Dance and Gender in Ancient Jewish Sources

Abstract

Dance is often represented in ancient texts and iconography as an activity in which the two genders have specific, defined roles. In ancient Hebrew there are even different terms to denote men's dance and women's dance. Does this mean that the term itself is gendered and it merely describes in different words the same thing when men perform and when women perform, or does it also suggest that there was a formal distinction between the way men danced and the way women did? The author suggests that the distinction was one of strictly delineated gender differences in the dance.