A Case Study of Modern Jewish Education

Moshe Rosman has prodded us to ask “How Jewish is Jewish history?”¹ This is the journal in which to inquire “What is modern about modern Jewish education?” Specifically, I am interested in how a “modern Jewish educator” might deal with the contemporary challenge of teaching premodern texts which grate on modern sensibilities. In an earlier article I explored this issue in the case of the Beautiful Captive, Deuteronomy 21: 10–14, but limited myself to premodern sources.² Now I want to see how several modern Jewish Bible commentators—or at least those writing their commentaries in the modern era—address the Beautiful Captive (hereafter “BC”) case.

(10) When you take the field against your enemies, and the Lord your God delivers them into your power and you take some of them captive, (11) and you see among the captives a beautiful woman and you desire her and would take her to wife, (12) you shall bring her into your house, and she shall trim her hair, pare [literally ‘make’] her nails, (13) and discard her captive’s garb. She shall spend a month’s time in your house lamenting her father and mother; after that you may come to her and possess her, and she shall be your wife. (14) Then, should you no longer want her, you must release her outright. You must not sell her for money: since you had your will [‘innah] of her, you must not enslave her.

(NJPS translation)

In the ancient world, captured civilians were taken home as slaves. In the Rabbinic mind it was a given that non-Jews would sexually exploit civilian prisoners of war. Hence the Rabbinic tale (Gittin 57b) memorializing the “400 boys and girls who were taken captive [to Rome] for shameful purposes,” but committed group suicide en route rather than endure the fate which awaited them at their destination. In contrast, Michael Walzer cites the BC law as the first legislation in human history to regulate the wartime treatment of women based on “a conception of the captive woman as a person who must be respected, despite her capture.”³ To the rest of the ancient world, granting a captive full marital status and then, when the relationship sours, granting her freedom—would have been thought absurd.

This is the only legally sanctioned case of “intermarriage” in the Bible, albeit from the inverse social situation of diaspora Jewish life: an independent Jewish army victorious over a non-Jewish enemy, far removed from the land of Israel (Dt 20: 15). As the Bible appears unruffled both by the marriage and its motivation, my earlier characterization of the text as grating on modern sensibilities is slightly attenuated. Moreover, it is among the few Torah laws to put a humane face on out-group relations at the personal, even intimate, level. Yet, already in ancient times, out-group relations were problematic and have remained so. Thus, the BC well illustrates those cases where “the moral compass of the Bible feels askew to the modern reader . . . texts about the treatment of women and institutions like slavery.”⁴

Two last introductory comments on Rabbinic interpretation of the text, as modern commentators who are traditional often assume that point of view. Rabbinic sources have viewed the captive case (which opens the weekly Torah portion of Ki Taytzay) as the first domino for the two cases of family law which immediately follow: preserving the inheritance rights of the children of the hated of a man’s two wives (Dt 21: 15–17) and the execution of the incorrigible rebellious son (Dt 21: 18–21). When intermarriage (the captive case) became frowned upon, it was seen as giving rise to marital disharmony and then to bad seed (Sifrei 218: 18; Tanchuma Ki Taytzay 1). Second, sometime in the third century, there emerged a Babylonian interpretation which allowed the soldier to have relations with the captive woman one time before the thirty-day procedure. Rabbi Yochanan, a leading scholar in Eretz Israel at that time, opposed the innovation (Jerusalem Talmud Makkot 2: 6), but by the time of the Babylonian Talmud several...