over, it is at least possible that there is a suggestion here that an unmarried adult male will either masturbate or have nocturnal emissions, both of which were considered as leading to moral impurity in ways that marital intercourse did not. This story should be understood, then, as commentary on the talmudic passage that precedes it. The Babylonian rabbinic community strongly encodes its own self-perception that adult males cannot live without sex, and therefore the young scholar should marry and then study.
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We are left to account for the view and practice of "them"the Palestiniansalso encoded in our text. Presumably, "they" have a different understanding from "us" of the nature of men and the function of marriage. Rabbi Yohanan's case for delaying marriage is based on the impossibility of full commitment to Torah-study while exercising the responsibilities of marriage. Moreover, he seemingly does not share the Babylonians' concern that an unmarried man could not possibly study Torah ''in purity." If the Babylonians understood marriage as the means to fulfillment of a universal need and as a defense against pollution, and
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(footnote continued from the previous page)
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 | | after the flood, the priests and priestesses are forbidden to bear children, but not to have sex!
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| | 14. By "self-perception," I mean that it reflects a judgment by Babylonian Rabbis on themselves, as well as on others. While this does not in itself constitute a positive appreciation of sexuality per se, as opposed to procreation, it does make it impossible for the capacity to withdraw from sex to be understood as a barometer of the spirit, as it is in several Hellenistic traditions:
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| | A man must not treat his wife as he would a mistress, Seneca admonishes, and Saint Jerome cites him approvingly. His nephew Lucan was of the same opinion. He wrote an epic, a sort of realistic historical novel, in which he describes in his own fashion the story of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey. He shows Cato, model of the Stoic, taking leave of his wife (the same wife he lent for a time to a friend) as he prepares to go off to war. Even on the eve of such a lengthy separation, they do not make love, as Lucan is at pains to point out, explaining as he does the doctrinal significance of the fact. Even that semigreat man Pompey, although no Stoic, does not sleep with his wife on the farewell night. Why the abstinence? Because a good man does not live for petty pleasures and is careful about every action. To give in to desire is immoral. There is only one reasonable ground for a couple to sleep together: procreation. It was a question not of asceticism but of rationalism.
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| | (Veyne 1987, 47)
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| | In addition to the fact that a Jewish husband is
required
to sleep with his wife on a farewell night, the fundamental difference here is that according to the rabbinic cultural formation, fulfilling desire (within the bounds of the permitted) is in no way censorable and cannot, therefore, serve as a barometer of virtue.
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