Breasts are not a typical conversation topic for biblical scholars, at least not in my experience. But they do tend to be a common conversation piece in my household. My wife, among other things, is a Certified Lactation Educator and is very passionate about breastfeeding. If the topic interests you, you may find her blog on the subject quite helpful: The Milk Mama.

Our interests rarely align very well, but I notice that there is a presentation at SBL right up both our alleys:

Gale A. Yee, Episcopal Divinity School, ‘Take this Child and Suckle it for Me’: Wet Nurses and Resistance in Ancient Israel

Exodus 1–2 is a story of three marginalized groups: slaves, midwives, and wet nurses. The first two groups come readily to mind when considering Exodus 1–2. Slaves are prominent, of course, because the chapter deals with the Egyptian pharaoh who, when threatened by the increasing numbers of Hebrew immigrants, set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor. Midwives also are on the forefront of the story, because Exodus 1 is a marvelous narrative about the resistance of two midwives named Shiphrah and Puah against pharaoh’s genocidal decree against newborn Hebrew males. However, the social conditions of wet nurses as a marginalized group do not figure immediately in our collective consciousness when considering Exodus 1–2 or the biblical text as a whole. Through the clever deception by Moses’ sister, Miriam, Moses was able to be breastfed by his own mother. The resistance and deception which pushes back against oppression and genocide in this story ironically reveals that wet nurses generally do not get to nurse their own children. What then were the real conditions of wetnurses in antiquity? Through a socio-historical analysis, this paper will examine the story about an Egyptian pharaoh’s daughter and her Hebrew slave wet nurse, to discover the power relations and dynamics in which an empire exploits enslaved foreign women for the products of their bodies. It will then discuss how the Exodus 1-2 is an example of resistance literature in its subversion of the usual social expectations for wetnurses in antiquity.

Sounds intriguing! The paper is being delivered on Sunday in the 4pm-6:30pm slot for a session of the “Social Sciences and the Interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures” group.