Procreation, Production, and Protection: Male-Female Balance in Early Israel

Abstract

In recent years there has been a growing reawakening to the necessity for dealing with ancient Israel as a community, as a social entity the concerns of which are reflected-sometimes dimly and other times sharplyin the writings of the Hebrew Bible. Decades have passed since Max Weber first established the value of a social history of Israel with its accompanying insights into the socio-economic factors affecting various aspects of Israel's emergence and development. While political and literary factors continue to be seen as important in understanding the biblical period, patterns of social organization and of economic realities have become accentuated in the search for a comprehensive picture of Israelite life and beliefs (e.g., Mendenhall, 1962; Gottwald and Frick, 1976; Gottwald, 1979).1 Emerging from the absorbing but limiting concerns of theological or historical or literary studies, the quest for penetration into the mystery of Israelite beginnings and survivals has benefited from a great variety of twentieth-century scholarship produced by the social sciences, sociology and anthropology in particular. Descriptions of groups such as tribes, with their class and family subdivisions and their characteristic uses of leadership and available resources, have been enormously helpful in allowing