My Lord the Queen: Gender Discord in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

implications of this observation, in the case of the book of Ruth, the author has utilized gender discord to literary effect. Understanding the implication of this effect is essential to properly comprehending and unpacking the story and its characters, where male and female roles are frequently upended and subverted. Ruth is indeed as valuable as seven sons would have been. the of on the basis of arguing in the distinction of in Second and feminine plural counterpart. certain Neo-Assyrian employ a similar grammatical strategy in which high-ranking are to, reverently, with male titles. Influential women of the court in a society where institutional authority was most often a masculine property come to be seen as “honorary males” in this patriarchal social system. Beyond the grammatical explanation, in this paper I consider the literary effect of gender discord in biblical narrative in light of a comparative semantic study between gender discord in Neo-Assyrian texts and the book of Ruth.