Saturday, January 15, 2022

Michael Satlow on Polygyny among Jews in the Second Temple Period and Beyond

  

POLYGYNY

 

The Hebrew Bible clearly legislates for, and assumes, polygyny, the marriage of a man to more than one wife. (Its opposite, polyandry—the marriage of a woman to more than one man—would be classified as adultery.) While sketchy, extant evidence suggests that at least some, and perhaps most, post-biblical Jewish communities retained an allowance for the practice of polygyny.

 

Two sources speak of the survival of polygyny among Jews during the Second Temple Period. Josephus, in his discussion of Herod’s many marriages, states explicitly (for the benefit of his non-Jewish audience?) that polygyny is a patrios, or Jewish custom (War 1.477). A second, indirect source, is from the polemic against polygyny in the Dead Sea scrolls. The Damascus Document condemns those who allow a man to marry “two women during their lifetime” (CD IV 20-21). Whatever else it may mean, this polemic would include those who allow polygyny. Similarly, the Temple Scroll prescribes that a king marry only a single wife (11QTemple 57:15-19). . . . The strongest evidence from the rabbinic period that Jews practiced polygyny is from contemporary nonrabbinic sources. The Jewess Babatha . . . entered her second marriage as a second wife. As Naphtali Lewis has noted, “Babatha’s second marriage sheds a bright new light upon the extent to which polygamy was practiced by Jews of the tannaitic period” (Naphtali Lewis, ed., The Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters: The Greek Papyri [Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society; Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1989], 23). Lewis’s main point is that contrary to much scholarly opinion, here was an absolutely normal case of polygyny between Jews of moderate means. Justin Martyr, writing only a few years later, also refers to the Jewish custom of polygyny (Dialogue with Trypho 141 [PG 6:800]). In 393 the emperor Theodosius (with Arcadius and Honorius) prohibited Jews from polygyny: “None of the Jews shall keep is custom (morem) in marriage unions, neither shall he contract nuptials according to his law, nor enter into several matrimonies at the same time” (CJ 1.19.7). This imperial legislation was apparently not fully successful—even outside the Land of Israel—because in 537 Justinian issued a novel that granted an exemption from laws against polygyny to the Jews of Tyre. In 535, Justinian prohibited “abominable marriages,” subjecting those who contracted such marriages to seizure of a fourth of their property (Nov. 12). Two years later, the Jews of Tyre “supplicated with tears that they shall not be forced now to send away their wives but that they shall keep them and have the children born to them.” As late as the early sixth century, then, at least some Jewish communities in Byzantium continued to practice polygyny.

 

Rabbinic law too assumes polygyny. In all of the rabbinic legal writings there are many, often tortuous, discussions of polygyny and how it effects other legal areas, most notably levirate marriage (Nov. 139). From the time of Zechariah Fraenkel there has been a scholarly tendency to see these discussions as academic rather than prescriptive, and there can be little doubt that most of them are (cf. Z. Fraenkel, Grundlinien des Mosaisch-Talmudischen Eherechts [Leipzig: 1860], 10-11). Yet they may well reveal not only a theoretical possibility, but also a living social institution. While it is impossible to gauge the extent to which polygyny may have been practiced, it does seem fair to classify Jewish societies in antiquity, at least in Palestine and Babylonia, as polygynous societies. . . . Monogamous thinking made no headway into Babylonian Jewry. As many scholars have noted, despite the absence of concrete evidence of polygynous marriages among Babylonian Jews, Babylonian rabbinic statements simply assume a polygynous society. In light of the contemporary non-Jewish practice of polygyny in Babylonia, the fact that Jews too were polygynous is unsurprising. Like Palestinian sources, Babylonian rabbinic sources give no indication of the frequency of Jewish polygynous marriages. At the same time, Babylonian amoraim recognize that a man’s first wife would not be overly thrilled at the prospect of acquiring a “rival”: “[For] an evil wife with a large marriage settlement—[put] a rival at her side,” Rabba advises (B. Yev. 63b. Cf. B. Pes. 113a). One sugya in the Babylonian Talmud hinges on the presupposition that a man would not want to marry his daughter to one who already has a wife (B. Ket. 64a).

 

The last source raises the practical question of how polygyny was actually practiced in these societies. On this, we have only the evidence from the Babatha archive. Babatha’s first marriage appears to have been unexceptional: a young woman from an upper-class Jewish family in Maḥoza married a local man of similar economic means. About Judah Khthousion’s first marriage we know even less, except that he married a local woman (from En-Gedi), and that they probably remained there for the first ten to fifteen years of their marriage. His own means were probably always limited, for the property he mortgaged (and eventually inherited) was worth no more than forty or sixty denarii (P. Yadin 11). Judah was what we would call a hustler. From what we can reconstruct on his business dealings, he was continuously shuffling his finances, seeking to find capital. When he (probably) met Babatha, she was not in good straits. She had some money from her first dowry and a young son from whose guardians she kept trying to wheedle more cash (P. Yadin 13, 14, 15 [124-125 CE]). Perhaps it was physical attraction or love that brought them together, but it could not have hurt that Judah could provide her with some immediate support, she could bring him some much needed cash immediately, and he stood to obtain sizable land holdings later (Note that once she obtained the gift of her father’s orchards, she dropped her suit against her son’s guardians [P. Yadin 27 (August 19, 132 CE)], which I interpret as a sign of her better economic circumstances).

 

One wonders if this was one “typical” polygynous pattern. Levirates and widows made better “second” wives than virgins, whose fathers wanted to marry them as first wives. Men may have been attracted to a second wife for a variety of reasons, such as political expediency (e.g., Herod) or as a source of liquid capital. If we can believe the (formulaic) wording of the plea of the sixth-century Jews of Tyre, cold calculation was not the only determining factor within these marriages.

 

Babatha appears to have lived in the same housing complex as Miriam. Although Babatha may have established some relationship with Miriam’s daughter (whose marriage contract was found with Babatha’s documents and whose dowry she underwrote), Miriam was happy to evict Babatha upon Judah’s death: “Before this” summons issued by Babatha, Miriam complains, “I summoned you not to go near the possessions of my and your late husband” (P. Yadin 26, lines 12-14). Again, we are at a loss as to how typical this kind of relationship may have been. It is certainly reasonable—and by no means anachronistic—to assume that there was some degree of hostility and competition between “rival” wives. (Michael L. Satlow, Jewish Marriage in Antiquity [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001], 189-90, 191-92)

 

Further Reading

 

Kevin L. Barney (reproducing comments from Ben McGuire), Polygyny in NT Times