Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

HONOR, SHAME

Among North Americans, honor and shame often refer to a psychological state — a person’s internal moral character or the actions that reflect that character. In the world of the Bible and in traditional Mediterranean societies, however, honor and shame are social values determinative of a person’s identity and social status. Honor is a person’s claim to self-worth and the social acknowledgment of that claim — i.e., honor is a person’s public reputation which constitutes his or her identity. Shame is a person’s concern for reputation. It is a positive value by which one seeks to maintain or protect his or her honor. If one is unable to maintain his honor, or if his peers do not acknowledge his claim to self-worth, then the person is shamed, i.e., dishonored and disgraced. A person with no concern for his honor or reputation is shameless.

Honor is both individual and collective. Individually, a man makes a claim to honor which is affirmed or denied by his social peers according to his own past and present behavior. A man’s individual honor is dependent in large part on the man himself. But the man also shares in and commits his individual honor to the collective honor of his family, village, class, state, or other group to which he belongs. Honor can be ascribed or achieved. Ascribed honor is derived from birth — one inherits the collective honor of natural groups such as family or community — or it can be endowed from persons in power. Ascribed honor is passively received. Acquired honor is the honor that a person actively seeks and achieves. Moreover, because honor is a limited good, honor is acquired at the expense of someone else’s honor, usually through the normal social interaction of challenge and response.

Honor and shame belong to both men and women and characterize their behavior as collective members of common humanity and natural groups. As individuals, however, men are associated with honor and women with shame. Their behavior is determined by their gender roles, which are rooted in the cultural understanding of their contribution in procreation.

Procreation is understood in terms of agriculture. The man sows his seed into the woman, who receives it and nurtures it like a field. Male honor is based on a man’s ability to engender. It is symbolized by the penis and testicles and is an indication of his manliness and courage. Although the man has the power to create life from his seed (his honor), he does so externally to himself in the field of a woman. A man’s honor is thus also dependent upon his ability to ensure that the child born is from his own seed. A woman, like soil, represents indiscriminate fecundity in which any man might sow his seed. Therefore, just as a farmer marks off soil into a field and guards it against outside intrusion, an honorable man will cover and protect his wife (and his daughters and sisters by extension), and thereby bring order to her fecundity and safeguard the legitimacy of his paternity.

Positive female shame reflects a woman’s ancillary role in procreation. It is symbolized by the hymen, and it represents a woman’s shyness, timidity, restraint, or sexually exclusive behavior. A woman will display honor by recognizing her position of shame and acting accordingly. She will yield to her husband’s ordering of her sexuality; to do otherwise would be shameless. The sexual purity or exclusiveness of the woman is embedded in the honor of the man.

The gendered division of honor and shame is replicated in the division of labor and the arrangement of space. Just as a man’s honor is rooted in his ability to engender and a woman’s shame is her recognition of dependence upon a man for procreation, so a man’s social orientation is outward and a woman’s orientation is inward. Because a woman is indiscriminately fecund, her labor and space are ordered to ensure her exclusivity to a man. As a result, women model shame through domestic roles such as raising and educating children and managing the household economy. They carry out their tasks in the home or public spaces dominated by female activities such as the market, the well, and public ovens. In contrast, men display their honor through work and public activity in space that is common — the fields and industrial areas, city squares and gates—or exclusively male—the temple and cultic areas.

The social world described in the Bible resembles what anthropologists label an agonistic society, characterized by an intense competition among social equals which is often perceived as a battle for personal honor and family reputation. Honor is the basis of precedence among equals. The competition for honor takes the form of a confrontation through challenge and response. Every social interaction outside one’s own family or close group of friends is considered to be a challenge to one’s honor. It is a claim to enter into another person’s social space. Yet at the same time, the challenge itself bestows honor; it proclaims that one is a person of honor and worthy of challenge. By challenging the honor of one’s peer, one hopes to gain precedence over that person and thereby enhance one’s own honor.

The challenge of honor is only recognized among social equals, for it implies the ability or need to respond. For a person to make a challenge against someone who is unable to defend his honor (e.g., someone of lower status, a woman, an aged or infirm person) brings dishonor upon the challenger. In such a case, a champion may take up the cause of the one challenged. If in the opposite case a man challenges his social superior, the one challenged may choose to ignore the affront of his inferior without any damage to his honor. The challenge of the inferior is unworthy and consequently brings dishonor upon him. The challenge between equals may be positive (e.g., a word of praise, a gift, a request for help, or the offer of help) or negative (e.g., an insult, a threat, or a physical affront). The challenged person in turn responds in kind to defend his honor. If the challenged person fails to respond or responds poorly, then he dishonors himself — he gets shamed. However, if the person loses the honorably fought challenge, he is not shamed; he has simply established his own lack of precedence in relation to his challenger. The de facto achievement of honor depends upon a person’s ability to respond effectively to any challenge of his claim to honor.

Bibliography. D. D. Gilmore, ed., Honor and Shame and the Unity of the Mediterranean (Washington, 1987); B. J. Malina, The New Testament World, rev. ed. (Louisville, 1993); J. G. Peristiany and J. Pitt-Rivers, Honor and Grace in Anthropology (Cambridge, 1992); Pitt-Rivers, The Fate of Shechem, or the Politics of Sex (Cambridge, 1977).

Ronald A. Simkins

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

HONOR, SHAME

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)