"Between Rome and Jerusalem: Jewish Elite Women, Euergetism, and NaziritePractice" –

David Levinsky (Stanford)

For elite Jewish women, nazirite vows offered a religious practice which closely resembled the votive activity and the euergetistic giving of the larger religio-cultural environment—the Greek East. Both in a public setting, where help and benefit was asked of the Gods, or in private transactional contexts, Roman votive practice attempted to establish a benevolent relationship with the divine and to encourage the reception of divine beneficence for the household and city of the petitioner. Euergetism—a French neologism which describes the network of reciprocal responsibilities enacted by elite public donations—took many forms. Nazirite vows, which include the public donation of sacrifices to the Temple in Jerusalem, could be understood by the Roman populace as a Jewish variation of elite noblesse oblige.

At the same time, nazirite vows offered an opportunity to elite Jewish women to uphold the traditions of the Bible. As described in chapter six of the book of Numbers, a man or a woman could take a nazirite vow, abstaining from three things for a period of time--wine, cutting their hair, and contact with corpse impurity. At the completion of the full duration of their vow, the person brought sacrifices to the Temple, cut their hair, and burnt the hair on the Temple alter.

Given the textual and material evidence, I argue that representations of elite female nazirite vows reveal a twofold effort to generate social status—within the Jewish world and within the Greek East. In the Jewish environment, nazirite practice offered women an opportunity to show their status as supporters of the Temple in Jerusalem via a biblically ordained practice. Yet other non-Jewish elites would also recognize the performance of nazirite vows as both a type of votive and euergetistic practice, acquiring social status for the women in a larger social milieu.