Chapter 9 - OBSERVATIONS ON WOMEN IN THE GENEALOGIES OF 1 CHRONICLES 1–9

Summary

Although these chapters contain numerous references to males, they also contain references to more than 50 different women, named or unnamed. These references construe women as fulfilling a variety of roles in society, and characterize and identify them in various ways. Although the text was (most likely) written by male literati for male literati and reflects a patriarchal point of view, it contains references that indicated to the ancient readers of the book that ideologically construed gender expectations may and have been transgressed in the past and with good results. The goal of this article is to advance preliminary, basic observations about some of these references to women in the genealogical lists, within the historical context of the society for which the book of Chronicles was composed. It is our hope that by doing so, this paper will lead to future, more detailed studies on these topics.

For the purpose of the present endeavor, it seems heuristically helpful to classify the roles assigned to women in 1 Chronicles 1–9 into two categories: (a) those in which they are involved in lineage roles often associated with female members of an ancient household and (b) those representing roles that were commonly assigned to mature males in the society in general, or in their household. It should be stressed already that the borders between (a) and (b) are represented as porous in Chronicles.