Notes[ 9 ]6. M. Yev. 4 :1.
63. M. Yev. 11 : 6 – .
64. M. Qid. 4 : 1 – 3.
65. T. Yev. 1: 8. This presumption is sometimes understood as a consequence
of a husband acquiring his wife and her biological functions. It is expressed in
The Laws of Manu by comparing a w ife to a field; just as t he ow ner of a field ow ns
whatever grows in the field, so too a husband may legally claim any child born
to his wife. Similar statements can be found in ancient Iranian legal documents,
which allow a man to arrange a temporary levirate union for his wife during his
lifetime if he has been unable to father a child. Women and fields are compared
in rabbinic literature (Labovitz, My Wife I Called “My House”), but the presump-
tion that a man may claim any child born to his wife does not remove the pos-
sibility that there are circumstances in rabbinic law in which a woman may be
labeled an adulteress and her children mamzerim.
66. Roma n leg islat ion a nd w r it i ng f rom t he ea rly i mper ia l per iod a lso i nd icate
a fair degree of anxiety surrounding marriage and the production of children,
including legislation by Augustus promoting marriage and procreation, but that
anxiety is related to procreation per se rather than the qualities of the children
being produced. See Suza nne Di xon, “The Sentimenta l Idea l of t he Roma n Fa m-
ily,” in Rawson, ed., Marriage, Divorce, and Children in Ancient Rome, 1, and
Dixon, The Roman Family, 119 – 13.
6. Boyarin, Carnal Israel, 3.
68. B. BB 58 a.
69. Rabbi Yohanan’s “assistance” in creating beautiful children for other men
is particularly poignant in light of a tradition that all of his own children prede-
ceased him (B. Ber. 5 b).
. Under Roman law, all children born within a marriage were presumed to
be the children of their mother’s husband (Rawson, ed., Marriage, Divorce, and
Children in Ancient Rome, ). However, the father had the right, at the time of a
child’s birth, to recognize or repudiate the child; furthermore, even if a man ac-
cepted that his wife’s child was in fact his, he had the right to raise the child or to
expose it (Mireille Corbier, “Divorce and Adoption as Roman Familial Strategies”
in Rawson, ed., Marriage, Divorce, and Children in Ancient Rome, 64 – 65 ). Post-
humous children were recognized as their father’s legal offspring and could not
be rejected by their mother or another relative; the power vested in the Roman
pater did not devolve on any other relative upon his death.
- Conclusion (pages 195 – 5)
- I want to reiterate that we should not assume that rabbinic texts describe
the family as it was but as it ideally would be. See Alexei Sivertsev, Households,
Sects and the Origins of Rabbinic Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 5), 1 .
. Jacob Neusner, Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press: 1981 ), 35. - M. Ket. 4 : 5.
- M. Pes. 8 : 1.
- M. Eruv. : 4 ; 6 :.
- Meyers, “The Family in Early Israel,” 3 – 3.
. M. BM 1 : 5 ; T. Eruv. 6 :; T. Pes. : 4. - Satlow, Jewish Marriage in Antiquity, 1 – 1.
- While the Mishnah states that sexual intercourse formalizes or completes
a levirate union, even if the intercourse is nonconsensual, the expectation that
- I want to reiterate that we should not assume that rabbinic texts describe