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Policy: The Bible and Welfare Reform
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teachings in Judaism such as those found in the Mishnah represent values
that are distinctly different from other Greco-Roman societal influences.
As biblical scholar Adeline Fehribach shows in her study of the way women
were defined in the Mishnah, this is a problematic source for depicting
Jewish women’s lives in the first century. The Mishnaic framers combined
elements of Hellenistic culture, Roman law, and scripture. 35Moreover, the
Mishnah represents writings of a particular rabbinic school; the sayings of
the rabbis in the Mishnah reflect their vision for their communities. These
writings were attempts by leaders to respond to current conditions facing
their community rather than historical accounts of those conditions.
Fehribach points out that the Mishnah was compiled at the end of the sec
ond century out of a need by survivors of the Jewish-Roman war to reorder
their world following the destruction of the Temple. She asserts, “What
the writers of the book described was what they wanted the world to be,
not necessarily the world as it was.”36Only in later centuries did the Mish
nah become authoritative or normative for the majority ofJews.
Spurious characterizations of black women, as in the text of the 1995
Personal Responsibility Act linking them with the presence of high crime
rates, mandate a cautious reading of legal artifacts. Similarly, easy moral
conclusions about women based upon ancient legal texts have to be scru
tinized. When one refers to the texts that constitute available sources of
information about women in the Greco-Roman world, one enters a con
text of “male textuality.”37We must be mindful that the ancient texts were
written by men in the context of a society where education and literary
production were primarily male prerogatives. The texts themselves func
tioned as tools of control. Statements in these texts that limit women’s
autonomy should not be interpreted as representations of women’s actual
lives in antiquity. As feminist theologian Elisabeth Schiissler Fiorenza
reminds us, “Prescriptive injunctions for appropriate ‘feminine’ behavior
and submission increase whenever women’s actual socio-religious status
and power within patriarchy increase.”38 She, too, comments upon both
the Mishnah as prescriptive, rather than descriptive, ofJewish life, and the
relentless male-centered nature of its vision. The Mishnah defines a
woman’s status, for example, not in terms of “whether she may have sex
ual relations, but ‘with whom she may have them,’ and what are the con
sequences for the natural and supernatural order.”39 To gain a sense of
women’s realities, Schiissler Fiorenza shows how important it is to launch
an inquiry from the silences when analyzing a patriarchal text and con
text. In this vein, she poses the question of whether the Mishnah’s andro
cent r i c pres cr ipt ions
could have*
been
a
re spons e “to
a social-political