Gender: Woman as Property

Some 2,000 years ago, a Hebrew sage named Ben Sira wrote “the birth of a daughter is a loss” and “better is the wickedness of a man than a woman who does good.

Some of “the texts are sometimes nearly devoid of reference to women. 1 Maccabees, for example, refers to women almost exclusively in lists of possessions, usually in descending order, as in “women, children, and cattle” (1 Macc 1:32) or “women, children, and goods” (1 Macc 5:13). There are eight such lists:” (OxfordHandbooks.com).

“Tosefta Berakhot 6:18 teaches in the name of Rabbi Yehuda ben Ilai (mid-2nd c. CE) that every (Jewish) man is obligated to recite three blessings daily. These express gratitude for ones station in life through the negative statements: thank God that I am not a gentile, a woman, or a slave (or in earlier formulations, a boor). This language echoes Greek prayers preserved first by Plato. Especially because this text also appears as a legal dictum in the Babylonian Talmud, Menahot 43b, these blessings, which modern scholars call the “blessings of identity,” gradually became part of the preliminary prayers to the daily morning service. They are found in the earliest preserved Jewish prayer books, from the end of the first millennium, but not yet universally as public prayers” (bc.edu).

“Most American treated married women according to the concept of coverture, a concept inherited from English common law. Under the doctrine of coverture, a woman was legally considered the chattel of her husband, his possession. Any property she might hold before her marriage became her husband’s on her wedding day, and she had no legal right to appear in court, to sign contracts or to do business. Although these formal provisions of the law were sometimes ignored—the wives of tradesmen, for example, might assist in running the family business—married women technically had almost no legal identity” (www.gmu.edu)

"Between the 17th and 19th centuries, divorce was prohibitively expensive. So some lower-class British people didn’t get them—they sold their wives instead. The custom seems outlandish today, but it could be found in public places like markets, taverns and fairs. Historians disagree on when or how the custom started and how widespread it was, but it seems to have been an accepted alternative divorce among lower-class Britons. Wife sales were crude and funny, but they also served a very real purpose since it was so hard to get a divorce” (www.history.com)

In the Thora women are counted among a man’s possessions along with children, slaves, and livestock (e.g., Exodus 20:17; Deuteronomy 5:21).

Thora views on adultery, incest and prostitution provide evidence for the status of women as sexual property. Example David and Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11)

In the Decalogue, although it can be assumed that women were included in the community that was being addressed women are not addressed explicitly.

“Job invokes on himself a series of curses in conditional form: if I have committed such-and-such sin, may some appropriate punishment befall me.” One of these curses involves a reference to adultery. Job cries, “If my heart has been enticed by a woman, and I have lain in wait at my neighbor’s door; then let my wife grind for another, and let other men kneel over her” (Job 31:9-10). From a modern perspective it does not appear that the punishment necessarily fits the crime. Why should Job’s wife be punished for his sin? According to Countryman, this is because “the wife was a form of property; adultery was violation of the property of another and should therefore be punished with violation of one’s own.” Countryman claims that it is this connection with sexual property that places adultery in proximity to theft within the Ten Commandments12 (e.g., Exodus 20:14-15)” (wlu.ca)

Book of proverbs: “Quite a number of times Proverbs uses the phrase “my son.” The phrase “my daughter” does not occur. And the commands in Proverbs are consistently second person masculine, never second person feminine. And the readership of the book of Proverbs is warned to beware of the evil seductress (e.g., Proverbs 5), but the reverse doesn’t occur: never does the book warn women to beware of a male seducer. The authors say living with a contentious woman is terrible, but never say the same about a contentious man (Proverbs 25:24). The book was written to men, not women” (huffpost.com)