Gender and Timebound Commandments in Judaism

This book examines a key tradition in Judaism - the rule that exempts women from 'timebound, positive commandments' - which has served for centuries.

Elizabeth Shanks Alexander (Author)

9781107035560, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 April 2013

300 pages, 2 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.61 kg

'This novel approach to gender in the earliest stratum of rabbinic texts concerns the rule that women are exempt from positive commandments occasioned by time … The author acknowledges the role of the feminist critiques and debates of recent decades regarding women's exemption or exclusion from some key Jewish ritual matters but seeks to show that much of the substance of these debates is informed by later rereadings of the Mishnah.' Religious Studies Review

The rule that exempts women from rituals that need to be performed at specific times (so-called timebound, positive commandments) has served for centuries to stabilize Jewish gender. It has provided a rationale for women's centrality at home and their absence from the synagogue. Departing from dominant popular and scholarly views, Elizabeth Shanks Alexander argues that the rule was not conceived to structure women's religious lives, but rather became a tool for social engineering only after it underwent shifts in meaning during its transmission. Alexander narrates the rule's complicated history, establishing the purposes for which it was initially formulated and the shifts in interpretation that led to its being perceived as a key marker of Jewish gender. At the end of her study, Alexander points to women's exemption from particular rituals (Shema, tefillin and Torah study), which, she argues, are better places to look for insight into rabbinic gender.

Part I. Gender and the Tannaitic Rule: 1. The rule and social reality: conceiving the category, formulating the rule
2. Between man and woman: lists of male-female difference
Part II. Talmudic Interpretation and the Potential for Gender: 3. How tefillin became a positive commandment not occasioned by time
4. Shifting orthodoxies
5. From description to prescription
Part III. Gender in Women's Ritual Exemptions: 6. Women's exemption from Shema and tefillin
7. Torah study as ritual
8. The fringes debate: a conclusion of sorts
9. Epilogue.

Subject Areas: Judaism [HRJ]