Treatment of women in the ancient near-east

by DRAGONxOFxTHExWEST

I recently read a magazine from National Geographic called "Women in the Bible" which discussed not only prominent women in the bible but also the roles and statuses of women during biblical times. Throughout the magazine, the author stated that, despite being extremely poor by our standards, women were treated far better by jews and early Christians compared to their contemporaries. Is there any truth to this claim? Did this change over time? (I assume it would since this is such a huge period of time)

Khanahar

tl;dr: A high-status Roman woman had rights generally in excess of an equivalent Jewish woman, but an average Roman woman had rights considerably inferior to an average Jewish woman.

Roman society was divided along many lines. One of these was gender: women were treated worse than men. But the most important divisions were of basic social belonging, a pyramid on which Roman citizens resided at the top, with freedmen and peregrines below them, and slaves at the bottom. Furthermore, it really mattered which "family" you belonged to. (NB: in Roman law, the term "family" was more concerned with economics than blood, and which included everything under the power of a pater famlias or "father of the family").

This all interacted in sometimes complicated ways. A woman of good repute was far above a slave in dignity, rights, and power. But the slave of a powerful family could often bully men or women of inferior families, though they would have to tread somewhat gingerly because of the legal rights of free citizens.

Your legal rights in Roman society were based on who you were. There were no inherent rights, and rights to e.g. bodily autonomy could be considered waived for a variety of reasons.

With that said, masculinity in Roman culture had an extraordinary appeal and mystique, even moreso than in the rigidly sexist Greek culture with which they regularly interacted. And masculinity was tied to social status: a male slave was not really considered a man in Roman culture due to the emasculating nature of his position.

Jewish culture therefore lacked some of the high level autonomy enjoyed by high status Roman women and the extraordinary protection Roman law gave such women even against moderate insults to dignity (at least when coming from social lessers). On the other hand, Hebrew law did not distinguish between different classes of person except between free and slave. The murder of a vagrant and a palace official were (in theory) regarded the same in the eyes of Jewish law, in stark contrast to Roman law. Jewish law did not punish insults as Roman law did, meaning that freedom of speech was actually somewhat greater for everyone in Jewish culture (provided one avoided blasphemy, of course).

And what of slaves? Where slaves of Romans lacked rights at all, slaves of Jews had quite a few. Jews were not allowed to take sexual advantage of their slaves without giving them the rights of wives. Jews were forbidden to return fugitive slaves to their owners. Jewish law lacked Roman law's strict rules limiting manumission. Jews were commanded to give their slaves a day of rest.

As for Christians, that is a matter of heated scholarly debate. Suffice it to say that most scholars believe that the first generation church was considerably more egalitarian in many ways than the third generation church. Paul's churches had women in leadership positions, including at least one woman titled "Apostle." This radical egalitarianism (the extent of which is debated) was squished out of the church within a few generations, though Christian women did retain some important rights over non-Christian women.