There was therefore no inevitability in the emergence of an all­ male priesthood. The prolonged ideological struggle of the Hebrew tribes against the… - Gerda Lerner

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There was therefore no inevitability in the emergence of an all­ male priesthood. The prolonged ideological struggle of the Hebrew tribes against the worship of Canaanite deities and especially the persistence of a cult of the fertility-goddess Asherah must have hardened the emphasis on male cultic leadership and the tendency toward misogyny, which fully emerged only in the post-exilic pe­riod. Whatever the causes, the Old Testament male priesthood represented a radical break with millennia of tradition and with the practices of neighboring peoples. This new order under the all-powerful God proclaimed to Hebrews and to all those, who took the Bible as their moral and religious guide that women cannot speak to God.

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About Gerda Lerner

Gerda Lerner (30 April 1920 – 2 January 2013) was an Austrian-born American feminist, historian, author, and advocate of Women's History.

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Alternative Names: Gerda Hedwig Lerner
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Additional quotes by Gerda Lerner

Revisionist theories usually begin with an argument with one's predecessors. In my case, these predecessors were 19th- and 20th-century feminist writers, who saw women's history as a manifestation of women's oppression and focused excessively on the struggle for women's rights. The most recent, and certainly indispensable book was Eleanor Flexner's Century of Struggle, which cut a wide swath, although it was essentially written in the woman's rights framework.

Patriarchy has not only invented itself and usurped a central place, but it has usurped intellectually, a kind of legitimacy, that described anything that is not like it, as deviant. And men and women have gone into that for 4000 years. Not all women. There were always some women who resisted. And our great tragedy is, that because we were deprived of a history of women, generation after generation of women who wanted to resist patriarchy, had to do it on their own.

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