The Refusal of Sex/Work in b. Ketubot 63a-64b

• In Event: Legal Resistance and Non-Compliance in Babylonian Talmudic Sources

Abstract

Rabbinic sources on marriage are often described by scholars with the language of mutual and reciprocal obligations (Wegner, Satlow). In this model of reciprocity, a man for his part feeds and clothes his wife, while the woman for her part contributes to the household through activities like cooking, spinning wool, and breastfeeding. This model tends to bracket sexual obligations apart from other household obligations, and depicts sexual or procreative negotiations as existing beyond or outside the economy of marital obligations. Sources about marital sex are treated under the rubric of love or harmonious marriage, and are bracketed from sources about husband and wife’s financial obligations, which are instead treated as reciprocal or contractual.

This paper shows that the Bavli discussion of the non-compliant wife and husband (mored/et) in b. Ket. 63a-64b does not bracket sex from household obligations. The husband and wife’s refusals are superficially equated in m. Ket. 5:7 although they already entail different consequences. But the Bavli discussion of the mishnah encodes a different understanding of the marital relationship by explicitly linking sexual with non-sexual household work.

Through its reading of this passage, this paper explores alternatives to the language of mutual and reciprocal obligations. The language of reciprocity assumes the spouses’ equality if not in status then in their ability to opt into the marital arrangement. Drawing on theoretical critiques of contract, and of the marital relationship as a contract, this paper argues that b. Ket. 63a-64b points towards an alternative understanding: one in which sexual and reproductive negotiations, just as much as finances and domestic work, are part of the economy of marital obligations.

Author

• Pratima Gopalakrishnan, Yale University