CHAPTER V

CONTROLLING PASSIONS- MIXED RESULTS Walter Jacob

Er religion and society tries to control sexual life and impulses through a variety of ways as this is an area of considerable conflict that has always disturbed familial and communal harmony. Prohibitions, taboos, saintly examples, ritualization, and other methods have and continue to be used. Biblical Judaism met with considerable success in this area; sexual misadventures occurred among the Israelite kings and others, but they did not play a crucial role as in the legends and mythologies of the ancient Near East or those of the Greeks. They did not become the pretext for national wars or revolutions as in the Iliad.

How far is it possible to legislate successfully in the area of passions and jealousy? Where are the boundaries? The Decalogue dealt with sexual ethics with broad sweeping strokes, but other legislation was very detailed. We shall look at three pieces of such legislation that dealt with the passions of love and jealousy in the context of marriage and their development in the rabbinic tradition, essentially the Mishnah, Talmud Bavli, and Talmud Yerushalmi. The first legislation dealt with the very beginning of marriage and failed expectations; the second with what may have been seduction, an affair after engagement, or rape; and the last with jealousy in a marriage. This essay is not interested in dating the biblical material, but rather in following its development in later Judaism . Rabbinic Judaism treated Mosaic legislation as divine. We shall see what was done when the limits of practical efforts were reached.

We shall begin with two pieces of legislation that follow each other; one deals with the night of the marriage, in which the husband expected to find his bride a virgin(Deut. 22:13-21) and the other with the rape of an engaged woman(Deut. 22:21-28). The first piece of legislation was stimulated by a young husband who sought a pretext for dismissing his wife, who no longer pleased him, but its implications