ABSTRACT
My research will question how culture, history and religion loom large on forms of marriage and sexual relations in the Hebrew Bible. I shall investigate the way socioeconomic concepts either legitimize or outlaw such relations. Furthermore, I shall draw on historical and anthropological perspectives to highlight Hebrew concepts of marriage and sexual relations in comparative perspectives of the biblical time. Drawing on both local and peripheral contingency, comparative data shed light on the demarcating categories that define, regulate and enforce bars on sexual relations in ancient Hebrew culture. Assuming that, since time immemorial, humans have led communal life, conceivably, groups have always generated rules to demarcate their relations. Boundaries lend a group regulating systems, coherence and identity, shackling personal drives to interrelational imperatives. Accordingly, I start my analysis by quoting from Louis Epsteins monumental work Sex Laws and Customs in Judaism: �There is rarely a race so primitive but it has a code of sex morality’ (Epstein [1948] 1967: 3).
