CERTAIN BIBLICAL PASSAGES show that women served in some capacity at the sanctuary. The clearest case is that of the women attendants at the Tent of Meeting (38:8; I Samuel 2:22). Yet, in contrast to some other ancient cultures, there is no evidence of priestesses in ancient Israel. Scholars have proposed several theories to explain this absence, but none solves the mystery.
One theory is that women could not be priests because they menstruated, making them periodically ritually unclean. However, menstruation is not considered any more defiling than other causes of ritual impurity (see Leviticus 15). Priests could become ritually impure on occasion, yet once the period of impurity passed, they could go back to their priestly duties after performing the necessary ablutions. If menstrual impurity were the issue, why could women not perform communal religious functions during the rather lengthy times in their lives when they were not menstruating?
A second theory is that the absence of women reflects a division of labor along gender lines and the needs of a pre-modern, agricultural community. Because women were needed to bear and raise children and to perform essential household tasks, they could not be spared for temple service. But then why did women function as priestesses in surrounding cultures?
A third theory suggests that the women were priestesses elsewhere because they served in the sanctuaries of goddesses; but since Israel’s official religion did not sanction the worship of goddesses, there was no place in it for priestesses. However, a weakness of this theory is that priestesses in other ancient cultures served in sanctuaries of gods and goddesses alike.
A fourth theory suggests that excluding women from the priesthood meant to distinguish Israel from her neighbors, who often employed women in rituals of a sexual nature. Note, however, that in all the surrounding cultures, female functionaries filled a diverse number of roles, not all of which were sexual in nature. Some women functioned as priestesses; others filled maintenance and support roles or served as singers, dancers, and musicians.
A fifth theory is based on the claim that priestesses in the surrounding cultures did not conduct animal sacrifice—and that Israel followed its neighbors in this respect: women were not included because animal sacrifices constituted a central part of Israelite ritual. However, as Mayer Gruber notes, pictorial illustrations and written references to women slaughtering sacrifices are extant from all over the ancient Near East (“Women in the Cult According to the Priestly Code,” 1987, n. 37).
In evaluating these theories, one should take into account the fact that many of the surrounding cultures where we find priestesses were more economically developed and socially complex than was Israel. The smaller sanctuary that likely existed in ancient Israel—and the simpler procedures there—would have limited the number of functionaries in general. Furthermore, while the Bible legitimizes only male priests (from Aaron’s family), Israelite religion was surely more complex than what the text describes. Women probably had more roles in local sanctuaries than the Bible records.
—Hilary Lipka