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C‘ontrolling Passions- Mixed Results 95

our case the other party, if indeed there was one, remained unknown. Let us also turn to the next cases that form this unit:

In the case of a virgin who is engaged to a man— a man comes upon her in town and lies with her— you shall take the two of them out to the gate of that town and stone them to death: the girl because she did not cry for help in town, and the man because he violated another man’s wife. Thus you shall sweep away evil from your midst. But if the man comes upon the engaged girl in open country, and the man lies with her by force, only the man who lay with her shall die, but you shall do nothing to the girl....

If a man comes upon a virgin who is not engaged and he seizes her and lies with her, and they are discovered, the man who lay with her shall pay the girl’s father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife. Because he has violated her, he can never have the right to divorce her”(Deut. 22:23-28).

In each of these instances, the woman was left out of the proceedings, and only if the attack occurred in the countryside where cries for help would have been of no avail was the death penalty avoided. A woman not yet engaged and seduced or raped led to a fine and she again remained with this man for life.

The more complicated cases that would arise out of this legislation were discussed by the rabbinic literature first in the Mishnah and the Talmud . The Mishnah divided marriage into erusin (kiddushin) and nissuin as it dealt with these two issues.

We shall begin with the first case in which the lack of virginity, if indeed this was so, was at stake. The Mishnah dealt with this differently. First of all it had to be clear that no contact between the two individuals had or could have occurred. Furthermore, the charge