Tuesday, May 16, 2006

JEWISH STUDIES, AN INTERNET JOURNAL has posted another article in volume 4 (2006) which can be downloaded in Word or PDF formats from the website:
Ishay Rosen-Zvi, "'Tractate Kinui’: A Forgotten Tannaitic Debate About Marriage, Freedom of Movement and Sexual Supervision"
The article is in Hebrew, but there is an English abstract:
Mishnah Sotah opens with a discussion of the evidence required to force a married woman to undergo the biblical ordeal for a suspected adulteress (sotah). The first two Mishnayot in this tractate discuss the mandatory warning procedure (kinui) whose violation (setirah) renders a woman a suspected adulteress, requiring her to undergo the sotah ritual. Through a close reading of these two Mishnayot, related Tannaitic material, and the discussion of the relevant passages in the two Talmudim, this paper offers a reconstruction of a large scale rabbinic debate about the limits of freedom of movement and socializing for married women. This debate stems from a fundamental dilemma: On the one hand, the rabbis, unlike some of their Hellenistic Jewish contemporaries, were unwilling to completely lock up married women in their homes. On the other hand, the rabbis were extremely troubled by the dangers of free socializing. This paper analyzes the different and sometimes contradictory solutions offered by rabbinic sources to this dilemma.

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