A Woman's Place is in the House: Royal Women of Judah and Their Involvement in the House of David (review)

Abstract

A Woman's Place is in the House: Royal Women of Judah and Their Involvement in the House of David, by Elna K. Solvang. Journal for the Study of Old Testament Supplement Series, 349. London and New York: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003. 196 pp. $100.00. This study seeks to explore the roles and functions of the royal women of Judah as presented in the Hebrew Bible, focusing primarily on the books of Samuel and Kings. An introductory discussion, locating the thrust of the work in its immediate scholarly context, is followed in chapter 1 by an overview of the roles and positions of royal women in the ancient Near East, taking in a range of material which includes Egyptian, Sumerian, Akkadian, and Ugaritic texts. As is well known, many of the titles ascribed to ancient Near Eastern royal women are relationally passive, that is, they define a royal woman in terms of her relationship to the monarch (for example, mother of the king, wife of the king). However, in examining the titles and functions of many of these royal women, Solvang is keen to emphasize their active roles within the monarchy in the particular arenas of political and social access, industry in the royal household, service to the kingdom, dynasty, and cult. The second chapter, entitled Women's Place in the House, offers a cogent critique of the term harem, a label employed in scholarly discussions of the roles and positions of women in royal households. Solvang demonstrates the various ways in which this label-which is argued to have no technical equivalent in the pertinent ancient languages-is misused within scholarship. Its common application to groups of royal women renders them restricted and powerless figures in its evocation of images of a collection of women retained for the sexual pleasure of the king locked in a section of the palace accessible only to the king and guarded by eunuchs (p. 51). Rather, the women of royal households were all those for whom the king was responsible, including unmarried sisters, female dignitaries inherited from preceding royal households, and high status women of defeated enemies, as well as those sexually connected with the king. Among them, these women were responsible for a range of administrative, diplomatic, and cultic duties, and as such, Solving argues, are better understood as hierarchically organized female functionaries (p. 65) of the royal household. Chapter 3 marks the beginning of the second part of the study, in which the biblical material forms the primary focus. The types and titles of biblical royal women are briefly examined and assessed in this chapter, along with the information presented in the regnal notices of the so-called Deuteronomistic History. …