Beyond Individual Consent: tracing a “culture of consent” from biblical through rabbinic sources

• In Event: Bible & Biblical Interpretation

Abstract

A matter of contemporary debate and discussion, sexual consent has a long and complex history in classical Jewish texts. This paper will trace a genealogy of female sexual consent, focusing on treatment of “illicit” sex acts in the bible, early biblical interpretations, and talmudic traditions and their reception history. Deuteronomy 22 raises a distinction between illicit sex acts that occur in a “city” versus a “field.” One early biblical interpretation uses these geographical factors to introduce the legal significance of a woman’s consent. Other early interpretations suggest that there are legal outcomes that do not depend at all on the woman’s consent; she is simply treated as sexually “defiled” whether or not she consented. Early rabbinic sources introduce important language to widen the scope of how to define consent, to consider not only an individual woman but also the broader context in which this sex act occurs. The concern becomes what kind of contexts can make it possible to consent and in what contexts consent might be impossible. This early rabbinic interpretation probing the contextual basis for consent is amplified in talmud and later reception historiy of talmud, in particular a passage in a medieval Spanish commentary to bKetubot 51b about a discussion of women taken captive. In this talmudic reception history, rich language emerges to elucidate ways that a broader cultural context affects assumptions about how to interpret a woman’s apparent consent to a sex act. This medieval passage essentially asks: How should the law treat a woman’s silence in what would be described as “rape culture” in our contemporary terms? Through tracing key moments within the genealogy of female sexual consent in classical Jewish sources, it becomes possible to more clearly understand implicit and explicit assumptions about female sexual consent in contemporary discourse.

Author

• Aviva Richman, Hadar Institute