to resist. Moreover, this seems to have been the Rabbi's plan. Otherwise, what was his intention in suggesting that they make a marriage feast to celebrate their divorce? Indeed, the very language he uses is suggestive, for he says literally, "Just as you coupled with feasting, so shall you separate with feasting," the word "coupled" (
nizdavagtem
) having direct connotations of sexual intercourse. To be sure, he may not have predicted how clever the wife would be in achieving the goal, or what the means would be, but the story only makes sense if the Rabbi was trying by gentle means and indirection to deflect them from their pious path of divorce. But whether or not this reading is accepted, the text is opposing "love'' to procreation as the telos of marriage, and it is love that prevails. It goes without saying that the story, considering the context, must recuperate the halakha by the deus ex machina of the miraculous pregnancy at the end, but by returning to each other for however long it took for the Rabbi's prayers to work, the husband and wife had already violated the halakha, and the teller of the tale clearly approves. This legend may encode a moment of tension between a voice for which procreation was perceived as the sole or the overridingly important telos of marriage and one for which companionship was becoming increasingly important. This tension would bear some typological similarity to the development in the Roman world documented by Paul Veyne: "In the old civic code, the wife was nothing but an accessory to the work of the citizen and paterfamilias. She produced children and added to the family patrimony. In the new code, the wife was a friend, a 'life's companion'" (1987, 37).
33
In point of historical fact, the Jewish practice did change, and the halakha that a man must divorce his barren wife came to be honored more in the breach than in the observance (Biale 1984).
34
Sexual companionship had come
|
 | | 33. "Two things united them, he [Ovid] said: the 'marital pact,' but also 'the love that makes us partners.' It was possible for conflict to arise between duty and these extraneous tender feelings. What to do, for instance, if one's wife turned out to be sterile? 'The first man who repudiated his wife on grounds of sterility had an acceptable motive but did not escape censure [
reprehensio
], because even the desire to have children should not have outweighed lasting devotion to his wife,' according to the moralist Valerius Maximus" (Veyne 1987, 42). I am suggesting that the story here represents at least a partial accommodation here to these Roman mores, but one which "indigenous" ideas of the role of sexuality and intimacy had prepared for.
|
| | 34. See the remarkable text quoted by Winston (1981, 369) from a nineteenth-century Orthodox Rabbi: "The Sages of previous generations could not find it in their hearts to permit in actual practice divorce against her will or the taking of a second wife because of childlessness."
|
|
|