Biblical Shame is Not Female

One of the given’s when researching biblical shame is that honour is masculine and shame is feminine, or perhaps shame is female and honour is male. Now, I think I have already said that I don’t actually buy into the honour-shame dichotomy, but I still accepted this male/female dichotomy. Until I did the work.

I have just completed working my way through the occurrences of the shame words in all the books of the Hebrew Bible, except Psalms. What I found were that there were almost no instances of women or female sexuality being inherently shameful.

The shame passages that feature ‘women’ are almost all metaphors that employ the personification of the city as a woman - Jerusalem, Samaria and….Sodom. The use of imaging cities as women is a common linguitstic practise within the ANE which does not just refer to the women within them. Grammatical gender does not equal human gender, although there have been some interesting studies about how the two are connected.

These cities are accused of practising harlotry and chasing after lovers other than YHWH which is a way of communicating to the reader/hearer an accusation of religious idolatry. While it is tempting to suggest that this suggests a general cultural understanding of women as sexually promiscuous in the ANE, scholars working in the area of metaphor caution hasty generalisations.

The image of male-YHWH who has a covenantal/marriage relationship with the female-city and it’s inhabitants is employed, particularly in the prophetic books as a way of explaining why Israel and Judah have been conquered by the neighbouring armies. Israel and Judah, represented by their cities - Samaria and Jerusalem, respectively - are called back into covenantal/marital faithfulness so that YHWH will once again offer them both protection and blessing. While the cities are accused of being unfaithful, it is not assumed that being ‘female’ they will automatically be unfaithful. Rather, they have made a choice and there is an invitation to choose differently.

While it came as kind of a shock to me that female-ness wasn’t inherently shameful, the more I though about it the more it makes sense. The biblical writers don’t really care about women’s interior perspectives, so why would they care about if they felt ashamed? Now, controlling women and their sexuality, that is something the writers DO care about, but that is another post.