The Deuteronomic "Pretty Woman" Law: Prefiguring Feminism and Freud in Nahmanides

Deuteronomy 21:10–14, identified in the scholarly world as the "captive woman" law and in the rabbinic tradition as the "pretty woman" law, regulates the treatment of foreign women captured in battle by Israelite fighters. Medieval Jewish biblical exegetes anticipated contemporary notions of rape as a violent assertion of power and domination rather than a manifestation of sexuality or eroticism, as well as Sigmund Freud's interpretation of sexual anxiety dreams. Power is the key to the perception of the theological dangers of rape on the battlefield; it is the climax of an incontrollable urge to become God rather than to imitate Him.