Analogies of Violence in Rabbanic Literature

ANALOGIES OF VIOLENCE IN RABBINIC LITERATURE

MikaAhuvia

The so-called chapter on the wayward son (hen sorer u-moreh) is a foundational and popular text for study in rabbinic schools of learning, wherein the ancient rabbis grappled with a severe bib lical law that punished the willfully disobedient son with death (b. Sanhedrin 68b-75a). The discussion touches on many social issues, but the topics of gender and sexuality tend to be neglected in these institutional settings due to their uncomfortable misogy nistic undertones. A feminist analysis attuned to philological, his torical, and Talmudic research highlights the misinterpretations that result from neglecting direct engagement with these aspects of the text. This article unpacks the logical shortcuts that the rab bis have used to describe gender relations in one particular unit, but in doing so highlights the significance of analogical thinking in rabbinic literature more broadly. The rabbis have employed violent analogies as shortcuts to describe gender relations, and, unexposed, they continue shaping the imagination of readers and students today.

Keywords: Esther, magic, rape, Sanhedrin, Talmud

In the pages of the Babylonian Talmud commenting on the last mishnah of chapter 8 of tractate Sanhedrin, we find the generations of rabbis debating ethical issues related to parents and children, violence and its prevention, mar tyrdom and the sanctity of life, individuals and society, and lastly and indirectly,

-59- 60 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 34.2 male and female relations. 1 Perhaps because of its misogynistic undercurrents, the last topic tends to be neglected, accepted as either an uncomfortable aspect of the ancient rabbinic heritage belonging to a larger Mediterranean context or a phenomenon too well-known to require comment. In this article, I argue that precisely those moments in the text that seem at once all too familiar and too uncomfortable demand closer scrutiny.2 The last ruling of Mishnah Sanhedrin chapter 8 states, "these are the ones who are saved at the cost of their life: the one pursuing his fellow to kill him, and [pursuing] after the male and after the engaged maiden [to rape them]; but he that is pursuing a beast, or profaning the Sabbath, or committing idolatry they may not be saved [from transgression] at the cost of their lives." In other words, if a person sees a man in the act of attempting to kill or rape a male or an engaged female, then that person may kill the transgressor in order to stop him from committing these crimes (and thus save the offender or potential victim from the consequence of the crime). 3 By inference from Deut 22:25, the rabbis added the crime of the rape of any male and placed it on par with murder. I focus on their treatment of the engaged maiden in this sugya (textual unit of study), which brings issues of gender and sexuality to the foreground. In three developments in the Babylonian Talmud, troublingly violent analytical shortcuts are used that merit closer attention: the first analogizes a potential murderer with a potential rape victim, the second analogizes Queen Esther's conduct to the ground of the earth, and the third analogizes male desire with the thirst for stolen waters. In the process of unpacking how these analogies describe gender relations, significant literary and historical ramifications come

I thank the anonymous reviewers for their insights, encouragement, and detailed feedback. 1 The main topic of this chapter is the so-called waywardson (hen sorer u-moreh), a devel opment of Deut 21:18's severe laws about willfully disobedient sons. These minors are so defiant of their parents and resistant to discipline that the community condemns them to death. The biblical law justifies this practice by stating, "1bus you will sweep out evil from your midst: all Israel will hear and be afraid." Modem biblical commentators suggest reading this in light of the Decalogue's requirement to honor parents. In what follows, I discuss the end of this chapter, which transitions to broader issues of culpability. 2 !shay Rosen-Zvi rightly points out that the study of misogyny in some ancient Jewish texts tends to be trivialized. As he points out, taking this misogyny for granted obscures the opportunity to study its mechanics and the fact that it is not a uniform phenomenon ("Bilhah the Temptress: The Testamentof Reuben and 'The Birth of Sexuality,'"Jewish QuarterlyReview 96, no. 1 [Winter 2006]: 65-94, esp. 6fK>7). 3 Traditional Jewish interpreters are divided on whether it is the transgressor's soul that may be saved at the cost of his life (Rashi's interpretation) or the victims that are saved at the cost of the transgressor's life (Meiri's and Maimonides' interpretation). For the sake of simplicity, I follow the former here. The Mishnah's formulation assumes that all the mentioned activities are capital offenses but that only the first three categories-potential manslaughter and potential coerced sex of a male or an engaged female-require the intervention of bystanders to save the transgressor's soul. The rest of the offenses (bestiality, violating Sabbath prohibition, or idolatry) are left to a court and/or God for punishment. Ahuvia: Analogies of Violence in Rabbinic Literature 61 to light. A feminist analysis of these texts foregrounds not only the gap in logic between contemporary readers' and the ancient sages' ways of thinking but also the all too pernicious ways in which modem stereotypes can collaborate with ancient social constructions and thus inadvertently naturalize them. Recent contributions to the study of the Talmud and the history of religion and gender guide my analysis and provide fresh insight to a much-discussed sugya.4 Though normative Jews have received the Talmud as unified and authoritative whole, Talmudic scholars distinguish earlier and later strata of the Talmud and their insights.5 They have pointed out that the so-called stammaitic layer has its own unique concerns and anxieties, particularly on the topic of women and sexuality. While women were always excluded from the rabbinic enterprise and study house, the latest stratum of the Talmud nevertheless reflects a nascent preoccupation with sexual matters, which (perhaps ironically) serves to make women's sexuality and agency more invisible.6 The stammaitic framing and additions have important implications for a full understanding of this sugya.1 Previous general treatments of gender in rabbinic literature have inves tigated the topic through either legal or narrative materials. The work of Rachel Biale, Judith Hauptman, and Judith Romney Wegner on rabbinic hal akah related to gender and women exemplifies the former while that of Judith Baskin, Shulamit Valier, and Tai Ilan on midrash and Talmudic stories (aggadah) exemplifies the latter. 8 Recently, in the pages of this journal, Julia Watts-Belser

4 Sarra Lev's "Teaching Rabbinics as an Ethical Endeavor and Teaching Ethics as a Rabbinical Endeavor," in Tum It and Tum It Again: Studies in the Teachingand Leaming of ClassicalJewish Texts(Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2013) was veiy helpful to me in the early stages of conceptualizing this article. 5 Shamma Friedman, "Pereq ha'isha rabba babavli," in Meliqarim umeqorot, ed. H. Dimitrovksi (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1977); and Jeffrey Rubenstein, "Criteria of Stammaitic lntetvention in Aggada," in Creationand Composition:The Contributionof the Bavli Redactors(Stammaim) to the Aggada,ed. Jeffrey Rubenstein (Tiibingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005). 6 Ishay Rosen-Zvi, DemonicDesires: "Yetzer Hara" and the Problemof Evil in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 7 Most recently, Christiane Tzuberi examined this part of Sanhedrin from a source-critical and feminist perspective, exploring questions related to transgression and death and the figure of Esther, in particular ("Rescue from Transgression through Death; Rescue from Death through Transgression," in Rabbinic Traditionsbetween Palestine and Babylonia, ed. Ronit Nikolsky and Tal Ilan [Boston: Brill, 2014], 133-46). Tzuberi places Esther at the center of her study and argues that the anonymous editors of this sugya subtly, but consciously wove in a counternarrative about martyrdom that defies rabbinic insistence that one should die rather than transgress in public; in Tzuberi's reading, Esther publicly transgresses rather than choosing death. My analysis happens to look at the same two passages that she examines, but I reach diametrically opposed conclusions. 8 Rachel Biale, Women and Jewish Law: An Exploration of Womens Issues in Halakhic Sources(New York: Schocken, 1984); Judith Hauptmann, Rereadingthe Rabbis:A Woman's Voice (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998); Judith Romney Wegner, Chattel or Person? TheStatus of Women in the Mishnah (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Judith Baskin, Midrashic Women: 62 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 34.2 delved into the narratives of rape in midrashim on the temple destruction in light of postcolonial discourse. 9 Building on their work, I examine the intersec tion of narrative and legal sources in this one delimited section of the Talmud. In the second part of this essay, comparison with a Jewish-Aramaic magical text shows the road not taken in terms of linguistic possibilities and serves as a reminder of the contested context of the rabbinic enterprise.

Maiden as Murderer (b. Sanh. 73b-7 4a) The commentary on the last Mishnah of Sanhedrin 8 begins by questioning the basis for intervening and killing a pursuer on behalf of a potential victim. First, the rabbis bring biblical proof texts to bear (Lev 19:16 and Deut 22:26), then they propose the relevant principle of hermeneutic (kal vahomer or a for tiori), and finally, they cite the authority of R. Yehuda haNasi. According to a teaching from the house of this illustrious figure, this halakah derives from the 10 juxtaposition of two verses in Deuteronomy (22:26 and 22:27 ), which places side by side the rape of an engaged maiden and the slaying of a man, demon strating that they carry the same level of gravity and therefore that intervening to kill the transgressor is appropriate in both cases. The Torah explicitly analo gizes the rape of a betrothed maiden and a murder, and the rabbis follow suit. This much seems clear. The authority of Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi is cited several times in this chapter to weigh in on whether a potential perpetrator may be killed on behalf of the betrothed maiden (see b. Sanh. 73a and 73b). According to the sugya, Rabbi Yehuda specified that if the maiden, fearing for her life, asked bystanders not to intervene, they may follow her wishes and not intervene. Only when she is willing to resist unto her own death may potential rescuers intervene on her

Formationof the Feminine in Rabbinic Literature (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2002); Shulamit Valier, Women in Jewish Society in the TalmudicPeriod (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2000); and Tai Ilan, Silencing the Queen: The Literary Histories of Shelamzion and other Jewish Women (Tiibingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006). 9 Julia Watts-Belser, "Sex in the Shadow of Rome: Sexual Violence and Theological Lament in Talmudic Disaster Tales," Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 30, no. 1 (2014): l>-24. 10 Deut 22:26 compares the rape of an engaged maiden with murder, a crime deserving of the penalty of death (unlike the rape of a virgin, which requires a fine and marriage). For full context, I begin with verse 23 and italicize the relevant portion of verse 26: "If there is a girl who is a virgin engaged to a man, and anotherman finds her in the city and lies with her, then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city and you shall stone them to death; the girl, because she did not cry out in the city, and the man, because he has violated his neighbor's wife. Thus you shall purge the evil from among you. But if in the field the man finds the girl who is engaged, and the man forces her and lies with her, then only the man who lies with her shall die. But you shall do nothing to the girl; there is no sin in the girl worthy of death.for just as a man rises against his neighbor and rmtrdershim, so is this rose. When he found her in the field, the engaged girl cried out, but there was no one to save her" (NASV). Ahuvia: Analogies of Violence in Rabbinic Literature 63

behalf. The operating logic is that she must demonstrate her victimhood to the fullest (like the maiden in the field: screaming for her life with no one there to save her). Following upon these statements on the culpability and proper conduct of the betrothed maiden above, the later editors of the Talmud inserted one of the most famous passages in rabbinic literature: the story of an early generation of rabbis meeting in an attic in Lod to discuss martyrdom, asking when Jews ought to let themselves be executed rather than transgress the Torah (b. Sanh. 74a, yeharegv'al ya'avor).11 They agree that minor transgressions ought not occasion martyrdom, but that idol worship, forbidden sexual relations, and murder must be resisted at the cost of one's life.12 This context served to heighten the drama of the betrothed maiden. After relating this aggadah,the stammaim return to the matter at hand, repeating R. Yehuda's contribution but offering an analogy that takes things a step further. It has been taught, Rabbi said '"as when a man rises against his neighbor to murder him' so is this matter [the rape of the betrothed maiden in the field]." And what have we learned from this comparison to murder? This comes to illuminate the matter and is itself illuminated. To compare the mur derer to the engaged maiden: just as the betrothed maiden may be saved at the cost of [the violator's] life, so in the case of a murderer, the victim may be saved at the cost of the murderer's life. And to compare the betrothed maiden to the murderer: just as the [potential] murderer ought to be killed rather than transgress, so the betrothed maiden ought to be killed rather than transgress. The rabbis began by stating that the biblical proof text and its comparison of the rapist to a murderer taught them that rape and murder victims may be saved at the cost of the transgressor's life. However, the later anonymous editors further suggested that just as a person ought to die rather than be forced to murder another, a betrothed maiden ought to die rather than to allow her violation by another. What explains this forced analogy? Tai Ilan observes that there is a "thoroughly androcentric" assumption in rabbinic literature that "women who are raped begin by resisting the attacker but eventually even they enjoy the act."13 Since this would make any women

11 See parallels in Pesahim 25a and Yoma 82b, discussed in Stephen Passamaneck, "The Jewish Mandate of Martyrdom: Logic and illogic in the Halakhah," Hebrew Union CollegeAnnual 74 (2003): 215-41. 12 Two stringencies will be introduced to limit this statement: minor transgressions may be made only when it is not a time of persecution and secondly, regardless of climates persecution, minor transgressions may be committed only in private, not public. 13 Dan, Silencingthe Queen, 185-92. 64 Journalof Feminist Studies in Religion34.2 who endured rape complicit, the rabbis still place primary responsibility on perpetrators. Ilan cites Palestinian Talmud Sotah 4:5, 19d, a stoiy that appears in several parallels in Talmudic literature to illustrate this logic: "A woman came to Rabbi Yohanan and said to him: I was raped. He said to her: and did you not enjoy it in the end? She said to him: If a man dips his finger in honey and puts it in his mouth on Yorn Kippur, is it not bad for him, and yet does he not enjoy it? And he accepted her argument.'' 14 In this contrived scenario, a woman tells Rabbi Yohanan she was raped and then at his prodding, admits she enjoyed it; she admits to this reaction through a comparison to enjoying honey on the holy fast day of Yorn Kippur. The rabbi, in tum, decides (in her favor) that her enjoyment of the act does not render the act consensual and that her marital status is unaffected. Biale and Hauptman interpret this stoiy as exemplifying the rabbis' charitable attitude toward women and their expansive definition of rape, since the rabbis identify the act as rape, even if the woman said she ulti mately enjoyed it. 15 I read this as rabbinic fantasy that serves as a reminder of some rabbis' inability to distinguish male desire from female response. Reading similar stories in the Babylonian Talmud, Ishay Rosen-Zvi throws light on these observations, noting that the later anonymous rabbinic editors picture an independent demonic force (yetzer)in human hearts that drives men to commit sexual transgressions and renders women unable to resist them. 16 He analyzes a passage similar to the previous one in b. Ket. 51b, noting that the last question and answer is stammaitic: "For Rava said: eveiy [sexual act] which begins under compulsion, even if at the end she said, 'leave him,' that if he had not made the attack upon her, she would have hired him [to do it ]-she is permitted [to her husband]. What is the reason?-[{he rapist] plunged her into yetzer."17 Rava (who will also make an appearance) in the above sugya rules that a women's participation in rape does not violate her marriage because the act began under compulsion. The stammaitic gloss adds that the force of the yetzer in a woman debilitates her from resisting. Rosen-Zvi explains that the yetzer operates in diametrically opposed ways in men and women: forming an opportu nity for men to assert their agency against evil inclinations but depriving women of agency to resist. While the language of the yetzer is absent in the sugya about the betrothed maiden, Rosen-Zvi's observations elucidate the attitudes of the editors who compiled this layer of discourse in the Talmud.

14 Dan, Silencingthe Queen,185. See parallel in Babylonian Talmud Niddah 45a. 15 Biale, Women and Jewish I.Aw, 249; Hauptman comments on the parallel version in b. Niddah 45a in Rereadingthe Rabbis,92-93. Both Biale and Hauptman are willing to accept the attributions to actual women here. Hauptman reads the attitude of the woman toward the rabbi as derisive. I understand these texts to be entirely contrived scenarios that reflect the way the rabbis imagined women would speak about these issues if asked. 16 See his chapter "Sexualizing the Yetzer,"in Rosen-Zvi, Demonic Desires. 17 Rosen-Zvi, Demonic Desires, 109. Ahuvia: Analogies of Violence in Rabbinic Literature 65

And indeed, where R. Yohanan and Rava permit married women to return to their husbands, the anonymous editorial layer in Sanhedrin 8 does not prove similarly lenient for the betrothed maiden. Since according to the stammaitic logic, being raped, she cannot but become a willing participant, she can only preserve her soul by choosing death. In this way, she is, like the murderer, guilty for the crime she is about to commit. Comparing the murderer to the betrothed maiden only works in the framework wherein a woman who is raped is assumed to become as culpable as the man who raped her. I cannot emphasize enough the danger of teaching this sugya without acknowledging its androcentric assumptions. No society or community is free from the crime of rape. 18 Not critiquing the underlying principles of the rab bis in this text reinforces the all too common and still pervasive rhetoric that women enjoy forced sexual encounters, even if they begin by resisting them. It is incumbent on feminist scholars to point out that dispassionate cynicism is not more professional, objective, or sophisticated than explicitly critiquing these attitudes.

Esther as Karka Olam (b. Sanh. 74b) At this point, the framers of the sugyareturn to the story about the attic dis cussion of martyrdom in Lod and introduce two later amoraic Palestinian rabbis who are said to offer two stringencies: first, that in a time of foreign occupation, even minor mitzvahs may not be violated and second, that regardless of timing, violations of commandments must only take place in private. After the rabbis define what a "minor mitzvah" is and how many people must be present for the context to amount to "public," an objection is raised by way of Queen Esther's example and answers from Abaye and Rava follow. But was not Esther public? Abaye said: Esther was like the ground of the earth (karka olam).

Rava said: Their [i.e., the gentiles] personal pleasure is different. And if you disagree, then consider how would we yield coal shovels19 to them [on their festival days]-[lt is permissible] for their personal pleasure; here t~, in thiscase their personal pleasure made it different.

18 Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Wtll (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975) is the classic book on rape as a constructed social phenomenon, one dependent upon a normative model of gender relations that pictures man as dominant and woman as submissive and subordinate. For a more recent investigation, see Nicola Cavey, JustSex? The CulturalScaffolding of Rape (New York: Routledge, 2005). 19 The meaning of thishapax legomenon is contested and may mean coalshovels or churches. I return to this problem below. 66 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 34.2

This dialogue proves suspect upon closer examination and the analogy of Esther it offers is more opaque than it appears. I will address each section in turn. The question about Queen Esther seems to be whether she was in pub lic and therefore, should she have martyred herself rather than publicly trans gressed. The rabbis never explicitly state Esther's transgression. In classic rabbinic fashion there are two interpretations of Esther's sin: 1) she married a non-Jew, namely Persian King Ahasuerus 20 or 2) she had already been married to Mordecai 21 and publicly committed adultery by her 'marriage' to the gentile King.For the purposes of this paper, the nature of the transgression matters less than the rabbis' response to it. Abaye's response is: "Esther was [like] the ground of the earth" (karka olam);some translate "natural ground (that is ploughed)." 22 Most modern inter preters read this phrase in light of the cliche of women as passive ground ("like a 23 mere piece of earth" ): they read Abaye as saying that Esther was taken against her will and was passive as a rape victim (not actively engaged in adultery or in her marriage to a Gentile, depending on how one reconstructs the Amoraic reading of the situation). 24 Abaye is taken to reinforce an old cliche in Jewish legal terms. The analogy serves a function, closing this line of questioning and opening another, but it is not as self-explanatory as it appears to be. The phrase karka olam is used in other legal discussions of first generation Babylonian amor aim to characterize the public domain (what in the Mishnah is referred to as reshut harabim). It is the ground upon which people tread, natural soil or an uncultivated field, and it is used in contexts where an injury or a crime has hap pened or an impurity was found. 25 Karka olam may be said to harm someone,

20 This is the Tosafot's interpretation in B. Sanhedrin 74a. As Shaye Cohen observes, the rabbis recognized there was no biblical blanket prohibition on marriage to gentiles and that this pro hibition arises only in the second temple period. One Babylonian Talmudic tradition even proposes that gentiles could not effect marriage de jure, only de facto. See Babylonian Talmud Yebamot 76a; and Shaye Cohen, "From the Bible to the Talmud: The Prohibition of Intermarriage," Hebrew Annual Review 1 (1983): 22--39. 21 This interpretation depends on Esth 2:7, a verse that states Mordecai adopted Esther as his own daughter, but reads daughter 'le-bat as home 'le-bayit, which, as explained above, is used as a synonym for wifein Talmudic literature. See Babylonian Talmud Megillah 13a. According to Eliezer Segal, "the tradition that Mordecai and Esther were married to each other seems to be unique to the Babylonian Esther-Midrash and works deriving from it" (The Babyl.onian Esther Midrash: A Critical Commentary, vol. 2 [Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1994], 51). 22 So Jastrow, 1426. 23 Segal, Babyl.onian Esther Mtdrash, 2:258. Biale translates "merely natural soil" and also reads it as a description of Esther's as totally passive (Women and Jewish Law, 251). 24 See Segal 2:88 and 2:257. 25 The Mishnah uses the term reshut harabim to discuss the public domain. The term karka o'/amis only found in the Babylonian Talmud and sources that depend on it. See Babylonian Talmud Baba Kamma 28b and 50b; B. Niddah 57b; B. Sanhedrin 47b. This statement is not repeated in the Babylonian Esther Midrash (Megillah 10b-17a). Ahuvia: Analogies of Violence in Rabbinic Literature 67 but it cannot be held accountable or transfer accountability to anyone else. For instance, menstrual blood may be found in a location but cannot deem a woman in the vicinity retroactively impure. Importantly, the rabbis never use this term elsewhere to comment on the nature of women. Moreover, this is the only time the fourth-generation amora Abaye is attributed this phrase; in every other instance, the first generation Babylonian amoraim Rav and Shmuel deploy it. This is the first hint that this dialogue is a later stammaitic contrivance. A second hint lies in the fact that in one manuscript tradition, this phrase is attributed to Rabbi Yohanan.26 Variation in attribution may suggest later interventions. R. Yohanan is attributed many comments about Esther in Babylonian Talmud Megillah, where the Book of Esther is discussed at length, which may explain why his name shows up in this context. A third hint may be found in what Abaye and Rava have to say about Esther according to the so-called Babylonian Esther midrash in tractate Megillah. Abaye is quoted only once in this midrash-importantly, as speaking in unison with Rava (Meg. 15b). In answer to the question of why Esther saw fit to invite Haman and the king to a banquet (Esth 5:4), a concatenation of answers from many rabbinic authorities follows, with Abaye and Rava answering last that she was fulfilling the verse from Jer 51:39 (originally on God's punishment of the Babylonians): "When they are flushed, I will prepare their feast and I will make them drunk so that they may be merry and sleep an eternal sleep and never wake." If Esther was fulfilling Jeremiah's verse, then Abaye and Rava were characterizing her as avenging heroine, a prophetess, the very opposite of what Abaye seems to claim about her in Sanhedrin 74b. It seems that the stammaim (and contemporary scholars in tum) attributed to Abaye and Rava a very differ ent opinion about Esther than they hold elsewhere in the Talmud. This observa tion has implications for the understanding of Esther in the Babylonian Talmud, for interpreting the sugya in Sanhedrin, in particular, and for the meaning of the feminist scholarly enterprise, overall. In Baskin's article on Esther's treatment in the Babylonian Esther mid rash, she observes the rabbis' implicit and explicit criticism of Esther: Esther is juxtaposed with other biblical heroines in morally ambiguous situations (Abraham sending Sarah to Abimelech) or with prophetesses who are con demned for overstepping their bounds (Devorah and Huldah). 27 My reading takes Baskin's argument even farther. One of the only rabbinic defenses that Baskin can muster for Esther's marriage to the gentile king is from Abaye's analogy in b. Sanhedrin, which she interprets to mean that Esther, "was sexually

26 See Barko edition ofb. San. 74b. 'l:l Judith Baskin, "Erotic Subversion: Undermining Female Agency in bMegillah 10b-17a," in A Feminist Commentary to the Babylonian Talmud: Introduction and Studies, ed. Tal llan, Tamara Or, Dorothea Salzer, Christiane Steuer, and Irina Wandrey (TUbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 227-44. 68 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 34.2

passive in an analogy to ground that is tilled." However, if that view is alien to the Babylonian Esther midrash, then the rabbinic silence about Esther's con duct is even more dramatic. 28 What were the stammaim getting at? Abaye's use of karka olam to describe a woman is unparalleled in the Talmud. Rava's answer on the transgressing com mandments for the Gentiles' self-pleasure is similarly unique (as is the use of the hapax legomenon kevakei vedimonikei). The simplest explanation is that only the stammaim attributed to Esther the quality of the ground and utter nonpersonhood. Worth emphasizing is that the stereotype of women as passive ground was not yet formed but that when reading this passage with modern preconceptions, people mistakenly read it into the Talmud. Where does the analogy of women as passive ground originate? The iden tification of women with passive earth seems to lie in early modern medical and scientific treatises that found useful analogies between natural, agricultural, and female reproductive systems.29 Thousands of years earlier, ancient Near East lit erature abounded with examples of goddesses likening themselves to earth and inviting male consorts. In ancient Sumerian hymns, we find the goddess Inanna celebrating her sexuality by comparing herself to a well-watered field to which she welcomes her lover.30 In biblical texts, references to God as the fertilizer of the earth are subtler and do not provide close parallels to the matter at hand. 31 These redactors were certainly not trying to sexualize Esther as earth. While "earth" is grammatically feminine in all Indo-European languages, neither the

28 At the very end of the Babylonian Esther midrash, there is grudging acknowledgment of Esther's active conduct; see B. Meg 15a where Rabbi Abba's explanation for Esther's choice to go to the king "contrary to the law" in bMegillah 15a: "Until now, I have associated with Ahasuerus under compulsion, but now I will do so of my own will." Another relevant statement maybe found in b. Kett 51 where a baraita states that women taken captive by monarchies are assumed to be captives (i.e. assumed to have been raped) and Ahasuerus's reign is used as an example there. 29 See Denise Riley, "Am I That Name?" Feminismand the Categoryof"Women" in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 43. See also Stacy Alaimo, Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press, 2000);and Allison Muri, The Enlightenment Cyborg:A History ofComr,w,nicationsand Controlin the Human Machine, 1660-1830 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 202. 30 The hymn is titled "Plow My Vulva," published in Tikva Frymer Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses:Women, Culture, and the Biblical Transformationof PaganMyth (New York: Free Press, 1992), 52-55. It may be worth nothing that Inanna was later known as Ishtar, a name that may be cognate with Esther (b. Meg. 13a attests to a tradition that she was named for the foreign goddess Istahar; see Segal, BabylonianEsther Midrash, 2:43-45n56, esp.). 31 The Bible, of course, portrays God as provider of rain, sustenance, and fertility (Deut 11, Gen 17). In turn, rabbinic texts describe God as possessing the keys to rain, to life, and to resurrection-a decidedly nonsexual image (Bavli Taanit 2a; my thanks to Yedidah Koren for this reference). On this passage, see also Tal llan, MassekhetTa'anit: Text, 'lranslatton, and Commentary (Tiibingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008). In Pirkei deRabbi Eliezer 21, a rabbi named Zadok interprets the Cain and Abel rivalry as related to a woman, reading "when they were in a field" (Gen 4:8) as "the field is naught but a woman that is likened a field." Ahuvia: Analogies of Violence in Rabbinic Literature 69

Hebrew Bible nor Greek prose equates women, femininity and passiveearth. 32 Mother earth or virgin earth are more common motifs, but neither are inter changeable with passivity. I want to bring in another text, more relevant to the late antique Jewish Babylonian context, that "will illuminate the matter and is itself illuminated," to use the rabbis' turn of phrase. In doing so, I hope to show how so-called magical texts are an underutilized source for understanding Talmudic texts. At about the same time that the Babylonian sages were arguing in their yeshivot and redacting the Talmudic texts as they have come to us today, a woman elsewhere in Babylonia was composing an incantation text in a dialect similar to Talmudic 33 Aramaic, and she used language comparing herself to the earth (here ar'a ): I am the wide earth (that) no man (can) overpower me I am the high heaven so that no man (can) reach me. 34 The text continued, using analogies to food and rivers that affirm her power over her enemies. 35 And by the end of the incantation, the text imagined her enemies accepting her claims: "You are the wide earth that no man can compel, you are the high heavens, that no man can reach." She closed her incantation with an appeal to the Lord of Hosts. The analogy to the earth was not one of powerlessness or passivity. For this woman, it was an analogy of power, spe cifically directed against men. This striking incantation text, in its tone and its first-person feminine voice, provides an important corrective to the echo cham ber of the homosocial rabbinic beit midrash. The quotation attributed to Abaye would have made little sense to this speaker of Aramaic in the sixth century CE (or it might have been heard with opposite connotations to the one he intended) and it ought to baffle readers today more than it does.

32 See Menahem Stein, "Mother Earth in ancient Hebrew Literature," Tarbiz 9 (1938): 257-77; and Froma Zeitlin, "Cultic Models of the Female: Rites of Dionysus and Demeter," Arethusa 15, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 129-57. 33 Abaye uses this word for earth in b. Hul 105b. 34 Here, I follow Matthew Morgenstern's translation in "Notes on a Recently Published Magic Bowl," Aramaic Studies 2, no. 2 (2004): 207-22, but for the original publication details of this bowl, see Christa Miiller-Kessler and Theodore Kwasman, "A Unique Talmudic Aramaic Incantation Bowl,"Journal of the American Oriental Society (2000): 159-65. For an explanation of the Jewish context of this incantation bowl, see Mika Ahuvia, "Israel Among the Angels: Angels in Late Antique Jewish Texts" (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2014). A short reflection on this text can also be found in Mika Ahuvia, "An Ancient Jewess Invoking Goddesses: Transgression or Pious Adaptation?" AJS Perspectives:The 'IransgressionIssue (Summer 2017): 24-25. 35 It would be interesting to contrast the analogy of woman to food found here ("I am the bitter harzipa, that no man can eat me" [Morgenstern, "Notes," 2101) with the analogies to food usually found in the Talmud. See Gail Labovitz, "Is Rav's Wife 'a Dish'? Food and Eating Metaphors in Rabbinic Discourse of Sexuality and Gender Relations," Studies in Jewish Civilization 18 (2008): 147-70. . 70 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 34.2

Although they seem timeless, these different analogies to earth may in fact be more recently constructed than we think. While the stammaim are now known for their particularly negative and unsympathetic attitudes to women, exceeding that of an earlier generation of sages, the analogy of women to passive earth is a modern not an ancient cliche. The rabbinic disciple who contrived the analogy of Esther karka olam was trying to create a new excuse or explanation. He did not choose the "passive" route for Esther but chose an even more deper sonalized description: she was as irrelevant as the earth is in other legal cases. Perhaps sensing how weak this argument was, the stam had Abaye's famous study partner add another odd explanation that centers Ahasuerus's desire rather than Esther's actions. Contemporary readers have a choice of whether to read these late ancient analogies with our own prejudices or to identify their baffling qualities and note how their message is incongruous even with their ancient counterparts. A feminist reading does not merely reject sayings that are offensive to an egalitarian sensibility but highlights what deserves to be questioned and has not yet been, offering deeper and better interpretive possibilities, showing what other routes are possible, what roads were not taken, and what contemporary readers bring to the text that might lead them astray. Where the first analogy studied in this sugya compared a betrothed maiden about to be raped to a potential murderer, the second degrades a heroic queen to the Talmudic cate gory of common earth. The third analogy shifts the focus away from the maiden entirely, focusing instead on the victimhood of the male subject.

Stolen Water Is Sweet (b. Sanh. 75a) Following the contrived dialogue between Abaye and Rava, the sugya digresses to a discussion regarding whether the laws on martyrdom apply to descendants of Noah before returning to the topic of the obligation to let one self be killed rather than engaging in prohibited intercourse. 36 This chapter on the pursuer and pursued ends with an illustrative story (ma'aseh).37 It is well-known that stories in rabbinic literature serve an important function: they complicate law, sometimes undermining it and sometimes supporting it. In this

36 Tzuberi connects the previous discussion of Esther to this story, but I do not find this asso ciation compelling. The Yerushalmi places this story in a historical context and the Bavli retells it in a more generalized folkloric framework. I think the parallels with the biblical story of Arnnon and Tamar are most striking, but the rabbis do not allude to it directly. 37 I quote and translate Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin75a. Parallel versions of this story can be found in Palestinian Talmud Shabbat 14:4, 14d and Palestinian Talmud Avodah Zarah 2:2, 40d. See brief discussion of this story in Satlow, Tastingthe Dtsh, 160-63; and an illuminating discussion of these versions in Barry Wimpfheimer's Narrating the Law: A Poeticsof Talmudic Legal Stories (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 40--61. Ahuvia: Analogies of Violence in Rabbinic Literature 71 case, the story only furthers the ambiguity, ending ambivalently with a violent analogy that deserves attention: R.Yehuda said that according to Rav once upon a time there was a man who looked upon a woman and was consumed with a life-threatening passion for her. They went and asked the doctors and the doctors said: there is no cure for him except that she submit. The sages said, let him die rather than she submit. The doctors rejoined, perhaps she can stand before him naked rather than he die. The sages say, let him die rather than she stand before him naked. The doctors said, let her talk to him from behind a fence. The sages said, let him die rather than she talk to him from behind a fence. The story, attributed to Rav, has a parallel in the Palestinian Talmud, where it is said to take place in the days of R. Eleazar, an early second-century sage. In both Talmuds, the story is used to discuss "a fatal choice of death versus sin," and while it may seem utterly unrelatable to a contemporary reader, Barry Wimpf heimer observes that this is less peculiar than it may seem: stories of lovesick ness were often used as sites of contestation of authority in the Greco-Roman world. 38 Wimpfheimer adds that the ancient amoraim embraced "the full nor mative potential of the story" and used it to think through the authority of the rabbis beyond legal precedent. 39 This explains the rabbis' insistence that the man die rather than see or speak with the maiden-it establishes their authority to rule beyond the original Mishnah on matters related to the pursued and the pursuer. I acknowledge that the personhood of females is far from the main interest of these sages and the literary artifact they left behind, but I argue that it is nevertheless worth distinguishing what maneuvers were made to center male subjects and decenter female ones in this sugya.As before, we will see that the interpretive paths of the amoraim and the later stammaim diverge. However, the last word is with the anonymous stam, who would close off the conversation on the inevitability of gendered strife if the reader accepted his logic. The story continues with two amoraim seeking more details about the circumstances of this case, trying to ascertain why there is this rabbinic insis tence that the man die if he would violate no laws on sexual norms: Rabbi Yaakov bar Idi and Rabbi Shmuel bar Nahmani disagreed. One said that she must have been married and the other said she was avail able. Their [stringent] position is reasonable according to the one who said she was married, but according to the other opinion, what is this allabout?

38 Wimpfheimer,Narratingthe Law, 54--55. 39 Wimpfheimer,45. 72 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 34.2

R. Pappa said it was on account of damage to the family [reputation]. R. Aha the son of Rav Ika said in order that the daughters of Israel should not become loose in sexual conduct. In this Babylonian Amoraic discussion, what the maiden might desire was irrel evant to the sages. By contrast, in the Palestinian parallel to this stoiy, anony mous amoraim suggested that she was a woman of means unwilling to engage with this "suitor." It is noteworthy that only the Palestinian rabbinic source acknowledged that a woman might have the wherewithal to refuse another man's desire. Still, as Wimpfheimer observes, "rather than empower the wom an's agency as a significant force on its own, the anonymous answer limits such agency to a woman of stature and values that agency only because it connects with the matrix of legal precedent in a new way, with the prohibition of rape." 40 The Palestinian amoraic discussion of this stoiy ends here, with the conclusion that the sages did not permit this violent recourse that one cannot seek healing through spilling of blood. The Babylonian retelling is more expansive, but here the individual woman has been swallowed up by the suggestion of the family reputation, which (the implication is) might suffer from an inappropriate match. The second Babylonian amora R. Aha asserts that the precedent of giving in to this lovesick man's desire would set the stage for Jewish women to become "loose." Again, there is a striking slippage here: whose sexuality are the rabbis seeking to con trol, the pursuing men's or the pursued daughters of Israel's41? Asserting that the precedent of death for this pursuer must be established, R. Aha makes his point through a comment about women's sexuality. This slippage sets the stage for the next move of the anonymous stammatic editor. It is the Babylonian stam who makes the most creative move here and gives us the final violent analogy.42 The anonymous redactor interjects: "Marriage would not have assuaged his passion." AsR. Isaac elaborates: "Ever since the day that the temple was destroyed, the taste for intercourse has been taken [from good men] and given to transgressors as it said in "Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is tasty'' [Proverbs 9: 17]. Moving from a particular case, the stam makes a more general observation using a statement attributed to R. Isaac. He uses this rabbinic quote to explain this young man's fatal lust as a product of the post-temple world, where people's

40 Wimpfheimer, 48. 41 See Mika Ahuvia and Sarit Kattan-Gribetz, "The Daughters of Israel: An Analysis of the Term in Late Ancient Jewish Sources," Jewish QuarterlyReview 108, no. 1 (2018): 1-27. 42 Wimpfheimer offers an illuminating analysis of this stammaitic inteivention in light of his interests in the uses of rabbinic stories in legal discourse. I build on his work to offer a feminist perspective. Ahuvia: Analogies of Violence in Rabbinic Literature 73 intimacy with God has been lost, and in consequence, all sexuality has become transgressive. The quoted proverb, which equivocates hunger for deceptively acquired food and lust for forbidden women, forms the end of the chapter and the end of this Talmudic discussion. The analogy serves as a shortcut for an explanation: men desire what is forbidden; the maiden, married or not, is out of sight. Even rabbinic authority is no longer at the foreground. Rather, transgres sion (and its inevitability) is the final word. And who are the victims? Men. They have become "victims even in their active plots."43 Women, the objects of men's transgressive desire, are no longer in view. The final analogy turns the original Mishnaic law on its head. A maiden is no longer the potential victim of a transgressor's desire. The male transgressor has become the victim of his own fatal desire for a woman. The redactor used this analogy as an explanation, as the final link in the legal discussion, but a fem inist critique must weigh it and find it wanting. Through this closing, the anony mous editor admits that the rabbis' legal options have failed to find a resolution (marriage would not work; the pursuer cannot be saved). In the final analogy, men (including the rabbis?) are victims of their own desire and victims, by their very nature, are powerless to change things. What this analogy accomplishes, especially when modern readers collude with it, is a normalized vision of the world in which violence is inevitable and women are invisible. It is difficult to question precisely because it is all too familiar. As this analogy naturalizes rela tions of strife between men and women, it also leaves no imaginative space for creating an alternative vision-that is the most violent consequence of all.

Violent Analogies and Their Implications In one of her last books, anthropologist Mary Douglas called attention to what she termed "analogical thinking'' in the ancient world.44 She noted that people today generally engage in a logic that is inductive or deductive, gener alizing from particular to general or vice versa, organizing experience in theo retical terms or in a linear and hierarchical way. While that mode was available in antiquity as well, Douglas observes that thinking then was more horizon tal or analogical. About the biblical book of Leviticus, for example, she writes: "Leviticus' literary style is correlative, it works through analogies. Instead of explaining why an instruction has been given, or even what it means, it adds another similar instruction, and another and another, thus producing its highly schematized effect .... [Analogies] serve in place of causal explanations."45 Douglas shows how in the book of Leviticus the structure of the tabernacle,

43 Rosen-Zvi makes this comment about Jewish writings of an earlier period in "Birth of Sexuality,"76n24. 44 MaryDouglas,Leviticus as Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 45 Douglas,Leviticus as Literature, 18. 74 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 34.2 the architecture of the temple, the arrangement of the sacrificial animal and the revelation at Sinai parallel each other symbolically and structurally. Each encodes holiness in a parallel hierarchical way. Legal implications follow from the analogies of holy structures about where one may enter, what one may eat, and so on. In rabbinic literature, as in Leviticus, we find that analogies serve in place of causal explanations as well with devastating implications for gendered relations. When the rabbis discuss intervention in the case of the pursued betrothed maiden of Sanhedrin 8:5, they take three analogical shortcuts: equating the threat of a betrothed maiden to that of a potential murder, comparing Esther to the earth, and likening transgressive sex to consumption of forbidden food.46 The first analogy takes for granted a maiden's complicity in rape, the second deprives a woman of agency, and the third renders her invisible. Analogies about gender relations do seem to build upon each other, but they are not parallel in logic or function. Nonetheless, these unholy analogies were powerful shortcuts in their own time and when studied uncritically they remain powerful in shap ing how readers view subjects and objects and culpability in sexual matters. These analogies are often overlooked because they are either too disturbing or too seemingly obvious. Whereas most of this chapter in the Talmud pondered how and when to save men from their own crimes, the Babylonian Talmudic redactors' final words on this topic accept a reality in which men's transgressions are inevitable. Women, as objects or victims of desire, barely figure in these layered texts and are completely out of view by the end. In reading these works, we must be careful neither to shy away from these texts nor to accept them as descriptive but to keep in mind their contested context in antiquity as well as the contestations that must continue today.

Mika Ahuvia is the Marshaand Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies and assistantprofessor of ClassicalJudaism in the Henry M. Jackson Schoolof International Studies at the Universityof Washington, Seattle. She receivedher PhD in religionfrom Princeton Universityin 2014. Ahuvia specializesin Late Antique Jewish history, working with Rabbinic sources,ritual texts, liturgical poetry, and early mystical literature.Her forthcoming book investigates conceptionsof ange~ in foundational Jewish texts and ritual sources. [[email protected]]

46 Labovitz, "Is Rav's Wife 'a Dish'?" License and Permissible Use Notice

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