The Contribution of Archaeology to the Study of Women in Biblical Times: Two Case Studies

The Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) provides limited information about women's lives in ancient Israel, but various other sources are available that can be used to reconstruct aspects of women's everyday activities and their roles in important lifecycle events. In this article I present two different case studies—brewing beer and childbirth—in order to show how much we can learn about Israelite women's lives using archaeology, iconography, ethnography, and ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian textual sources along with passages from the Hebrew Bible.