Video Transcript: Jewish Women in New Testament Times

So our second segment now is looking at the question of Jewish women. in New Testament  times, we're going to look at Jewish women then we're going to look at Greek and Roman  women. And then we're going to look at how they all fit together. So, so this is the part about  Jewish women. And by the way, I wanted to say that I misspoke once in the at least once, in  the last segment, when I refer to I Corinthians 5 and women prophets, what I meant to say is I Corinthians 11 prophets. So we're looking now at Jewish women. And here are our talking  points. The first one is to be aware of time differences, when we're reading things about  Jewish women in the Hebrew Bible, in the Old Testament. So we have regulations, for  example, about what women should do and not do in Leviticus, in Deuteronomy, etc. And we  have to be aware that a number of centuries have passed between the writing of those codes, those texts, and the time that we're talking about here, in the New Testament period in the  first century, of the Roman in the Christian era. And we're not sure, we can't assume that  exactly the way something was understood in the third or the third century BC, or even  perhaps earlier than that, is the way it's understood in the way it's practiced in the first  century. AD, because times change, things develop, if things work differently. And also, the  other problem about this is that when you have legislation, which is what you have in  Leviticus, for example. We can't necessarily assume that everybody's doing it that way, that  everybody's doing what this text says, this is somebody some group's idea of how to do it. But it's not necessarily, you can't necessarily assume that everybody's doing it that way. So it's  both that question of whether everybody's is doing it, because just because the text says it,  but also the time lapse that's going on here. And so it's the question of reading biblical  practice. What we assume is biblical practice, even into later times. Now, one of the problems of Christian interpretation of this kind of material from from the Old Testament is that we read  our own bias into it. And often we don't understand the spirit in which some of these texts are written. And I use the example of Talmud. Talmud is the collection of post biblical writings in  Judaism, then that is compiled within the second, third, fourth, maybe fifth centuries of the  Christian era. And in some earlier scholarship, Christian scholarship, about the role of women, in biblical times and in the New Testament times and in the world of Jesus. Some Christian  scholars have really misunderstood Talmud and have used pieces, passages from Talmud to  say, this is the way Jewish women we're living in the first century. Now first of all, you have  several centuries of gaps sometimes. And also, there are some there are some repressive  things in in about women in Talmud and the most famous one is the opinion that the question  about what would be the grounds for which a husband can divorce his wife and this and this  and this and or if he's if she spoils the supper? So misunderstandings things like that. This is a Christian misunderstanding of Judaism, okay. And this is it's a very serious in a in a very in a  much bigger issue. We'll say, Well, I mean, life was so hard for Jewish women and Jesus freed  them from all that. Well, no, that's not it. What we have to understand is the Talmud is a  collection of opinions. It is not legislation. It is the posing of a question, what should we do  about this? How should we interpret this text and a variety of different rabbis lobbying in their opinions, and all of this is collected in writing. And so, for Christians to read Talmud, it's very  interesting to show us how different experts and different people within Judaism were  thinking, but it's not legislation, it's not law. It's not that because a rabbi says this, that  everybody's doing it. And indeed, the spirit of Judaism is very free about that. You You observe the things that that make sense to you in your worshiping community. So, so that again, is is  an important point, I think. And then, understanding the purity codes, what I mean by the  purity codes is is the legislation in both in in the Bible and the opinions given in Talmud, that  continue to interpret it, about questions of, of ritual purity? And if you read much in Judaism  and in the Old Testament and Leviticus even what are the what are the things in daily life and  in not so daily life that make you incur ritual purity, that impurity, sorry, that, that make a  person unclean. Now, one of them obviously, in the book of Tobit, you get this it's burying the  dead. So that's a very good action, you don't want to not bury the dead. But there's a period  of ritual impurity after that. And so there are certain things that that are defining the bodily  functions. Childbirth, and and childbirth makes a woman in the in the purity code ritually  unclean for a certain number of days, isn't having a baby a good thing? Of course, it is.  There's no question of that. So it's very important when when Christians get into these texts, 

to understand that we're, to, to not associate ritual impurity with anything, like guilt, or sin,  okay? It is simply a way of saying that this action puts us a little bit out of kilter with the rest  of society. And so there, there needs to be a kind of a cooling off period, you know, in the case of the ritual impurity for a woman after childbirth, you know, it's a, it's a downtime you know,  she it is for people who are really seriously observing this, she can't cook for the rest of her  family, somebody else has to cook dinner. So this whole idea of ritual impurity, we need to be  very careful not to think of it as guilt, as somebody has done something wrong, you know, in,  in modern, American, or perhaps European society, I tend to associate it with getting a traffic  ticket, you know, you're driving along and you get a break some traffic law, you get a ticket,  and you have to do something to reinstate yourself, and in this case, is paying a fee. So I find  that it's kind of a similar thing, you know, it's not oh I feel guilty, it's darn, you know, I have to do this thing to sort of reinstate myself with the rest of society. And and so that may be a  helpful way of understanding this. So so what what do we know about Jewish women in this  period, we know that they were very much part of their society. We know that they were living in cities, I'm not talking about women in the Gospel, which is another piece that we'll talk  about later. But for instance, in the Pauline letters, they're living in their society like  everybody else. We use this expression, the diaspora, which means the diaspora really means is sowing of seeds. It's in planting in the process of planting, you know, they would sow the  seeds and then plow it under. So the diaspora is the sowing of the seed. But it's it's an  expression that's used for the way in which Jewish emigrants had moved out of Judea and into all parts of the Roman Empire. We know of a Jewish community way down south in Egypt and  close to us one, the place called Elephantine. We know of large Jewish communities in  cities like Alexandria, in Egypt, in Rome, all over the what we call Asia Minor present day  Turkey. So there are large communities of Jews. And Paul, of course, was coming from Tarsus,  in what is today southern Turkey, and large communities of Jews all over the Roman world.  And they had been there for several centuries, in in most cases. And so Jewish women are  with their Jewish men are living in cities, great Greek and Roman cities, they have  synagogues, they have their places of worship, which may or may not be impressive  buildings, a synagogue, you know, doesn't have to be a building it because the word  sunagoge means assembly. And so it can be in any kind of a building any kind of a room and,  you know, it can be a rented room someplace, because the important thing is that the people  gather for prayer. And I could say something to here about what were called proselytes.  Judaism was open to converts. It was not as far as we can determine an aggressively  missionary religion. But it certainly was open to people who wanted to join the communities.  In the Acts of the Apostles, we have allusion to those who fear God, you're in the synagogue  context, and it will say all the Jews and the God fearers or the way those who fear God, who  those who reverence God depends on what your translation is. And what we think that refers  to is people, men and women who are attending synagogue services. But they're not Jewish,  they have not accepted the ritual for men of circumcision. For both men and women, there  seems to have been a baptismal ritual. So these are people who may be on their way to  becoming Jews, or maybe they're just interested in it, because Judaism was attractive,  because it was monotheistic. And, and it was also this is very interesting. It was one of the  very few religious groups that that brought together, worship and ethics. In other words, it  said, whom to worship, the one true God of Israel. And this is how you are to act, to behave, if you do. And in most cases, most religions in the world that they're, they're in tell you, what  God to worship, and how to worship. But if you want to know how to live, you have to go to  philosophy. And so, in Judaism, because of the, the idea of Covenant Theology, God makes  this covenant with the people and the people and people react, respond is to live according to the law. So, so there was this integration of worship and ethics and way of life, which of  course, then Christianity picked up and got it from from Judaism. So, so women are part of all  of this. And they are, they're living their lives in just a normal way.