxury items. Despite the disproportionate number of elite or monumental tombs that have survived, differences in the quality of burials are still discernible. For example, in a tenth-century tomb from Jericho (Tomb A85), the bodies of at least twelve individuals were found, but very few luxury items; instead, the tomb held only bowls, jugs, and other types of pottery, one ring, and a few beads.148 Even more telling are a group of simple graves from Lachish that date from the same period (the tenth to the eighth centuries, according to Bloch-Smith) as the chamber burials from that site.149 In one of these simple graves (110), one finds an individual buried with many items, including a plaque, a seal, cowrie shells, and beads made of carnelian, crystal, serpentine, and coral.150 Yet, other graves at the site contained only pottery – or no funerary items at all.151 While variations in the type or quantity of funerary items found in burials do not necessarily attest to socioeconomic differences, the Iron II mortuary evidence as a whole not only clearly demonstrates that such strata existed, but strongly implies that graves such as these represent the converse of the beautifully adorned chamber tombs of Silwan and elsewhere: the burials of the poor and forgotten. It is worthwhile to turn at this time to another body of Iron II evidence that also clearly attests to social stratification during this period: the biblical corpus. Of the biblical evidence, I will focus upon the early prophetic books, for their dating is generally less disputed than narrative texts such as Samuel and Kings.152 A cursory review of the biblical material will suffice 146

147 148 149 150 151 152

Bloch-Smith, “Burials, Israelite,” I:787–788. See also idem, Judahite Burial Practices, 43–44, 209–210; Ussishkin, “Necropolis,” 34–46, and Village of Silwan. Bloch-Smith, Judahite Burial Practices, 205–206; Tufnell, Lachish III, 203–210. Bloch-Smith, Judahite Burial Practices, 193. Ibid., 182; Tufnell, Lachish III, 172–174. Bloch-Smith, Judahite Burial Practices, 182; Tufnell, Lachish III, 172. Bloch-Smith, Judahite Burial Practices, 182; Tufnell, Lachish III, 172–174. While some have recently downdated even prophetic books such as Hosea to the postexilic era, the great majority of scholars very reasonably maintains that, a certain amount of later

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here, considering the abundance and clarity of the archaeological evidence on this issue, and the fact that biblical texts in many ways mirror the physical evidence on social stratification in Iron II Israel. For example, prophetic and other books clearly attest to the existence of a centralized state and to the social classes that normally accompany such a state – the royal class, comprised of kings and their progeny; and a nobility made up of royal officials and other elite individuals and families. These texts also demonstrate that, in ancient Israel, such a nobility was composed partially of members of the priesthood – an important social class even in the preexilic period – and, arguably, those prophets who were attached to and bolstered the authority of the state apparatus in some way, as well as various other groups. One even finds in Isaiah 3:1–3 a fairly extensive list of elite social groups, though priests go unmentioned: For now the lord Yahweh of hosts is taking away from Jerusalem and from Judah every manner of sustenance, all support of bread and all support of water, warrior and soldier, judge and prophet, diviner and elder, captain of fifty and man of honor (Mynp )w#n), counselor, wise enchanter, and one practiced in charms.153

Other prophetic texts mention yet further elite groups, as do early narrative materials in the books of Samuel and Kings,154 leading Dever to state: “If one ‘reads between the lines’ in the Hebrew Bible, there are indications of many social classes.”155 Dever himself provides an exhaustive list of these classes, enumerating eleven major groups, including the military, the aristocracy, the mercantile class, common laborers, and so on, each of which is divided into numerous subgroups.156 Prophetic and other biblical texts not only refer to classes such as these, but they also describe differences in wealth and power between such elite groups

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redactional activity aside, these books actually do date to the era to which they purport to date. For a proposal, in my view unconvincing, that sees the book of Hosea as a product of the Persian period, see Ben Zvi, Hosea. Philip R. Davies (unsurprisingly) adopts this dating in “Wilderness Years,” 160–174. All biblical translations are my own unless otherwise noted. Though in all likelihood, there is less preexilic material in the latter. See the discussion on dating in Chapter 1 of this book. Dever, “Social Structure in Iron II,” 427. Ibid., 427–29. Some of these groups are attested by the epigraphic evidence from preexilic Israel as well.

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and the rest of the population. In fact, the perceived abuse of non-elites by the elite classes is not only addressed, but forms one of the major themes of the early prophetic books. One reads in the same passage in Isaiah (3:14–15): Yahweh will come into judgement with the elders and officials of his people: You are the ones who have consumed the vineyard; the plunder of the poor (yn(h) is in your houses. What is for you in crushing my people, in grinding the face of the poor? Oracle of the Lord Yahweh of hosts.

Amos 4:1 berates a group of elite women for similar behavior: Hear this word, O heifers of Bashan who are on Mount Samaria, who extort the poor (Myld), who oppress the needy (Mynwyb)), who say to their husbands, “Bring something for us to drink!”

Micah 3:9–11 reads: Hear this, O heads of the house of Jacob, O rulers (ynycq) of the house of Israel, those who despise justice and would make crooked all that is straight, building Zion with blood, and Jerusalem with iniquity! Its leaders judge for a bribe, its priests teach for payment, its prophets divine for silver, but they all lean upon Yahweh, declaring, “Is not Yahweh in our midst? Evil will not befall us!”

Isa 3:18–23 attests to the stratification of Iron II Israel in a less direct, but no less telling fashion: by providing a list of (presumably rich) women’s luxury items: “On that day the Lord will take away the beauty of anklets, of headbands, of crescents, of pendants, of bracelets, and of scarves; of headdresses, of armbands, of sashes, of perfume boxes, and of amulets; of signet-rings and nose-rings; of royal gowns, of mantles, of cloaks, and of purses; of mirrors, of linen shawls, of turbans, and of veils.” These are just a few of the passages from prophetic books that make reference to social stratification and decry the corruption that

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so often comes with it.157 Marvin Chaney and others have in fact suggested that passages such as these go beyond attesting to the existence of social stratification in Iron II: they actually serve as evidence for increases in stratification during this period.158 Chaney writes: “As a careful reading of the oracles concerning economic dynamics makes clear, the prophets critique certain changes in the political economy . . . While these changes benefited the powerful and privileged who initiated them . . . the prophets insist that they did so at the expense of even meager subsistence for the impoverished majority. . .”159 Though Chaney goes on to paint a dire picture indeed of monarchic Israel – a picture too dire for most scholars – few would contest the argument that Israel became an increasingly stratified society between the time of its emergence at the beginning of the Iron Age and the time of Jerusalem’s traumatic fall six centuries later. The material evidence in fact demonstrates that the level of stratification in Israel grew quite dramatically in this period, and that this was so should be unsurprising. After all, it was not only the Israelites who formed a kingdom in the Iron Age; during the same period, small kingdoms sprang up in Ammon, Moab, and Edom; the Arameans first came together as a people, forming several important city-states; the trade networks that collapsed at the end of the Late Bronze period reappeared and flourished in a way they had not in many centuries; and the Egyptian and Mesopotamian empires, which had scarcely survived the catastrophes of the thirteenth and twelfth centuries, rose again to vie with each other for control of the region. The increasing stratification in Israel, then, was not unique, but was instead symptomatic of wider changes in the region. In Amos 9:7, the prophet famously asks: “Are you not like the Cushites to me, O people of Israel? Oracle of Yahweh. Did I not bring up Israel from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Arameans from Kir?” Ironically, Amos could not have known how resoundingly one could answer “yes” to these questions.

Other Aspects of Social Structure Relevant to the Study of Israelite Marriage Gifts While the previous chapter made clear that social stratification plays the most important role in determining what marriage gift will predominate in 157

158

159

An interesting parallel to these biblical passages is provided by the Mes[ad H[ ashavyahu (Yavneh Yam) inscription. See Pardee, “Mes[ad H[ ashavyahu,” 3:77–78; he provides a brief bibliography of schholarship on the inscription, as well. Chaney, “Bitter Bounty,” 15–31. See also Houston, “Was There a Social Crisis?” 130–149, though I disagree with him on certain points. Chaney, “Bitter Bounty,”16.

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a society, it was also apparent that other aspects of social structure may also influence marital gift exchange. Two of these, the role of pastoralism and that of inheritance patterns, will be discussed briefly here. In Chapter 3, we saw that the giving of bridewealth related strongly to pastoralism among two of the groups examined, the Nuer and the Lovedu. In both of these societies, pastoral activities are not only of great importance to the economic livelihood of the people, but are also highly valued socially. Correspondingly, bridewealth consists almost entirely of livestock among these groups, and transfers of livestock are very often tied to marriage. Neither of these groups is in fact unique: groups to whom pastoral activities are of central importance both economically and socially most often give bridewealth.160 It would be difficult to ignore the highly valued and even romanticized role of these activities in some biblical texts.161 Figures no less important than David and 160

161

See, among others, the entry on bridewealth in Dictionary of Anthropology, 46; Turton, “Economics of Mursi Bridewealth,” esp. 89–90; and François-René Picon, “From Blood-Price to Bridewealth,” 307–319, which details the fascinating case of the Guajiro, who, despite only having become pastoralists using the cattle that Spanish colonials brought with them, nonetheless give bridewealth. Even among this group, distant as they are from the pastoral societies of Africa or the Middle East, bridewealth always involves livestock. Certainly, bridewealth plays an important role among the Bedouin, despite the Islamic prohibition on this prestation (a prohibition ignored throughout much of the Arab world). See, for example, Peters, “Aspects of Bedouin Bridewealth”; and Kressel, “Bride-Price Reconsidered.” According to Schlegel and Eloul, “Marriage Transactions,” bridewealth is normally found among subsistence pastoralists, while indirect dowry is expected among commercial pastoralists. Of the 17 pastoral societies included in their study, they in fact code an equal number as giving bridewealth (7 groups) as indirect dowry (another 7), with the latter category being composed primarily of Middle Eastern or Central Asian groups they characterize as “commercial producers of animals and animal products” (295–296). However, the work of Peters, Kressel, and others leads me to question whether the marriage gifts of the Middle Eastern pastoral groups were correctly coded. It seems that the official sanction against bridewealth in the Islamic world has led to some confusion in the anthropological literature, as is evidenced by Goody’s chapter “Marriage and Property in the Arab World” in The Oriental, the Ancient, 361–382, which underplays the role of bridewealth among Arab groups, in my view. On bridewealth among Arabs, see the works mentioned by Peters and Kressel, as well as Granqvist, Marriage Conditions, 119–131, which is outdated, but provides useful ethnographic information; Gulick, Middle East, 183; Bates and Rassam, Peoples and Cultures, 216–220; Antoun, Arab Village, 116–121, 169–170, who states that: “. . . in Kufr al-Ma [Jordan] wide divergence exists between the Islamic rule on the one hand (guaranteeing women rights in property), and local norms on the other (denying them these rights). This variation between the two norms is shown in the behavior of fathers with regard to the disposition of their daughters’ mahr. Some men keep the whole mahr and deny the pertinence of Islamic norms for their action; others keep the mahr or large portions of it realizing the unethical nature of their action while excusing it on the grounds of economic necessity; and still others, mainly rich but some poor, hand over the entire mahr to their daughters and take pride in doing so. Thus, while mahr constitutes in Islamic law a ‘marriage settlement,’ in Kufr al-Ma it partakes of the nature of bridewealth or marriage settlement depending on the particular marriage examined” (121). On the “nomadic ideal” found in some biblical texts, see de Vaux, Ancient Israel, 13–14.

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Moses are characterized as keeping sheep; the latter is in fact tending flocks when he sees the burning bush. The patriarchs, too, are generally depicted as pastoralists in the narratives of Genesis. Yet, while the importance of pastoralism to the Israelite imagination is clear enough, its role in Israelite society is more disputed. The dispute between Finkelstein and Dever over the relative similarity or dissimilarity of early Israelite pottery to that of the LB Canaanite wares in fact directly relates to a larger dispute between the two scholars over the importance of pastoralism in early Israel, and whether or not most of the early Israelites came from a pastoral background. In the opinion of Finkelstein, the proto-Israelites were largely pastoralists who were forced to sedentarize as the dimorphic, or better “polymorphous,”162 structures of Late Bronze society broke down.163 These pastoralists had not come from outside Canaan to settle in the hill country, but had in fact been present all along. Though there were very few permanent settlements in the hill country in LB and it is notoriously difficult to find archaeological evidence for pastoral groups,164 Finkelstein provides two major data to support his thesis. The first is the presence of “isolated sanctuaries, either unrelated to any settlement or else located close to permanent sites, but beyond the boundaries of their built-up areas.”165 The second is “the relatively large number of cemeteries that were not situated adjacent to permanent settlements.”166 In addition, he points to evidence from Egyptian sources for pastoral groups, most importantly the Shasu, living in Canaan in the LB period.167 Finkelstein argues that, as periods in which extensive nomadic behavior is followed by resedentarization, LB and Iron I would correspond to early periods of Palestine’s history – namely, EB IV (his “intermediate Bronze”) and MB I – in which one sees 162

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Lemche suggests that, rather than LB Palestine’s being divided into two major groups, it was actually comprised of a “socio-economic continuum” embracing “a polymorphous society which ranges from the city-dweller who never passes through the gates of his city, to the pure nomad, whose entire life is an endless trek” (Early Israel, 198). See also Finkelstein, “Pastoralism in the Highlands,” 134. Finkelstein’s position on this subject is in many ways an updating of Alt’s “peaceful infiltration model,” though Finkelstein does not see the Israelites as having come from outside Canaan. Or so it is normally thought. Banning and Köhler-Rollefson, on the other hand, dispute that “pastoralists’ camps are too ephemeral to be archaeologically recoverable” and blame the small number of settlements found on the fact that “archaeological surveys are not designed to prospect for small, ephemeral campsites, but rather for more obtrisive sites such as village mounds” (“Ethnographic Lessons ,” 181, 185). Finkelstein, Archaeology, 343. Ibid., 344. Ibid., 345, where he provides a bibliography of other scholars who have proposed a connection between the Shasu and the early Israelites. See also Killebrew, Biblical Peoples, 182; and note 10 of this chapter.

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these exact same trends.168 In terms of evidence from the Iron I sites themselves, Finkelstein points to a number of Iron I hill country sites that were arranged in an elliptical fashion, arguing that these sites represent “an early stage in the sedentarization of desert nomads,” who arranged their houses in the same manner they had previously arranged tents.169 He also suggests that the earliest stage of settlement, as attested by the evidence from surveys, was “concentrated in the desert fringe and along the intermontane valleys of the northern mountain range, i.e., in the areas best suited for cereal crops and pasturage. The settlement pattern in Ephraim (and also in Benjamin and Judah) thus shows that the subsistence base of the inhabitants at the beginning of the period of the Israelite Settlement was similar to that of pastoralists, not villagers.”170 Settlement in regions more suited to horticulture, which would have required more advanced agricultural techniques such as terracing, took place only later.171 Dever, in rejoinders that sometimes border on the cantankerous, has vigorously contested Finkelstein’s proposal, arguing instead that most of the early Israelites were not pastoralists, but rather experienced agriculturalists. First, he disputes Finkelstein’s argument that the earlist phase of settlement in the hill country was primarily in agriculturally marginal zones, citing “a lack of evidence that the easternmost sites are indeed the earliest.”172 He also disputes, on the one hand, Finkelstein’s evidence that certain sites had a circular arrangement (for example, ‘Izbet S[artah[), and on the other, Finkelstein’s argument that such circular arrangement of sites – and Dever does concede that such an arrangement was common enough in early Israel – had anything to do with the inhabitants of these sites having come from a nomadic background. Among his reasons for skepticism regarding such a connection are the following: (1) These early Iron Age villages are mostly hilltop sites. The easiest, most efficient, most sensible village plan would follow the natural contours of the hilltop – often bare bedrock. It would be a very strange geological formation indeed that would result in a rectangular hilltop. (2) Nearly all later Iron II sites, even large urban sites dating from the Monarchy, are also curvilinear – some, like Megiddo, almost perfectly circular in plan. Are these, too, sites 168

169 170 171 172

Finkelstein, “Great Transformation,” esp. 354–357. In seeing Palestinian history as following certain longue durée cycles of expansion and decline, his views correspond with the proposals of Coote and Whitelam (in Emergence of Early Israel), and others, which have seemingly – and rightfully, in my view – become the consensus position. Finkelstein, Archaeology, 244. Ibid., 354. Ibid., 354. Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites? 158.

194 MARRIAGE GIFTS AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN ANCIENT PALESTINE that were established by nomads? The fact is that almost all tells or mounds in Palestine . . . have a circular or oval configuration.173

While Dever successfully refutes two of Finkelstein’s supports for seeing a large proportion of the early Israelites as coming from a pastoral background, he is forced to concede that Palestine, in earlier phases of its history, did undergo transformations that precisely parallel those Finkelstein proposes for LB/Iron I. He writes: “[Finkelstein’s] basic premise about long-term cycles of settlement is correct, as I have often pointed out independently (contrary to his charge that I ignore this). And he and I agree entirely on at least one interval of nomadization on which I have worked extensively, the Early Bronze IV period, ca. 2300–2000 B.C. These cycles constitute such a wellknown phenomenon that no defense of the argument is required.”174 It is of course true that such social transformations occurring in EB IV would not necessarily mean that similar changes had occurred in LB, but Dever does not to my knowledge contest the evidence for isolated temples and cemeteries in this period, nor offer an alternative explanation for why such sites were not attached to any settlements.175 Neither Dever nor Finkelstein seem to have made much of Bimson’s argument regarding the Merneptah stela, though in my view it is quite relevant to the issue of Israel’s origins. Bimson points to two well-known facts that when paired together, present problems for many scholars’ reconstructions of early Israelite history: the Merneptah stela, which presents us with the first mention of a people Israel, dates at the latest to the last decade of the thirteenth century, while the proliferation of sites in the hill country, where we know Israel to have emerged, was only beginning at that time. Where, then, were these Israelites to whom the stela refers, and who were they? Bimson very logically concludes, citing precisely the LB evidence provided by Finkelstein, that the Israelites must at the time of Merneptah have been a “semi-nomadic population.”176 Even if Finkelstein overestimates the proportion of early Israelites who were pastoralists in the process of sedentarizing, few if any scholars would contend that the proto-Israelite population was not comprised of at least some pastoralists. Even Dever, who sees most proto-Israelites as having been agriculturalists who withdrew from the lowlands to the hill country,177 believes 173 174 175

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Ibid., 163. Ibid., 156. His rejoinders to Finkelstein are numerous, however, and it is possible that I have overlooked such an explanation. Bimson, “Merneptah’s Israel,” 24. While I disagree with some of Bimson’s supporting points, I find his conclusion to be more than reasonable. See especially Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites? 178–180.

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that between 10 percent and 15 percent of the early Israelites would have been pastoralists, based on ratios of semi-nomads to settled farmers in Palestine in later periods.178 Thus, while early Israel was almost certainly composed of a heterogeneous assortment of groups, including many people from the lowlands and ‘Apiru and other bandits,179 and while the precise number of each of these groups in relation to the others is virtually impossible to estimate, it is very likely that pastoralists comprised a significant percentage of the early Israelites. As Coote and Whitelam write: For most periods in Palestine’s history the pastoral lands for the region as a whole have been extensive. Agriculturally marginal lands include not only the steppe and desert, but land within what could be called settled zones that is too rocky, hilly, marshy, sandy, covered with trees, or otherwise unsuited for settled agriculture under prevailing political and economic conditions. Thus although such marginal lands support only a fraction of the population that settled agricultural lands can support, because of the size of the marginal area the pastoral population accounts for 10–20 per cent of the total population of the area, although even these limits probably fluctuated with demographic extremes.180

If the pastoralists of early Israel were at all typical of their brethren throughout the world, one of the major functions of their livestock would have been to create marital unions through the giving of bridewealth. We also saw in the previous chapter that Goody has posited a connection between corporate land ownership and the giving of bridewealth. This connection is especially strong in the case of segmentary societies, which in the great majority of cases give bridewealth. While determining whether or not the early Israelites held land corporately or were organized into segmentary units from archaeological evidence alone is virtually impossible,181 there are many preexilic biblical texts relevant to these issues. Regarding the topic of corporate land ownership, one logically turns to texts discussing the Israelite conception of the nah?ălah (hlxn), or “inalienable inheritance.” This word is certainly common enough in the biblical corpus, and while many usages of it are figurative or theological (that is, Israel as Yahweh’s nah?ălah), many refer to the land holdings of kinship units larger than the nuclear family, sometimes much larger. For example, Joshua 13–16 repeatedly refers to the 178 179

180 181

Ibid., 157. As most scholars believe, see ibid., 181–182; Coote and Whitelam, Emergence of Early Israel, 88–116; Gottwald, “Recent Studies,” 170–171, 178; among others. Coote and Whitelam, Emergence of Early Israel, 95. Stager proposes that the clustering of houses in Israelite villages serves as evidence that extended families lived together in multiple family compounds, but this argument is as much

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territories allotted to each tribe as their nah9ălah. Numbers 36 contains a similar usage: the text prescribes that daughters may inherit in the absence of sons, but only if they marry within their own tribe, so as not to diminish the size of the tribe’s nah[ălah.182 This and other texts make clear that smaller kinship units were allotted a portion of the larger unit’s land holdings, though there is a certain discrepancy over which kinship units are given allotments. That is, Numbers 36 seems to refer to individual families (whether nuclear or extended)183 having their own allotments, while Joshua 18–19 explicitly describes territory being allotted according to clans (twxp@#m), with the clan (hxp#m) in Joshua being a grouping smaller than the tribe, but larger than the lineage, which itself is larger than the household, as Joshua 7:16–18 makes clear.184 Whether land was held by individual families or by larger groupings, plot-holders had the right of usufruct over their allotment, but could not sell or otherwise alienate this land from the larger holdings of the clan or tribe.185 But what exactly did the nah[ălah consist of? S. Bendor has proposed that the inalienable inheritance of families consisted of agricultural and horticultural lands, but not pasture-land.186 Flocks, too, seem to have been the property of individual families.187 The latter is implied not only by biblical texts such as 2 Samuel 12, but also by the archaeological evidence. As stated earlier, Stager has proposed that the bottom level of the four-room house was used

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based on the biblical material as on archaeology. See Stager, “Archaeology of the Family,” esp. 18–23. For texts containing the same usage, see, for example, Num 26:52–56; Deut 10:9, 29:8; and Ju 18:1. There has been a fair amount written on the question of whether the most basic unit of Israelite society in the preexilic period was the nuclear family or the extended family, but this question by itself does not have direct implications for the study of marriage gifts. (On Israelite family composition and the related issue of the composition of the bêt āb, “house of the father,” see Gottwald, Tribes of Yahweh, 285–292; Lemche, Early Israel, 245–272; Hopkins, Highlands of Canaan, 252–258; Stager, “Archaeology of the Family”; Bendor, Social Structure; McNutt, Reconstructing, 88–94; Schloen, House of the Father, esp. 147–152; Avraham Faust, “Farmstead in the Highlands,” 91–104, and idem, “Differences in Family structures”; among others. Williamson, “Family in Persian Period Judah,” 469–485, especially 472–73, is also useful.) While dowry is generally correlated with nuclear families, one does find various exceptions to this (see, for example, the section on marriage gifts in North India in Chapter 3), and with both bridewealth and dowry, household composition is less important than other social features such as levels of stratification and inheritance patterns. It is of course possible, or even probable, however, that the clans (twxp#m) would have further subdivided their holdings according to lineages or even individual familes. See also Lev 25:25–28; Ruth 4:3–6; among other passages. Bendor, Social Structure, 135–140. While I agree with Bendor regarding agricultural and pastoral lands, the legal standing of vineyards is less clear to me, though Num 16:14 does imply that vineyards were part of the nah[ălah. Ibid., 135–136.

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to stable animals. If this widely accepted thesis is correct, it then seems likely that livestock was owned by the family in whose house it was kept. As is often the case with reconstructions of Israelite social practices that are based almost exclusively on the biblical text, as is that regarding patterns of landholding in the preexilic period, just how closely biblical narratives and prescriptions reflected the reality is unclear. Was the nah[ălah merely a widely held ideal, or was it a central feature of Israelite social structure? One can only speculate on this matter. Even various biblical passages state that the inalienable property was not always so, that it was sometimes sold out of economic desperation or seized by land-hungry royals.188 Considering the archaeological evidence one finds for palaces and other monumental building projects in Iron II, it would be surprising if the state apparatus did not infringe on the rights of private landholders, whether their properties were considered inalienable or not. As the earlier part of this chapter made clear, throughout the Iron II period Israel became an ever more stratified society. One would expect, then, that an important part of such a process would be the increasing concentration of property in the hands of fewer and fewer individuals. Nonetheless, if familial properties were generally considered inalienable, this fact would place certain constraints on marriage gifts. While corporate land ownership is not by itself determinative of which gift will predominate in a society, it is correlated with the giving of bridewealth. Certainly, a system in which land is held jointly by a larger kinship unit while flocks are owned by individual families would lend itself to the giving of said prestation, since giving livestock as bridewealth would not affect land holdings. This type of system would also fit within a segmentary system – we in fact saw earlier that many of the biblical texts that speak of corporate ownership of land presume such a system. That is, they presume that Israelite society was comprised of a multi-tiered structure of unilineal descent. The model of the segmentary lineage system is one that was developed and utilized by many anthropologists, though Evans-Pritchard’s work on the Nuer was arguably the most seminal on this subject. His work describes the kinship system of the Nuer as a “descending series of groups branching out from the most inclusive ‘tribal’ level through primary, secondary, and tertiary or minimal lineages.”189 While Israelite structures of kinship are not always described in the same fashion by different biblical texts, the ordering of groups detailed in Joshua 7, and

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See, for example, Lev 25:26; 1 Sam 8:14; 2 Sam 19; 1 Kings 21; and 1 Chron 27:25–31 and 2 Chron 26, which imply that Israelite kings had very large holdings. As the Dictionary of Anthropology puts it, 419. See Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer, and Kinship and Marriage, as well as Chapter 3 of this book.

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referred to in other biblical texts, corresponds rather well with the kinship structures of the Nuer. At the very least, it corresponds well enough for one to characterize Israelite kinship structures as being in some way segmentary, as various scholars have done.190 Certainly the patrilineal nature of Israelite society is widely agreed upon, and taken together with the probable segmentary arrangement of Israelite, and especially early Israelite society, one has two features that, especially in conjunction with one another, very widely correspond with the giving of bridewealth.191

Conclusion In the previous chapter, it became clear that social stratification is the societal feature most strongly correlated with marriage gifts, with pervasive socioeconomic stratification tied in virtually all cases to the giving of dowry and the absence of such stratification tied to the giving of bridewealth. Though Goody assumed that ancient Israel was always a stratified society, an examination of not only biblical, but especially extrabiblical, archaeological evidence has revealed that this was not in fact the case. At the beginning of Iron I, one finds a conglomeration of tiny villages subsisting in the hill country, not only physically isolated, but with a homogeneous material culture, and no signs of centralization. Several centuries later, one finds kingdoms in both the northern and southern parts of the country, and evidence for increasing social stratification, a quickly burgeoning population, and a varied material culture rife with luxury goods and monumental architecture. The data is unmistakable: in the six centuries between the beginning of Iron I and the century before the exile, ancient Israel underwent a drastic social change, and it is thus likely that its marital customs changed along with it. The archaeological evidence from Iron I, and even the first centuries of Iron II, show Israel to have had features typical of a bridewealth-giving society: not only 190

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Whether the segmentary model may be applied to ancient Israel is disputed by scholars. See McNutt, Reconstructing, 78–85, 233, for a discussion of the relevant issues, though her treatment is less characteristically clear than her book as a whole. See also Malamat, “Tribal Societies,” 126–36 and Wilson, Genealogy and History, esp. 18–37, both of whom apply the segmentary lineage model to ancient Israel, as do Gottwald, Tribes of Yahweh, 321–334; Schäfer-Lichtenberger, Stadt und Eidgenossenschaft, especially 338–42; Frick, Formation of the State, 51–69; among others. However, Lemche, Early Israel, 223–231, feels that this model is less adequate for studying ancient Israel than ones derived from Middle Eastern societies. Rogerson, “Was Early Israel Segmentary?” 17–26, also disputes the appropriateness of this model for Israel, though his argumentation is weaker, in my view. Fiensy, “Using the Nuer Culture,” 73–83, summarizes some of the critiques of Evans-Pritchard’s model that have come from within the discipline of anthropology. See Comaroff, “Introduction,” 16, and chapter 3.

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was it socioeconomically unstratified and lacking in any centralized state, but it had a strong pastoral component, both in tradition and in fact, and, as many biblical texts demonstrate, held up corporate ownership of land as an ideal. Strikingly, this trumpeting of the pastoral and the communal is found in biblical texts that in all likelihood date to the last century or two before the exile, and not to the early days of Israel. This is also the case for the texts that describe Israel as having features typical of a segmentary society and it is certainly the case for texts that portray Israel as patrilineal, many of which even date to the exilic period or later. It is unsurprising, then, that most of the biblical texts that speak of marriage gifts discuss bridewealth. Yet it is also unsurprising that some of these texts should refer to indirect dowry or dowry, for as the centuries passed and the monarchy grew ever stronger and the divisions between rich and poor ever more entrenched, Israel’s ideals of egalitarianism, of communalism, and of pastoralism became just that: ideals, cloaking a far less idyllic reality. In the socially and economically agonistic context of the late preexilic period, dowry, a gift known for its utility in negotiating wealth and status, would have become very appealing to the wealthy classes of ancient Israel. One can surmise that it became more appealing than bridewealth, a gift no doubt associated with all of the ism’s of early Israel and, though this gift perhaps managed to survive rather longer than its ill-fated cousins, we shall see in the next chapter that it was destined to meet the same dreary end.

5

0 The Social Structure of Palestine in the Second Temple Period

“The daughters of Israel are beautiful but poverty destroys their beauty.” – R. Ishmael1

The previous chapter examined the social structure of ancient Israel from the time of Israel’s emergence to that of the Babylonian exile, and demonstrated that stratification grew markedly more pronounced in the region over the course of the several centuries preceding the exile. This chapter extends the analysis of social stratification from the latter time until the Roman period. The reason for separating these two chapters as such is quite obvious: Israelite society underwent many radical changes as a result of the destruction of the First Temple, the forced migration of Israel’s elite to Babylon, and the general devastation wrought by the Babylonian military’s incursions into Judah, incursions that left clear signs of damage at many sites.2 This chapter, however, does not focus on the exilic period itself, for in a longue durée study of this kind, seventy years is an exceedingly brief span of time, nor does it address all of the changes that the exile brought about, or – perhaps better – set in motion. As was the case with the previous chapter, it focuses instead on the 1 2

M. Ned. 9:10. Contra Barstad and others who have attempted to minimize the importance of these events. See Barstad, Myth of Empty Land and “After the ‘Myth,’” 3–20, as well as Carroll, “Myth of Empty Land,” 79–93. Both these scholars are indebted to much earlier work by Torrey on the exilic and Persian periods. (See particularly Torrey’s Ezra Studies.) While I certainly do not dispute Barstad’s argument that most of the population of Judah was not in fact exiled, the archaeological evidence does strongly imply that the Babylonian military assualts, combined with the forced migration of the Judean elite, left the region both depopulated and severely economically depressed. It seems that if exile did not take the bulk of the region’s inhabitants, the sword and hunger did. (For recent rejoinders to Barstad and those who hold similar views, see Oded, “Where Is the ‘Myth’?” 55–74; and Faust, “Social and Cultural Changes.”) The archaeological evidence for widespread destruction in Judah in the Neo-Babylonian period and for a very thinly populated Judah at the beginning of (and, in actuality, throughout) the Persian period will be discussed later.

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issue of social stratification and on the following question: did the political and social changes of the postexilic period, which affected so many spheres of life in ancient Palestine, influence levels of social stratification as well? This examination in fact makes it evident that, while social stratification was no more static in the postexilic period than it had been in the previous era, no region of Palestine would ever return to the simple, isolated society we saw in the central hill country in Iron I.

The Social Stratification of Palestine in the Persian Period For most of the twentieth century, the Babylonian, Persian, and Hellenistic periods received little attention from scholars. As Charles E. Carter puts it: Biblical scholars and archaeologists alike – though perhaps for different reasons – have devoted most of their energies to uncovering the textual and artifactual imprints of emergent Israel, the ‘golden ages’ of the monarchy and Israelite prophecy on the one hand and . . . the emergence of nascent Judaism and Christianity on the other. Sandwiched in between these two ‘more interesting’ periods, the ‘dark age’ of the postexilic period seemed of little consequence.3

While the postexilic era is no longer the victim of scholarly neglect, much of it nonetheless remains quite poorly documented. For example, fewer than twenty Persian period sites have been excavated in Judah, a number that certainly pales in comparison to that of excavated Roman period or even Iron II sites in the same region.4 Also, the Persian empire has left us with fewer pieces of documentary evidence than did the Assyrians or Romans. Finally, though some scholars have begun dating a larger and larger number of biblical texts to the Persian era, these texts have been shaped so thoroughly by their authors’ ideological agendas that little sociological evidence can be gleaned from them.5 Yet, however unsatisfactory the evidence for the Persian period may be, it is still sufficiently plentiful for one to make some sociological observations and come to certain conclusions about the social history 3 4 5

Carter, Emergence of Yehud, 31–33. Ibid., 118. As Paula McNutt writes: “Persian period Judah is the most likely setting for the final construct of much of the material in the Hebrew Bible, even though many of the independent traditions originated in earlier periods. However, extracting information that may be relevant to the social situation during this time is like, to use Leach’s metaphor, trying to unscramble an omelet. Even the material that is directly related to the Persian period poses difficulties, particularly because much of it appears to be propagandistic in nature” (Reconstructing, 182). On the problems with using Ezra-Nehemiah in particular for historical reconstruction, see

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of the period. Perhaps the most striking evidence for the period is the archaeological data. This evidence is not uniform, but rather seems to change over the course of the Persian period, and also differs from region to region. We will focus here on the evidence from the region of Judah, but also address that from other regions of Palestine where appropriate. Archaeologists have long noted the presence of destruction layers dating to the Babylonian period at sites throughout Judah. Not only Jerusalem, but many sites elsewhere in Judah, such as Jericho and En-Gedi to the east, Lachish to the west, and many sites in the Beersheba Valley to the south, were completely destroyed by the Babylonians and did not recover for many decades, if at all.6 Even coastal sites such as Ashdod and Ashkelon suffered extensive damage.7 It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that most of Judah exhibits fairly unimpressive material remains in the Persian period, as well. Not only does the province of Yehud seem to have been quite small geographically,8 but it was also remarkably rural and agricultural in character, containing primarily sites under 5 dunams in size.9 In fact, only one site, Jerusalem, was larger than 2.5 hectares in the Persian period.10 While the coastal cities recovered fairly quickly from Babylonian assaults and returned to their former glory under the Persians,11 Judah was so thinly populated that Kenneth Hoglund Grabbe, “Reconstructing History,” 98–107; idem, “What was Ezra’s Mission,” 286–299; idem, History of the Jews, 74–83, 324–331; Carroll, “What Do We Know?” 34–51, especially 45–46, though his writings in general are, in my view, overly revisionist or, if one prefers, minimalist; “McNutt, Reconstructing, 183; among others. 6 Ephraim Stern, Archaeology of the Land II, 321–326. See also Stager, “Fury of Babylon,” 56–69, 76–77; Vanderhooft, Neo-Babylonian Empire, 106–110; Oded, “Where is the ‘Myth’?” 66, among others. 7 Archaeology of the Land II, 317–318. In contrast to sites in Judah, many of the coastal towns were apparently destroyed in the Babylonian campaigns of 603 (ibid., 315–318). Interestingly, Ephraim Stern and others have found that “in contrast to all other regions west of the Jordan that had been conquered by the Babylonians, the settlements of Benjamin were not destroyed, continued to exist during the Babylonian period, and may have even prospered” (ibid., 321; Oded, “Where is the ‘Myth’?, 66). The Benjaminite town of Tell en-Nas[beh (Mizpah) in fact seems to have served as the capital of the Babylonian province of Judah, and most likely continued to serve this function in the early Persian period, as well. Other sites, such as Gibeon and Mozah, even show evidence of wine production in this period (Archaeology of the Land II, 322). Somewhat bizarrely, the prosperous, or relatively prosperous, towns of Benjamin were wiped out c. 480 bce, in a destruction that does not correspond with any known historical event (ibid., 322–323). 8 On the boundaries of Yehud, see, for example, Carter, Emergence of Yehud, 75–113, who both provides his own reconstruction and reviews those of previous scholars; Stern, Archaeology of the Land II, 375, 428–443; Lipschits, Fall and Rise, 154–184; and John W. Wright, “Remapping Yehud,” 67–89. 9 Carter, Emergence of Yehud, 215–216, 220. 10 Ibid., 216, 220. 11 On the prosperity of the coastal sites, see Lipschits, “Achaemenid Imperial Policy,” 26–29.

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has proposed the idea that an imperial policy of ruralization was at work in Judah. 12 As part of a thorough examination of the archaeological and other evidence for Persian period Judah, Carter proposes dividing the period into Persian I, which spanned from 538–450, and Persian II, which lasted from 450 to Alexander’s conquest; he estimates the population of Judah to have been roughly 13,000 for Persian I and 20,000 for Persian II.13 Though both Carter’s periodization and estimates of population have been called into question, the archaeological evidence does make quite clear that Judah’s population was far smaller in the Persian period than it had been in Iron II.14 Moreover, it also demonstrates that previous estimates of population, such as those of Joel Weinberg, based as they were almost exclusively on information provided by biblical texts, were far too high.15 The population of Jerusalem, in particular, seems to have been startlingly low: occupation was apparently limited to the Temple Mount and the southeastern section of the city and comprised, maximally, 13–14 hectares, only 6 of which were used for non-administrative purposes.16 Based on this information, Carter sets the number of inhabitants at less than 1,500 – and this only in Persian II, when he sees a marked increase in the number of sites found in Judah, as well as in its population.17 As Lipschits 12 13 14

15

16

17

See Hoglund, “Achaemenid Context,” 57–60. Carter, Emergence of Yehud, 116–118, 201. Oded Lipschits has convincingly challenged the bases for Carter’s periodization. See Lipschits, Fall and Rise, 193–194, and “Demographic Changes in Judah,” 359–360. In the latter work, he estimates the population of Judah to have been 110,000 just before the fall of Jerusalem, but only 30,000 in the Persian period (363; see also Fall and Rise, 269–270). (Lipschits’s estimates of Judah’s population at the beginning of the sixth century accord with those of Magen Broshi and Israel Finkelstein for the number of inhabitants living in the area in the first half of the eighth century, which they approximate also as 110,000. See Broshi and Finkelstein, “Population of Palestine,” and Chapter four of this book.) Lipschits sets the number of settled dunams in Persian-era Judah at approximately 1,345 (ibid., 363), while Carter sets the number at only between 723 and 868 – thus the latter’s very low population estimates (Emergence of Yehud, 199). In any case, the population of Judah in the Persian period was clearly much lower than it had been earlier. It is worth noting, however, that the province was also in all likelihood much smaller geographically, a fact that might lessen the significance of these lower population estimates. Weinberg estimated that the population of Persian-era Judah was about 200,000, and that was before the return of the exiles; the population of his proposed citizen-temple community was, he states, 150,000 in the mid-fifth century and later. See Weinberg, Citizen-Temple Community, 35, 37, 132. For critiques of Weinberg, see Blenkinsopp, “Temple and Society,” 22–53, especially 40–44, who provides a useful critique not only of Weinberg’s population estimates but also of his larger theory of Judah as a citizen-temple community, though in the end he does adopt a modified version of Weinberg’s model; Carter, Emergence of Yehud, 294–307, who also reviews the critiques of other scholars; and Grabbe, History of the Jews, 142–145, among others. Carter, Emergence of Yehud, 147–148. “[A]pproximately 70 to 80 dunams would have been dedicated to the temple and administrative complex,” writes Carter, “this, however, is considered public space rather than settled area” (ibid., 201). Ibid., 201.

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writes, “There are no architectural or other finds that attest to Jerusalem as an urban center during the Persian Period.”18 A small population does not necessarily mean an absence of social stratification, however, nor does having an economy based almost solely on agriculture; it is thus worth examining the archaeological evidence more closely for evidence of disparities in wealth. Unfortunately, the paucity of excavated sites makes it difficult to identify social stratification at the local level, and the fact that “very few building remains dating to the Persian Period have been uncovered in the hill country – that is, within the province of Yehud or the province of Samaria” – only exacerbates the situation.19 In terms of differential housing, one finds only a few pieces of evidence for this in the hill country. At Tell en-Nas[beh, for example, excavators “uncovered three four-room houses of finer construction than any other buildings on the site,” the average size of which was 133.3m2.20 These buildings are in fact larger than their Iron II counterparts at the same site.21 In addition, excavators discovered one structure “far larger than any other found – one that was certainly more than a private dwelling.”22 This was most likely a palace, though its exact dimensions are unknown due to incomplete excavation of the site.23 Both the houses and the palace, however, seem to date to the Neo-Babylonian period rather than to the Persian period, and whether or not the buildings continued to be in use into the later period is unfortunately rather difficult to determine because of the muddled nature of the site’s Persian and Hellenistic remains. Another site with noteworthy remains is En-Gedi (Tel Goren). In contrast to most sites in Judah, En-Gedi actually seems to have prospered during the Persian period. Excavators found there a clustered residential quarter which included a large dwelling (about 550m2) comprised of three wings and containing a workshop, “possibly for the perfume industry long associated with this site.”24 Also found was another large structure that may have been a public building of some kind.25 At Khirbet etTubeiqah (Beth-Zur), too, excavators uncovered a palace or citadel that has been dated to either the Persian or the Hellenistic periods. Though Ronny Reich assigns the building to the Persian period and suggests that it was a residence for the regional governor, both this dating and his characterization 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Lipschits, “Achaemenid Imperial Policy,” 31. See also Fall and Rise, 212–213. Ibid., 27. Zorn, “Tell en-Nas[beh,” III:1101–1102; Carter, Emergence of Yehud, 130. Carter, Emergence of Yehud, 130. Zorn, “Tell en-Nas[beh,” III:1101–1102. Ibid., 1102; Carter, Emergence of Yehud, 130; Grabbe, History of the Jews, 24. Carter, Emergence of Yehud, 157–160; Benjamin Mazar, “En-Gedi,” II:403. Carter, Emergence of Yehud, 160; Ephraim Stern, Archaeology of the Land II, 439.

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of the structure are debatable.26 The dating of the palace at Lachish is more secure: the structure was built in the Persian Period over the remains of the level III palace-fort (destroyed in 701 by the army of Sennacherib).27 Though the Persian-era palace was smaller than the earlier building, it combined an Achaemenid ceremonial structure with North Syrian-style porticos, and included a large courtyard.28 The site of Lachish, however, was probably just outside the boundaries of the province of Judah in the Persian period.29 Yet, considering that Lachish was previously a part of the Kingdom of Judah, it is likely that the site counted at least some Judeans among its residents in this period as well. Relevant in a similar way is the region of Samaria, which if not primarily ethnically Judean in character, certainly contained a large number of Yahwists; the archaeological remains from this area thus merit at least a brief discussion.30 Surveys have shown that this province was quite densely populated in the Persian period, containing at least 235 sites – more even than in Iron II – and a population of about 42,000.31 While the large majority of these sites were under 10 dunams in size, about one-third were more than a hectare.32 By comparison, only slightly over 10 percent of Judean sites were similarly large.33 Despite the large number of sites, unfortunately we have little evidence for residential patterns because only two sites with Persian period strata have been excavated in Samaria, the capital city and Shechem, neither of which 26

27

28 29

30

31

32 33

Reich, “Beth-Zur Citadel II”, 113–123. While Albright also dated the citadel to the Persian period, the original excavator and some others have instead assigned it to the Hellenistic era. See Stern, Archaeology of the Land II, 437–438, and Carter, Emergence of Yehud, 153–157, for discussions of the contested dating of this structure and the problematic excavation of the site as a whole; Carter also calls into question Reich’s proposal, in my view convincingly. Ussishkin, “Lachish,” III:907, 910. The structure was called a “residency” by the original excavation team. Ibid., 910. Stern places Lachish within the boundaries of Idumea, while Carter suggests that the town and the area north of it, including Gezer, may have constituted its own province under the Persians. See Stern, Archaeology of the Land II, 375, 447–450, and Carter, Emergence of Yehud, 75–113, 291. As Knoppers writes, “It is relevant . . . to point out that of the many personal names found within the fourth-century Samaria papyri, the vast majority are Yahwistic” (“Revisiting the Samarian Question,” 275). The Samaria Papyri will be discussed in more detail later. Also worthy of note is that there is some evidence for Judeans living in Samaria in the Persian period, though it is not as secure as one might like. See Stern, Archaeology of the Land II, 423. Zertal, “Pahwah of Samaria,” 11. Settlement seems to have been concentrated in the northern and western parts of the province, however. The Southern Samaria survey showed a marked decline in the number of sites in that region in the Persian era. See Finkelstein et al, Highlands of Many Cultures, especially 896–907; and Stern, Archaeology of the Land II, 428. Zertal, “Pahwah of Samaria,” 13. Carter, Emergence of Yehud, 216, 220. According to Carter, about 11 percent of Judean sites were over twelve dunams and 25 percent were between five and twelve dunams in Iron II.

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yielded much in the way of building remains.34 Yet, according to Zertal, the Samaria survey did uncover two large “buildings in a palace/fortress style,” one at Khirbet Marajim and the other at Khallet Kalles. Each of these was an enormous 5,000m2 in area and was comprised of “some units of ‘courtyard house’ surrounded by rooms, in the style of the Achaemenian administration buildings.”35 Zertal compares these structures with ones at Lachish, Hazor, Megiddo, and Beth-Zur. Each of those, however, is much smaller than the buildings at Khirbet Marajim and Khallet Kalles, and one is led to wonder if the structures he describes were not in fact single buildings but rather densely packed quarters of buildings.36 The architectural remains from certain sites in Transjordan are also noteworthy. For example, at Tell es-Sa‘idiyeh, a palace measuring almost 600 m2 was found, and at Bus[eirah a very large administrative building that may date to the Persian period was uncovered.37 At Khirbet Nimra in Idumaea, too, a structure, most likely an administrative center, measuring 25 × 12m was found. 38 Far more impressive, however, are the remains from the province of Megiddo and the coastal regions. As stated earlier, large structures were found at both Hazor and the city of Megiddo.39 A large residential quarter, possibly laid out in Hippodamian plan, was also found at Megiddo.40 Settlement was dense in the province of Megiddo and along the coast, and excavations have revealed extensive remains at sites such as Akko, Dor, and Ashkelon. At Akko, a large public building with a courtyard and sizeable complex of rooms was found, as well as a residential area showing clear signs of city planning.41 The archaeological remains from this site demonstrate that it underwent a “period of prosperity” during the centuries of Persian rule.42 The site of Tell Abu Hawam also seems to show signs of city planning, and at 34 35 36

37 38 39

40 41 42

Stern, Archaeology of the Land II, 424–428; Edward F. Campbell, “Shechem,” IV:1353. Zertal, “Pahwah of Samaria,” 15–16. For example, the structure at Megiddo, the largest of the four, is approximately 3,700m2 meters, while that at Lachish is no more than 1200m2 and that at Hazor is less than 800m2. The citadel at Beth-Zur is most likely Hellenistic rather than Persian, but it, too, measures only about 1,400m2. See Kempinski, Megiddo, 106; Ussishkin, “Lachish,” 911; Stern, Archaeology of the Land II, 374 (on Hazor); Carter, Emergence, 153 (on Beth-Zur); and Funk, “Beth-Zur,” I:261. Stern, Archaeology of the Land II, 455, 458. Ibid., 450. Stern refers to these structures as fortresses, or in the case of Megiddo, as a “fortress” in quotation marks, his punctuation no doubt an indication of the difficulty of characterizing the large administrative structures of the Persian period in any precise fashion – thus the alternating use of “fortress,” “citadel,” “palace-fortress,” or “palace” that one finds in different scholarly works referring to structures of similar design. See ibid., 374, 376. Ibid., 376–378. Ibid., 382–383. Dothan, “Acco,” I:22

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Shiqmona and Tel Michal city-planning is clear.43 At Dor, “the entire eastern part of the mound was a residential district, laid out meticulously according to a Hippodamian plan.”44 The quality of workmanship at Dor, where some walls were built entirely of ashlar, was quite high.45 At Ashkelon, excavators unearthed monumental ashlar buildings and a series of warehouses, among other remains.46 Also, a building characterized by its excavator as a palace was found at Tell Jemmeh, a site located a few miles inland in Philistia.47 And these are just some of the relevant data from this region. While there is little evidence that large numbers of Judeans lived in the coastal regions at this time,48 the evidence presented here is pertinent because it seemingly attests in various cases not only to residential hierarchy – and thus one feature of social stratification – but also to imperial administration. Despite the paucity of architectural and other remains from Judah, the region was ruled by a foreign power during this period and was thus subsumed within the larger structure of that empire. The evidence for city planning, and even meticulous city planning, that one finds at the coastal sites demonstrates that a central administration was active at those sites. Such administration is naturally reliant upon administrators, and thus in all likelihood evidences an administrative class. Though one can scarcely find evidence for city planning among the meager remains from Judean or Samarian Persian-period sites, one does find other pieces of evidence that attest to the presence – and importance – of imperial administration in these regions. One of these is the abundance of fortresses dating to the period that one finds throughout greater Palestine. Though the number of fortresses found at coastal sites and in the other regions outside of Judah and Samaria is unsurprisingly greater than that within those regions,49 fortresses were indeed found in Judah at such sites as Khirbet Abu et-Twein,50 Khirbet Nijam (Har Adar),51 Beth-Zur, Khirbet el-Qat?t?, and Khirbet al-Zewiyye.52 In 43 44 45 46 47 48

49

50

51 52

Stern, Archaeology of the Land II, 384, 389, 404–406. Ibid., 395. Ibid., 395; Raban, “Dor,” I:361. Stern, Archaeology of the Land II, 408–412. Ibid., 413. Note, however, the presence of Yahwistic names and even biblical names on some of the ostraca from Tell Jemmeh. See Naveh, “Aramaic Ostraca,” ‘Atiqot 21 (1992): 49–53. For a list of fortresses in the province of Megiddo and in the coastal zones, see Stern, Archaeology of the Land II, 465. Amihai Mazar dated this fortress to the Iron Age, but Carter and Hoglund prefer a Persian period date. See Mazar, “Abu Tuwein, Khirbet,” I:15–16; Carter, Emergence of Yehud, 166–168; and Hoglund, Achaemenid Imperial Administration, 191–196. Carter, Emergence of Yehud, 169. Ephraim Stern, “Persian Empire,” 1:86.

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the province of Samaria, sites containing fortresses include el-Qul‘ah and Khirbet Zakariya.53 As Hoglund writes, these fortresses, “built upon standardized plans, were staffed with imperial forces drawn from all over the empire. As such, they were garrisons, pockets of concentrated force established by the imperial system to maintain the empire’s interests within the Levant.”54 Further evidence for imperial administration may be found in the data concerning taxation in the Persian era. There is ample evidence that the Persians taxed subject peoples,55 and the data for taxation in Judah is sufficiently abundant to erase any doubts that Judeans were required to pay imperial taxes.56 In Nehemiah 5, for instance, people complain to Nehemiah that the imperial taxes (K;leme@ha td@ami) are too burdensome.57 And one finds more concrete evidence of taxation in the hundreds of Aramaic ostraca – albeit most of them from Idumea – that survive from this period.58 On one fourth-century Idumean ostracon, the title tax-collector ())bg) appears as part of a receipt for the payment of olives.59 Similarly, at Tell el-Kheleifeh on the coast of the Red Sea, an ostracon was found bearing the word sglprq. Despite the proposed Persian period date of the item, the term seems to be a transliteration of the Greek karpologov or “tax collector,” and was found on a receipt for wine.60 The great majority of ostraca, however, record the delivery of goods to different individuals without giving their titles. An example of one of these reads: 1 q x ygxl yrwx H[uri to H[aggai, wheat: 1 qab.61 53 54 55

56

57 58

59 60 61

Hoglund, Achaemenid Administration, 199–200. Ibid., 204. Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander, 67, 403–406, and elsewhere; Grabbe, History of the Jews,195–197. Contra Weinberg, Citizen-Temple Community, 88, 136. See Grabbe, History of the Jews, 144, 207, who doubts that even Ezra 7:24, which states that temple personnel were exempt from paying taxes, can be taken at face value; Carter, Emergence of Yehud, 57–58, 77 n.5, 80; Lemaire, “Administration in Fourth-Century Judah,” 56–62; and elsewhere. See also below. This text will be discussed in more detail later. The ostraca do demonstrate, however, that there were some individuals with Yahwistic names, presumably ethnic Judeans, living in Idumea at this time, with one ostracon even mentioning the “house of Yaho” (BYT YHW) . On the latter, see André Lemaire, “New Aramaic Ostraca,” 416–417. For evidence of Judeans in Idumea, see ibid., 415–417, 423; and Eph’al and Naveh, Aramaic Ostraca, 26 (#16), 42 (#61), 48 (#78), 54 (#96), and 56 (#106). Eph’al and Naveh, Aramaic Ostraca, 84 (#187). Grabbe, History of the Jews, 59–60. Eph‘al and Naveh, Aramaic Ostraca, 68 (#137). x is an abbreviation, commonly used in these texts, for N+nx. q is obviously an abbreviation for bq. See ibid., 11.

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In general, deliveries are made again and again to the same individuals. Some of the ostraca even record deliveries to storehouses.62 Features such as these have led many scholars to see not just the very few ostraca that refer explicitly to tax collection, but the body of Aramaic ostraca as a whole, as evidence for taxation. André Lemaire writes: The great number of Aramaic ostraca and their dating scheme make clearer and clearer that they are somehow connected with Achaemenid administration. Most of the ostraca probably record taxes in kind (barley, wheat, oil, and so on), and it is no surprise that quantities of barley, wheat, and oil were, at the time of the harvesting of each crop, entering the storerooms . . . Some of the ostraca may be drafts of a land-registry indicating the quantity of barley to be given for each field. A few ostraca mention quantities of silver, perhaps connected with taxes to be paid in silver . . . There are also several references to taxes in Judea during the Period in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, and the Judean taxes were probably similar to the Idumean taxes. So, indirectly, these ostraca could help us understand Judean taxes during the Persian and beginning of the Hellenistic Periods.63

Similar evidence is provided by the “Yehud stamps.” These seal impressions, sometimes found on jars or jar handles, have been uncovered at sites throughout Judah, sometimes together with a personal name and title. Examples of these are stamps reading “Yehud Yeho‘ezer governor” ()wxp rz(why dwhy) and “Uryo Yehud” (dwhy wyrw)).64 The issues of interpretation surrounding these stamps are in many ways similar to those related to the “lamelekh” seals of the preexilic period. As with the latter, most scholars now agree that “the Yehud stamps are official marks of the administration,” and many see them as being connected with taxation.65 Noteworthy, too, are the stamps bearing only a personal name, or a personal name and title, without the provincial name. A particularly interesting example of the latter type reads: “belonging to Shelomith mother of Elnatan, governor” ([)w]xp Ntnl) tm) tyml#l).66 Another example reads: “belonging to Yeremi the scribe” (rpsh ymryl).67 The corpus of stamps as a whole attests clearly the existence of an administrative class, and thus stratification, in Judah.68 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

Porten and Yardeni, “Social, Economic, and Onomastic Issues,” 457–488, especially 468–469. Lemaire, “New Aramaic Ostraca,” 414–415. Grabbe, History of the Jews, 62; Avigad, Bullae and Seals, 7, 22. Grabbe, History of the Jews, 61; Carter, Emergence of Yehud, 282. Avigad, Bullae and Seals, 11. Ibid., 7. One also find the names of governors and other officials on Judean and Samarian coins. See Grabbe, History of the Jews, 64–68, who provides a summary and bibliography on the subject.

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Evidence for social stratification also comes from the luxury items found at sites throughout Palestine. Signs of trade of all kinds are abundant in certain regions, especially the coastal sites.69 While Judah and Samaria seem to have been more isolated, even in those provinces excavators have found luxury wares and other evidence of trade. In addition to small numbers of Phoenician and Greek coins, pottery originating in Greece was found at various sites in Judah and Samaria.70 For example, various types of Greek vessels, dating from the sixth to the middle of the fifth centuries, were found at Tell en-Nas?beh.71 In the tombs surrounding Jerusalem, too, an assortment of Greek wares was found, as well as an Egyptian vessel, and Rhodian glass vessels were found in the City of David area.72 Attic pottery dating from the fifth through the fourth centuries has been found at En-Gedi, Jericho, Gezer, and Bethel, as well.73 In addition to imported pottery, various other luxury wares have been uncovered, among them Achaemenid-style jewelry made of gold in the graves of Ketef Hinnom, and of silver at Gezer.74 More mundane pieces of jewelry have been found at many other sites.75 Significantly, an Achaemenid coin, an Achaemenid clay cup, and parts from a bronze throne, the latter most likely belonging to a provincial governor, have all been found at Samaria, together with large amounts of Attic ware.76 Finds such as these demonstrate that, even in relatively isolated provinces such as Samaria and Judah, there were at least some individuals who could afford luxury goods. Seemingly, wealth in this period was often characterized not only by an ability to purchase luxury items such as jewelry, but also by the ability to acquire those individuals who occupy the lowest social stratum: slaves. The most important source of evidence for slavery in Persian-era Palestine is the “Samaria papyri” from Wadi ed-Daliyeh. These documents date to the 4th century bce, and consist primarily of deeds of slave sale. For example, WDSP 1 records the sale of a slave named Yehoh[anan son of Še’ilah to Yehonur son of Lenari; the seller, H[ananiah son of Beyad’el, received 35 shekels of silver for 69 70

71 72 73

74 75 76

Stern, Archaeology of the Land II, 518–534; Lipschits, “Achaemenid Imperial Policy,” 26–27. On foreign coins found in Palestine, see Stern, Archaeology of the Land II, 555–561; Carter, Emergence of Yehud, 268–270. Carter, Emergence of Yehud, 257. Ibid., 143, 147, 257. Ibid., 257; Stern, Archaeology of the Land II, 425, 441. Whether or not Gezer was located within the boundaries of Judah is still in question – while Stern does place Gezer in Judah, Carter and Lipschits do not. See Stern, Archaeology of the Land II, 375; Carter, Emergence of Yehud, 291; Lipschits, Fall and Rise, 183. Carter, Emergence of Yehud, 257; Stern, Archaeology of the Land II, 529–530. Stern, Archaeology of the Land II, 529. Knoppers, “Revisiting the Samarian Question,” 270; Crowfoot et al, Samaria-Sebaste, 213–216.

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the sale.77 Despite the Yahwistic names of all three parties, the document states that Yehoh[anan will be a slave of Yehonur “in perpetuity,” and of his sons after him, making clear that the slave laws of Leviticus were not followed in this place and time.78 Interestingly, WDSP 4 states that the same Yehonur bought another slave for thirty shekels. Also, WDSP 5, 8, and 9 record the sales of a total of twelve slaves to a certain Net[ira’ bar Yehopadani, or to Net[ira’ and his father.79 Clearly these buyers, and particularly the last two, were men of very great means. It is interesting to note that, contrary to the general practice of Mesopotamian texts, these documents list the patronymic of the slave being sold. As Gropp writes, “It is possible that this practice, along with the fact that most of the slaves like their new owners bear Yahwistic names, indicates that they were originally free-born but were reduced to servitude through poverty.” 80 Unsurprisingly, Samaria is not the only region evidencing traffic in slaves. Evidence for slavery also comes from the third-century Zenon papyri, which will be discussed in the next section, and from the ostraca from Idumaea. A particularly interesting example from the latter group reads: )psk yl Ntnml Myqh yz )nwbz 1 rxsm hml yl rm) Nk bhy )l 2 )bxw yty) )l Psk yrt)b tn) 3 hywl( r)# yz Psk P((..)hm 4 )l {.} Nyzx yzk rm)tm 1 m 5 ht) Nh N(k )y/ rbgl tlbqh 6 )tmyl( Nm hdx hl wbx hmt 7 ywhy bxb )tyr)#w 8 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 77 78 79

80 81

The buyer who promised to give me the money, did not give [it]. He said thus to me: “why do you beg (or: trade) in my place? there [sic] is no money.” And the debt that . . . the money that has been left on his account, is 1 ma‘ah. It has been said, as we saw, you did not pay the man’s/ collector’s respect. Now, if he comes there, give (pl.) him one of the slave-girls, and the rest will remain in debt. 81

Gropp, Wadi Daliyeh II, 34–35. Lines 4, 10. Also, WDSP 18 records the sale of a slave to Yehobanah bar Yehopadani, who was presumably the brother of Net[ira’. DJD XXVIII, 7. Eph al) and Naveh, Aramaic Ostraca, 90 (#199). Ostracon #198 in this collection also mentions a slave, but is too fragmentary to provide us with any information about slavery as a practice.

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Though there is much left unanswered by this text, it does attest both to slavery and to another variety of unequal social relations: debt. In serving as evidence for debt, it is certainly not alone among the many extant inscriptions from this period. WDSP 10 also combines evidence for debt with evidence for slavery in an interesting fashion: a certain slave Bagabarta son of Eli is placed in the service of a creditor in exchange for a loan of fifteen shekels.82 Other documents attest to debt more mundanely: an Aramaic ostracon from Idumaea speaks of a debt of twenty ma‘ah; another ostracon from the same region records a payment of ten seah of wheat toward a loan ()tpz); yet another records a payment, involving two different individuals, of twenty seah of grain for the same purpose.83 Also, a document from Ketef Yerih[o in Judah, containing a list of names followed by “a symbol and number, which together represent an amount of money,” has been interpreted as a list of loans and repayments.84 Similarly, an ostracon recently published by André Lemaire consisting of a list of individuals and amounts of barley might also be a docket recording loans.85 Finally, evidence for debt comes from Nehemiah 5, where the people lament that, because of famine, they must pledge their land-holdings and houses just to buy food, in addition to having to borrow money to pay the imperial taxes. In response to this, Nehemiah decrees that he and the other affluent individuals of Judah will restore to those in debt their fields and stop lending to them at interest. It is clear, then, that although both Judah and Samaria left poorer material remains for the Persian period than did the rest of Palestine, the evidence that does exist for these provinces amply attests to social stratification on the dual bases of rank and wealth. Judah, especially, seems to have been both poor and isolated, but it was not so isolated or so impoverished that certain Judeans could not acquire for themselves pottery imported from distant lands, bury their kin with fine gold jewelry, or, insofar as the meager architectural evidence allows us to say, build large residences for themselves – or live in the palatial residences the Persians built for them qua administrators of the Persian empire. Despite the almost obsessive desire some scholars have recently shown to attribute all things biblical to this period, Judah in the Persian era was not what it was during late monarchic times. Yet it was a complex, stratified society nonetheless, and one that, as 82 83 84

85

DJD XXVIII, 97–101. Eph‘al and Naveh, Aramaic Ostraca, 62 (#122), 52 (#92), 38 (#47) (respectively). Carter, Emergence of Yehud, 164–165; Eshel and Misgav, “Document from Ketef Yeriho,” 158– 176. Alternatively, the document could be a “local or imperial tax roster” (Carter, Emergence of Yehud, 165). Lemaire, “New Aramaic Ostraca,” 420–423.

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we shall see, grew increasingly complex and stratified in the several centuries to come.

The Social Stratification of Palestine in the Hellenistic Period While the era of Persian domination was one marked by a paucity of both material and relevant literary evidence, the Hellenistic period is thankfully one better documented. Not only have more Hellenistic sites been excavated, but the archaeological remains, including the Hellenistic-era monumental architecture, are better understood. In addition, texts such as the Zenon Papyri and Ben Sira provide us with clearer evidence regarding Palestinian social structure than did the literary sources of the Persian period. As will become apparent, the evidence leaves us with little doubt that Judea and other regions of Palestine were marked by numerous levels of social stratification during this time. Judea and Samaria were both marked by an increase in urbanization in the Hellenistic period, compared with the Persian era.86 In this era, one sees an increase both in the number of sites occupied and in the size of many sites.87 One also sees in the material remains of many of these Hellenistic sites evidence of residential hierarchy, an important characteristic of social stratification. At Gezer, for instance, excavators found “several fine courtyard houses,” as well as a private home containing two different wings and twelve rooms.88 Coins and Rhodian jar handles found among the architectural remains date the stratum to the second century. At Shechem, one sees two different residential quarters, one built early in the Hellenistic period and referred to by the excavator as the “poverty quarter,” and a wealthier section built a few decades later containing houses constructed of high quality masonry and decorated with painted walls.89 In the city of Samaria, too, excavators uncovered one large house that was of much finer construction than the others (house A). This residence measured 28 × 12.5m and its entrance, writes Rami Arav, “led through a vestibule to a paved central court. On the south and west sides, and 86

87

88

89

Hoglund, “Material Culture,” 69. In Transjordan, as well, one sees the emergence of several large cities (ibid., 70). See ibid., 69; pace Lipschits and Tal, “Settlement Archaeology.” While Hoglund states that the number of sites decreased in the Hellenistic period, Lipschits and Tal have more recently concluded just the opposite: that the number of sites more than doubled in this era. Arav, Hellenistic Palestine, 43; Halpern-Zylberstein, “Archaeology of Hellenistic Palestine,” 2:14. As was the case for the Persian period, however, Gezer’s position on the border of Judea and the Sharon Plain makes the ethnic identification of its residents somewhat questionable. Arav, Hellenistic Palestine, 94.

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probably on the north as well, there were columns in antis on Doric bases. The house was built of fine masonry, ‘the best of the period.’”90 In the Hasmonean period, residential differentiation became glaringly obvious with the construction of several royal palaces. At Jericho, John Hyrcanus built for himself a residence consisting of, as Andrea Berlin writes, “a huge building (50 by 55 m) with frescoed interiors, a heated bathing room including a plastered tub, and a miqve’ [sic]. To the south of this complex were two large side-by-side swimming pools.”91 The palace complex was further expanded by Alexander Jannaeus, who added a “new recreational area, which included another pair of pools, a colonnaded pavilion, plastered patios, and ornamental gardens.”92 This Hasmonean Xanadu was yet further expanded by Jannaeus’s widow, Salome Alexandra, at whose behest “architects laid out a huge new building. The plan consisted of two identical villa-like structures, each with a central open-air courtyard surrounded by rooms. A single rectangular room opened to the south of each courtyard, separated by two columns; these may have served as formal dining rooms. Frescoed walls decorated the interior . . . To either side of the villas . . . were square pools surrounded by gardens.”93 These “twin palaces,” as Ehud Netzer refers to them, were built for Salome Alexandra’s two sons Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II, who ungraciously repaid their mother’s lavish generosity by attempting to kill each other. Residential hierarchy and other features of social stratification are also visible outside of the hill country at sites on the coast, in Transjordan, and in the Galilee. For example, at Tell Anafa in the northeastern Galilee, excavators uncovered a “villa,” the walls of which were constructed of cut limestone blocks and rough basalt fieldstones and bedecked with “painted and gilded stucco.” According to Berlin, “This stucco décor included imitations of drafted blocks, egg-and-dart moldings, and Ionic and Corinthian column capitals.”94 Further attesting to the social position of the building’s inhabitants are the many “luxurious ceramic, glass, and metal objects” that were found within it, not to mention the house’s three-room bath complex and the evidence that its owners drank copious amounts of imported Aegean wine.95 Turning to Mareshah (Marisa) in Idumaea, a site that archaeological excavations and 90 91 92 93

94 95

Ibid., 91. Berlin, “Between Large Forces,” 34. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 42. On the Hasmonean palace complex at Jericho, see also Arav, Hellenistic Palestine, 163– 165; Netzer, “Hasmonean Palaces in Eretz-Israel,” 126–136; idem, Palaces of the Hasmoneans, 13–39; and idem, “Jericho, Exploration since 1973,” II: 683–686; among others. Berlin, “Between Large Forces,” 26. Ibid., 40; Berlin, “Hellenistic Period,” 425.

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evidence from the Zenon Papyri show to have been thriving in the Ptolemaic period, one finds various houses containing such features as bathing installations, “stucco Ionic pilasters,” and “beaded mouldings.”96 The residents of these homes, too, ate off imported plates and drank wines brought in from the Greek isles.97 Another noteworthy site is ‘Iraq el-Emir in Transjordan, where there stands an enormous building known today as Qasr el-‘Abd, or “fortress of the servant.” The building has a symmetrical plan and contains such decorative features as two feline fountains sculpted in red and white dolomite along its walls and friezes of large animals ornamenting its corners.98 Though the structure’s function is still debated, some have suggested that it was a palace or manor house.99 Interestingly, three pieces of evidence make clear that it was connected with the Tobiad family in some way: the two Tobiah inscriptions found a short distace from the structure; the evidence from the Zenon papyri concerning the prominence of the Tobiads in this region; and the fact that the structure conforms well to Josephus’s description of the barij built by the Tobiad Hyrcanus.100 Regardless of the building’s exact function, its size and decoration attest more than adequately to the Tobiad family’s very high social standing, and thus to social stratification in this region of Palestine. As obtrusive as Qasr al-‘Abd are the extravagant tombs of the Palestinian upper classes, monuments also attesting to stratification in this period. The most well preserved of these is the Tomb of Jason, located just outside Jerusalem. While the internal design of this tomb is similar to the bench tombs of the First Temple period, standing atop the tomb itself is an “extremely elaborate architectural framework . . . consisting of an arched gateway, paved outer court, interior entrance with a Doric column and neat Doric architrave, all constructed of beautifully cut and fitted limestone ashlar blocks.”101 This tomb dates to the reign of Alexander Jannaeus.102 Dating to roughly the same period is the Benê H?ezir tomb in the Wadi Kidron valley.103 It “is a rock-hewn tomb, consisting of a porch with a Doric style façade . . .,” writes Rachel Hachlili, “a main chamber with three chambers branching off it, each with loculi; another small chamber has arcosolia on three sides.” She continues: “The tomb’s porch facade [sic] is distylos in antis, with two baseless Doric columns between engaged antae crowned by an entablature 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103

Berlin, “Between Large Forces,” 7–8. Ibid., 7–8. Arav, Hellenistic Palestine, 107–108. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 106–109. The Zenon Papyri will be discussed in greater detail later. Berlin, “Power and Its Afterlife,” 142. Halpern-Zylberstein, “Archaeology of Hellenistic Palestine,” 21. Hachlili, Jewish Funerary Customs, 30–31.

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with a Doric frieze. The tomb had another façade – a nefesh – attached to the side of the Doric façade.”104 The tomb also contains an inscription identifying the tomb and nefesh as those of the “sons of Yosef son of Oved” and “sons of H?aniah, priests of Benê H??ezir” (ryzx ynbm Mynhk).105 While lacking such ostentatious façades as those of the Tombs of Jason and the Benê H?ezir, the tombs from Maresha also attest to the wealth of some residents of that city. These tombs were decorated with brightly colored frescoes, including one depicting a long line of exotic animals and another portraying a banqueting scene in which a harpist and a flautist provide entertainment for the diners.106 Finally, although the structure itself no longer survives, 1 Macc 13:27–29 states that the Hasmonean Simon built an elaborate funerary monument in Mode’in over the tomb of his father and brothers involving seven pyramids, massive columns, and carvings of ships. Considering the flamboyant tendencies of his son and grandson, there is little reason to think that the text exaggerates the splendor of this construction. It is not only in the monumental and sometimes lavish urban residential architecture that one finds archaeological evidence for social stratification in the Hellenistic period; evidence from rural areas, too, points toward this phenomenon and more specifically, toward both the seizure of lands by the ruling power and the accumulation of land in the hands of fewer and fewer individuals. Evidence that strongly suggests the former is provided by the survey of western Samaria led by Shimon Dar. This survey uncovered no fewer than 1,200 “field towers” throughout the region.107 Excavation of 45 of those towers showed that they had been erected in the third to second centuries, though they were utilized well into the Roman period, and that they were all attached to a plot of land.108 Considering the sheer number of towers and the amount of labor required to build each of them, Dar logically concludes that the towers are the product of a planned government effort. He goes even further to call the towers “evidence of governmental colonisation in the Hellenistic period . . . The method and arrangement with which the towers were built indicate a planned government project, although the instructions for its implementation are still unknown. The settlement pattern of the villages with towers, in contrast to those without them, shows that a single planning agency determined and carried out the division of the 104 105 106

107 108

Ibid., 31. See ibid., 263, and Avigad, Ancient Monuments, 59–66. Halpern-Zylberstein, “Archaeology of Hellenistic Palestine,” 20; Berlin, “Power and its Afterlife,” 140. Dar, Landscape and Pattern, I:92. Ibid., I:108–109; Fiensy, Social History, 32.

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fields.”109 Though Shimon Applebaum initially suggested that the towers served as temporary residences for workers who farmed areas distant from their villages, Dar contests the idea that the towers were generally not suitable for habitation, and argues instead that the towers were fermentation buildings for wine.110 He comes to this conclusion both from the construction and design of the towers themselves and from the location of the towers in the general region of the so-called har hammelek (Klmh rh), or “king’s mountain.”111 Regardless of which interpretation is correct, the towers provide almost incontrovertible evidence for strong government oversight of agriculture in the Hellenistic period, and also strongly imply governmental land seizure. Dar’s survey team uncovered further evidence of stratification in the form of a large farming complex connected to a field tower at Qasr e-Lejah. The enclosure of the farm measured 26.5m × 36m and contained not only a residence, but also a livestock enclosure, a large oil-press, water cisterns, and what seem to be rooms for laborers, whether slaves, tenants, or day laborers, and perhaps also quarters for a manager or overseer. Dar writes, “The farm of Qasr e-Lejah is a rare and excellent example of an agricultural holding managed by a well-to-do farmer . . . He may have had influence with the rulers or have accumulated landed property in other ways, since, in the Hellenistic and Herodian periods an estate was a way of rewarding servants of the royal court for loyal service.”112 Though Dar’s interpretation of this complex is speculative, evidence from epigraphic sources lends it further support. The Hefzibah inscription, specifically, provides evidence for the consolidation of land in the hands of the elites – elites given land by the Seleucid regime. The inscription records, among other correspondence, messages sent between Antiochus III113 and Ptolemaios, the strathgoj of Syria-Palestine. Lines 20 through 26 read: (20) [Bas]ilei== mega/lwi 0Antio&xwi upo& ( mnhma [para_ Ptol]ema[i/ou] ~ strathgou [kai_] a0rxiere&wj. a0ciw=, e0an& soi fai/nhtai, basileu=,. . .. . .. . .. . .pro&j te 109 110

111

112 113

Dar, Landscape and Pattern, I:120. Ibid., 109–111; Fiensy, Social History, 32. Applebaum later accepted Dar’s interpretation of the towers. See Applebaum, “Settlement Pattern,” 258. The precise geographical parameters of this “king’s mountain country” – a designation used in rabbinic literature – and with which monarch the region was first associated have been the source of much speculation. (See Dar, Landscape and Pattern, 119–121; Applebaum, “Settlement Pattern,” 259–260; Fiensy, Social History, 35–38; among others.) What is clear, however, is that the term originated in reference to crown lands of some kind, and Dar’s connection of the towers to this land, though not assured, is quite plausible. Dar, Landscape and Pattern, 12. Or, possibly, his eldest son. See Landau, “Greek Inscription,” 66.

218 MARRIAGE GIFTS AND SOCIAL CHANGE INI ANCIENT PALESTINE [Kle&(?)]wna kai _ (Hlio&dw[ro]n [tou_]j diokhta_j? ei0j ta_j u(p[arx] ou/s?aj moi kw&[m]a?j [e0g]k?th&sei kai_ ei0j [t]o_ pa?[t]r?iko_n kai_ ei0j [a#j] s?u_ pro[s]e&taxaj katagra&y[ai(?)..], [mh]qeni\ e0cousi&an 'ei1nai e0pistaqmeu&ein kata\ m[hde]mi&an [p]areu&&resin (25) m?hd' e(te&rouj e0pagagw_n? mhd 0 e0pibolh_n poih&saj [k]a?i?\ ta\ k?th&mata, mhde\ laou\j e0ca&gein. (20) To the great [K]ing Antiochos, memorandum [by Ptol]ema[ios], strategos/ [and] chief-priest. I propose, if you approve, King,. . .. . .. . .. . ...to [Kle(?)]on and Heliodo[ro]s [the] dioketai respecting the villages belonging to me as [pro]perty and hereditary tenure and respecting those which you ordered to be assigned to me:/ that nobody should be allowed to quarter under no pretence (25) neither by bringing in others nor by assault also on (or: requisitioning also) the possessions/ and not to eject villagers.114

Also, in another part of the document, Ptolemaios refers to “the villagers in my territories.”115 This inscription not only provides evidence that the Seleucids rewarded loyal servants with gifts of land, but also implies that those gifts of land could be quite large. It tells us, moreover, that these lands could even be heritable, and contain villages whose inhabitants would presumably work the land as tenants. Similar evidence is provided by the Zenon Papyri, which inform us that Apollonius, the finance minister of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, had an estate at Baitanata, or Beth Anath, in the Galilee.116 According to Tcherikover, the estate had been given to Apollonius as royal land and was worked by tenant farmers who paid over a portion of their crops to him.117 The Zenon Papyri have been mentioned at various points already in this analysis; it is appropriate to turn now to more detailed examination of these papyri. In addition to discussing patterns of trade and royal estates, these papyri also provide us with a great deal of evidence for other aspects

114 115 116

117

Ibid., 59, 61. Line 12. Ibid., 60. The town is also transliterated in the Zenon Papyri as bhqanaqa and appears in the plural genitive form baitianatoiv. See Papiri Greci e Latini, Volume Sesto, 37–39; Tcherikover and Fuks, eds., Corpus Papyrorum Judaicorum, I:122. On Beth Anath and the Zenon papyri, see Tcherikover, Hellenistic Civilization, 60, 67, 431 n. 73; idem, “Palestine under the Ptolemies,” 23, 45–48, 68; Fiensy, Social History, 34–35, who also discusses differing proposals for the site identification of Beth Anath; Dar, Landscape and Pattern, 119, among others.

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of life in Ptolemaic Palestine. One of these was the existence of slavery.118 Tcherikover goes so far as to say that “slaves appear in the Zenon correspondence as the most frequently mentioned Syrian export item.”119 For example, one papyrus details the sale of a seven-year-old slave girl to Zenon, who was in the service of Apollonius, by Nikanor son of Xenokles, a servant of Tobiah the Ammonite. The girl was sold for fifty drachmai at Bi/rtai th=j 0Ammani/tidoj.120 Another striking document details a gift from Tobiah to Apollonius of a eunuch and four slave boys, aged seven to ten years, whose physical features, including whether or not they were uncircumcised, are given in detail. The text states that the boys are “house-slaves and of good stock” ([oi0ke] ~ tika& te kai\ tw n eu0genw2n).121 C. C. Edgar writes, “These black-eyed boys from Coele-Syria were not destined to lead a life of toil in the quarries or factories of the Fayûm. Slaves of this sort were luxuries for the rich. . .”122 Tcherikover adds, “The eunuch who accompanied them was probably their ‘instructor.’” Elsewhere, he abandons the Victorian euphemisms and states, “It is possible [these slaves] are to find employment in Egypt as boys-of-pleasure.”123 The Zenon Papyri also attest to the practice of giving loans and to an interesting case of a defaulting debtor named Jeddous. This man, rather than paying his debt, attacked those sent by his creditor to collect what he had pledged on the loan.124 While cases such as this were in all likelihood rare, evidence from Hellenistic works such as Ben Sira suggest that debt and other financial troubles were not. In fact, Ben Sira seems to assume that accumulating debt and lending out money were everyday occurrences, and chapter 29 of the work is concerned almost solely with these topics. Verse 2 reads: “Lend to (your) neighbor in his time of need/ and pay back (your) neighbor on time.” While this statement seems to assume that most people would be in the positions of both borrower and lender at different points in their life,125 much of the chapter takes a more sympathetic attitude toward those who lend – taking for granted that the book’s audience would be in a financial position to give loans – and assumes that borrowers would be irresponsible in paying creditors back. For example, verse 5 reads: “One kisses another’s hands until he gets a loan/ and is deferential in speaking of his neighbor’s money/ but at 118

119 120 121 122 123 124 125

On the evidence for slavery in the Zenon Papyri, see Tcherikover, “Palestine under the Ptolemies.” Ibid., 16. Tcherikover and Fuks, Corpus Judaicarum, 119–120. Ibid., 126–127. Cited in ibid., 127. Ibid., 127; Tcherikover, “Palestine under the Ptolemies,” 18. Tcherikover and Fuks, Corpus Judaicarum, 129–130. As does Sir 8:12–13.

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the time for repayment he wastes time/ and repays with empty words/ and complains about the time (the loan is due).” Ben Sira’s position of social privilege is of course well known, and he offers ample proof of social stratification and all manner of things connected with it: debt, slavery, day laborers, and the abuse of the poor by the wealthy.126 Ben Sira sees his world not as bifurcated – with everyone falling into one of two categories, rich or poor – but as divided into several strata. While he does speak of the rich and poor in a dyadic manner at times, he also recognizes, despite his clearly upper-class position, that there are those much richer and more powerful than himself, and those much poorer.127 Some individuals 126

127

References to slavery may be found in Sir 7:20; 33:26–33; 41:22, which seems to assume that sleeping with female slaves was not uncommon; and elsewhere. For references to day laborers, see 7:20; 34:27, among other passages. Comments referring to the abuse of the poor occur throughout the book, of course. This is not to imply that Ben Sira’s was a “bourgeois” middle-class position as one would find in the modern, industrialized West. I do feel, however, that some scholars, in attempting to dispel what they see as anachronistic notions about class stratification in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, have gone too far in the other direction by positing a rather simplistic twostratum society in Palestine, where one was either rich or dreadfully poor. The textual and material evidence make clear, in my view, that there were multiple socioeconomic strata in Hellenistic and, especially, Roman Palestine. That the majority of individuals occupied the lower strata does not in any way militate against this. (The multi-tiered nature of the society is characterized well by Table C in Fiensy, Social History, 158.) The work of Garnsey and Saller on Roman society reinforces this assessment. They state of patronal relations: “A man might have ‘superior friends,’ ‘equal friends,’ ‘lesser friends’ and humble ‘clients,’ and the categorization of others into one or another of these depended on their resources,” that is, on their relative amount of wealth and authority (“Patronal Power Relations,” 97; Roman Empire, 149). This statement demonstrates, as well, that recognition and analysis of the importance of patronage in the ancient world need not preclude analysis of socioeconomic stratification. Garnsey and Saller see this stratification as having been somewhat fluid in the Roman empire, with mobility between classes at times occurring, even if the great majority of persons would occupy the lower strata for their entire lives. While they state that there “was no genuine ‘middle class’ in the sense of an intermediate group with independent economic resources or social standing,” Garnsey and Saller also describe scribes and other skilled “staff ” as having been “appendages to the ruling aristocrats” (Roman Empire, 116, 118–125). The latter statement, too, can then serve as evidence that multiple socioeconomic strata existed in the Roman empire, not just two, for these “appendages” clearly occupied a lower tier than those whom they served. In a related way, these observations may be applied to Schloen’s argument that Late Bronze and Iron Age societies were organized almost entirely according to what he calls the patrimonial household model (see House of the Father). While there is no doubt that patrimonialism was important in ancient Near Eastern societies, Schloen’s patrimonial pyramid, when seen from a different perspective, itself points towards complex divisions of wealth. Even if some or even most people in ancient societies conceived of their associations as a vertical chain running from one patron-client relationship to another, these pyramidal relations, viewed from outside, comprise a rising set of smaller and smaller social classes, with those on the bottom level of the pyramid having the least authority and the least wealth and those on the highest levels, which are comprised of far fewer individuals, possessing much more authority and much more wealth. While a patron or client might view his relations as being negotiable

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are so poor they must beg, and it is repeatedly called a virtue to give alms to these disadvantaged souls;128 others earn daily wages; still others farm, or work as artisans, potters, smiths, and so on.129 Some hold or attend luxurious banquets;130 others can barely afford to buy food. The book of Ben Sira, then, like the archaeological and other evidence from this period, leaves little doubt that the world of Hellenistic Palestine was a complex, stratified world.

The Social Stratification of Palestine in the Roman Period If social differentiation and stratification are reasonably clear in the Hellenistic period, in the Roman period they become glaringly obtrusive. Evidence for this period is abundant, and it unfailingly demonstrates that Roman Palestine was a region fractured along socioeconomic and other lines. As before, we will begin with the archaeological evidence, focusing on Judea, but examining data from other regions of Palestine where appropriate. As was the case in the Hellenistic period, one finds clear-cut evidence of residential hierarchy in the Roman period – and perhaps in even more exaggerated fashion. While there is no questioning the ostentatiousness of the later Hasmoneans, even their excesses pale in comparison to those of Herod and his descendants. Leaving aside many of the fruits of Herod’s building frenzy to concentrate upon palatial architecture, one finds evidence for Herodian residences in Jerusalem and at Caesarea, Herodion, Jericho, Samaria-Sebaste, and Masada.131 The ruler also built or expanded various fortresses, or smaller fortified palaces, at sites throughout Palestine.132 (One might almost forget that

128 129 130 131

132

and individual, from a macrosocial perspective, such relations, replicated over and over again throughout the society, demonstrate that a clear correlation existed between wealth, authority, and one’s standing in this patrimonial pyramid. This is not to say that patronal relations should be conflated with socioeconimic stratification, merely that these relations must be analyzed together with societal patterns of wealth distribution. Incidentally, it is worth noting, too, that analysis of patron-client relations is often very much androcentric because ancient patrimonialism was an incredibly androcentric ideology. Examinations of socioeconomic stratification need not be so male-centered, especially if one shares Goody’s interest in the connections between mode of production, marriage gifts, and the devolution of property through women. See Sir 3:30; 7:10; 28:5, and elsewhere. See chapter 38 especially. See especially 31:12–18. In addition, Josephus mentions that there was a royal palace at Ashkelon. (See Ant. 17.321; J.W. 2.98.) Excavators uncovered an impressive structure at the site and some have attempted to connect this structure with Herod, but Lawrence Stager feels that it more likely dates to the Severan period in the early third century ce (Stager, “Ashkelon,” I:110–111.) These are generally referred to as the “desert fortresses.” See Netzer, 68–78; idem, Architecture of Herod, 202–217; and elsewhere.

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Palestine was only slightly larger than the state of Massachusetts.) Regarding these palaces, Ehud Netzer writes, “It is safe to assume that these structures, inter alia, derived from ancient Hellenistic traditions and the palaces of Alexandria, Antioch, Pella and other cities. On the other hand, from an architectural viewpoint, one can clearly detect the drive, daring and the wide scope so characteristic of King Herod.”133 Though little survives of the palace in Jerusalem, Lee Levine has called it “sumptuous”134 and Josephus’s description of the structure leaves little doubt it was indeed so; the latter states: “the king’s palace, baffling all description: indeed, in extravagance and equipment, no building surpassed it.” He continues: [The palace] was completely enclosed within a wall thirty cubits high, broken at equal distances by ornamental towers, and contained immense banqueting-halls and bedchambers for a hundred guests. The interior fittings are indescribable – the variety of the stones (for species rare in every other country were here collected in abundance), ceilings wonderful both for the length of the beams and the splendor of their surface decoration, the host of apartments with their infinite varieties of design, all amply furnished, while most of the objects in each of them were of silver or gold.135

The Jerusalem residence was not unique among the Herodian palaces in its splendor. At Masada, for example, Herod built not one palace, but a palacecomplex consisting of two large palaces and three smaller ones.136 One of the large palaces measured 66m × 48m and contained elaborate colored mosaics in geometric and floral patterns.137 The other large palace was built, as Ariel Lewin writes, “on three separate levels linked by a steep flight of steps: an upper terrace, a middle terrace 18 meters lower, and a lower terrace 12 meters below that.” She continues: “The upper and lower terraces were surrounded by colonnades, as was the tholos of the middle terrace, but it stood within a larger space. Each of these courtyards offered a splendid view, but perhaps the most extraordinary prospect was reserved for guests in apartments on the lowest terrace, for these were perched on its precipitous edge.”138 Elsewhere in the Masada palace complex, one finds a pool, columbaria, and a vast set of baths decorated with mosaics and frescoes.139 133 134 135 136

137 138 139

Netzer, “Palaces Built by Herod,” 35. Levine, Jerusalem, 190. See J.W. 5.176–182 for Josephus’s description of the palace. Netzer, Palaces, 79–97; idem, Architecture of Herod, 17–41; Ariel Lewin, Archaeology of Ancient Judea, 126–137, especially 132–134; among others Lewin, Archaeology of Judea, 133. Ibid., 133–134. Ibid., 132–134; Netzer, Palaces, 95.

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Though the Herodian palaces obviously occupy the pinnacle of this period’s residential hierarchy, there is evidence that some non-royals, too, dwelled in residences superior to those of the great majority of Roman Palestine’s inhabitants. In Jerusalem, for instance, excavators found a clear residential hierarchy comprised of at least three tiers. Naturally smaller than Herod’s palace in size, but still impressive, were several large “mansions” dating from the first century ce.140 One of these, the so-called “Herodian House,” was around 300m2 in size; in it were found fine pottery and large amphorae bearing Latin inscriptions that once held wine imported from Italy.141 Two other houses, “The Mansion”142 and the “Burnt House,” contained similar ceramic remains, and the former included a fine frescoed wall.143 Interestingly, the “Burnt House” contained a stone weight with the inscription “[of] bar Qathros” (srtq rb[d]); the Qathros family is listed in rabbinic writings as one of the four large priestly families who used their status to abuse the people.144 Also found were rows of homes that, though smaller, still clearly “belonged to upper class families.”145 In many of these were found imported pottery and such features as mosaic pavements – three in one building alone.146 Outside of Jerusalem, one also sees evidence for residential hierarchy. For example, various sites throughout Palestine contain the remains of what seem to have been Roman-style villas.147 One of these is H?orvat H?as@as@a in the Negeb. The house there had an area of over 1,100m2 and contained around twenty rooms, two courtyards, and two vestibules.148 Another example was found at ‘En Yael. This villa was built in the second century ce and contained a main reception room, a bathhouse, and a triclinium “decorated with mosaic floors rich with maritime and agricultural scenes befitting the character of the place.”149 As in the late Hellenistic period, the upper classes of Palestine displayed their wealth not only in life but in death as well. In the Roman period, however, one does not find a mere handful of ornately constructed or decorated 140 141 142

143 144 145 146 147 148 149

Fiensy, Social History, 52–53; Avigad, “How the Wealthy Lived,” 1, 22–35. Avigad, “How the Wealthy Lived,” 25–26. Or, alternately, the “Great Mansion” (Hirschfeld, Palestinian Dwelling, 59) or “Palatial Mansion” (Fiensy, Social History, 52–53). Avigad, “How the Wealthy Lived,” 26–32; Hirschfeld, Palestinian Dwelling, 58–62. Avigad, “How the Wealthy Lived,” 29. See b. Pesah?. 57a. Avigad, Discovering Jerusalem, 95; Fiensy, Social History, 53. Avigad, “How the Wealthy Lived,” 30. Applebaum, “Roman Villa in Judaea,” 124–131; Fiensy, Social History, 49. Hirschfeld, Palestinian Dwelling, 80–81. Ibid., 56.

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tombs, but dozens of such tombs and many dozens of ossuaries.150 Some of the most well-known examples of these are the group of monumental tombs from the Kidron valley. One of these, the Benê H?ezir tomb, was discussed earlier. The other two, the so-called Tombs of Zechariah and Absalom, date to the 1st century ce.151 Both of these are fitted with elaborate external monuments. The Tomb, or Monument, of Absalom is an impressive 20m high and 7m × 6.80m wide, and has two parts: a lower part consisting of a “rock-hewn square cube decorated with engaged Ionic columns bearing a Doric frieze and crowned by an Egyptian cavetto-cornice”; and a rounded upper part built of ashlars and “topped by a concave conical roof, of Hellenistic-Roman style . . . crowned by a petalled flower.”152 The Tomb of Zechariah, which is not in actuality a tomb but a memorial, is a “freestanding, solid, monolithic monument with a three-stepped base,” topped by a pyramid.153 Elsewhere in the region – though primarily in the area of Jerusalem – one finds many other impressive tombs, including the “magnificent” Tomb of Queen Helene of Adiabene,154 the Tomb of Herod’s Family, the Tomb of Nicanor, and the Sanhedriya tomb. Though not all of these include external monuments, their decoration and fine construction nonetheless distinguish them from most burials, and make quite obvious the affluence of those once interred within.155 Even when examining the ossuaries found within tombs, wealth distinctions are evident, with some of these receptacles bearing beautiful decorative work and others only sloppy inscriptions, or nothing at all – some even lack smoothed surfaces.156 Like the archaeological evidence, the epigraphic and literary evidence of the Roman period, too, leave us with clear proof that social stratification was extremely pervasive at this time. Drawing upon all three sets of evidence, David Fiensy has argued persuasively for the existence of a large, and probably increasing, number of agricultural estates held by wealthy landlords, and thus for the concentration of land in the hands of a small percentage of the population.157 The dozens of villas found in the region themselves offer 150

151

152 153 154 155 156 157

For a discussion of ossuaries and why they may have come into use in the Roman period, see Hachlili, Jewish Funerary Customs, 522–528, where she also reviews ideas on the subject, and idem, “Burials, Ancient Jewish,” I:790–791. Also noteworthy is the Tomb of Jehoshaphat, a subterranean tomb complex attached to the Tomb of Absalom. See Hachlili, Jewish Funerary Customs, 33–34. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 36–37. See ibid., 29–54 for descriptions and drawings of these upper-class tombs. Ibid., 94–115, as well as the many photos at the back of the book. Fiensy, Social History, 21–74.

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evidence for this phenomenon. The converse of this process of accumulation, of course, is that large numbers of individuals and families become landless – those once freeholders are reduced to tenants working property not their own, day laborers finding work where they can, or even bandits.158 As Fiensy writes, “. . . the survey of large estates in the previous chapter has shown that at least a sizable minority of the acreage during that time was the property of large-estate owners. Such a landownership pattern meant that there was less and less land to go around for the small freeholders and we would naturally expect the number of landless peasants to have increased.”159 Certainly, there are numerous references in Josephus and elsewhere to banditry,160 and references in various sources to day laborers or tenants are even more abundant – the Synoptic Gospels alone provide several references, and the rabbinic texts provide many more.161 The documents from the Judean Desert, too, contain much evidence for these phenomena; one in fact finds among them several lease or tenancy agreements.162 These sources together provide us with much useful information concerning the realities of life for most people at this time, but perhaps one of the most telling pieces of information they contain regards daily wages and the relative costs of goods and property. For example, literary sources assume that the average daily wage of a hired hand was one denarius, though rates seem to have varied according to skill level or time of year.163 A daily portion of grain, on the other hand, cost roughly 1/12 of a denarius. A family of four would thus require approximately 120 denarii per year just to feed themselves, a family of six, about 180 denarii.164 Naturally, weather, illness, the Sabbath, and other issues would prevent any laborer from working every day, so one denarius per day could barely provide for a family’s overall needs, much less serve to buy even a half share of a vegetable garden – which in one sale contract cost 100 denarii.165 Even just a pair of donkeys cost twenty denarii – donkeys that 158

159 160 161

162

163

164 165

On bandits, see Fiensy, Social History, 77, 96, 165–167; Horsley and Hanson, Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs; Seán Freyne, “Bandits in Galilee,” 50–68; idem, “Geography, Politics, and Economics,” 94–96; among others. Fiensy, Social History, 77. Ibid., 77. In the Gospels, see Mk 12:1–8; Mt 9:37–38, 10:10, 20:1–8, Lk 10:2, 15:17. In rabbinic texts, see m.Bik. 1:2, 2:3; m.Demai 6:1, 6:8; t.Demai 3:5, 7:1; t. Pe’ah 3:1; m. B. Mes@i’a 9:1–10; among others. See P. Mur. 24, A-K; P. Yad. 6, 42, 44, 45, and 46. P. Yad. 43 is a receipt for the partial payment of a lease. Also, P. Yad. 7 also seems to refer to tenants in lines 15 and 52. Fiensy, Social History, 86–87. See also Porten and Yardeni, “Social, Economic, and Onomastic Issues,” 482, who cite an unpublished Aramaic ostracon of the first century C.E. recording payments of roughly a half-denarius per day to laborers. Fiensy, Social History, 88. See P. Yad. 47.

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would themselves require large amounts of grain to maintain.166 Clearly even a very productive laborer with several productive children could never hope to purchase something so valuable as a date grove, which could easily cost several hundred denarii.167 Though the situation of tenant farmers and their families was perhaps less dire, a rent of one-third or one-half the leased property’s crops was seemingly not atypical, amounts that surely would have been crushing in the event of a poor harvest. Tenants who paid a set fee rather than a percentage, even if better off in times of plenty, would have borne the burden of drought or other hardships entirely on their own shoulders.168 For these reasons, Joseph Klausner concludes that tenants in Palestine were essentially “a class of serfs.”169 Considering the precarious existence that many in ancient Palestine must have led, it is no surprise that evidence for debt is as abundant as that for the phenomena just described. Again, one finds ample data in the New Testament and rabbinic materials.170 More direct evidence is also provided by various contracts found in the Judean desert, including five acknowledgements of debt and a promissory note.171 Perhaps the most telling evidence for the widespread and oppressive nature of debt in this period is provided by Josephus, who recounts that one of the first acts committed by insurgents during the first revolt was to burn down the public archives, where debt records were kept. He writes: “The victors burst in and set fire to the house of Ananias the highpriest and to the palaces of Agrippa and Bernice; they next carried their combustibles to the public archives, eager to destroy the money-lenders’ bonds and to prevent the recovery of debts, in order to win over a host of grateful debtors and to cause a rising of the poor against the rich, sure of impunity” ( J.W. 2.427). He also tells of a similar incident occurring at Antioch.172 Though the extent of slavery and its importance for agricultural production in ancient

166 167

168 169 170

171

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P. Yad. 8. See P. Yad. 2 and 3. The implications of such low wages for the giving of marriage gifts will be discussed in the conclusion to this study. Fiensy, Social History, 80–85; Freyne, “Geography, Politics and Economics,” 109–110. Klausner, “Economy of Judea,” 192; Fiensy, Social History, 84. In the New Testament, see Matt 18:23–25; Matt 5:25//Luke 12:58; 16:1–9; among other passages. For rabbinic examples, see m. S[eb.10; m. Git[. 4:3; b. Git[. 36a; m. B. Mes@i a) 5:11; m. Sanh. 3:3; and elsewhere. On the widespread nature of debt, see also Oakman, “Jesus and Agrarian Palestine,” 57–73; idem, Jesus and Economic Questions, 72–77; Goodman, Ruling Class of Judaea, 56–58; among others. See P. Yad. 1; P. Mur. 18, 114; XH?ev/Se 49, 66, and 344. Interestingly, P. Mur. 46 seems to call for leniency in the case of a debtor who gave charity to the poor and buried the destitute, though interpretation of the text is somewhat difficult. See DJD II: 164–166. See J.W. 7.61.

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Palestine have been debated,173 this phenomenon, like debt and landlessness, is also amply attested in the evidence from this period.174

Bilateralism in Roman-Era Palestine In Chapter 3, it became clear that marked social stratification is the feature of social structure most closely correlated with the giving of dowry. The presence or absence of stratification is not the only feature correlated with bridewealth or dowry, however, and in Chapter 4, the topics of pastoralism and inheritance patterns were also addressed. That analysis demonstrated the importance of pastoralism in Iron I especially and of the ideal of corporate land ownership in the preexilic period, though how regularly this ideal was put into practice is unclear. Certainly, in examining Second Temple period sources, there is little evidence for corporate land ownership of any kind or for the existence of larger kinship units such as the clan (hxp#m) in anything but the most symbolic, idealized fashion. Pastoralism as the primary manner of gaining a livelihood, too, seems to have been a rarity among Judeans in this late period.175 One social feature that seems to have gained in importance in the Roman period, however, is bilateralism. Goody has demonstrated that bilateral inheritance is a characteristic correlated with dowry – in some sense because the giving of dowry is equivalent to premortem inheritance by females, but also more broadly.176 Apart from the giving of dowry, bilateralism is seen in Roman Palestine primarily in two areas, the first of which is the bestowal of property upon daughters through deeds of gift.177 P. Yadin 19 and XH?ev/Se 64 serve as examples of such deeds of gift, and P. Yadin 16 refers to property that Babatha in all likelihood also received in such a manner.178 It thus seems 173

174

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177 178

See Fiensy, Social History, 90–92, who reviews scholarly positions on the subject; and Oakman, Jesus and Economic Questions, 22. For broader treatments of slavery, see M. Stern, “Aspects of Jewish Society,” II:624–630; Martin, “Slavery and the Ancient Jewish Family,” 113–129; idem, “Slave Families,” 207–230, among others. Texts from the period mentioning or discussing slavery include Ant., 16.1–5; Mk 12:2; Mt 13:27; 18:25; Lk 15:22, 17:7; Acts 6:9; CD XI, ln. 11, XII ln. 10–11; m. B. Bat. 3:1; b. Sukkah 41b; t. Sukkah 2:10; b. Ketub. 67b; b. S#abb. 137b; m. Git i. 4:9; b. Git.i 38a; Sipra Lev 25; Sem. 1.9–11, among many other examples. Pastoralism seems to have been on the decline in Palestine as a whole in the Roman period. See Finkelstein, Living on the Fringe, 156, though Liora Kolska Horwitz (“Application of Ethnographic Analogy,” 2: 833–852) argues that in the region of Mt. Carmel, pastoral activities continued to comprise an important part of the subsistence base in the Roman and Byzantine eras. Goody, Bridewealth and Dowry , 17, 24, 42; Production and Reproduction, 7–8, 20, 29; The Oriental, the Ancient, 2–3. For a case of husband deeding property to his wife, see P. Yad. 7. See DJD XXV, II:204 and Cotton and Greenfield, “Babatha’s Property.” Though P. Yadin 19 follows Babatha’s marriage by only eleven days and was thus most likely connected with that

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clear that daughters were deeded familial property on an at least a somewhat regular basis in ancient Palestine, as was also the case in other parts of the Roman empire.179 The other evidence for bilateralism in this period concerns the matrilineal principle first enunciated in rabbinic law. Shaye J. D. Cohen has convincingly argued that this principle arose only in the Roman period (the second century ce, more specifically) and was not known during the Second Temple period.180 Though one might readily contend that this principle is antithetical to bilateralism in the area of descent,181 and has little or no impact on bilateralism in the area of inheritance, it is intriguing that rabbinic law, which is overwhelmingly patrilineal and androcentric in focus, took on such a glaringly bilateral feature during precisely the period when Palestine reached its premodern apex of social stratification and complexity.182

Conclusion The archaeological, epigraphic, and literary material from the Roman era all provide us with incontestable evidence that Palestine was characterized in that period by the very features that so often mark dowry-giving societies. The most prominent of these features is social stratification, and, on examination of the abundance of relevant material, one can only conclude that levels of stratification in Roman Palestine were extraordinarily high. This situation did not emerge from nowhere, of course: its roots can be traced back clearly to the Hellenistic period that preceded it. The evidence from the Persian era, too, while less abundant and less clear, also provides us with data that implies social stratification was present at that time. Certainly, however unimpressive the Persian remains may seem when compared with those from Roman times, they nonetheless demonstrate that Palestine was a far more complex

179

180

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event, we do not know when or for what reason the property in XHev/Se 64 and P. Yadin 16 were given. See the discussion of this issue in Chapter 2. Yaron, Gifts in Contemplation, especially 153–160; DJD XXV, II: 203–206; Satlow, Jewish Marriage in Antiquity, 204–209. See Cohen, Beginnings of Jewishness, 263–307. Interestingly, though, one does see in the book of Jubilees the inclusion of women in genealogies. For example, the genealogy in Jubilees 4, unlike its counterpart in Genesis 5, lists the names of the wives of the various ancestors. Of course, Jubilees predates the Roman period. Otherwise, the child of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother would be as much a Jew as the child of a Jewish mother and non-Jewish father. As Coote and Whitelam write, “A glance at a map of Palestine during the Roman-Byzantine period immediately reveals the extraordinary expansion of settlement in the early centuries of this era . . . This period represents the greatest density of population in the history of Palestine before the [year] 1900 ce” (Emergence, 37).

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society in that period than it had been in Iron I. Considering the evidence from the postexilic period as a whole, one would easily expect Palestine to be a dowry-giving society, and it is no surprise that it is precisely that gift that one finds not only repeatedly discussed, but adjudicated and reflected upon in the documentary and literary material dating from these centuries. The social changes that occurred over the course of Palestine’s history, and their implications for the issue of marriage gifts, will be discussed in greater detail next.

Final Analysis and Conclusions

It has not been the objective of this book to argue that the culture of ancient Palestine was an island, free from the influence of other groups. My goal has instead been to propose that something other than foreign influence best explains why one aspect of this area’s culture and society, the exchange of marriage gifts, changed so markedly over the course of several centuries. While it is true that all groups are influenced – through trade, through direct contact, or through conquest and invasion – by the ideas and practices of other cultures, it is also true that all groups develop and change along a path that is in some way unique to their own society. The movement along this path is a slow one involving the intersection of multiple features, multiple aspects of social structure and culture. Changes in Israelite marriage gifts, and in Israelite marriage, cannot be understood apart from changes in other aspects of ancient Israelite society because the exchange of marriage gifts did not in actuality stand apart from these features. By effecting inchoate marriage, these gifts were part of what constituted kinship structures and social alliances. By serving as a mode of devolving property, they were part of larger inheritance patterns. By redistributing and/or concentrating wealth, they were part of the formation and maintenance of social strata. Thus, as Goody argues, they must be examined together with these other aspects of social structure. Such a synthetic examination for ancient Israel is what this book has attempted to achieve. Of course, there are many areas of ancient Israelite history and society for which we have a frustrating paucity of relevant evidence, and Israelite marriage is unfortunately one of these. Yet the evidence we do have for marital gift-giving in preexilic Israel, however incomplete, nonetheless presents us with a reasonably clear picture. Based upon texts such as Genesis 34, Exodus 22:16–17, and 1 Samuel 18, one may conclude that bridewealth was necessary for the contracting of marriage, and was 230

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in all probability what effected betrothal or inchoate marriage. These and other texts imply that bridewealth was widespread in ancient Israel, but also that the content of this gift may have been variable. Although 1 Kings 9 and Genesis 29 also demonstrate that dowry was known as a custom in ancient Israel, both the paucity of texts that attest to dowry and the details of the texts themselves seem to indicate that it was neither common nor considered necessary for marriage. A handful of biblical texts provide similar evidence for marriage gifts such as indirect dowry: these gifts were given on occasion, but seem to have lacked either a juridical function or any great cultural importance. As was discussed in Chapter 3 of this work, bridewealth was also a central part of marriage, and more specifically of betrothal, in ancient Mesopotamia. Yet, in the Mesopotamian law codes, one finds repeated discussion of dowry, especially concerning how the latter was to be devolved in the case of the death of the husband or the wife. One even finds legislation regarding indirect dowry. Though the biblical legal collections do not treat issues of inheritance as extensively as do those from Mesopotamia, it is nonetheless noteworthy that they contain not one mention of dowry.1 In addition, their relative lack of interest in inheritance laws might itself be seen as telling: it is perhaps a reflection of the lack of entrenched social strata in the society, and perhaps of a still persistent custom of corporate land ownership, as well. Corresponding to the latter, one could argue, is the relatively great interest biblical texts do show in assigning lands to different kinship groups. However, while the cases of bridewealth found in the biblical corpus are more numerous than cases of dowry, one must still address the fact that cases of dowry are found. In only one of these, 1 Kings 9, is a technical term used: šillûhiîm. A cognate to this term is found in a Ugaritic text (CAT 1.24), but, strikingly, this term appears not once in the many postexilic texts that discuss bridewealth. When one considers the longevity of the term melûg, a Sumerian loan word that was used in Akkadian texts to refer to dowry and still used in rabbinic texts more than two millennia later, it is surprising that this word was not used by the Judeans at Elephantine. Those Judeans did, after all, utilize the preexilic word for bridewealth, mōhar, even though the gift had by that time morphed into indirect dowry. The fact that neither the Elephantine papyri nor any other postexilic text utilizes the word šillûhiîm to refer to dowry, or to any other marriage gift, strongly implies that dowry was not a widespread custom in ancient Israel.2 1

2

The legal texts dealing with inheritance are primarily Deut 21:15–17; Num 27:1–11; and Num 38:6–9. While one might instead propose that it was the term šillûh?îm, rather than the custom of giving dowry, that was not well-established, the fact that this term is used to refer to a marriage

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Yet, if the giving of dowry was common in Mesopotamia from as early as the Old Babylonian period, was at least known at Ugarit (a lack of evidence precludes us from estimating just how common it was there), and was widespread among Judeans living in the postexilic period, why wasn’t it more common in preexilic Israel? The answer, I have argued, lies in the nature of Israelite society itself: early Israel was a subsistence economy with little or no evidence for social classes; it was a society in which pastoralism played an important economic and social role; in all likelihood one in which lineages and corporate ownership of land were important organizing features on the local level; and, finally, one lacking centralized governance. It was, in short, exactly the type of society that normally gives bridewealth and does not give dowry. Even if dowry had been given in the cities of Late Bronze Age Palestine, a subject about which we know nothing, unless this society were somehow radically different from other dowry-giving societies, dowry would have been found almost exclusively among the wealthy. The poor cannot afford dowry in modern India and in the modern Middle East, and, though we have little evidence for the marriages of non-elite ancient persons, one can only imagine that this would have been the case in the various societies of the ancient world as well. The economic situation of those living in early Israel was tenuous – living at the line of subsistence always is. Would the early Israelites have provided their daughters with wealth when wealth was lacking, with luxury items when luxury items were apparently so scarce in the society that archaeologists have found almost none for the Iron I period? If many of the dead were buried in simple graves with few or any grave goods, would daughters have gone to their marriage beds wearing basketfuls of jewelry, with newly appointed slave girls in tow? Such a scenario is in my view unlikely, and one is thus left with two possibilities: that early Israel knew of dowry, but did not give it, out of dire economic circumstances, or did not know it and did not give it – the two situations are functionally equivalent. Conversely, it was not in spite of, but because of, their subsistence that the Israelites gave bridewealth. As I argued in Chapter 3, the reasons why societies give bridewealth are manifold: to compensate lineages for the loss of female labor; to affiliate children to their father’s lineage; to contract marriages in the absence of written contracts and in the absence of a state; to create a sense of connection and a sense of debt between lineages; and to do all of this while keeping a group’s land holdings intact. While bridewealth may have taken different forms in ancent Israel, it is very likely that one form it took gift at Ugarit and used by the writers of Kings centuries later to do the same militates against this fact.

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was livestock, for livestock constituted property that could be given without affecting clan or village land holdings. Whatever form it took, the giving of bridewealth must have been closely tied to the constitution and reconstitution of kinship structures, as women moved from one lineage to another, and property, too, moved between kinship groups. As Goody and others have demonstrated, features such as corporate kinship, and especially corporate kinship of the patrilineal variety, little or no stratification, subsistence agriculture, and widespread pastoralism all “fit” with the giving of bridewealth; cross-cultural data has shown them to be closely correlated with the exchange of this gift. In the Iron II period, however, economic and other circumstances changed in ancient Israel. Slowly, over the course of centuries, the Israelites came together under the banner of an increasingly centralized state with an increasingly complex bureaucracy – no longer was their society organized solely according to kinship. In addition, they developed a site hierarchy, with some sites now vastly outsizing most others and a few sites, such as Jerusalem, outsizing them all. Those who could began purchasing luxury items, and a few even lived in palaces or large houses. In short, by the seventh century in the south, and perhaps a century or so earlier in the north, one sees in the material and textual evidence all the features of a complex, stratified society. One sees further a society in the process of shedding those very features that “fit” so well with the giving of bridewealth. By then, clear social stratification was present, kinship structures were growing weaker, corporate land ownership was being eroded, and perhaps even pastoralism was on the decline. Instead, Israel in the Iron II period was fast becoming the very type of society in which the upper strata give dowry: one where maintaining wealth and social status are central, and where kinship is less important than social status. In societies that give dowry, too, social status is tied to the alliances created by marriage, and extended or even nuclear families own land individually, apart from whatever kinship groups they might ostensibly be a part of. Finally, in dowry-giving societies, women, and especially wealthy women, contribute little to household economic needs. In the two or three centuries before the fall of Jerusalem, Israel had either developed or was in the process of developing all of these characteristics. Dowry perpetuates inequality, perpetuates asymmetry between classes and between families, and it is precisely upon such asymmetry that the position of the wealthy is based. Slowly, over the course of decades, perhaps even centuries, wealthy Israelites were coming to endow their daughters, so that the social position of their progeny might be maintained even after marriage. And slowly, the Israelite society as a whole was moving away from the practice of giving bridewealth. Marital customs change no more quickly than the social

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structure of a society and, indeed, can endure for some time after the features that gave rise to them have disappeared or changed form – but they rarely live on indefinitely without these features. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the social stratification that developed in the preexilic period continued into the Second Temple period and beyond. While Judah was not at the peak of its importance in the Persian period, it was nonetheless a society in which an administrative class, taxation, government buildings, including palaces and fortresses, slaves, and luxury items were found. All of these are signs of social stratification. Certainly, few would question that Judah, and Palestine as a whole, were marked by pervasive stratification in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, when not only archaeological, but literary and epigraphic material, all evidence a society in which a few individuals were wealthier than any others, where some lived in such dire conditions that they could not even provide for themselves or were in fact the chattel of the wealthy, and where some – most – eked out a living that was paltry, but enough to fend off starvation and, in a lucky year, to pay the taxcollectors and landlords their due. The meager wages given to day laborers, wages that could be barely support a family’s subsistence needs, clearly demonstrate that the non-elite parents of Palestine could not have provided their daughters with the lavish dowries one finds in the marriage contracts from the Judean desert. If they endowed their daughters at all, it was with scanty sums and with trinkets. The men and women of the latter group married, one imagines, with as much celebration as they could, but without the burdensome gifts that the wealthy considered requisite. I fully agree with Satlow that dowry was considered necessary to contracting a “respectable” marriage, but there is little evidence that day laborers and tenants were any more affluent in respect than they were in wealth, or that they in any case would have chosen not getting married at all over a disreputable marriage. It is perhaps doubtful that the wealthy landowners of Palestine would have had enough awareness of their illiterate tenants’ marital practices to look askance at them any more than they did already. What concerned them was that they endow their daughters with appropriately large dowries and that their sons’ brides bring in appropriately large dowries to their households. The marriage contracts and literature of this period tell us that great care and great importance were placed upon dowries, and, by contrast, that little or no attention was paid to bridewealth, which had lost all juridical status and is attested only in the form of the gift-giving and fanfare that seems always to accompany the marriages of the wealthy and ostentatious. If the elaborate burials in the Kidron valley and elsewhere and the elaborate housing found in Jerusalem especially are any indication, the two latter qualities – wealth and ostentation – often went

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together in the Hellenistic and, especially, in the Roman periods. And the texts make clear to us that central to this culture of affluence was the practice of giving dowries.3 In some sense, it is no surprise that the practice of giving marriage gifts was one embedded into the very fabric of ancient Palestine’s culture and society. Yet the fact that this was so has important implications for future research on the social history of this region. There is a tendency, not only in biblical studies, but in many academic disciplines, to divide up the field of study into many narrowly defined subfields and to then examine this or that feature, this or that text, in isolation from any others. For example, one might author a study on the purity laws in Leviticus, or on motherhood in ancient Israel. However, the authors of Leviticus did not live in a vacuum; their views on purity were no doubt influenced by the society and culture in which they lived. Similarly, mothers in ancient Israel interacted with fathers, and with children, uncles, soldiers, merchants, elders, shepherds, and numerous other classes of individuals. What sense then, I respectfully ask, does it make to study women apart from men, priests apart from lay people, kings apart from subjects, and so forth? While it is of course true that, in writing books, one must set parameters for one’s work, lest every monograph become an encyclopedia set, I think it is also true that one might set parameters that are not so artificial as the ones we are too often in the business of setting. A greater latitude in the framing of academic inquiries would facilitate rather than complicate the study of many social and cultural phenomena. It would certainly facilitate the study of changes in these phenomena, for as we have seen, social processes rarely stay within neatly drawn boundaries of religion, economics, kinship, and politics, but constantly intersect and intertwine with one another, crossing into many different aspects of a group’s social and cultural life. Features of Israelite religion intersect with features of the Israelite economy which intersect with Israelite kinship structures, and so on. Moreover, these processes and how they intersect may take centuries to reveal themselves. This book, then, involved a measure of reconstruction – the nature of the evidence made this a necessity. While previous reconstructions often relied upon diffusionistic and evolutionistic ideas, mine relied instead upon more recent anthropological theories and ways of thinking about cultural and historical change. Israelite society, Palestinian society, was no more static than is our own. What engendered changes in this society was certainly the influence of foreign groups, but it was also the slow motion of time and history, a motion 3

For a discussion of the connection between dowry and status displays, see Harrell and Dickey, “Dowry Systems.”

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that eroded some structures and built up others, that caused some customs to fade into obscurity and others to take their place. “But the mountain falls and crumbles away, and the rock is removed from its place; the waters wear away the stones; the torrents wash away the soil of the earth”;4 so is destroyed the culture of mortals. Yet the soil is replaced with other soil, and so the process continues perpetually. Every schoolchild, every moviegoer, and most university students, as well, prefer to conceive of history as the striking blows of soldiers and kings, rather than as something glacial, something virtually imperceptible unless seen through the long shutter of centuries. Battles and invasions, whether martial or cultural, are far more exciting than these slow shifts. But as a glacier can open cracks in the very face of the earth, so the plodding movement of social history changes the face of a culture far more than the spear or sword of any marauder ever could. 4

Job 14:18–19. NRSV translation.

Appendix: Marriage Gifts Among Judeans Living in Babylonia During the Sixth Century bce

Relevant to this work, but in many ways difficult to interpret, are several marriage contracts that were written in Babylonia during the exilic period. These texts involve or name Judeans and date to the second half of the sixth century bce. More specifically, the earliest of the contracts dates to 542 BCE (BMA no. 17), two others date to 534 and 535 bce (fNanaya-kānat’s marriage contract and BMA no. 26/BM 68921, respectively),1 and a fourth cannot be dated because of its fragmentary state of preservation (BaAr 2, no. 5).2 These documents, then, were written scarcely 100 years prior to the marriage contracts from Elephantine. Yet unfortunately, we know far less about the Judean community living in Babylonia at that time than we do about that in Elephantine, and what we do know has led me cautiously to bracket off these documents from a larger discussion of Judean marriage and Judean marriage gifts. Nonetheless, some discussion of the contents of these marriage documents, and especially of what they evidence regarding marital gift exchange, is certainly warranted. Unlike the Elephantine texts, the marriage documents from Babylonia involving Judeans were written not in Aramaic, but in cuneiform. For the most part, the latter texts closely resemble the other cuneiform marriage documents extant from first millennium bce Babylonia. As Kathleen Abraham writes of one contract, “The West-Semitic ethnic background of the bride, her family, and her circle of acquaintances . . . does not seem to have influenced the formulary or the content in any significant way. Indeed, f Nanaya-kānat’s marriage contract was written in good Akkadian; it was 1

2

BMA no. 26 and BM 68921 are two separate contracts, technically speaking, but since they date to the same year and discuss the same marriage, they will be treated together here. See Abraham, “West Semitic,” especially, 207; Roth, Babylonian Marriage Agreements, 69–70, 92–95; Wunsch, Urkunden, 21–24. For the sake of facility, I use here Abraham’s abbreviations for these documents.

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formulated and styled in accordance with the local Babylonian standards of the time.” She continues, “A similar picture emerges from the other texts from Āl-Yahudu. The community of Judeans recorded their economic, administrative and private legal activities on clay tablets in Akkadian [that] conform[s] to the well-attested cuneiform text types; they did not use Aramaic for these purposes.”3 The site to which Abraham refers is a settlement near Borsippa whose name translates as “town of Judah,” where Judean exiles presumably were settled.4 The texts from this locale are still in the process of being published, but perhaps nothing demonstrates Abraham’s overall point better than lines 23–28 of the fNanaya-kānat marriage contract: “May Marduk and Zarpānītu decree the destruction of [whoever] contravenes [this agreement]. May Nabû {Nabû}, scribe of the Esagil cut short his long [d]ays. May [the majes]ty of Cyrus, king of Babylon and the Lands call him to account.”5 Laurie Pearce has commented upon the “integration of Judeans into Babylonian economic life” and their “process of acculturation.”6 Seemingly, this acculturation influenced not only their economic activities but also their religiocultic affiliations, if the above curse is any indication (and it bears noting that it may not be). One also sees various Babylonian theophoric elements in the onomasticon of these sixth century Babylonian texts involving Judeans, a fact that may or may not indicate a move away from Yahwistic worship.7 Pearce states of the new evidence from the texts from Āl-Yāhudu8 and the related site of Našar (TAYN): 3 4

5 6

7

8

Abraham, “West Semitic,” 206. Ibid., 198. On this site, also see Abraham, “Inheritance Division,” 211; Joannès and Lemaire, “Trois Tablettes,” 24–27; Pearce, “New Evidence for Judeans”; Grabbe, Ancient Israel, 190. Abraham, “West Semitic,” 201, with a few notations omitted. Pearce, “New Evidence for Judeans,” 402. However, Joannès and Lemaire conclude differently; speaking of another text from the same site and the Babylonian Judean community more generally, they state: “Ce maintien des traditions culturelles semble confirmé par l’onomastique typiquement judéenne de la plupart des noms mentionnés dans ce contrat, environ un siècle après l’exil” (“Trois Tablettes,” 27). As we will see later, however, the linguistic and cultural origins of the names borne by Judeans living in Babylonia in this period varies. Relevant also to these issues is Zadok, “Representation of Foreigners.” Zerubbabel, a governor of Judah in the early Persian period, is perhaps the best example of a Judean with a prototypically Babylonian name who nonetheless seems to have maintained strong Judean attachments, though not very much is known about him. See Hag 1:1, 12, 14; 2:2, 4, 20–21, 23; Zech 4:6–7; 1 Chr 3:17–19; Ezr 2:2; 3:8; 4:2–3; 5:2; Neh 7:7; 12:1, 47. Other Judeans, whether literary or historical, with foreign names are Esther, Mordechai, and Sheshbazzar, though Sheshbazzar and Zerubbabel may be the same individual. On the latter, see Ezr 1:8, 11; 5:14–16; 1 Esd 2:12, 15; 6:18–20. Transliterations of this place name vary. Strictly speaking, the Akkadian for the latter part of the name would be transliterated as Ya-a-h}u-du (see Lambert, “Document from a Community”), but in Hebrew and Aramaic the medial consonant is a hē.

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. . . while the TAYN corpus provides much new information, it is frustratingly silent about many areas of inquiry. Some may have hoped that the texts would furnish information about the social status of Judean deportees in Babylonia . . . Unfortunately, the TAYN texts do not provide evidence for the professional status of deportees or their descendants, nor do they provide any indication of the participation of those deportees in cultic activities, Babylonian or otherwise.9

Until more is known about this group of Judeans in Babylonia, we cannot really say for certain which aspects of their cultural and social lives reflected acculturation and which did not, a fact that necessarily affects an examination of marriage gifts in these documents in important ways. Let us begin with the fNanaya-kānat document, to which reference has already been made. Despite its overall similarity with other Neo-Babylonian marriage documents, there are several interesting things about this text. One party to the document is the bridegroom, a man named Nabû-bān-ah~i, son of Kînā. Yet this man approaches not the prospective bride’s father or brothers about the marriage but in fact her mother, fDibbî, daughter of Dannâ, though the document does mention in line 41 that the bride’s brother was present. The text states in lines 19–22: “With one KUR.RA-garment wor[th] five shekels of silver, the . . . (of) fNanaya-kānat, [Nabû]- bān-ah~i will cover fDibbî.”10 A few lines before, one also reads: “Should Nabû-bān-ah~i release fNanaya-kānat and sa follows: ‘She is not a(/my) wife,’ he will bind six minas of silver in the hem of her garment. She may go whi[ther] she wishes” (lines 11–16).11 Thus, one finds two different marriage gifts in this document: bridewealth, in the form of a garment presented by the bridegroom to the bride’s mother, and a divorce penalty, what may be considered a delayed form of indirect dowry that is paid by the husband only in the case of divorce and that we have seen not only in Babylonian sources from the Old Babylonian period onward but also very frequently in rabbinic sources. The document does not contain any discussion of or reference to dowry. This stands in contrast to most of the other marriage contracts that survive from this period. Abraham writes: “A marriage without a dowry was usually the lot of a poor bride, who would also face death by the iron dagger if she were found adulterous.”12 And such a death is exactly what is promised the bride in lines 16–18 of the document. Notably, 9 10 11 12

Pearce, “New Evidence,” 401. Abraham, “West Semitic,” 201. Ibid., 201. Ibid., 202. For more on this stipulation, see Roth, “‘She Will Die,’” though Roth does not connect this particular punishment for adultery with socioeconomic status.

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while most marriage contracts of this period do make mention of dowry, there are a few texts involving “fatherless” brides – brides whose fathers were unknown – that also make no mention of dowry or discuss only a very small dowry.13 In the one text of this sort that does mention dowry (BMA no. 8), the gift consisted of jewelry worth twenty shekels of silver. We cannot know from the contract of fNanaya-kānat alone whether or not she was fatherless, or rather whether she was an orphan – her father’s name is never mentioned, not even as a patronymic – but in any case, the parallel is noteworthy. Also noteworthy is the large number of West Semitic or Judean names found in this document. While the bridegroom and his father have plainly Babylonian names, the former including a Babylonian theophoric element, the bride herself has a name combining West Semitic and Babylonian elements. Although the goddess Nana or Nanaya is of Babylonian origin, the verbal part of her name is West Semitic.14 While the bride’s mother’s name is of uncertain background, Abraham states that the bride’s maternal grandfather’s name, Dannâ or Dānâ, was a “plain Babylonian hypocoristic name.”15 Yet, considering the fact that the bride’s brother’s name was the Aramaic Mešallam, one is tempted to see a West Semitic origin, too, in the grandfather’s name. After all, the cognate root d-y-n (Nyd) is also found in Hebrew and Aramaic. Most striking of all, perhaps, are the eight Hebrew or Aramaic names with a Yahwistic element that are found in this document. These names are found exclusively in the witness list and include: Šillēmyah (i.e., Shelemiah); Natanyah (i.e., Nethaniah); and S?idqiyah (i.e., Zedekiah). What to make of all of this? While Yahwistic names are known to have been borne by non-Judeans and non-Israelites, particularly Hamatheans, this scenario is quite rare, and the great majority of bearers of Yahwistic names were in fact Israelite or Judean.16 Speaking conservatively, one can easily conclude that the bride and bridegroom’s community included Judeans and that they had social connections with Judeans. But were they themselves Judean? The fact that the bridegroom and his father both bore Babylonian names would not compel one to conclude that they were themselves Babylonian – they could have merely taken or been given these names. The date of the document, 13

14

15 16

See BMA nos. 4, 8, and 20, and most likely also 13 and 36. See Roth, Babylonian Marriage Agreements, and Abraham, “West Semitic,” 210. Abraham distinguishes between orphaned girls or women and those whose fathers are unknown; it is the latter group to whom she refers as “father-less” [sic] (“West Semitic,” 210). While orphaned girls did have dowries – or at least those whose marriage contracts survive for us – fatherless girls generally did not. See Abraham, “West Semitic,” 216, which discusses the origin and form of the name in detail. Ibid., 217. See Zadok, Jews in Babylonia, 4–5.

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534 bce, would make it likely that the bridegroom’s father would have been borne in Babylonia even if he were ethnically Judean. And, it is of course common for migrants to a region to bestow upon their children names from their host culture. There is also some evidence, though admittedly limited, that the Babylonians themselves sometimes renamed captives.17 Thus, while a Yahwistic name almost certainly indicates Judean origin, a Babylonian name does not necessarily indicate a Mesopotamian ethnic background. It is interesting, as well, that the name of the document’s scribe is itself West Semitic: Adad-šamā. If the latter had not himself adopted the gods of the local culture, he had at the very least adopted the local scribal convention of cursing by those gods. That is the most that one can say about the cultic affiliations of the other individuals mentioned in this contract: in my view, we can not discern whether or not they were Marduk worshippers merely by the reference to Marduk in this contract any more than one can discern whether or not they were Yahweh worshippers. This is particularly the case considering that it is highly dubious that any of them could read the contract that Adadšamā had drawn up for them. Another marriage contract involving Judeans, BM 68921, also features Yahwistic names. This marriage is also discussed in a second contract, BMA no. 26 (BM 65149), drawn up a month later.18 These documents are from Sippar, rather than Āl-Yāhudu, but are in many ways similar to the contract of fNanaya-kānat. For example, the bride’s father is not a party to the contract – in fact, the father is not present in any of the four Neo-Babylonian marriage contracts involving Judeans. As in the contract above, it is the mother who is approached by the bridegroom. Yet, in these two related contracts, the brother is also approached and it is he who is listed first. Here, too, the bridegroom has a Babylonian name, Guzānu son of Kiribtu. However, despite this similarity, we here again find a difference, for this man had the surname Ararru and was thus an ethnic Babylonian.19 The bride herself, as well as her brother and mother, too, have Babylonian names, but the bride’s father’s name was Amušē/Hawše’ (i.e., Hosea), a Judean name. Whether or 17

18

19

See Dan 1:7, where Daniel and his companions are given Babylonian names. 2 Kgs 24:17 reports that Nebuchadnezzar renames Mattaniah as Zedekiah. Joseph is also given an Egyptian name in Gen 41:45. On these name changes, see Collins, Daniel, 140–141; and Smith-Christopher, “Book of Daniel,” 31–32, 39. Abraham, “West Semitic,” 208. In producing the transliteration and translation of BMA no. 26, Roth generally follows BM 65149, rather than BM 68921, thus Abraham’s choice to list BMA no. 26 and BM 68921 separately. I have followed Abraham’s usage here. Though Roth initially refers to BM 68921 as a duplicate of 65149, the two texts are not exactly the same and Roth does comment upon their differences. See Roth, Babylonian Marriage Agreements, 92–95. Zadok, Earliest Diaspora, 29, 58; Abraham, “West Semitic,” 208.

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not the bride’s mother was also of Judean extraction is impossible to state. As was the case also in the previous contract, the bride here is threatened with death by the iron dagger should she commit adultery, a death that is normally associated with the lower classes according to Abraham. This bride, though, unlike the last, was endowed at marriage. Her dowry was comprised of “onethird shekel of (gold?) jewelry, one pair of gold earrings worth one shekel, one Akkadian bed, five chairs, one table, a goblet and a platter of bronze” (lines 17–19).20 This is not an impressive dowry as compared with various others that one sees in the contracts from this period, but just the fact that a dowry was given, combined with the bridegroom’s possessing a surname – generally an indication of higher status in Babylonian society – indicates that the bride in this contract had a more enviable social position than the woman in the previous text.21 Considering that the bride was given a dowry, it is perhaps unsurprising that she was also promised monetary compensation in the case of divorce, or more specifically, if her husband should “release” her and “take a second wife in preference to her” (lines 12–15).22 Interestingly, though, the amount promised, six minas of silver, is equivalent to that pledged to the dowry-less fNanaya-kānat. BMA no.17, a marriage contract from a place called Ālu-ša-banê, shares both similarities and differences with those just discussed. This document does not contain any Yahwistic names, but it does mention several West Semitic names. One of the latter is that of the bride’s brother, Elnatan son of Bara’el (or Ili-natannu son of Bara-ili, as the names are rendered in Akkadian). While this name is not Yahwistic, names containing the theophoric element ’el were certainly not uncommon among Judean worshippers of Yahweh, and so it is highly possible that the bride’s father was a Judean. Abraham writes of BMA no. 17 and BaAr 2, no. 5, a contract that will be discussed later: [The contracts] do not contain any Yahwistic names. They do provide, however, onomastic evidence that clearly demonstrates the immigrant background of the parties involved. The brides,23 some of their brothers, and most of the witnesses, had Aramaic or West-Semitic names. In BMA no. 17, even the groom is a member of a non-Babylonian, West-Semitic group. It is 20 21

22 23

Roth, Babylonian Marriage Agreements, 92–93. Abraham says of a man in another document: “To judge by his name, he was not necessarily Judean, nor is it likely that he came from an established urban Babylonian family, because his surname was not given” (“West Semitic,” 211). See also Nielsen, Sons and Descendants. Roth, Babylonian Marriage Agreements, 93. It should be noted, however, that one of these brides, fTallâ-Uruk, has a name that combines West Semitic and Babylonian elements.

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worth noting that despite the absence of a Babylonian party, the document was written in Akkadian and not in Aramaic.24

In BMA no. 17, as in BMA no. 26, the bride’s brother and mother are both listed as agents of the bride. Like the previous two women, fTallâ-Uruk, as the bride here was called, was promised death by dagger if she were found with another man, and pledged six minas of silver in the case of divorce or her husband’s taking of a second wife “of senior status(?)” (lines 13–26.)25 Yet, in this contract, we find neither bridewealth nor dowry – no marriage gift is described as having been given, despite the fact that the body of the document is essentially complete.26 BaAr 2, no. 5, too, lacks mention of a marriage gift’s having been transferred, but this is perhaps because of the fragmentary state of the document.27 This document is from Ālu-ša-Rab-(ša-)rēši and is rather limited in scope, saying nothing (in its current state) of adultery and divorce, though the text does make clear that if the bridegroom should take a second wife, the bride, Nabê-h~innī, would remain the first-ranking wife. Interestingly, this marriage document states that whatever male children are borne to the union will be affiliated with their paternal household (lines 10–12); none of the marriage contracts discussed here includes this stipulation. What, then, may one conclude from this material? One finds three different marriage payments discussed in these documents: bridewealth, dowry, and the so-called “divorce penalty. ” In fact, it is the latter payment that is the most commonly discussed, being found in three out of the four relevant marriage contracts.28 Of course, this payment is really a potential payment, rather than an actual transfer of wealth on the occasion of marriage. Only one of the texts, the contract of fNanaya-kānat, contains a record of bridewealth, and in the case of that text, it was a paltry bridewealth indeed – a garment worth only five shekels. The penalty that is promised to the bride in the case of divorce far outstrips in value the worth of the bridewealth payment. (Six minas was equivalent to at least three hundred shekels.29) In terms of dowry, 24 25 26

27

28 29

Abraham, “West Semitic,” 208. Ibid., 69–70. Abraham also considers BMA no. 1 to involve an “immigrant” bride, though apparently not a West Semitic one. That contract discusses indirect dowry, as well as nungurtu. See Abraham, “West Semitic,” 209, 211; Roth, Babylonian Marriage Agreements, 37–38; and the third chapter of this work. For a drawing, transcription, and translation of this document into German, see Wunsch, Urkunden, 21–24. Or, four out of five, if one takes BMA no. 26 and BM 68921 as separate contracts. See King and Stager, Life in Biblical Israel, 195–198.

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only one of these marriages (BMA no. 26/BM68921) contains a record of it and, again, the value of the dowry is not overly impressive. To interpret this varying evidence, one must take into consideration not only the culture and ethnic affiliation of those involved but also their socioeconomic status. As we have seen throughout this book, anthropologists and other scholars have associated dowry time and again with high socioeconomic status. Even in a society such as India, where an extraordinary cultural value is placed upon dowry, the lower classes tend to give indirect dowry because they are unable to afford dowry proper. Surely it is not inconsequential that the one marriage out of the four just discussed that included dowry was a union involving a Babylonian man from a well-established family. If Abraham is correct that death by dagger in the case of adultery is related to lower social status, then the evidence related to this particular marriage is somewhat mixed, for the two contracts detailing the terms of this union also include this stipulation. That is, the presence of dowry and a bridegroom with a surname seem to indicate a higher-status union, while the stipulation of death by dagger might indicate a lower status for the bride. Nonetheless, it is tempting to see various features found in the other marriage contracts (that of fNanaya-kānat, BMA no. 17, and BaAr 2, no. 5) as being related to one another: the token bridewealth or absence of marriage gift; the stipulation of death by dagger in the case of adultery; the presence of bridegrooms lacking a surname; and the orphaned or fatherless status of the brides. Thus, socioeconomic status and marriage gift may again be correlated, though only with great caution here because of the small sample of texts at hand. In any case, the differences in these contracts, combined with the problems in determining the ethnic background of the parties involved, make it difficult or impossible to connect the evidence for marriage gifts found in these documents with the marital evidence for Judeans living outside of Babylonia in either the pre- or postexilic periods.

Glossary

affine a relative of one’s spouse; a person with whom one has a relationship that was created through marriage, or a relationship of affinity agnatic descent descent reckoned through the father; patrilineal descent bilateral descent descent reckoned through both the father and the mother brideprice an antiquated term for bridewealth bridewealth property transferred on the occasion of marriage from the bridegroom or his kin to the bride’s kin diffusionism the theory positing that cultural change occurs primarily through one culture’s transmitting practices or ideas to another dowry property given to the bride by her own family on the occasion of marriage and brought into the marriage with her evolutionism (unilineal evolutionism) the theory positing that all cultures move through certain stages of development, from “primitive” to more advanced groomwealth property transferred on the occasion of marriage from the bride’s family to the bridegroom’s family; this variety of gift is rare cross-culturally indirect dowry property transferred on the occasion of marriage from the bridegroom (or his family) to the bride herself kethubbah (hb@ftuk@;) term used for the Jewish marriage contract; can also be used to refer to a penalty paid by the husband if he chooses to divorce his wife, or, more rarely, to dowry matrilineal descent descent reckoned through the mother’s side mōhar (rhamo) term used in the Hebrew Bible to refer to bridewealth; in the postexilic period, the term refers to other forms of marriage gift patrilineal descent descent reckoned through the father’s side patrilocal residence residence established when a woman and her husband live with her husband’s kin after marriage; also called virilocal residence phernē (φernh) Greek term for dowry proix (proic) Greek term for dowry šillûh[îm (Myx?w@l@#$i) term used (rarely) in the Hebrew Bible to refer to dowry social stratification division of society by wealth, rank, or other factors

245

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GLOSSARY

segmentary lineage mode of reckoning descent in a unilineal fashion – that is, either matrilineally or patrilineally; this term is applied to societies lacking a centralized government (acephalous societies) that are comprised of a descending order of “segments” – for example, tribe, maximal lineage, major lineage, minor lineage, minimal lineage.

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Index of Biblical and Other Ancient Sources

HEBREW BIBLE Genesis general 5 11:28 11:31 12 12–50 12:2–3 12:10–20 12:16 14 15 20 20:12 24 24:22 24:47 24:51 24:53 24:59–61 26 29 29:14–30 29:22–27 29:24 29:29 30 30:20 31 31:1

192 228 22 22 22, 48, 59 28 22 48 48 28 22, 26 48 104 27–28, 46–47, 59–60, 160 46 46 47 10, 46, 58 54, 59 48 45, 57–60, 231 45 41 54, 59 54, 59 50 12 56, 58–59 57–58

275

31:14–15 31:15 33 34 34:11–12 34:12 41:45

56 57 25 43–45, 59–60, 160, 230 43 10, 82 241

Exodus 15 18:2 20:22–23:33 22 22:15–16 22:16–17

24 52, 59, 82 36 37, 39–40 82 37, 59, 82, 230

Leviticus 25:26

196, 197

Numbers 16:14 26:52–56 27:1–11 36 38:6–9

196 196 58, 231 196 231

Deuteronomy general 10:9 20:7 21:15–17 22 22:13–21

23, 30–31, 34, 36–37 196 41 231 39–40 38, 41

276

INDEX OF BIBLICAL AND OTHER ANCIENT SOURCES

22:23–27 22:28–29 22:29 29:8 33

41 38–39, 59, 82 5, 40 196 24

Joshua 7 7:16–18 13–16 13–19 13 15 15:13–19 15:16–19 15:18–19 15:19 18–19

197 196 195 54 160 59 54 54, 59 12 55 196

Judges 1:11–15 1:14 5 14:10 14:15 18:1 1 Samuel 8:14 16:14 18

54 55 24 41 37 196

18:17–19 18:25 18:27

197 42 41–44, 56, 59–60, 83, 85, 160, 230 41 42, 82 42

2 Samuel 3:14 3:25 5 12

41 37 42 196

1 Kings 4:5 9 9:16

51 53, 59, 160, 231 11, 12, 52, 60

9:16–17 21

53 197

2 Kings general 20 22 23:25 24:17 25

34 31 30–31 53 241 31

Isaiah 3:1–3 3:14–15 3:18–23 22:15–16 61:10

188 189 189 187 41

Ezekiel 16:8–13 16:10–12

41 59

Hosea general 1 1–2 3 3:1 3:1–2 3:2

24, 187–88 48, 50 49 48, 50, 59 49 48 49

Amos general 1–2 4:1 9:7

24 23 189 23, 190

Obadiah 9–14

25

Micah 1:14 3:9–11

53 189

Haggai 1:1

238

INDEX OF BIBLICAL AND OTHER ANCIENT SOURCES

1:12 1:14 2:2 2:4 2:20–21 2:23

238 238 238 238 238 238

Zechariah 4:6–7

238

Malachi general 2:14

25 59

Psalms 16:4 78:63 137:7

44 41 25

Job 14:18–19 42:15

236 58

Proverbs 2:17 24:28

59 37

Ruth 4:3–6

196

Daniel general 1:7

25 241

Ezra general 1:6 1:8 1:11 2:2 3:8 4:2–3 5:2 5:14–16 7:24

25 46 238 238 238 238 238 238 238 208

Nehemiah 5 7:7 12:1 12:47

208, 212 238 238 238

1 Chronicles 2:36 51 3:17–19 238 8:19 51 27:25–31 197 2 Chronicles 21:3 46 26 197 32:23 46

NEW TESTAMENT Matthew 1:18–19 5:25 9:37–38 10:10 13:27 18:23–25 18:25 20:1–8

83 226 225 225 227 226 227 225

Mark 12:1–8 12:2

225 227

Luke 10:2 12:58 15:17 15:22 16:1–9 17:7

225 226 225 227 226 227

Acts 6:9

227

277

278

INDEX OF BIBLICAL AND OTHER ANCIENT SOURCES

APOCRYPHA/ DEUTEROCANONICALS

Testament of Judah 13:4 82

1 Maccabees 13:27–29 216

MESOPOTAMIAN TEXTS

1 Esdras 2:12 2:15 6:18–20

Epic of Gilgamesh 29 238 238 238

Sirach (Ben Sira) general 213, 219–21 3:30 221 7:10 221 7:20 220 8:12–13 219 25:21–22 82 25:22 10 28:5 221 29 219 29:2 219 29:5 219 31:12–18 221 33:26–33 220 34:27 220 38 221 41:22 220 Tobit general 8:20–21 8:21 10:10

62, 79, 81 79 81 79

HEBREW BIBLE PSEUDEPIGRAPHA Jubilees 4

228

Pseudo-Phocylides 199–200 81–82 Testament of Joseph 18:3 82

Laws of Eshnunna (LE) general 139, 141–43, 148 17 141 18 141–2 26 142 Hammurapi’s Code (LH) general 139, 141–43, 145–46, 148 130 142 138–139 144, 146 138 143, 146 139 143 150 145 155–156 142 159–161 142, 145 163 143 167 143 171 143, 145 172 146 178–184 144 180 144 Middle Assyrian Laws (MAL) general 146, 148 A 29 148 A 37 148 55 40 56 40 Neo-Babylonian Laws (LNB) general 146, 149 8 150 Old Babylonian Marriage Documents BE 6/1 84 143, 144 BE 6/1 95 145 BE 6/2 48 147 CT 6 38a 146

INDEX OF BIBLICAL AND OTHER ANCIENT SOURCES

CT 8 2a CT 8 34b CT 33 34 CT 47 40 CT 48 50 CT 48 51 CT 48 52 CT 87b PBS 8/2 155 PBS 8/2 183 Riftin 48 RSM 15 UET 5 636 VAS 18 101 YOS 8 154

143 145 143 143 144 143 143 143 146 145 145 144 142, 145 146 143

Kassite Texts/Kudurru Inscriptions BBSt. ix 146 Caillou Michaux

147

CBS 12917

147

Neo-Babylonian Marriage Contracts BaAR 2, no. 5 237, 242, 244 BM 68921 237, 241, 244 BMA 1 150, 243 BMA 4 149, 240 BMA 8 150, 240 BMA 9 149 BMA 13 240 BMA 15 149 BMA 17 237, 242–44 BMA 18 149 BMA 20 240 BMA 21 149 BMA 22 149 BMA 24 149 BMA 25 150 BMA 26 150, 237, 241, 243–44 (BM 65149) BMA 33 149 BMA 34 149 BMA 35 149 BMA 36 240 BMA 43 149 f Nanaya-kānat’s 237, 239–41, 244 marriage contract

UGARITIC TEXTS CAT 1.24 (Marriage of Yarikh and Nikkal) 38–39, 52, 231 CAT 1.100 38

ELEPHANTINE PAPYRI (TAD) B2.4 B2.5 B2.6 B3.3 B3.6 B3.7 B3.8 B3.11 B6.1 B6.2 B6.3 B6.4

63 63, 65, 69 63–66, 68, 87 65, 87 66 67 66, 68, 87 63, 66, 87 67–68, 87 67–68, 87 67, 69 67, 69

SAMARIA PAPYRI FROM WADI ED-DALIYEH (WDSP) 1 4 5 8 9 10 18

210 211 211 211 211 212 211

ARAMAIC OSTRACA (in Eph‘al and Naveh, Aramaic Ostraca) #16 #47 #61 #78 #92 #96 #106

208 212 208 208 212 208 208

279

280

INDEX OF BIBLICAL AND OTHER ANCIENT SOURCES

#122 #137 #187 #198 #199

212 208 208 211 211

QUMRAN CORPUS 4Q 197 5:6 CD XI 11 CD XII 10–11

81 227 227

JOSEPHUS Antiquities 6.202 12.154 13.82 16.1–5 16.228 17.11 17.321

83 82 82 227 82 82 221

Contra Apion 2.200

82

Jewish War 1.483 1.553 2.427 2.98 5.176–182 7.61

82 82 226 221 222 226

JUDEAN DESERT PAPYRI P. Hev. 13 P. Hev. 64 P. Mur. 18 P. Mur. 19 P. Mur. 20 P. Mur. 21 P. Mur. 24, A-K P. Mur. 46 P. Mur. 114

78 80 226 77, 87 77 77, 87 225 226 226

P. Mur. 115 P. Mur. 116 P. Yadin 1 P. Yadin 2 P. Yadin 3 P. Yadin 5 P. Yadin 6 P. Yadin 7 P. Yadin 8 P. Yadin 10 P. Yadin 16 P. Yadin 18 P. Yadin 19 P. Yadin 22 P. Yadin 23–26 P. Yadin 37 P. Yadin 42 P. Yadin 43 P. Yadin 44 P. Yadin 45 P. Yadin 46 Xhiev/Se Gr. 2 (P. Hev. 69) Xhiev/Se 49 Xhiev/Se 64 Xhiev/Se 65 (P. Yadin 37) Xhiev/Se 66 Xhiev/Se 344

76, 87 77, 87 226 77, 226 77, 226 78, 87 225 79–80, 225, 227 226 70–73, 87 79–80, 227, 228 73–74, 76, 87 79, 87, 227 73, 87 73 73, 76, 87 225 225 225 225 225 73, 76, 87 226 227, 228 73, 76–77 226 226

PHILO Fug. 29

82

Spec. Leg. 2.125 3.7

82 82

RABBINIC TEXTS Mishnah (m.) B.Bat. 3:1 9:5 10:10

227 86 86

INDEX OF BIBLICAL AND OTHER ANCIENT SOURCES

B. Mesii‘a 5:11 226 9:1–10 225 Bik. 1:2 2:3 Demai 6:1 6:8 Git i. 4:3 4:9

225 225

225 225

226 227

Ketub. 1:2 1:4 1:5 4:7 5:1 6:3 6:5

72 72 72 72 72 84 84

Ned. 9:10

200

Qidd. 1:1 2:1 2:6 2:7 3:2 4:4 Sanh. 3:3 Šeb. 10

84 85 86 85 85 86

226

226

Tosefta (t.) Demai 3:5 7:1

225 225

Ketub. 4:17 6:5 6:5–6 6:7 12:1

84 84 84 84 5, 85

Pe’ah 3:1

225

Qidd. 1:1 2:1 2:7

84–85 85 85

Sukkah 2:10

227

Babylonian Talmud (b.) B.Bat. 145a

86

Git i. 36a 38a

226 227

Ketub. 67b 82b

227 5

Qidd. 50a-b

86

Šabb. 137b

227

Sukkah 41b

227

Jerusalem Talmud (y.) Ketub. 3.5, 8.32b-c 27d 82b

82 85 82 82

281

282

INDEX OF BIBLICAL AND OTHER ANCIENT SOURCES

Mekhilta De-Rabbi Yishmael

82

Pesiqta De-Rab Kahana 52b-53a

78

Semahioth 1.9–11

227

Sipra Leviticus 25

227

OTHER PREMODERN TEXTS Benê Hiezir tomb inscription “Burnt House” inscription

216 223

Code of Manu Hefzibah inscription Ketef Hinnom inscription Ketef Yerihio inscription Mesiad Hiashavyahu (Yavneh Yam) inscription Tel Dan inscription Tell el-Kheleifeh ostracon Yehud stamps Zenon Papyri

106, 113 217–18 33 212 190 32–33 208 209 211, 213 215, 218–9

General Index

Abraham (figure), 29, 46, 48, 104 Abraham, Kathleen, 237–44 Achaemenid (Achaemenian), 205–06, 209–10 Achsah, 55–56 marriage to Othniel, 55 administration administrative class, 188 in Hellenistic-era Palestine, 216–17 in Iron II Israel, 184–85, 233 in Persian Yehud, 206–09, 234 affinal relations, 94–96, 99–101, 104–18, 111–13, 233 and dowry, 105–08, 233; see also alliance theory Agrawal, D. P., 134 Ahituv, Shmuel, 163 Ahlström, Gösta, 162–63 ‘Ai, 168, 176 Akko, 206 Albright, William Foxwell, 164, 172, 205 Alexander Jannaeus, 214–15 alliance theory, 90, 104–13, 125 Alt, Albrecht, 163, 192 Althusser, Louis, 117 Āl-Yāhudu, 238 Ālu-ša-banê, 242 Ālu-ša-Rab-(ša-)rēši, 243 Amarna letters, 162–63 Ammon and Ammonites, 190 Andersen, Francis I., 44, 48–50, 55 Annales school, 16 Antiochus III, 217

Antoun, Richard T., 191 Aphek, 173 ‘Apiru, 163, 195 Applebaum, Shimon, 217, 223 Arabs, 51, 160; see also bridewealth, among Arabs; mahr Arad, 163 Aram and Arameans, 190 Arav, Rami, 213–14 Archer, Léonie, 14 Aristobulus II, 214 Ashdod, 202 Ashkelon, 202, 206–07, 221 Athas, George, 33 awīlum, 139–41 relation to muškēnum, 139–40 Avigad, Nahman, 209, 216, 223 Aztecs, 161 Babatha; see Judean desert archives Babylonia and Babylonians, 18, 137–52, 200, 202; see also dowry, in Babylonia; terhatum Babylonian exile, 200 marriages of Judeans living in, 237–44 Balibar, Etienne, 117 Bandits, in Roman Palestine, 225 Banerjee, G. N., 106 Banning, E. B., 192 Bäntsch, Bruno von, 36 Barkay, Gabriel, 33, 167, 184–86 Barnard, Alan, 1–2, 93, 109 Barnes, R. H., 100–01

283

284

GENERAL INDEX

Barry, Herbert, III, 153 Barstad, Hans M., 33, 200 Baruya (Papua New Guinea), 115–16, 118 Bates, Daniel G., 191 Baumgartner, Walter, xii Becking, Bob, 33 Bedouin, 160, 191 Beersheba valley, 163, 174, 181, 202 Bell, Catherine, 117 Bendor, S., 196 Benê Hiezir tomb, 215 Benjamin (region), 193, 202 Benjamin, Don C., 13, 16 Ben Zvi, Ehud, 33, 188 Benoit, Pierre, 70, 77–78 Berlin, Andrea M., 214–16 Bernstein, Moshe, 211 Beth Anath, 218 Bethel, 30, 185, 210 bêt ’ āb, 196 betrothal (inchoate marriage), 37, 40–41, 47, 83–86, 141–43, 151, 230–31 betrothal gifts, 62, 83–87 in Babylonia, 41, 141–43 in Roman Palestine, 83–84 biblum, 44, 145, 149 Bickerman, Elias, 82 bilateralism, 93, 105, 127, 129–31 in Roman Palestine, 227–28 Bimson, John J., 162, 194 Biran, Avraham, 32–33, 173–74 Birch, Bruce C., 35 Bird, Phyllis, 49 Blenkinsopp, Joseph, 12, 20, 48, 50–51, 55, 203 Bloch-Smith, Elizabeth, 162, 164, 175–79, 186–87 Block, Daniel I., 14, 41 Blum, Erhard, 28–30, 34, 43, 45–46, 56, 58 Boling, Robert G., 54, 56 Book of the Covenant (Covenant Code), 20, 21, 26, 36–37, 40 dating of, 20 Borowski, Oded, 169, 185 Borsippa, 238 Boserup, Ester, 123, 125 Boster, James S., 153

Bourdieu, Pierre, 89, 117 Braemer, Frank, 167 Brettler, Marc Zvi, 42 Briant, Pierre, 208 brideservice, 45, 122; see also Jacob bridewealth, 3–4, 8, 13–14, 17, 19, 230, 39–46, 49–50, 56–57, 59–60, 62, 82–102, 104, 106–07, 114, 116–33, 135, 141–43, 146, 149, 152, 157, 191, 195–99, 227, 230–36, 239, 243–34 among Arabs, 5, 39, 160, 191 and affiliation of children, 8, 93–94, 98, 127, 152, 158, 232 and circulating marriage fund, 122, 124 and corporate ownership of property, 100, 122, 124, 128, 195, 197–98, 232 and legitimation of marriage, 92, 95, 97–98, 152, 157–58, 230, 232 and livestock, 105, 124, 126–28, 197, 233 and matrilineal kinship, 47, 93, 98, 100, 105, 131 and pastoralism, 124, 126–28, 191, 199, 233 and patrilineal kinship, 47, 93–94, 98, 100, 105, 117, 121–22, 124, 127, 131–33, 233 and subsistence agriculture, 17, 124, 126–33, 232–33 and transfer of rights, 93–94, 97, 121–22, 128, 142, 157 as compensation, 7, 92, 232 as purchase price, 4–8, 12, 15, 92–93, 96, 105, 142 as pretium pudicitiae, 6–7 as token in exchange, 105, 114–15 composition of, 48 contradictions and misrecognition related to, 98, 115–17, 157 cross-cultural distribution of, 122 for virgins, 40 Greek misunderstanding of, 82 role in kinship system, 93–94, 121–22, 131–33 versus “brideprice”, 3, 5, 8, 13, 92–93; See also mahr; mōhar Briggs, Charles A., xi Brockelman, Carl, 51

GENERAL INDEX

Brody, Robert, 84 Broshi, Magen, 33, 181, 203 Brown, Francis, xi Brydon, Lynne, 153–54 bullae, 184 Iron II, 184 Bunimovitz, Shlomo, 162–63 “Burnt House,” 223 Burrows, Millar, 6–8, 13, 39, 43–46, 57, 58, 64, 81 Busieirah, 206 Caesarea, 221 Cahill, Jane M., 182–84 Callaway, James A., 176 Campbell, Antony F., 35, 42, 53 Campbell, Edward F., 206 Campbell, Ken M., 13–14 Canaan and Canaanites, 162–65, 172–73, 192 relation to Israelites, 162–64, 192; see also early Israel, emergence of Caplan, Lionel M., 81, 156 Carr, David McClain, 29–30, 34, 43, 45, 50, 56, 58 Carroll, Robert P., 200, 202 Carter, Charles E., 33, 201–07, 209–10, 212 Cassuto, Umberto, 40 caste system, Indian, 108, 134–37 Cazelles, Henri, 36, 41 centralization, state, 180, 182–83, 185, 232–33 Chaney, Marvin L., 163, 190 Chapman, David W., 14, 64, 79 chiefs and chiefdom, early Israel as, 175 Childs, Brevard S., 36, 52 Chodorow, Nancy, 154 Choga Mami, 138 cisterns, slaked-lime, 162 clan, as kinship unit, 196, 227 Cohen, Shaye J. D., 228 collared rim pithoi (jars), 162 Collins, John J., 12–13, 241 Comaroff, John L., 3, 81, 91, 98–101, 105, 113–14, 118–20, 125, 128, 198

285

complex households, 156 and dowry, 136–7, 156; see also extended families corporate land ownership, 122, 128, 227, 231–33 among Israelites, 195–98, 231–33; see also bridewealth, and corporate ownership of property; nahiălah Coote, Robert B., 162, 164, 193, 195, 228 Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine, 115 Cotton, Hannah M., 70, 73, 78–80 cousin marriage, 107, 131 Cowley, A. E., 63–64 Cross, Frank Moore, 32, 35, 52–53 Crowfoot, J. W., 210 Culley, Robert C., 24 culture areas (circles), 1–2 Currid, John D., 169 Cypro-Phoenician pottery, 184–85, 187 Dan (tribe), relation to Denyen (Danuna), 174 Dar, Shimon, 216–18 David, 41–42, 183, 192 Davies, Eryl W., 58 Davies, G. I., 50 Davies, Philip R., 22, 31–34, 188 Davies, W. D., xii day laborers, in Greco-Roman Palestine, 220, 225–26 death by iron dagger (for adultery), 239, 242–4 debt, 140, 211–12, 219–20, 226–27 acknowledgements of, 226 promissory notes of, 226 relation to marriage payments, 100, 113, 132, 157–58 debt slavery; see slaves and slavery, and debt deeds of gift, 79–80, 227 descent theory, 90, 104, 107–08, 111–12, 125 Dessel, J. P., 176 Deuteronomy/Deuteronomists, 21–28, 30, 34, 42, 54 Deuteronomistic History (DtrH), 30–36, 53, 54

286

GENERAL INDEX

Dever, William G., 162–67, 178, 180, 182–84, 186, 188, 192–94 Diakonoff, Igor M., 139–40 Dickey, Sarah A., 120, 124–25 Diebner, B. J., 31 Dietrich, Manfried, xii Dietrich, Walter, 32, 35 diffusionism, 1–2, 9, 15–16, 234 and “foreign influence,” 2, 4, 9, 15, 230 dimorphism and polymorphism, 192 Dinah, 43–44, 60 divorce, 7, 65, 67, 71–72, 75, 97, 136, 148, 150, 156, 239, 242–43 and dowry, 65, 67, 71, 75–76, 78, 87, 120, 125 Indian upper-caste prohibition of, 136, 156 in Greco-Roman Palestine, 71–72, 75, 156 divorce penalty (endowment pledge), 5, 6, 14, 70, 73–75, 77, 84, 86, 146–50 among Judean exiles in Babylonia, 239, 242–43 in Babylonia, 146–47; see also rabbinic law, and divorce penalty domestic cycle, 169 Dor, 206–7 Dothan, 178 Dothan, Moshe, 206 dower, 3, 81, 119, 150; see also indirect dowry dowry, 3–4, 6–7, 106, 10–13, 14–15, 19, 47, 51–69, 73, 75–84, 86–89, 102, 118–25, 133–37, 143–52, 155–56, 158, 160–61, 196, 198–99, 227–36, 239 absence in Africa, 92, 102 and birth of children, 143, 146 and complex societies, 102, 124, 158 and diverging devolution, 125, 155, 158, 230 and hypergamy, 108, 119, 134, 155 and plow agriculture, 125 and premortem inheritance, 57, 79–80, 108, 121, 124, 134, 144, 151, 155, 227, 230 and social stratification, 122, 124, 136, 151, 158, 230, 233

as conjugal fund, 3, 122, 125, 151, 155 composition of, 55, 75–76, 120, 144, 149 cross-cultural distribution of, 12, 102, 122 Greek influence upon, 15 in Babylonia, 143–52, 239–40 among Judean exiles, 242–44 in India, 90, 133–7, 232, 244; see also bridewealth; divorce; indirect dowry ; social stratification Dothan (site), 178 Dothan, Moshe, 206 Driver, G. R., 151 Driver, S. R., xi Dumont, Louis, 106–09, 112–13, 169 Durkheim, Emile, 91 Dussaud, René, 7 Dutta, Saroj, 134 Early Bronze period, 192, 194 early Israel, 161–79 “egalitarianism” of, 175, 177, 179, 199 emergence of, 161–64 mortuary evidence for, 177–79, 232 pottery of, 164–6, 172–75, 177–78, 192 “ranked” society of, 175, 178 subsistence of, 164–66, 168, 177, 193, 232 unstratified society of, 164–66, 175–67, 179, 231 “wealth distinctions” in, 168 Eberharter, Andreas, 7 Edelman, Diana, 162–63 Edgar, C. C., 219 Edom and Edomites, 25–26, 190 Egypt and Egyptians, 1, 7, 9–10, 15, 17, 75–76, 104, 110, 190, 192 and incest (close-kin endogamy), 104, 110 Elephantine papyri, 4, 7, 9, 15, 17, 62–69, 83, 87, 144, 231 dowry in, 64–69, 87 indirect dowry in, 63–69, 87 marriage of Miptahiah to Eshior, 63–65 marriage of Tamet to Ananiah son of Azariah, 65

GENERAL INDEX

marriage of Jehoishma to Ananiah son of Haggai, 66–67 mhr in, 63–69, 231 Elohist (E); see Pentateuchal Sources, Elohist Eloul, Rohn, 122, 130, 153, 191 Emerton, J. A., 23–24 Emmerson, Grace I., 11 endogamy, 104 caste endogamy, 136 En-Gedi (Tel Goren), 79, 202, 204, 210 ‘En Yael, 223 Eph‘al, Israel, 51, 208, 211–12 Ephraim, 166, 181, 193 Epstein, Louis M., 5, 7, 84 Eridu, 138 Eriksen, Thomas Hylland, 1–2, 109 Eshel, Esther, 9 Eshel, Hanan, 212 ethnicity, Israelite and Judean, 162–64, 173, 205; see also Canaan and Canaanites; early Israel, emergence of Eurocentrism, 8 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 3, 11, 93–94, 96, 100, 126–27, 197 evolutionism, 4, 7–8, 106, 109, 152–53, 234 as “pseudo-history,” 91, 103, 109, 152 exchangist approach to marriage, 44, 96, 104–17 androcentrism of, 110–11 and asymmetrical exchange, 107, 113, 134 exogamy, 104, 109 extended families, 126, 195–97 and bridewealth, 197 see also complex households; corporate land ownership Fairservis, Walter A., Jr., 134 Fallers, Lloyd A., 169 Faubion, James D., 154 Faust, Avraham, 162, 170–71, 177–78, 184, 196, 200 female religious functionaries, Babylonian, 139, 144 Fiema, Zbigniew T., 51

287

Fiensy, David A., 198, 216–18, 220, 223–24, 226–27 Finkelstein, Israel, 33, 162, 164–67, 169–71, 173–74, 181–83, 192–94, 203, 205, 227 Finkelstein, Louis, xii Fitzmyer, Joseph A., 81 foreign trade, Israelites and, 184 Fortes, Meyer, 95, 98, 112, 120, 127–28 four-room house (pillared house), 162, 167 Fox, Robin, 109 Freedman, David Noel, xi, 44, 49, 55 Freud, Sigmund, 103–04 Freyne, Seán, 225–26 Frick, Frank S., 198 Fried, Morton H., 169 Friedman, Mordechai A., 70–72, 82, 84–85 Friedman, Richard Elliott, 32, 34, 53 Fritz, Volkmar, 167 Frymer-Kensky, Tikva, 55–56 Fuks, Alexander, 218–19 functionalist anthropology, 8, 16, 90–103, 109, 112, 116, 120–21, 125–26, 143, 157 and jural analysis, 92–95, 98–99 androcentrism of, 97–98 critiques of, 96–103 Funk, Robert W., 206 Galilee, 176, 214 gamika, 78 Garnsey, Peter, 220 Gaulin, Steven J. C., 153 Geller, Markham J., 9 Gezer, 180, 182, 205, 210, 213 Gibeon, 202 gift exchange, ritualized, 89, 104–8 Giloh, 165 Giveon, Raphael, 163 Glass, Jonathan, 175 Glick, Thomas F., 1 Godelier, Maurice, 89, 110–11, 113, 115–18, 157 Gonen, Rivka, 163 Gonja, 16, 120, 128–31, 133, 154 Good, Anthony, 93, 109

288

GENERAL INDEX

Goodman, Martin, 226–27 Goody, Esther N., 128–30 Goody, Jack, 4, 13, 16, 18, 45–46, 57, 90, 100, 104, 111–12, 115, 118–30, 133, 135–37, 151–61, 169, 191, 198, 221, 227, 230 critiques of, 152–6 Gottlieb, Alma, 154 Gottwald, Norman K., 27, 162–63, 182, 195–96, 198 Grabbe, Lester L., 202–04, 208–09, 238 Granqvist, Hilma, 191 Greeks, 15; see bridewealth, Greek misunderstanding of; dowry, Greek influence upon Greek pottery, 210, 213 Greenberg, Moshe, 163 Greenberg, Raphael, 170, 172 Greenfield, Jonas, 70–72, 74–75, 80 Greengus, Samuel, 142 groomwealth, 3, 81, 111, 119, 156 in Book of Tobit, 81 Gropp, Douglas M., 211 Grosz, Katarzyna, 14, 152 Gujarat, 135–6 Gulick, John, 191 Guro, 113–14, 118 Guyer, Jane, 152 Habel, Norman, 58 Hachlili, Rachel, 215, 224 Håkansson, Thomas, 103 Hallo, W. W., xii Halpern-Zylberstein, Marie Christine, 213, 215–16 Hanson, John S., 225 Hanson, K. C., 82–83 Har Adir, 173 Harappan culture (Indus civilization), 134 Harrell, Stevan, 120, 124–25 Hasel, Michael G., 162–63 Hasmoneans and Hasmonean period, 214–15, 221 Hazor, 180, 184, 206 Hellenistic Period, Palestine in, 213–21 mortuary evidence, 215–16, 234 Hengel, Martin, 51

Herod and Herodian period, 221–23 “Herodian House,” 223 Herodion, 221 Herzfeld, Michael, 2 Hezekiah, 185 hill country of Palestine, 162–69, 174, 198 in Iron I, 163–69, 174, 198 in Late Bronze, 162–63, 179 size of sites, 166–7 Hirschfeld, Yizhar, 223 Hodges, Harry, 138 hoe agriculture, 122–23, 127–30, 132–33 and bridewealth, 123 Hoffman, Hans-Detlef, 34–35 Hoglund, Kenneth, 202–03, 207–08, 213 Holladay, John S., Jr., 162, 167–75, 185 Hopkins, David C., 166–67, 196 Hopkins, Keith, 104 Horsley, Richard A., 225 horticulture, 126 among early Israelites, 193 Horwitz, Liora Kolska, 227 Hiorvat Hiasia sai, 223 Hosea, 48–50 marriage to Gomer, 48–50 Houston, Walter, 16, 190 Hutchinson, Sharon Elaine, 126 Hyrcanus II, 214 hypergamy, 14, 108, 119–20, 131, 155; see also dowry, and hypergamy Ibrahim, Moawiyah, 162 Idumaea, 205–06, 208, 212 Ilan, Tal, 80 incest taboo, 104–05, 109–10; see also Lévi-Strauss, Claude India and Indians, 18, 90, 102, 133–37, 144, 155–56, 158, 169; see also caste system, Indian; dowry, in India indirect dowry, 4, 7, 10, 14, 39, 43–44, 47, 55, 57–60, 71, 74, 76, 84–85, 87, 89, 119–21, 135–6, 144–46, 160, 199, 231, 239, 244 inheritance, 19, 57–58, 79–80, 133, 155, 227, 231 among Israelites, 195–97, 231 collateral, 122

GENERAL INDEX

vertical, 123; see also dowry, and premortem inheritance ‘Iraq el-Emir, 215 Iron I; see early Israel Iron II Palestine biblical evidence for social stratification in, 187–90 ceramic evidence for, 185–86 evidence for stratification, 179–90 mortuary evidence for, 186–87 isogamy, 108, 120 ‘Izbet Siartahi, 164, 169, 171–73, 176, 184, 193 ethnic identification of, 172–73 ivory inlays; see Samaria ivories Jackson, Bernard S., 36 Jackson, Gary B., 152 Jacob, 25, 29, 45, 56–58 and Esau, 25 Jahwist (J); see Pentateuchal sources, Jahwist (J) Jakobson, Vladimir A., 140 Jay, Nancy B., 47 Jericho, 187, 202, 210, 214, 221 Jerusalem, 18, 25–26, 180, 182 City of David, 184 excavation of, 182–83 in Hellenistic period, 215 in Iron II, 180, 182–83 in Middle Bronze, 182–83 in Persian period, 202–03, 210 in Roman period, 182, 221–24 population estimates of, 203 settlement of, 182–83, 203 stepped stone structure in, 182 Jha, D. N., 134 Joannès, Francis, 238 John Hyrcanus, 214 palace complex of, 214 Jones, Tom Bard, 138 Josephus, 4, 62, 82–83 Josiah, 30–31 Judah (Judea), 202, 210, 213 population estimates of, 33, 181 settlement of, 181–2, 193 Judean desert, 193 settlement of, 181, 193

289

Judean desert archives, 4, 17, 62, 69–80, 83, 87 Babatha archive, 69–73, 79–80 marriage of Shelamzion, 73–76, 79–80 Salome Komaïse archive, 76–77, 80 Judeans living in Babylonia (6th cent. bce), 237–44 and divorce stipulations, 239, 243 marriage gifts of, 239–44 onomasticon of, 238, 240–2 religiocultic affiliation of, 238–41 social status of, 239–40, 242, 244 Karve, Irawati, 135 Kassites, 147–8 Katzoff, Ranon, 70, 74 Kempinski, Aharon, 174–75, 206 Kenyon, Kathleen M., 182 Ketef Hinnom, 210 Ketef Yerihio, 212 kethubba, 4–5, 9, 70–73, 77–78, 82, 84–85; see also divorce penalty ; dowry Khallet Kalles, 206 Khirbet Abu et-Twein, 207 Khirbet al-Zewiyye, 207 Khirbet el-Qat it i, 207 Khirbet et-Tubeiqah (Beth-Zur), 204, 206–07 Khirbet Marajim, 206 Khirbet Nijam (Har Adar), 207 Khirbet Nimra, 206 Khirbet Raddana, 168, 175–76 Khirbet Zakariya, 208 Kidron valley, 215, 224, 234 Killebrew, Ann E., 162–64, 182–84, 192 King, Philip J., 243 King, Richard, 133 kinship and functionalist anthropology, 90–103 and structuralist anthropology, 90, 103–13; see also alliance theory ; descent theory Kirkpatrick, Patricia G., 24 Köhler-Rollefson, Ilse, 192 Klausner, Joseph, 226 Kletter, Raz, 164, 175, 178–89 Kloner, Amos, 9

290

GENERAL INDEX

Knoppers, Gary, 205, 210 Koehler, Ludwig, xii Korn, Francis, 104 Koschaker, Paul, 45, 92, 142–43 Kressel, Gideon M., 100, 191 Krige, Eileen Jensen, 131–32 Kufr al-Ma (Jordan), 191 Kuhrt, Amélie, 138–40, 147–48, 162 Kulturkreise; see culture areas (circles) Kuper, Adam, 105, 131–33 labor, women’s, 120, 122–4, 128–9, 133, 154, 232–33 and marriage gifts, 120, 232 Lachish (Tell ed-Duweir), 172, 184, 187, 202, 205–06 Lambert, W. G., 238 lamelekh storage jars, 185, 209 Landau, Y. H., 217 Landsberger, Benno, 142 Lapp, Paul W., 185 Laslett, Peter, 169 Late Bronze Age, 162–63, 165, 192, 194, 232 Leach, Edmund, 91, 103–04, 109–10, 131–2, 201 Leah, 45, 50–51, 54, 56–57 Lederman, Zvi, 166 Lemaire, André, 26, 51, 208–09, 212, 238 Lemche, Niels Peter, 162–64, 192, 196, 198 Lemos, T. M., 16 Lenski, Gerhard E., 168–9 Levenson, Jon D., 31 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 103–06, 109–13, 117, 157; see also: exchangist approach to marriage; incest taboo; structuralist anthropology Levin, Christoph, 22–23, 34 Levine, Baruch A., 58 Levine, Lee, 222 Levinson, Bernard M., 36 levirate marriage (wife inheritance), 129, 132, 137 Levy, Thomas E., 180 Lewin, Ariel, 222 Lewis, Naphtali, 73–75, 78–80

lineages, 18, 93–94, 98–101, 117, 122, 127, 129, 131, 133, 157, 195–8 among Israelites, 195–8; see also: bridewealth, and patrilineal kinship Lipschits, Oded, 202–4, 210, 213 loans, 212, 219–20 Locher, Clemens, 38 London, Gloria, 162, 173 Loretz, Oswald, xii Lounsbury, Floyd, 101 Lovedu (Lobedu), 18, 131–33, 154, 191 woman–woman marriage among, 132 Lowie, Robert H., 106 luxury items general absence in early Israel, 165, 168, 177, 232 in Iron II Israel, 186, 189, 198, 233 in Persian-era Palestine, 210, 234 Macintosh, A. A., 49–50 mahr, 5, 38–39, 191; see also bridewealth, among Arabs Mair, Lucy, 91, 93, 100–01 Maisels, Charles Keith, 123 Malamat, Abraham, 198 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 91, 95–97 Manasseh, 166, 181 Mandelbaum, David G., 137 “Mansion, The” (Roman Palestine), 223 Marcus, David, 38–39, 52 Maresha (Marisa), 214 Margalith, Othniel, 174 marriage as analytical category, 91 marriage by purchase; see bridewealth, as purchase price Martin, Dale B., 227 Marx, Karl, 117, 156 Marxist and neo-Marxist anthropology, 16, 90, 113–18, 125, 152–53, 157 critiques of, 117–18 Masada, 221–22 matrilineal principle, rabbinic, 228 mattān, 43–44, 59 Matthews, Victor H., 13, 16, 55–56 Mauss, Marcel, 96, 103 Mayes, A. D. H., 31, 35, 38, 42, 53, 55

GENERAL INDEX

Mays, James Luther, 50 Mazar, Amihai, 162–65, 167, 173, 175, 184, 207 Mazar, Benjamin, 204 Mazar, Eilat, 183 McCarter, P. Kyle, 35, 41–42 McConville, J. G., 31 McKenzie, Steven L., 31 McNutt, Paula, 162–64, 174, 185, 196, 198, 201–02 Megiddo, 180, 182–84, 193, 206–07 Meillassoux, Claude, 113–15, 117–18 Melpa and Wiru, 99 melûg, 146, 231 Mendenhall, George, 163 Merneptah stela, 162–63, 194 Mesopotamia and Mesopotamians, 1, 6, 9, 12, 15, 40, 44–45, 134, 137–52, 155, 158, 169, 190, 211, 231–32 Meyers, Carol L., 11–12, 176 Meyers, Eric M., 176 Middle Bronze period, 182, 192 Midianite pottery, 175 migdānôth, 46–47 Miles, John C., 151 Milik, Jozef T., 70, 77–78 Miller, Robert D., II, 163, 166, 168, 175, 177–79 Mir-Hosseini, Ziba, 39 Misgav, Haggai, 212 misrecognition; see bridewealth, contradictions and misrecognition Moab and Moabites, 190 mode of production, 3, 114, 120, 125–26, 128, 138, 157, 159 Mode’in, 216 mōhar, 4–7, 10–11, 14–15, 17, 37, 47, 50, 60–61, 71, 72, 82, 83, 85, 87–88, 90, 160, 231 as purchase price, 5–7, 10–12 origins of term, 5 three-stage shift of, 5, 14; see also bridewealth Mommsen, H., 185 Moore, Carey A., 81 monarchy, Israelite, 163, 180–82, 185, 197, 233

291

monumental architecture in Iron II Israel, 180, 182, 186 in Hellenistic Palestine, 213–16 in Persian-era Palestine, 204–05, 207, 234 in Roman Palestine, 221–24 Moran, William L., 163 Moses, 52, 192 and Zipporah’s šillûhiîm, 52 Motzki, Harald, 39 Mozah, 202 Muffs, Yochanan, 63 Murdock, George, 125 muškēnum, 139–40 relation to awilum, 139–40 Mycenaean pottery, 173 Na’aman, Nadav, 163, 185 nahiălah, 128, 195–98; see also corporate land ownership Nakhai, Beth Alpert, 176–77 Našar, 238 Nauerth, C., 31 Naveh, Joseph, 32–33, 51, 207–08, 211–12 Navon, Avi, 169 Needham, Rodney, 91 Negeb, 55–56, 167, 223 Nelson, Richard D., 29–30, 32, 37–38, 53, 56 Neo-Marxist anthropology; see Marxist and neo-Marxist anthropology Netzer, Ehud, 214, 221–22 Neufeld, E., 6–7, 9, 39, 41, 44–45, 54–55, 64 Nicholson, Ernest W., 20–21, 23–26, 28, 34, 54 Nielsen, Finn Sivert, 1–2, 109 Nielsen, John P., 242 niśśû’în, 86 Northern kingdom, 24, 29–30, 45, 61, 182 Noth, Martin, 31, 34 nuclear families, 17, 122–24, 137, 196, 233 nudunnûm, 44, 145–46, 149 relation to šeriktum (širku), 145–46; see also dowry ; indirect dowry nungurtu, 150–52, 243 Nuer, 16, 18, 94, 126–28, 157, 191, 197 Nuzi, 14, 148

292

GENERAL INDEX

Oakman, Douglas E., 82–83, 226–27 Oates, J., 138 O’Brien, Mark A., 31, 35, 53 Oded, B., 200, 202 Ogbu, John U., 97–98, 100, 157 Olmo Lete, Gregorio del, 52 Olrik, Axel, 24 Olyan, Saul M., 16 Omri and Omrides, 182, 184 Oppenheim, A. Leo, xi, 140 orphans and fatherless brides, 240, 244 ossuaries, 224 ostraca, Aramaic, 26, 208 Otto, Eckhart, 36 Overholt, Thomas W., 16 palaces Hasmonean, 214 Hellenistic, 176, 214–15 Herodian, 221–23 Iron II, 176, 180, 183–85, 233 Persian-era, 176, 204–77, 212, 234 Pardee, Dennis, 190 pastoralism, 126–8, 132 in ancient Palestine, 174, 191–95, 199, 227, 232 scholarly disagreements over, 192–95 sedentarization of pastoralists, 174, 192–95 Patai, Raphael, 8 patriarchal narratives, 27–29; see also Pentateuchal sources Paul, Shalom M., 36 Pearce, Laurie E., 238–9 Peckham, Brian, 31 Peletz, Michael, 125, 156 Pentateuchal sources, 17–30, 54 and “minimalist” scholarship, 32–33 revision of dating, 17–30, 60 Elohist, 21, 56–57 Priestly writers (P), 21–22, 27, 29, 43 Yahwist (J), 20–27, 34, 36, 43, 45, 48, 54, 56–57; see also: Blum, Erhard; Carr, David McClain; Deuteronomist; Deuteronomistic History ; patriarchal narratives, formation of; Rendtorff, Rolf Perdue, Leo G., 12–13

Perlitt, Lothar, 24 Perlman, L., 185 Persian period, Palestine in, 201–13, 234 fortresses, 207–08, 234 Persian policy of ruralization in, 202–03; see also palaces, Persian-era; Yehud, Persian province of Pestman, P. W., 10 Peters, E. L., 39, 191 Pfeiffer, R. H., 36 phernē, 4, 44, 51, 70, 74–76, 78, 82 usage of term, 75; see also dowry Philistia and Philistines, 42, 162, 165, 172–3, 190, 207 Philistine pottery, 165, 172–73 Philo, 4, 62, 82 Phoenicians, 210 Phoenician pottery, 175 Picon, François-René, 191 pit silos, as evidence for surplus wealth in early Israel, 169–74 Pitt-Rivers, Julian, 43 plow agriculture, 122–23, 134, 138, 161 and dowry, 134 development of, 134, 138 polygyny, 17, 123, 127–29, 150–51, 154 and bridewealth-giving societies, 17, 127–28 Pope, Marvin H., 52, 58 population estimates, of Palestine, 181 Porten, Bezalel, 51, 63–69, 209, 225 Praag, A. van, 152 Prague school, 103–04 Pramalai Kallar, 108 prestige (status), 132, 136, 233 priesthood, Israelite, 188 Priestly writers (P); see Pentateuchal sources, Priestly writers (P) prime and contigent prestations, 95, 98–99 proix, 4, 73, 75–76, 82 usage of term, 75; see also dowry Propp, William H. C., 52 prosphora, 75–76 Ptolemaic period, 219 Ptolemy II Philadelphus, 218

GENERAL INDEX

Pury, Albert de, 21, 23, 34 Qasr e-Lejah, 217 Qasr el-‘Abd, 215 Qathros family, 223 qiddûšîn, 84–86 payments effecting, 84–85; see also betrothal (inchoate marriage) Qimron, Elisha, 78 Quale, J. Robina, 160 Qul‘ah, el-, 208 Raban, Avner, 207 rabbinic law, 84–87 and divorce penalty, 5, 71–73, 85–86, 147, 239 attempts to reconcile evidence with, 73 Rabin, Chaim, 31 Rachel, 45, 50, 54, 56–57 Rad, Gerhard von, 21, 41 Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 91, 92–93, 95–96, 109, 111, 152–53 Rainey, Anson F., 33, 163 Randhawa, M. S., 134 rape, in biblical laws, 37–40 Rassam, Amal, 191 Rebekah, 46–47, 58 Redford, Donald B., 162–63 Reich, Ronny, 205 Rendsburg, Gary A., 32 Rendtorff, Rolf, 20–21, 23, 27, 30, 34, 35, 61 Renger, Johannes, 145 residential patterns in early Israel, 166–69, 175–77 in Hellenistic-era Palestine, 213–15 in Iron II Israel, 180–81, 183–85 in Persian-era Palestine, 204–07 in Roman-era Palestine, 221–24, 234 Rivière, P. G., 91 Rofé, Alexander, 27, 37–38, 46 Rogerson, J. W., 198 Roman Period, Palestine in, 221–29 mortuary evidence, 223–24, 234 Rome and Romans, 15 Römer, Thomas C., 42 Romney, A. Kimball, 152

293

Rose, Martin, 22–23 Rosen, Baruch, 171–72 Roth, Martha T., xi, 40, 139, 141, 143, 146, 148–49, 150–51, 237, 239, 241–43 Rothenberg, Benno, 175 Rowley, H. H., 48–50 Roux, Georges, 138 Sahlins, Marshall, 113 Saller, Richard, 220 Salome Alexandra, 214 Salome Komaïse; see Judean desert archives Samaria, 180, 184, 204–07, 210, 213 Hellenistic-era field towers in, 216–17 population of, 205 Roman-era Sebaste, 221 Samaria ivories, 184, 186 Samaria ostraca, 33 Samaria papyri, 205, 210–12 Samaria surveys, 166 Sanhedriya tomb, 224 Sanmartín, Joaquin, xii Saporetti, Claudio, 148 Sarah (Sarai), 48, 54, 104 Sarna, Nahum, 44 Satlow, Michael, 5–6, 15, 63–64, 70–71, 80, 82–87, 228, 234 Schäfer-Lichtenberger, Christa, 198 Schaps, David, 70 Scheffler, Harold W., 101–02, 109–10, 113 Schlegel, Alice, 122, 130, 153, 191 Schloen, J. David, 166–67, 169–70, 176, 184–85, 196, 220 Schmid, Hans Heinrich, 22–24 Schmitt, Hans-Christoph, 22, 34 Schneider, David M., 101–02 Schwartz, Glenn M., 170 Scott, John, 169 segmentary kinship, 99–100, 127, 195, 197–98 šeriktum (širku), 143, 145–46, 149 relation to nudunnûm, 145–46; see also dowry sexual intercourse, and betrothal, 84, 142 Shah, A. M., 137 Sharma, Ursula, 120, 123

294

GENERAL INDEX

Shasu, 163, 192 Shechem, 184, 205, 213 Shephelah, 170 Shiloh (site), 165 Shiqmona, 207 siblônôth, 85–87 šillûhiîm, 4, 11, 52–54, 60, 231 Silwan, 186–7 Silva, Aldina da, 41 Silver, Morris, 140, 185 Simon (Hasmonean), 214 Sippar, 241 sister-exchange, 115–16 site hierarchy, development of in Iron II Israel, 180–81 Slanski, Kathryn E., 147 slaves and slavery, 54, 76, 139–40, 144, 210–12, 217, 219–20, 234 and debt, 140 prevalence of, 219 Yahwistic names of slaves, 211 Smend, Rudolf, 32 Smith, J. Payne, 38, 51 Smith, W. Robertson, 4–5 Smith-Christopher, Daniel, 241 social stratification, 3, 17–19, 180, 120, 122–26, 128–37, 139–41, 151, 157, 159–99, 175, 200–27, 230–36 and bridewealth, 17, 122–23, 130, 231–33 and dowry, 122, 133–37, 151, 233–35 definitions of, 131–32, 168 Soggin, J. Alberto, 54 Solomon, 53, 182–3 and Pharaoh’s daughter, 53 Speiser, E. A., 27, 43–44, 48, 51 Sperber, Daniel, 78 Spies, O., 39 Spiro, Melford, 119–20 Stager, Lawrence E., 162, 167–68, 195–96, 202, 243 Stamm, J. J., xii state development of early Israelites, 180–01 Steinberg, Naomi A., 57 Steiner, Margreet, 182–3 Stemberger, Günter, 82, 84

Stern, Ephraim, xii, 202, 204–07, 210 Stern, M., 227 storage of grain; see pit silos Strack, H. L., 82, 84 structural-functionalism, 91; see functionalist anthropology structuralist anthropology, 16, 90, 102–13, 125 critiques of, 109–13; see also alliance theory ; Dumont, Louis; exchangist approach to marriage; Lévi-Strauss, Claude subsistence agriculture and economy, 17–18, 124, 126–33, 177; see also bridewealth, and subsistence agriculture; early Israel, subsistence of Sumer and Sumerians, 138 Swartz, Marc J., 153 Szubin, H. Z., 67 Tal, Oren, 213 Tallensi, 16, 98–99, 127–29, 133 men “owning” wives, 98 Tambiah, Stanley J., 13, 92–93, 96, 98, 113, 121, 133–36, 152, 154–55 taxation in Iron II Israel, 185 in Persian Yehud, 208–9, 234 Tcherikover, Victor, 218–19 Tel Dan, 173, 180 Tel ‘Ein Zippori, 176 Tel Michal, 207 Tel el-Wawiyat, 176–77 Tel ‘Ira, 185 Tel Masos, 166, 174–75, 180 Tel Miqne, 185 Tell Abu Hawam, 206 Tell Anafa, 214 Tell Beit Mirsim, 170–73, 184 ethnic identification of, 172–73 Tell el-Far‘ah, 184 Tell el-Kheleifeh, 208 Tell en-Nasibeh (Mizpah), 184, 202, 204, 210 Tell es-Sa‘idiyeh, 206 Tell es-Sawwan, 138

GENERAL INDEX

Tell Jemmeh, 207 terhatum, 38, 44, 92, 141–45, 149, 151–52, 158 and betrothal (inchoate marriage), 142 declining importance of in Babylonia, 149; see also: bridewealth tenants and tenancy in Hellenistic Palestine, 217 in Roman Palestine, 225–26, 234 Thompson, Thomas L., 33, 164 Tigay, Jeffrey H., 29 Tobiads, 215, 219 Tomb of Absalom, 224 Tomb of Herod’s Family, 224 Tomb of Jason, 215 Tomb of Nicanor, 224 Tomb of Queen Helene, 224 Tomb of Zechariah, 224 Torrey, C. C., 200 Transjordan, 206, 213, 214 Tshidi, 98–99 Tufnell, Olga, 187 Turton, David, 100, 191 Tylor, Edmund B., 109–10 ‘Ubaid culture, 138 Ugarit, 231–32 United Monarchy, 172, 180–83 urbanization, 138–39 in Babylonia, 138–39 in Iron II Israel, 180–81 in Hellenistic-era Palestine, 213 Uruk culture, 138 “ultraprimitive” societies, 110–11 unilineal kinship, 100–01, 104, 110, 197; see also lineages Ussishkin, David, 183, 185, 187, 205–06 Vanderhooft, David S., 202 Vanderkam, James C., 42 Van Seters, John, 22–25, 35–36, 41–42, 46, 149 Vaux, Roland de, 10, 41, 70, 77–78, 191 Veijola, Timo, 32, 35 Vincent, Albert Léopold, 63 Vogels, Walter, 48–50 Vörlander, Hermann, 22

295

Vuyk, Trudeke, 153–54 Wadi ed-Daliyeh, 210 wages, daily, 225, 234 and relative cost of goods in Roman Palestine, 225–26, 234 Wason, Paul K., 169, 178 wealth distinctions, 168–69 vs. class distinctions, 168–69 Weber, Max, 156 Weinberg, Joel P., 203, 208 Weinfeld, Moshe, 31, 39 Weippert, Manfred, 163 Wellhausen, Julius, 21, 26 Wenham, Gordon J., 24–25, 31 Wesselius, Jan Wim, 32 Westbrook, Raymond, 11, 36, 41, 54, 57–59, 139–43, 146 Westermann, Claus, 43, 46, 48, 56–57 Westermarck, Edward, 91, 93, 106 Wette, Wilhelm M. L. de, 30 White, Marsha, 42 Whitehead, Ann, 154 Whitelam, Keith W., 162, 164, 193, 195, 228 Whyte, Martin King, 154 Wiggins, Steve A., 39 Williamson, H. G. M., 196 Wilson, Robert R., 16, 198 wine, imported (as luxury good), 214–15, 223 Winnett, Frederick Victor, 21–23, 26–27 Wisthoff, Bonnie L., 176 Wolff, Hans Walter, 50 Wright, Christopher J. H., 7, 11 Wright, G. Ernest, 56 Wright, John W., 202 writing, development of, 134, 138 effect upon marriage customs, 152 Wunsch, Cornelia, 237, 243 Wyatt, Nicolas, 39 Yadin, Yigael, 70–72, 174 Yahwist writer(s) (J); see Pentateuchal sources Yahweh-worshippers and Yahwism, 205, 241

296

GENERAL INDEX

Yahwistic names, 205, 207–08, 211, 240–42 Yamauchi, Edwin M., 41 Yardeni, Ada, 33, 51, 63–66, 64, 68–73, 78–80, 209, 225 Yaron, Reuven, 228 Yehud, Persian province of, 33, 202, 204, 234 population estimates of, 33, 203 Yehud stamps, 209

Yellin, J., 185 Yiftach-Firanko, Uri, 75 Zadok, Ran, 63, 238, 240–41 zēbed, 12–13, 50–51, 54 Zertal, Adam, 166, 205–06 Zerubbabel, 238 Zorn, Jeffrey R., 204 zubullûm, 145