 | | And God said, it is not good for the man to be alone:
it has been taught: one who has no wife remains without good, without help, without joy, without blessing, and without atonement. . . .
R. Hiyya the son of Gumadi said, also he is not a complete human, for it says, "And He blessed them and called their name, Adam"
26
[Gen. 5:2]. And there are those who say that he even decreases the likeness [of God], for it says, "In the image of God, He made the Adam" [Gen. 9:6], and what does it say after this? ''And as for you, be fruitful and multiply" [Gen. 9:7].
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| | (Theodor and Albeck 1965, 152)
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This midrashic text explicitly grounds the Rabbis' ideology of marriage in their interpretation of the creation stories of Genesis. The telos of marriage is a return to the condition of completeness or even of
imago dei
in the act of marriage that reconstructs the Divine Image in which the original androgyne was created.
27
No wonder, then, that Augustine and other Christian writers would make reference to this difference between Judaism and Christianity and consider the Jews "indisputably carnal."
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The Rabbis on Sex: Palestine and Babylonia
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| | The Jews disdained the beauty of virginity, which is not surprising, since they heaped ignominy upon Christ himself, who was born of a virgin. The Greeks admired and revered the virgin, but only the Church of God adored her with zeal.
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| | (John Chrysostom,
On Virginity
1,1)
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In this passage the fourth-century Father represents the basic difference between rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, as well as the Greek origins of the valorization of virginity. Once again, I would claim, this sensibility is grounded in cultural reality. Marriage is the positively marked term in rabbinic culture, while virginity is marked as negative. Within this frame-
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| | 26. Emphasis mine. Here we have the most clear antithesis to the view held by some Christian thinkers that only the virgin is a complete human. Whatever can be said about the "status" of women in rabbinic Judaism, "woman" is not essentialized as lack (as in Freud, e.g.), but as the fulfillment of lack. I will come back to this in Chapter 3 and again in the conclusion, but meanwhile see duBois (1988).
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| | 27. Another take on this would be that procreation is the
imago dei
. Other rabbinic texts would certainly interpret that way.
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