A History of the Wife (4 page)

The Hebrew Bible has a rich cast of spouses performing many varia- tions on marital themes. One of my favorites is the terse interchange between Job and his wife, after Job had been laid low by God. Having lost all his sons and daughters, his servants and animals, then afflicted with boils from head to toe, Job sat down among the ashes and accepted the will of God. But not his wife, as the following verses show.

“Then said his wife unto him. Dost thou still retain thine integrity?

Curse God, and die.”

But he said unto her, “Thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh. What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?” In all this did not Job sin with his lips ( Job 2:9).

We hear the bitter voice of the wife and mother, overwhelmed by sorrow and unforgiving of a God deemed responsible for the death of her children. In the Bible, she is described as “one of the foolish women” who cannot bear up to suffering. Job, on the other hand, resists despair—at least initially. Their interchange draws from an antique Mediterranean tradition in which wives were often seen as fool- ish: caught up in the grief of their losses, insolent to indifferent gods, they were presumably unable to see the “larger picture,” be it political or metaphysical. Like the Greek queen Clytemnestra who never stopped blaming Agamemnon for the sacrifice of their daughter Iphige- nia, Job’s wife had no compunctions about cursing the God who had taken away her children. Whatever the prescriptions about wifely obe- dience, wives obviously opposed their husbands in the privacy of their homes, and even opposed the supreme patriarch—God Himself.

Men are supposed to be more steadfast. Though Job experiences grave psychological anguish and questions God’s justice, he never suc- cumbs to blasphemy. In the end God rewards him with “twice as much as he had before” ( Job 42:10). At this point the narrator does not deign to mention Job’s wife.

In contrast to Job’s wife and certain other negative models, a picture of the ideal wife is presented in the final section of Proverbs. It is clearly

written from the male point of view, beginning misogynistically with the notion that a good woman is hard to find and rising to a wifely encomium unique in all the Bible.

Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her . . .

She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life.

She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands. She is like the merchants’ ships; she bringeth her food from afar. She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her house-

hold, and a portion to her maidens. . . . She stretcheth out her hand to the poor. . . .

Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her.

Such is the dutiful, hardworking, charitable woman who brings honor to her husband and children. Any man in any age might dream of such a wife.

Husbands and wives as couples are, as I have mentioned, notably absent from the Gospels, except for the miraculous story of Mary and Joseph, briefly told in Matthew and Luke. Mary was probably twelve or thirteen when she and Joseph were committed to one another. Our term “engagement” does not carry the weight of their commitment: although they were not yet living together when Joseph discovered that Mary was pregnant, she was legally his wife. Fortunately for her, given the death sentence that could be inflicted on Jewish brides who were not virgins, “Joseph was a just man, and not willing to make her a pub- lic example.” Instead, “he was minded to put her away privately.” But before he did so, “the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream,” and convinced him that Mary had become impregnated by the Holy Ghost. Joseph and Mary did not consummate their marriage “till she had brought forth her firstborn son” (Matt. 1:18–25).

Aside from Mary and Joseph, there are no New Testament couples of any significance. Instead, the accent in the Gospels is on the individual and personal salvation. How we behave on earth, as individuals respon- sible for our actions, will determine whether we inherit the Kingdom of Heaven or whether we shall spend eternity in Gehenna, the Hebrew

equivalent of Hell. In any event, in the afterlife, there is no marriage, as Jesus makes explicit. “When they rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels” (Mark 12:25). The strong apocalyptic bent in Jesus’ message seems to have made mar- riage irrelevant.

What did Jesus think about marriage on earth? His thoughts were expressed in a commentary on divorce, a practice he explicitly con- demned. Citing the creation story when God made both male and female and they became one flesh, Jesus declared: “What God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Mark 10:9). Then he went on to specify that “Whosoever shall put away his wife... and shall marry another, committeth adultery” (Mark 10:11). It is important to remember that the ancient Hebrew law proscribing adultery applied exclusively to married women, requiring them to limit their sexual activity to only one man. There was no such requirement for married men, who were allowed to have sex with unattached women, such as widows, concubines, and servants, as well as their wives. A convicted adulteress could be put to death by stoning, along with her illicit sexual partner. But Jesus, in opposition to Hebrew practice, equated the male prerogatives of divorce and remarriage with adultery. Whoever wanted to be a Christian and married—male or female—would have to be per- manently monogamous.

Jesus also challenged the excessive punishment meted out to the adulteress. In a by now famous incident, he was asked whether a woman “taken in adultery, in the very act,” should be stoned, according to Mosaic law. His response has become proverbial: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” ( John 8:7). Jesus’ emphasis upon compassion rather than revenge, and upon the equality of all men and women in sin, struck a new chord in religious history. Nonetheless, Christian society continued to mete out strong punish- ment to adulterers for centuries to come. Both parties to the act were paraded through the streets nude in thirteenth-century France, and, worse yet, subject to being buried alive and impaled in fourteenth- century Germany.
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The Kingdom of Sicily under the emperor Frederick II in 1231 adopted a series of laws intended to soften the penalty against adulterers; instead of the sword, confiscation of property was decreed for the man who had fornicated with a married woman, and the slitting of her nose was deemed sufficient for the condemned wife.
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In seventeenth-century Puritan New England, the usual punishment was a whipping or a fine, combined with a symbolic execution: the adulterer stood in public for an hour with a rope around his or her neck. In biblical times, adultery was but one of several “abominations” that carried a death penalty among the ancient Hebrews. Anther was homo- sexuality. The condemnation of homosexual acts reads: “Thou shalt not lie

with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination” (Leviticus 18:22).

The prohibition against lying “with mankind, as with womankind” is addressed to men and to be taken literally. That is, it applies exclusively to male homosexuality. There is no similar injunction against female homosexuality in the Hebrew Bible. Perhaps female homosexuality was disregarded because the male writers of the Bible either ignored or triv- ialized it. Or perhaps it was seen as less heinous because lesbian prac- tices are not party to the “spilling of seed” that male homosexuality entails.
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Why homosexual acts were so reviled by the biblical Hebrews has been the subject of endless debate. One answer has to do with the ancient focus on procreation: any sexual act, such as masturbation, coitus interruptus, and bestiality, that did not contribute to progeny was vehemently condemned. Whereas other inhabitants of the ancient Mediterranean world, most notably the Greeks, but also the Romans, tolerated same-sex couples, Judaism was consistently antihomosexual.
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As for Christianity, Jesus said nothing on the subject of homosexuality—and this in contrast to numerous condemnations of adultery. Saint Paul, however, explicitly condemned both male and female homosexuality (Romans 1:26–27, I Corinthians 6:9, and I Tim- othy 1:10). His negative view of same-sex eroticism was rooted in a widespread system of thought that took heterosexual relations as natu- ral and all other forms of sexuality as unnatural. God had established the natural order of things in Genesis, and any deviation from hetero-

sexual coupling was seen as a rejection of God’s design.

When I think about ancient Judaism and early Christianity, I am struck by certain basic differences in their conceptions of marriage—differ- ences that have persisted in some form to this very day. Judaism taught that marriage was connected to the
mitzvah
of procreation—a divine commandment and a blessing.
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Because marriage was seen as the only sanctioned way Jews could fulfill their obligation to reproduce, men

and women were literally obliged to marry. Numerous rabbinical say- ings found in the Torah and Talmud reaffirm this sentiment: for exam- ple, “Whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing, and obtaineth favor of the Lord” (Proverbs 18:22).

Christianity, on the other hand, took an early deviation from this position. Following the models of Jesus and Saint Paul, early Christian- ity valued celibacy above marriage. In the words of Saint Paul, “The unmarried man cares for the Lord’s business; his aim is to please the Lord. But the married man cares for wordly things; his aim is to please his wife; and he has a divided mind.... The married woman cares for wordly things; her aim is to please her husband” (I Corinthians 7:32–34). Acquiring a wife or husband was seen as interfering with the more primary business of forming a union with the Lord. If, for the Jew, the only way to obey God’s commandment was to marry and produce offspring, for the Pauline Christian, the best way to fulfill God’s com- mandment was to abstain from sex altogether.

While a wife was considered “a good thing” for Hebrews but a potential obstacle to salvation for Christians, both Judaism and Christi- anity took it for granted that females were inferior to males and needed the lifelong tutelage of men. At the time of Jesus, Jewish women were strictly confined to the home, especially if they were wealthy and lived in cities. They rarely went out, except to the temple, and when they did, they had to cover their heads and faces, with only their eyes show- ing. Pamela Norris, in her engrossing book
Eve,
argues that even with only
one
eye left uncovered, Jewish women knew how to call attention to themselves by using eye makeup and wearing colorful clothes and jewelry that jingled as they walked.
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Such adornments had been con- demned in Scripture (most notably Isaiah 3:19–23) and continued to evoke the wrath of rabbis, convinced that male surveillance was required to control women from their innate bent toward seduction and troublemaking.

In this vein, the words of Saint Paul would be cited endlessly by patriarchal advocates for the next two thousand years. “Wives, be sub- ject to your husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church” (Ephesians 5:22). Wifely obedience was to be conspicuously manifested in church, where, according to Paul, “women should keep silence. . . . If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home” (I Corinthi-

ans 14:34–35).

Early patristic thinkers, most notably Tertullian, Saint Jerome, and Saint Augustine, argued that the Fall, initiated by Eve, had conferred a moral taint on all carnal union, even that within marriage. There were, however, gradations of difference in the repugnance toward marital sex expressed by the church fathers. Augustine justified coitus according to the rationale of the three goods of marriage: procreation, social stability, and the safeguard it provided against fornication. He declared that mar- ried couples should engage in sex only to beget children, and should scrupulously avoid copulating merely for pleasure.
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Saint Jerome went even further. He considered sex, even in marriage, as intrinsically evil. He rejected sexual pleasure as filthy, loathsome, degrading, and ultimately corrupting. This linkage of sex and sin, with blame attributed primarily to the daughters of Eve, became increasingly entrenched within the church, and by the fifth century was common currency among ecclesiastical authorities. It was also related to the rise of monasticism, which, by the sixth century, offered an alternative to marriage for Christian men and women. (Institutionalized celibacy has not been a part of Jewish or Muslim practice.)

Yet a few Christian theologians took a counterposition in praise of marriage. They pointed to the words of Jesus when he defended it as a God-given, indissoluble bond and to the wedding at Cana, where he miraculously provided wine for the wedding guests (Mark 10:6–9; John 2). They could even point to Saint Paul, who, having conceded the necessity of marriage for the purpose of procreation, endeavored to endow it with deep spiritual meaning by comparing it to the union between Christ and the church. They could also cite Paul’s prescription for spouses to love each other, with specific focus on the marital bed: “The husband must give the wife what is due to her, and the wife equally must give the husband his due.... Do not deny yourselves to one another” (I Corinthians: 7:3–5). Paul may have derived this con- cept from the Hebrew Bible, for in Exodus (21:10) a husband is ordered to provide his wife, even a slave wife, with “meat, clothes, and conjugal rights.” This recognition of a couple’s affective and sexual needs will be picked up later, during the Reformation, as the basis for a more positive view of marriage than that of the early church.

Both Judaism and Christianity supplied enduring models of good and bad wives. Since all women were the daughters of Eve, they were, accord-

ing to both Jewish and Christian lore, capable of leading men astray. But there were also the examples of the Old Testament matriarchs—Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah—and the “virtuous woman” of Proverb 31, who brought nothing but blessings to her husband. Throughout the ages Jewish women have been reminded of their industrious, fruitful foremothers.