Like Rachel and Leah Who Together Built Up the House of Israel (kĕrāḥēl ûkĕlē’â ’ăšer bānû šĕtêhem ’et-bêt yiśrā’ēl)

The national history of the “House of Israel” was a contested history of a divided house. Maternal subunits within the house of Jacob came to define the Rachel-born northern kingdom of Israel, known as “Ephraim,” and the Leah-born southern kingdom of Judah, known as the “House of David.” Peripheral territories and nations traced their ancestry to foundational mothers whose houses had become satellite houses, no longer nested within the father’s house. Sons who inherited the satellite houses of their mothers became “seeds of women,” inheritors of a maternal covenant. Sent out from their chosen brothers in the Promised Land, unchosen sons dwelled “alongside” their brothers. Far from being reproductive “vessels” who produced male heirs to continue the tôlĕdôt of their husbands, foundational mothers become nations, kingdoms, military units (’ummōt), and household alliances. Mothers served as the building blocks for the biblical house of the father and its attendant kinship structures; their breasts and wombs defined social and political alliances within the house of the father.

Chamber of Her Who Conceived Me (ḥeder hôrātî)

Spatially, the term “house of the mother” (bêt ’ēm) is found in a parallelistic line with the phrase “the chamber of her who conceived me” (Song 3:4) and is described as a place one can run to, return to, and take one’s lover into. Biblical narratives associate the “house of the mother” and tents and chambers of mothers with sleeping, sex, conception, and childbirth. If a mother and her children received recognition and legitimacy from the male head of household, their bêt ’ēm formed a spatial subunit nested within the house of the father. If a mother and her children were not recognized and legitimized by the father or were cast out by a primary wife, their maternal house became a satellite house in relationship to the house of the father; they were physically separated from the house of the father. Sons born into these low-status, satellite houses of the mother had no ascribed status in the house of their father and had to fight for any property and inheritance rights.

The House of the Mother (bêt ’ēm)

The term “house of the mother” (bêt ’ēm) is an indigenous Hebrew kinship designation for the “uterine family.” Comprised of a mother and her biological and adopted children, the house of the mother is distinct within yet supportive of the house of the father upon which it depends. In its most basic form, a bêt ’ēm represented a social and spatial subunit nested within the larger house of the father. Four biblical texts that contain the phrase bêt ’ēm (Gen 24:28; Song 3:4; 8:2; Ruth 1:8), and one additional biblical text, Gen 34, contain explicit cues that evoke the house of the mother. Taken together, the house-of-the-mother texts demonstrate that this was a space and a kinship unit associated with the marriage negotiations for a daughter who would marry out of her birth home and into the house of her husband. Uterine brothers played key roles in these negotiations and maintained economically significant relationships with their married sisters for life.

The One Who Opens the Womb (peṭer reḥem)

When a biblical narrative records a woman’s wish to “be built up” through having a son, it signifies her need for security, economic maintenance, and honor within the house of her husband. Being built up also brought a woman prestige among the community of women in her husband’s village. A woman’s womb-opening son, her peṭer reḥem, inaugurated her uterine family, her own generated “house” within her husband’s house. Mothers celebrated womb-opening sons with praise and laughter, they marked them with auspicious names, and they ritually redeemed them at the temple. The special status of womb-opening sons becomes evident as they are pitted against each other during struggles for succession in elite and royal households. A mother brought her house into existence through birthing a son; she created a full maternal alliance when she birthed multiple sons; and she ascended to the status of senior mother in the paternal house when her womb-opening son defeated the sons of other wives and succeeded his father.

The House of the Father of His Mother (bêt-’ă bî ’immô)

For Jacob, Abimelech, and Absalom, the house of the father of their mother proved to be a crucial staging ground for a coup attempt in the house of their father. These men enjoyed years of safety in the houses of the father of their mothers, and during these years of refuge, each aspiring heir acquired financial backing and support from his mother’s brothers. During the flight to and residence within the house of the father of the mother, sons claimed direct and unmediated kinship to their mother and her brother; they were of the same “bone and flesh” as their maternal uncles who claimed them as “brothers.” However, in order to be successful, a son had to use the house of the father of his mother as a temporary training camp, a place he would ultimately leave in order to return to his father’s house and attempt to become his father’s heir.

Like a Brother to Me, One Who Had Nursed at My Mother’s Breasts (kĕ’aāḥ lî yônēq šĕdê ’immî)

Anthropological literature on milk kinship helps to establish that the Hebrew phrase “O that you were like a brother to me, one who had nursed at my mother’s breasts” (Song 8:1) was a kinship designation similar to, though not an exact substitute for, “brother, son of my mother.” Biblical narratives that contain references to breastfeeding attest to the understanding that a mother or wet nurse transmitted her ethnicity and status (royal or priestly) to her suckling through the act of breastfeeding. Specifically, biblical birth narratives of foundational male figures include breastfeeding episodes in order to bolster the hero’s royal or priestly credentials and to establish his insider ethnicity. Through breastfeeding, a mother establishes bonds of loyalty within her own maternal clan; she creates an allied group of children who trace their relationship to each other through her.

House (bayit)

Ancient Israel was a house society that organized itself into concentrically larger social groupings and geographic areas under the rubric of the single Hebrew word for house: bayit. The Bible and the origin stories contained within it is the heirloom valuable of ancient Israel’s foundational houses. In the patrilineal genealogies of foundational men, we find an idealized memory of the direct and unmediated transference of material and immaterial inheritance from father to designated son within the fixed geography of a named house. At the same time, the house of the father subdivides into maternally named units that have significant social ramifications for the sons nested within them. Sons who trace their genealogical pathway to the house-founding father through a primary wife become heirs to their father’s house. Sons who trace their pathway to the father through low-status wives find themselves nameless and socially and geographically peripheral. The division of a man’s house into hierarchically arranged maternal subunits is seen in the story of Abraham’s death and burial (Gen 25) and Joseph’s ascent to heir within the house of Jacob (Gen 37-48).

No, Son of My Womb (ma-bar-biṭnî)

Biblical Hebrew understands a mother to contribute to the physical, ethnic, and character makeup of her child from the time spent in the womb and at the breast to the time spent under her active tutelage. A mother’s womb served as the basis for a lifelong bond between mother and child and between siblings who came forth from the same womb. This womb-based connection between mother and child or between uterine siblings could be expressed through the word raḥămîm, meaning a womb-centered allegiance that involved lifelong mutual protection. The formation of the child was imagined as a two-staged, maternally focused process encapsulated in the Hebrew word pair “breast and womb.” Biblical authors imagined a child’s physical and emotional development to begin at conception, continue during the time in the womb, and find completion through breastfeeding.

My Brothers, the Sons of My Mother (’aḥay bĕnê-’immî)

The biblical kinship designation “brother, son of mother,” which is often expressed as a word pair, communicates a uterine sibling relationship. The brother, son-of-mother relationship emerges within house-of-the-mother texts and narratives that describe maternal subunits within a larger, polygynous house of the father. Heightened emotional ties, public displays of physical affection, mutual loyalty, and a perceived duty to enact revenge on one another’s behalf characterize the uterine sibling relationship. If a daughter is raped, her uterine brother will take on the responsibility for avenging the rape and providing a house to his sister. Within a polygynous house of the father, sons of the same mother form a maternal alliance and support one another’s aspirations to ascend to the position as heir.

Introduction: Disrupting the Begats (tôlēdôt)

This chapter examines the critique of the patrilineal model within current anthropological literature in order to reconsider the claim that ancient Israel was a pure patrilineal society. While biblical writers valued patrilineality and preserved that value explicitly within the paternal begettings, known in Hebrew as the tôlēdôt, they consistently followed the exclusively paternal genealogies with narratives that introduced households. The biblical house, as opposed to the patriline, contained fathers, mothers, wives, concubines, slave wives, firstborn sons, second-born sons, daughters, foreigners, and slaves. The introduction of women and maternally defined subgroups of kin disrupts the neatness of a patrilineal genealogy, marking divisions within a paternal line. When the biblical patriline becomes a noisy, fully peopled house, we find not only a father and his firstborn son, but a series of maternally aligned kin groups with specific kinship labels that delineate maternal sub-houses within the larger house of the father.