Did Paul Blame Victims of Sexual Assault? Jewish Contexts (Part Two)
Consent, coercion, and culpability in an ancient Jewish context
We’re in a series on the Apostle Paul’s views on sexual consent, inspired by my M.A. thesis on sex and slavery in 1 Corinthians. (Click here for Part One!)
While writing my thesis, I faced a number of difficult questions: Did Paul blame enslaved Corinthians for the ongoing sexual abuse that they suffered? (The sexual abuse of the enslaved was ubiquitous—members of the church in Corinth almost certainly experienced ongoing abuse.) Did he view these enslaved victims as complicit? Did he lump them in with the “sexually immoral”? Or did he look on their situation with understanding and compassion, recognizing them as honored members of the Church?
But ancient people thought about sex differently than we do. So before we can dive into 1 Corinthians, we need to learn what assumptions about consent were common in Paul’s world. Last week, in Part One, we began with this question: Is it historically plausible that Paul could have distinguished between coercive violation and consensual sex?
In pursuit of an answer, we looked at Roman perspectives. For the Romans, consent didn’t really matter when judging whether a sexual act was moral. However, if a sexual act was deemed immoral, a lack of consent—due to either force or coercion—meant that the non-consenting woman was not deemed morally or legally guilty, though she still suffered dishonor and social stigma.
Today, we’re going to examine the question of historical plausibility again, this time from the perspective of the other cultural context that heavily influenced Paul’s worldview: first-century Judaism. What did the Jews of Paul’s day think about consent, coercion, and culpability?
Ready? Let’s do this.
So … What Did the Jews Think?
I’ll be up front here—our Jewish sources from this time period talk about sexual violation less often than Roman sources do. It’s hard to say with precision whether Jews thought of consent in the exact same way as the Romans. Nor should we assume that there was one Jewish view! Hellenized Jews (who spoke Greek and adopted more Roman customs) may have had more Roman ideas than more traditional Jews in Judea or Galilee.
So I want to look at two of our most detailed sources from this time period, representing very different forms of Jewishness—Josephus and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Josephus
Josephus (37-100), a contemporary of Paul, was born and raised in Jerusalem but later defected to Rome. (He was definitely a Hellenized Jew.) He wrote a book called Antiquities of the Jews, a history of the Jewish people designed to appeal to the Romans—basically, he was trying to improve the reputation of the Jews after the major uprising that had resulted in the destruction of the Temple.
The first half of Antiquities is pretty much just Josephus retelling Old Testament stories. So, by looking at the way he retells each story—especially the details he adds or omits—we can figure out his perspective on what’s happening in the story. (Or … at least what he wants the Romans to think!)
When Josephus retells biblical rape narratives, what choices does he make? Let’s speed-run through his adaptations of five stories involving victims of forcible or coercive sex: Hagar, Dinah, the concubine of Judges 19, Bathsheba, and Tamar.
Hagar: In Josephus’s telling, Abraham is blameless in regard to Hagar—Sarah gives Hagar into his bed at God’s command;1 Hagar stirs up conflict with Sarah;2 Abraham thinks it barbarous to expel Hagar and Ishmael, but God agrees with Sarah’s decision.3 Now, Josephus doesn’t portray Hagar as sinful for her relationship with Abraham; she is blamed only for her disrespect toward Sarah. This lines up nicely with a Roman moral framework: There’s nothing morally wrong with sex between an enslaver and an enslaved woman, so neither Abraham nor Hagar are condemned. Since the sexual activity is perfectly moral, Hagar’s consent is beside the point. (Sound familiar?)
Dinah: Jacob’s only daughter attends a festival, eager to see the finery worn by the other women. There, Shechem forcibly rapes her (by violence, Josephus specifies). In addition to emphasizing the violence of the act, Josephus communicates Dinah’s innocence by setting the scene at a festival. (A trope in Greek and Roman comedy involves a virtuous woman raped at a festival. In these plays, it’s “funny” because she later ends up accidentally married to her rapist. How … amusing.)4
The concubine of Judges 19: In his retelling of this horrific, violent gang rape, Josephus echoes the story of Lucretia, which we read last week.5 The victimized woman dies of shame, despite the husband’s comforting words that place sole blame on her assailants. With this woman as a rallying cry, the people take up arms against the inhabitants of that region—just as the people of Rome use Lucretia as a rallying cry to overthrow the king and establish the Republic.6
Bathsheba: Josephus does seem to assign Bathsheba some level of blame—in that regard, she is unique among these five women. His description of the affair emphasizes David’s culpability—Bathsheba is in her own home, washing herself in cool water (a detail he usually uses to describe a ritual bath) before David sends for her and lies with her. However, afterward, Bathsheba sends David the news of her pregnancy so that David “should contrive some way for concealing her sin (for, according to the laws of their fathers, she who had been guilty of adultery ought to be put to death).”7 So, David and Bathsheba are both guilty of adultery, in Josephus’s telling.
Josephus’s reading may be motivated, in part, by his desire to depict David positively.8 Though he unambiguously condemns this sordid episode as sin, he otherwise depicts David as, essentially, sinless.9 I wonder, also, if he is eager to distance the story from any allusions to Lucretia, which he evoked with precise parallels in his portrait of Judges 19. The rape of a freeborn woman, even by a king, wouldn’t have been especially palatable to a Roman audience shaped by Lucretia’s story. (The rape of Lucretia was not merely one semi-mythical story among many—it was one of the foundational myths of Rome.) It would’ve undermined his positive narrative of David to depict Bathsheba as wholly innocent. Even so, David remains the most active participant in the matter. Bathsheba goes along with it but doesn’t set out to seduce David.
One further interesting detail about portrayals of Bathsheba in this time period: The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, was completed in the third century BC and used widely in this time period. The translation choices made in the Septuagint suggest that its translators deemed Bathsheba to not be guilty.10
Tamar: In contrast to Bathsheba, Tamar is presented as a perfect victim when her half-brother rapes her—she cries out, promises that the king will condone an incestuous marriage, and goes away weeping, living as a widow in the house of her other brother.11 Tamar’s story is a bit less useful to us because Josephus makes relatively few changes—although he does suggest more explicitly than the biblical account that her promise of marriage is merely a ploy to escape.
To sum up, Josephus emphasizes force in his depictions of rape and seems to classify the assaults of Dinah, the woman of Judges 19, and Tamar as rapes while avoiding such characterizations in the stories of Hagar and Bathsheba.
However, his retellings of both Hagar and Bathsheba sit comfortably within the framework of Roman sexual conventions. Abraham has a “right” to Hagar’s body. David transgresses both the law of God and Roman moral codes by engaging in an affair with a free woman—and Josephus condemns his sin—but falls short of the infamous behavior of Lucretia’s rapist. It’s reasonable to conclude that Hellenized Jews in this period generally shared the Romans’ baseline assumptions about sex, though they had a few additional prohibitions on certain sexual pairings/acts.
The Dead Sea Scrolls
The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered at the Qumran Caves in the Judean Desert in the 1940s and ’50s. Part of this discovery included fragments of the Damascus Document, which details the laws of the Qumran Essenes, a strict, austere, mystic, very non-Hellenized Jewish sect.12
(Throughout this section, I’m citing the work of Cecilia Wassen, but I was alerted to this material in Lynn Cohick’s excellent book Women in the World of the Earliest Christians. Highly, highly recommend!)
The Essenes viewed some sexual activity between husband and wife as immoral.13 This illicit married sex was likely some form of intentionally non-procreative sex, perhaps sex during pregnancy.14 Yet, only the husband suffered the penalty of excommunication. And wives were required to testify against their husbands in these sorts of purity violations.
The asymmetry is striking. If the woman reported her husband and testified against him, she suffered no penalty, even though she had also engaged in immoral sex.15 There’s no indication in the Damascus Document that she’s expected to cry for help or demonstrate other signs of resistance to prove her innocence.
Though the Damascus Document treats illicit sex as an act that contaminates the community, the husband alone is deemed culpable. The wife is a witness whose report can cleanse the community by exposing hidden impurity.
This suggests an acknowledgment of power imbalance—in a world where the husband is his wife’s authority, immoral sex is presumed coercive, and the woman remains morally unblamed. This tells us that the idea that a coerced woman was not morally or legally culpable was comprehensible within the social world of first-century Jews—and even had the force of law among the desert ascetics most removed from Roman influence!
The Bottom Line
Putting it all together: The two cultural streams that most influenced Paul’s worldview distinguished between consensual and coercive sex when assessing a woman’s culpability for an immoral sexual act.
The cultural waters that Paul swam in assumed that a woman victimized by either force or coercion remained morally blameless, even if the sexual act itself was worthy of condemnation.
So, we return to our main question for these first two weeks: Is it historically plausible that Paul could have distinguished between coercive violation and consensual sex?
Last week, I said:
Yes, it is plausible.
Our survey of ancient history doesn’t, yet, tell us anything definitive about Paul’s views. But it does tell us that these categories existed in his cultural context—and so he, too, could have made these distinctions, especially if he viewed the moral innocence/guilt binary as more important than the honor/shame binary.
This week, I go one step further: It’s not only plausible; it’s probable. When our Jewish and Roman sources agree on something (even the Essenes!), that means it’s a wide-ranging cultural assumption. It was in the air Paul breathed. That doesn’t mean that Paul, without a doubt, shared these views—Paul adopted countercultural stances on a number of issues—but it does tell us that he more likely than not made these distinctions, too.
Next week, we’ll dive into the biblical text, asking what 1 Corinthians tells us about Paul’s thoughts on consent, culpability, and coercion.
Are you excited? I’m excited!
I hope you’ll come along for the journey.
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ICYMI
It Is Right to Give the Children's Bread to the Dogs
Remember that time Jesus called a Gentile woman a dog?
Josephus, Ant. 1.187.
Josephus, Ant. 1.188-189.
Josephus, Ant. 1.216-218.
This trope in New Comedy sees the woman married to her rapist so that the story can have a “happy” ending. But these stories’ festival-settings establish the woman’s innocence. Young women were expected to attend festivals; she didn’t, in the playwrights’ assessment, contribute to her own victimization by going out. For more on this trope, see Karen F. Pierce, “The Portrayal of Rape in New Comedy,” Rape in Antiquity: Sexual Violence in the Greek and Roman Worlds, eds. Susan Deacy and Karen F. Pierce, (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 2002; repr., Bristol Classical Press, 2012), 163-184.
Caryn A. Reeder, “Wartime Rape, the Romans, and the First Jewish Revolt,” JSJ 48.3 (2017): 368.
Josephus, Ant. 5.147-165.
Josephus, Ant. 7.130-131. (William Whiston’s translation.)
Michael Avioz, “Josephus’ Retelling of the David and Bathsheba Narrative” in The Character of David in Judaism, Christianity and Islam: Warrior, Poet, Prophet and King, ed. Marzena Zawanowska and Mateusz Wilk, (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 408.
Josephus, Ant. 7.391.
R. H. van der Bergh, “Is Bathsheba Guilty?: The Septuagint’s Perspective,” Journal for Semitics 17 (2008): 182-193.
Josephus, Ant. 7.168-172.
I have risked oversimplification for the sake of clarity. Some pieces of the Damascus Document also come to us from the Cairo Geniza collection; most scholars identify the Qumran community as Essene, but this isn’t absolutely certain; some Essenes lived in towns scattered throughout the region and it is unclear to what degree practices varied across locations.
Cecilia Wassen, Women in the Damascus Document, Academia Biblica 21, (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005), 173-174.
Wassen, Women in the Damascus Document, 173-182.
Ibid.
Really appreciate these insights. An added layer of complication is the trauma response / survival mechanism of “fawn.” Both in the original interactions themselves and in interpreting how ancient authors and societies viewed consent or complicity.
loving this series.