Saturday, January 15, 2022

Michael L. Satlow on Jewish Betrothals in Antiquity

  

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)