"Shall She Die Rather than Sin?” Sexual Coercion and Legal (Non)Compliance in Bavli SUGYOT

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

Abstract

This paper examines rabbinic texts about whether a person being coerced to commit an illicit sex act should be willing to “be killed rather than sin.” At face value, these are texts about maximizing compliance, stipulating the extent to which one must be willing to resist sin in order to comply with the law. Yet at the same time, these texts are about non-compliance in two ways. 1) Drawing the boundaries of martyrdom also stakes out the territory where the law “allows for” conscious non-compliance. 2) The rabbinic discussion of these cases reflects (or constructs) a gap between the legal discourse and lived realities, where individuals resist these boundaries, choosing to die even when non-compliance is permissible, or opt for non-compliance even when it is inappropriate.

Through close textual analysis of Bavli SUGYOT about the category of illicit sex as a cardinal sin (especially bSanhedrin 74a-b), alongside Bavli passages that convey “realities” of women’s responses in cases of sexual coercion, I show that the Bavli’s discussion of sexual coercion includes a gendered characterization of the ideal legal response that differs from a variety of “non-compliant” women’s responses. Does acknowledgement of this gap between law and reality serve to strengthen and clarify the legal norm, or undermine the validity of this norm altogether? Particularly in contrast to aggadic traditions of active female resistance found in PIYYUT literature, I argue that the case of the sexually coerced woman in the Bavli is deeply wrapped up in passivity that can contain both compliance and non-compliance. A slight textual variant yields a major conceptual tension as to whether her passive (non)compliance reflects radical marginalization from legal subjectivity or whether the sexually coerced woman may serve as a theoretical paradigm of the constrained legal subject more generally, where passive (non)compliance becomes normalized.

Author

• Aviva Richman, NYU