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Gender in the book of Ben Sira : divine wisdom, erotic poetry, and the Garden of Eden
Ellis, Teresa Ann.Boston : De Gruyter, [2013]Scholars who accept Ben Sira's comments on women at face-value or ignore parallel comments about men preclude fundamental questions about the functions of these statements and about their contexts. Gender in the Book of Ben Sira provides a distinctly-different perspective on the discourse of gender in the extant Hebrew manuscripts. The focus on wordplay, genre-constraints, and topics named in the book's subtitle-Divine Wisdom, Erotic Poetry, and the Garden of Eden-expands the boundaries for studies of gender.Gender in the Book of Ben Sira is a semantic analysis and, also, an investigation of hermeneutical pathways for performing such an analysis. A comparison of possible Greek and Hebrew gender taxonomies precedes the extensive delineation of the target-category, gender. The delineation includes invisible influences in the Book of Ben Sira such as the author's choices of genre and his situation as a member of a colonized group within a Hellenistic empire. When the Book of Ben Sira's genre-constrained invectives against women and male fools are excluded, the remaining expectations for women and for men are mostly equivalent, in terms of a pious life lived according to Torah. However, Ben Sira says nothing about distinctions at the level of how "living according to Torah" would differ for the two groups. His book presents an Edenic ideal of marriage through allusions to Genesis 1 to 4, and a substantial overlap of erotic discourse for the female figures of Wisdom and the "intelligent wife" creates tropes similar to those of the Song of Songs. In addition, Ben Sira's colonial status affects what he says and how he says it; by writing in Hebrew, he could craft the Greek genres of encomium and invective to carry multiple levels of meaning that subvert Hellenistic/Greek claims to cultural superiority.
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Family patterns, gender relations
Toronto : Oxford University Press, 1993.This book offers a collection of articles that together develop a systematic understanding of family. Many of the other articles focus on the social relations of sexuality, intimacy, reproduction, parenting and living together. All the articles flesh out the definition of 'family' as the social relations people create to provide for the daily needs of children and adults. The articles (most previously published) were chosen for their thorough but also critical, feminist analyses and provocative arguments.
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