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" The Agency of Daughters in the Hebrew Bible "
Ortiz-Roberts, C. Alixxandr
Brody, Aaron
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1107734
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| Doc. No
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TLpq2454705844
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| Main Entry
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Brody, Aaron
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Ortiz-Roberts, C. Alixxandr
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| Title & Author
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The Agency of Daughters in the Hebrew Bible\ Ortiz-Roberts, C. AlixxandrBrody, Aaron
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| College
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Graduate Theological Union
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| Date
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2020
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| student score
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2020
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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268
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| Abstract
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Through the lens of childist criticism, this dissertation demonstrates that the agency of daughters in the Hebrew Bible can be discerned from texts written without explicit consideration of daughters in and of themselves. Recognizing limitations inherent in projects that rely solely on the biblical Hebrew texts to analyze “biblical Israel,” this dissertation brings together textual, archaeological, anthropological, and epigraphic evidence from first millennium BCE Southern Levant; modern ethnographic studies; agency studies; and neurobiology and behavioral science to understand biblical daughters as they live as characters in the storyworld of the Hebrew Bible, and to a lesser extent the daughters of early Israel. This dissertation asks: how are daughters characterized in the Hebrew Bible, and how does this construction reflect actual daughters in the ancient world? How are daughters’ lives independent from the goals of the narrative and from cultural expectations of early Israelite daughters? What type of agency do biblical and Israelite daughters exert, and how effective are they at realizing their goals? Agents exercise agencies of obedience, disobedience, and agencies of risk. Agents are influenced by internal factors such as self-perception, risk tolerance, social age, cognizant ability, and a cost-benefit analysis balancing the risk and reward of action or inaction. External factors including the agent’s real or perceived personhood as an agent-in-society; the temporal aspect of agentic circumstances; environmental factors including available resources; and the influence of other agents who support or oppose their agentic goals. Infants exercise no agency; young children exercise inconsequential agency; while adolescents have the capacity and willingness toward effective agency. Biblical daughters regularly defy the perception of weakness, subservience, and blind obedience often claimed in secondary literature. Far from “damsels in distress,” biblical daughters and their Israelite counterparts have the same range of characteristics available to them as their modern daughters. We can concede that in cultures that privileged boys over girls, male adolescents had more risk-opportunity. But we cannot assume that adolescent females did not take risks. We should be unsurprised daughters in early Israel “talked back” to their parents. We should be equally surprised that in the Hebrew Bible they do not.
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Ancient history
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Biblical studies
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Cultural anthropology
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