Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (4 page)

the king, if he wished, could let his errant male subject go free.

Influenced by Hammurabi's code but lacking the glorious Tigris and Euphrates, the ancient Hebrews substitu ted death by stoning for a watery grave. When Moses received his tablets from God on the top of Mount Sinai, "Thon shalt not rape" was con spicuously missing from the Ten Commandments, although Moses received a distinct commandment against adultery and another, for good measure, against the coveting of thy neighbor's wife, bracketed this second time around with thy neighbor's house, his field, his servant, ox and ass. Like her Babylonian sister, a married woman within the Hebrew culture who was victimized by rape was considered culpable, adulterous and irrevocably defiled. She was stoned to death along with her attacker at the gates to the city. But unlike the woman of Babylon, who before her last gasp might be rescued by her grief-stricken husband, for the women of Israel there was no reprieve. Reprieve from adultery, real or imagined, had to wait till the Gospel of St. John, in which appears Jesus' famous statement, "He that is without sin among yon, let him first cast a stone at her."

We must cut through the thicket of some minor passages in Deuteronomy, written long af ter the original Ten Command ments, to arrive at the true Hebraic concept of a criminal act of rape, one in which the violator, and not the violated, bore full responsibility for his unlawful act.

In the Hebrew social order, which differed only in its exquisite precision from the simpler Babylonian codes, virgin maidens were bought and sold in marriage for fif ty pieces of silver. To use plain language, what a father sold to a prospective bridegroom or his

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family was title to his daughter's unruptured hymen, a piece of property he wholly owned and controlled. With a clearly marked price tag attached to her hymen, a daughter of Israel was kept under watch to make sure she remained in a pristine state, for a piece of damaged goods could hardly command an advantageous match and might have to be sold as a concubine.

Like the Hebrew wife who was held responsible for her own defilement, a Hebrew daughter was given the task of guarding her own untouched flesh.
If
a man raped a virgin within the walls of the city both shared the same fate of death by stoning, for the elders reasoned that if the girl had screamed she would have been rescued. Patriarchal wisdom allowed that if the act of rape took place outside the city or while the girl was laboring in the field, for all her screaming, no one might hear, so a judicious solution was put into effect. The rapist was ordered to pay the girl's father fif ty silver shekels in compensation for what would have been her bride price and the pair was simply commanded to wed. But if the maiden who was raped in a field was already betrothed to someone else, and betrothals in infancy were common, Hebraic wrath de scended with unilateral vengeance on the rapist's head. No civil exchange of money and goods could be countenanced, for not only was the original betrothal null and void, but the house of the father had suffered an irreparable blow to its honor.
In
this singular instance the incautious rapist was stoned to death while the girl went unpunished, to be sold at a markdown to one who might have her.

One authority on the blood-vengeance justice of the early Assyrians has noted that under the
lex talionis
the father of a raped virgin was permitted to seize the wife of the rapist and violate her in turn. Before the codification of Mosaic law, Hebrew retribution for rape was even deadlier than this, particularly if the offender came from outside the tribe. The story of Dinah· stands as a warn ing to any who might violate a Hebrew daughter. It is also a serious warning to young women of what might befall them if they stray too far from their father's house.

As told in Genesis, Dinah was a virgin daughter of Jacob by Leah. She was raped by a gentile when she lef t the house one day to go to visit some female friends. Dinah's attacker, who was not without his own tribal code, then applied to Jacob's family for permission to marry the woman he had violated. Pretending agree—

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ment, Jacob's sons suggested to the eager young man that he and all the male members of his uncivilized tribe undergo the ritual of circumcision. Three days later, the Bible tells us, when the gentile tribe was still sore from the painful operation, Jacob's sons de scended on their encampment, slaughtered the weakened men and made captives of their women and oxen. Thus was the house of Jacob vindicated, but what benefit accrued to Dinah is ques tionable.

Protecting wellborn daughters of Israel from rape by the threat of massive retribution was obviously serious business, but as the story of Dinah shows, men of the Hebrew tribes, like their neighbors, had no compunctions against freely raping women of tribes they had conquered, for in this way they prospered and grew. Captured slave women were lawfully employed as servants, field hands, concubines and breeders of future slaves in much the same manner that the eighteenth-century American slaveholder made use of his black female slaves, and indeed, this Biblical parallel was of ten cited as religious justification by upholders of American slavery.

The unfortunate lot of women caught in the middle of inter tribal warfare within the confederated twelve tribes of Israel is demonstrated by a series of swif tly moving events reported in the Book of Judges. A Levite, accompanied by his unfaithf ul concu bine, seeks rest and shelter for the night with an old man in Benjamite territory. Hearing that a stranger has come to town, some men of Benjamin approach the house with the intention of committing homosexual abuse. The Levite's protector offers up his own virgin daughter and the Levite's concubine to deflect the energy of the eager young bloods. They graciously decline the use of the daughter but they rape the concubine through the night. When the Levite discovers her dead on the doorstep in the morn ing, he calls on the other tribes of Israel to defend his honor. In the ensuing battle most of the Benjamite men and all of the Benjamite women are slaughtered. Now the Hebrew elders become seriously concerned, for without women the tribe of Benjamin will cease to exist. They arrange for the defeated Benjamites to catch and rape four hundred young virgins of neighboring Shiloh, and thus secure for them legal wives.

With all this lawful rape as the order of the day, it comes as no surprise that the Bible's major rape parable is not concerned

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with the plight of an unfortunate female or even with the efforts of her father and brothers to avenge their house. The famous story of Potiphar's wife is an important morality lesson in Hebrew, Chris tian and Moslem folklore, and it expresses the true, historic con cern and abiding fear of egocentric, rapacious man: what can happen to a fine, upstanding fellow if
a vengeful female lies
and cries that she has been assaulted.

Joseph the Israelite was a highly placed slave in the household of Potiphar the Egyptian. As recorded in Genesis, Potiphar's wife-she is not identified by a first name-cast a lecherous eye upon the Hebrew slave. She was always pestering this unwilling sex object to "lie with me," and the virtuous Joseph was forever re minding her of their master in common. One day Joseph and Potiphar's wife found themselves alone in the house. Seizing her opportunity, Potiphar's wife caught Joseph "by his garment" and commanded, "Lie with me." At this point, supposedly, Joseph fled-and Potiphar's wife began crying rape or its Biblical equivalent.

This is the Hebrew male side of the story, I must stress. When Potiphar came home his wife showed him Joseph's torn cloak and wailed, "The Hebrew . . . came in unto me to mock me!" Poti phar had no choice but to throw his favorite slave into prison. But God, as would .be expected, remained on the side of the Israelite. Once in jail Joseph became quite the prison leader, and by cor rectly interpreting the Pharaoh's dreams he won a full pardon and rose to become prime minister. The moral of the story of Poti phar's wife is that a woman scorned-especially if she is gentile can get a good man into a hell of a lot of trouble by crying rape.

The legend of Potiphar's wife, in some form or other, is a familiar staple in many ancient cultures. Joseph's misfortune occu pies a place of importance in the teachings of the Koran and a similar tale has been traced to Egyptian folklore of
i
300
B.c.
A variation appears in Celtic myths. One historian of sexual attitudes has noted the frequent recurrence of the theme in romantic his tories of the Crusades, where "very of ten the rapacious maiden is a Saracen who jumps into the bed of a crusader," all the more significant when we remember that the Crusades were marked by Christian rape and pillage of Moslems as the crusaders pursued the Holy Grail. The universal promulgation of a parable of rape that places the full burden of blame squarely on a lascivious female of

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another race or nation can hardly be accidental. Aggressive warlike peoples must have found it highly expeditious to promote this sort of legend as they went about their routine business of conquering others. What better way, af ter all, to absolve themselves from guilt as they plucked the fruits of victory?

As the centuries rolled by and Jewish women began to win a measure of independence, the learned men who interpreted the Bible became increasingly concerned about an act that was not quite rape but had some elements of mutual seduction. The emer gence of an independent female, one whose father had died or one who did not marry, began to affect the ground rules governing criminal-rape prosecutions for "she herself became a litigant," writes a modem rabbinical authority, and "her consent to the act had great bearing on the payments due." Talmudic theorists of the Middle Ages, the Jewish intellectual elite, manfully sought to cover all the new contingencies. Virginity remained the sine qua non of individual rape prosecutions, but maidens who displayed "sexual eagerness'' were added to the official list of statutory nonvirgins, along with gentile women, captives and slaves.