Ancient Literary Depictions of Women

Although depictions of women in Jewish literature of this period are relatively rare, they are of particular interest. Not only do they shed light on attitudes toward women within ancient Jewish patriarchal cultures; they also allow us a glimpse into the lives of a population often neglected in the historical sources.

The Posen Library includes three categories of ancient literature about women: stories about women in the Apocrypha, women in texts from Qumran, and exceptional rabbinic tales about women extant in the rabbinic corpus.

The literature on women in the Apocrypha, a set of noncanonical Jewish texts of the Second Temple period, demonstrates that its authors largely adopted Hellenistic gender norms and binaries even as the texts also reflect Jewish values. In some ways, the women in these texts are paradigms of the ideal woman as envisioned in their time. They are prized for their beauty and modesty and for their piety and commitment to their families. In other ways, they are quite exceptional and were constructed by their authors to be heroines and saviors of their people (Judith) or to critique corrupt leadership (Susanna).

The women portrayed in rabbinic literature are often realistically complex, but the extent to which they are historical remains contested. It is possible that the women in these texts are based on historical kernels, but these literary depictions, having passed through so many hands and centuries, can be used only for aiding our understanding of rabbinic attitudes toward women.

As a class of people, women serve different functions throughout the canon of rabbinic literature. Women are the subject of many rabbinic legal discussions, in which they serve as theoretical test cases for determining the details of the law or as a metaphor for the love of the study of Torah. At the same time, a wife can be competition for the rabbi’s love and pursuit of Torah. Women, of course, also were part of the rabbis’ reality. Although depictions of specific women are relatively few, they were not completely excised from the corpus. Thus, from a literary perspective, the presence of women in rabbinic texts is intentional and instructive. This chapter concentrates on a handful of specific women who appear repeatedly in rabbinic literature and who were evidently important to the rabbis and left an imprint on their society. Martha bat Boethus lived at the end of the Second Temple period and was married to a high priest. Beruriah seems to have frequented the rabbinic academy before or after the Bar Kokhba revolt. Yalta and Rav Ḥisda’s daughter are known only from the Babylonian Talmud. Other women included are Imma Shalom, Rabbi Judah the Prince’s enslaved woman, and the Matrona, who asked the second-century Palestinian sage Rabbi Yosi numerous questions about scriptural interpretation. Em was a famous healer whose medical recipes are recorded on many pages of the Talmud. These women are clever, witty, sometimes biting, and appropriately complex.