 Thank you. All right, so hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for the third lecture in our Women and Gender Performance Series. My name is Jess Johnson, and I am the Assistant Curator at the Badae Museum of Biblical Archaeology. Before I introduce today's speaker, I'd like to invite my colleague, Brooke Norton, to read the museum's land acknowledgement. We would like to begin by acknowledging that Berkeley, California is on the territory of the Huchiyun, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo Alone. We respect the land and the people who have steered it throughout many generations, and we honor their elders, both past and present. We are living in a moment that warrants deep reflection on our past and present. Across many global contexts, equal access to healthcare, education, fair wages, and human rights is contested on the basis of sex and gender identity. In an effort to bring light to 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. Through this lecture series, we hope to highlight new and established scholars who are engaging with risky and marginalized topics concerning women, gender performance, and sexuality in the past. We invite you to participate in these programs so that together we can listen, learn, and work towards creating a more inclusive museum community. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you, Brooke. It is now my pleasure to introduce today's speaker, Dr. Alex Ortiz-Roberts, earned his doctorate in Hebrew Bible from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California in 2020. His dissertation entitled The Agency of Daughters in the Hebrew Bible introduces modern agency theory, contemporary ethnography, modern neurobiology, and behavioral science to the traditional biblical critical tools of textual criticism, archaeology, anthropology, and epigraphy. It relies heavily on the concept of story world, common to literary theory, to close the gap between the depictions of daughters in the Hebrew texts and historical analysis to better understand how daughters are criticized, or sorry, characterized in the Hebrew Bible and how their construction reflects actual daughters in 1st millennia BCE in the Southern Mevant. Dr. Ortiz-Roberts recently moved to Phoenix, Arizona with his family to start a cupcake catering business. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Ortiz-Roberts to the floor is not yours. Thank you very much. So thanks for joining me. And as I said earlier, let's do this as, I don't want to lecture, I'll read what I have, but if you have any questions, you can jump in at any time, okay? All right, so the title of my presentation is a methodological proposal for biblical studies and its use for subaltern studies. Today I will introduce agency theory and its potential use for biblical studies. Well, beyond the scope of this presentation, I suggest agency theory as one component of a methodological group of tools not typically seen in biblical studies to create round characters from those characters that are constructed as flat. I'm testing agency theory in conjunction with ethnography from modern communities, neurobiology, modern behavioral science, a rethinking of patriarchy and power theory. And as I mentioned, I sit, I sit right these tools in Story World, which is a concept for modern literary studies to create space for these characters to live. We all know the peril of asking the question, how many children does Lady Macbeth have? While not offering a definitive answer, I believe these tools have the potential to offer possible questions. So here's my proposal. I propose lessening our reliance on text through the consideration of the six modern social scientific, biological scientific and literary tools not typically used in biblical studies to help us manage the slippage between the biblical Hebrew texts, Rialia and the various allergies and our limited understanding of boots on the ground daily life in 1st millennium BCE Southern Levant in order to aid our understanding of biblical characters. And my work has a particular emphasis on girl children in the Hebrew Bible. And I use these through the use of tools, these tools are applicable to any biblical character and particularly subalterns. Okay, so in this presentation, I will introduce agency theory and suggest this potential for subaltern studies in the Hebrew Bible. While agency theory is used in other disciplines, to my knowledge, it's inclusion in biblical studies is limited or non-existent. I will briefly introduce two additional tools, which I mentioned neurobiology and behavioral science, which work in conjunction with agency theory. So I'm gonna begin with a brief review of the challenge of biblical studies that I found when dealing with texts that I believe agency theory can address. I will outline the components of agency theory. And at the end, I'm gonna offer a practical example of how it can be used with a brief analysis of Dinah in Genesis 34. So challenges with biblical studies that I've come across. Biblical interpreters know the frustration of using ancient texts to shed light on the lives of ordinary members of the societies that gave rise to the text. There is an almost universal acceptance that the biblical Hebrew text, text reflect the values, worldview and religious political agenda of elite male writers, whose existence was far removed from the daily lives of ancient Israel. What is written on the text cannot be used as a template for early Israel. This is followed by an almost universally equal frustration that the dearth of credible evidence results in over reliance of textual evidence as the previously issued template to read the lives of some 95% of early Israel inaccurately represented in these texts. And for myself and my early interpretive career, I wrote embarrassingly too many papers where all I did is cite biblical verses as evidence of life in ancient Israel, all the while chastising others for doing the same. So I'm going to, let's see, I've got a couple of guardrails that I use in all my work, so early in my academic career. I came across a critique by a non-biblical text scholar. Who quipped that the depth and beauty of biblical studies can in part be attributed to over analysis of insufficient material. But in my frustration, I can't remember who said this. I set the critique as guardrails to any interpretation. Back by a warning from my graduate mentor, Dr. Barbara Green, that I can only argue what is in the text. The challenge then is to make meaningful contributions to biblical studies without violating its principles. So this is a brief introduction to agency theory. This paper focuses on agency theory. Okay, yeah, on agency theory, and it's six components necessary for a genetic, for an actin's agentic capacity. So six components. The first component is that agency theory, agency requires intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness, and self-reflectiveness. Without these features, what appears as agentic is more likely inadvertent or accidental. Power, agency is relational and exists within a fluid power dynamic with other actin's. Agency also has a time aspect. Agentic decisions rely on time. Drawing experience from the past, making reciprocal and dynamic decisions in present and planning for future action. Identity, an individual as a biologically unit of society has no agentic capacity, think of infants. As an individual becomes self-aware, agentic capacity grows but is still limited. A self who attains personhood has the potential to maximize her agentic capacity. Self-construct, an actin's self-perception is a construct created from her self-concept and perception of her self-efficacy. An actin with low self-perception is risk averse while an actin with high self-position, high self-perception is risk tolerance. And then the levels of agency, risk tolerance in conjunction with self-perception influences an actin's willingness to engage in active or inactive agencies of obedience, disobedience and risk. So the background, agency theory was developed in part from Albert Benderer's pioneering work on social cognitive theory. A model for examining the myriad of feedback loops between a subject and her society that informs the development of the subject's inner self. According to Benderer's theory, a subject observes other actin's interactions with one another and with society, drawing conclusions and testing her own interactions with other actin's in society. At its most basic, human agency requires the means, motive and willingness to affect one's environment through either action or inaction. Agency is contextual encompassing cultural notions of personhood as well as the subject's evolving self-perception, self-reflectiveness and forethought. Agency operates in the context of a cost-benefit calculation regarding the value of action or inaction. Agency is percussive, creative and regenerative, analyzing situations to provide suitable relief. Agency is also relationally oriented, occurring in context where the actin is in relation with other actin's and her environment. It operates temporarily through phenomenal and functional consciousness and spatially within a social structure wherein members are both producers and products of their society. Humans exercise agency directly through proxies as Bathsheba does to ensure solid succession or collectively through group dynamics. Now, within this, there are four requirements of personal agency. The absence of any of these features render an action accidental or inadvertent rather than agentic. So agency requires intentionality, an act known or believed by the actin to have a particular outcome. Actin's know what they are doing and why they are doing it. As an example, throwing a baseball through a neighbor's living room window is agentic. Hitting a foul ball through the window is an accident. Agency requires forethought or consideration of one's action. This deliberative ability enables people to transcend their immediate environment to direct the present towards a desired future. Agency requires self-reactiveness which influences moral agency linking knowledge and reason to moral conduct through self-sanctioning regarding right and wrong. Thus keeping conduct in line with personal and social standards. Self-reflectiveness is closely related to self-reactiveness and moral standards. Agency cannot exist absent a reciprocal relationship. Social transactions are not unilateral. Agency begets environmental and social reaction which begins a modified response. Power relationships underlight every action through an actin's capacity to affect her environment either directly or through the manipulation of other actions, of others actions using the resources at hand. And again, we can go back to the example of Bathsheba ensuring Solomon's transition to King. Okay, okay. So identity, identity, the person's identity is also a component of agency. Experience alone does not govern action. Anyone with children can attest that the identities of two children raised in identical environments can grow to be vastly different people. While experience informs action, identity provides guardrails or lack thereof to agentic behavior. The concept of the individual, the self and the person are constructions that define the status of a society's members. And it heavily influences how those members influences their social expression. So the three categories. So an individual is a single member of the humankind, the most basic category within this model. This category is biological. Most individuals with normal cognition have the capacity to become aware. So if we think about infants, infants are members of the humankind, but they do not have self-awareness. And anything they do is either biological, instinctual or, I don't know, perhaps an accident, knocking over a bottle, something like that. Adults who are person, adults as persons when they get older, if an adult develops dementia and they lose capacity for self-awareness and they move back to the category of an individual. The self, self-awareness marks the transition from an individual to a self. Without some notion of her own interiority, an individual remains a biological unit of society. And we can think of children as they grow through various stages of childhood and their self-awareness increases, their ability to reflect inward also increases and this affects their agency. So younger children have very limited agency, but as they grow older, they start to venture out and become more full, as they approach adolescence, then they develop the ability for more agentic behavior. The final category is a person. A self may be granted personhood and the associated space to offer percussive action as a publicly recognized agent in society. Self-possession, self, I'm sorry, persons possess general rights, legal agency and public duties free from the threat of physical harm. Personhood is not a status, but a standing within a socio-moral order or a person as a social kind that can be granted or denied. Personhood is the most fluid of these three categories. So we think of adolescents gaining more independence as they grow older and they take on more responsibility in the society. The society will grant them the status of personhood. Now personhood, as I said, it can be taken away. It can actually be granted or taken away throughout their life. So if you think of say a warrior in his society, that warrior has full personhood. But if that warrior is captured in battle, then that person is reduced to a self. He no longer has the ability, he's no longer a publicly recognized agent in this new society. All right, self-perception. Self-perception influences how one engages with her community and her environment. One with a strong self-perception engages confidently with her community and her environment. Conversely, one with a weak self-perception finds these engagements challenging. Two self-constructs, self-concept and self-efficacy leads to a subject's self-confidence perception, promoting or impeding the subject's agentic engagement. So self-concepts, broadly speaking, self-concept is a composite view of oneself. It comprises self-perceptions of one's strengths, weaknesses, abilities, attitudes and values. It influences economic success, long-term health and wellbeing and is among the most important psychological concepts. The second is self-efficacy, similar to self-concept, self-efficacy, I should actually say self-efficacy belief is a construct that influences one's agentic engagement and is foundational to agency. If a subject lacks belief in her personal efficacy, there is little incentive to act. A strong self-efficacy belief leads to the pursuit of goals while a poor self-efficacy belief may result in paralysis, regardless of one's actual ability. So this is important because others may think that my self-efficacy is higher or lower than my own and it doesn't really matter if I'm actually capable of doing something, if I don't believe that I can, if I have a low self-efficacy concept, that's gonna affect the risk that I take, the kind of agency that I'm willing to employ, whether or not I can actually do it. So if you think about an athlete trying to jump a high bar, if that athlete's never done that before, the athlete may not believe that she can jump the high bar. If that athlete perhaps has jumped the high bar in the past, even though the athlete is not sure whether or not she can do it, her self-efficacy belief tells her, well, I've done this in the past, so I'm likely to be successful doing it again. Okay, now, in every agentic encounter, an active, an actin balances external factors, including her environment, challenges from other actins, and her identity with internal factors, such as experience and self-perception against potential risks to the award to determine her risk tolerance as she considers three general types of active or inactive agency. So I identified three modes of agency that have different levels of risk with an actin. So the first is an agency of obedience. An active agency of obedience is the least risky. The agent behaving as expected, with or without a directive. So think of children tasked to wash dishes and clean the kitchen after meals. Now, some of them may do so on their own or perhaps through a gentle nudge. But as washing the dishes after meals is routine and expected, no notice is given when the dishwasher is run and the counter's away clean. So in this instance, there is no risk or no reward. An active agency of obedience is not always risk-free. However, the agent may be ordered to do something dangerous to herself or another, though the risk may be relatively low. Facing peer pressure, an agent might join her friends doing donuts in the parking lot or skipping classes to smoke behind the dumpster. And in this, in the other case, in an inactive agency of obedience, a child stays away from a hot stove or follows parents' orders not to run with scissors. An active agency of disobedience is riskier. Disobedience can be active or inactive. Challenging authority is the most common agency of disobedience. In an active disobedience, the child does something forbidden, such as playing with matches. Some acts may be both obedient and disobedient. So skipping class to smoke with your peers is obedient to your peer group, but it's disobedient to their parents and school administrators. And then final level, which is more common as children grow, is an agency of risk. And the danger to the subject is varied. Risk can be active or inactive, obedient or disobedient. So say, actors playing chicken with their car in the railroad tracks is moderately, is a moderately risky agency of disobedience. You're not supposed to do it. At the extreme, agency of risk may carry an existential threat as in D-Day soldiers ordered to storm Normandy Beach where over 8,000 combatants on both sides lost their lives. An inactive agency of risk might be like soldiers refusing to fight. They could be put in prison or back in the day they could be subject to a firing squad. So to recap, agency requires the means, motive and willingness to exert some control over one's life and environment into influence and transform social relationships. Agency requires intentionality, forethought, self-reflectiveness and self-reactiveness. Agency is relational and exists in a power dynamic. Without these features, any action may be unintentional or accidental. Act and straw upon three time-related aspects of a genetic experience to inform present and future agency. Past experience provides a cumulative framework for future action. Challenges in the past require dynamic adjustments and a causal feedback loop. Past experience reflectively informs the present, but there is no intentionality. Actants relax exclusively on past and present experience and feedback loops with other agents to inform future goals. Identity works in conjunction with experience to inform and guide agentic behavior. An individual as a biological unit of society is the lowest identity formation. Individuals are not agents. Self-awareness promotes an individual to selfhood, granting some degree of agency. Personhood is less dependent on the subject than it is on social standing. Okay, an act in self-concept and belief in our self-efficacy is a self-construct that limits or encourages agentic behavior. And then finally, through a combination of factors, an actant makes a situational risk assessment. Exercising an active or inactive agency of obedience, an active or inactive agency of disobedience, or an active or inactive agency of risk. Some agentic choices combine multiple risk levels. Okay, so I'm gonna stop for just a moment. So I wrote this and I got about 40 pages and I whittled it down to about 12 because I didn't think I'd have enough time. So before I talk about its potential use for feminist studies, if anyone has any questions, maybe we can talk about agency theory. Sure, we do have a couple of questions, about three or four from the audience. So kind of going off of what you maybe mentioned in the introduction and some about agency. So I'll just ask you those. To help those who may not be as well versed in the theories you mentioned, could you explain, and you might be doing this later, could you explain how StoryWorld used as a modern literary theory who can textualize the daughters of the Hebrew Bible? Yes, I love StoryWorld. And I actually didn't put it in here because I didn't think I'll have enough time but I can talk about this. So StoryWorld, first of all, my mentor in graduate school, Dr. Barbara Greed, she is retired. She was at the Dominican school for about 20 years or so. Her focus is literary theory. Well, we can after a very long time discussing our people studying Hebrew Bible, we've come to understand that these are literary texts, they're fictive, not meaning that they're necessarily fiction but they're created. So there's a slippage though between what is said in the text and other information we have, like I mentioned earlier, archeological, Realia, historicity, what history we do have, understanding of how ordinary people practice religion in the ancient world. And then all of theologies we have, archeology, sociology, what is it, anthropology, ethnography. So there's this slippage because the Hebrew Bible creates one world and then all of this other evidence creates another world. And all too often, and I mentioned, I did this earlier in my career, all too often when we're discussing, when we're gonna go and analyze the Hebrew Bible, we list all the reasons why we can't use the text alone. And then we can talk about some of these other tools but because we're limited with, as I use the phrase boots on the ground, understanding of ancient Israel, at least for myself. But actually we've all read this before. You lay all these two categories out. This does, the Hebrew Bible does not equal boots on the ground. Boots on the ground does not equal the Hebrew Bible. And there's an entire analysis where all you do is cite biblical verses to say this is how Hebrew Bible or how people in the ancient world work. The idea of story world is that you acknowledge that slippage between the two spaces. And then you gather all of this information together including the text. And you create, it's not fictive. Well, it is fictive in that you create it but I wouldn't call it fiction. You create a space where the characters on the page can live. So if you think about, think about like, and I was actually thinking how to answer this forever. Because again, I love story world. Think about Harry Potter. So Harry Potter is a creation and is fictive. And if you go back through history, I suppose you can, you can pull out, you can see something in here and like spells or whatever. You can see something in Harry Potter or the characters, which is warlocks, that sort of thing. And you can see how they're created and how they fit in the story world but that story world is completely fictive. It's fictional, it was created for, it was written to make lots of money and create seven moves and seven books. Well, we're looking at the Hebrew Bible though we wanna take the text seriously but we don't want the, or for me, when we're talking about story world, we wanna take the text seriously but we don't want to say this is how it was in the ancient world. So by combining all of this together, we can create, as I say, a space, an actual space for characters to live. And then I think earlier on I said that, you know, we don't really ask the question how many children does Lady Macbeth have? But when you create story world, you can take all of this disparate information and make some, I guess we'll say, informed conjectures without saying this is how it was. You can make some conjectures and then set aside things that don't fit in with all of the evidence that you have. And so that is story world and it's used a lot in modern literary studies. It's also used in, I know they use it in our Thurian studies, text studies. So does that answer the question? Does that help? Yeah, I think it does, especially for our viewers that may not be as well versed in the theory that you're mentioning and sort of in keeping that idea in mind about this story, were you able, you know, connecting it to agency theory, were you able to identify examples of each mode of agency in the Hebrew Bible? You know, can we see individuals participating? I'm sorry, finish your question, sorry. Oh, no worries. Can we see individuals participating in both risky and non-risky modes of agency? Yes, I wrote my dissertation on the agency of girl children in the Hebrew Bible and I analyzed Dinah in Genesis 34 and the rape of Tamar. I analyzed Jephthah's daughter. Oh, gosh, nothing I remember. Two others, I don't remember the others, two of the next thing I'm working on is lots, lots of daughters. So Zalofa had daughters. So in each of these, so four, I analyzed four stories in the Hebrew Bible and using some of the other material and they have some extra biblical texts, I am able to map out the kind of agency and the kind of risk that these girl children or daughters, actually daughters, that these daughters, the kind of agency that they exercise in the Hebrew texts and some of them are far more authentic than others. And I'm gonna talk about Dinah in Genesis 34. While she does exercise aspects of agency, my conclusion at the end of that, which I didn't map the whole thing out is that she's not really an agent because the story acts upon her rather than really much action by her. When I talk about Zalofa has daughters, Zalofa has daughters when they're going to Moses and they're saying, hey, we don't have any husbands, we don't have any brothers, we don't have any sons, we would like this piece of land and they make a case and they lay it out and they directly challenge the social order, which I consider that an agency of risk because well, we know what can happen and at least in the story of the Hebrew Bible, which I don't take that story and the kind of risk that the text lays out for women and I don't apply that to the real world because I don't think it was really like that, but we know that these texts were written by and for the agenda of the male writers. So does that answer your question? Yeah, I think it does, thank you. If there's another part of your presentation you wanna go ahead with, we can take a pause and then I have a few questions afterwards. You wanna take a pause now? Well, did you say that before? Oh, continue, continue. Yeah, I've got a bit of an answer, which is like, yeah, I wanna talk about, am I potential for biblical studies? Okay, so the seven tools that I've proposed for inclusion in analysis of subalterns have the potential to construct a more realistic view of the interiority of these characters and their agentic expression. And with respect to agency theory, interiority is important because although external factors can influence how an agent behaves, like perhaps external threats or pushback from other agents, it really is how an actin' thinks of herself, her experiences and what she's willing or not willing to do in order to determine what kind of agency she's gonna undertake. So female adults and children in the Hebrew Bible are constructed as demure, submissive obedience. While conventional wisdom among some modern interpreters reduce these characters to near slave status, near slave status, people living under the daily threat of patriarchal tyranny. And this is what I talked earlier about maybe rethinking some aspects of patriarchy because patriarchal tyranny is both exhausting and debilitating for men, women and children. Anyone with children knows that this character, characteration is at variance with the realities of family relationships where there are power dynamics, where you come home after a long day at work and you really don't wanna deal with disciplining the children, so you set them in front of the TV, what have you. Now, combined with behavioral and neuroscience, which I'll talk about in a bit, agency theory is helpful when thinking about girl children, though these tools are applicable to any biblical character and especially subaltern studies. Though discussed in another paper, neurobiology tells us that as children grow, the brain develops to favor increased agency and increased propensity for risk. As human children mature through adolescence to young adulthood, the amygdala, which is responsible for low level cognitive functions, including emotional processing and regulation, especially the fear and safety response, motivation including aggression, stimulus reward and appetite learning or risk taking, impulsivity and sexual stimulation and expression, the amygdala. Develops rapidly while the frontal cortex, which is responsible for high level cognitive functions, including decision making, emotional regulation and impulse control, and environmental analysis and consequence prediction, frontal cortex. So the frontal cortex and synaptic connections between the two areas develop more slowly. During this period of neurodevelopment, adolescence experience heightened responses to stimulus and reward, while impulse control is relatively immature. As a result, adolescent decision making is dominated by the amygdala, which overwhelms still maturing self-regulatory capabilities. As children mature to adolescence, neurobiology predisposes defiance and rebellion. And I suspect that every parent has heard a variant of, you're not the boss of me, sometime in their lives. Now this kind of behavior is baked into human DNA. Now rebuttals that children in the ancient world were somehow different ring hollow. As we know, 2000 years is evolutionarily moved. The brains of children in the ancient world were identical to those of modern children. Children in the ancient world talk back to their parents just as modern children do, though this is unreflected in the text. Cultural expectations surely mitigate how children rebel as they exercise agency, but children rebel nonetheless. Culture cannot trump biology. So we should be unsurprised that in the ancient world, children talked back to their parents. We should be equally surprised that in the Hebrew Bible they do not. Okay, any questions about neurobiology and these kind of applications, behavioral science? Anything? I am not noticing any coming from our audience regarding that, but I do have a question from our YouTube audience asking if your work is related to a contemporary book called The Red Tent. What is it called? Red Tent. R-E-D? I have no, no, I do not. And I'm not a neurobiologist, I'm not a science. Math is not my friend. I worked though, I studied, well, I reviewed literature on neuroscience and behavioral science, probably four months as I was working on this project. But I will look up Red Tent. Does that person know who wrote it? I'm not sure, but I'm told that it's a book that's focused on women in the Hebrew Bible and their lives. Is that right? It's not in his head, so you realize. I'd call it a midrash. So it's a story world, shall we say. Okay. Using the characters, but recreating sort of the lives of matriarchs and their daughters. So the storyline, of course, is framed by stories and genesis, but the midrash fills out the in between. So it has nothing to do with neuroscience, it has everything to do with it. Using biblical characters to spin stories that aren't actually represented in the ancient texts themselves. Got it, got it, got it. I'll get that from you, Aaron. I'll take a look at that. The reason that I put neuroscience in here and behavioral science is exactly, as I said earlier though, we create these pictures based on the text of women and girls as demure, submissive, maybe shirking in the face of patriarchal tyranny. And again, as I said, anyone with children know that you cannot control children. They just, they're gonna do what they're gonna do. You can influence them, you can teach them, but short of daily violence, which as I said, it's just exhausting for the parents, let's say. I mean, which is why I don't agree that this is how it was in the ancient world. It's exhausting, right? Maintaining that iron fist control over your family. It's just not possible. Okay, so now I wanna put this into an actual consideration of Dina and Genesis 34. Okay, good, we're good on time. So consider Dina and Genesis 34. Dina remains speechless, the subject of a single verb and the object of 13 additional verbs. Dina, though Dina is referenced throughout the story, she effectively ceases to participate in her own story once she traces off from her home to the village of the Hittites. This leads to interpretive speculation, occasionally bordering on the absurd. Remaining within the bounds of the guardrails that I put before, meaning I could only argue what's in the text. We can still use these interpretive tools to get a sense of adolescent behavior in order to sketch out a possible scenario. And admittedly, all I'm doing is adding the scenario to the myriad of scenarios about Dina. But here we go. So we're gonna talk about personhood. Dina is a freeborn daughter of Leah, one of Jacob's full status wives. As Jacob's only daughter, she has a unique place among Jacob's 13 named children. Though Jacob's sons have different mothers, they seemingly work together towards the success of the household as well as the sack of Shechem. So there's no reason to assume that the sons of Rachel, Billa and Zilpa, or actually Rachel, Billa and Zilpa themselves treat Dina as a lower status than Leah's children. They're not sons, so there's no competition among the wives. Moreover, as a girl, Dina possesses or I should say, Dina offers no political threat to any brother. We can therefore imagine Dina holding a special place among her family, the little sister with whom all to whom, the little sister whom all the members of her family protect. So in this case, despite having a young age, Dina seemingly has full personhood. Now, agency theory and neurobiology can also inform Dina's journey. Whether she has permission or not, a young child is unlikely to travel across the border by herself to meet the women of the neighboring community. Moreover, as Shekhin proposes and her brothers consider marriage, she is more likely closer to 15 years old than five years old. As such, her adolescent brain has developed to the point where risk tolerance is heightened while impulse control is nascent. Having expressed permission or not for her journey, it is reasonable to imagine adolescent Dina intentionally journeying to the hivites on her own accord. Risk is an unlikely factor in her calculus. Now, her encounter with Shekhin could also be intentional, unsanctioned as it is with Romeo and Juliet. If Dina indeed meets Shekhin for an illicit assignation, she violates her cultural expectations that fathers and in Dina's case, brothers control a girl's virginity and sexuality. In this scenario, one can imagine that Shekhin's status as Prince of the Shekhinites might influence her to risk the appropriate of her family, Dina taking the opportunity to marry up as it might be. If so, Dina exercises an agency of significant risk we can see how her family reacts. Shekhin could also be an older man who seduces her through his charm and status. But in this scenario, Dina still has to remain in Shekhin's company long enough for him to work his wily ways until she concedes. Though this does not require that she sought out, that she sought out the liaison with Shekhin. In the least, this implies an active agency of disobedience against her family, though not necessarily defiance. At the outside hers as an agency of risk. So agency of disobedience or it could be an agency of risk. Shekhin could also be a creeper hiding behind a rock who overpowers and rapes her. As there is no intentional intentionality on Dina's part, Dina is the hapless victim of circumstance. So while not discernible from the text, indeed we know nothing of Dina's interiority, her previous relationship with Shekhin or Shekhin's age, nor do we know if he seduces or rapes her. Agency theory and neurobiology can help shuffle more plausible scenarios to the top of the deck. And then I have got time for questions. In the interest of time, I will ask just one more question before we wrap up. So first of all, thank you for the informative talk. We have one logistical question from an audience member wondering, where can they read your dissertation? Email me because no one has asked me for it yet. No one has asked me for it, but look, I spent a good deal of time on the science. Aaron read it, he called me groundbreaking. So just to add, Alex, with your permission, we can put your email, attach it to the YouTube video or find a way of contacting you if individuals wanna receive your dissertation. Permission granted, number one. Okay. Please, please do. Because again, I have this, it's kind of like, you spend $280,000 on an education, a PhD, and then eight people read it. And then you go up and you start a cupcake company. Yeah, well, I definitely think after this conversation and lecture and sharing it with our community that more people will definitely want to contact you and are interested in your research. So with that, I will say thank you, Dr. Ortiz Roberts for your time and thank you to our audience for their attendance and attention. Before we end, I wanna quickly remind our audience that we have our next talk coming up in the series on December 8th, also at 9 30 AM Pacific Standard Time that will be given by the body's very own director here with us on the screen, Dr. Aaron Brody. And his talk is entitled, Women's Religious Rituals and the Sea, Phoenician Coastal Evidence. So with that, I'll say have a wonderful day everyone and thank you.