w OMEN in the OLD TESTAMENT Jwenty Psychological Portraits BY NORAH LOFTS THE MACMILLAN COMPANY New york i949 Dear, dead women, with such hair, too Browning foreword There was once, in the journalistic world, a slogan which ran Women are always news and even now, in the nineteen-forties it does not seem to be quite outworn. The very existence of the series to which this book belongs, Women in . . . pre-supposes that there is something automatically in teresting, almost automatically romantic, in merely belonging to the female sex, and that when any woman engages in any spe cific activity outside strictly functional ones, more people are in terested in the process and in the result than they would be if the same process were followed, the same result achieved, by a man. The only valid reason that I can see for this focussing of interest upon the female is that in any assembly attention is always directed if only for a moment towards the latest arrival and Woman arrived late upon the outer, public scene, just as she ar rived late if we believe the story of the Creation upon the ac tual planet. Men have done and thought and achieved things un til doing and thinking and achieving have become commonplace then some woman does, thinks, achieves, and interest immediately revives. It is not entirely flattering to Woman a little reminiscent of Dr. Johnsons comment upon the performing dog. How ever, that cannot be helped and the author of Women in the Old Testament together with those of Women in Art and Women in Crime and all the other exploiters of this curious interest in the female, must be grateful that the general, if un acknowledged, opinion of women is so low that the words Woman SweepsChimney would make an arresting headline even in these days of paper shortage. So here is a book, written by a woman, about a group of people who have nothing in common save their sex and the fact that their names or their stories happen to be included in what is one ix x foreword of the most magnificent pieces of history in the whole of litera tureif not the most magnificent. There are twenty of them and they differ from one another far more sharply than would the next twenty women you would meet in the busiest London street different as they would be, could you know their stories They range from simple nomadic desert women to palace-bred princesses here are women of sound good practical sense and mystics prudes and harlots women who have attained immor tality because some man once looked upon them with love, and women who by their own actions influenced the history and thought of their times. I have never, during the long time in which I have been writ ing this book, been blind to the fact a rather terrible fact that, compared with the Old Testament, dynamite is a harmless sub stance, lightly to be handled. More blood has been shed, more venom exuded, over this one volume than over any other book in the world. The Old Testament founded Salt Lake City the Old Testament justified the Puritans and the Covenanters. With a single simple sentence, Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, it set a monstrous machinery in motion, both in Europe and America. I am inclined to think that no one is entirely responsible for his or her attitude towards the Old Testament. It is one of the fundamentals like sex or money to which we are conditioned in our childhood and subsequently are bound to accepteither as Holy Writ, a bogey outgrown, or an interesting, curious piece of literature. For those in whose childhood it loomed large, something remains until the end, even it be only a faint, yearning nostalgia for the time when we did believe that the earth was created and populated with every living thing in the space of six days, and that cheeky children were in danger of being im mediately devoured by bears...