**2. Now: What Does Contemporary Scholarship Look Like?**

As is well documented, it is women who most often engage in gender-related discussions, whether they are advocating for gender equity in the workplace and at home, or reconstructing the lives of

<sup>1</sup> For a discussion of the negative consequences of this approach, as found in European (primarily German) biblical scholarship, see Albertz (1994, pp. 1–17).

<sup>2</sup> For the challenges faced when utilizing the Hebrew Bible to reconstruct the lives of Iron Age women, see Nakhai (2007, 2018a, pp. 195–99).

<sup>3</sup> Ismar J. Peritz's 1898 article, "Women in the Ancient Hebrew Cult," is a rare exception. Peritz (1898) endeavored to identify every biblical reference to women's religious activities. He considered women's participation in religion to have been legitimate, and he criticized those scholars who dismissed women's agency in cultic and ritual matters.

<sup>4</sup> Two examples make the point. William F. Albright, the "father of biblical archaeology," included nothing whatsoever about women's religious practices or beliefs in his highly influential *Archaeology and the Religion of Israel* (Albright 1942). In his classic study, *Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions*, Roland de Vaux restricted his consideration of women to only a few biblically determined social categories: wife, divorcée, widow, and slave (de Vaux 1961).

women in antiquity.<sup>5</sup> Change is afoot, though, since in the twenty-first century, men have begun to join women in the study of ancient women. Our brief overview of scholarship on women in Israelite religion looks at the 1970s and beyond, the decades in which women began their assault on what had been male hegemony over the study of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.6 Feminist biblical scholars have engaged in a two-pronged approach: identifying women in scripture and amplifying their voices, and challenging the notion of male dominance and patriarchy to the exclusion of women's authority and agency. Among the first were Trible (1973, 1979, 1984) and Bird (1974, 1987); other important contributions soon followed (see, *inter alia*, Bal 1989; articles in Day 1989b; Exum 1993; Newsom and Ringe 1992; Brenner 1993 and subsequent volumes; Meyers 2000).7

What about the archaeological contribution? Already in 1984, Conkey and Spector (1984) had published "Archaeology and the Study of Gender," which systematically addressed the subject of gender within the field of archaeology. Several years later, Carol Meyers published *Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context*, integrating archaeology with biblical studies in its reconstruction of women's lives; spiritual and ritual dimensions were among the topics explored (Meyers 1988, 2005, 2012). In 1997, Conkey and Gero (1997) emphasized the "the centrality of feminist thought" to all aspects of archaeological method and theory, and discussed an "explosion of literature on archaeological gender" (p. 413). In the study of ancient Israel, and especially of Israelite religion, there is now some sense of this "centrality"—but even now, one would be hard-pressed to experience the "explosion."

Archaeological data is not curated. Material culture, the remnants of myriad lives lived, has an unpredictable quality. It does not "speak" to reality; rather, it reflects realities that otherwise remain unseen. Inanimate objects require archaeologists to give them voice and this means that, just as occurs with ancient texts, the physical past can be misunderstood. That said, archaeologists have begun to alter our understanding of women's religious beliefs and ritual practices. Their "discovery" of Israelite women has gone hand-in-hand with their "discovery" of non-elite men and rural communities; recently, attention is being paid to children, as well (Garroway 2014, 2018). Evidence for these groups is best revealed through household, family, or domestic archaeology (see, *inter alia*, Daviau 1993; Albertz 1994; Hardin 2010; articles in Yasur-Landau et al. 2011; Dever 2012; see also Perdue et al. 1997).<sup>8</sup> As it turns out, women's household tasks and responsibilities are made evident, and so, too, are their acts of domestic piety. It is in the domestic sphere that women's agency, whether practical or spiritual, was most clearly articulated—and is now being illuminated through recourse to artifactual and architectural remains (see, *inter alia*, van der Toorn 1994, 1996; Daviau 2001; articles in Bodel and Olyan 2008; Meyers 2010; Albertz and Schmitt 2012; articles in Albertz et al. 2014).
