 | | And as for them, how did they justify their practice biblically?
Sit here with the donkey
[Gen. 22:5]with the people that is like a donkey.
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| | Rabbah the son of Rav Huna used to ring the bells around the bed [
another reading:
drive away the horse flies]. Abbaye drove the flies away. Rava drove away the mosquitoes.
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Rabbi Shim'on the Palestinian holy man established an extreme rule for privacy during sex. No living creature should be present. While Shmuel (an early Babylonian authority) seemingly attempted to ameliorate this rule, the later Babylonian Rabbis endorsed it unequivocally. Shmuel regards it simply as an attack on the Roman practice of having intercourse in the presence of slaves, a practice that indeed involved the assumption that slaves are not somehow human (Veyne 1987, 7273). However, his successors understood "living creature" quite literally and vied with each other to drive away smaller and smaller living creatures before having intercourse with their wives. The first view, that of Rabbah the son of Rav Huna, is ambiguous, because of a difference of reading between different talmudic manuscripts. According to our received text, endorsed and interpreted by Rashi, he drove away the human beings by ringing a bell indicating that he was going to sleep with his wife, showing that his view was like that of Shmuel, but according to Eastern manuscript traditions, he drove away horse-flies, manifesting support for Rav Yehuda's position. In any case, two of his fellows vied with each other: Abbaye drove the flies away and Rava even the much smaller mosquitoes. We cannot know, of course, precisely what Rabbi Shim'on's position was (or indeed what he said), but it is certainly possible that the statement was made in reaction to prevailing Roman practices of treating slaves as virtual non-persons, who were often privy to their masters' sexual behavior. The interpretations of the other Rabbis would then represent a much more extreme version of that reaction.
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Now, there may be no doubting that these regulations were understood as promoting that rabbinic ideal of "modesty"; however, the very extremes of privacy that were encoded in the practice also promoted the notions of intimacy and freedom in sexual behavior. Veyne points out that the Roman practice amounted to constant surveillance (ibid). In sharp contrast, the rabbinic reaction to that
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| | 20. It could be, however, that the Babylonian Rabbis, for whom the custom of Romans having sex with their servants present was unknown, simply misunderstood Rabbi Shim'on's dictum and took it literally to mean "any creature."
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