50th Anniversary of my PhD

 My PhD was completed and handed in during 1974. We were married since 1969 and my grant ended in 1973. To pay the mortgage I had to take a post of secondary school teacher in Buxton. The school had merged a secondary modern with a grammar school and all was not going well. My head of depaertment had had a brakedown in November and our pregnancy miscarried. It was the year the school leaving age was raised to sixteen. Half of my teaching timetable was with pupils who didn't want to be there. I wrote up my research during this difficult year.

I chose my research topic in 1969. My course was Biblical Studies and I was inspired by a course on ancient Hebrew social institutions by Arnold Anderson and noticed that there had been very little recent research on this theme. I had already had a major row with my church on the rights of women which ultimately caused me to leave that church. Much more has been published now, mainly by women but mine was the first detailed analysis. Most new research focuses on  rather thanparticular stories, mostly of violence against women. My analysis was broader, indeed too broad. Having supervised 20 PhDs and persuaded students to think deeply rather than in breadth, I realise that I was given no such advice but just expected to get on with it. Also this was a period of emphasis on the Old Testament as history, whereas now I focus on the Bible as story which may or may not be historical. I corrected this in the structure of my 1989 book Creating the Old Testament.

As previous research had used (and misused) social anthrology this was where I started. There were some benefits (for example debunking proposed evolutionary stages) but overall was not a good use of my time. Comparing Hebrew with other Mesopotamian source, for  example the Hammurabi and Assymian Lawcodes was more profitable.. Source criticism was then unnecessarily time-consuming. My substantive chapters are on marriage customs, intermarriage, incest, adultery, and levirate marriage.A final section on the family was more than I should have attempted, although the work on patriarch was useful. I never managed to publish except for one article on Leviticus 18 and 20, on forbidden marriages. Indeed I now can see that a great deal of extra work was needed to turn the thesis into a book. Feminist research was taking off in the 1980s, pioneered by Phyllis Trible, which led to an enormous body of new literature which I continue to study.