Aseneth and Women’s Religious Experience in Antiquity
If we understand “religious experience” to refer to personal encounters with the transcendent realm, then the characterization of Aseneth offers little, if anything, about the religious experiences of “actual” women in antiquity.
Aseneth’s encounter with the angelic figure equates her with Joseph in greatness and has little to do with reflecting real experiences of the audience. If we understand “religious experience” as the “committed participation in... institutions, rituals, values and worldview [that provide] participants with an overall structure of meaning,”[154] then Joseph and Aseneth does prescribe guidelines for living out its vision of religious experience. Aseneth, however, is not the only character who follows these rules, and Joseph and Aseneth’s instructions are directed to both women and men. The only way that Aseneth serves as a model for the audience is precisely when she makes decisions according to these prescriptions. As is the case with how Greek novels portray their protagonists, Aseneth’s words and actions underline and confirm social structures that Joseph and Aseneth promotes. Certainly the heroine in Greek novels is more contained than the hero; she reacts more than she initiates action, and Aseneth’s need to have God destroy the weapons aimed at her is a case in point. Nevertheless, “actual” women from antiquity may have understood Aseneth as actively engaged in socially appropriate, yet extraordinary ways.I have argued elsewhere that Joseph and Aseneth depicts the couple, Joseph and Aseneth, in an “epic past” for Jewish audiences in Egypt, and in particular, Joseph and Aseneth portrays its protagonists in ways that are reminiscent of Ptolemaic representations of royalty.[155] Joseph and Aseneth’s depiction of Aseneth’s greatness, then, may have been influenced by perceptions of the politically influential queens in Ptolemaic Egypt.[156] But, even if I am right about the royal depiction of Aseneth, Joseph and Ase- neth’s presentation of her may say more about the well-deserved union between Aseneth and Joseph and this couple’s contribution to the Egyptian past than it indicates anything about “actual” women.
At best, Aseneth and Joseph may convey something similar to what the protagonists in Greek novels convey. Joseph and Aseneth confirms the value of marriage between nobility and enlists female and male audiences to invest in this worthy cause. For Joseph and Aseneth, the partners of a legitimate marriage must only revere the God Most High, and devotion to this deity also includes refraining from retaliatory actions against others, even one’s own kin. In other Greek novels, epuy is a dominant element of persuasion for noble marriage, but in Joseph and Aseneth, devotion to the God Most High provides the only way for reciprocal passion to flourish. What is perhaps most interesting is that Joseph and Aseneth’s vision of marriage does not simply preserve the social structure of the polis, but it is attributed to the success of a civilization.Works Cited
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