**1. What Does Traditional Scholarship Look Like?**

Only in the past four decades have women populated scholarly reconstructions of ancient Israel life, whether religious, or historical, or anything else. And this is not to say that in the past forty years, women have been included in all reconstructions of Israel's past. It has been surprisingly easy, for example, for (male) biblical scholars and archaeologists to write about "daily life"—the quotidian responsibilities upon which all of life's grand activities are predicated—and to exclude women (Nakhai 2005). One has to wonder who they thought was doing all that work. As easy as it has been to exclude Israelite women when discussing the responsibilities and chores of daily life, easier still has it been to exclude their active role in Israelite religion (Nakhai 2007). This point is particularly critical because there is, in many people's eyes, a direct link between the religion of ancient Israel and modern-day Judaism and Christianity; therefore, reconstructions of women's roles in biblical antiquity have influenced expectations for women's roles in contemporary society.<sup>1</sup>

What accounts for the unduly limited attention that traditional scholarship has paid to religious ritual and belief as experienced by Israelite women? This question must be answered in the first place by stressing that it is not correct to assume—as scholars have traditionally done—that women did not matter in ancient religion. As it turns out, the near-absence of women in the Bible is not because women had no religious lives, but rather because women were not players within the monarchical, prophetic, priestly, scribal, and other dominant communities that crafted the demonstrably androcentric Bible.2 However, the narrow lens of the Hebrew Bible has been, until recent decades, the primary lens through which scholars have engaged with Israelite religion.

Who, we next ask, are the scholars who so misrepresented the roles of women in Israelite religion? Whether priests, ministers, rabbis, or professors, whether seminary-educated or university-trained, they have generally been men who owed their intellectual heritage to that long line of male scholars who began writing sacred text in Israel's Iron Age and who have been interpreting it ever since. Just as men monopolized religious leadership from ancient times to modernity, so too have men dominated the study of ancient Israel and its religion. Like biblical scholars, archaeologists (who have often held theological degree), have typically focused on bastions of male authority and elite governance, choosing to excavate palaces and temples, city walls and gates. In short, the exclusion of Israelite women as a topic of scholarly study has been, albeit unwittingly, predicated upon a belief system that has supported male privilege and suppressed women's agency, meaning that the biases of the past have been perpetuated in the present.

What, then, have such reconstructions of Israelite religion looked like? They have been, in short, androcentric, favoring men, the Temple and its priests, the Jerusalem royalty, and other elites.3 They have accepted the biblical trope that vilifies the practice of community and private religion and as they do so, they have perpetuated the erasure of women from the story of Israel.<sup>4</sup> The cumulative impact of these factors upon the reconstruction of women's roles in ancient Israelite religion is clear. The marginalization of women's roles in ancient religion has served to validate the marginalization of women throughout the millennia.
