 Welcome to our internet audience to today's installment of the women and gender performance lecture series. My name is Melissa Craddock. I'm curator at the body museum. Before I introduce today's speaker, I'd like to invite my colleague associate curator, Brooke Norton to read a statement on behalf of the museum. We would like to begin by acknowledging that Berkeley, California is on the territory of the Hoot Shoon, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenye alone. We respect the land and the people who have steward it throughout many generations, and we honor their elders both past and present. We're living in a moment that warrants deep reflection on our past and present across across many global contexts, equal access to health care, education, fair wages and human rights is contested on the basis of sex and gender identity. To bring to light these timely issues to serve a broader public audience online, and to connect to the local community that it serves. The museum is taking action to become a more inclusive, welcoming and equitable institution that practices the philosophy of radical inclusion adopted by its parent institution, Pacific School of Religion. One of these steps is the creation of public programming. In the future series, we hope to highlight new and established scholars who are engaging with risky marginalized topics concerning women, gender performance and sexuality in the past. We invite you to participate in these programs that so that together, we can listen, learn and work towards creating a more inclusive museum community. Thank you for joining us today. It's now my pleasure to introduce today's speaker. Pratima Gopala Krishna is the Provost Early Career Fellow in the Department of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. She's a historian of late antique near Eastern Jewish communities. Her current research focuses on labor and the household and the interconnections of agricultural and domestic economies. She received her PhD in religious studies from Yale University with a certificate in women's gender and sexuality studies. In fall 2022, she was an educational and cultural affairs junior research fellow at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem. The title of her talk is domestic labor and status in the late ancient Near East. Dr. Gopala Krishna, the floor is yours. Hello everyone. Thank you so much to the Bade Museum and in particular to Dr. Brody and Dr. Craddick for inviting me to participate in this lecture series. I have been a viewer and an admirer of the museum's previous lecture series. So it is an honor to be included in this year's wide ranging program on women and gender performance in the ancient Middle East. As Dr. Craddick just explained, I am a historian who works on the late antique Near East and I work a lot with a corpus of Jewish texts known as rabbinic texts, as well as material culture. And some of my recent research also addresses itself to early medieval textual and documentary evidence, in particular the Cairo Geniza. For today's talk, I am focusing on gender and labor in Roman era Palestine during the first few centuries CE. I would like to introduce you to a text that exemplifies some of the challenges of talking about gender and labor in the ancient Middle East. Because it indulges our ideas about women's work or what we might call domestic labor as static and unchanging over time, as a backdrop to social and economic transitions, rather than as a shaper of those transitions. And that's a habit of thinking that I'm really hoping to shift. I'm going to argue that once we set aside any pretenses to using this text to reconstruct daily life as such, we can actually say quite a bit about how the economic value of free and enslaved women's work may have shaped familial and social relationships, both within and beyond the household. For me, it all started with this list, which I will now read out to you, and perhaps it may even be familiar to some of you. These are the labors that a wife performs for her husband. She grinds, she bakes, she washes, she cooks, she nurses her child, she prepares the bed and she works in wool. If she brought him one enslaved woman in her dowry, she does not grind or bake or wash. Two, and she does not cook, and she does not nurse her child. Three, and she does not make the bed. Four, and she sits in an easy chair. Rabbi Eliezer said, even if she brought him 100 enslaved women, he may compel her to work in wool, because idleness leads to lewdness. Rabbi Shimon Ben-Gamliel said, a man who takes a vow preventing his wife from doing labors must divorce her and give her her ketuba, that's a marriage settlement, because idleness leads to dullness. This is from a second century CE rabbinic Jewish composition known as the Mishnah, and right away you might notice a few things about this text. First is this interchange of labors between the wife and the enslaved women she brings in her dowry. The text presents a highly stylized account of how wealth and status affect a woman's relationship to labor. With the wife being released from more and more labors as she brings more enslaved women in her dowry. Second is this construction that the wife does these labors for her husband. This turns the husband into the recipient of the wife's work, and it makes the husband wife relationship, the spouse relationship central to the construction of the household. So in practice households may have taken a lot of different forms that may not have had necessarily both spouses living for instance. The text also makes the husband into the sole recipient of the labor even though in practice, he would presumably not be the direct or sole beneficiary for labors like cooking, baking, breastfeeding and so on. Third is that the list itself is presented in an anonymous editorial voice, but then we have these specific opinions attributed to these two sages Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Shimon van Gomel. In particular Rabbi Eliezer says that spinning wool is labor that a woman cannot escape no matter how many enslaved women she brings in her dowry. These are all things that we could talk about in great detail, I have written about them in other places, I'm happy to discuss them further but for today's talk. I want to focus on the list of labors itself. This might seem like a strange choice. After all the list feels like the kind of vaguely plausible collection of tasks that a woman might do. There's much more to say than that. This is a good place to pause and talk about this text the Mishnah and these people the rabbis. In the wake of two failed revolts and from 66 to 70 CE and from 132 to 135 CE. In the wake of the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, Jewish society in the newly reorganized Roman province of Syria Palestine underwent a series of political, economic, social and religious transformations. In the face of these changing political and social regimes, several diffuse reactions may have emerged among sub elite Jewish populations of Roman Palestine. The plastic tradition retroactively referred to as the rabbinic movement was one such emergence, at least during the first few centuries CE, the rabbis were a group of marginal importance in ancient Jewish society. They enjoyed very little formally recognized authority as a group or individually beyond beyond the kind of their their own circles. Nevertheless, it is clear from their work that they see daily life as a worthy and urgent topic of interpretation so they're addressing themselves to a much wider range of of society and a wider range of topics than what their their reach might suggest in in actuality. This is the context for the circa 200 CE emergence of the mission, which is often called the first rabbinic book. The mission is not, it's not a law code, it's not a law collection. We might describe it as a compilation of opinions akin to the digest. As we just saw the mission of renders opinions, both in the anonymous voice of the editor and in the voices of individual named sages. In addition to these statements that also contains lists, disputes, anecdotes, biblical exegesis descriptions of rituals, especially associated with the defunct temple cult and much more. And then a note on the thematic organization of the mission of the mission is divided into six sections or orders on overarching topics like agriculture festivals women, civil damages and so on. These orders are then divided into track dates on topics such as the Yom Kippur ritual of the high priest practices of Shabbat and the holidays marriage contracts divorce and manumission documents and much more. Although the mission draws on build the material to frame its treatment of these very topics. The material itself is organized alongside organized along thematic rather than canonical lines. This thematic ordering cast along shadow in kind of the history of Jewish interpretation because the mission and a roughly contemporary compilation known as the Tosefta became the object of iterative study and commentary. And this process of study, much of it was oral resulted in the compilation of two Talmudim, the Palestinian Talmud or your your shami and the Babylonian Talmud or the Bob Lee. And along with various works of Midrash, a form of biblical interpretation spanning from the third century to the ninth century CE. These works all together make up what is referred to as the classical rabbinic corpus. The mission exhibits a few features that contribute to its textual character and that also shaped the methodological challenges inherent in reading these texts. The text makes virtually no reference to contemporary historical events. On the other hand it is shot through with historical memory. This is clearest in all the track dates pertaining to the defunct temple cult. The mission is also clearly produced by and for an insider audience so it generally does not offer a programmatic discussion of any topic, but instead assumes a readership that is familiar with the, with their terms and can jump right into the middle of a discussion. These peculiarities mentioned up to now shape the horizon of what kinds of questions one may ask about that list of labors that I began with. On the one hand, the mission is an underappreciated text for the social and economic history of the late ancient Near East. On the other hand, there are challenges in reading it because it resists easy historical contextualization, and this list of labors is no different. The labors halfway through a track day on marriage and the rabbis do not define the term that they use for labors, they use this term Malachot, they don't define what they don't explain kind of what this list denotes. The rabbis had little influence beyond their immediate circles so this text can't really be understood as carrying anything even remotely akin to legal force in ancient Jewish society or in actual households. However, the significance of this text doesn't depend on our ability to determine whether or not it was somehow implemented in people's households. And this is where I find it really helpful to look to kind of borrow from Marion Holmes cats who works on early Islamic juristic texts and has written about domestic labor in that context, writes about a very similar methodological challenge and says that we must use the terminology and logic of these texts as objects of inquiry in their own right, rather than as imperfectly transparent media for the reconstruction of realities beyond the text. And so it was in some ways the trite nature of the list that drew me to it. The list reads like the kind of thing that could be as true for medieval Iraq as for ancient Egypt. And in truth, our ideas of domestic labor tend to look that way, timeless and unchanging. As someone interested in gender and labor. I wanted to see if I could historicize this list if I could make sense of these choices and situated against its will perhaps in a specific place and time. Here's what I will not be able to do. I will not be able to explain or psychologize why the compilers of this text chose these seven specific labors or why they put them in this particular order. There are certainly many theories about what the order of tasks means. One of them is that perhaps the latter tasks like breastfeeding and making the bed 10 more intimate perhaps than the earlier ones like grinding or baking spinning wool which again is the last item in the list is obviously, you know it has a special place in this list. And it's also special because according to Rabbi Eliezer at least a woman cannot be released from it no matter how wealthy she is. So all these theories about the order of the of the labors say important thing to have merit they say important things about the different kinds of physicality involved in these labors the different demands that they make on someone's person or time. But my goal here is not to provide the definitive explanation of the organizing principle behind this list. In part because I'm not sure that such a principle exists. Here's what I can tell you, for all of its fascinating choices. This list of housework is not sweet generous. Atomic juristic discussions of wives labor also often contain enumerations of what these labors might consist of. So one passage defines indoor work or I'll hit my partner as meeting bread, cooking, sweeping spreading bedding, drawing water, if she has it and all of the housework. The other one references grinding flour, cooking food, making flower up have a something out of order here. But the slide has a correctly spinning weaving meeting bread cooking and sweeping and then the other one is grinding flour cooking food, making, making the bed that should say attending the house which is sweeping it out and spreading out the bedding. The list I began with is not even the only list of labors. It's not even the only list of Malachi within the mission itself. The list of a wife's Malachi comes from a track date about marriage, but another track date on Shabbat contains an equally enigmatic list of 39 Malachi that one may not perform on Shabbat. Here they are the 39 labors I'm not going to read all of them out. But you can see here that, you know, they are clustered around particular they're kind of live various tasks involved in the process of, of baking a loaf of bread, starting growing and threshing and grinding all the way up meeting and baking. This one is these are kind of clustered around the process of making a garment. So, again, there are theories about what this list of 39 means where does it come from. But, you know, as we can see here there's no kind of immediate association with certainly not with women specifically, nor with, nor with the household. So, the list of seven also felt vague and inadequate to the mission as own earliest readers so I have a text here from the to sefta, which is that companion compilation that I mentioned, which sometimes comments on the mission and sometimes includes material not preserved in the mission. And you can see here that these earliest readers so they actually quote the mission that they say labors at the wife does for her husband that's in the mission. Well, it's not actually comprehensive they just didn't name the other pattern you know there's obviously more than this they just didn't name everything else they just named the seven. So, rather than look at our list of labors from from to vote as a vague but plausible enumeration of what wives might do. Instead of looking at it as this a historical but ultimately unobjectionable list of women's work. I want us to understand this vague possibility as a key characteristic of lists of housework. In fact scholars of housework have noted even in modern empirical context that when housework as a concept is is ill defined one of the ways that it is, it is operationalized is is in this kind of list form is rendered into this list form. And these lists of housework often retain an unfocused quality, even as their individual contents are often taken as self evident and their choices about what to put in and what to leave out. But there's no, there's no attempt to kind of define housework as a category. This is where we come to the inherent difficulty of defining this thing that we might call domestic labor. When socialist feminists of the 1960s and 1970s, posited that something called domestic labor could be theorized. One of their key insights had to do with understanding the household as a site of production. This entailed approaching housework and childcare as labor processes and asking questions about the nature of these processes. How or if they created value and what this value was. It also entailed thinking about the relationship between production and reproduction and thinking about how domestic labor was key to the process of reproducing labor power. These discussions of domestic labor were enlightening in many respects but they also raised some puzzles. One puzzle was whether the category of domestic labor ought to include childbearing and childcare. This is fundamentally also a question about how to define reproduction. So is reproduction simply the biological act of procreation or is it in fact all the activities required for the maintenance of daily life, kind of necessary for social reproduction. And while these critiques identified the societal need for domestic labor and then showed how these needs were met by women's work. It did not succeed in explaining why specifically it was women associated with this labor, nor did it really account for how human agency played into this increasingly abstract process. The other puzzle for me is the use of domestic labor as a concept when talking about the ancient world. In other words, how well does this concept travel. The Mishnah uses the term Malachol, which as I just mentioned has no particular association with either homes or women. The Islamic sources use this term al-khidmalatatina, which is translated as indoor work. I have also used, you know, referred to this, referred to this list as a list of wives work, women's work, housework and so on. None of these terms are perfect, but all of them play a heuristic purpose because they each get at part of the issue in defining this concept. When I refer to domestic labor, I am placing this labor implicitly within a domestic realm, whether that's work done physically in the house, but then what exactly is a house. Or perhaps it's defined as work that is done for domestic use. When I refer to wives work in this list, when it says these are the ways that a wife does for her husband, it's placing this labor within a particular web of familial relationships. And when I refer to women's work, I'm placing this concept within kind of ideologies of gender and propriety. My question for the remainder of this talk is, how can the contents of this list of this Mishnahiq list help us theorize domestic labor better for the late ancient Near East. And I would like to answer this question by focusing on the first item from the list, namely grinding green. The reason for that is that the work of grinding green is rooted in domestic production, and it can show us that what we think of as domestic labor or wives work was not work that that we need to rescue from the obscurity of unpaid work. Instead, we're dealing with a time before this work was artificially separated from the market and made part of a private realm. In other words, we're dealing with the time before domestic labor became domestic labor. In order to appreciate why grinding green was an industry rooted in domestic production. Let's discuss some of the technological changes in grain processing that were happening during the first millennium CE and the Eastern Mediterranean. Beginning as early as the Neolithic period and for several millennia thereafter, the predominant category of tool for processing grain was the saddle corn. The most common version of this consisted of a lower rectangular stone and an upper rubbing stone, not unlike a rolling pin that was moved back and forth to crush the grain or the other item. The last few centuries BCE, however, saw the development of several more efficient milling technologies that changed the face of grain processing in the region. Three new styles of mills began appearing in the Levant as early as the Hellenistic period, but most became well established in Palestine during the first few centuries CE. First was a lever mill that came to be named the Hopper rubber or the Olympus mill. There are several morphologies and types for this mill, but one standard type consists of rectangular lower and upper stones. And the upper stone contains a rectangular depression with sloping sides that ends in a slit through which the grain is fed. And the upper stone is connected, is attached to a wooden rod, and the lever movement of the rod is what made the operation of the Olympus mill possible. And one end of the lever was either fixed to a vertical pin or we have some in situ examples where it was actually attached to a niche in the wall. So again, you could move it by, you could operate the mill by moving the lever in an arc motion. The Olympus mill originated in the East, maybe in Greece or Anatolia, but the rotary mill on the right here seems to have originated in the Western Mediterranean at around the same time. The rotary mill also consists of two stones with a hopper mechanism in the upper stone, but the two stones are round in shape and the mill is operated through a circular movement rather than a lever movement. The rotary mill was much slower to move east, and it seems that the Olympus mill remained dominant in the Levant throughout the Hellenistic and Roman periods. And then I should also mention here the simultaneous use of the Olympus mill and the rotary mill may have led to the development of the Pompeian mill or the donkey mill, which archaeologists first encountered in Sicily. This mill has a conical lower stone, which you can see in the back of this picture here and then this hourglass shaped upper stone. And this mill could be powered by a draft animal so it was several magnitudes more powerful than the Olympus mill. Although the first three centuries CE saw a great deal of technological change in mill types in Palestine, the history of milling is not a straightforward one about progressively more efficient mills replacing earlier manual technologies. Nor is it a story of women's household work turning into professionalized men's work. This is partly, you know, partly borne out by the fact that rotary mills become popular and remain popular long after the more powerful Pompeian mills are available. But for the for the first few centuries CE were really mostly dealing with Olympus mills and then occasionally Pompeian mills in urban context or the continued use of old fashioned saddle corns in rural contexts. Olympus mills exemplify how what we label as commercial baking was born of domestic production. Although grinding stones and archaeological context are usually found in secondary use, the few in C2 examples of mills illustrate the difficulty of distinguishing between a domestic and commercial production. So at Gamla, for instance, an Olympus mill was discovered in a workshop adjacent to a domestic quarter, and the excavators describe the installation as larger than usual for larger than usual for domestic flour production. But it's also clearly very close by it's adjacent to a wing labeled as a domestic quarter so it suggests that we might need to think more expansively about this concept of domestic flour production. And in the textual evidence, there's not a clear kind of gender gender binary that maps on to different kinds of technology so if we don't see this instance of men are depicted using this kind of mill and women are depicted using this other kind of mill, at least when it comes to Olympus mills, rabbinic texts depict both men and women using this using this mill type and we see that here in in the Tosefta we see the rabbis depict two women grinding at an Olympus mill, which is referred to as a hand mill. And we also have all these texts about Olympus mills as domestic installations. These texts are concerned with the mill's placement within a room, and they describe the distance from any shared walls with the neighbor's domicile. They describe the status of the mill in case the property is sold and so on and so forth. So again we can see how this mill is really rooted in domestic production. So I said I wanted to look at this case study of grinding grain to think about how can the form and contents of this list help us theorize domestically but this concept of domestic labor better for the ancient world. So the point of this of this little survey of grinding technology is not to offer historical contextualization for its own sake. Instead, archaeological and textual evidence about grinding green can push us to take a more critical posture between more critical posture towards the distinction that is often made between unpaid work done at home and commodified work done outside at home. So this distinction between paid and unpaid work has for a long time governed how scholars conceptualize of domestic labor in the in the late ancient Near East. So scholars will often refer to how to the cultural and economic decommodification of female labor, including this text from Q2 vote. These are saying that the rabbis are participating in in decommodifying women's work by kind of restricting it within within the home. And specifically, this this text and this term Malahot is understood to establish non-wage work done at home in opposition to a woman's earnings outside the home. The problem with this distinction is that it presumes that the rabbis themselves understood the home as the site of decommodified labor. I would like us to be more skeptical towards this assumption. As I mentioned before, we're not dealing with a time before domestic labor was pushed into a private realm. We're dealing we're dealing with a time before domestic labor was pushed out of the private realm. We're dealing with a time before it was kind of severed severed from severed from the economy. So that's, I think the problem with this distinction between decommodified work at home and commodified work outside the home is that it doesn't match. It doesn't match the clear the clear value that the clear economic value that the rabbis themselves seem to have understood as understood as kind of characteristic of the work that women did they understood this work as clearly valuable. Let me say a few words now by way of conclusion. So I spent some time today talking about this list of labors that appears in the second century composition. The Mishnah, the list casts a long shadow in the history of Jewish interpretation. And if the mission as goal was to provide an impression of neutral description, then it has absolutely succeeded in creating that impression. The list has long been read as a banal description of the kinds of work that women might do. I want to suggest that the list can be more than that. The rabbinic corpus presents a series of methodological challenges. It offers an underappreciated textual vantage point into Roman Near Eastern society. And the rabbis are patently interested in matters of daily life. However, it is not always evident how to historicize this material or how to put it into conversation with other textual sources or into conversation with archaeological evidence. The list of labors exemplifies several of these pathological challenges. As a description of daily life, it feels vague, plausible and incomplete. Even the mission as earliest readers found this list and unlikely and inadequate encapsulation of a wife's work. The Tzefda says by way of explanation that the Mishnah only mentioned seven categories of labors didn't mention the rest. As it turns out, vagueless of housework is not an enterprise unique to the Mishnah. In the absence of definitions of these terms like Malachol or wives' work or women's work or enslaved women's work, we get this operationalization of housework into list form. The point of the list is not to serve as a prescriptive ideal for what women ought to do. The significance of this text doesn't lie in whether or not it was enforced or practiced in an actual household. We would be better off not reading it as either a prescriptive or a descriptive account of daily life. Instead, the form and contents of the list can help us theorize the concept of domestic labor and consider how well this concept might travel in the ancient world. I explored this question today through the case study of grinding grain. In the Mishnah, this is the first to go in this fantasy of labor that is seamlessly transferred from the wife to the enslaved women. The text does not mention where this grinding happened or with what tools or who it was done by, who else was involved in the process, but how and where is a key part of the story about grinding grain in the first millennium CE. New technologies came to the Eastern Mediterranean during this period, but they don't fit into this narrative of linear technological progress. And they don't fit into this narrative that we often want to impose of a transition from domestic to professional production or vice versa. In addition, the technological shift doesn't map easily onto a gender binary, doesn't map easily onto this technology is associated with men or women. My takeaway here is that the case of grinding grain is productive as an instance of labor rooted in domestic production that really shows us that we don't need to be in the business of rescuing free or enslaved women's work as productive. And I think this has often been something that we've felt like we needed to do, we felt like we needed to kind of say actually this work, you know, kind of retrieve how important this work was. But I'm finding instead that the work plainly carried, the work was plainly recognized as economically valuable in at least the sources that I'm looking at. So my question really is, you know, how can we, how can we read textual and archaeological evidence together to actually take this recognition of this works value. So it's not enough to just say, hooray, we showed that it's valuable. But what can we say about how the kind of the recognition of this works value shapes social and economic relationships both within and beyond the household. And with that, I am excited to hear your questions and thank you so much. Thank you so much for this fascinating talk. It gave me a whole lot of food for that. I'd also like to invite the YouTube audience anyone see who is watching live to contribute questions or comments you might have into the chat so that we can ask Dr. Gopal and Krishna. But I'm going to start with a couple questions of my own. And I think I'll start sort of at the more granular level and then build up to a broader set of issues in order to directly relate to some of your concluding remarks that you just talked about. So right at the end of the talk, you were problematizing the assumption of decommodification of household labor. I'm wondering how if and how women's housework was understood as a direct economic contribution to the household, and whether that was put in numeric terms or other other terms of value. It was valued differently and I think the answer is no based on what you just said but if it was valued differently to the domestic labor, based on who performed it whether an enslaved woman, or a wife who did or did not have enslaved women laborers with her household. You're muted. Thanks. Thank you for the question. I want to start by saying that I think I think the claim about the decommodification of wives work comes mainly from the rabbis treatment of textile work, and it has to do with, you know, it's kind of it's kind of placed in the opposition to, you know, even work that is done for pay or even work that is kind of, you know, attached to a kind of a monetary some wages will have you is still placed under the control of the husband so this is kind of a rabbinic opposition to to take waged work and place it under the control of the husband. So, it's really important to to what specifically when we're looking at at this corpus. We're looking at, you know, conceptual innovations that the rabbis have come up with to to place different kinds of work into into this, you know, into their into their kind of vision of of household exchange. And that that's really where this opposition between commodified and decommodified even comes from there's that additional layer of, you know, these are the term is specifically described as, you know, the kind of the decommodifying and kind of doing the work of decommodifying labor and it's placed into into contrast with this other word for, you know, for kind of clearly wage, waged work, but that waged work is still being placed under your masaya time, it's still being placed under the control of the husband. And that that is also related to to your question about is, you know, how is this work valued. There is, you know, one, there's a text just later in the same chapter that actually does quantify textile work quantifies you know what the amounts are and what the what the wages are. We can do with that what we will it's hard to kind of contextualize in in isolation, but even more interesting is the fact that you know the terms that the terms actually use there for that kind of waged work. It is, it is a term that is that is considered applicable only to wives and daughters and enslaved men. Only the, you know, wives daughters and enslaved men are the only ones who do that kind of wage to work because that is the kind of wage work that is actually under the earnings actually belong to the patriarch, that is different from, you know, the. So it's a very specific definition of waged work as well so that's that's something to kind of keep in mind that the, the this narrative of the kind of the scholarly narrative of the decommodification of women's work emerges because of I think it emerges out of this. The specific mechanics of how textile work is managed, and I'm really interested in what happens when we look at other look at other kinds of work. Thank you. Something that you were just saying is spurring a little bit more. Oh, so Aaron, did you have a question I see that you just turned your video on before I get into my other question. Yeah, sure, if that's okay if I just sort of jump in. First of all, proud to me thank you so much for such a fascinating talk. It stimulated many, many thoughts, not my time period so I know we all use that sort of excuse, but thinking more from a kind of bronze and iron age framework. You know, I think, and I love to hear you in this more of a kind of statement but I'd love to hear you comment on it, because I think we can sort of complicate that binary of paid and unpaid labor in that, you know, the sort of framing of domestic production is that not everything was used within the household. And so, you know, there are opportunities there for, you know, quote unquote household work to generate surpluses. And for those surpluses to be bartered sold, whatever so that's kind of a category that's, you know, so it is that paid labor or is it unpaid labor. And, you know, I think it creates a third category, which is, you know, sort of mediates between those worlds. Anyway, I would love to hear you kind of think through some of what I've just talked about. I think the management of the surplus is kind of at the heart of these kind of definitions of what is defined as paid labor or unpaid labor. I guess my, you know, if I could kind of address one one kind of statement to one group of people it would be to say that we should be and I think this is what you're what you're pointing out as well we should be a little cautious about how we define terms like paid work and unpaid work we shouldn't kind of take those. We shouldn't take that that kind of binary for for granted, especially when it's being presented to us on a platter by our sources. That is especially when we should be very suspicious of it. So I think I think the this question of things that either don't fit into that binary things that I think this is. I've encountered that kind of middle space more. Actually I've encountered it with granny granny so I just bring didn't bring those texts today but I've encountered that kind of middle space of things that things that are now classified as paid or unpaid in several of the specific specific labors that I mentioned on this list, which is why when you put them into in the in the conversation with which is why which is why I think I want I want to think about you know what can the list do for us to actually nuance the concept of domestic labor rather than to kind of accept that Malacho means, you know, a certain kind of decommodified labor in opposition to a to kind of a wage economy, the wage economy is in the household to. Yeah, it sounds like also what you're saying relates to some of your other work on subsistence and maintenance within the household and how the grinding of grain contributes to of course the production of bread which then feeds and maintains the household. Yeah, that's a good way of understanding that middle ground that helps to clarify it for me and also helps to bridge. I think some of the evidence that Aaron is thinking of from earlier periods where we see similar kinds of practices and play. Yeah, within that within the household context. So another question that I have has to do with lists and the role of lists more generally within rabbinic texts. So the list there in the mission for example, are they typically economic or labor focused and how do these lists of housework and labor fit into listing more broadly and can we consider a subgenre within these texts. And if you could allow absolutely. Yeah. List, I mean, I would say the rabbis in general but the mission in particular make liberal use of lists, all kinds of different contexts. I, you know, the list of 39 labors is obviously interesting because it uses the same exact term but you can see how I mean, it's hard to say what the relationship between those two lists is or if they're, you know, how, if there's kind of if they're defining this term a whole differently from each other but certainly, there's no necessary association between between There's no particular association with with houses or women in the in the Shabbat list. I think the, the interesting thing about about this particular list, you know, when you list things. It kind of gives the items in the list and intrinsic value it makes them worth relisting again. And I think that's kind of how this list starts to take on a life of its own. I really, I really do think it was kind of a, I don't think there's some deep meaning to the list I guess you know it's, it's the product of this oral process of study at some point it got written in this farm. And then it leaves people with a bunch of problems for centuries thereafter because then they have to explain why this list looks so strange. And I think we would all just, we could all free ourselves by just saying there's no there's nothing kind of, there's nothing intrinsically kind of there's no kind of secret to kind of solving what the what what the seven items are and I think that's why it's so helpful to find you kind of bring in these lists of housework from, you know, seven, eight centuries later from a different corpus just to say, yeah, it is kind of that thing where you're just like, oh, you know, cooking and you know, baking and grocery shopping and you know a few other things I guess I don't know, because to actually describe everything that goes into the maintenance of a household but of course, you know, it's going to be kind of, you know, very difficult to do exhaustively. So, I think, I think what's, what's interesting about about this list appearing, you know, what's interesting about this is, you know, it gets written in this form and then much like, you know, I think the list in the mission, it's, it's this by virtue of being written down like this, it then kind of becomes, you know, because it's written down and because it becomes worthy of relisting and revisiting. It, it gets, it kind of takes on a life of its own, well into, you know, medieval, early modern, later legal literature, people are always trying to come back to this, to this text to kind of, to kind of work out their ideas of kind of gender and propriety and what, what, you know, what a wife ought to do. On a similar note, could you comment a bit more about what at least to me I sort of gathered as being a special significance within that list on spinning and weaving, because as you mentioned, even women who had it enslaved laborers still had to perform that work, as opposed to some of the other items on the list that, that she no longer had to perform. So what, what is your interpretation of the significance of, of spinning and weaving and textile production within domestic labor. Fortunately for me, I mean textile labor is, is the, the aspect of this list that has probably been, been written about the most. That's also the place where, so Miriam Peskovitz, spinning fantasies is kind of the, the book that deals with this most directly that really, as I said, this, this idea of decommodified work at home in opposition to paid work, which is then also kind of, you know, put under the husbands control that whole case is built is built on on textile work. The, when I talk about, you know, there's not a clear gender ideology in the kinds of technology used. That's also, and I'm saying that partly in response to this situation seems to have been with textile work where we do have examples of texts, you know, depicting women working on more old fashioned, we moral fashion looms, and men working on kind of the newer technology that was actually more in use in Roman Palestine so we do have this archa, archa, archa, archaization of, of work done by women in this realm of textile work. We also have, I think, this, I think stronger case for kind of gender division in, you know, between kind of spinning and weaving spinning as something done by women leaving as something done by men. So a lot of what I'm saying about about grinding grain a lot of the possibilities that I'm pointing to about, you know, what can this, what can this, how can this help us see, see the, the late ancient household a little differently. I'm saying a lot of this kind of in, in response to to house scholars have, have used textile work specifically to, to kind of come up with, come up with, come up with this idea of what the ancient household was. So if the, you know, if, if I'm talking about the household as, you know, if I'm interested in kind of thinking about the household, what, when does, you know, how does a modern times economy or waged work invade the household. All of that is kind of in response to the opposite tendency that that scholars have had when talking about textile work, where it is kind of described as, as kind of restricted to the home decommodified, strongly gendered associated with sexual impropriety, all kinds of things. Interesting. Thank you. Associated with sexual propriety, sorry, not impropriety. An important distinction. Such a fun one. Well, Dr. Gopala Krishnan, thank you so much for a wonderful talk, and it really has enriched the series as well. And I think we're at the end of our Q&A session. So, besides, again, thanking you for such a stimulating presentation. I'd also like to let our audience know that the series is continuing of course in April. And as usual, we're meeting. Our next talk is going to be on April 6th, Thursday at 930 a.m. California time when Dr. Solange Ashby of UCLA will be presenting on the topic of women in ancient Nubia. So again, I'd like to thank today's speaker and to look ahead to several more talks to follow in the rest of this academic year. So, thank you all and thank you for coming and and this wraps up our hat tip also to.