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Lilies Do Not Spin: A Challenge to Female Social Norms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2010

Lee A. Johnson  and
Robert C. Tannehill
Lee A. Johnson
Affiliation:
East Carolina University, Religious Studies Program, Greenville, NC 27858, USA. email: johnsonle@ecu.edu
Robert C. Tannehill
Affiliation:
Methodist Theological School in Ohio, 3081 Columbus Pike, Delaware, OH 43015, USA. email: rtannehill1@insight.rr.com
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Abstract

The saying about the birds and lilies presents a challenge to the expected domestic roles of men, in providing food, and women, in providing clothing, opening the possibility that these duties can be neglected because of a higher priority. This challenge is relevant to situations reflected in other Q texts. The challenge is a threat both to a family's livelihood and to honor status. Evidence is presented showing that spinning and weaving have special importance in cultural models of the ideal woman and contribute to a woman's honor. This evidence broadens our awareness of the potential conflict with social norms in the birds and lilies passage.

Keywords

Matt 6.25–33Luke 12.22–31womenhonorspinning
Type
Articles
Information
New Testament Studies , Volume 56 , Issue 4 , October 2010 , pp. 475 - 490
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 See Dillon, Richard, ‘Ravens, Lilies, and the Kingdom of God’, CBQ 53 (1991) 619Google Scholar; Schottroff, Luise, ‘Itinerant Prophetesses: A Feminist Analysis of the Sayings Source Q’, The Gospel behind the Gospels: Current Studies on Q (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995) 350Google Scholar; Schottroff, , Lydia's Impatient Sisters (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1995) 81Google Scholar; Luz, Ulrich, Das Evangelium nach Matthäus (EKK; Zürich: Benziger; Neukirchen–Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1985) 368–9Google Scholar [The translation in the Hermeneia series, which, referring to sowing and harvesting, puts ‘two characteristic tasks of a human’ for ‘zwei charakteristische Arbeiten des Mannes’, misses the point.]; Carter, Warren, Matthew and the Margins (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000) 177–8Google Scholar; Walter Grundmann, Das Evangelium nach Lukas (THKNT; Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, n.d.) 261; Verbin, John S. Kloppenborg, Excavating Q (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000) 97Google Scholar; Klein, Hans, Das Lukasevangelium (KEK; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006) 454Google Scholar.

2 Fricker, Denis, Quand Jésus parle au masculine–féminin (Études bibliques; Paris: J. Gabalda, 2004)Google Scholar.

3 Fricker, Quand Jésus parle, 101. Others include additional texts from Q (here cited by their Lukan location): 12.51–53 (father against son, mother against daughter), 14.26–27 (father and mother, son and daughter), 17.27 (marrying and being married). See Arnal, William E., ‘Gendered Couplets in Q and Legal Formulations: From Rhetoric to Social History’, JBL 116 (1997) 82Google Scholar.

4 Fricker, Quand Jésus parle, 380.

5 Xenophon Oeconomicus 7.19–25, 30 (Xenophon, , Memorabilia and Oeconomicus [LCL; Cambridge, MA; Harvard University, 1923] 420–3Google Scholar); Philo, Special Laws 3.169–71 (Philo, vol. 7 [LCL; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1937] 580–3); Flaccus 89 (Philo, vol. 9 [LCL; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1941] 350–1). Noted by Aida Besançon Spencer, ‘Jesus’ Treatment of Women in the Gospels', Discovering Biblical Equality (ed. Ronald W. Pierce and Rebecca Merrill Groothuis; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004) 130–2.

6 Fricker provides supporting argument for understanding sowing/harvesting as male labor and spinning as female labor. See Quand Jésus parle, 70–6, 84–5.

7 See Schottroff, Lydia's Impatient Sisters, 82.

8 Zeller, Dieter, Die weisheitlichen Mahnsprüche bei den Synoptikern (FB; Würzburg: Echter, 1977) 87Google Scholar; Hoffmann, Paul, Tradition und Situation: Studien zur Jesusüberlieferung in der Logienquelle und den synoptischen Evangelien (NTAbh; Münster: Aschendorff, 1995) 113Google Scholar.

9 Luz, Matthäus, 365.

10 The rationale is a question expecting a positive answer in Matthew. It is a supportive statement in Luke.

11 Most texts of Matthew add a reference to drink in 6.25 (missing in Sinaiticus and some other texts), but only the references to food and clothing are developed in 6.26–30.

12 So Hans Dieter Betz in his rhetorically oriented commentary. See The Sermon on the Mount (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995) 472.

13 Davies, W. D. and Allison, Dale C. Jr., A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew (ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1988) 1.654Google Scholar, recognize that spinning is women's work but believe that the paired verb κοπιῶσιν refers to men's work. This is doubtful. κοπιάω is a general term for hard work. It is applied to women in Rom 16.6, 12.

14 In Luke 12.27 Codex Bezae and a few of the Old Latin and Syriac versions have οὔτɛ νήθɛι οὔτɛ ὑϕαίνɛι, ‘neither spin nor weave’ in place of ‘they grow; they do not toil nor spin’. This alternative reading has attracted attention despite its rather weak textual support. Bruce M. Metzger indicates that it was rejected ‘after much hesitation’ by the Editorial Committee of the United Bible Societies' Greek New Testament. See A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (London/New York: United Bible Societies, 1971) 161. It was accepted in the 25th edition of the Nestle–Aland text. Hans Klein, Lukasevangelium, 454 n. 34, argues in its favor.

15 This, of course, is a rhetorical argument against which many objections could be raised. To feel its force, one may have to do as instructed—spend some time observing the birds and the wild flowers. If one finds there some cause of amazement—signs of a benevolent force at work within transient life—and if one agrees with the speaker on the surpassing value of God's kingdom, the words may have their intended effect.

16 William Arnal (‘Gendered Couplets in Q’, 75–94) denies that the Q couplets indicate a higher valuation of women partly because the best parallels, in his view, are found in ancient legal or regulatory texts that wish to make clear that certain regulations apply also to women. It may be true that these regulatory texts and the Q couplets both refer to men and women in order to be comprehensive, but there the similarity ends. Regulatory texts attempt to regulate external behavior, using clear and literal language to specify what is acceptable and what is unacceptable behavior and to whom the regulations apply. The words about the birds and lilies instead use forceful and imaginative language, and they leave those addressed with considerable freedom to decide what is the appropriate response for them. These words address the moral imagination rather than external behavior. Changed behavior may result, but there is no attempt to define clearly what that behavior should be. Arnal also says, ‘[I]n no instance of direct exhortation is any effort made to pair examples by gender’ in Q (‘Gendered Couplets’, 86). This claim can only be made because he mistakenly excludes the birds and lilies passage from consideration.

17 The Q texts are cited according to their position in Luke. For a careful attempt to determine the wording of Q, see Robinson, James M., Hoffmann, Paul, and Kloppenborg, John S., eds., The Critical Edition of Q (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000)Google Scholar.

18 James M. Robinson, et al., Critical Edition of Q, includes the reference to lending in Luke 6.34 in a reconstructed text of Q, with an indication that this reconstruction is ‘probable but uncertain’. See lxxxii, 70.

19 Kloppenborg Verbin, Excavating Q, 144, includes the ravens and lilies passage among sub-collections in Q that advocate an ‘adventuresome social practice—including debt forgiveness, the eschewing of vengeance, and the embracing of an exposed and marginal lifestyle’.

20 Concerning the question whether μɛριμνάω implies a mental state or a concern expressed in action, the comment of Luz is appropriate: ‘Man darf beide Momente des “Sorgens”, die Angst um Dasein und das aktive Sich-Mühen, nicht auseinanderreißen. “Sorge” is ein Handeln aus Angst, praktizierte Angst ums Dasein.’ Luz, Matthäus, 367.

21 Xenophon, Memorabilia 3.9.15 (Xenophon, Memorabilia and Oeconomicus [LCL; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1959] 230–1)Google Scholar.

22 See also Prov 14.23; 20.13; 21.5; 24.33–34.

23 ‘The ethic of Proverbs is the ethic of the bureaucratic elite’, according to Pleins, J. David, Anchor Bible Dictionary (ed. Freedman, David Noel; New York: Doubleday, 1992) 5.407Google Scholar. This suggests that its warnings against slackness apply most appropriately to those who start with privileges and then squander them, rather than to those trapped in poverty from the beginning. But that would not limit the way that the wisdom sayings were applied in later times.

24 Babrius and Phaedrus (LCL; ed. Perry, Ben Edwin; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1965) 183–85, 341–3, 443Google Scholar.

25 See also Prov 14.20 and Luke 16.3, where the steward says, ‘I am ashamed to beg’.

26 For the purposes of this essay, the term ‘elite’ will be applied to families and women who have domestic servants sufficient to produce fabric and clothing for the household.

27 Either spinning or weaving, by synecdoche, can stand for the whole process of fabric and clothing production.

28 See Osiek, Carolyn and MacDonald, Margaret Y., A Woman's Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006) 90, 151Google Scholar. For a recent discussion of women's honor, showing that it could be acquired in other ways than sexual purity, see Crook, Zeba, ‘Honor, Shame, and Social Status Revisited’, JBL 128/3 (2009) 604–9Google Scholar.

29 Suzanne Dixon cites Jashemski's 1979 study of the gardens in Pompeii and Herculaneum. See Reading Roman Women: Sources, Genres and Real Life (London: Duckworth, 2001) 118.

30 We owe thanks to Sarah Iles Johnston for this discussion. Her fascinating work ‘A New Web for Arachne’ (unpublished paper given at the Women in the Religious and Intellectual Activity of the Ancient Mediterranean World Conference in honor of Adela Yarbro Collins, Methodist Theological School in Ohio and Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, March 15–17, 2009) discusses the tradition of the Panathenaia and the weaving of the πέπλος in Athens.

31 Adding to the notion of the unity of the man and woman were the gender-specific terms: ‘warp’ as masculine and vertical and ‘woof’ as feminine and horizontal. The warp was made of a stiff thread and the woof a more supple thread. Both Seneca and Aristotle elaborated upon the sexual conjugal imagery already inherent in the gendered terminology of weaving. Seneca used the word ‘coitus’ to describe the interaction of the warp and woof, and Aristotle noted that the weights attached to the warp to hold the threads in position were comparable to testicles. (Scheid, John and Svenbro, Jesper, The Craft of Zeus [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1996] 13Google Scholar.)

32 Burkert, W., ‘The Legend of Kekrops' Daughters and the Arrhephoria: From Initiation Ritual to Panathenaic Festival', Savage Energies: Lessons of Myth and Ritual in Ancient Greece (Chicago: Chicago University, 2001) 37–63Google Scholar.

33 The connections between spinning and the Protevangelium of James were made by Jeremy F. Hultin (unpublished ‘Response to Sarah Iles Johnston's “A New Web for Arachne”,’ at the Women in the Religious and Intellectual Activity of the Ancient Mediterranean World Conference in honor of Adela Yarbro Collins, Methodist Theological School in Ohio and Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, March 15–17, 2009). Proclus of Constantinople elevated the process of weaving to a spiritual plane through his reading of this passage: ‘[Mary] is the awesome loom of the divine economy upon which the robe of union was ineffably woven. The loom-worker was the Holy Spirit; the wool-worker the “overshadowing power from on high”. The wool was the ancient fleece of Adam; the interlocking thread the spotless flesh of the Virgin. The weaver's shuttle was propelled by the immeasurable grace of him who wore the robe; the artisan was the Word who entered in through her sense of hearing’ (Hom. 1.I, 21–25). (Translation by Constas, Nicholas, Proclus of Constantinople and the Cult of the Virgin in Late Antiquity [Leiden: Brill, 2003]Google Scholar.)

34 Livy, , The Early History of Rome (Baltimore: Penguin, 1975) 98Google Scholar.

35 Plutarch's, Moralia, vol. 3 (LCL; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1968) 540–51Google Scholar.

36 Rufus, Musonius, Fragment 3 That Women Too Should Study Philosophy, in Malherbe, Abraham J., Moral Exhortation: A Greco-Roman Sourcebook (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986) 134Google Scholar.

37 Hierocles, On Duties: Household Management (4.28.21), in Malherbe, Moral Exhortation, 98.

38 Kathleen E. Corley summarizes this idealized notion of public and private in Private Women, Public Meals: Social Conflict in the Synoptic Tradition (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1993) 41–3.

39 So noted by Ilan, Tal, Jewish Women in Greco-Roman Palestine (Peabody, MA: Hendrikson, 1996) 128–9Google Scholar.

40 Plutarch, , Advice to Bride and Groom, 31 (Plutarch's Moralia, vol. 2 [LCL; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1928] 320–3)Google Scholar.

41 Pro Caelio 30–36, 47–50 (Cicero: The Speeches [LCL; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1958] 443–53, 465–9).

42 Anonymous inscription dated from the mid-second century bce.Cantarella, Eva, Pandora's Daughters: The Role and Status of Women in Greek and Roman Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1987) 132–3Google Scholar. Also noted in Corley, Private Women, 61.

43 Friedländer, Ludwig, Roman Life and Manners under the Early Empire (London: Routledge & Sons, 1908) 266Google Scholar. Noted in Corley, Private Women, 62.

44 Pantel, Pauline Schmitt, ed., A History of Women in the West, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1992) 211Google Scholar.

45 Laertius, Diogenes, Lives of Eminent Philosophers 6.98 (LCL; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1925; 2.101)Google Scholar.

46 Suetonius, , The Deified Augustus Lives of the Caesars (Oxford: Oxford University, 2000) 76, 82Google Scholar. Also noted by Dixon, Reading Roman Women, 118.

47 Dixon, Reading Roman Women, 117.

48 Dixon, Reading Roman Women, 118.

49 Shown in Dixon, Reading Roman Women, 114 (CIL 13.7067b).

50 Cantarella, Pandora's Daughters, 132.

51 Dixon, Reading Roman Women, 118.

52 See Dixon, Reading Roman Women, 114, on the ‘Public Face’ of Roman Women.

53 Terence, Andria 69–79 (Terence, The Comedies [London: Heinemann, 1912] 11)Google Scholar.

54 Juvenal 8.43 (Juvenal and Persius [LCL; London: Heinemann, 1940] 160–1). Noted by Dixon, Reading Roman Women, 128.

55 Ilan, Jewish Women, 129.

56 Eric M. Meyers, ‘The Problems of Gendered Space in Syro-Palestinian Domestic Architecture: The Case of Galilee’, Roman-Period, Early Christian Families in Context: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue (ed. Balch, David L. and Osiek, Carolyn; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003) 45Google Scholar. See also Hirschfeld, Yizhar, The Palestinian Dwelling in the Roman-Byzantine Period (Jerusalem: Franciscan, 1995)Google Scholar, whose archaeological work reveals that outdoor (non-secluded) space was often employed for women's work in homes over centuries in Palestine.

57 Ilan, Jewish Women, 128–9. Or, the rabbis' intended audience is elite women who have the means to live a sequestered life, but are unwilling to do so.

58 Ilan, Jewish Women, 134.

59 Neusner, Jacob, The Mishnah: A New Translation (New Haven: Yale University, 1988) 388Google Scholar.

60 Although commonly dated to the Persian period (see Yoder, Christine Roy, Wisdom as a Woman of Substance: A Socioeconomic Reading of Proverbs 1–9 and 31:10–31 [BZAW; Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 2001] 38Google Scholar), this praise poem in Proverbs shows a valuation of women who spin and weave that persists across cultures and centuries.

61 Two issues that relate to the woman in Prov 31.10–31 remain unresolved. First, it is not clear whether this portrait reflects actual or idealized women's activity in the Persian period. Christine Yoder argues for the former in ‘The Woman of Substance (אׁשת־חיל): A Socioeconomic Reading of Proverbs 31:10–31’, JBL 122 (2003) 446; whereas Bernhard Lang (‘Women's Work, Household and Property in Two Mediterranean Societies: A Comparative Essay on Proverbs XXXI 10–31’, VT 54 [2004] 188–207) draws parallels and contrasts with the ideal Athenian wife depicted in Xenophon's Oeconomicus, which may indicate less connection with actual activities and more of an idealized view of women's lives. Secondly, there is some uncertainty about how to describe the socio-economic position of the woman. R. N. Whybray says these verses present a ‘well-to-do family, neither aristocratic nor royal’ (Proverbs [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994] 426); and Yoder concludes that the woman is a ‘composite figure of Persian-period women, particularly women of affluence or position’ (‘Woman of Substance’, 429). Lang (‘Women's Work’, 194) says, this Hebrew household ‘belongs to the elite that would produce and use only the best quality’. He notes ‘the use of scarlet and purple for dying cloth’ (vv. 21–22).

62 The wives of rabbis mentioned in rabbinic writings provide a parallel to the woman of Prov 31. These wives engage in business in order to support husbands or sons who devote themselves to the study of the Torah (Arlandson, James Malcolm, Women, Class, and Society in Early Christianity: Models from Luke–Acts [Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1997] 77Google Scholar). Babatha from Maoza, perhaps the best-documented female Jewish merchant, displays financial acumen similar to the woman of Prov 31, but she operates fairly independently of male oversight. See Kraemer, Ross, Women's Religions in the Greco-Roman World: A Sourcebook (Oxford: Oxford University, 2004) 143–52Google Scholar.

63 The overt purpose of Prov 31.10–31 is to praise a capable wife, but the covert effect might be to encourage husbands to allow their wives to engage in commercial activity.

64 Contrast the woman of Prov 31 with the wife of the triumvir Lepidus, who displayed a loom in the atrium to confirm her symbolic adherence to traditional female values (Dixon, Reading Roman Women, 117–18).