**4. Final Thoughts**

The fact that the stories of these women, and others as well, appear in the Bible demonstrates that women in at least some Israelite communities fulfilled meaningful religious functions. That there are so few of these stories speaks to the androcentric biases of the biblical authors, editors, and redactors. That so little has been known about women, including information about their religious beliefs and behaviors, can be attributed both to the androcentric nature of the Hebrew Bible and to the enthusiasm with which this androcentrism has been embraced by male scholarship over the millennia. Archaeology has become an invaluable resource for reconstructing the lives of women and examining their religious behaviors. The relationship between the Bible and archaeology is two-way. That is, evidence from each explicates otherwise obscure passages or realia in the other; taken together, they expand our ideas about what was possible, and about what was. The scholarly biases of the past are now being contested by female scholars—and by their likeminded male colleagues—who together strive to develop reconstructions of ancient Israelite religion that highlight both its inclusivity and its diversity.

**Acknowledgments:** My thanks to Avi Faust for inviting me to contribute to this special issue. Thanks, too, to the two anonymous reviewers whose thoughtful comments helped to improve the paper. A version of this paper was presented at the 2018 annual meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

#### **References**


© 2019 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
