contradictory action.’ The Rambam cited these Talmudic regulations to buttress his own decision. According to the decisor, allowing the young man to marry the slave girl after freeing her would not be an actual sin, but only“a sort of sin.”’
In comparison with the scripturally proscribed, severe iniquity of living with her as a non-Jewish slave, the rabbinically forbidden marriage appears to be the lesser of two evils and therefore permissible.
When Maimonides compared this grave iniquity of continuing to live with her in her Gentile state with the alternative of a valid and lasting marriage with the freed slave, now a full-fledged Jew , he knew that violating the prohibition was merely“a kind of sin.”
He was, in fact, confronted by a conflict between two laws codified in his Mishneh Torah. According to the first, the young man suspected of having had intercourse with the slave girl was forbidden to marry her after freeing her. The talmudic rationale for prohibiting the union was that their marriage might confirm the rumor that he had been sleeping with her while she was still a slave. The rabbinic prohibition is concerned with the public credibility of the original rumor.® Once freed, however, she became a full-fledged Jew , and their marriage, although forbidden ab initio, would be valid and they need not be divorced. It is clear that a statute that gives post factum recognition to the forbidden marriage and is founded on the believability of gossip can hardly be considered a stringent law. Hence, transgressing it would be only a“sort of sin.”
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