Saturday, December 12, 2020

Cynthia R. Chapman on the Female Contribution to their Offspring in the Hebrew Bible and its Implications for Psalm 51:5 and the Original Sin Debate

  

Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me. (Psa 51:5 [Heb: v. 7]

 

Commenting on the authors of the Hebrew Bible and their understanding of the female “contribution” to the traits of offspring, Cynthia R. Chapman (associate professor of biblical studies at Oberlin College) wrote the following, which has important ramifications for understanding Psa 51:5 and whether it is teaching “original sin”:

 

While many biblical texts present sons as the “seeds” of their father, they do not associate paternal seed with the transmission of physical, ethnic, or character traits. Instead, a father transmits his name, his house, his land, and his monument to his seed. Throughout the ancestral narratives in Genesis, when the word “seed” designates a human offspring, it is associated with the covenantal promises transmitted from father to son (Gen 13:15, 16; 15:5, 13; 17:7, 8, 10; 21:13 [Ishmael]; 22:17; 26:3, 4, 24; 28:4, 13, 14; 32:13; 35:12; 48:11). Outside of Genesis, covenantal promises continue to bind men and their seeds, alluding to the covenant of circumcision (Deut 30:6), the covenant between David and Jonathan and their seeds (1 Sam 20:42), the covenant of an eternal dynasty that Yahweh promises to David and his seed (2 Sam 7:12), and the commandments and “name” associated with covenantal observance among the seeds of the house of Jacob (Isa 48:17-19). The covenant promises bestow on a son a father’s material and immaterial wealth—“a great name,” a “blessing,” “land,” and “protection”—all of which are values within an idealized patrilineality. Therefore, while the word “seed” is important to the ideal of patrilineality, it is not used in reference to the transmission of physical or character traits from father to child.

 

Delaney and Speiser overemphasize the importance of the male seed in the biblical understanding of procreation, and fail to see those places where mothers are presented as contributing to the physical, ethnic, or character composition of their children. Naomi Steinberg is correct in her assertion that a mother’s ethnicity determined whether her son became his father’s designated heir. In Genesis, a man’s mother and wife had to come from the line of Terah in order for him to receive the covenantal blessing (Naomi Steinberg, Kinship and Marriage in Genesis: A Household Economics Perspective [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993], 1-11, 95-100; Tammi J. Schneider, Mothers of Promise: Women in the Book of Genesis [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2008], 16). Coming from the line of Terah does not simply mean that these women were good quality “containers”; they contributed something of themselves and their Terahite ethnicity to the child who was eventually named heir.

 

Several biblical texts provide evidence for the Hebrew understanding of cognatic descent. In the story of Jacob’s and Esau’s birth, for example, each twin is tied to one parent based on his physical appearance; the hairy Esau is tied to the masculinity of his father, Issac, while the smooth Jacob is tied to the femininity of his mother, Rebekah (Gen 25:25-26; 27:11). Joseph seems to have inherited physical beauty from his mother. Several texts, both literal and metaphorical, locate the formation of negative character traits within a mother’s womb. Job complains concerning the wicked: “They conceive trouble and give birth to evil; their womb fashions deceit” (Job 15:35). The psalmist laments, “Look, I was brought forth in iniquity and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Ps 51:5), and the Qumran psalm cited above asserts humans are “encompassed by iniquity since birth and since the breast by guilt” (4Q507,2). None of these texts insists that evil, guilt, iniquity, and deceit are the only possible products fashioned in the space of the womb, but they connect the traits of a mother to the child she births. They locate the formation of character traits in the female-focused reproductive process that moves from conception to pregnancy to birth.

 

Additional texts present the mother as the source of negative personality traits in the child, but they do not identify the womb as the site of transmission for these traits. These mothers are thought to teach iniquity rather than having it fashioned in their wombs. The metaphorical Mother Jerusalem, for example, is described as learning husband- and children-loathing from her Hittite mother (Ezek 16:44-47). Uterine sisters Oholah and Oholibah are introduced as “two women, the daughters of one mother,” in a text that describes how each led a life of whoredom from her youth (Ezek 23:2). Saul curses his son Jonathan for colluding with David, saying, “You son of a perverse, rebellious woman! Do I not know that you have chosen the son of Jesse to your own shame, and to the shame of your mother’s nakedness?” (1 Sam 20:30). In this text, Saul traces Jonathan’s traitorous behavior against him to the rebellious nature of his mother. Again, there is no specific mention of the womb. Finally, Ahaziah’s reign is introduced as follows: “Ahaziah was forty-two years old when he began to reign; he reigned one year in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Athaliah, a granddaughter of Omri. He also walked in the ways of the house of Ahab, for his mother was his counsellor in doing wickedly” (2 Chron 22:2-3). In both sets of texts—womb-focused and mother-focused—we find a transmission of traits from mother to child, sometimes occurring within the womb and sometimes occurring under the mother’s active instruction. While none makes the transmission of traits from mother to child through the womb explicit, together they suggest that a mother’s womb was more than a container for a man’s trait-bearing seed.

 

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 breasts 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 among siblings who came forth from the same womb. This womb-based connection could be expressed through the word raḥāmim, meaning a womb-centered allegiance that involved lifelong mutual protection. (Cynthia R. Chapman, The House of the Mother: The Social Roles of Maternal Kin in Biblical Hebrew Narrative and Poetry [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016], 122-24)

 

For those interested, 4Q507, the text from Qumran quoted in part in the above, reads as follows:

 

Frag. 1 1 … […] … […] … […] 2 But we are in sin from the womb, and from the breast, in gu[ilt …] 3 And while we exist, our steps are with impurity …

[…]

Frag. 2 1 […] all the […] 2 [… Bl]essed be the Lord […] 3 […] Blank […] 4 […]

… […]

Frag. 3 1 […] … [Bl]essed be the L[ord …] 2 […] everlasting [gene]rations.

Amen. Amen. […] 3 […] … Rem[ember, Lord, that …] (Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, eds. Florentino García Martínez and Eibert J.C. Tigchelaar [Leiden: Brill, 1997], 1021)

 

The above ties into what Mitchell Dahood and Herberg Haag wrote about this text:


brought forth in iniquity. All men have a congenital tendency toward evil; this doctrine finds expression in Gen viii 21; I Kings viii 46; Job iv 17, xiv 4, xv 14, xxv 4; Prov xx 9. (Mitchell Dahood, Psalms II, 51-100: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968], 4)



The idea that Adam’s descendants are automatically sinners because of the sin of their ancestor, and that they are already sinners when they enter the world, is foreign to Holy Scripture. The well-known verse from the psalms, ‘Behold I was born in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me’ (Psalms 51:7; 50:7), merely means that everyone born of woman becomes a sinner in this world, without fail. The Bible often uses the device of attributing a man’s later deeds or achievements to him from the time of his conception and birth. (Cf., for example, Jeremiah 1:5, where Jeremiah is made a prophet in his mother’s womb.) (Herbert Haag, Is Original Sin in Scripture? [trans. Dorothy Thompson; New York: Sheed and Ward, 1969]. 106-7)