Esther and the Politics of Negotiation

Public and Private Spaces and the Figure of the Female Royal Counselor

Rebecca S. Hancock

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781451465624
• eBook ISBN: 9781451469868
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

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Theoretical Problems with the Language of Public and Private

Historians sometimes become imprisoned by the preconceptions, categories, and concepts that we bring to our “texts.”. . . We see or hear or read what we have been trained to recognize, applying predetermined categories perhaps beyond the point of sensible or reasonable interpretations.

—Carol Lasser, “Beyond Separate Spheres: The Power of Public Opinion”

More recently . . . feminist theorists have questioned the universality and usefulness of the public/private distinction. Such theorists contend that the dichotomy mystifies or misleads us into thinking of life in two separate boxes and makes it easy to assume that each of us fits more naturally into one box or the other, according to our sex. . . . Our colleagues in history remind us that the lives of the men and women they study are far more complex than such a clear dichotomy would suggest.

—Nannerl O. Keohane, Gendered Domains: Rethinking Public and Private in Women’s History

The previous chapter demonstrated the way that the narrative portrayal of Esther has been greatly contested, which often leads to one of two very different conclusions: either that Esther is a passive figure or that she defies gender stereotypes and acts in a public way. Furthermore, these divergent interpretations are often rooted in a distinction between public and private spheres, a concept that has been understood to impact women’s roles. Yet there are some problems with taking this approach. In most cases, the reliance on separate spheres is assumed, not a position for which scholars argue explicitly. Furthermore, it is not always clear how the term private or domestic is being used. Does this refer to the physical spaces to which women are restricted? Or does this term instead refer to conceptual categories and thus limit the potential roles available to women? This chapter will explore some of the ways in which biblical scholars have applied the public/private discourse to biblical women as well as some of the theoretical problems with this approach.^[1] Scholarship from a number of disciplines outside of biblical studies will explain the history of this framework and a variety of ways in which this language obscures more nuanced historical dynamics when specific situations are evaluated more closely. It is the task of this chapter, then, first, to map out the scope of the discourse and, second, to identify potential problems with the assumptions that undergird this language.

Public and Private in Biblical Scholarship

The idea that women are ordinarily confined to the private sphere whereas men are associated with the public has shaped a good deal of scholarship on biblical women. Michael O’Connor’s comments on women in Judges are indicative of this trend: “Women, here as elsewhere in pre-modern society, are set to do duty as representatives of the private, as men do duty as tokens of the public. Women are typically of the inside, the domestic sphere, while men are of the outside, the common sphere.”^[2] Scholars have seen within the concept of public and private various dimensions, which may include both spatial and conceptual limitations.^[3] Either women are described as being precluded from physical spaces or they are excluded from certain roles.

There are two salient aspects that have characterized this discourse, each of which we shall consider in this chapter. The first aspect of note is that scholars have often seen women’s roles as being rooted in domestic and family life. Scholars who employ these terms often notice women’s connection to the family and the home, which shapes both social expectations and roles and often excludes women from positions of power. Second, biblical scholars have often recognized that the public/private divide is not entirely universal and thus may be transgressed in times of political instability or unrest.

Women’s Association with Family and Home

A number of scholars have made connections between women’s roles and the part that they play in domestic and family life. For example, Claudia Camp describes women’s social roles as follows: “In a patrilineal, patrilocal society such as Israel’s, we can take as a given that the primary source of a woman’s authority will lie in her domestic roles. She may well, however, perform other leadership roles, the acknowledgement of her authority dependent on the credence and authority vested in domesticity in her particular social setting.”^[4] Thus, Camp argues that when women do move beyond normal domestic actions, it is often in extension of the roles that she has already performed within the home or local community. Women may wield public authority at times, but their status is a consequence of roles already played within familial structures.

Beatrice Lawrence’s analysis of Prov. 31:10-31 attempts to demonstrate complexity in the way gender is configured and described in ancient Israel. Her reading suggests that the ideal woman described in the text is sometimes portrayed in language that resembles masculine modifiers. Moreover, the woman who engages in all the activities of the poem is highly respected for her work, indicating that women’s labor was valued. Lawrence argues that the portrayal of the woman of valor, however, is concerned only with her role in the domestic realm, whereas her husband’s role is in the public. Lawrence’s study of the ancient Israelites’ constructions of gender offers more nuance by suggesting a certain amount of fluidity in language about men and women, but still her work continues to rely on the notion of public and private realms to which men and women are relegated.^[5] Like Camp, Lawrence sees women’s roles, including positive assessments of them, as rooted particularly in domestic and household labors.

In the Rebekah narrative cycle, Naomi Steinberg critiques the Western bias inherent in much of the gender analysis on biblical women. She argues that the notion that women’s equality should be defined “in relation to male activity and the access that women have to that activity” is something found in “American society” and should not be used as a standard by which to assess women’s roles in the ancient world. In valuing activity in the public sphere, feminists who analyzed the status of biblical women often found them to be lacking, because they more often performed domestic roles. Steinberg’s analysis, although it critiques the way that categories have been used to devalue women’s role in society, is predicated upon the notion that there are separate public and private spheres and that these have specifically gendered dimensions. She describes the impact of role-behavior theory for analyzing women’s roles as follows:

Role behavior for men is localized primarily in the public sphere; where the interests of the public sphere overlap, men are the chief actors. Women’s role behavior is confined to the private sphere of society. The story of the fate of Dinah is the exception that proves the rule. Though she goes out into the public sphere, we are never told anything about her in the first person; and her public visit brings tragedy upon her new husband and kin. The message behind this story appears to be that the public domain is not intended for women.^[6]

Steinberg offers an important caution against imposing contemporary values onto ancient cultures and thus offers a new paradigm for viewing both men’s and women’s roles, finding that there is a degree of complementarity between the two in the roles that they inhabit in the domestic sphere. Her continued reliance, however, on the public/private distinction demonstrates the endurance of the Western cultural bias that she attempts to eschew.^[7]

In her monograph Households and Holiness, Carol Meyers makes an argument similar to Steinberg’s in relationship to women’s religious practices. In this work, she employs archaeology, textual evidence, and anthropological models to assess women’s participation in domestic religious practice. She concludes that women were involved in religious rites but that these were mostly associated with the home and thus often not represented in scriptural texts that describe national, communal religious rites.^[8] The consequence is that women’s involvement has often been overlooked by scholarship, which “inevitably privilege[s] the religious activities of men over those of women.”^[9] Her work offers an important corrective to earlier assessments of Israelite religion that endorsed the view of biblical authors and thus assumed women were not involved in religious activity. More importantly, she also suggests that women were not excluded from communal practices any more than laymen were.^[10] This suggests, then, that, at least in the realm of religion, the division was not between men and women but rather between priestly and nonpriestly individuals. This division, nevertheless, has gender implications, because women were categorically excluded from priesthood, whereas men were not.

Patrick Mullins examines the portrayal of biblical women vis-à-vis the status of women in the surrounding cultures of the ancient Near East, especially Mesopotamia and Egy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Introduction
• Introduction to the Problem
• Theoretical Problems with the Language of Public and Private
• Narrative Representatives of Space, Gender, and Women’s Roles in Esther
• Esther and Representations of Persian Royal Women
• Esther the Politician
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Suggested Reading
• Bibliography
• Index of Authors
• Index of Biblical References