Talmud Commentary: Bavli 4/2. bBetsah 32b (mBetsah 4:4)

@General observations

While discussing mBetsah 4:4 an opinion is voiced in the name of Rav Natan bar Abba. Because this sage’s name does not appear often in the Bavli, the editor now deems it fit to cite other traditions in his name, creating a sort of anthology of his sayings. He is apparently known to have opined on the wealthy of Babylonia, who are heartless and will surely go to hell. He is also known to have expressed the view that if people expect charity, they will surely be disappointed. In-between these two opinions, the Bavli editor inserted the story of Shabbtai bar Marinus, a sage from the Land of Israel, who came to Babylonia, suffered from the tightfisted attitude of the wealthy Babylonians and concluded that they could not possibly be real Israelites, but rather had to be descendents of the multitude who joined the Israelites when they left Egypt. The insertion of this tradition between the two sayings of Rav Natan bar Abba creates the impression that the latter is arguing with Shabbtai bar Marinus and criticizing his expectation of charity from the Babylonians. Since Shabbtai bar Marinus is obviously a sage from the Land of Israel and Rav Natan bar Abba is Babylonian, and since the Bavli wishes eventually to vindicate the Babylonian sage, and perhaps even to refute his assertion that the Babylonian rich are destined to end in hell, it now introduces a tradition which is clothed as a baraita, namely from the Land of Israel, and confirms Rav Natan bar Abba’s dictum against beggars. The tradition is presented in Hebrew, and follows the usual formula of a baraita: “Our rabbis taught” (תנו רבנן). Having clothed it in the garb of a tradition from the Land of Israel, the Bavli editor now inserts a saying fashioned along the lines of a wisdom aphorism divided into three parts.

Numerical sayings are part and parcel of a “science of lists,” common in the Hebrew Bible, ancient Near Eastern literature as a whole and also ever present in rabbinic literature, beginning with the Mishnah. These compositions are usually headed by a typological number (two, three, five, seven, ten, twelve etc.), which is then followed by a list that sometimes (depending on the length of the list) does not conform to the title. The larger the number in the title, the more likely it is that the list and its title will not correspond.[1] Most of the Mishnah, both in its halakhic and in its more aggadic portions, employs lists. Thus for example, chapter 7 in mShabbat lists “forty minus one” labors that are forbidden on Shabbat. mAv 5:6 lists ten items that were created on the eve of Shabbat, just before sunset. Often the Mishnah presents lists without spelling out to which number(s) they should conform, and the distinction between lists with number titles and those without becomes blurred.

Thus, in order to define more clearly the genre to which our aphorism belongs, we need to limit it to wisdom sayings that count up to three. Such sayings are numerous, appearing in the Bible (e.g., Amos 1:3-2:6; Prov 30:18-31), in the apocryphal books of wisdom literature (like Ben Sira) and in Tractate Avot of the Mishnah, which belongs to the same genre (mAv 1:2; 4:13; 5:19). These sayings can be subsumed under the heading suggested by Wolfgang Roth as “reflective numerical sayings”[2] dealing with a variety of aspects of human experience. In an unsystematic way, the Bavli, too, is involved in the project of listing aspects of human experience numerically. Yet in the Bavli we find an attempt to preserve uniformity in the way these sayings are cited. The vast majority is presented in Hebrew, begins with a formulation reserved for baraitot and is limited to the number three. Consequently, as in our example, when an additional observation, beyond the three listed examples, presents itself as fitting the title, it is enumerated under the additional clause “There are those who say: Also […]”

@Feminist observations

As can be noted in the aphorism presented above, the second category of people whose life is no life at all includes those whose wives rule over them. This statement immediately defines the person for whom the saying is formulated – a man. It is not in any way to be understood symmetrically. Whether the life of a woman whose husband rules over her is a life at all is of no interest to the formulator of this saying. And indeed, a close look at this genre shows that it often involves observations on women as objects of a man’s intellectual endeavor, he being the subject of the saying. Perhaps the prime example of this sort of saying is the one found in bBer 57b: “Three do not enter the body, but give the body pleasure: bathing, anointing and sexual intercourse” (שלשה אין נכנסין לגוף והגוף נהנה מהן: אלו הן רחיצה, וסיכה, ותשמיש). Obviously the body the rabbis have in mind here is the male body.

The pseudo-baraita we observe here is composed of several elements. One is the title: “For three types life is no life at all.” That this title is not a fixed composition connected inseparably to the list that follows is evident from another such pseudo-baraita found elsewhere in the Bavli: “For three types is life no life at all, and they are these: Those who take pity, and those who become angry and those of an exacting mind” (שלשה חייהן אינו חיים: הרחמנים, והרתחנים, ואניני הדעה) (bPes 113b).

The list in our pseudo-baraita is also not fixed to the title under which it stands. Elsewhere we find the element we are most interested in – the wife ruling over her husband – under another title: “Our rabbis taught: Three types implore but are not answered, and they are these: He who has money and lends it without witnesses, he who buys a master for himself and he whose wife rules over him” (תנו רבנן: שלשה צועקין ואינן נענין, ואלו הן: מי שיש לו מעות ומלוה אותן שלא בעדים, והקונה אדון לעצמו, ומי שאשתו מושלת עליו – bBM 75b). The two lists in which this element is found draw our attention to the importance of a gendered element in lists of three.

In many (though certainly not all) sayings of three, a gendered element is present. This form is so old that it is already recorded in an ancient cultic text from twelfth-century BCE Canaanite Ugarit. Here we read: “Two kinds of offerings Ba‘al hates, three the Rider of the Clouds: An offering of shame (בתת – בשת), an offering of fornication (דנת – זנות), and an offering of the slave-girl’s lewdness [1](תדמם [זימת] אמהת).” Note that this list ends with two criticisms of sexual misbehavior: Fornication (זנות) and lewdness (זימה), but only the second one also mentions that the culprit is female – the slave-girl.

The form of listing two/three in order to arrive at a round number is also found in the Bible, albeit with three/four as its components; in Proverbs 30, where this phenomenon prevails, a similar rejection of human actions is listed, ending with the mention of the abominable actions of a slave-girl (שפחה): “The earth shudders at three things, at four it cannot bear: A slave who becomes king, a scoundrel sated with food, a loathsome woman (שנואה) who gets married (כי תבעל) and a slave-girl who supplants her mistress” (Prov 30:21-23). A previous list in Proverbs 30 also ends with a reference to gender ordering: “Three things are beyond me; four I cannot fathom: How an eagle makes its way over the sky, how a snake makes its way over a rock, how a ship makes its way over the sea, how a man makes his way with a maid (עלמה)” (Prov 30:18-19). We could have expected the list to end here, because it has already listed, as it promised, four phenomena, but it continues: “Such is the way of the adulteress: She wipes her mouth and says: I have done no wrong” (Prov 30:20). As we see, all three lists end on a critical note, decrying what they regard as negative gendered behavior. Even this last example, which ends with the neutral “way of the man with a maid,” is supplanted by the case of the adulteress, who is obviously judged to be acting negatively.

In Ben Sira too, its lists of three (and four), which record the sage’s abhorrence, end with his judgment of sexual behavior: One example is: “With three things my heart is concerned, and of a fourth I am afraid: An evil report in the city, and the assembly of the people, and a false accusation, all are worse than death. There is grief of heart and sadness when one wife is the rival of another (Ben Sira 26:5-7). Another example “Three species I despise, and their lives are abominable to me: A proud pauper, a cheating man and an adulterous old man” (Ben Sira 25:2).[2] In both cases the list ends with what the author considers to be gender disorders or sexual misconduct.

This last example brings us with ease to the Bavli since it is one of the Ben Sira texts adopted by the Bavli.[3] In bPes 113b, within a large assemblage of lists of three, we read a reworking of this tradition, ironically enumerating four elements: “Four are intolerable to the mind and they are these: A proud pauper, a wealthy cheat, an adulterous old man and a civil servant (פרנס) who lords it over the public for naught. Some say: Also he who divorces his wife once and twice and takes her back” (ארבעה אין הדעת סובלתן, אלו הן: דל גאה, ועשיר מכחש, וזקן מנאף, ופרנס מתגאה על הציבור בחנם. ויש אומרים: אף המגרש את אשתו פעם ראשונה ושניה ומחזירה). Here we see how a list of three from Ben Sira was transformed into a list of four in the Bavli, only to have a fifth element added to it, much like in Prov 30:18-20. Consequently we can see that adding a fourth element to the list had moved its gendered element, the adulterous old man, to the penultimate position. This is remedied by adding a fifth, even stronger, gendered element at the end – the repeated divorce and remarriage of a couple.

In all the cases we have seen, from the earliest Ugaritic example, down to those from the Bavli, we find the last item on the list in some way disparagingly describing gendered behavior. Is the location of the gendered element always in the last position, and does this imply a progressive development from bad to worse, with the gendered element constituting the worst? Warren Trenchard has nicely summed up the issue:

Not surprisingly the type X [i.e. a simple list T.I.] clearly contains no progression or climax. It is not generally claimed that this type is anything more than a simple list. On the other hand, the X/X+1 type [list of two/three or three/four T.I.] invites the view that the second and larger number represents the climax of the list. The evidence is not as conclusive as for the first type. However, it is sufficient to nullify any thoroughgoing view that all X/X+1 Zahlensprüche progress toward climax.[1]

The formula under discussion here, “he whose wife rules over him,” supports this assertion. It is found, as we see, in two Bavli lists – once as a second element (bBets 32b) and once as the third and last element (bBM 75b). Is this order intentional? In the following discussion we will inquire whether this difference is significant.

Let me begin by referring to perhaps the most powerful historiographical observation of the rabbis, recorded also, but not initially and not exclusively, in the Bavli (see tMen 13:22), and formulated as a list of three – the grounds for the destruction of the first Temple: “Why was the First Temple destroyed? Because idolatry and incest and bloodshed were practiced in it” מקדש ראשון מפני מה חרב? מפני שלשה דברים שהיו בו: עבודה זרה, וגלוי עריות, ושפיכות דמים – bYom 9b). In this list we see sexual sins listed in the second position. The progression in this list suggests that bloodshed was probably considered by the editor to be more grievous. If we compare it to the list of three in bBets 32b, where a wife’s rule over her husband comes before physical suffering ruling over the body, perhaps a notion is at work here that such suffering is indeed more grievous than that inflicted by a bullying wife. Yet when in bBM the wife who rules over her husband comes last in the list, following a person who buys himself a master, we may actually apply to the list the principle of qal vahomer (a fortiori). If a person who buys himself a master is in a sorry state, how much more so is one whose master is a woman – his wife?

In this context we may draw attention to a different wisdom text that is not formulated as a list of three, but does nevertheless supply such a list and ends progressively, with a woman as the last element. I am referring to the story of the three bodyguards in the apocryphal 3 Ezra 3-4.[1] In this story a contest between three wise youths – the king’s bodyguards – takes place to determine who can describe what is most powerful. The last of the three, who is also the hero, claims that women are the most powerful and wins the competition. Yet the story does not end here because, afterwards, another element is introduced: The winning youth wishes to claim that actually the truth is stronger than women. I can imagine this story formulated in a list of three: “Three are very powerful: The king is powerful, wine is more powerful and women are the most powerful of all. And some say: the truth is even more powerful than women.” This story alerts us to the possibility that sometimes there is progression in lists of three, particularly when they end with a gendered element. Out of hand we cannot dismiss such an assertion. And the Bavli provides many more examples of such lists as, for example:

1. “Our rabbis taught: Three hate one another and they are these: Dogs and roosters and sorcerers. And there are those who say: also prostitutes” (תנו רבנן: שלשה שונאין זה את זה, אלו הן: הכלבים, והתרנגולין. ויש אומרים: אף הזונות – bPes 113b) Note that prostitutes (and sorcerers) are listed here together with animals rather than with men.
2. “It is taught: Three things bring a person to poverty: He who urinates in front of his bed naked, and who takes hand washing lightly, and one whose wife curses him to his face” (תנא: שלושה דברים מביאין את האדם לידי עניות ואלו הן: המשתין מים בפני מטתו ערום, ומזלזל בנטילת ידים, ושאשתו מקללתו בפניו – bShab 62b).
3. “Said Rabbi Yehoshu‘a ben Levi: Three things did the Angel of Death impart to me: Do not take your garment in the morning from your servant and put it on, and do not let one who has not washed his hands wash yours, and do not stand in front of the women when they re turn from [attending] the dead, for I dance in front of them and my sword is in my hand and I have the authority to do damage” אמר רבי יהושע בן לוי: שלשה דברים סח לי מלאך המות: אל תטול חלוקך שחרית מיד השמש ותלבש; ואל תטול ידיך ממי שלא נטל ידיו; ואל תעמוד לפני הנשים בשעה שחוזרות מן המת, מפני שאני מרקד ובא לפניהן וחרבי בידי ויש לי רשות לחבל – bBer 51a). In this case only the third piece of advice is followed by an explanation, and it places women squarely in association with death and its messengers.
4. “Three things did Rabbi Yishma‘el command Rabbi (Yehudah the Patriarch): Do not cripple yourself […] and do not negotiate if you have no money, and if your wife has immersed, do not have intercourse with her on the first night” שלשה דברים צוה רבי ישמעאל ברבי יוסי את רבי: אל תעש מום בעצמך [...] ואל תעמוד על המקח בשעה שאין לך דמים, אשתך טבלה – אל תזקק לה לילה הראשונה – bPes 112b).

In all these cases it seems to me that the texts display a progression and that the climax has something to do with gender. Thus, though we are not entitled to assume that this is the case in all instances of lists of three, I suspect that when a gendered element comes third and last (or last beyond the third), a progression is intended and the gendered element is the most extreme one. In this we may rightly suspect a strong misogynistic apprehension at work in these patently androcentric texts, which sees in women and gender a great danger of disorder and evil for men.