Ki Teitzei: Virginity

In ancient Israel, a bride who is not divorced or widowed¹ was supposed be a virgin at her wedding. What if the groom accused her the next morning of not being a virgin? Or what if an unmarried virgin was raped?

This week’s Torah portion, Ki Teitzei (Deuteronomy/Devarim 21:10-25:19), provides rules for dealing with these situations.

A spiteful groom

If a man takes a wife and comes into her, and then he hates her, and he places a charge of wantonness on her, speaking out against her [giving her] a bad name, and says: “This woman I married, I approached her and I did not find betulim in her!”— (Deuteronomy 22:13-14)

betulim (בְּתוּלִים) = virginity.

In this example, the man claims publicly that his new bride did not bleed when he had intercourse with her on their wedding night; therefore she must have wantonly lost her virginity to someone else after they were betrothed but before the wedding night. A woman was considered betrothed once the marriage contract was written and the bride-price was paid to her father. After that, if she had sex with anyone else it counted as adultery.

If the husband’s accusation is accepted as true, the bride is guilty of a capital offense, and the bride’s parents are shamed, since she was supposed to be under their control while she was living under their roof.

Then the father of the na-arah, and her mother, take and bring out the betulim of the young woman to the elders of the town at its gate. (Deuteronomy 22:15)

Na-arah (נַעֲרָה orנַעֲרָ) = a female human during the years between puberty and marriage. (Na-arah overlaps, but is not the same as “teenage girl”; girls in ancient Israel were often married in their early teens.)

What do her parents bring out to the elders? Commentators from the Talmud (5^th century C.E.) to Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (19^th century) declared that the groom would bring witnesses to the town gate to support his claim that the bride was not a virgin. Her parents would “take and bring” witnesses who would disprove the testimony of the groom’s witnesses. After all, the previous Torah portion, Shoftim, states that an accusation must be corroborated by at least two witnesses before a death sentence can be decreed.²

But how could witnesses observe either the consummation of the marriage, or any previous illicit sex act? Both acts would be done in private. Furthermore, the example in this week’s Torah portion refers to a different form of evidence. The bride’s father says to the elders in the gate:

“But these are the betulim of my daughter!” And he will spread out the simlah before the elders of the town. (Deuteronomy 22:17)

simlah (שִׂמְלָה) = garment, wrapper, cloth.

It seems obvious that the bride’s father takes the nightgown or sheet that was stained with blood when the bride’s hymen broke, and brings it from the groom’s bedroom out to the town gate as evidence. Yet Hirsch claimed:

“The witnesses called by the girl’s father confront the witnesses cited by the man, and then the whole matter ius spread out for all to see, like a new garment without folds of creases.”³

It was hard for commentators to abandon a traditional explanation, especially one that reinforced a favorite rabbinic principle like the requirement for two witnesses. Modern commentators have advanced the straightforward explanation that the bride’s father must exhibit the blood stain.⁴

After seeing the evidence, the portion Ki Teitzei continues, the elders judging the case must decree three penalties for the slandering husband. The first is physical punishment.

Then the elders of that town will take the man and discipline him. (Deuteronomy 22:18)

Although Deuteronomy does not specify the type of discipline, the Talmud says the man is flogged.⁵

The second penalty for slandering the bride is monetary.

And they will fine him a hundred of silver, and they will give it to the father of the na-arah, because he gave a bad name to a betulah of Israel— (Deuteronomy 22:19)

betulah (בְּתוּלָה) = female virgin. (From the same root as betulim.)

The portion Ki Teizei mentions later that a disappointed husband could get rid of his wife at any time by writing a bill of divorce.⁶ But since the husband who hates his new bride does not do this, a divorce probably required a payment even when Deuteronomy was written, sometime during the 7^th to 5^th centuries B.C.E. (From Talmudic times to the present, a marriage document (ketubah) includes the statement that in the event of a divorce, the husband will give the wife a large sum of money.)

The slandering husband probably hoped to get rid of his bride for free. The requirement that he pay a large fine frustrates his purpose, and deters future slandering husbands. According to Hirsch, the fine also rewards the bride’s father, since:

“…the daughter’s chastity, manifested by her innocence, is first and foremost the merit of the father, the merit of the home that understood how to inculcate and instill in his daughter the pearl of Jewish national wealth, the Jewish chastity of woman.”⁷

Hirsch’s commentary demonstrates more than two thousand years after Deuteronomy was written, 19^th-century European men still assumed not only that virginity was crucial in a daughter (but not in a son), and that the father was responsible for the behavior of his wife and daughters, whom he had to train so they would not do something foolish.

The third penalty prohibits the slandering man from ever divorcing his wife.

—and she will remain his wife; he is not able to send her away all his days. (Deuteronomy 22:19)

This certainly punishes the husband, who must live with a woman he hates for the rest of his life. But what about the wife, who faces a lifetime under the roof of a man who hates her? The writers of Deuteronomy considered this clause a protection for her, since she would at least have a home and the social status of a wife—the highest status available to a woman at that time, better than being an unmarried extra in her father’s house, a concubine, a slave, or a prostitute.

But if this thing was true—betulim was not found for the na-arah —then they will bring the na-arah to the entrance of her father’s house, and the men of the town will stone her with stones, and she will die. For she did a disgraceful thing in Israel, to be a harlot in her father’s house. And you will burn out the evil from your midst! (Deuteronomy 22:21)

No allowance is made for an accidental hymen breakage; the bride is deemed guilty. The husband who hates her is free of any penalty, the young woman is killed painfully, her parents are publicly shamed, and the whole kingdom of Israel is disgraced. Hirsch explained:

“The immorality of the young wife incriminates the upbringing she received in her parents’ home, and disgraces the entire nation … The enormity of this offense and depravity lies in the fact that a girl, still in the legal custody of her parents, still living under her parents’ supervision, committed knowingly an act of adultery!”⁸

A virgin who is not betrothed

What if a young woman loses her virginity before her father has betrothed her to anyone? The portion Ki Teitzei also considers this situation.

If a man finds a na-arah betulah who is not betrothed, and he seizes her and lies down with her, and they are found, then the man who lay with her will give to the father of the a na-arah fifty of silver, and she will be his as a wife. And since he overpowered her, he is not allowed to send her away, all his days. (Deuteronomy 22:28-29)

If there is no betrothal, there is no adultery, and there is no death penalty for either party. But a single adolescent girl is still someone’s property: she belongs to her father. (If her father is deceased, she belongs to the male relative who is her guardian.) The man who deflowers her is damaging another man’s property. In ancient Israel, a daughter was an investment which a father could cash in by marrying her off, thereby acquiring both a bride-price and an alliance with the groom’s family. A non-virgin had a lower market value.

Since the man seizes the virgin and overpowers her; it is a rape.⁹ The rapist’s payment counts as marriage, and she is never allowed to return to her father’s house, because the man is never allowed to divorce her. Whereas the penalty for raping a betrothed virgin is death, the penalty for raping an unbetrothed virgin is a bride-price and marriage. The young woman who was raped must live with her rapist until he dies, just like the young woman whose husband slandered her. Her father does not have the option of rejecting the rapist as his son-in-law. As in the first example in the portion Ki Teitzei, the woman at least has a home and the social status of wife. For the writers of Deuteronomy, that was enough.

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The laws about virginity in this week’s Torah portion are rooted in the same two principles: that it is evil for a female to have sex with anyone except her eventual husband, and that women are controlled by their men—first their fathers, then their husbands. These two assumptions are not found in all cultures, but they have been the norm in western civilization through the 19^th century, and continue to be the norm in many Muslim countries.

An anthropological explanation I have often encountered is that a man objected to raising another man’s child as his own, unless he had already chosen to adopt the child. Therefore he did not want to marry a woman who was already pregnant, and he did not want his wife to commit adultery. And therefore men, who made the rules, decided that brides must be virgins and adultery is a sin.

I do not find this argument convincing. The examples in Ki Teitzei do not say anything about children. And today, after five decades of very reliable birth control methods, virginity before marriage and adultery after marriage are still hot topics.

(Virginity until the wedding remains a goal for fundamentalist Christians and orthodox Jews, but not for the majority of Americans. There are more experiments with non-monogamous and open marriages today, but monogamy without adultery remains the goal for the majority. The biggest change is that in 21st century America, husbands as well as wives are expected to limit their sex to one another, and gay and lesbian couples face the same decisions regarding sexual fidelity.)

If the strict laws in the bible regarding female chastity (virginity before the wedding night and sexual fidelity after) were not the result of concerns about fatherhood, then what motivated them? I suspect it was a question of purity. An emission of semen was ritually impure, and required a period of cleansing before one could enter the sacred space of the temple or sanctuary courtyard. The same applied to menstrual blood and other icky discharges from the body.¹⁰

Ritual impurity easily became associated with moral impurity. And as long as men dominated a society, there was a double standard, and the rules for a female to count as morally good were stricter than the rules for a male.

During my lifetime, the rights and responsibilities of men and women have become more and more equal. I consider this an unqualified moral good. But the work is not finished. I hope that someday the double standard will completely disappear, and no one will say “Boys will be boys!” again; and that despite testosterone surges, everyone will master self-control and follow the same rules about both keeping marriage vows and respecting the rights of others.

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1. A woman could remarry after being divorced or widowed; the only caveat was that she could not marry the high priest, who was only allowed to marry a virgin (see Leviticus 21:13-14).
2. Deuteronomy 17:5-6. See my post: Shoftim: To Do Justice.
3. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, The Hirsch Chumash: Sefer Devarim, translated by Daniel Haberman, Feldheim Publishers, Jerusalem, 2009, p. 525.
4. E.g. Everett Fox and Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz.
5. Talmud Yerushalmi Ketubot 3:1, Talmud Bavli Makkot 4b, Talmud Bavli Sanhedrin 71b.
6. Deuteronomy 24:1.
7. Hirsch, pp. 527-528.
8. Hirsch, p. 529.
9. Unlike a superficially similar example in Exodus 22:15-16, in which a man seduces a virgin.
10. Leviticus 15:1-32.