Households and Holiness: The Religious Culture of Israelite Women. By Carol Meyers.

Fortress Press (Minneapolis, 2005). ISBN: 0-8006-3731-3. viii and 105 pp. $6

In this reprint of a lecture given at the XVII Congress of The International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament in Basel in 2001, Duke Professor Carol Meyers women's religious culture in ancient Israel. This short book, printed on small pages, deals not so much with beliefs as with religious practices, many of which are explicitly or implicitly criticized in the biblical text itself.

Many of these practices were carried on in the family household rather than in the public arena, and most of them here studied deal with reproductive activities. Her anthropological approach does not privilege theology or religion over magic. The hundreds of pillar figurines (small terra-cotta figurines depicting standing women who are naked from the waist up) discovered by archaeologists were probably votary figures representing women seeking the aid of a deity in pregnancy, birth, and/or lactation. Small statues of the Egyptian dwarf god Bes have also been found in households and tombs and served as guardians of women in childbirth and of newborns. Such images helped women cope with the risks of reproduction and therefore were part of women's religious culture.

The Bible itself mentions prayers for fertility, the use of mandrake roots to achieve pregnancy (Gen 30:14-17), and washing and anointing a newborn, rubbing it with salt, and wrapping it in swaddling cloths (Ezek 16:4), all of which may have played an apotropaic function. Naming the child is done 62% of the time in the Bible by women, and Zipporah is the one who circumcises the son she bore to Moses (Exod 4:24-26).

Meyers focuses on the household as the center of Israelite life and reminds us that most biblical "cities" would be considered rural hamlets in modern times. Among religious specialists she mentions midwives, necromancers, sorcerers, and diviners, the last three of which are strongly criticized by the biblical text. Household life in her judgment was characterized more by heterarchy than by hierarchy.

In activities surrounding the reproductive process, Israelite women carried out religious behaviors essential for the viability of their families and community. Readers will have to decide how to integrate this anthropological data into the ongoing and contemporary significance of the Bible itself.

Ralph W. Klein, Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, Chicago, IL