Sacred and profane writings, papyruses, inscriptions, an amulet and other artifacts — these are all that physically remain of the ancient civilization of Babylonia and the Mediterranean basin.
Professor Michael Satlow not only translates and interprets these fragments in his book “Jewish Marriage in Antiquity,” but connects the dots between them to reconstruct the realities of that world, however messy. He believes that his book is relevant to understanding some of the problems of modern marriage.
Satlow writes that exceedingly little is known today about ancient Jewish marriage, but of that little he has reconstructed a great deal.
He traces the writing and redaction of the Hebrew Bible since 586 BCE, with the destruction of the First Temple and subsequent development of the Torah and Jewish canon. The Second Temple period marked the beginning of the rabbinic movement which, from 70 to 500 C.E., would produce most of the existent literature on Jewish marriage in that era.
Satlow’s direct sources are Jewish legal contracts from a military colony in Elephantine, Egypt, and the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. To provide a context, he has included material from the early Christians and many of the Greek and Roman authors whose classic literature and language were, until recently, the staple of academia.
In antiquity there was no essential “Jewish marriage,” he points out; the community adopted and “Judaized” their neighbors’ customs. “Christians faced the same problems that Jews did,” Satlow writes, “in making their marriage distinctive within what is essentially a pagan mindset.”
He explains the evolving “myth and metaphor” of Jewish marriage, starting with the concept that the relationship between husband and wife was like the one between God and Israel — an idea that never appealed to the Jews, who preferred to think of God as a father or a king. Later, influenced by the story of the Garden of Eden and the practices of Greeks, Romans and Christians, Jews broke with the polygamous teachings of the Hebrew Bible to become monogamous, according to Satlow.
The author is noncommittal on the issue of incest, though he quotes the violent denunciations of that Jewish practice, by the Roman authors Tacitus and Suetonius. For the most part, Satlow adopts an attitude of cultural relativism, stressing the similarities between that era and the present.
But on one aspect of antiquity — the subordination of women — he is thoroughly polemic. A recurrent theme of the book is the misogyny of the Babylonian rabbis, for whom marriage served only as a sexual outlet and means of procreation, in contrast to the more egalitarian view of the Palestine rabbis that it was all-important in forming the household.
In courtship, a man wanted a wife both beautiful and virginal. In marriage he expected her to be modest and submissive. Rabbinic law gave husbands alone the right of divorce, though the ketubah, or marriage contract, also included a sum of money the husband pledged to his wife, to be paid her if the marriage dissolved through divorce or death.
Satlow questions whether the Jewish husband and father had as much control over his family as the “honor and shame” culture decreed. “The prescription of absolute male control by a group that had little or no social power, coercive or not, itself might indicate how weak such control actually was.” This is debatable.
Writing of the Hellenistic period in the fourth century BCE, Satlow describes “a Jewish aristocratic community fighting a very bitter and public battle to gain civic rights.”
The book has reconstructed a world that is, except to antiquarians, mostly unfamiliar. The book jacket portrays the third- or fourth-century epitaph of Maria, a Jewish woman of Rome — giving the reader a chance to see the representation of a historical artifact. But there are no illustrations in the book, which might have been helpful as well.
With its bibliography and indexes, the book provides a wealth of information for the scholar. But for the average reader, it may be somewhat daunting, though fascinating in parts.
Satlow, an associate professor in the Jewish studies program at Indiana University, has written extensively on the subject of Jews in antiquity. While his vocabulary is erudite, his style is plain and pleasant, and at times informed by an understated humor.