 | | Ravina said: It was not necessary [to say this], except for even when both of them are his wives [i.e., when the women are not both his wives it is obvious that he must not think of another woman while he sleeps with his wife, but this comes to teach us that even when he is married to both of them, he is forbidden to have his mind on one while he has sex with the other].
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| | And I will remove from you the rebellious ones and the criminals
[Ezek. 20:39]Said Rabbi Levi: These are nine categories:
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| | Children of fright; children of rape; children of a despised woman; children of excommunication; children of exchange; children of strife; children of drunkenness; children of one whom he has divorced in his heart; children of mixture; children of a brazen woman.
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| | Indeed? But did not Shmuel the son of Nahmani say that Rabbi Yohanan
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said: Any man whose wife approaches him sexually will have children such as were unknown even in the generation of Moses. . . .
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| | That refers to a case where she arouses him [but does not explicitly and verbally request sex].
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This is, perhaps, the single most extended and important text on the techniques of married sex in the talmudic literature. It is an excellent demonstration, moreover, of the dangers of quoting a talmudic citation out of the dialectic context in which it is embedded. The text has to be read in two modes. At one level, it has to be read for the ideology of the redactor[s], but at the same time, the contrary ideologies of the sources cited and problematized by those redactors have to be taken into account.
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The Talmud here thematizes two kinds of control over sexual behavior in the conjugal bed. One has to do with the actual practices engaged in and the other with the affective state of the couple. The first type of control is renounced by the text, while the second is strongly supported. In addition, as we will see below, the two types of control are actually thematized as mutually oppositional to each other. After a general statement of the requirement of modesty for Jewish people, both men and women, the Talmud cites a source that is ostensibly a prescription for the enactment of modest behavior. This text has one strikingly unusual feature, namely, that it is a report of a conversation with the Ministering Angels. In all of the Talmud, there is no other report of an attempt by the Ministering Angels to impose their halakhic or moral ideas on human beings. Indeed, in the only places in the Talmud where knowing the speech of angels is referred to as part of the knowledge of an outstanding sage, this
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| | 3. Variant: Yonathan.
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