21st Century Bible Hebrew -- women in Torah

Genesis 2:18

 

יח ו וַיֹּ֨אמֶר֙ יְהוָֹ֣ה אֱלֹהִ֔ים לֹא־ט֛וֹב הֱי֥וֹת הָֽאָדָ֖ם לְבַדּ֑וֹ אֶֽעֱשֶׂה־לּ֥וֹ עֵ֖זֶר כְּנֶגְדּֽוֹ:

 

Translation:     **** Gd said it is not good, the man being alone; I shall make for him a help like an opponent.
 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

לְבַדּוֹ	Alone, by himself
עֵזֶר	Help (n)
נֶגְדּוֹ	Opposite to him

 

Notice heyot and the vowel under the he.  You saw something similar when I conjugated “to be” in perfect aspect.  Heh not only won’t take shva like bet does, it won’t take patach chataf like chet does.  It requires segol chataf.  And when it comes before itself as a definite article, again, it has to be voweled segol, not patach or qamats.  An example would be he-harim, הֶהָרִים.

 

The translation reflects Midrash (Breshit Rabbah 17:3). It says that Gd intended for a woman to be a help to her husband when he is doing right, but to be an opponent to him when he is doing wrong. There is a reference to R. Yossi ha-Glali and his wife, who would contradict him in front of his students, and they asked him why he put up with it. Eventually he divorced her for her bad behavior because it also brought the law into ill repute, but when she remarried and they became impoverished, R. Yossi supported them. R. Yossi is cited in Talmud as declaring that Torah was to be taught to girls, in one of many places where he is cited.

 

At any rate, Jewish women were never second class in the house. They were expected to assert themselves to prevent wrong-doing. They could testify in court in business cases, operate their own property, keep their earnings if their husbands refused to provide for them, and bequeath property without asking their husbands’ permission. They could get courts to force a divorce from husbands who tried to isolate them from their family or community or if he wouldn’t sleep with them; conjugal rights in a Jewish marriage belong to the woman, not the man.

 

People talk and write a lot of bushwa about the so-called inferior status of women in Jewish law; here’s oneof my posts on another page of this blog showing that men are in a worse position in some respects and that in others it’s a wash.

 

In England, a man could marry a woman for her money, waste it on gambling and prostitutes, and drag her into debtor’s prison with him, or kidnap her children and leave her in the street, without the law lifting a finger. Changes began only in the middle of the 1800s in England, after the accession of Queen Victoria. For thousands of years these things have been prohibited under Jewish law. It may be no coincidence that the first Jewish peer was seated in Parliament about the time women’s legislation began to change.