Ben-Azzai and Rabbi Eliezer differ on the supreme value to be protected in this situation: Ben-Azzai clearly places paramount importance on protection of the daughter, while Rabbi Eliezer is most concerned with protection of the integrity of the Torah's test. If a woman knows that Torah protects and has acquired the knowledge of Torah that would constitute this protection, then a major obstacle has been removed from the way of her temptation into license, for she would no longer be afraid of the discovery of her sin and its punishment via the water ordeal.
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On this interpretation, R. Eliezer is quite a straightforward and logical antithesis to Ben-Azzai. On the other hand, the Babylonian Talmud, since it has rejected the notion that women gain any merit from studying Torah, has to find an entirely different explanation for Rabbi Eliezer's claim that study leads to sexual sin:
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 | | Said R. Abbahu: What is the reason for the statement of R. Eliezer? As it is written,
I am Wisdom, I dwelt with guile
[and knowledge will find intrigues]
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[Proverbs 8:12]. As soon as wisdom has entered a man [!], with it has entered guile.
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Thus the interpretation of R. Eliezer promoted by the Babylonian Talmud
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has the study of Torah as a
direct
cause of lasciviousness in women. Note that this is not an entirely unfamiliar move from other cultures as well. Often, when women take a public and active intellectual or political stand within patriarchal culture, they are stigmatized as sexually wanton and licentious (Jones 1990, 786). I would suggest that this move on the part of the culture is both a means of protecting male cultural cap-
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| | 10. This is the interpretation of R. Eliezer's view accepted by R. Israel Danzig. It is, moreover, consistent with the view of another Rabbi, R. Shim'on, who says that it is impossible to argue that merit mitigates, because then one would have entirely vitiated the validity of the ordeal as a chastity test. Ben-Azzai is simply portrayed as more concerned with the fate of the girl than the certainty of the test. The fact that Ben-Azzai is the proverbial celibate of rabbinic literature, and that it is he who most insistently supports marriage (see last chapter), only adds to the complexity of the representation.
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| | 11. The word for "intrigues" in the biblical text,
mezimot
, is generally used in talmudic discourse to refer to sexual transgression. I believe that this association may be underlying R. Abbahu's citation of this verse in a context in which sexual license is the issue at hand.
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| | 12. Paradoxically, R. Abbahu himself is Palestinian, but that does not matter here, since I am arguing for the ideological positions manifested by the editors of the two Talmuds and it is in Babylonia that his view was preserved and transmitted while in the Palestinian text it is ignored.
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