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Sex or Power? The Crime of the Bride in Deuteronomy 22


Seiten 279 - 296

DOI https://doi.org/10.13173/zeitaltobiblrech.16.2010.0279




Yeshiva University, NY

1 The ideas in this paper were worked out in conversations with Shira Hecht, who was also kind enough to read an early draft of the paper. A version of this was presented at the SBL International Meeting in Tartu, Estonia, in July 2010. I am indebted to Yeshiva University for making my trip to this beautiful city possible, and to the participants in the session on biblical law for their comments and criticisms. Later, Dr. Shalom Holtz read a draft and made important critical comments which assisted in formulating the arguments, and Profs. Jeffery H. Tigay and Moshe J. Bernstein read drafts and provided valuable criticisms and references.

2 Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur: The Winchester Manuscript, ed. Helen Cooper; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, 285.

3 Bruce Wells, Sex, Lies, and Virginal Rape: The Slandered Bride and False Accusation in Deuteronomy, JBL 124, 2005, 41–72; Cynthia Edenburg, Ideology and social context of the Deuteronomic women's sex laws (Deuteronomy 22:13–29), JBL 128, 2009, 43–60; Joseph Fleishman, The delinquent daughter and legal innovation in Deuteronomy xxii 20–21, VT 58, 2008, 191–210; Meir Malul, What is the nature of the crime of the delinquent daughter in Deuteronomy 22:13–21? A rejoinder to J. Fleishman's suggestion, VT 59, 2009, 446–459; Adele Berlin, Sex and the single girl in Deuteronomy 22, in Mishneh Todah: Studies in Deuteronomy and Its Cultural Environment, in Honor of Jeffrey H. Tigay, ed. Nili Sacher Fox, David A. Glatt-Gilad, and Michael J. Williams; Winona Lake, Eisenbrauns, 2009, 95–112; Hilary B. Lipka, Sexual transgression in the Hebrew Bible, HBM 7, Sheffield, Sheffield Phoenix, 2006, 93–101. The only book-length treatment remains Clemens Locher, Die Ehre einer Frau in Israel: Exegetische und rechtsvergleichende Studien zu Deuteronomium 22, 13–21, OBO 70, Freiburg and Göttingen, Universitätsverlag Freiburg and Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986.

4 Fleishman, The Delinquent Daughter (above, n. 2), 201.

5 Fleishman, The Delinquent Daughter (above, n. 2), 195.

6 Malul, What is the Nature (above, n. 2), 455–456.

7 The Rabbis discuss cases which show that this is a tenuous assumption (bKet 10a–b); see Jeffrey H. Tigay, Examination of the Accused Bride in 4Q159: Forensic Medicine at Qumran, JANES 22: Muffs Volume, 1993 (129–134), 129 with n. 2. For the unreliability of the absence of hymeneal blood as proof of non-virginity more generally in late antique and medieval cultures, including discussion of some of the Talmudic texts, see Kathleen Coyne Kelly, Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages, Routledge Research in Medieval Studies 2, London and New York, Routledge, 2000, esp. 19–20 and 28–30, as well as the discussion in Hanne Blank, Virgin: The Untouched History, New York, Bloomsbury, 2007, 88–90and 112–113, with further references to classical and medieval literature. For the rabbinic construction of the law of the slandered bride, see especially the sophisticated analysis of Moshe Halbertal, Interpretive Revolutions in the Making, Hebrew, Jerusalem, Magnes, 1997, 84–92, and also Joseph Fleishman, The husband's sin and punishment in Deuteronomy 22:18–19 in early Jewish law, Jewish Law Association Studies 18, 2008, 70–87. It should be noted that one Tanna (R. Eliezer b. Jacob) argued that the law was “as written”, but the dominant rabbinic view reinterpreted essentially every detail, bringing it in line with regular judicial proceedings.

8 Certainly it does not seem fair to say that the law “mandate[s] that a woman could be killed for a lack of virginity (Deut. 22.13–21)” (Cheryl B. Anderson, Woman, Ideology, and Violence: Critical Theory and the Construction of Gender in the Book of the Covenant and the Covenant Code, JSOT Sup 394, London, T&T Clark, 2004, 49), or that the bride's concealment of the sexual experience is itself the proof necessary to show that the sex was after betrothal, and thus a capital crime (so Richard M. Davidson, Flame of [Yhwh]: Sexuality in the Old Testament, Peabody, MA, Hendrickson, 2007, 358). Besides questions of reasonable doubt and the like, all the cross-cultural parallels show that in a society which prized virginity, women could be expected to hide any experiences which deprived them of theirs. In any event, virginity in and of itself was not the issue; for an extensive discussion of texts relating to virginity from the Bible and the Ancient Near East, see Locher, Die Ehre einer Frau in Israel, 117–237.

9 The details of the groom's accusations will be set aside here. Tigay argues that the case is one in which rather than quietly approaching the bride's family with his complaint, the groom went public with the accusation (Jeffrey H. Tigay, Deuteronomy, JPS Torah Commentary, Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society, 1996, 204). Also important is the meaning of the phrase weśām lah ʿălīlōt deḇārīm. The NJPS translates, “he makes up charges against her”, according to which the reader knows from the outset that the accusations are false. Tigay corrects, this, however, offering instead the rendering „accuses her of misconduct“ (Tigay, Deuteronomy, 204 and 384 n. 45), which allows that the accusations may or may not be true. This possibility is supported by the “hierarchical ordering of conditionals”: the main law begins with kī, and the secondary case (in v. 20) begins ʾim. For this to be coherent, it would appear that the phrase weśām lah ʿălīlōt deḇārīm has to govern both the case in which the bride is convicted and the case in which she is acquitted — which means that it cannot, in itself, tell us whether the charges are slanderous or accurate. For further discussion of ʿălīlōt, see S. R. Driver, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Deuteronomy, ICC 5, New York, Scribner, 1895, 254–255. The term “hierarchical ordering of conditionals”, and the logic of this analysis, is drawn from Bernard M. Levinson and Molly M. Zahn, Revelation Regained: The Hermeneutics of כי and אם in the Temple Scroll, DSD 9 2002 (295–346), 314–327.

10 The significance of this phrase in this context was pointed out to me by Jeffrey Tigay.

11 From context it appears that this must be the translation of beṯūlīm in our passage. For discussion of the “signs” which the husband claims to not find, and which the parents are expected to produce, see Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Deuteronomy, in Women's Bible Commentary, ed. Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe, Louisville, KY, Westminster John Knox Press, 1998, 62.

12 Edenburg, Ideology and Social Context (above, n. 2), 51 with n. 25 observes that the burden of proof does not usually fall on the defendant. She cites a suggestion by Bruce Wells that the law “might reflect a legal principle according to which the litigants with the best access to evidence are required to produce it in order to prove their case”, but Edenburg rejects this idea.

13 Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Virginity in the Bible, in Gender and Law in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East, ed. Victor H. Matthews, Bernard M. Levinson, and Tikva Frymer-Kensky, JSOT Sup 262, Sheffield, Sheffield Academic Press, 1998, 95. There are a number of fascinating literary twists on the motif of the bloody sheets, which are worthy of a study of their own, for example, Desdemona's bloody sheets in Othello, which are bloodied by her death rather than her sexual experience, and the blood from the wounded Lancelot staining Guinevere's sheets and leaving their own sexual relationship ambiguous (on which see Gary Ferguson, Symbolic Sexual Inversion and the Construction of Courtly Manhood in Two French Romances, The Arthurian Yearbook 3, 1993, 203–214).

14 See, for example, the citations in Driver, Deuteronomy, 255.

15 S. D. Luzzatto, Commentary on the Five Books of the Torah, Tel Aviv, Dvir, 1965, 542. I am indebted to Jeffrey Tigay for drawing my attention to Shadal's comments.

16 Frymer-Kensky, Virginity and the Bible (above, n. 12), 95; Frymer-Kensky, Law and Philosophy: The Case of Sex in the Bible, Semeia 45, 1989, 93; Frymer-Kensky, Deuteronomy (above, n. 10), 61–63; Frymer-Kensky, Reading the Women of the Bible, New York, Schocken, 2002, 172.

17 My thanks to Jeffrey Tigay for confirming that the elders are not “judges” anywhere in Deuteronomy. Contrast Pamela Barmash, Homicide in the Biblical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 89–90 with n. 69 (“the elders do exercise judicial functions in general”), and Frymer-Kensky, Deuteronomy (above, n. 10), 63, who speaks on the elders having the “power to decide”.

18 Cf. Berlin, Sex and the Single Girl (above, n. 2), 109.

19 See Kelly, Performing Virginity (above, n. 6), 128–130; Theodora A. Jankowski, Hymeneal Blood, Interchangeable Women, and the Early Modern Marriage Economy in Measure for Measure and All's Well that Ends Well, in A Companion to Shakespeare, Volume IV: The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean D. Howard, Malden, MA, Blackwell, 2003, 89–105.

20 yKet 1:1 (25a). See again Tigay, Examination of the Accused Bride (above, n. 6), 130 and n. 3, with references also to Abarbanel's recognition of the possibility of fraudulent blood.

21 The translation in front of me is Powys Mathers, The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, London, Routledge, 1986, 2.48–49.

22 See the ethnographic data cited in Meir Malul, Susapinnu: The Mesopotamian Paranymph and His Role, JESHO 32, 1989 (231–278), 264–265.

23 Susan Schaeffer Davis and Douglas Davis, Dilemma of Adolescence: Courtship, Sex, and Marriage in a Moroccan Town, in Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle East, 1st ed., Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana University Press, 1993, 87–88, and Kelly, Performing Virginity (above, n. 6), 129. In the second edition of Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle East, the article by Davis and Davis is gone, but there is another study with much relevant information: Angel Foster, Young Women's Sexuality in Tunisia: The Health Consequences of Misinformation among University Students, pp. 98–110; see esp. 102–106 on virginity and its value.

24 Lipka, Sexual Transgression (above, n. 2), 101; Berlin, Sex and the Single Girl (above, n. 2), 109.

25 Andreas Kunz-Lübcke emphasized (p.c.) that the case is presumably not occurring the day after the wedding, based on 21:13 (“if a man marries a woman … and then despises her”).

26 Fleishman, The Delinquent Daughter (above, n. 2), 195, contra Malul, What is the Nature (above, n. 2), 450. Contra also Blank, Virgin (above, 6), 30–31, who claims it is a crime against God.

27 Timothy Willis, The Elders of the City: A Study of the Elder-Laws in Deuteronomy (SBL Monograph Series 55; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2001), 190.

28 This point is again made by Shadal (above, n. 14), 542.

29 Willis, The Elders of the City, 187.

30 Berlin, Sex and the Single Girl (above, n. 2), 111–112 with n. 42; Fleishman, The Delinquent Daughter (above, n. 2), 201.

31 Frymer-Kensky, Virginity and the Bible (above, 12), 95. The claim that “the authority to sentence them to death resides with the council of elders” is not quite true: the elders, as mentioned above, provide only the forum for the declarations of the various parties to the case.

32 This is not, of course, what bothered the groom himself when he began to spread word of his bride's status at marriage, as Tigay pointed out. The groom's complaint was either that he married a non-virgin or that he was the victim of fraud, but only indirectly is he concerned with his in-laws' control over their daughter.

33 Berlin, Sex and the Single Girl (above, n. 2), 111. Compare again Frymer-Kensky, Virginity in the Bible (above, n. 12), 95, and see Blank, Virgin (above, n. 6), 10–11, on virginity as a female attribute cross-culturally (despite n. 35 below).

34 The flogging of the ‘incorrigible son’ is, in turn, derived through a gezera shava between the incorrigible son and the casuistic law of two man fighting at the beginning of Deut 25. I am indebted to Moshe Bernstein for reminding me of this passage from Bavli Ketubbot and pointing out its implications for our discussion.

35 This also the view of Carolyn Pressler, The View of Women Found in the Deuteronomic Family Laws, BZAW 216, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 1993, 30. I do not accept the formulation of the crime offered by Wells, as being “sex plus deception” (Sex, Lies, and Virginal Rape [above, n. 2], 49–50 and passim). Sex has nothing to do with the crime, any more than eating meat has to do with the crime of the incorrigible son. Meat and sex are merely the symptoms or indicators of the true crime. For a different rejection of Wells' position in this regard, see Fleishman, The Delinquent Daughter (above, n. 2), 194. For a different view regarding the crime, cf. Malul, What is the Nature (above, n. 2), 455–456.

36 It should not be thought that this is true for other cultures in which virginity was held dear. In early medieval French and British culture, male virginity was treasured as much as that of females, as can be seen in Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur: Sir Galahad's “maidenhood” (sic!) is what enables him to achieve the Holy Grail, and to balance the statement of Dame Elaine (cited above, at n. 1), one could cite the words of Sir Percival: “How nigh I was lost, and to have lost that I should never have gotten again, that was my virginity, for that may never be recovered after it is once lost” (Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur [above, n. 1], 344). In this culture virginity is symbolic of the repudiation of earthly pleasures for the sake of spiritual purity (see also Cooper's note on p. 554 regarding sexuality in the Garden of Eden), but this is far from the biblical conception.

37 Frymer-Kensky, Virginity in the Bible (above, n. 12), 84–85; also Reading the Women of the Bible (above, n. 15), 9. Indeed, Blank, Virgin (above, n. 6), 26–27, has argued (following others — see references on p. 260) that virginity became a culturally significant category in human history as a way of ensuring paternity claims.

38 Joseph Ginat, Blood Revenge: Family Honor, Mediation and Outcasting, 2nd ed., Brighton and Portland, Sussex, 1997, 133.

39 It is worth comparing this to the biblical laws of the blood avenger, but this would take us too far afield.

40 Berlin, Sex and the Single Girl (above, n. 2), 102.

41 It should again be emphasized that there is no real judicial process, and the elders have no actual judicial power. See above, at n. 16.

42 Edenburg, Ideology and the Social Context (above, n. 2), 47. Edenburg further suggests that the text is arguing that “maintaining the proper relations between the sexes — particularly with regard to the uncompromising fidelity incumbent upon women to maintain toward their patron… — is as critical to preserving the proper social order as maintaining exclusive fidelity to YHWH”.

43 The other occurrence of “you shall purge the evil from your midst” are: Deut 13:6, regarding the false prophet; 17:7, regarding an idolater; 17:12, regarding one who flouts the ruling of the court in Jerusalem; 19:19, regarding the plotting witness; 21:21, regarding the ‘incorrigible son’; 22:22–23, regarding adulterers; 24:7, regarding a kidnapper who sells his victim. No single factor needs to explain all of these, but a number of them (one who flouts the court's ruling, plotting witness, the incorrigible son, adulterers) may plausibly be seen as subverting societal norms and structures, and it is possible to interpret the others in this light, as well.

44 Victor H. Matthews, Honor and shame in gender-related legal situations in the Hebrew Bible, in Gender and Law (above, n. 12), 112; see also Lipka, Sexual Transgressions (above, n. 2), 100.

45 Compare Fleishman, The Delinquent Daughter (above, n. 2), 204–205.

46 See, for example, the story in Ginat, Blood Revenge (above, n. 37), 149–150. See also Gideon M. Kressel, Sororicide/Filiacide: Homicide for Family Honor, Current Anthropology 22, 1981, 141–152, and especially the critique by Ginat on p. 153.

47 Jane Schneider, Of Vigilance and Virgins: Honor, Shame and Access to Resources in Mediterranean Societies, Ethnology 10, 1971, 21. In Schneider's cases, the family also has to kill “their daughter's lover”. Not so in the biblical context, although whether this is a technicality (because his identity is not known) or a substantive point (since she and no one else is responsible for her own sexuality) is not clear. Whether “Mediterranean societies” is a category with any explanatory significance has been challenged effectively by Frank Henderson Stewart, Honor, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1994, 75–78.

48 The significance of this point was first pointed out to me by Shira Hecht, and then reiterated by Jeffrey Tigay.

49 The Rabbis argue that he is “judged based on his end” (mSan 8:5), i.e., he is executed for what we expect he will do in the future. This is, I believe, another way of saying that it is not the particular actions done — eating meat and drinking wine — which have earned him the death penalty, but the danger to society which his attitude represents. (The Mishnah itself continues, “let him die innocent, and not die guilty”, which may indicate another way of thinking about his execution.)

50 See the many examples collected from the Bedouin world in Ginat, Blood Revenge (above, n. 37) and Stewart, Honor (above, n. 46).

51 Among the Bedouin, there are similarly two ways of restoring honor which has been impugned: admitting the wrong and righting it, or disputing the accusations. See Stewart, Honor (above, n. 46), 79–85.

52 Anthony Phillips, Another Look at Adultery, JSOT 20, 1981 (3–25), 9, rejects ysr as a reference to corporal punishment, and takes it as “to admonish, discipline”; Mayes, Deuteronomy, 310, argues that with the exception of 21:18, ysr is never otherwise used to refer to corporal punishment, so better “to punish”, and the following verse prescribes a fine as punishment. Mayes is followed by Pressler, View (above, n. 34), 28 n. 17. For a different perspective that for our purposes may be lumped with the above, see Hayim Tawil, Hebrew יסר, Akkadian esēru: A Term of Forced Labor (Lexicographical Note IX), in Teshûrôt LaAvishur: Studies in the Bible and the Ancient Near East, in Hebrew and Semitic Languages: Festschrift Presented to Prof. Yitzhak Avishur on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. Michael Heltzer and Meir Malul, Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Archaeological Center Publications, 2004, 185–190.

53 The basic meaning of the root ysr is “to discipline”, and the word appears a few times with this meaning even within Deuteronomy, but in our verse and in a few others, it seems plausible that the sense has developed to “physical discipline → flogging”. Cf. Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1973, 303 and n. 3 there.

54 The LXX has καὶ παιδεύσουσιν αὐτὸν “and they shall educate/chastise him”, which is unhelpful because παιδεύω is the word generally used to translate forms of יסר in all stems (See Edwin Hatch and Henry Redpath, A Concordance to the Septuagint, 2nd ed., Grand Rapids, Baker Books, 1998, 1047). The Temple Scroll (65:14), too, merely cites the text from Deuteronomy verbatim. See Yigael Yadin, The Temple Scroll, Jerusalem, The Israel Exploration Society, 1983, 2.295. Yadin actually translates, “they shall whip him”, but this is based on his understanding of the biblical text, not on anything in the Temple Scroll.

55 Translation according to Louis Feldman, Judean Antiquities 1–4, Flavius Josephus, Translation and Commentary, ed. Steven Mason, volume 3; Leiden: Brill, 2000, 424. Feldman there notes that “Josephus understands the word ויסרו … to mean ‘whip’’.

56 Alejandro Díez Macho, Neophyti I, Madrid, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1978, 5.187.

57 See also bKetb 46b; yKet 3:1; bSan 71b; and bMak 4b, with Rashi s.v. lwqh wmšlm.

58 The text and translation given here rely primarily on that prepared by Moshe J. Bernstein and available on the Dead Sea Scrolls Electronic Library, CD-ROM, Leiden, Brill, 2006. The original publication was by Allegro, but important reconstructions and improvements were suggested by John Strugnell, Notes en marge du volume V des ‘Discoveries in the Judaean Desert of Jordan’, RQ 7, 1970, 175–179; Yigael Yadin, A Note on 4Q159 (Ordinances), IEJ 18, 1968, 250–252; and especially Tigay, Examination of the Accused Bride in 4Q159 (above, n. 6), 129–134. Compare also Lawrence H. Schiffman, Ordinances (4Q159 = 4QOrda), in The Dead Sea Scrolls: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek Texts with English Translations, ed. James H. Charlesworth, Tübingen and Louisville, J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) and Westminster John Knox Press, 1994, 154–157. As Tigay notes, according to Hallo, there is an Akkadian text which also deals with a husband who slanders his wife's virginity; the text states that the verdict depends on the testimony (presumably based on physical inspection) of the female elders (or, Tigay adds, female witnesses). Also in Ginat's “Case History XLVII” (Blood Revenge [above, n. 37], 136), virginity is tested by “an old [Bedouin] woman”, supervised by a policewoman, who tried to push a hard-boiled egg into a girl's vagina (in this case, post-mortem). See William W. Hallo, The Slandered Bride, Studies Presented to A. Leo Oppenheim, June 7, 1964, Chicago, The Oriental Institute, 1964, 95–105. Hallo comments, “Here as elsewhere, then, Biblical case law preserves a more archaic stage of legal development than the corresponding provisions of Babylonian codes and contracts” (102). Now that we have the Qumran text, however, the picture may become significantly more complicated. The law that existed in Old Babylonian times is absent throughout the biblical text, but reappears in post-biblical Jewish law. Other such cases have been noted; see especially Samuel Greengus, Filling Gaps: Laws Found in Babylonia and the Mishna but Absent in the Hebrew Bible, MAARAV 7, 1993, 149–171. Hallo's interpretation has not been accepted, however, by Raymond Westbrook, Old Babylonian Marriage Law, AfO Beiheft 23, Horn, Austria, Verlag Ferdinand Berger & Söhne Gesellschaft, 1988, 44 n. 109 (reference in Tigay, Examination [above, n. 6] 134 n. 15 [end]). Westbrook does not provide any objections to Hallo's reading, however, and his translation of the text (on p. 116) allows it. Wells, Sex, Lies, and Virginal Rape, 65 n. 79 states that “it has been shown that Hallo's interpretation of the document as parallel to Deut 22:13–21 cannot be maintained”; see also Eckart Otto, Review of Hallo, Origins, ZAR 3, 1997, 256.

59 Also conspicuously absent, as Moshe Bernstein pointed out to me, is any mention of the bride's parents, who play a central role in the biblical law. This may indicate something about how the law was read in Qumran, but it also may indicate something of the genre of 4Q159, a legal text of an opaque genre. For discussion of these issues, see Moshe J. Bernstein, The Re-Presentation of “Biblical” Legal Material at Qumran: Three Cases from 4Q159 (4QOrdinancesa), in Shoshanat Yaakov: Ancient Jewish and Iranian Studies in Honor of Professor Yaakov Elman, ed. Shai Secunda and Steven Fine, Leiden, Brill, forthcoming 2011; I thank Dr. Bernstein for sharing his paper with me prior to publication.

60 Text and translation from Martha T. Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, Society of Biblical Literature Writings from the Ancient World 6, 2nd ed., Atlanta, Scholars Press, 1997, 159. Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School (above, n. 52), 293 with n. 2, and Wells, Sex, Lies, and Virginal Rape (above, n. 2), 43 n. 7.

61 One other interesting parallel should be noted in LH §127 (Roth, Law Collections [above, n. 59], 105): šumma awīlum eli uqbabtim u aššat awīlim ubānam ušatrisma la uktīn awīlam šuāti maḥar dayānī inaṭṭûšu u muttassu ugallabu “If a man causes a finger to be pointed in accusation against an ugbabtu or against a man's wife but cannot bring proof, they shall flog the man before the judges and they shall shave off half his hair.” Note that G.R. Driver and John C. Miles, The Babylonian Laws, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1952, 1.278) argue that the word ought not be read inaṭṭûšu “they shall flog him”, but inaddûšu “they shall cast him down”, and they explain, “the man is brought to his knees and thrown to the ground before being shaved”; for a rebuttal, see Roth, Law Collections (above, n. 59), 141 n. 24. These two views are strikingly similar to the two views discussed in this paper regarding Deut 22:18–19: according to Roth's rendering, there are two punishments prescribed in LH §127 for slander (flogging and shaving), and according to Driver and Miles, the clause taken previously as requiring flogging is taken as merely a description of how to impose the other punishment. Incidentally, in Driver and Mill's earlier work, The Assyrian Laws, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1975, 70, they assumed that LH §127 required flogging.

62 LU §14: “If a man accuses the wife of a young man of promiscuity but the River Ordeal clears her, the man who accused her shall weigh and deliver 20 shekels” (Roth, Law Collections (above, n. 59), 18). LL §33: “If a man claims that another man's virgin daughter has had sexual relations but it is proven that she has not had sexual relations, he shall weigh and deliver 10 shekels of silver” (Roth, Law Collections (above, n. 59), 33).

63 Tigay, Deuteronomy (above, n. 8), 205, relying especially on Maimonides, Guide, 3.49.

64 Locher, Die Ehre einer Frau in Israel, 315–380, explains at length why talion does not apply here; see also Pressler, The View of Women (above, n. 34), 24–25, with references. Wells, on the other hand (Sex, Lies, and Virginal Rape [above, n. 2]) argues that in fact the principle of talion is in effect here; some of his specific proposals have been rightly (in my view) rejected by Fleishman, The Deliquent Daughter (above, n. 2), 194, Edenburg, Ideology and Social Context (above, n. 2), 49–50 with n. 20, and Berlin, Sex and the Single Girl (above, n. 2), 100, but the basic thesis seems reasonable.

65 For doubts, see Tigay, Deuteronomy (above, n. 8), 208.

66 Thus Maimonides, ibid., and Tigay, Deuteronomy (above, n. 8), 384–385 n. 51.

67 Wells, Sex, Lies, and Virginal Rape (above, n. 2), 61.

68 The same point was made by Tigay (Deuteronomy [above, n. 8], 205): “He is flogged, and thereby degraded (see 25:3), because he defamed her family. He is fined because his accusation would have forced her father to return the bride price. He loses the right to divorce, which was probably his aim in slandering her.”

69 This can be contrasted further with the approach of Eckart Otto, False Weights in the Scales of Biblical Justice? Different Views of Women from Patriarchal Hierarchy to Religious Equality in the Book of Deuteronomy, in Gender and Law (above, n. 12), 137, who argues that the tension between the punishment for the groom if he is lying and the punishment for the bride if he is not are so great that it indicates that 22:13–19 and 22:20–21 were originally independent compositions, redacted with inconsistencies.

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