He Forbids Her to All: A Linguistic Look at Kiddushin, Part 2

Introduction

Tannaitic and later rabbinic texts contain a variety of terms and legal categories that together are evidence of an underlying metaphorical model¹ of marriage as a relationship of purchase and property ownership: women are “acquired” in marriage (M Kiddushin 1:1), a marriage made under false pretenses is a “purchase made in error” (M K’tubbot 1:6 and 7:8), and a man takes possession of his wife’s (or wife-to-be’s) property because he has “taken possession of the woman” (M K’tubbot 8:1). Another marital term/concept, however, also appears prominently in rabbinics, to the extent that (most of) an entire tractate is devoted to it: kiddushin, or betrothal. Many scholars of rabbinics and Judaism in late antiquity have suggested that because this latter term appears to be a rabbinic creation, and because of its apparent connection to the Hebrew root kof-dalet-shin (henceforth: k-d-sh)—which, in other contexts, carries “holiness” and “sanctity” among its connotations—it can therefore be brought forward as evidence that the rabbis were, in fact, moving away from an ownership model of marriage and replacing it with a new conception of their own.

In the first part of this work, I articulated several reasons why this thesis does not stand up to scrutiny, demonstrating instead quite the opposite: the root k-d-sh functions in rabbinic literature very much like kof-nun-hei (henceforth: k-n-h) does, that is, as an example of the larger rabbinic ownership metaphor. In short, I presented three key arguments against the idea that kiddushin can be read as a (beneficial) rabbinic response to an older, inherited model of marriage as purchase:

1. 1. The claim that kinyan (i.e., acquisition, derived from the k-n-h root) represents an older, pre-rabbinic model of marriage—that the rabbis then moved to overturn/supplant with a different model—is not so straightforward as the talmudic text or some of its later interpreters would have it.

2. 2. The presence of the term and legal concept of kiddushin in rabbinic literature does not displace the term/legal concept of kinyan.

3. 3. Rabbinic texts often use k-d-sh synonymously with, or in very similar ways to, k-n-h.

The outstanding question with which I concluded there, and that I will pick up here, thus is: how did a meaning of “betrothal,” understood metaphorically as a form of ownership, come to be part of the meanings of the root k-d-sh? Or, coming at the question from another direction: how and why did the rabbis come to adapt/adopt this root to convey this meaning? In particular, I will explore the one rabbinic statement that directly attempts to answer this question, and I will argue that although it is questionable as a historical report, it nonetheless can shed important light on how this terminology came to be integrated into rabbinic marital vocabulary.

As just noted, rabbinic literature itself gives us little to no information by which to explain this shift in vocabulary. No tannaitic text, nor the Palestinian Talmud, ever addresses the derivation of the term kiddushin or questions the disparity in terminology between M Kiddushin 1:1, which uses the language of acquisition (k-n-h), and the rest of the tractate, which discusses betrothal (k-d-sh). Only this statement from BT Kiddushin 2b provides any clues:

And what is [the meaning of] the language of our rabbis? He forbids her to all, like that which is sanctified to the Divine (hekdeish).²

However, the entire opening of the g’mara in BT Kiddushin has long been recognized as being of very late provenance, from the final, anonymous editorial layer of the talmudic text.³ The extreme lateness of this explanation relative to the first appearances of k-d-sh to denote betrothal in tannaitic literature would thus seem to render it at best only suggestive as to the term’s origins, associations, and connotations.

It is not surprising, then, that since the redaction of the Babylonian...