Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture Read Free

condition of their teachers; in that sinners could never have either shown or supplied anything conducive to integrity.
(Tertullian 1989b, 1415)
I think that I am not unjustified in seeing in these fallen angels a powerful echo of the gods and goddesses who in Hesiod decorated Pandora as a trap for man. The discourse of contempt for women's adornments and their deceptive nature is, of course, endemic throughout Greek thought, but the specific narrative element of the jewelry as a deceptive gift from divine beings is particular, I think, to the Pandora story.
A similar but even more powerful reversal of values is shown in a parallel to the above midrashic text, in which we are told that God led Eve by the hand to Adam, to which can be compared the leading of Pandora to Epimetheus in the Works and Days version of the story. However, in the midrashic text, this is referred to as a proof of God's steadfast love for the human couple!, and "Happy is the citizen who has seen the king taking his [the citizen's] bride by the hand and leading her to his [the citizen's] house to him" (Tanhuma Buber Hayye Sarah), while in Hesiod, "when he had completed this sheer inescapable snare, Zeus Father had her led off as a gift to Epimetheus" (Frazer 1983, 9899). Once more, I think that the midrashic text is an allusion to the motif in the Pandora myth of the woman given to the man by the god as a trick, a trap, and a punishment. But in the midrashic text, the valence is explicitly reversed; God is not a trickster, and his activities are only benevolent. In the
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to explain why women do adorn themselves. The argument is just as obnoxious but nevertheless significant of the directly opposite roles that objectification of women play in the two cultures.

 
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androcentric economy of the midrash, the woman is God's greatest gift to the man, not his revenge. The midrash emphasizes over and over that the creation of sexuality and God's participation in the wedding, as it were, signify his "steadfast love" for humans both male and femalesteadfast love, as opposed to the anger and jealousy manifested by Zeus. The very excessiveness of this repetition serves, I would suggest, as an index to the energy that is being mobilized to reverse the meaning of the Hesiodic motif. Moreover, in the midrash, both man and woman are subjects, and both recipients, of God's graciousness to them in the marriage relationship.
Woman exists only to be a marriage partner, but as such, her attractiveness and pleasure are warmly appreciated, not reviled as snares and deceptions, and her ornaments and decorations are also positively valued. God himself acts the bridesmaid and prepares her for the nuptial night. Woman is not a deviation from humanity but rather its completion, for as the Rabbis proclaim, "One who is not married is not a whole human." Sin and its punishment, according to the Rabbis, initiate not sexuality but sexual shame. In describing the rabbinic ideology of sex and gender an important set of distinctions made by anthropologist Sherry Ortner in a classic paper will be very useful (1974). She identifies three different versions of female inferiority in different cultures:
(1) elements of cultural ideology and informants' statements that explicitly devalue women, according them, their roles, their tasks, their products, and their social milieux less prestige than are accorded men and the male correlates; (2) symbolic devices, such as the attribution of defilement, which may be interpreted as implicitly making a statement of inferior valuation; and (3) social-structural arrangements that exclude women from participation in or contact with some realm in which the highest powers of the society are felt to reside. These three types of data may all of course be interrelated in any particular system, though they need not necessarily be.
(1974,