According to one prominent Catholic feminist theologian, ancient Israelite women experienced “enslavement” within their families. Carol Meyers attests that her undergraduate students likewise tend to assume biblical women were veiled, subservient, and oppressed. Yet the archaeological record of ancient Israel, when combined with a more careful reading of the Hebrew Bible itself, yields a very different picture of relations between the sexes. Meyers illustrates this point by focusing on the role ancient Israelite women played in processing grains into flour and baking it into bread:

The biblical prominence of national religious institutions—priesthood, sacrifice, tabernacle, and temple—often means that household religious activities are overlooked. Yet those activities were arguably the primary and most common aspect of the religious lives of most Israelites, and women had essential roles in sacral household activities involving food and its preparation.

Sanctity related to bread production appears in the offering of a piece of bread dough to God (Numbers 15:19-21) in order to secure God’s blessing for the household (Ezekiel 44:30). This ritual reflects a belief about the sanctity of bread. . . . In addition to the sacred task of making bread, women prepared special loaves and other foods for everyday and seasonal festivals.

All this should sound familiar to modern practitioners of Judaism. In a similar vein, Meyers warns about misreading the Bible’s depiction of a woman’s role in economic life:

Preparing bread was not simply a domestic chore; it was a life-sustaining activity. It was no less important to household survival than was the work of men in growing grain. While men and women were not equal in all aspects of community life, . . . both women and men were “breadwinners.” In fact, women dominated many household activities and men dominated others.

And let’s not forget the “strong woman,” [usually rendered as “woman of valor”] of Proverbs 31:10‒31. These 22 verses portray a household manager. More than half refer to economic processes. She provides food and engages in textile production; she purchases land, has a profitable business, and sells the textiles she produces to merchants. Moreover, she uses some of her household’s resources as charity for the poor.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.