BETWEEN
BETROTHAL AND MARRIAGE
The betrothal period may have been
lengthy. Both Second Temple and rabbinic sources indicate that a significant
amount of time could elapse between the time when a girl is promised in
marriage by her family and the marriage itself. Josephus testifies that Agrippa’s
daughters were betrothed by the time they were six and then; presumably they
would not be married until after they reached puberty (Ant. 19.355).
Rabbinic law allows for a delay between the times of betrothal and marriage of
up to a year after the girl reaches legal majority, but it also assumes
that a woman who betrothed past her age of legal majority—which could have been
most of the women—would marry no more than thirty days later (M. Ket. 5:2; M.
Ned. 10:5; T. Ket. 5:1). Because of the difference between a promise to marry
and the legally significant act of rabbinic betrothal, it is impossible to
evaluate popular practices on this issue. Most likely, there was a wide range
of practices. Some couples might have been promised to each other, waited for
many years, and then quickly betrothed and married. Other couples might have
agreed to marry (in the nonrabbinic sense) and then married in relatively quick
succession. Yet other families might have negotiated longer betrothal periods in
order to give them time to accumulate (mainly through spinning and waving) the
bride’s trousseau.
Rabbinic sources indicate that at
least among some Jewish communities, the (perhaps lengthy) period of betrothal
was accompanied by decreasing expectation of chastity. In [a sugya], the
Babylonian amora Abayye explains that Palestinians recited the grooms’ blessing
at the celebration of the betrothal because “in Judaea . . . he would be together
with her.” Even in Palestinian sources, Jewish couples betrothed in Judaea had
a “reputation” for having sexual relations before the marriage itself. The Mishnah
alludes to this reputation when it states that “one who eats at his father-in-law’s
in Judaea without witnesses is not bale [later] to make a claim [regarding his
wife’s] virginity, because he was together with her” (M. Ket. 1:5; cf. M. Yev.
4:10). The Tosepta contrasts these promiscuous Judaeans with chaste Galilean
Jewish couples:
R. Yehudah said: At first in
Judaea, they would examine the ḥuppah, and the groom, and the bride,
three days before the ḥuppah. But in the Galilee they did not do so.
At first in Judaea, they would leave the bride and the groom alone for one a hour
before the ḥuppah, so that his heart may become crude with her. But in
the Galilee they did not do so.
At first in Judaea, they would appoint two shushbinin [attendants], one
from the groom’s family and the other from the bride’s family, but despite this,
they would only testify concerning the marriage. But in the galilee they did not
do so.
At first in Judaea the shushbinin would sleep where the groom and bride
slept. But in the Galilee they did not do so.
Anyone who did not act according to this custom was unable to make a claim [against
his wife’s] virginity. (T. Ket. 1:4. The parallels have minor variations: Y.
Ket 1:1, 25a; B. Ket. 12a)
Because betrothed Judaeans were
suspected of being promiscuous, the tradition records, a number of steps were taken
in order to assure the legitimacy of any claim by the husband that his wife, on
their wedding night, was not a virgin. The preventive measures, however, are
odd; some are contradictory and others do not seem to address the “problem” of
premarital sexual relations. Another Palestinian source justifies the Judaean practice
of sexual relations among the betrothed couples by ascribing its origin to the
period of the Bar Kokhba revolt, when Roman soldiers would regularly practice
the jus primae noctis (Y. Ket. 1:5, 25c). Tal Ilan has convincingly shown
the ahistoricity and mythical nature of this account (Tal Ilan, “Premarital
Cohabitation in Ancient Judea: The Evidence of the Babatha Archive and the Mishnah,”
HTR 86 [1993], 260-64).
There is no compelling reason for
not accepting, in a very broad way, the testimony of these sources that
betrothed couples engaged in physical contact before the wedding (see also Sipre
Deut. 241, which mentions the case, with no condemnation, of a woman who
had sex while betrothed. Shmuel prescribes flogging for the man “who has sex
with his betrothed in his father-in-law’s house [Y. Qid. 3:10, 64b). In Rome,
according to Treggiari, “The virgin certainly needed to be protected from
seducers, but the phobia of premarital sex with a sponsus does not seem
to occur until the empire becomes Christian” (Susan Treggiari, Roman
Marriage: Iusti Coniuges from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian [Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1991], 159). Judaean Jews could have adopted similar mores
and expectations. Galilean Jews especially would have been unlikely to have fabricated
these accounts from whole cloth, for they might have been familiar with Judaean
custom, and the Palestinian Talmud explicitly states that Judaeans continued to
do this. These ores made the rabbis increasingly uncomfortable with Palestinian
amoraim fabricating a historical origin for them, and Babylonians distancing
themselves from these “bad” Jews. Yet at the same time one cannot lose sight of
the ideological nature of these sources. Attacks on the “other’s” sexual laxity
is a common form of self-definition in rabbinic courses (“we are better than
they are”). Galilean rabbis are defining themselves against Judaeans, and
Babylonians have lumped together, for all practical purposes, Galilean and
Judaean practices into a “Palestinian” custom (Galilean rabbinic sources
frequently portray the practice of the Judaeans as other). (Michael L. Satlow, Jewish
Marriage in Antiquity [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001], 166-68;
a sugya is a passage from the Gemara discussing a specific issue in the
Mishna; a ḥuppah is the canopy a Jewish couple stand under during their
wedding ceremony)
