Read Sex, Marriage and Family in World Religions for Free Online Page B

circumcision (Gen. 17), comes to be the reward of a covenant whereby Abraham’s descendants must obey God’s law as it was revealed to Moses at Sinai and during the wilderness wanderings. The people’s status as God’s “special treasure among all the nations . . . a kingdom of priests, a holy nation” (Ex. 19:5–6) is predicated on their living according to demanding standards, including a host of sexual norms (Doc. 1–2). These are deemed the idolatrous and abominable practices of the local tribes, and the Jews must maintain their purity and holiness—or suffer a similar fate of displacement and exile.
    The TaNaKh ’s presentation of the history of the Jewish people as that of an extended family—twelve tribes, the descendants of the sons of Jacob, settling on ancestrally allotted land—highlights the text’s assumption that the covenant is meant to be lived out in the context of large, agrarian patriarchal families, with very specific division of labor between men, women and children and traditions passed from parents to children. The consequences of this orientation for our subjects cannot be overstated, yet virtually all have a “covenantal over-lay” as well. Strict rules of endogamy and exogamy, including the prohibitions against incest mentioned above, controlled marriage with the aim of producing legitimate heirs; yet the text often adds the importance of these rules in maintaining allegiance to God: alien, non-Israelite women will lead men astray (Docs. 1–3, 1–4) unless, like Ruth, they accept the God of Israel. Polygamy is allowed (concubinage seemed to be the preserve of the aristocracy) so long as primogeniture is not disrupted; yet grave spiritual dangers accompany the pursuit of women other than one’s wife, and monogamous marriage becomes the metaphor of the God-Israel covenant (Docs. 1–5 to 1–7). The ideal woman, extolled in Proverbs’ famous poem in chapter 31, is both a competent manager of the household, overseeing food and cloth production, as well as a God-fearer (Doc. 1–8). To maintain order and preserve tradition in these agrarian hierar-chies, respect of parents is demanded in the Decalogue; incorrigibly disobedient children are to be publicly executed. At the same time, parents must educate children and pass on the tale of the nation’s birth and Sinaitic covenant with God, so that they may fear the Lord as well (Docs. 1–9 to 1–13).
    As we enter the Persian period, during which much of the TaNaKh reached its current form, the process of marriage in particular seems to have undergone greater formalization. Based on the evidence of fragmentary papyri from Elephantine, a Jewish garrison in Egypt, we may conclude that marriage was a multistaged process: the bridegroom first asked the woman’s male guardian for the bride and then declared “she is my wife and I am her husband.” A dowry was set and a written contract was then drawn up (Doc. 1–14). This contractualizing trend in marriage would continue through the Greco-Roman period and into Rabbinic Judaism.
    It is likely that over the course of the Biblical period, as Jews became a dispersed minority and came into close contact with other peoples (even in 4
    m i c h a e l s . b e r g e r
    Yehud itself), greater emphasis was placed on endogamy as critical to preserving the covenant—as exemplified in the fifth-century bce account of the expulsion of foreign women and their children by Ezra the Scribe and his renewal of the covenant with the Jews of Jerusalem (Ezra 9–10). A close connection between living the covenant and endogamous marriage, however, may not yet be in-ferred: the Elephantine papyri attest to exogamous marriage, so we may have here a parallel tradition to that in Jerusalem or a more exceptional situation given the lack of Jewish females in the garrison. In any event, it appears that both the more conservative agricultural society in which Jews lived and the growing sense of Jewish exclusiveness and