The Side-Lining of the Pain of Women in the Hebrew Bible
The relationship between pain and gender is currently one of the most debated topics in pain studies. Scholars have analysed the extent to which cultural constructions of gender impact experiences of physical suffering and how these experiences are represented in various historical and cultural contexts. Within biblical studies, however, the relationship between pain and gender has not been fully addressed. The present lecture aims to help fill this gap by showing that the patriarchal and androcentric society of ancient Israel resulted, among other things, in the marginalization of women’s pain in the texts of the Hebrew Bible. The physical suffering of women, whether real women or literary constructions, remained largely unspoken, untold and therefore unheard.
Danilo Verde is a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven. He studied at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome (2006–2009), at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2007–2008), and at the Institute of Gestalt – Kairos in Rome-Venice-Ragusa (2010–2014). He obtained his doctoral degree at KU Leuven (2018) defending a dissertation on the warlike metaphors in the Song of Songs. In 2018, he was granted the FWO junior post-doctoral fellowship (2018–2021) to work on the relationship between trauma, poetry, and the body in the Hebrew Psalter, followed by the FWO senior post-doctoral fellowship (2021–2024) for the project entitled “Pain in Ancient Hebrew: Language, Cognition, and Culture.”