“Overturning the ‘Table’”: The Hidden Meaning of a Talmudic Metaphor for Coitus

In the fall of 2001 this journal devoted a volume to the topic “Sexuality in Late Antiquity.”¹ This special issue was designed in part as a gentle critique of Foucault’s planned shift to Christianity as the subject of the fourth volume of his History of Sexuality, which he did not live to finish.² Guest editors Daniel Boyarin and Elizabeth Castielli argued for the adoption of the basic premise of Foucault’s earlier volumes, namely, that “sexuality” (unlike the act of coitus itself) neither is universal nor belongs to the realm of the self but is, rather, a “discourse,” a means by which culture produces meaning.³ This position is perhaps best articulated elsewhere by David Halperin, who has argued that “sex has no history. It is a natural act, grounded in the functioning of the body, and, as such, it lies outside of history and culture. Sexuality, by contrast, does not properly refer to some aspect or attribute of bodies. Unlike sex, sexuality is a cultural production: it represents the appropriation of the human body and of its physiological capacities by an ideological discourse. Sexuality is not a somatic fact; it is a cultural effect.”⁴ Many of the authors of the “Sexuality in Late Antiquity” issue sought to balance Foucault’s proverbial scales by mining Talmudic or Rabbinic literature, that corpus of literature produced by a group of elite male Jewish scholars who were active in Roman Palestine and Sassanian Babylonia from some point in the second century until the rise of Islam in the seventh, for clues as to how a minority culture within the broader context of late antiquity mapped out its ideological discourse on the copulating bodies of its audience.⁵ This kind of work is explicitly based on Daniel Boyarin’s Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture, which attempts to faithfully apply Foucault’s method to the culture that produced the documents of classical Rabbinic Judaism.⁶ Additionally, Michael Satlow’s Tasting the Dish: Rabbinic Rhetorics of Sexuality collects and treats the relevant Rabbinic sources that pertain to sex and sexuality.⁷

This body of literature, whose documents include the mishnah and its companion volume, the Tosefta, along with the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds and the wide variety of biblical commentaries known as midrashim, began to take shape in Roman Judea in the period following the Bar Kokhba revolt in the second century CE. It found its full flowering in Roman Palestine and Sassanian Babylonia in the following centuries. The scholarly turn toward this material serves two explicit goals. First, as with the broader focus on sexuality in antiquity, modern readers are forced to see contrasts with their own culturally produced ideas, particularly Freudian ones, about sexuality and its meanings. Second, analysis of Rabbinic sources by their very nature as the literature of a minority culture always in dialogue with the wider world is explicitly comparative, as it invites the mining of Greek, Latin, Syriac, Babylonian, and Arabic texts along with whatever is to be found in the record of material culture, such as gravestones, art, graffiti, earthenware, and coinage, to better situate each in the multicultural mix that so defines late antiquity. Yet there is a third possible avenue for analysis of the history of Rabbinic sexuality, and it necessarily draws upon the first two: the tracing of the development of changing Rabbinic attitudes toward sexual acts. This is the task of this article.

A brief note on terminology and historiography is in order: Rabbinic literature is conventionally divided into two distinct periods, each named for the sages who were active during those eras.⁸ The earlier Rabbinical sages are known in both Talmuds as Tannaim (singular Tanna), literally, “one who repeats [traditions].” These are the scholars who are mentioned in the collections of Rabbinic teachings known as Mishnah and its companion volume, Tosefta.⁹ These scholars were active in Roman Palestine up to the early third century, when these texts were redacted and published orally.¹⁰ The later generations of scholars who were active into the...