People of the Book: Faculty Christine Neal Thomas Examines the Roles of Royal Women in the Ancient Near East

In her new book, Royal Women at Ugarit: Reconceiving the House of the Father (Routledge, 2025) Christine Neal Thomas, Ph.D., M.Div., Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible, invites readers to travel to Ugarit in Late Bronze Age Syria to see how royal women were positioned at the center of their political world. The book builds on Thomas’s previous publications, including “Ugarit,” a commissioned article in Bible Odyssey, an online database on the Bible and the Ancient Near East hosted by the Society of Biblical Literature (2023), and “Gender and Politics at Ugarit: The Undoing of the Daughter of the Great Lady” in the Journal of the American Oriental Society (2019), among other articles and reviews.

After serving as Visiting Assistant Professor of Bible and Cognate Languages at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion from 2013-2018, Christine Neal Thomas became Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible at Xavier University in joint appointment with Hebrew Union College. She teaches courses in biblical literature and exegesis, as well as courses in ancient Near Eastern languages and Jewish–Christian relations. We reached her at her office on the Cincinnati campus to discuss her latest book.

In this book, you challenge accepted notions about the political model of the ancient Near East. What sources did you examine, and what did you find?

Christine Thomas: The dominant theory in the field of ancient Near Eastern studies has been that societies were patrimonial, meaning that everybody, male or female, was identified with a particular house under the rule of a father or father figure. In this way, the political world was structured in terms of kinship relations in which the apex of political power was the king, understood as a father figure. A profoundly influential book for this theory was David Schloen’s The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol. However, my challenge to this was simply to point out that every father is the son of a mother. Gender relationships, fundamental to household life, were fundamental to larger social structures. Father and son relationships depend on women to reproduce and mediate these relationships, not just physically, but socially and politically.

This insight came out of my work with archives from the Late Bronze Age Syrian city of Ugarit. I saw that in diplomatic texts, legal verdicts, and letters, women played central roles in the political world, particularly as the mothers of kings.

What do these letters, legal texts, and case studies tell us about the roles women played in the exercise of power?

CT: Women were at the center of the political system. The capacity of a single woman to function simultaneously as mother, daughter, wife, and sister mediated alliances among multiple men across generations. Women operated on two axes in this system. On the horizontal axis, they mediated links in an inter-dynastic system – as the daughter and wife who could make two men father and son, or as the sister and wife who made men brothers. On the vertical axis, as royal women tended to outlive their husbands, those who successfully maintained their status as queen and royal mother into the reign of their sons could become agents in dynastic succession and influential in periods of political transition.

How are the concerns of royal women in this time and place reflected in the Hebrew Bible?

CT: The biblical authors shaped their literary figures in terms that were credible for their ancient setting. As in the ancient historical texts, in the Hebrew Bible we see instances of women maintaining their position from husband to son, acting in roles central to the politics of patrimonial succession. An example of this is Bathsheba as the mother of Solomon promoting her son as David’s heir and then taking on a powerful role as the king’s mother when Solomon takes the throne.

The biblical texts also can enliven our approach to the ancient world. Figures like Bathsheba allow us to push at the boundaries of our historical imaginations and consider the subjectivity and agency of ancient women whose lives survive in the laconic lines of ancient tablets. By the same token, the Late Bronze Age royal women, who lived, gave birth, and died in ancient Syria lend urgency to the need to reassess the foundational canonical narratives which have for so long informed our understandings of gender and power.

How does your study help readers better understand not only the Late Bronze Age Levant, but also other ancient societies and other systems in which data are thin and patrimonialism widely in evidence.

CT: The textual evidence we have from the ancient Near East is often quite laconic, as it is in other times and places in the ancient world. The strategy I used for interpreting these ancient texts then was to look at their rhetorical structure. Legal verdicts, like the ones I examine, are written at times of political rupture. By looking at the measures taken to contain such ruptures, we see the patterns of rule that were expected. Prohibitions indicate what might regularly have been assumed to take place. For instance, in the case of a royal woman who was divorced and exiled by her husband the king, her son was prohibited from returning his mother to power even after his father had died. This shows us that such collaboration was to be expected, indeed it must have been so compelling for a son to collaborate with his mother that stringent penalties had to be put in place to prevent it.

What do you hope your students, fellow scholars, and other readers will take away from the book?

CT: I want readers to not only appreciate women’s agency in their political worlds, but to come away with a new vision of how society was structured. The so-called House of the Father was not a system revolving around one powerful man, but a network of alliances in which women played pivotal roles.

How did your teaching at HUC interface with this research?

CT: My work with HUC students has had a profound impact on my scholarship, especially my final chapter of the book on the biblical royal women from the House of David, Bathsheba and Michal. I first created a seminar on the King David narratives in the Fall of 2016 and have taught it with three cohorts of students, most recently in Fall of 2022. With joy and verve and delight, we read our way through these compelling narratives of the women and men who surrounded David. My students’ questions, insights, and enthusiasm propelled my writing, bringing these characters ever more vividly to life for me.