The difference between the Babylonians and the Palestinians seems to be predicated on a cultural division in the understanding of male sexuality. While the Palestinians seem to have adhered to the general Hellenistic notion that sexuality was something that a human being could do without, and all that was required was self-control,
sophrosyne,
the Babylonians apparently did not think so (Gafni 1989, 2021).
11
This suggestion is supported strongly by the continuation of the text itself, which proceeds with a story that clarifies both the intensity of the Babylonian allegiance to early marriage and the reason for it:
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 | | Rav Huna [the Babylonian] said, "Anyone who is twenty years old and not married, all of his days are sinful." Can you really think that he is sinful? Rather I will say, "All of his days are in thoughts of sin." Rava said, and thus also the One of the House of Rabbi Ishmael teaches, ''Until the twentieth year, the Holiness, May it be blessed, waits for the man; when will he marry. When he is twenty and unmarried, He says, 'Blast his bones!'" Rav Hisda said, "I am preferable to my fellows, for I married at sixteen and if I had married at fourteen, I could have said to the Satan, 'An arrow in your eyes!'"
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The discourse of these two major Babylonian Rabbis suggests strongly that the primary motivation (or, at least,
one
primary motivation) for marriage as understood by the Babylonians is that sexual activity is necessary for people from the age of puberty on (fourteen), and that without sex they would find it impossible to concentrate on their studies.
13
More-
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(footnote continued from the previous page)
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| | with), someone who was unmarried was impure, on the assumption that he would necessarily engage in impure thoughts or more probably seminal emissions, which would, of course, produce impurity in the technical sense.
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| | 11. I find it exciting that Gafni, whose article came out while this book was being written, came to such similar conclusions about Palestinian and Babylonian differences on the question of sexuality.
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| | 12. Rashi: "I could have challenged him (and Satan is the Evil Inclination), and I would not have been afraid that he would cause me to sin."
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| | 13. The text here only addresses the question regarding male people. Note the difference between this and Paul's notion of marriage as a defense against lust in 1 Corinthians 7. For Paul, this is a concession for those "not gifted" by being able to transcend sexuality, and he argues that it is not to be accounted a sin for them to marry, while for these Babylonians
everyone
is prey to lust and should marry. The ability to renounce sexuality cannot be taken as any sort of barometer of the person. (I am, of course, aware that some interpret Paul's remarks as being addressed solely to the apocalyptic situation; I think, however, that the anthropological and psychological implications remain the same.) See next note. My colleague Anne Drafthorn Kilmer has informed me that the notion that sex is necessary for everyone seems to have been current in the Babylonian
Kulturgebiet
from very ancient times. In the epic
Atrahasis,
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(footnote continued on the next page)
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