a control over the act of sexual intercourse itselfnamely that it should not be repeated immediately, presumably because the second act would not be procreativeis transmuted by the Talmud into yet another and stronger prohibition of wife-rape. Even if she has agreed to a first act of intercourse, he may not presume her agreement to a repeated act on the same occasion but must know explicitly that she wishes it.
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Furthermore, several of the other elements of Rabbi Levi's list also regard the affective relation between husband and wife as of primary importance in the propriety of sexual relations. If the husband hates his wife, has decided to divorce her, is drunk and "cannot pay attention to his wife's needs" [Rashi], or even if the pair have had a quarrel and not properly made up after it, then sexual relations are forbidden between them, and the fruit of such improper unions will be rebellious and wicked children. Indeed, even if he believes that he is sleeping with one of his wives and is actually with another, that alone is enough to produce such undesirable offspring, because the intimate emotional relations required for appropriate sexual joining are absent. This is marked even more explicitly in a parallel text, which adds "the children of a sleeping woman" to the list. All this is totally irreconcilable with a notion that a wife is a sexual object and not a subject in talmudic culture.
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The most obvious way to read Rabbi Yohanan and Rabbi's utterances is that these passages, at least, explicitly treat a wife as instrument and object of the husband's sexuality. Their statements are, then, in this regard, the counter-voice within the talmudic text, and, as such,
may
represent a minority ideology that did objectify wives. The method of reading employed in this book often involves the identification of a point of tension or conflict between the voices of the texts that the Talmud quotes and the ideological interests of the redactors. If we accept this reading, that which I have just identified as the most obvious one, then we have such a point of sharp conflict here. While all the rest of the text here and other textual resources in the Talmud insist that sexual practice be only in accord with the wife's will and desire, these statements seem to represent a different position, one that encodes a wife not so much as a human
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(footnote continued from the previous page)
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 | | context, I would like to note that Wegner's repeated insistence that a wife's sexuality is the property of her husband in talmudic law is extremely misleading (Wegner 1988, 19 and passim), particularly in the legal context of her discussion. Virtually none of the legal definitions of ownership apply. A husband may not make use of her sexuality without her consent; he may not alienate it; he may not dispose of it. The definition seems to me, therefore, entirely invalid.
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