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exceptions, all the way up to the modern period.
    This reality had a profound impact on every facet of Judaism. Survival was the constant call, and the tradition mustered all of its resources—theological, legal, social, and economic—to meet the challenge. The family was, in many cases, the primary vehicle for preserving distinctiveness from the majority culture, and so the tradition used law, custom, and lore to govern its formation and maintenance. Indeed, from the Bible forward the Jewish people is portrayed at its core as a large extended family descended from the patriarch Jacob, and from the Second Temple period forward Jews increasingly insisted on endogamy to ensure a common heritage.
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    Practically speaking, however, boundaries were far more permeable than was claimed; the forces preserving distinctiveness were always offset by those promoting accommodation. Jews were in regular contact with their neighbors, producing a startling array of Jewish thought and practice in all areas, including marriage and family. Indeed, some of the most significant alterations in the form and content of Jewish marriage, such as the emphasis on documents or the switch to monogamy, can be understood in this light. Therefore, the history of Jewish views on sex, marriage, and family can be most helpfully understood as the oscillation between the two poles of continuity, with the Jewish covenant on the one hand and correlation with one’s surroundings on the other.
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    While the majority of the Hebrew Bible, known as TaNaKh, recounts the period of Israelite settlement in the land of Canaan, most scholars insist that the majority of canonical texts reached their current form in the Persian period (sixth to fourth century bce) when Jews lived as a minority population both in the province of Yehud in the Land of Israel and elsewhere in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Out of their minority perspective this collection of texts came to be the main scripture of the Jewish people because virtually all its books are about the Jewish people—or, more specifically, its covenant with God.
    Given the portrayal of the Jewish people as an extended family, one might think that such a parochial story would begin with, or would quickly reach, the story of the nation’s progenitor, Abraham. However, the first eleven chapters of Genesis speak of God’s relationship with the world, beginning with the creation of a highly ordered and differentiated world. Each creature is part of a species, a group that is meant to know its place in the world and maintain its boundaries and functions. Man and woman are both informed and blessed to procreate, to “be fruitful and multiply” and assert stewardship over the created order. This state, termed “very good” in divine eyes (Gen. 1:31), is presented somewhat differently in chapter 2, which offers the creation of woman as a response to the first man’s lone-liness: “Therefore a man leaves his father and mother, clings to his wife, and becomes one flesh” (Gen. 2:24). Thus, between the first two chapters, there emerges a sense that the union of man and woman was inherently good, intended since creation for the purposes of procreation and companionship (whether practical or emotional). But this idyllic state collapses as the first couple eats from forbidden fruit, with the consequence that they sense, for the first time, sexual shame (Gen.
    3:7). Painful childbirth, female sexual passion, and male domination of the female are all presented as punishment for the woman’s submission to temptation and her insistence that her husband join her in the sin (Doc. 1–1).
    Humanity’s decline continues until God chooses Abraham, promising him that his descendants would become abundant, great, and would receive the Judaism 3
    Land of Canaan as an inheritance (Gen. 12:1–3). This divine blessing, later symbolized through