A History of the Wife Read Online Free PDF Page B

man who had fornicated with a married woman, and the slitting of her nose was deemed sufficient for the condemned wife. 7
    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. 8
    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. 9 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. 10 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