David Rauschenbach ("Leader by default")

Through an intensive study of the bible, archaeologist and priest Roland de Vaux made these observations about Hebrew women in his study of 1965, published as Ancient Israel:

The social and legal position of an israelite wife was inferior to the position a wife occupied in the great countries round about... all the texts show that Israelites wanted mainly sons, to perpetuate the family line and fortune, and to preserve the ancestral inheritance... A husband could divorce his wife... women on the other hand could not ask for divorce... the wife called her husband Ba'al or master; she also called him adon or lord; she addressed him in fact as a slave addressed his master or a subject, his king. The Decalogue includes a man's wife among his possessions... all her life she remains a minor. The wife does not inherit from her husband, nor daughters from their father, except when there is no male heir. A vow made by a girl or married woman needs, to be valid, the consent of the father or husband and if this consent is withheld, the vow is null and void. A man had the right to sell his daughter. Women were excluded from the succession.

...

Perhaps the most shocking laws of all were those that declared that a woman was to be stoned or burned to death for losing her virginity before marriage, a factor never mentioned in other law codes of the Near East, and that, upon being the victim of rape, a single woman was forced to marry the rapist; if she was already betrothed or married she was to be stoned to death for having been raped.