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About the Event
Visiting PhD Fellow Katie Brown (University of Texas at Austin) will present on her dissertation to UVA and Jewish Studies students and faculty on Monday, September 28 at noon in New Cabell Hall room 236. Her talk is entitled: "Women's Noble Death as Social and Moral Judgement in Jewish Antiquity." Lunch provided.
Presentation Abstract
This talk examines women's noble death as an understudied literary phenomenon in Jewish antiquity beyond the Maccabean Mother, using Seila in Pseudo-Philo's Biblical Antiquities as its central case. Pseudo-Philo reshapes the story of the sacrifice of Jephthah's daughter into a "noble death": he makes her willingness explicit, gives her own interpretation of the vow theological weight, and has God declare her death precious. I read this transformation against documentary, material, and legal evidence for Jewish daughters in the late Second Temple and tannaitic period to reconstruct the normative expectations and documented realities of this social position. Against that historical backdrop, her death does two things at once: it exposes the failure of Jephthah and the wise men, whose judgment she is shown to exceed, and it affirms the binding force of God's law through her acceptance of her father's vow. This case illustrates a broader argument: that women's noble deaths are socially situated representations whose force depends on the specific identities assigned to the women who die, and that violence and death in ancient narrative more generally require attention to social position to be properly understood.