Language:
English
Year of publication:
2022
Titel der Quelle:
"A Community of Peoples"
Angaben zur Quelle:
(2022) 384-407
Keywords:
Bible Comparative studies
;
Moabite stone
;
Pregnant women
;
War and society History
;
Herem (The Hebrew word)
;
Women Violence against
Abstract:
With the support of the Moabite god Kemosh, King Mesha of Moab recounts in KAI 181.14–18 his successful imposition of ḥērem on Nebo, an Israelite town east of the Jordan River that maintained a cult to Israel’s god YHWH during the Omride period. Historically, the ninth-century BCE Mesha Stele, now located in the Louvre, provides one of the most important sources for understanding the ancient institution of ḥērem-warfare, a religiously inflected political act in which an invading people targeted an enemy town, annihilated (some significant portion of) its population, and consecrated the slaughter to the attacking group’s deity. Drawing on theoretical tools from postcolonial and feminist critics on the role of gender in the discursive construction of political communities, this study offers a fresh historical interpretation of the religious politics of Mesha’s literary portrayal of ḥērem-warfare by analyzing the gendered dimensions of the Mesha Stele’s ḥērem-list (ll. 16–17), which specifies five gendered subgroups within Nebo’s slaughtered population. In particular, I argue on contextual, etymological, literary, and conceptual grounds that the ḥērem-inventory’s final, emphasized term, rḥmt (l. 17)—commonly translated by scholars as “female slaves,” “maidservants,” “concubines,” or the like—most likely refers to “pregnant women.” In its culmination with pregnant women, the Mesha Stele’s ḥērem-list rhetorically demonstrates the king’s complete fulfillment of his religious obligations to the Moabite god Kemosh, as well as Moab and Kemosh’s political dominance over Israel and its god YHWH. Pregnant women (and their fetuses) were highly vulnerable members of ancient society whose continued existence harbored the potentiality for the social and political rebirth of the Israelite “Other.” Religiously sanctioning violence against the bodies of “foreign” pregnant women thus serves as a special point of emphasis in the construction of the boundaries of an independent Moabite political identity ideologically centered on the institution of divine kingship.
DOI:
10.1163/9789004511538_019
URL:
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