Yifat Monnickendam, Jewish Law and
Early Christian Identity: Betrothal, Marriage, and Infidelity in the
Writings of Ephrem the Syrian
Daniel
Picus
Western Washington University
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
George A. Kiraz
James E. Walters
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James E. Walters
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
2021
Volume 24.1
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https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/article/hv24n1prpicus
Daniel Picus
Yifat Monnickendam, Jewish Law and
Early Christian Identity: Betrothal, Marriage, and Infidelity in the
Writings of Ephrem the Syrian
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/pdf/vol24/HV24N1PRPicus.pdf
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute, 2021
vol 24
issue 1
pp 335-338
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies is an electronic journal dedicated to the study
of the Syriac tradition, published semi-annually (in January and July) by Beth
Mardutho: The Syriac Institute. Published since 1998, Hugoye seeks to offer the
best scholarship available in the field of Syriac studies.
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Yifat Monnickendam, Jewish Law and
Early Christian Identity: Betrothal, Marriage, and Infidelity in the
Writings of Ephrem the Syrian (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2020). Pp. xi + 332; $99.99.
It is a rare thing for a book to accomplish exactly what it
sets out to do, but Yifat Monnickendam has done precisely that, in her
erudite study of marriage laws in the writings of Ephrem. Jewish Law and Early Christian Identity: Betrothal, Marriage, and
Infidelity in the Writings of Ephrem the Syrian is a remarkable
accomplishment, and a groundbreaking contribution to a field that is
constantly evaluating the evidence of contact between Aramaic-speaking
Jewish and Christian communities in late antiquity. Monnickendam brings
together a considerable command of many sources (Roman law, Rabbinic
literature, Ephrem’s corpus) with a deep understanding of legal theory to
examine a complex and often disparate body of evidence.
Monnickendam’s investigation is shaped by her analysis
of four related concepts, with a chapter dedicated to each. These concepts
are organized through their temporal relationship to marriage: the first
chapter deals with the act of bethrothal itself, the second with questions
of cohabitation during betrothal, the third with
marriage, and specifically, the question of whether or not rape requires
marriage after the fact, and the fourth with questions of infidelity and
fornication—the violation of a marriage. Each chapter moves fluidly through
sources that range temporally from the Hebrew Bible to Ephrem’s writings,
covering a millennium’s worth of evidence, and a dense web of interpretive
possibilities that Monnickendam skillfully delineates and analyzes.
Two aspects of Monnickendam’s argument stand out as
particularly important, and it is worth highlighting them here. I hasten to
add, of course, that I am only able to present them in the briefest of
terms: Monnickendam’s book is worth reading in its entirety for its nuanced
treatment of sources, and the keen critical eye with which they are
compared. Her close readings are both lucid and convincing. Rabbinic
literature especially can be difficult for the uninitiated, but
Monnickendam’s careful attention to detail ensures that even the absolute
beginner to rabbinic materials will gain something valuable from her
writing. The two most important aspects of Monnickendam’s book, in my view,
come from both the author’s background in legal studies and an extensive
training in rabbinic sources: only the combination of these two would be
able to produce such thought-provoking results. In that sense, this book is
truly interdisciplinary.
First, following a growing trend in the study of
rabbinic literature, Monnickendam places the halakhah
of the rabbinic movement onto a spectrum of law that runs from “positive” to
“naturalistic” and identifies Ephrem’s approach to sexual relations as
distinctively naturalistic (pp. 3, 37–30). Monnickendam is not the first to
think about rabbinic halakhah in the context of Roman
law—indeed, this is a robust area of research. See, for example, Catherine
Hezser, “Roman Law and Rabbinic Legal Composition,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic
Literature, ed. C. Fonrobert and M. Jaffee (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), 144–164. Using this
type of broad heuristic as a framing device, however, is a particularly
helpful and useful strategy on her part. “Law” and “halakhah” are neither of them immediately self-evident categories,
but by placing them on a spectrum, and explaining how they relate to the
communities she is discussing, Monnickendam creates a highly suggestive
interpretive framework.
“Positive” law, according to Monnickendam, refers to
legal writing and legislation that aims to describe
the way people act and behave, and the way that larger structures—be they
political or religious—attempt to govern that behavior. “Natural” law, on
the other hand, is normative, attempting to derive laws of behavior from
principles that are either assumed or explicitly stated. Roman law falls on
the “positive” side of the spectrum, while halakhah
is “natural,” but Monnickendam is swift to note, in several instances, that
neither of them is exclusively one or the other. It is this vision of a
sliding scale, moreover, that is so helpful, providing a vocabulary for
legal concepts and laws that mostly, if not entirely,
fall on one side or the other.
Monnickendam’s most striking conclusion, however, and
the second critical aspect of this book, is an element of her overall
argument that Ephrem utilizes different legal traditions in different
contexts while largely reproducing ideas found in Palestinian rabbinic
sources. She points out that time and time again, when Ephrem’s legal
terminology and thinking is in line with opinions expressed in Palestinian
rabbinic sources, the opinions he follows, while expressed in the Palestinian literature, are ultimately rejected
(p. 27). Palestinian rabbinic literature, for example, has notably less
severe penalties for premarital cohabitation than Roman legal literature and
Greek Christian literature. This is a line of thinking shared by Ephrem, and
ultimately rejected in Babylonian rabbinic literature (and, indeed,
discussed by those same rabbis as a uniquely Palestinian phenomenon, pp.
97–108).
This is a compelling observation, and if I have one
criticism of Monnickendam’s book, it is that she presents us with this
tantalizing analysis, but offers no concrete explanation for it. There is a
general sense that it is reasonable for Ephrem, a Syriac-speaking writer in
the general region of the Palestinian rabbis, to have access to this
material, likely through oral transmission, but the conditions on the ground
that might have enabled this are left undiscussed. Did Ephrem come across
only these rejected traditions over the course of
his life? Did he have access to a wide variety of them, from which he picked
and chose selectively? If so, was that selection process a polemic against
the Jews in whose proximity he lived? Is this understanding of marriage and
related concepts deeply personal and idiosyncratic, or is it part of a
broader set of group understandings, and were these understandings
consciously arranged in opposition to another set of ideas? These are
possibilities without a way of being proven decisively, of course, but as
reflections of possible lived conditions, articulating them would lend
another angle to this fascinating book.
The absence of this type of reconstruction, it should
be noted, seems to come from the author’s robust commitment to clear,
analytic methodology, and an unwillingness to engage in speculation (pp.
22–27). However, it seems that evidence like this is what makes speculation
possible, and a little bit less “speculative,” when we engage in it as
readers and scholars. The general question of how Ephrem might have accessed
rabbinic ideas is broad and nebulous, to be sure, but the presence of
rejected rabbinic opinions points to a slightly more constrained arena of
possibilities that would, in all likelihood, be fruitful to reflect
upon.
In many ways, Jewish Law and Early
Christian Identity is a model book. It delineates a clear project,
which it accomplishes with precision and finesse. Complicated rabbinic
texts, along with Ephrem’s own poetry and commentaries, are introduced
clearly and accessibly: a sign that readers unfamiliar with either are still
likely to gain much. Perhaps most valuable of all, though, Monnickendam
presents her findings in a way that raises still more productive questions.
These are not vague, mysterious questions whose answers forever elude the
scholar, however—or at least, not entirely. These are questions that promise
hours of research and stimulating, thoughtful answers; questions that, even
if they don’t immediately shed light on the lives and inner thoughts of
ancient figures like Ephrem, at least allow us to build lamps that might one
day be lit for that purpose.