ABSTRACT
The legal significance of a woman's sexual consent surfaces in various realms of classical rabbinic literature, in particular as to whether an illicit sex act has consequences with regard to her status and legal penalty. I focus on a complex case in a Bavli sugya, described as a sex act that began as coercive and ended as volitional – תחלתה באונס סופה ברצון. I argue that the Bavli's discussion of this case is best understood at a methodological crossroads. On the one hand, “a devotional” reading could see this sugya as an internal development of rabbinic traditions related to sex crimes and purity. From a relativist lens, the sugya must be situated in light of shifting notions of sexuality, shame, sin, and self in late antiquity. I perform a devotional and relativist reading, to dissect the sugya along the lines of “fracture points” that reveal a redactional hand navigating contested views of female sexuality. This integrated approach allows a devotional reader of the Talmud to understand the complex textual origins for startling statements in the sugya, and contributes to a picture where the female subject is part of the Talmud's theorizing of the self.
