Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (25 page)

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fully how much pressure the halakhic requirement that a husband must sleep regularly with his wife brought to bear on the entire socio-cultural system.

There is here, to be sure, an apparent self-contradiction. On the one hand, I have claimed on the basis of fairly explicit Babylonian texts that these men held that adults cannot do without sex and that therefore they must marry early. On the other hand, I am arguing that to solve problems occasioned by those same early marriages, some of them promulgated a system of exceedingly long absence of husband from wife. The contradiction is, I think, internal to the system and not an artifact of my reading. Several solutions seem possible. One is that the understanding was that very early marriage would dampen sexual desire forever.
²¹A perhaps more plausible suggestion would be that the men were not expected to be celibate during these long absences from home. There are two stories in the Talmud itself about prominent rabbis who, upon arriving in a strange city, would go into the marketplace and seek a "wife" for the night (Yoma 18b; Yevamoth 37b). As Gafni (1989, 2425) has already argued, this practice bears a remarkable similarity to the well-attested later Iranian institution of temporary marriage for pleasure (Haeri 1989), an institution that also seems to attest to the persistence of the notion of the necessity for sexual outlets in this cultural area. If indeed there was a widespread practice of such temporary marriages for rabbinical students far from home (and this possibility is quite speculative), it is much easier to understand why the Talmud would have represented the primary problem here as being the wife's sexual needs and not the husband's! Another possibility would be to read this as another example of "thinking with women," the notion that men often talk about women when referring in fact to their own sexuality, such that here the requirement of a certain frequency of intercourse because of the needs of women becomes, ipso facto, a means of giving men permission to enjoy that frequency of intercourse themselves. It is important, however, to note once more that at least in the rabbinic formation, the need of women for sex is not described in pejorative terms.
²²


21. For evidence of such notions among Jews at a much later period, see David Biale 1986.


22. In partial contrast to this, a modern Orthodox rabbi who requires a greater frequency of intercourse for rabbinic scholars than does the Talmud argues for it in the following terms:


Because of the promiscuity of this generation and jealousy for another woman's

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Whatever the solution to that structural contradiction, this dissenting tradition of what Rav had said is identified as definitive, in marked contrast to the drift of the entire discourse up until this point, which had been strongly oriented toward the responsibility of the husband to satisfy his wife regularly. Without, of course, suggesting that Rav Ada's tradition is fabricated, it is nevertheless remarkable that this tradition became accepted as authoritative in spite of the fact that it contradicts the Mishna and contradicts another tradition of Rav's own view.
²³The Palestinian Talmud, on the other hand, knows of no such "qualification" of the Mishna's position, and the law there is established that the husband may not leave home without permission for more than thirty days.

The Babylonian Talmud's report of Rava's declaration"our Rabbis have relied upon Rav Ada, the son of Ahva and indeed practice according to his view"constitutes evidence for a change in social practice that is associated by the tradition with Rava, that is, with the leading Babylonian rabbinic authority of the fourth century, though to be sure, such attribution is not necessarily to be taken literally. It would seem, however, that the attempt to institute this change in marriage practice met with substantial opposition in spite of Rava's hegemonic prestige. The talmudic text, at the same time that it is ostensibly recording the support for this innovation, reveals sharp dissension from it. These oppositional voices encoded within the text, I suggest, are intimations of the social conflict outside the text.

Contestation in the Texts

Conflict within Babylonia: Covert Contestation

The Talmud proceeds to cite a story, which, while overtly claiming to be a precedent for the practice of the "Rabbis" who stay away from their

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lot, a woman feels desire and erotic passion more often than once a week. Therefore, her husband is obligated in this respect.


(Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, cited in Rachel Biale 1984, 134)


What is fascinating about this text is that despite manifesting no open recognition of the fact that male sexual needs may have changed owing to the promiscuity of the generation, it provides, in line with classical rabbinic practice, not for greater sexual abstemiousness but for more frequent sexual satisfaction for everyone, in the disguise of the obligation of men toward women.


23. It further contradicts the statement above in the names of both Rav and Rabbi Yohanan to the effect that even with permission a man should not stay away from home

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