Sex in Antiquity

Exploring Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient World

Mark Masterson, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, James Robson, Mark Masterson, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, James Robson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317602767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Looking at sex and sexuality from a variety of historical, sociological and theoretical perspectives, as represented in a variety of media, Sex in Antiquity represents a vibrant picture of the discipline of ancient gender and sexuality studies, showcasing the work of leading international scholars as well as that of emerging talents and new voices.

Sexuality and gender in the ancient world is an area of research that has grown quickly with often sudden shifts in focus and theoretical standpoints. This volume contextualises these shifts while putting in place new ideas and avenues of exploration that further develop this lively field or set of disciplines. This broad study also includes studies of gender and sexuality in the Ancient Near East which not only provide rich consideration of those areas but also provide a comparative perspective not often found in such collections. Sex in Antiquity is a major contribution to the field of ancient gender and sexuality studies.

PART I

Ancient Near East

1
“I HAVE HIRED YOU WITH MY SON’S MANDRAKES”

Women’s reproductive magic in ancient Israel

Susan Ackerman

Genesis 30:14–16; 38:28; and Ezekiel 13:17–23

There are three texts in the Hebrew Bible that arguably depict women engaged in acts of reproductive magic. In Genesis 30:14–16, Rachel, who is barren (Genesis 29:31), and her sister Leah, who has ceased to bear children (Genesis 30:9), vie to use the “love plants” (dûdā’îm, a term kindred to the noun dôd, meaning “love, beloved”)¹ that Leah’s son Reuben has found in a field, in the hope that one of these sisters might benefit from the love plants’ powers as an aphrodisiac and their ability to bestow fertility. In Genesis 38:28, the midwife who attends Judah’s daughterin-law Tamar as she gives birth ties a red thread around the hand of her son Zerah as his arm emerges from the womb, most probably an act of apotropaic magic meant to protect the baby from malevolent agents. And in Ezekiel 13:17–23, an anonymous cadre of “daughters who prophesy” are said to sew bands of cloth onto wrists,² to put head bands³ on heads (v. 18), and to be associated as well with “handfuls of barley” and “pieces of bread” (v. 19) – all magical rites, according to an interpretation put forward by Nancy R. Bowen (1999), that can be enacted on behalf of expectant women during the course of their pregnancies and at the time of delivery.

To be sure, the classifying of each of these texts as an instance of reproductive magic can be debated. For example, Hector Avalos uses the language of medicine, not magic, to describe Leah’s and Rachel’s efforts to use the “love plants” that Reuben has found; more specifically, Avalos compares moderns’ “medicinal” use of tea, or lemon juice, or chicken soup to treat various ailments to Rachel’s and Leah’s vying to perform an act of “self-medication” or “self-help,” in which the “love plants” serve as a “natural remedy” that “cure[s] infertility” (Avalos 1995: 254–5; see similarly Avalos 1997: 454).⁴ Yet as has been long and often pointed out, the boundary between “medicine” and “magic” in the ancient world was largely unmarked,⁵ and thus Marten Stol (2000a: 56), who follows the standard interpretation that Leah’s and Rachel’s “love plants” were mandrake roots, can describe the mandrake of Genesis 30:14–16 as “a magical plant” (emphasis added). Likewise, Carol Meyers (2005: 38; see similarly Meyers 2002: 289) writes of Rachel and Leah engaging in a “magical act performed to promote fertility” (emphasis added).

Somewhat similarly Meyers, while noting that the purpose that is intimated in Genesis 38:28 for the red thread that is tied around Zerah’s wrist is not magical, but pragmatic (it marks him as the first of Tamar’s twin sons to have breached the womb), nevertheless proposes that the thread has a significance that transcends the rather idiosyncratic function that is described for it on the occasion of Zerah’s birth. In her words, “its [the red thread’s] use may reflect a set of practices involving the apotropaic character of strands of dyed yarn, with both their red color and the fact that they are bound on the infant’s hand having magical protective powers” (Meyers 2002: 290, 2005: 38–9).⁶ Meyers goes on to remark that in Mesopotamian and Hittite birth rituals, binding with red thread is used in exactly this sort of apotropaic fashion (although in the Mesopotamian example, which is from the Old Babylonian period [1894–1595 BCE], and in one Hittite text, red wool threads are bound not to the baby, but to the mother during delivery to protect her).⁷

As for Ezekiel 13:17–23, Katheryn Pfisterer Darr (2000: 336) proposes that there are allusions in this text to “séance-like practices,” which indicates to her that the “daughters who prophesy” are women engaged not in rituals of reproductive magic but in necromancy. This interpretation has also been urged by several other scholars, based on the description of these daughters’ “hunting for souls” in Ezekiel 13:18.⁸ This phrase is taken, under the terms of these scholars’ interpretation, to refer to spirits of the dead, given that, according to at least some among these commentators, “the dead can manifest themselves in the shape of birds” (van der Toorn 1994: 123, quoting Spronk 1986: 100, n. 3, 167, 255).⁹ Ann Jeffers (1996: 94) somewhat similarly finds allusions in Ezekiel 13:17–23 to death-related, as opposed to reproductive, magic but she posits that a far more sinister practice than necromancy is being enacted: according to her analysis, the “daughters who prophesy” “mak[e] images of people tied up … [and] search for personal objects belonging to them,” which is followed by “their burying” (whether Jeffers means the burying of the images, or of the personal objects, or of both, is unclear to me). Jeffers then goes on to say that in this way, “through the system of correspondences, the person represented by the image should die.” In support of this argument, Jeffers cites Babylonian accounts of witchcraft that describe witches as making images of their victims and binding these images’ knees and arms, which she sees as analogous to the binding practices depicted in Ezekiel 13:18.

That Ezekiel 13:18 refers to images, rather than the wrists and heads of actual individuals, is, however, an interpretation that Jeffers must impose upon the text, as this is nowhere explicitly indicated; moreover, Jeffers has no compelling explanation to offer for Ezekiel 13:19 and its association of the daughters’ actions with barley and bread (she can suggest only that “the grain or the barley may have been used to block the mouth of an image” [1996: 94]). Conversely, those who interpret the daughters’ acts as necromantic rituals that summon bird-like spirits of the dead can explain the allusions to barley and bread (this food is “meant to allure the bird-like souls,” according to Marjo C. A. Korpel [1996: 103–4]). But these scholars are less able to explain the binding practices. Korpel, for example, can only suggest that the daughters “sew bird-nets which they spread out over their arms,” in order to snare the bird-like dead spirits (1996: 103). But this defies the (admittedly difficult) syntax of the passage, which is best understood as distinguishing between those who sew the wrist and head bands and those upon whom these fabrics are bound. Moreover, the proposition that the dead can take on the shape of birds according to West Semitic religious thought has been challenged by such noted experts as Marvin H. Pope (1987: 452, 463) and Mark S. Smith and Elizabeth Bloch-Smith (1988: 277–84).¹⁰

Bowen turns, therefore, to consider some of the same sorts of Mesopotamian and Hittite data that I cited above to suggest that the binding acts performed by the Ezekiel 13 “daughters who prophecy” may be magical rites executed on behalf of women of childbearing age during their pregnancies and at the time of parturition.¹¹ For example, Bowen points out that in addition to the Hittite and Mesopotamian texts that speak of apotropaic red threads that can be bound to a delivering mother and/or her newborn infant, Mesopotamian sources describe how threads of various colors could be twined together, knotted, and then bound on a woman’s hand or other body parts to stop excessive vaginal bleeding during pregnancy (Bowen 1999: 424, citing Scurlock 1991: 136–8). This act reminds her of the binding on of wrist bands performed by the “daughters who prophesy”; indeed, the specific term for the “wrist bands” that the “daughters who prophesy” in Ezekiel 13 apply, kěsāBtôt, is arguably related to the Akkadian verb kasû, “to bind” (Bowen 1999: 424, n. 31; also Davies 1994: 121). A cloth band could also be tied on a Mesopotamian mother-to-be to prevent miscarriage (Bowen 1999: 424, citing Scurlock 1991: 138–9), and special amulet stones could likewise be tied to a mother-to-be’s body if she was experiencing difficulties. One Neo-Assyrian text, for example, refers to nine stones that were tied around the waist of a pregnant woman who was experiencing profuse vaginal bleeding during the course of her pregnancy (Scurlock 1991: 136; Stol 2000a: 203). Mesopotamian sources describe as well a set of twelve amulet stones that can be tied to the hands, feet, and hips of a woman who struggles during labor and “does not give birth easily” (Stol 2000a: 132–3; see also ibid: 49–52, 116, 203; Stol 2000b: 491; Gursky 2001: 98–9).

Note, moreover, that it is not the amulet stones alone that protect the mother-to-be according to these texts: the knot-magic that is deployed when securing the amulets to the woman’s body also has significant apotropaic powers according to Mesopotamian lore. Mesopotamian ritual texts (as well as Egyptian tradition) moreover speak of the removal of bands or the untying of knots at the time of the actual birth (Bowen 1999: 424, citing Scurlock 1991: 139, 141; Foster 1996: 1.138), given that “knots [otherwise] … constrain birth” (so much so that, in Egypt, a delivering woman’s hair was intentionally unbraided and left to hang unbound [Ritner 2008: 174]).

Additionally, in Mesopotamian tradition, a midwife might sprinkle a circle of flour on the floor during a pregnant woman’s delivery, and offerings of bread could be made (Bowen 1999: 424, citing Scurlock 1991: 140, 151, 182). This latter ritual, Jo Ann Scurlock hypothesizes, was meant to sate the hunger of demons that might otherwise snatch newborn infants (Bowen 1999: 424, citing Scurlock 1991: 157; Foster 1996: 2.545). Bowen suggests that the association of the “daughters who prophesy” in Ezekiel 13:17–23 with barley and bread indicates that they used these foodstuffs in a similar way. All in all, she concludes (Bowen 1999: 424),

the activities that Ezekiel ascribes to the female prophets … share some of the same imagery as these various incantations associated with childbirth. In particular they share the imagery of the binding and removal of knots or bands of cloth (13:18, 20, 21) and the use of grain and bread for ritual use (13:19).

The biblical tradition’s assessment of reproductive magic: Ezekiel 13:17–23

After putting forth her interpretation that identifies motifs that come from the arena of ancient Near Eastern reproductive magic in Ezekiel 13:17–23, Bowen turns to ask why the “daughters who prophesy” are excoriated in this oracle, as in v. 17, for example, where Ezekiel is commanded by God to prophesy against them, or in v. 19, where Ezekiel, speaking for God, accuses the “daughters who prophesy” of having “profaned” the deity. The question is a good one, especially given that Ezeki...