Athalya Brenner , Regulating ‘ sons ’ and ‘ daughters ’ in the Torah and in Proverbs : Some Preliminary Insights

This essay traces, in general lines, how the regulations a
 society presents as normative may reveal its deepest uncertainties, more so than
 its implied praxis. The case study chosen will be a vertical (chronologically
 and textually intersecting) as well as horizontal enquiry (from the Torah to
 Proverbs) into gendered regulations concerning second-generation members of the
 community.

for us the Bible is a parallel universe not only to ours, but to the [social, moral] worlds we tease out of it.
The interpretation process produces other texts, with similar problematics, and the need to uncover ideologies that underlie them, consciously or otherwise.In other words, a tension between text and praxis, cultures and the literatures they produce, can be assumed and perhaps also uncovered, if only to a limited extent.
I prefer to anchor prescriptions and proscriptions in implied modes of production, subsistence and culture, rather than in alleged historical placing of the relevant texts.That this is not easy to do with any certainty, and is gained largely by applying selective methodologies and by considering the texts themselves (on a non-one-to-one ratio, of course) as well as external evidence, adds to the difficulties.In other words, my approach in this survey is social/cultural and literary/critical rather than historical. 1 It must be taken for granted that many aspects of HB 'law' and 'instruction' 2 literatures have antecedents and cognates in other ancient Near Eastern cultures.
However, this aspect will not be dealt with in this essay, even though it largely and justifiably features in scholarly discussions.
Moving from general considerations yet closer to the specific topic, I shall focus on offspring, that is, on the relational second-generation members of a household or , rather than on the parents or first-generation members.I take it for granted that in biblical literatures the viewpoint of parents is privileged over that of their offspring: Parental, or metaphorically parental authority is privileged in a way that idealizes it as a cornerstone of society's continuity.This is seemingly paradoxical: 'be fruitful and multiply' is a highly realistic ideology/policy in times and places of alarming child mortality, and could be supported by privileging the young.But power play intervenes.Obedience is required of children of whatever age and gender in relation to their elders.However, how this demand for obedience was met, how it was focused, which areas were apparently perceived as danger zones, and hence requiring at least a literary codification, which betrays them as the most vulnerable in relation to the authorial and authoritative parental demands, remains to be defined further.

Overview of Relevant Texts in the Torah (/Pentateuch)
A good place to start is with the linguistic terms, even if they seem to be basic and well known.potential sexual partner and treated as a 'daughter', with relative care and protection -as is the priest's daughter who, upon widowhood, may return to her father's household as a dependent and be a participant in the household's priestly benefits (Lev 22:13).Finally, the extended story about Zelophehad's daughters (Num 27:1-11 and 36:10-12) attempts to regulate daughters' inheritance in the absence of male claimants related to their late father. 5w, then, is this complex picture [pictures?] to be summarized, or reduced, to a coherent picture?Let me assume, as a matter of course, that regulations -be they enforceable or otherwise -emanate from an apprehension, a worry about group identity and limits and concerns; and from the need -imagined or actual -to control such uneasiness .Therefore, regulations point to their opposite, that is, problem areas.
Seen in that light, several features may emerge.In Exodus as in Leviticus, participation of daughters in public life is minimal: sons are the true bearers of the covenant and its sign, the circumcision; females, including daughters, are taken care of but have a secondary status.Anxiety about sexual matters -intermarriage, female religiosity, female sexuality -is manifest, in Exodus as in Leviticus and Deuteronomy.This sexual anxiety is especially foregrounded in the priestly literature and is also a hallmark of Deuteronomy.While by comparison to other Torah sources D stipulates greater participation of daughters, esp.daughters under their fathers' jurisdiction, in ritual and religious and public life in general, this in itself is perhaps no reason for rejoicing.Were such 'laws' ever practiced and even if so, by whom and when?This generosity may in fact point to a lack, or to different norms that operate in the same society.They can be read as a rough indication of the inferior status of daughters in a largely non-urban society. 6Similarly, inheritance by daughters (Numbers) is indeed an innovation, apocryphally related to Moses, but does it give us much apart from the sour knowledge that, yes, sons inherited, especially so in the case of land, and this was the norm?
Furthermore, both a commandment and the D passage about the wayward son show that 'honouring' parents, that is, supporting them in older age, as well as obeying them, was a social requisite but by no means an absolute or even a favoured norm.
We therefore do remain, in the Torah, with the impression that agrarian societies, loosely knotted out of households and families, had their own prescriptions for binding second-generation members with their elders.Some regulations were similar or identical for daughters and sons.Many others were gender-specific or gender-motivated and perhaps indicative not only of social insecurity (on the part of the law writers) but of shifty, contrary social customs.Sons would, in turn, become the owners of the Phallus, of the land or religious function, of economic responsibility.Hence, they'll be accountable for their aging parents and must behave accordingly.Daughters, ultimately, will become mothers.In the interest of transparent paternity, and the ensuing economic responsibility of sons, daughters' sexuality (that is, reproductive potential) would get the most attention and attempted control.

Overview of Relevant Texts in the Book of Proverbs
In the following remarks I shall focus on Proverbs 1-9 and 30-31.
Prescriptions and proscriptions are rife here as well as in the 'law' passages of the Torah; the aim is, once again, to produce a younger person who will be a well adjusted member of society, as imagined in and to a certain extent also imaged or refracted by the text.However, the genre is of course different: it is largely an instruction; and the addressee or addressees are 'son' and 'sons'.I suggest that we take this situation seriously.The plural appears twice only in Proverbs, at its end (30.15,31.29).seems to be god's daughter in ch. 8, but only by implication.
Otherwise, son/s are often addressed, by a father figure or a mother figure, or both, or by an implied instructor of either gender.

Education
An important trope of Proverbs is advice-giving; when an advice-giving situation is conjured, it is from a 'parent' to a 'son', or from an 'elder' or 'elders' who are 'wise', while the target audience is imaged implicitly or explicitly as male, young, 'foolish', 'ignorant', 'insensitive', in need of instruction and teaching.Whether this implies an actual family teaching praxis, or rather a teaching situation at schools where elder persons prepared younger males for the privileged life of public office, scribal activity or economic viability, remains uncertain despite heated discussions among scholars.What can be deduced, though, is that the literal trope points to the class situation in which such counsel could be formulated and transmitted: urban elite classes (Merchants?Royals?Court officials?Landowners?Scribes?Priests?).Those would have the leisure, means and inclination to invest in the continuance of their ways through the training of whoever needed prompting in the right (and Right) direction.That the producers as well as the consumers of this seemingly oral, but for us readers literary, training were 'sons' seems to be borne out by the texts themselves, as well as by the preoccupation with female figures, personifications and metaphors.
That these texts hold incidental value for woman readers, 7 and those women could and must have educated their male and female children alike in the home, seeps occasionally into the largely male-dominated discourses. 8

Short Summary
This short summary of Proverbs' opening and closing materials pertaining to sons, and with the absence of daughters as agents or addressees, foregrounds some points that are endemic to the collection as a whole and meaningful for understanding it.These units serve as the book's frame and its framework: all the other units are enveloped by or embedded in the frame.This frame contains much sexual education for young males, that is, discourse that is concerned with femaleness and femininity; more specifically, materials that elaborate the roles of a legitimate wife/lover and mother as against illicit sexual ties of a man with Other women, in keeping with Proverbs' general interest in safeguarding the family as an ongoing, [re]productive social institution.This impulse makes sense for social continuation and selfperpetration.At the same time, it betrays anxiety about the very social project it appears to promote.

Interim Reflections
Ageism -in the sense of age superiority, diametrically opposed to what we call ageism nowadays -is the order of the day in both the Torah and in Proverbs, as it is in most of the HB, to a greater or lesser degree.The power structure within the and beyond it is unmistakable.For me, the implications of such a power structure are distasteful.This is a culture that, at least textually and in spite of its own prohibitions, lets fathers sacrifice their sons (Abraham and Isaac, Genesis 22) or their daughters (Jephthah and his nameless daughter, Judges 11) to their supreme divine father for the collective good.This is a culture that condones sending young persons to war by elder politicians, for the collective good, every single day in the Middle East, up to and including the present; and this is the culture that, eventually, allowed the divine father to sacrifice his divine son for the same purpose.From where I am, reflections about superior fathers and their control over their sons or daughters, in different ways, are more than disturbing.
Ultimately, as already mentioned several times in this short paper, cultures may be characterized by their anxieties as much as by their promoted values and aspirations.Along this line, it seems that the mini-cosmos teased (perhaps unfairly) out of the Torah and Proverbs texts, regarding sons and daughters, may be generalized by its greatest fears: (1) Fear of being abandoned in old age.
(2) Fear of being, or appearing, overtaken or controlled by the next generation for whose wellbeing society is ostensibly committed as a basic, pre-Mosaic requirement.
(3) Fear of an early death, most certainly, as warranted by the harsh conditions and by low human life expectancy.Moreover, these fears must have been internalized into female consciousness, as is apparent from the few Proverbs texts that are perhaps delivered by a female speaker-in-the-text (ch.7, perhaps more within 1 -9).Therefore, this fear can be gendered from the perspective of its hopefully regulated target, but perhaps not from the perspective of its source or producers.Is it a male fear, or a female fear?
How does ideology enter this complex picture, anchored in essential biological and environmental factors?Let's look at an example.In Exodus 1-2 the Pharaoh decided to exterminate the Hebrews -he fears their multiplication and reproduction rate!-so he orders the midwives to kill every newborn son, whereas every newborn daughter would live.The midwives do not carry out this command, citing as self-justification that the Hebrew women are too quick to give birth.The Pharaoh then repeats his order, almost verbatim, to his men: the sons will die, the daughters will live.Consequently, a son is born, two daughters help him survive, and the surviving son will meet Jethro's daughters, and the Pharaoh's son will die in the plague, and so on.
I've often wondered about this story.Why didn't the textual Pharaoh, simply, decide to kill the productive Hebrew women instead?Wouldn't this be a much easier final solution?Why is the story constructed as it is?In order to supply a background for the well-known 'birth-of-the-hero' paradigm?In order to sneer at the stupidity of the obtuse foreign ruler, especially entertaining if this is a women's story, since 12 women save Moses, as noted by Siebert Hommes 10 ?Or because, ultimately, even if this can be gendered as a female story, ideology still dictates -and against naturethat sons are more important for a social group than daughters, and both genders internalize this value?Difficult to say; at any rate, it does seem that the Pharaoh's recourse to destruction of the male line instead of the female line proves costly to his cause.In the tension between expedience, knowledge and ideology, he chooses for gender ideology.Ideology displaces common sense.However, Hebrew female fertility and resourcefulness are presented as strong, manipulative, and victorious.This is perfectly in order as far as presenting the Pharaoh is concerned; it is stupid of the Pharaoh to forget about [Hebrew] female power.Here in-group solidarity overrides gender considerations.But within the group itself, this kind of gender possibilities should be kept in mind and treated as suspect and in need of regulation.

( 4 )
Fears of female sexuality, femininity and the mystery of productivity.In the Torah this fear focuses mainly on the figure of the 'daughter'; it permeates Proverbs by warning the son/s against the Other (adult, sometimes married) woman, even though the book starts and ends with expanded female figures.