Evaluating Traditional Interpretations

Ancient Near Eastern Texts

While it is true that the Hebrew Bible does not mention clay female figurines, other texts from the ancient Near East can be brought to bear on the interpretation of ancient “female” religion.

One very interesting omission is the infrequency of clay figurines in rituals related to gestation, birth, and infant health. Moreover, when clay figurines are involved, they either represent a sorceress, who is assumed to be threatening the expectant mother (Scurlock 2002, 215-23), as in the Mesopotamian corpus, or they are representation of Bes or animals (Borghouts 1971, 12-13; Leitz 1999, 67-71), as in the Egyptian corpus. In fact, the relatively numerous rituals describing complications in pregnancy, delivery, and lactation far prefer other remedies, such as amulets, knots, herbs, and incantations (Scurlock 1991, 137­85; Robins 1993, 78-88; Stol 2000, 35-37).

Furthermore, the ritual texts do not seem to imply that the rituals were relegated to female participants. In other words, no ritual instructions seem to exclude the participation of males. Rather, difficulties with birth, miscarriage, still birth, and deformities seem to have been the concerns of the entire family.

The Near Eastern ritual texts have a number of important implications. First, there appears to be little textual evidence that conception, gestation, birth, or infant health were concerns of women alone. Rather they were the business of the entire family unit. Second, the very fact that Egyptian and Mesopotamian spell literatures describes complications in these processes indicates that these rituals were not wholly relegated to the private purview of the household. Rather, male magico-medical professionals who read, produced, and archived these texts knew a great deal about these problems and were called upon to officiate rituals related to these difficulties. Third, figurines, of whatever iconographic type, were not the most common objects listed in these types of rituals, thus questioning the likelihood that figurines were regularly used for these purposes. Finally, when figurines are mentioned in these types of rituals, they are not “female,” challenging the assumption that figurines depicting female images were more likely to be used by actual females or for ritual interventions in events that disproportionately affected females, like gestation and birth.

In sum, the ancient Near Eastern textual accounts of conception, gestation, birth, and infant mortality rituals challenge modern assumptions that assign these particular elements to “female” concerns and that create a separate sphere of female religion within the household complex that is somehow unrelated to the “public” aspects of ancient Near Eastern religion.

Iconography

Another important facet of the “female piety” argument is the assumption that “female” iconographic depictions uniquely relate to actual females or to concerns assumed to be female. Several depictions of naked females in ancient Near Eastern art of the Late Bronze through Iron II can be used to test whether the “naked female image” is always associated with ancient women or their fertility. In fact, the image crops up in some curious places. For example, naked females of varying types have been discovered on metal equestrian frontlets (Burkert

1992, 16, 18, fig. 2, 20; Winter 2010, 340, 374, fig. 2), and comparable ivory frontlets and blinkers were discovered at Nimrud in ancient Assyria (Orchard 1967, 29, no. 144, pl. 31; Gubel 2005, 126, fig. 14, 129, fig. 17, 130). Frontal naked females, including some holding their breasts, also appear on cylinder seals from a number of periods where the en face position (in contrast with other images in the seals) may indicate a protective or apotropaic function (Aurerbach 1994, 208; Bahrani 2001, 88; 2002, 56-57; Pruß 2010, 127).

1993, 142-43). A unique but comparable seal from the Israelite corpus shows a fully naked female with hands down at her sides and four wings; here, too, the inscription shows the seal was owned by a male (Sass 1993, 233, fig. 142, 236).

The naked female standing en face also occurs on small model shrines and cult stands in the Bronze and Iron Ages. Many of these objects were associated with shrines where, presumably, both males and females would visit (Rowe 1940, 54-55, pls. 17:1-2, 35:2, 56a:3, 57a:1; Keel 1998, 41; Zevit 2001, 331-32, fig. 4.14, 329; Beck 2002, 185, figs. 1-3a, 209, fig. 10; Tadmor 2006, 322; Maeir and Dayagi-Mendels 2007, 111-23, figs. 1-2; Schroer 2007, 430-38; Kletter 2010a, 186-88; 2010b, 40, 42-43). Female images are also occasionally found as parts of temple architecture, for example, a defaced female between two date palms carved in stone blocks from Tell al-Rimah (Howard-Carter 1983, 64-72) or the Hathor columns from Egypt and the Levant (Rothenberg 1972, 130, 151, fig. 78; Schroer 2007, 442-43). Large female images occur in other public space as well, such as the Carchemish orthostat from the Herald’s Wall, which may have comprised part of the inner defenses of the fortress (Winter 2010, 375 fig. 3), and the large female basalt statue guarding the entrance to the ninth century palace at Halaf (Oppenheim 1931, 121). Some consider the Caryatids a later manifestation of the same Near Eastern practice (Mylonas Shear 1999, 65-85).

It is doubtful that the female images from Carchemish or Halaf were used solely by women to invoke fertility. The same could be said for females on equestrian objects and on seals owned by males.

To be even more specific, this range of female images has direct bearing on interpretations of small-scale naked female figurines. No one would be so simple as to claim that the naked female on the Herald's wall and the standing female at Halaf were used by women to induce fertility or lactation. The scale and setting of the images preclude this interpretation; however, this same assumption is typically applied to small female figurines, in large part because the figurines have breasts. As contemporaneous Near Eastern iconographic depictions of the naked female make clear, the presumed connection between “female” iconography and actual ancient females remains unsound. Thus, to undergird any hypothesized connection between naked female figurines and women's practice, further data must be taken into consideration, particularly the archaeological context of the figurines.

Jerusalem Archaeology

The archaeological data also problematize many of the traditional interpretations. Turning to Jerusalem, where over five hundred JPF fragments have been found, the city lies in the center and along the eastern border of Judah, the southern kingdom of Israel. Domestic buildings and public buildings have been found on the southeastern hill, as well as on the southwestern hill and a few other areas throughout the modern city. The following analysis will focus on the buildings on the southeastern hill.

The southeastern hill, or the “City of David,” is the largest neighborhood uncovered in the ancient city. It was excavated by Kathleen Kenyon from 1961 — 1967, Yigal Shiloh from 1978-1985, and most recently by Eilat Mazar.

The archaeological data from Shiloh's excavations of Jerusalem's southeastern hill do not strongly support a close association between the figurines and ancient females. First, the figurines are not solely associated with spaces some interpreters connect with women's work in the domestic unit (e.g., Meyers 2013, 128-35), such as food preparation areas (Darby 2014, 180). Part of the problem is identifying room function in structures that have been abandoned (Schiffer 1987), as is the case in the majority of Iron Age domestic contexts, including those in the City of David. Another significant impediment is the portability of objects that might indicate women's activity areas, suggesting that tasks could be performed in any of the rooms in the domestic unit, collectively in a neighborhood house, or outside of the domestic spaces entirely. The fundamental ambiguity of most of the data must be taken seriously before archaeological inferences are drawn, especially when engendering household spaces or artifacts (Gero 2007). What structures in the City of David indicate (Darby 2014, 452-53) is that JPFs on the southeastern hill of Jerusalem are found throughout domestic units in lanes, floors, cisterns, pits, and, in Area G, even in toilets, indicating random disposal throughout neighborhoods with little meaningful correlation to particular activity areas (table 1).

Second, figurines are not found in any strong correlation with objects that some modern interpreters have connected with ancient female work, such as ground stones or loom weights (e.g., Meyers 2013, 128-35). For example, figurines on floors from Area E on the southeastern hill occur more frequently with inscribed handles than with either ground stones or loom weights, and the most meaningful correlation between artifacts and JPFs is with zoomorphic fragments (fig. 4). Again, most of these objects, even those on floors, seem to have been recovered in disposal contexts, weakening any conclusions that might be based upon their archaeological context.

What the archaeological data from the southeastern hill suggest is that, at least in Jerusalem where the majority of figurines have been found, no strong archaeological evidence supports the assumption that the figurines were used solely by women. In fact, the only way to make the Jerusalem data undergird the association between JPFs and women is to assume that all objects in domestic units were associated primarily with females. Even if such a problematic assumption were valid, figurine fragments have been found in construction fills and external neighborhood areas, activities and spaces that are certainly not limited to females. Moreover, the presence of JPFs in public spaces, like the

Table 1. Locus types with pillar figurines in east, west, south, and north in strata 12-10 in Shiloh's excavations

figurines found on the streets outside of Jerusalem city walls (Steiner 1990, 51­57; Avigad and Geva 2000, 63; Darby 2014, 121-28, 228), makes it impossible to rule out the likelihood that males came into contact with and/or used the objects as well. Thus, the archaeological contexts from the southeastern hill do not rule out the possibility that women used JPFs, but the data do not serve as strong evidence for a unique connection between JPFs and females.