> "which
we think they might have been originally written"
please don't assume about me, almost all of what you wrote was known to me prior before reading your comment. That information regarding XVII century England for example is something I would have supposed, but did not know for sure; I just knew the equivalent for German society at that time.
> When was that exactly? I believe the oldest extant versions are from around 300 AD. We have a rough idea of when certain books might have been written, but that is open to debate, and strong arguments have been made that put the origin of certain parts of these books centuries apart. Even the composition of a 'canonical' version of these books collections is not really clear before a certain point that is several centuries removed from the time in which we think they might have been originally written.
Yeah, 300 AD would be a sensible starting point. I am strictly talking about ancient Israel, during the time where the old testament was composed, where the exact point in time does not even matter for my claim, because my claim is: "The society that composed the OT was primarily patriarchical during most of the perioud where the OT was written, edited, read, to such a degree that it would be a mistake to pretend it was not." Nobody claims to have a time machine, of course.
Here are some well-reputated sources that strengthen my claim, and are congruent with what I rememember from my own readings of the Code of Hammurabi and the Old Testament way back:
- "Hennie J. Marsman, Women in Ugarit and Israel: Their Social and Religious Position in the Context of the Ancient Near East (Brill, 2003)". Massive comparative study of the ANE, her conclusion: [AI/]She concludes that while women had more rights than often assumed (they could sometimes buy land or engage in trade), the societies were undeniably patriarchal in their legal architecture. High priesthoods, kingships, and tribal elderships were exclusively male domains.[/AI]
- "Hans Jochem Boecker, Law and the Administration of Justice in the Old Testament and Ancient East (1980)", summary: [AI/]Analyzing the biblical Covenant Code, the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, and Middle Assyrian Laws, Boecker points out that women were legally disadvantaged. For instance, in many ANE legal codes, a woman's sexuality was treated as the property of her father or husband. Boecker writes regarding ANE legal codes: "There cannot either, of course, be any question of the legal equality of men and women"[/AI]
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_Bible:
"Ancient Near Eastern societies have traditionally been described as patriarchal, and the Bible, as a document written by men, has traditionally been interpreted as patriarchal in its overall views of women.[1]: 9 [2]: 166–167 [3] Marital and inheritance laws in the Bible favor men, and women in the Bible exist under much stricter laws of sexual behavior than men. In ancient biblical times, women were subject to strict laws of purity, both ritual and moral.
Recent scholarship accepts the presence of patriarchy in the Bible, but shows that heterarchy is also present: heterarchy acknowledges that different power structures between people can exist at the same time, that each power structure has its own hierarchical arrangements, and that women had some spheres of power of their own separate from men.[1]: 27 There is evidence of gender balance in the Bible, and there is no attempt in the Bible to portray women as deserving of less because of their "naturally evil" natures."
Heterarchy being present would not render the society non-patriarchical, especially when it comes to matter like the one that started this subthread, in that geneology trees should be viewed through a patriarchical lens, and that it is more likely that those elements are something familiar to the intended audience (which is not some small religious elite, mind you, the opposite, those narratives were written for a deeply religious society, with a scripture-based religion).
> Put simply, what I meant with my previous comment was: we have literally no idea if the people who wrote these supposed genealogies in Exodus were in fact practicing these inheritance legal forms you mentioned.
Of course not, put that way, we know basically nothing about anything and could simply abandon the discipline of academic history.
Scholars have to make and do make educated guesses though, which forms a consensus if enough do agree, and the current consensus is still that ancient israel had a patriarchical legal framework, and for example also that women were economically dependent over large amounts of time. Which is also reflect in a lot of books in the OT, which makes sense if 1) the stories where intended to be relatable and 2) the authors used what they observed around them to describe it. That depends on the genre of course, for prophetic books or lyricals books, there are different rules, but when it comes to the stories that have a narrative core, then this absolutely is something that historians consider when it comes to how the intended audience of the literarical work is structured. Constistently so, across regions and times.
The position that "many instances of primogeniture in the old testament would have been something not deeply known and likely experienced first hand by the typical reader" is pretty hard to defend, as I argued above. That is as close to knowing as we can get without a time machine - but if one does not make such (well-founded) assumptions, then much of the humanities, including hermeneutics, stands on shaky grounds.