82 A History of Judaism
the frequent metaphorical uses of the notion, with references to circum-
cision of the heart, lips and ears to make them acceptable to God. Even
the fruit of a newly planted tree could be described as forbidden because
it is ‘uncircumcised’.^16
For both men and women sex was intended for procreation, and the
prohibition of some other sexual practices was unequivocal: ‘You shall
not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination. You shall not
have sexual relations with any animal and defile yourself with it, nor shall
any woman give herself to an animal to have sexual relations with it: it is
perversion.’ More positively, the command to both men and women in
the first chapter of Genesis to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ can be taken to
assume that procreation is a duty as well as a blessing. Many biblical
stories about barren women longing for a child take for granted the desir-
ability of numerous offspring. There is no clear biblical teaching about
the permissibility of contraception: later Jewish interpreters considered
the death of Onan, who ‘spilled his semen onto the ground whenever he
went in to his brother’s wife’, to constitute divine punishment for inten-
tionally destroying male seed, but in the context of the original biblical
passage it appears that Onan’s sin was neither masturbation nor the
adoption of a method of contraception but, more specifically, his reluc-
tance to make Tamar pregnant because any offspring would be accounted
not his child but the child of his dead brother.^17
Such constraints contrived to make the home a locus of sanctity both
in sexual relations and in the preparation and consumption of meals (in
both cases providing women with a larger religious role in practice than
might appear from the male focus of the biblical texts). The biblical text
of the Shema enjoined the writing of ‘these words that I am command-
ing you today’ on ‘the doorposts of your house and on your gates’, an
injunction which may have been taken literally by the late Second
Temple period, if some of the biblical manuscripts from Qumran were
written for that purpose. But the greatest sign of sanctity in the home
was the cessation of work on the Sabbath. The Israelites were required
to observe a weekly rest day even before the revelation at Sinai had been
given because it was ‘a holy Sabbath to the Lord’. The significance of the
Sabbath was said to have been emphasized to Moses while he was still
on the mountain:
The Lord said to Moses: You yourself are to speak to the Israelites: ‘You
shall keep my sabbaths, for this is a sign between me and you throughout
your generations, given in order that you may know that I, the Lord,