Talk:Hebrew Bible views on women

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Articles for deletion This article was nominated for deletion in the past. The result of the discussion was keep.

I rather like the draft intro.Ark30inf

Title? How about women in the Old Testament (ie, is testamentical even an adjective??)
Too general. How about Attitudes toward women in the Old Testament? -- Daran

Thanks. I think Attitudes... is an ok name but we want to capture the views of the authors of the Old Testament's books AND how those same views have been read by various Christian groups and so on. Naming this one is hard. BL 23:22, 26 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Christian attitudes toward women are informed by more than just the OT. I think you should decide whether the piece is to be about OT attitudes, or current Christian attitudes, and title the article accordingly. Or write two articles. -- Daran 14:51, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Or Old Testament views of women? Has the word testamentical ever been used before? Michael Hardy 00:02, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)

google - 38 times
That is no authority. -- Daran 14:51, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Why even call it the "Old Testament"? This is, at the most basic, biased.

Hemhem20X6 22:07. PST, Feb 15, 2006

Why not call it: The ((Tanakh))'s veiw on women?

Hem hem 16:33, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

The Tanakh page contains the text "some scholars prefer Hebrew Bible as a term that covers the commonality of Tanakh and the Old Testament while avoiding sectarian bias." A similar note is at the top of the Old Testament page. Using "Hebrew Bible" would eliminate both both the bias of referring to it as "Old Testament" and the bias of referring to it as "Tanakh". I'm not convinced the bias is major enough to require action, but that solution is probably better than changing to a different bias. The remaining question - would it be found? GRBerry 02:25, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Agree that "Old Testament" is a POV-biased title and using "Hebrew Bible" may be more appropriate than a Hebrew term as the main title for a NPOV English edition of Wikipedia. "Tanakh" and "Old Testament" could be used as synonyms to aid searches as long as there is language clarifying that these terms represent distinctively Jewish/Christian (respectively) points of view. --Shirahadasha 05:20, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

I do agree to that. Hem hem 09:17, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia shouldn't be theorizing about or reconstructing an "Old Testament" view of women, it should be quoting people who done so, and quoting them non-selectively. Imposing "a" unitary view on a Scripture is imposing a point of view: first, the point of view that that Scripture has a single view, rather than contradicting itself, and secondly, what that view (or rather, those views) might be. This can only be accomplished neutrally by attributing points of view, rather than by "winging it" by picking out random quotes and depicting them as exemplars of a single "view". Somehow I don't think Wikipedia is capable of accomplishing this: certainly an introduction

In the scripture known as the Old Testament to Christians, as the Torah to Jews and as the Qu'ran to Muslims

that appears to think that the Qu'ran and the Old Testament are identical, that the Tanakh and the Torah are identical, that the Torah and the Old Testament are identical, and that the Torah and the Qu'ran are identical, does not bode well for the endeavor. -- Someone else 00:37, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)

The hope is that a Jew and a Muslim will come around and replace Torah and Qu'ran with the exact title they refer the Old Testament with. :-) I think the quotes are a good starting point and you don't have to look hard to find literally thousands of different interpretations for each and every quote. BL 01:04, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)

There are significant commonalities between Torah and the Christian Old Testament; the Koran is a completely separate book. This is like saying "the city known as Constantinople to the Greeks, Istanbul to the Turks, and Marseilles to the French." Furthermore, someone who calls it Torah and someone who calls it the Old Testament are looking at it very differently.Vicki Rosenzweig 01:16, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)
So what is the Old Testament in Islam and Judaism? I can't believe it's called the "Old Testament" by them - it would be way to simple. :-) BL 04:34, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Followers of Islam are perfectly content to refer to "The Bible". The "distinction" between testaments is not terribly important to them, but they are also perfectly content to refer (in English, anyway), to the "Old Testament" when the need for a distinction arises. But it ain't the Koran, and it ain't the Qu'ran. See Tanakh for your Judaism question. As I said above I rather doubt that compiling Bible verses with interpretations by Wikipedians is going to result in a decent article here: until that decent article arises, proving me wrong, I think it's only fair to note the factual and methodological errors in a warning at the head of it. The "story" of Lilith by the way doesn't appear in the Bible, the Old Testament, the Torah, the apocrypha, or the Tanakh. It's a medieval legend based on a midrashic elaboration on Isaiah 34:14. -- Someone else 04:56, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Think of it like this way, you have an article called "Current Jewish attitudes towards Palestinians" then "Current Jewish attitudes towards women" then "Jewish attitudes towards woman as they were 2500 years ago" and you have this article. BL 07:57, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Such articles, if they were to exist, would very likely be worthless. Choices on what to include in an article called ""X" views on "Y"' are very, very, very, very, very subjective. --Someone else 08:03, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Such articles are a dime a dozen. See xxx and anti-Semitism etc, etc. And there's alot written about what the Old Testament says about women. And in this case "X" consists of only about 1000 pages so there is no need to be selective. BL 08:33, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Yup, a dime a dozen. And over-priced at that.-- Someone else 08:37, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] From VfD

  • Old Testament views on women, Old Testamentical views of women: not improved by being moved from Christian views of women, mentioned above, with which it shares numerous factual errors. Shows little promise of ever being anything but a point-of-view essay. -- Someone else 06:22, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)
    • The article is very far from Wikipedia standards at the moment and at least one of its authors (I didn't check the history) really does not know what he/she is talking about. However, I would have thought that this is cause for fixing the article rather than deleting it. There are issues here there are not properly covered elsewhere. --zero 07:45, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)
      • There's nothing salvagable here, as far as I can see. If there is an article worth having on this subject, it's more likely arrived at from a blank slate than from this mess. --Someone else 08:08, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)
    • Keep. Comprare with the history of Jews in the New Testament - it'll get there eventually. Martin 18:16, 28 Sep 2003 (UTC)
    • Keep, I think. This at least has the potential of being a workable title. -- Jake 20:05, 29 Sep 2003 (UTC)
    • I think the trouble here is that trying to make a NPOV article. This is not NPOV- This is the Old Testament's view. Wikipedia should try and make things as NPOV as possible, but it's no use rewriting history to do so. -Adrian.

[edit] Attempt to improve

I've attempted to improve the very first section, (while accidentally masquerading as 207.236.234.180), largely by removing the references to Lilith (who is not a feature of the Old Testament), and adding in a much more significant reference in Genesis. I will try to improve further sections as time permits, which may not be very often. I will also try to look at Christian views of women. However I'm not a biblical scholar, especially Old Testament, so any other scholarly input would be appreciated. DJ Clayworth 18:14, 6 Oct 2003 (UTC)


First draft done. Feedback welcome. I was also bold enough to remove the dispute notice. DJ Clayworth 03:51, 7 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Nice work! I was the orginator of the article, but I must admit that the topic was way over my head. BL 02:30, 8 Oct 2003 (UTC)


There's been improvement, but it's still not neutral and it's still methologically flawed, with little reference to scholars, preferring the interpretaions of anonymous writers. So let's keep the warning up a little longer. -- Someone else 02:42, 8 Oct 2003 (UTC)


What is it about the article you think is not neutral? DJ Clayworth 18:03, 8 Oct 2003 (UTC)
As an example, note that the stories about Eve in the creation sequence in Genesis play a much larger role in the Christian world than they do in the Jewish world. Judiasm does not extract the same theological implications from these narratives that Christianity does, and does not give them the same level of influence. There is no single view of these narratives common to Judaism and Christianity, and there of course many viewpoints within each. --Shirahadasha 05:28, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

DJ, thanks for the invite here, I've taken a look at the article and I have to ask, what is it we (Wiki writers) wish to accomplish here? I ask this because from the start we have an issue, and that is, the thesis of this article is, in my view, incorrect. To quote:

This article concerns the laws, customs and practices described in the Old Testament regarding women. These formed the norm of Jewish society from around the time of the Exodus to around the destruction of the second temple in 70CE.

The problem is that the priests who wrote the Old Testament were not normative in their behavior or their writings, as least from the time we can find archeological evidence of the Israelis. They were the extreme edge of a monotheistic strain of religion in an area that was more pluralistic in religious practice than the priests cared for. The presence of "Asherah" icons and statements like "Yahweh and his Asherah" show that the time and place of the Old Testament was one of cultural pluralism; the reason we place so much emphasis on the one point of view depicted in the Old Testament is that the priests "won" the war of history, so to speak. Their views survived.

  • There are those that are currently striving to revive those other views, because some of those people think that those views have merit. Ever heard of Judeo-Paganism? I'll bet you a buck or two you haven't. Rickyrab 18:19, 15 Oct 2003 (UTC)
    • To be blunt Ricky, if all the Judeo-Pagans are as egoistic about their new catch-phrase as you are, the only way I'll encounter one is if I have to gun the son of a biscuit eater down for tresspassing. It's nice you think you invented the study of Canaanite history. I'm really "impressed". I guess people like Alt and Wellhausen, Friedman and Campbell never existed. And Frank Cross, who actually reads the languages and works at a joint called Harvard, I guess he doesn't count either. Dwmyers 18:21, 16 Oct 2003 (UTC)

So let me ask: do we want to talk about the place and views of women as expressed by this document, by possible deconstructions of this document, or is this a history piece of the region using the Old Testament as one of the tools to describe the role and place of women in ancient Israel and Judah?

If it's more historical than pure narrative interpretation, then we should talk about the Canaanite religion of the area and how they treat women, we perhaps should include the views of some feminist scholars that Israelis had attitudes more in line with the "iron bearing invaders" of the region (I'm not sure archeology supports this as much anymore, but it can be mentioned) and then internal and external evidence that polytheism was alive and well in Israel, at least through the reign of King Josiah, should be mentioned as well. With these kinds of details as background, then we can describe the views of the Old Testament with regards to women (and a reference does need to be made to Harold Bloom's work in The Book of J as his assertion is that the J document is written by a woman).

If the focus is the narrative view of the Old Testament, then we can normalize it by talking about the caveats, pointing out that the Old Testament does have a point of view and that perhaps it is not the sole view of the inhabitants of Palestine of the time. In other words, build the background and then launch into the story of the OT's view of women. I think by doing so we can get closer to a neutral POV. The background can keep historians and mythologists happy and the narrative middle can deal with the orthodox interpretation of the OT narrative. Dwmyers 15:55, 14 Oct 2003 (UTC)


Thanks for coming here Dwmyers. I don't myself have a definite idea of what should go here. I got involved because the original article was just a collection of out-of-context quotes, plus some stuff about Lilith.

My intention was to write an article explaining what the OT said about the role and status of women, surrounding it with as much historical context as necessary to understand what is said, and try to say something the mind-set that contemporary readers would bring. I was forced to treat the document as a

I don't understand why this is a separate article, rather than a section within the already-existing article Hebrew Bible.--Nycteacher 20:21, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] introduction

The introduction reads like an essay, and is not easily verifiable. It needs to be amended. Rintrah 19:14, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

Actually, nevermind. I need to go to bed. Rintrah 19:24, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] What a Mess

I'm tempted to put this article up for deletion, no offence to all who have worked on it. The entire text is more interpretive than reference oriented. As others have noted, it is significantly biased in POV, detail, and even the entry title. So much so that I can't even get a handle on where to begin to correct it. I originally came to the page to do copy-editing but was discouraged from attempting it because of basic faults I see in it. It is entirely original research as well. I'm putting it on my watchlist and will try to come back to it. Sorry to be such a downer. --Pigman 21:34, 9 November 2006 (UTC) (Argh! Since I got a satellite hookup a couple of days ago, I keep getting signed out of my Wikipedia account without warning. Not a vandal, not anonymous. You may see my sig twice here. Pigman (talk • contribs) --Pigman (talk • contribs) 21:41, 9 November 2006 (UTC))

[edit] I agree with Pigman, Someone else and Dwmyers...

If after three years it still doesn't 'cut the mustard' then it is time for deletion. So nominated. Shir-El too 13:29, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Separating "Hebrew Bible" from Interpretation

As written this article presumes a certain view of women is inherent in the Hebrew Bible, versus the meaning overlaid on the text by various hermeneutics. For example, the interpretation of the Adam/Eve creation story would likely be very different for an early Talmud scholar than it would be for a modern day feminist Hebrew Bible scholar.

I suspect this article was originally conceived as a place to provide information on modern, feminist-friendly critiques of the Hebrew Bible. If that's the case I suggest renaming it to something like Modern Feminist Critique of the Hebrew Bible, which is a much more managable scope for an article than attempting to critique the Hebrew Bible from all perspectives. Also, that modified scope seems appropriate for an encyclopedia. RainbowCrane | Talk 19:40, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

There was no consensus to move this page through the discussion you initiated, but you might want to try a WP:BOLD move yourself. I'd advise against colons to denote qualifiers in the title - parentheses are better, per our naming conventions. Dekimasuよ! 11:47, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Stubbed

The article has been turned into a stub to remove as much of the original research and POV problems as possible, in accordance with the comments on this talk page over the past 2 months or so, as well as the comments in the AfD discussion. Feel free to expand the article, but please stick to the core policies of neutrality and verifiability when you do so. --Darkwind (talk) 00:55, 27 October 2007 (UTC)