A History of the Wife Read Online Free PDF Page A

and quite a number of chil- dren. Since sons represented the ultimate good in biblical households, the wives competed with each other in producing male offspring. First Leah, the least loved, was compensated by the birth of three sons, and Rachel, who remained barren, became jealous of her sister. So she said to Jacob: “Here is my slavegirl Bilhah. Come to bed with her, that she may give birth on my knees, so that I, too, shall be built up through her” (Gen. 30:3). Placing the baby on her knees after its birth indicated adoption.
    The competition between wives was intensified by the use of man- drakes, plants thought to have magical aphrodisiac and fertility- promoting properties. With the help of these plants, Leah continued to produce more sons and a daughter, and Rachel, finally, gave birth to a son. Jacob was now the father of a miniature tribe. This story illustrates the fierce rivalries between wives living in a society that valued married
    women primarily as the mothers of sons. And like the story of Sarah, Abraham, and Hagar, it illuminates the role of female “outsiders” within Hebrew households—Egyptian slave girls, for example, whose bodies facilitated the very existence of Hebrew families.
    The Hebrew Bible has a rich cast of spouses performing many varia- tions on marital themes. One of my favorites is the terse interchange between Job and his wife, after Job had been laid low by God. Having lost all his sons and daughters, his servants and animals, then afflicted with boils from head to toe, Job sat down among the ashes and accepted the will of God. But not his wife, as the following verses show.

    “Then said his wife unto him. Dost thou still retain thine integrity?
    Curse God, and die.”
    But he said unto her, “Thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh. What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?” In all this did not Job sin with his lips ( Job 2:9).

    We hear the bitter voice of the wife and mother, overwhelmed by sorrow and unforgiving of a God deemed responsible for the death of her children. In the Bible, she is described as “one of the foolish women” who cannot bear up to suffering. Job, on the other hand, resists despair—at least initially. Their interchange draws from an antique Mediterranean tradition in which wives were often seen as fool- ish: caught up in the grief of their losses, insolent to indifferent gods, they were presumably unable to see the “larger picture,” be it political or metaphysical. Like the Greek queen Clytemnestra who never stopped blaming Agamemnon for the sacrifice of their daughter Iphige- nia, Job’s wife had no compunctions about cursing the God who had taken away her children. Whatever the prescriptions about wifely obe- dience, wives obviously opposed their husbands in the privacy of their homes, and even opposed the supreme patriarch—God Himself.
    Men are supposed to be more steadfast. Though Job experiences grave psychological anguish and questions God’s justice, he never suc- cumbs to blasphemy. In the end God rewards him with “twice as much as he had before” ( Job 42:10). At this point the narrator does not deign to mention Job’s wife.
    In contrast to Job’s wife and certain other negative models, a picture of the ideal wife is presented in the final section of Proverbs. It is clearly
    written from the male point of view, beginning misogynistically with the notion that a good woman is hard to find and rising to a wifely encomium unique in all the Bible.

    Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her . . .
    She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life.
    She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands. She is like the merchants’ ships; she bringeth her food from afar. She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her house-
    hold, and a portion to her maidens. . . . She