The Jewish Family in Antiquity.

• Author: Gilner, David Jonathan

This work includes seven papers - or their derivatives - delivered at the Hellenistic Judaism section of the annual meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature for 1990 and 1991, sessions co-chaired by the editor of the volume. In his introduction, which summarizes each of the articles and places them within the context of the work as a whole, Cohen reveals that the topics for these papers were not occasioned by some problem of inquiry posed to the authors: no particular body of evidence was selected as their focus, nor was some single methodology designated. This seemingly diffuse program was adopted "to get some sense of the range of possibilities suggested by the topic" (p. 2) in order to stimulate scholarly inquiry in this largely unexplored field. The body of the book is divided into four parts: assumptions and problems (Peskowitz); parents, children, and slaves (Yarbrough, Reinhartz, Kraemer, Martin); rabbinic law (Satlow); by way of comparison: some Greek families (Pomeroy).

In "Family/ies in Antiquity: Evidence from Tannaitic Literature," Miriam Peskowitz alerts the reader to the generalizations and less-than-rigorous conceptualizations that often underlie scholarly reconstruction of the family, in general, and the study of the Jewish family of antiquity, in particular. As an alternative, she proposes sociological and social historical methodologies for the study of families, stressing the need to use complex categories that match the complexity of the lives being studied. The brief discussion of M. Rosaldo's paradigm of women's participation in the public and private realms (M. Rosaldo, "Women, Culture and Society: A Theoretical Overview," in Women, Culture, and Society, ed. M. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere [Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1974], 24ff.) alerts the reader to a scholarly reappraisal of a model for assessing women's status and role which has frequently been applied by scholars of various disciplines.

O. Larry Yarbrough's "Parents and Children in the Jewish Family of Antiquity" surveys biblical, intertestamental and rabbinic literature under the categories of parents' obligations to children and children's obligations to parents. Analyzing the treatment of these categories in Greco-Roman texts, he concludes that Jewish values were practically identical to those expounded in Greco-Roman works.

In "Parents and Children: A Philonic Perspective," Adele Reinhartz analyzes Philo's treatment of the parent-child relationship by...