Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (5 page)

Any Hebrew man who formally accused his bride of being impure at the time of the wedding set off a high-stakes legal process. The bride’s father would have been required to prove his daughter’s virtue, which he normally did by giving the soiled wedding bedclothes to the town elders to inspect. If the bloodstains on the fabric were deemed insufficient, the bride was stoned to death in front of her father’s house. Just as Shechem did wrong by taking what was not his, so did the sexually experienced bride commit a grave crime by deciding when, and with whom, she would have sex. (It is easy to imagine savvy fathers splattering animal blood on the bedclothes to make sure their daughters were exonerated.) If, on the other hand, the bedclothes passed inspection, then the accusing groom would be beaten by the elders, forced to pay the bride’s father one hundred silver shekels, and barred from ever seeking a divorce. Again, the bride’s well-being was of least concern. She would be condemned to living out her days with a husband who most likely hated her—a small price to pay for her family’s honor.

Given the differences in marriage value between virgins and non-virgins, it was illegal everywhere even to spread rumors that a bride was something less than intact on her wedding day. The laws of Lipit-Ishtar, another Sumerian ruler (circa 1900 BC) who predated Hammurabi, required a man making such an accusation to pay a fine if proven wrong. The question is how such proof was made. The Hebrews and others used bloody bedclothes, but that was not a universal test. Neighboring cultures were not nearly as convinced that blood always resulted from a female’s first intercourse. The only way to prove conclusively that a girl had had sex was either to catch her in the act or to observe her belly swollen with child.

Why was it so critical for men to marry untouched women? It makes sense that adultery should have been forbidden, as husbands wanted to be assured that their children were actually their own, but there is no corresponding concern with marrying sexually experienced brides. If a wife gave birth less than eight or nine months after the wedding, it would have been simple enough to allow the husband to disown the child. But ancient law did not go in that direction; rather, it barricaded women and girls from sexual opportunities and punished them if they transgressed. Explanations for the virginity obsession seem to be limited to men’s desire for a “tight fit,” as well as the assurance that the human property they purchased was truly brand new. Most likely, though, the fixation on virginity—which never existed where men were concerned and has persisted to this day in many cultures—was simply one more avenue for men to control and dominate females. Having a virgin for a bride was power incarnate for a husband, and keeping her untouched before marriage was a test of control for her fathers and brothers.
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THE JOYS OF MARRIAGE

The sexual restrictions ancient societies placed on girls and women did not loosen with their marriages. The restraint fathers expected of their daughters was merely training for their duty of fidelity as wives. Everywhere, married women were kept on short leashes and disciplined. The Assyrian law mentioned above that allowed husbands to beat, whip, and mutilate their wives for misbehaving extended to anything short of killing them. Presumably, qualifying offenses included going about town unveiled. If only sexually available women, such as prostitutes and slaves, uncovered their heads in public, a respectable wife who did so would therefore be signaling her availability and, even worse, that her husband had lost control over her. For that, wives would suffer violence.

Married Assyrian women who kept their veils on but associated with other men were also running big risks, as were the men. Any man who “traveled” with an unrelated woman had to pay money to her husband and prove—sometimes by jumping into a swiftly flowing river and surviving—that he had not taken the woman as a sexual partner. Palace females were completely off-limits. It was a capital offense for a woman of the royal court and a man to stand together with no one else present. If another palace woman were to witness such an encounter without reporting it at once, she would be thrown into an oven.

The Code of Hammurabi made wives’ lives no less hazardous. Married women who were “not circumspect” or who shamed their husbands by disparaging them or leaving their houses without permission risked death by drowning. This penalty accomplished two purposes: It got rid of a troublesome wife and it washed away the husband’s dishonor. If a wife was so impudent as to steal her husband’s property or denigrate him in public, then he had the choice of either casting her out of his house or—in a delicious gesture of revenge—keeping her around as a slave while he remarried.

The overriding goal of these laws was to prevent even the
appearance
that a wife was committing adultery. Virtually nothing consumed ancient lawmakers more than female infidelity, and few crimes were so severely punished. With the exception of the Hebrews, men who had sex outside of marriage were never at risk of punishment, but even Jewish law skewed hard against women. Married Jewish men were technically discouraged from having sex with other women, but were never punished to the same degree as their wives, and prostitution flourished in ancient Hebrew society. The men were also permitted to take multiple wives and concubines.

As a rule, women in the ancient Near East who had extramarital affairs and were caught suffered, died, or suffered and then died. That this should be the case was never questioned. The main legal issues concerned just when the punishments would be inflicted, and by whom. Could a husband go on a killing spree when he learned his wife had been unfaithful, or was the state to perform the executions? Was he allowed to forgive his wife or (less likely) her paramour? Was his decision final? As far back as the Sumerian kingdom of Eshnunna, in about 1770 BC, no forgiveness was permitted. “The day [a wife] is seized in the lap of another man, she shall die, she will not live.” Later Mesopotamian cultures allowed husbands to pardon their wayward wives and not kill them, so long as they also gave a pass to the wives’ lovers. In other cases, kings had the power to trump the husband’s decision, either by pardoning the sinning couple despite the husband’s desire to kill them or vice versa.

Assuming that punishments for adultery went forward, as they must have in most cases, they were nasty indeed—at least for the women. We have already seen how the unfortunate Nin-Dada was condemned and most likely impaled on the mere suspicion that she had committed adultery with her husband’s killers. In another case from the same period, a man named Irra-malik came home to find his wife, Ishtar-ummi, making love with another man. Rather than commit violence on the spot, Irra-malik kept his head: He tied Ishtar-ummi and her lover to the bed with rope and dragged them to the assembly for trial.

Although the case record is short on detail, it appears that the assembly took the evidence in front of them—the two lovers tied and wriggling on the bed—as proof that adultery had taken place. This would have been sufficient to seal Ishtar-ummi’s fate. Irra-malik, however, decided to pile more charges upon her. He accused her of stealing from his grain storehouse (perhaps to give a gift to her lover) and opening his jar of sesame seed oil, covering it again with a cloth to hide her theft. While these additional charges seem piddling next to adultery, they were framed as part and parcel of female wrongdoing: Bad wives not only took lovers, they also wasted their husbands’ resources.

Ishtar-ummi’s life was headed for a cruel end, but death appeared to be too much for her to hope for. The assembly first ruled that her pubic hair be shaven—whether this was merely to humiliate her or to prepare her for a lifetime of slavery, we do not know. It is probable that she was to be downgraded from wife to slave in Irra-malik’s house, to be abused daily by him and his new wives. Before that happened, however, the assembly also ruled that she was to have her nose bored through with an arrow before being led around the city in disgrace, like a mule. The fate of her lover is not recorded, although it is likely that if she was not killed, neither was he.
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Wives never had any right to complain when their husbands took lovers, except when they were refused sex altogether or belittled in public. In that case, at least in Babylon, they could attempt to divorce their husbands—but that was a risky step, for the trials inevitably covered the wives’ sexual behavior as well, and if they were found to have been promiscuous themselves they were thrown into a river to die. Given the risks involved, it was a far safer, if more bitter, decision for wives simply to put up with their husband’s misbehavior.

Rivers were also involved when wives were accused of adultery without solid proof. Under what has become known as the “river ordeal,” a woman could clear herself of suspicion by having herself thrown into the water. If she survived, she was declared innocent; if she sank, she was guilty. In either instance, the matter was decided. In one case that unfolded in the Sumerian kingdom of Mari, an unnamed woman made a detailed public statement just before the start of her river ordeal. She declared that she had indeed had sex with a father and his son before marrying the father. After her wedding, while her husband was away, the son came back to her to demand sex once again. “He kissed me on my lips,” she reported. “He touched my vagina.” She insisted, however, that they never went past the heavy petting stage: “His penis did not enter my vagina.” Moreover, she scolded her aggressive stepson for coming after her, telling him that she would never do her husband “unforgivable harm” by letting him possess her again. Her declaration reads as if she doubted that she would survive the river, but the gods apparently believed her story. She floated.

A married Assyrian woman who invited a man to have sex with her could be punished by her husband in any way he chose. The lover usually walked away, but not always: If a man knew the woman in his bed was married, both were put to death. The problem for the courts was figuring out who knew what and when they knew it, especially when everyone’s stories were plausible. To decide the undecidable, the Assyrians also used the river ordeal. A man who insisted he did not know his companion was married, or who claimed that there had been no sex, could prove his case by being thrown into a river. If he lived, he was exonerated, though he still had to pay the husband for the trouble. If the accused man sank, then the matter was over for him anyway. The errant wife’s fate at that point was her husband’s decision.

One knotty Assyrian sex case began when a wife left her husband and went to another man’s house, where she stayed in the company of the host’s wife for a few nights. The runaway wife’s husband tracked her down, at which point he had the right to take her home and mutilate her to his heart’s content. The woman who had taken care of her was presumed to know she’d harbored a disloyal woman, and was subject to having her ears cut off. The male host was at risk of paying a big fine if it could be shown that he’d known his guest was married. If no one believed him, he would have to undergo a river ordeal.

Thousands of years later, the spicy details of this dispute are left to the imagination. Why did the woman leave her husband? What brought her to the new home? Was she seeking sex with the host or refuge with the host’s wife? As critical as each of these questions might seem to us, they were irrelevant to Assyrian justice. By law, husbands
owned
their wives, and were free to treat them as they wished. The sole issue was whether or not there was any way to assuage the fragile pride of the runaway’s husband.

THE FREEDOM OF husbands to do violence to their adulterous wives seems to have diminished slightly by the Neo- and Late Babylonian periods (roughly the seventh to sixth centuries BC). By then, punishments against wives for taking lovers were often spelled out in advance, in marriage contracts. Several of the contracts that have survived contain an interesting clause, loosely translated as “Should [the wife] be discovered with another man, she will die by the iron dagger.” Why this kind of language was put into marriage contracts at all, when the law had long allowed husbands to kill their adulterous wives, is the main question here. Were the contracts simply reminding young brides what awaited them should they stray? Perhaps, but a better interpretation is that the expression “she will die by the iron dagger” meant that the unfaithful wife would no longer be punished by the angry husband, but by
state authorities
, and in a public, example-setting way. As awful as dying “by the iron dagger” was, the clause was probably inserted into these contracts at the insistence of the brides’ families to limit the husbands’ options if their women were caught with other men. Rather than grant license to kill the lovers on the spot, the contracts most likely forced the husbands to bring them before the authorities. There was nothing a father could do to save his daughter’s life once she had been unfaithful, but at least he could negotiate a fair shot at justice for her.

According to the Greek historian Herodotus, it was not easy to find a faithful wife in Egypt. He told of a king named Pheros, who had gone blind after showing disrespect to the Nile. Pheros’s journey into darkness lasted for ten years, after which an oracle told him he would recover his sight when he washed his eyes with the urine of a faithful wife. Pheros went first to his own spouse, but her urine was tainted with adultery and could not heal him. He then tried the urine of “a great many” married women, one after another, until at last he found one who had been faithful—and his sight was restored. He gathered all the adulteresses he had tested (including, presumably, his own wife), sequestered them in a town known as Red Clod, and burned them to death. For good measure, he burned down the town, too. Afterward, he married the woman whose urine had retained the healing powers of fidelity.

Herodotus, of course, was all too often ready to sacrifice accuracy for a good tale, but he makes a fair point: Ancient Egyptian culture was deeply intolerant of women having extramarital sexual relations, and Egyptian law was ready to punish adulterous wives. The punishments were usually carried out by the husbands. In one account, dating to the New Kingdom (sixteenth–eleventh centuries BC), a man who had learned of his wife’s attempted seduction of his younger brother chopped her to bits and fed her to the dogs. Other records tell of a man named Webaoner, whose wife regularly met with a townsman for adulterous trysts. Webaoner hired a magic crocodile to snatch the townsman and drag him to the bottom of the river. On orders from the king, the adulterous wife was then burned alive. (Burning and dismemberment were punishments calculated not only to cause pain but also to do eternal damage, as failure to preserve the intact body of a corpse was believed to ruin a spirit’s chances to pass peacefully from this world into the afterlife.)