Abstract
This dissertation investigates constructions of biblical mothers and motherhood in Jewish art and literature in the Second Temple Period and Late Antiquity. I argue that early Jewish communities rhetorically deploy the biblical mother as a figure who could effect communal, political transformation in the world of the text. I consider four texts as “case studies” which represent four major ways biblical mothers are understood to transform the political circumstances of their communities: through maternal prayer, Targum Jonathan’s Song of Hannah (2nd century CE); through maternal resistance, the fresco of the Widow of Zarephath at Dura Europos (3rd century CE); through maternal grief and loss, Lamentations Rabbah, petihta 24, on Rachel as a mourning mother (5th–6th century CE); and finally, through maternal martyrdom, the mother of the seven sons in 2 and 4 Maccabees (2nd century BCE and 1st–2nd century CE, respectively). My analysis is guided by the framework of reception history, which is the study of how biblical texts, stories, images, and characters are transformed beyond their original contexts in nachleben, or “afterlives.” Ultimately, my project offers a new, comprehensive evaluation of the myriad of ways in which ancient Jewish communities “thought with” biblical mothers in the Second Temple period through Late Antiquity.