A Woman Will “Encompass” a Man 385 The New Kingdom “Prophecies of Neferti” paints a similar “inverted” world: I show you the land in turmoil, The weak of arm is (now) the possessor of an arm, One salutes him who (formerly) saluted. I show you the lowly as superior ... The poor man will make wealth, The great one will (pray) to live. The beggar will eat bread, The slaves will be exalted. (Lines 54-56) (34) 2. Jeremiah 30 – 31 and the topos of the mundus inversus Against this background we can now return to the Jeremiah 30–31. First we look at the gender reversal pronouncement at the beginning of Jer 30 (v. 6), where the rhetorical question is asked whether a male in times of distress would exhibit an attitude naturally expected of a female: “Ask and see: can a male bear children? Why then do I see every man with his hands on his loins like a woman in travail”. Between this pronouncement and what is stated in Jer 31,22b there is a direct connection, or to put it in the words of Sawyer: “These two verses, 30.6 and 31.22, which appear respectively at the beginning and end of a recognized literary unit, can be understood as the counter-face of patriarchal society where the norm is for men to dominate and women to obey” (35). To ascribe to a male characteristics which are customarily expected of women, therefore, would obviously have been conceived as being quite against the normal order of things and typical of a mundus inversus order of existence. Compare, for example, the following prototypical expectations regarding masculinity and femininity in an Ur III birth incantation from which it is clear that men are generally perceived as warriors and women as the weaker sex: “If it is a male … he holds in his hand a weapon and an axe, which is his strength of heroship. If it is a female … she holds in her hand a spindle and a decorated comb” (36). One could therefore imagine that a pronouncement such as the one in Jer 30,6, where maleness is associated with what is biologically expected of women, would have been experienced as indeed a disgrace or a deadly curse. There are several more examples elsewhere in the ancient Near East where similar feminine qualities are assigned to men and many of them have their origin in curses. The following stereotypical pronouncements clearly betray that to be womanlike implies to be weak. The first one stems from a Hittite self-maledictory oath where the following threat is made: “Whoever breaks these oaths … let these oaths change him from a man to a woman! Let them change his troops into women, (34) The translation is by SHUPAK, “The Prophecies of Neferti”, The Context of Scripture (ed. W.H. HALLO, et al.) I, 109. (35) SAWYER, “Gender-Play and Sacred Text”, 104. (36) ASHER-GREVE, “Decisive Sex, Essential Gender,” 13.