- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Dedication
- Editor and Advisers
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transliteration
- Introduction
-
One Cooking, Cuddling, and Candle-Lighting: Motherhood in Award-Winning Jewish Children’s Literature -
Two The Jewish Mother’s Prayer: Mothers in Late Nineteenth-Century Hungarian Jewish Women’s Prayer Books -
Three Nene Mesl-e Nān—‘Mother is Like Bread’: The Perception of Motherhood and Folklore Expressions among the Jews of Afghanistan -
Four Mothers and Children in Ottoman Jewish Society as Reflected in Hebrew Sources of the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries -
Five Like Mother Like Daughter: Mother–Daughter Relations in Babylonian Talmudic Stories -
Six The (Re)production of a Maskilah: The Mother–Daughter Bond between Menuhah and Hava Shapiro -
Seven Maurice Sendak’s Jewish Mother(s) -
Eight The Jewish Mother as Metonym for Community in Postwar America -
Nine The ‘Mothers’ Who Were Not: Motherhood Imagery and Childless Women Warriors in Early Jewish Literature -
Ten Motherhood as Motivation: American Jewish Women in Action, 1890–1940 -
Eleven ‘Two Voices Heard in Castile’: Rachel and Mary Weep for Their Children in the Age of the Zohar -
Twelve ‘Where Was Sarah?’ Depictions of Mothers and Motherhood in Modern Israeli Poetry on the Binding of Isaac -
Thirteen Depictions of Childbirth in Rabbinic Literature: The Innovation of a Genizah Midrashic Text -
Fourteen Upending the Curse of Eve: A Reframing of Maternal Breastfeeding in BT Ketubot -
Fifteen The Biblical Root ’mn: Retrieval of a Term and Its Household Context -
Sixteen Mothers and Ma’asim: Maternal Roles in Medieval Hebrew Tales -
Seventeen On Teachers, Rabbinic and Maternal - Contributors
- Index
The Biblical Root ’mn: Retrieval of a Term and Its Household Context
The Biblical Root ’mn: Retrieval of a Term and Its Household Context
- Chapter:
- (p.327) Fifteen The Biblical Root ’mn: Retrieval of a Term and Its Household Context
- Source:
- Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination
- Author(s):
Deena Aranoff
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
This chapter describes the maternal figure's connection to the etymological development of a key religious term, the Hebrew root 'mn, which is commonly translated as 'faithfulness' or 'constancy'. It talks about the abstract meanings of faithfulness and constancy as outgrowths of concrete maternal associations and provision of an infant's physical needs. The chapter recovers cultural traces of the maternal activities involved in childrearing in biblical terminology and traces maternal disappearance through the ways in which the meanings 'to rear, nurse' become muted abstractions. The chapter emphasizes how culture is embedded within language and how the physical activities of childrearing had a linguistic impact on the elite literature of ancient Israel. It then examines the subjectivity of mothers over their bodies and their own physical experiences as mothers.
Keywords: maternal figure, faithfulness, constancy, childrearing, biblical terminology, ancient Israel
Liverpool Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Dedication
- Editor and Advisers
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transliteration
- Introduction
-
One Cooking, Cuddling, and Candle-Lighting: Motherhood in Award-Winning Jewish Children’s Literature -
Two The Jewish Mother’s Prayer: Mothers in Late Nineteenth-Century Hungarian Jewish Women’s Prayer Books -
Three Nene Mesl-e Nān—‘Mother is Like Bread’: The Perception of Motherhood and Folklore Expressions among the Jews of Afghanistan -
Four Mothers and Children in Ottoman Jewish Society as Reflected in Hebrew Sources of the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries -
Five Like Mother Like Daughter: Mother–Daughter Relations in Babylonian Talmudic Stories -
Six The (Re)production of a Maskilah: The Mother–Daughter Bond between Menuhah and Hava Shapiro -
Seven Maurice Sendak’s Jewish Mother(s) -
Eight The Jewish Mother as Metonym for Community in Postwar America -
Nine The ‘Mothers’ Who Were Not: Motherhood Imagery and Childless Women Warriors in Early Jewish Literature -
Ten Motherhood as Motivation: American Jewish Women in Action, 1890–1940 -
Eleven ‘Two Voices Heard in Castile’: Rachel and Mary Weep for Their Children in the Age of the Zohar -
Twelve ‘Where Was Sarah?’ Depictions of Mothers and Motherhood in Modern Israeli Poetry on the Binding of Isaac -
Thirteen Depictions of Childbirth in Rabbinic Literature: The Innovation of a Genizah Midrashic Text -
Fourteen Upending the Curse of Eve: A Reframing of Maternal Breastfeeding in BT Ketubot -
Fifteen The Biblical Root ’mn: Retrieval of a Term and Its Household Context -
Sixteen Mothers and Ma’asim: Maternal Roles in Medieval Hebrew Tales -
Seventeen On Teachers, Rabbinic and Maternal - Contributors
- Index
