Bees, Wasps, and Weasels: Zoomorphic Slurs and Delegitimation of Prophetesses in the Babylonian Talmud and the Hebrew Bible
This study brings to the fore the vital understanding that religious traditions are not primarily influenced by the exact wording of their sacred texts, but by the sociocultural contexts in which these text are interpreted. One of the most recurring questions within Jewish and Christian traditions is the question of female religious leadership, demonstrated and sometimes regulated in Biblical texts. Although two women of the Hebrew Bible hold prominent roles within their literary contexts - judge Deborah and prophetess Huldah - the rabbinic traditions of the Babylonian Talmud claim that they are arrogant women, crowned with eminence unbecoming to their sex. Their punishment is in their "ugly" names: Deborah means "a bee/a wasp", and Huldah means "a weasel".
This study seeks to contextualize zoomorphic characterizations of Deborah and Huldah within their specific cultural context, reconstructing the roles of bees/wasps and weasels in rabbinic and Greek traditions from about the fourth century B.C.E. through about the fifth century C.E. It shows how the connection between women, animals and the divine can be viewed as a hermeneutic key to the understanding of the stories of Deborah and Huldah in the Bible on one hand, and to the submissive role assigned to women in later Jewish traditions, on the other hand.
This study seeks to contextualize zoomorphic characterizations of Deborah and Huldah within their specific cultural context, reconstructing the roles of bees/wasps and weasels in rabbinic and Greek traditions from about the fourth century B.C.E. through about the fifth century C.E. It shows how the connection between women, animals and the divine can be viewed as a hermeneutic key to the understanding of the stories of Deborah and Huldah in the Bible on one hand, and to the submissive role assigned to women in later Jewish traditions, on the other hand.
Final report
This study links gender studies in biblical and rabbinic literature with animal studies, demonstrating how deeply entangled animals are in human self-conception and providing an example of how the male/female binary, when paired with the female/animal binary, could be used to control prominent women in society. The female/animal binary is used in biblical and rabbinic texts as a hermeneutic key to interpreting the stories about influential women in the Bible, and to justify submissive roles assigned to women in Jewish and Christian traditions.
The entry point of this study was a concise reference in the Babylonian Talmud where the rabbis reflect upon the names of Deborah and Huldah, two female prophets of the Hebrew Bible. Following the evaluation of Deborah’s and Huldah’s moral flaws demonstrated through their alleged haughtiness and breach of social norms, the rabbis claimed that, because of their moral status and unacceptable behavior, the two women received unpleasant names:
R. Nahman said: Haughtiness does not befit women.
There were two haughty women, and their names are hateful,
one being called a hornet and the other a weasel.
Of the hornet it is written, And she sent and called Barak, instead of going to him.
Of the weasel it is written, Say to the man, instead of ‘say to the king’. (b. Meg. 14b)
A reader does not necessarily need to understand the meaning of these names to get the point of the rabbinic argument: the rabbis meant to make their position clear that women, however esteemed they might be, cannot be allowed to evade male authority. The ambition of this study, however, was to go beyond the rabbinic belittling of assertive women and dig deeper into the rationale and imagery of rabbinic thinking. I aimed to acquire a better understanding of the circumstances that led the rabbis to direct zoomorphic slurs against the two women. I presumed that if the slurs were to make sense in the historical context in which the rabbis were active, the gist of the zoomorphic slurs must be presupposed by the rabbis and shared by their audience. Thus, once the connotations of the animal names were focused, a prolific world of animal imagery emerged—a world of which the rabbis and their audiences were part and whose beliefs and stories about bees, wasps, and weasels they shared.
Analyzing the renaming of Deborah, whose name in Hebrew means “bee” and when translated to Aramaic, it reads Zibburta (“hornet/wasp”), I established that translating Deborah’s Hebrew name to Aramaic Zibburta facilitated a shift from the image of a bee to the image of a wasp, accentuating the negative connotations of wasps, rather than bees, for Deborah. Given that the image of a bee was surrounded with universally positive connotations, as beings of divine qualities, as symbols of poetry and prophecy, and as creatures prominent in the cults of female deities, the zoomorphic shift from bee to wasp for Deborah obliterated the basis of any such associations in Jewish traditions. Since Jewish communities of Greco-Roman empires were, up to the second-century CE, strongly influenced by Greek ideas, art, and language, the biblical Deborah carried a potential to inspire ideas about the female divine in Jewish traditions too. That this was a real risk for the Greek diaspora was indicated by the characterization of Deborah as a divine Melissa in Josephus and as a figure of divine Wisdom in Pseudo-Philo. This is not to say that Hellenized Jewish communities accepted the worship of Greco-Roman deities or attempted to portray Deborah as a deity, but that they harmonized the stories and traditions about these deities with their own inherited stories. Portraying Deborah as a wasp curbed such tendencies, retaining at the same time the idea that Yahweh used Deborah as a weapon against the enemies of the Israelites in the same manner that Yahweh used real wasps to fight Israelite foes in Canaan. Thereby, the rabbis dethroned Deborah from a position where she could be viewed as a divine agent to a position where she would be perceived as a divine instrument to be used with great caution and only under extraordinary circumstances.
The delegitimation of Huldah, whose name in Hebrew means “weasel” and, when translated to Aramaic, reads Karkušta (also “weasel”), followed a similar pattern. Traditions and stories about weasels were positive and negative, depending on the context in which they appeared. Changing Huldah’s name to Karkušta, therefore, did not change the animal imagery behind the name, but as the rabbis stated that the name was ugly, it created the desired effect: it evoked the image of a shrewd and shifty side of the weasel, illustrative of an individual inclined to treachery and deceit. This would have been of particular importance for the rabbis since the weasel also had highly positive connotations as a symbol for a prophet, a master problem-solver, and an individual who procreates through teaching and the accumulation of disciples—abilities which the rabbis liked to reserve for male religious authorities. Calling into question her integrity and accentuating her instinct to harm rather than help, the rabbis deposed Huldah as a reliable individual of authority and instead presented her as a woman not to be fully trusted.
My understanding of the connotations of bees, wasps, and weasels, and thus of the zoomorphic characterizations of Deborah and Huldah, required broad cultural contextualization. Therefore, I studied the roles of bees/wasps and weasels in the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha, and the rabbinic literature. Furthermore, I surveyed Greek and Roman textual traditions and, where needed, I brought in perspectives from Assyrian and Egyptian animal symbolism. This quest for the rationale of the zoomorphic slurs in b. Meg. 14b, together with the accumulated data, exposed the process of constant negotiation of traditions, textual interpretations, beliefs, and practices—negotiations that characterized a diverse, culturally rich, and religiously competitive world of which the Babylonian Jews were a part. The rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud submitted to the inevitability of such negotiations imposed by the conditions of life in multicultural, multilingual, and multi-religious communities.
Ending this study, I investigated the role of Deborah and Huldah in early Christian sources, as well as how bees and weasels were used in association with Mariology, reading b. Meg. 14b as a rabbinic reaction to developing doctrines of non-Jewish Christianity about Jesus and the Virgin Mary. The symbolic association of bees and weasels with the asexual conception and birth, known in Mariological debates as conceptio sine coitu and conceptio per aurem, made the zoomorphic slurs about Deborah and Huldah effective as an argument against the doctrine of the virgin birth in early Christianity. Hence, emphasizing the foundational process of constant negotiation of traditions, production of (sacred) texts, and textual interpretations, this study exposes a culturally rich and religiously competitive world in which biblical texts and traditions were formed, negotiated, and transmitted.
The traditions discussed and reflected in the Babylonian Talmud were formed and written by learned men for their edification as well as for the edification of the Jewish communities which they wanted to affect and form. Thus, the discussions and ideas preserved in this collection teach us much about the terrestrial concerns of the rabbinic community and their social and ideological interests. This study demonstrated how rabbinic argument in b. Meg. 14b was born out of two primary areas of concern. On one hand, the rabbis were concerned with female authority in religious matters, and the participation of women in the interpretation of Torah. On the other hand, they were concerned with the influx of non-Yahwistic perceptions of the divine (female divine in particular) in Jewish tradition. With the rise of Christianity—and the appropriations of Jewish texts by leaders of non-Jewish Christianity—both these concerns were intensified. This study contributes, thus, to the growing scholarly interest in studying early Christianity through the texts and references in the Babylonian Talmud.
In August 2023, this study was published as a monograph titled Bees, Wasps, and Weasels: Zoomorphic Slurs and the Delegitimation of Deborah and Huldah in the Babylonian Talmud, by Lexington Books/Fortress Academic. The monograph has been sent for review in major scholarly journals such as Vetus Testamentum, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Catholic Biblical Quarterly, Journal of Biblical Literature, and Review of Biblical Literature (published by the Society of Biblical Literature). Among the national journals, the monograph is being reviewed for Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift and Svensk Exegetisk Årsbok.
The project also results in seminars and talks on the topic. I also had a privilege to communicate and discuss this project during my stay in Helsinki in February 2018, where I spent a month at the Academy of Finland, the Centre of Excellence, and the research team of Changes in Sacred Texts and Traditions (CSTT), directed by Prof. Martti Nissinen and Prof. Jutta Jokiranta.
New avenues of research in the wake of this project are about exploiting zoomorphic imagery to characterize other individuals in the Hebrew Bible. In an article, to be published in early 2024, I study the zoomorphic characterization of Caleb (“dog”), one of the heroes of the Exodus story in the Hebrew Bible. Here, I show how the human/animal binary is paired with the domestic/foreign binary to communicate the social subordination and othering of the Calebites in ancient Israelite society.
Furthermore, since January 2023, I have participated in the RJ program At the End of the World: A Transdisciplinary Approach to Apocalyptic Imaginary in the Past and the Present, a transdisciplinary research program that aims to contribute critically and decisively to the international development of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic studies. Within this program, I explore how zoomorphic apocalyptic imagination shapes conceptions of gender and otherness by examining how animals, women, and foreigners are stereotyped as means of either bringing about or evading the apocalypse.
The entry point of this study was a concise reference in the Babylonian Talmud where the rabbis reflect upon the names of Deborah and Huldah, two female prophets of the Hebrew Bible. Following the evaluation of Deborah’s and Huldah’s moral flaws demonstrated through their alleged haughtiness and breach of social norms, the rabbis claimed that, because of their moral status and unacceptable behavior, the two women received unpleasant names:
R. Nahman said: Haughtiness does not befit women.
There were two haughty women, and their names are hateful,
one being called a hornet and the other a weasel.
Of the hornet it is written, And she sent and called Barak, instead of going to him.
Of the weasel it is written, Say to the man, instead of ‘say to the king’. (b. Meg. 14b)
A reader does not necessarily need to understand the meaning of these names to get the point of the rabbinic argument: the rabbis meant to make their position clear that women, however esteemed they might be, cannot be allowed to evade male authority. The ambition of this study, however, was to go beyond the rabbinic belittling of assertive women and dig deeper into the rationale and imagery of rabbinic thinking. I aimed to acquire a better understanding of the circumstances that led the rabbis to direct zoomorphic slurs against the two women. I presumed that if the slurs were to make sense in the historical context in which the rabbis were active, the gist of the zoomorphic slurs must be presupposed by the rabbis and shared by their audience. Thus, once the connotations of the animal names were focused, a prolific world of animal imagery emerged—a world of which the rabbis and their audiences were part and whose beliefs and stories about bees, wasps, and weasels they shared.
Analyzing the renaming of Deborah, whose name in Hebrew means “bee” and when translated to Aramaic, it reads Zibburta (“hornet/wasp”), I established that translating Deborah’s Hebrew name to Aramaic Zibburta facilitated a shift from the image of a bee to the image of a wasp, accentuating the negative connotations of wasps, rather than bees, for Deborah. Given that the image of a bee was surrounded with universally positive connotations, as beings of divine qualities, as symbols of poetry and prophecy, and as creatures prominent in the cults of female deities, the zoomorphic shift from bee to wasp for Deborah obliterated the basis of any such associations in Jewish traditions. Since Jewish communities of Greco-Roman empires were, up to the second-century CE, strongly influenced by Greek ideas, art, and language, the biblical Deborah carried a potential to inspire ideas about the female divine in Jewish traditions too. That this was a real risk for the Greek diaspora was indicated by the characterization of Deborah as a divine Melissa in Josephus and as a figure of divine Wisdom in Pseudo-Philo. This is not to say that Hellenized Jewish communities accepted the worship of Greco-Roman deities or attempted to portray Deborah as a deity, but that they harmonized the stories and traditions about these deities with their own inherited stories. Portraying Deborah as a wasp curbed such tendencies, retaining at the same time the idea that Yahweh used Deborah as a weapon against the enemies of the Israelites in the same manner that Yahweh used real wasps to fight Israelite foes in Canaan. Thereby, the rabbis dethroned Deborah from a position where she could be viewed as a divine agent to a position where she would be perceived as a divine instrument to be used with great caution and only under extraordinary circumstances.
The delegitimation of Huldah, whose name in Hebrew means “weasel” and, when translated to Aramaic, reads Karkušta (also “weasel”), followed a similar pattern. Traditions and stories about weasels were positive and negative, depending on the context in which they appeared. Changing Huldah’s name to Karkušta, therefore, did not change the animal imagery behind the name, but as the rabbis stated that the name was ugly, it created the desired effect: it evoked the image of a shrewd and shifty side of the weasel, illustrative of an individual inclined to treachery and deceit. This would have been of particular importance for the rabbis since the weasel also had highly positive connotations as a symbol for a prophet, a master problem-solver, and an individual who procreates through teaching and the accumulation of disciples—abilities which the rabbis liked to reserve for male religious authorities. Calling into question her integrity and accentuating her instinct to harm rather than help, the rabbis deposed Huldah as a reliable individual of authority and instead presented her as a woman not to be fully trusted.
My understanding of the connotations of bees, wasps, and weasels, and thus of the zoomorphic characterizations of Deborah and Huldah, required broad cultural contextualization. Therefore, I studied the roles of bees/wasps and weasels in the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha, and the rabbinic literature. Furthermore, I surveyed Greek and Roman textual traditions and, where needed, I brought in perspectives from Assyrian and Egyptian animal symbolism. This quest for the rationale of the zoomorphic slurs in b. Meg. 14b, together with the accumulated data, exposed the process of constant negotiation of traditions, textual interpretations, beliefs, and practices—negotiations that characterized a diverse, culturally rich, and religiously competitive world of which the Babylonian Jews were a part. The rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud submitted to the inevitability of such negotiations imposed by the conditions of life in multicultural, multilingual, and multi-religious communities.
Ending this study, I investigated the role of Deborah and Huldah in early Christian sources, as well as how bees and weasels were used in association with Mariology, reading b. Meg. 14b as a rabbinic reaction to developing doctrines of non-Jewish Christianity about Jesus and the Virgin Mary. The symbolic association of bees and weasels with the asexual conception and birth, known in Mariological debates as conceptio sine coitu and conceptio per aurem, made the zoomorphic slurs about Deborah and Huldah effective as an argument against the doctrine of the virgin birth in early Christianity. Hence, emphasizing the foundational process of constant negotiation of traditions, production of (sacred) texts, and textual interpretations, this study exposes a culturally rich and religiously competitive world in which biblical texts and traditions were formed, negotiated, and transmitted.
The traditions discussed and reflected in the Babylonian Talmud were formed and written by learned men for their edification as well as for the edification of the Jewish communities which they wanted to affect and form. Thus, the discussions and ideas preserved in this collection teach us much about the terrestrial concerns of the rabbinic community and their social and ideological interests. This study demonstrated how rabbinic argument in b. Meg. 14b was born out of two primary areas of concern. On one hand, the rabbis were concerned with female authority in religious matters, and the participation of women in the interpretation of Torah. On the other hand, they were concerned with the influx of non-Yahwistic perceptions of the divine (female divine in particular) in Jewish tradition. With the rise of Christianity—and the appropriations of Jewish texts by leaders of non-Jewish Christianity—both these concerns were intensified. This study contributes, thus, to the growing scholarly interest in studying early Christianity through the texts and references in the Babylonian Talmud.
In August 2023, this study was published as a monograph titled Bees, Wasps, and Weasels: Zoomorphic Slurs and the Delegitimation of Deborah and Huldah in the Babylonian Talmud, by Lexington Books/Fortress Academic. The monograph has been sent for review in major scholarly journals such as Vetus Testamentum, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Catholic Biblical Quarterly, Journal of Biblical Literature, and Review of Biblical Literature (published by the Society of Biblical Literature). Among the national journals, the monograph is being reviewed for Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift and Svensk Exegetisk Årsbok.
The project also results in seminars and talks on the topic. I also had a privilege to communicate and discuss this project during my stay in Helsinki in February 2018, where I spent a month at the Academy of Finland, the Centre of Excellence, and the research team of Changes in Sacred Texts and Traditions (CSTT), directed by Prof. Martti Nissinen and Prof. Jutta Jokiranta.
New avenues of research in the wake of this project are about exploiting zoomorphic imagery to characterize other individuals in the Hebrew Bible. In an article, to be published in early 2024, I study the zoomorphic characterization of Caleb (“dog”), one of the heroes of the Exodus story in the Hebrew Bible. Here, I show how the human/animal binary is paired with the domestic/foreign binary to communicate the social subordination and othering of the Calebites in ancient Israelite society.
Furthermore, since January 2023, I have participated in the RJ program At the End of the World: A Transdisciplinary Approach to Apocalyptic Imaginary in the Past and the Present, a transdisciplinary research program that aims to contribute critically and decisively to the international development of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic studies. Within this program, I explore how zoomorphic apocalyptic imagination shapes conceptions of gender and otherness by examining how animals, women, and foreigners are stereotyped as means of either bringing about or evading the apocalypse.