From Her Cradle to Her Grave: The Role of Religion in the Life of the Israelite and the Babylonian Woman.

• Author: Gilner, David Jonathan

This translation of the author's Van haar Wieg tot haar Graf (Baarn: Ten Have, 1987) includes a text which has been revised "only when I deemed it absolutely necessary" (p. 7) and bibliographical references which have been "eclectically updated" (p. 7) through some expanded footnotes and a dozen new ones. A list of abbreviations and an index of authors have been added. The translator, who lamented the lack of an English edition in her glowing review of the Dutch original (JBL 108 [1988]: 325-26), has acted here to rectify the situation.

The work does not purport to be an attempt at a rigorous ethnographic study of the religious life of women in ancient Israel and Babylonia, nor is it a theory-based ethnological study of these two ancient societies. It is a type of socio-literary study: "The method I have followed in this book is mainly biographical: I trace the (religious) life of a woman in the Near East "from her cradle to her grave" (p. 9). The "Israelite" in the work's subtitle refers mainly to the women portrayed in the text of the Bible, but refers also to the Apocrypha, New Testament, and Talmud. The "Babylonian woman" refers to images of women found in texts of the Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Kassites, Hittites, Canaanites, Greeks, and Romans. There are also comparative references to modern societies and cultures. The text is ordered along socio-chronological categories common to such works: infancy, youth, adolescence, marriage, motherhood, and widowhood. Two additional chapters deal with women's participation in...