The Babylonian Talmud in Selection: Nashim (Women): Betro...

This is an edited selection from the Babylonian Talmud, compiled by Leo Auerbach in 1944, presenting Mishnaic law alongside Gemara (rabbinic commentary and debate) from the classical Jewish legal tradition. The excerpts address the legal mechanics of marriage, slavery (Hebrew, Canaanite, and female), property acquisition, and family obligations, laying out precise conditions under which people, animals, and goods change hands or status. A recurring concern is the asymmetry of legal agency by gender and status: women are acquired rather than self-betrothing, fathers hold authority over daughters' marriage contracts, and the conditions freeing male versus female slaves differ meaningfully. The section on a father's obligations to his son — circumcision, Torah education, arranging marriage, teaching a trade, and possibly swimming — includes the striking aphorism that a father who fails to teach his son a trade "teaches him to rob." Debate over the proper age for marriage is notably vivid and earthy, with rabbis arguing that delaying marriage invites sinful desire and one declaring he would have told Satan to go blind had he married at fourteen. The closing passages on honoring parents use a gentile (Dama ben Nethinah) as the exemplary model of filial piety, a rhetorically pointed choice that subordinates ethnic identity to moral conduct.

The Babylonian Talmud in Selection: Nashim (Women): Betro...

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