After a short break for Yom Kippur and start of Sukkot, my blog is back with an interesting piece of Talmud [Taanit 24b] that Henry, my hevruta, and I studied last week in my sukkah. Generally the Talmud is self-referential; out of thousands of pages, less than a handful mention historically verifiable Babylonian people or events. In one rare example, we learn that the Nehardean Talmud school moved to Mechoza after a battle destroys the former city, which correlates with the King Odonathus of Palmyra's attack on Nehardea in 259 CE. Yet the Talmud mentions neither the attacks of Emperor Carus [283] nor Emperor Julian [365], both of whom led Roman armies that sacked the Persian capital, surely causing much havoc for Jewish towns in their path.
The short sugia Henry and I learned happens to be one of the unusual stories about a Talmudic rabbi interacting with a named Persian king, in this case Rava and Shapur. It begins with Rava's court flogging a man who dies of his injuries. Persian law does not permit Jewish courts to administer a death penalty, so the matter comes to King Shapur, who decides that Rava should be punished. But Rava has a defender in the person of the king's mother, Ifra Hormidz, who warns her son that the Jews' God will protect them. When Shapur asks how and Ifra replies that God answers Rava's prayers for rain, Shapur scoffs that this is easy during the rainy season and that Rava should pray for rain in the summer. Rava does so with such concentration that it rains from Tzippori [in Israel] to the Tigris River [in Babylonia], causing Rava's father to appear in a dream warning him that Heaven is so angry at Rava's audacity that Rava should sleep elsewhere. Rava obeys and indeed, the next morning finds his bed slashed by knives.
So what are we to make of this "legendary" story? The beginning is not so far fetched, as Rava [d. ca 360] and Shapur II [d. ca 380] were not only contemporaries, but lived within a few miles of each other. According to Persian sources Shapur's father was King Hormidz II, but the name of his mother, one of Hormidz's lesser queens, is unknown Interestingly, Talmudic commentators, who clearly have no knowledge of Persian history, say that Hormidz was the name of a demon and that Ifra [meaning grace] received her name because she was as beautifully bewitching as a demon. More interesting, I found a Persian legend claiming that Shapur's mother was a Jewish princess, one of several woman of the Exilarch's family who married Persian kings throughout the centuries [a la Esther].
Now our Talmud story is amazing enough if Ifra Hormidz comes from a Jewish noble family, plus we have to deal with a failed assassination attempt on Rava. Does someone at court resent his influence with King Shapur and Ifra Hormizd? Or was the attack the work of demons who know that Heaven has withdrawn its protection of Rava? And where was Hisdadukh, my heroine and Rava's wife, while all this was happening? I'm afraid my readers will have to wait for the second volume of RAV HISDA'S DAUGHTER to find out.
As we approach Yom Kippur I want to share a fascinating similarity between Zoroastrianism and Talmudic Judaism on the influence of deeds vs. fate. In Tractate Moed Katan, the great 4th-century amora Rava [the second of Rav Hisda's daughter's husbands] attributes to mazal [fate or luck] three elements of individual contentment: "length of life, surviving children, and sustenance." Rava asserts that these are determined by the stars and thus not dependent on religious merit.
He attempts to prove this by contrasting the lives of two great sages. Rabbah, head of the Pumbedita school, and R. Hisda, head of the Sura school and Rava's father-in-law, were both perfectly righteous. Yet R. Hisda lived to be 92 while Rabbah died at 40. R. Hisda's household celebrated 60 marriage feasts, but in Rabbah's there were 60 bereavements. At R. Hisda's house there was enough fine wheat bread even for dogs, yet Rabbah's had to make do with barley bread, and even that could not always be found. For Rava, the rewards of Torah-study and performance of mitzvot come in the afterlife, not in this world.
A saying attributed to Adurbad, Zoroastrian high priest contemporary with Rava, provides a striking parallel. "Adurbad, son of Mahraspandan, divided things of the world into parts: four (he assigned) to fate and four to action ... Life, wife, children, and wealth come mostly through fate. Salvation and damnation, righteousness and wickedness, come mostly through action."
As we ask/beg God to seal us in the "Book of Life" on Saturday night, let's hope that Rava wasn't completely right. While it's clear that many things in life do depend on mazel, we must also hope that "teshuva, tefilla and tzedaka" [repentance, prayer and righteous deeds] really do avert the severe decree - in this world.
Here's two miscellaneous musings on women in Late Antiquity, both of which are problematic for novelists. Nearly every female reader of historical fiction wants to know how the women characters dressed, yet that information is sometimes difficult to find [thank goodness for all the costumers for period plays and movies]. The tricky thing is that women dressed differently depending on their social status and where they lived, with Roman Palestine styles being quite unlike those in Babylonia. This difference is clear from descriptions of wealthy women's festive clothes; the former preferred white ankle-length linen tunics while the latter wore shorter colored silk tunics over "Persian" trousers, similar to what Indian women wear today. Poor women of both regions wore un-dyed tunics woven mostly from hemp, wool, or goat's hair.
As I wrote in an earlier post, women [or perhaps better called girls] married young, some in their early teens or even before. Their husbands were often older men, possibly strangers, and it doesn't take much imagination to realize that wedding nights may have been quite traumatic for the youngest brides. The Talmud honestly confronts this by stating that a first marriage is only a happiness for the husband, not the bride, and forbidding the couple from resuming sexual relations for seven days after the bride loses her virginity [at least she gets a week to heal].
Yet most historical novels, especially the romances, serve up a passionate wedding night of mutual satisfaction, even/especially when the bride is a virgin. It is rare to find an unsatisfying or painful sex scene, and rarer still to find one written where the bride is under the age of 13, for what modern reader would want to envisage such a scene? So what is the author who prizes accuracy to do? Even if there are no explicit bedroom scenes, readers expect the hero and heroine to enjoy/appreciate each other sexually. So authors are left with the choice of writing accurate scenes involving near-rape or a young girl being painfully violated, or ignoring the reality of ancient marriages. Or we can pretend that our own heroes and heroines were exceptional couples who had great sex right from the start.
As 5770 draws to a close, I wish all my friends and fans, may you be inscribed for a good new year.
KOL ISHA doesn't get much better than this.
So now that I'm back to studying Talmud, here's some interesting things I learned about Rav Hisda and his family from Tractate Shabbat, which we just finished Friday. Rav Hisda is most definitely a fastidious person; whereas most people washed their hands with minimal water [if they wash with water at all], he not only washes with copious amounts of water, but says he owes his prosperity to this habit. He also abhors obscene speech, saying that Gehenna [Hell] is dug deeper for those who use it.
In his household, spoons are made of bone, shards of broken glass are used to cut thread, and walls are plastered with a mixture of lime, sand and straw. More interesting, and a bit of a shock to my hevruta - who never studied these kind of Talmud discussions in yeshiva - was a sugia on how scholars are supposed to wipe themselves after defecation on Shabbat. Myself, I've long stopped being surprised at the bizarre, and fascinating, topics our Talmudic sages deal with.
Apparently Babylonians carried around a small quantity of round stones that they used as we would use toilet paper today. Since it's forbidden to carry things on Shabbat, this presented a problem for the Rabbis. Privies were few and far between, and in any case, one could not count on them being supplied with suitable stones, even on the Sabbath. After much discussion, and a diversion into whether wiping with a pottery shard was preferred over a rock [yes if it's a rounded shard, no if it has sharp edges], Rav Hisda declares that kavod habriot, human dignity, suspends a Torah prohibition, and thus one is permitted to carry rocks, normally a violation of Shabbat, for this purpose.
I was already getting to be a fan of Rav Hisda, but this ruling really made me respect him.