Amos 2:7 has been interpreted in various ways. While, some scholars
see it as an indictment against cultic prostitution,48 some suggest that it
is a rebuke against incest. Yet some understand Amos as reacting against sexual abuse of slave girls. At the centre of the controversy is the phrase;
hr"ê[]N:h:)-la, ‘Wkl.yE) wybiªa'w> vyaiäw>
‘Father and son go (enter) into the same girl’. Part of the problem for lack of unanimity among scholars is the multiplicity of possible meanings of the words and phrases used in the passage. For those arguing for a cultic prostitution context, Amos 2:7 is read together with verse 8, thus:`~h,(yhel{a/ tyBeÞ WTêv.yI ‘~yviWn[] !yyEÜw> x:Be_z>mi-lK' lc,aeÞ
WJêy: ‘~ylibux] ~ydIÛg"B.-l[;w>
hr"ê[]N:h:)-la, ‘Wkl.yE) wybiªa'w> vyaiäw>
‘a man (father) and his son enter (go) into the same girl’ and they ‘lay themselves down beside every altar on garments taken in pledge’. From this perspective, Amos 2:7, 8 are interpreted in the light of Amos 6:4-7 which is claimed to be alluding to fertility cult rituals or ‘cult festive meal’ enjoyed among the wealthyclass.49 Such a festival is attested in the Ugarit texts, and is understood
as ‘a social and religious institution in which included families, owned property, houses for meetings and vineyards for wine supply, as associ- ated with specific deities, and met periodically, perhaps monthly, to
48
Cf. A. Weiser, Die Profetie des Amos. BZAW 53. Giessen: Töpelmann, 1929, p. 141; G. Pfeiffer, ‘Denkformenanalyse als exegetische Methode, erläutert an Amos 1, 2-2,16,’ ZAW 88 (1976) pp. 56-71. (p. 67); Francis I Andersen and David Noel Freedman, Amos:
A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. London: Doubleday, 1989, pp. 318-321, concluded that: ‘when we look at the crimes charged against the nations, only the last two, Judah and Israel, are accused of specifically religious offenses, which amount to rejecting the covenant and not giving Yahweh due worship and service…in Israel’s case more detail is given, and the charges cover a spectrum of unacceptable practices; but the critical element seems to be the worship of other gods, or the corrup- tion of the worship of Yahweh’.
49
Richard M. Davidson, Flame of Yahweh: Sexuality in the Old Testament. Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, 2007, p. 109.
celebrate for several days at a stretch with food and drink and sometimes,
if not regularly, with sacral sexual orgies’.50
Building upon, this perspective, some have insinuated incest since the festival was organised by rich families. Thus
wybiªa'w> vyaiäw>
(a man and his son) is interpreted as reference to real biological relations. However, it is very doubtful that Amos was dealing with incest here. If it was incest that was meant, it would have been easy (for Amos or the redactor) to say that ‘a man had intercourse with his father’s wife (cf. Lev 20:11) or withfather’s concubine.51
A common approach therefore is that
wybiªa'w> vyaiäw>
is not meant to be literal.The phrase just connotes the prevalence of the practice of ‘a man and his son going into the same maid’. Hence for those scholars in support of cultic prostitution, the phrase indicates the spread of sacred prostitution among old and young; in other words, among all members of the society
and not the sharing of the sin in the nuclear family. That is,
vyaiäw>
(a man)is used in this case in the distributive sense, whereby it means ‘each’ and not just two men, but everybody is doing it and have been doing it for generations. Cultic prostitution has been further implied by the fact that
Amos 2:7 uses the verb
$lh
which literally is ‘walk’ to the same girl,therefore suggesting a religious pilgrimage to a shrine.52 This position is
also based upon the assumption that there was rampant sacred prostitu- tion in the Semitic regions, in which ‘Israel shared a lot of cultural ele- ments’.53
However, it seems very unlikely that Amos was addressing cultic prosti-
tution here, let alone incest.54
While the theory could be quite compel- ling, it does not situate Amos 2:7 in both the immediate and overall
50
Marvin H. Pope, ‘A Divine Banquet at Ugarit’, in James M. Efird (ed.) The Use of the Old
Testament in the New and Other Essays: Studies in Honour of William Franklin Stinespring. Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1972, p. 193.
51
Andersen and Freedman, Amos, p. 318.
52
Andersen and Freedman, Amos, p. 318.
53
Alberto Soggin, The Prophet Amos: A Translation and Commentary. London: SCM Press, 1987, p. 48; Bernard Thorogood, A Guide to Amos. London: SPCK: 1995, p. 23; Richard S. Cripps, (ed.), A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Amos. London: SPCK, 1929, p. 142; Charles M Laymon, (ed.), The Interpreter’s One-Volume Commentary on the
Bible. London: Abingdon Press, p. 468; D. Guthrie, et al, (eds.), New Bible Commentary. England: InterVarsity Press, 1988.
54
Cf. Paul M. Shalom, Amos: A Commentary on the Book of Amos. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991, pp. 82-83.
context of Amos. Notwithstanding that Amos could have addressed reli- gious matters, overall he is a prophet dealing with issues of social justice; the exploitation of the poor by the rich who claim to be religious by fre- quenting religious shrines and by paying tithes and freewill offerings (Amos 4:4-5). Thus, Amos 2:7 should be connected to verse 6, where oppression or exploitation of the poor looms large, which is the thrust of his message. According to Amos 2.6, Israel, the ruling elite is mainly guilty of ‘selling the righteous for silver and the need for a pair of san- dals’
`~yIl")[]n: rWbï[]B; !Ayàb.a,w> qyDIêc; ‘@s,K,’B; ~r"Ûk.mi-l[;...
This approach is plausible given that Amos 2:7 does not begin a new oracle; it simply expands the indictment and further delineates (after the past crimes listed in the former verse) the ongoing offenses for which Israel is guilty. Unlike those oracles of the foreign nations (which enu- merate only past transgressions) the accusations against Israel, are in the present and reflect the social situation current at the time of the
prophet himself.55 Hence, Gottwald observes that:
if we pay heed to the crushing of the poor as the central sin Amos con- demns and to the way he pictures divine activity through rhetorical ques- tions and figures of speech from natural and social world of rural Pales- tine, we can make an informed estimate of what weighed most in his thinking. He knew at firsthand about the murderous oppression of the poor; not only did he detest that oppression, but he knew that it was dia- metrically opposed to Yahweh’s wishes.56
It is in this eighth century context of Amos where the poor were crushed and oppressed by the rich that Exodus 21 is situated. Hence, chances are high that Amos 2:7 is addressing sexual exploitation of the slave girls,
the ones that are the subject matter in Exo 21:7-11 and Lev 12:17.57 This
interpretation makes sense considering the prevalence of debt-slavery in which the debtors who were legally free citizens had no choice but to
serve as slaves in households,58 as implied in Amos 2:6. While there are
55
Shalom, Amos: A Commentary on the Book of Amos, 79.
56
Gottwald, The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-Literary Introduction. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985, p. 357.
57
L. Markert, Struktur und Bezeichnung des Scheltwortes: Eine gattungskritische Studie anband
des Amosbuches. BZAW 140. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1977.
58
Walter A. Elwell, (ed.), The Marshall Pickering Commentary on the NIV. Britain: Baker Book House Company, 1991, p. 632.
still some scholars who argue against this theory,59 it should be noted that the objections do not hold water. A closer look at other biblical texts from the same era with Amos 2:7 and Exo 21:7-11, may as well show evidence of the prevalence of sexual abuse of slave girls by their masters. The story in Genesis 16: 1-6, which features Abram, Sarah and Hagar as key players, gives some clues about the powerlessness of the slave girls to deny sexual advances by their masters. Although the very details of what really transpired are difficult to come by, the story tells us that Abram was told by Sarah to sleep with Hagar their slave girl, to bear children on her behalf. We are not told if Hagar was employed in a dou- ble capacity of slave and wife or not. We are also not told about the reac- tion of Hagar to Abram’s proposal or that of Sarah. But it seems clear that she had no power to deny whatever Abram and Sarah had agreed about her. While it was a common practice in the ancient Near East that when a legitimate wife failed to bear children a surrogate mother would
be used for that purpose,60 the text does not tell us if a hired
hand/maidservant could be used for that purpose or not.
This story therefore could be showing evidence of the general sexual abuse of the slave girls in Israel as in the rest of the ancient Near East. But given that ancient Israel was a slave holding society as others, we could use evidence from elsewhere to conjecture the prevalence of sexual exploitation of slave girls as implied in Exo 21:7-11, Amos 2:7 and Gen 16:1-6. According to D. Brendan Nagle and Stanley M. Burstein, the
‘Greek society of the 4th century BCE offered few legal measures to pro-
tect the slaves against their masters,…corporal punishment and free sexual access to their slaves were both permitted to masters….(in fact), freedom of sexual access by masters to their slaves is one of the basic
characteristics of all slave systems’.61 Further, Martin Dale observes that
59
Cf. Shalom, Amos: A Commentary on the Book of Amos, says that Amos 2:7 therefore deals with the general abuse of the lowly people, especially of female sex, however not a slave young woman, but just a ‘young woman’ who belongs to the same category as that of the others previously mentioned-just one more member of the defenceless and ex- ploited beings in the northern Israel.
60
Cf. Davidson, Flame of Yahweh, p. 455; Jennifer Glancy, ‘The Mistress-Slave Dialect: Paradoxes of Three LXX Narratives’ JSOT 21 (1996), pp. 71-87, (86).
61
D. Brendan Nagle and Stanley M. Burstein, The Ancient World: Readings in Social and
Cultural History. Fourth Edition. New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2010. pp. 86, 91; Finley,
Jewish people were not an exception. Throughout history, ‘Jewishness itself had little if any relevance for the structures of slavery among Jews... Slavery among Jews of the Greco-Roman period did not differ from the
slave structures of those people among whom Jews were living’.62
In the same vein, sociologists have observed that the exploitation of slaves even sexually was a result of depersonalisation, which leads to desexualisation. According to Claude Meillassoux, it is almost a univer- sal norm that ‘in any social system, to be a man or a woman means to be acknowledged as having certain functions and prerogatives linked to cultural notions of femininity or masculinity’. However, male and fe- male slaves were largely excluded from these culturally defined func-
tions and prerogatives.63 As people whose gender had been severed so to
speak, slave women had to work in the fields like men while men slaves were employed as domestics. Further, female slaves were sexually ex- ploited and could not preserve their honour as free women did. The same applied to their male counterpart; since male slaves lacked free adult males’ power and authority they could be used as sexual objects
and be penetrated by male members of the master class.64
Craig Williams argues that ‘from the earliest of times it seems to have been understood that among the services that Roman men might expect their slaves to perform was the satisfaction of sexual desires…it seems always to have been assumed that the master would make such use of
his slaves of both sexes’.65 In the same direction, Joshel observes that
although in the Roman Empire,
Imperial legislation limited the corporal treatment and sexual abuse of slaves; freedom for abandoned sick slaves; regulations against prostitution, castration, and condemnation to the arena; rulings against excessive cru- elty and murder, none of this denied the master’s physical domination of
62
Dale B. Martin, ‘Slavery and the Ancient Jewish Family’, in S.J.D. Cohen (ed.), The Jewish
Family in Antiquity. BJS 289. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993, pp. 113-29.
63
Cf. Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery, p. 109.
64
Cf. Joseph A. Marchal, ‘The Usefulness of an Onesmus: The Sexual Use of Slaves and Paul’s Letter to Philemon’, JBL 130 No. 4 (2011), pp. 749-770. I however do not agree with his overall hypothesis that Onesmus must have been sexually useful to Paul while he was in prison.
65
Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 18.
his slave or the slave’s vulnerability, nor did it interfere with the master’s sexual relations with his own slaves.66
With this background, we can justifiably conclude that Exo 21:7-11, Amos 2:7 and Gen 16:1-6 depict common scenarios between masters and female slaves. Having established that Exo 21:20-21, 26-27 and to some extent, Exo 21:7-11, mark a significant departure from the general treatment of slaves in the ancient Near East and that the texts referred not to chattel-slaves but to poor Israelites, debt-slaves who were exploited by fellow countrymen (such that they could be exposed to beating some- times with fatal consequences and sexual abuse), it is important to con- clude the analysis of slavery laws in Exodus by returning to Exo 21:2-6 whose context and interpretation depends on the above texts.