Living with the Law by Oded Zinger

Author:Oded Zinger
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781512823806
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2022-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

I inform your Excellency, our lord, may you (rule) forever, that I am a woman cut off from support (marʾa munqaṭiʿa). I do not have (recourse) except to God’s gate and yours. I have fallen in with a man who is unashamed of the unseemly things spoken about him.116 My father does not enter my (house) for anything because of what happened to him.117 My brother is a young man, bashful and has no tongue.118 I have fallen, truthfully, into great distress.119

The wife bases her plea on the fact that she is a woman cut off from social support whose only recourse is to turn to Samuel. To make this claim she has to explain that while she has a father, he is of no help because the relationship between them broke down (we are not told why). She also has a young brother but, being bashful, he is of little support in the legal dispute. In fact, later in the petition the said brother was sent to receive some (probably dowry) items from the husband. We are then told that “the judge told (the brother): ‘give him until Sunday, that is best.’ Sunday came, and nothing was done in my case except postponements, and ‘go to the house of the judge.’ But nothing.120 (The judge) makes copious speeches to me, as if I was the one who did something forbidden!” If in the beginning of the chapter we saw how supportive male kin could tip the scales in favor of a wife, here we see how the lack of effective support was detrimental to a woman’s chances of success. With an ineffective male relative supporting her, she encountered only postponements and delays. Like many of the cases encountered in Chapter 2, we see judges making copious speeches to the wife rather than to the sinful husband. The woman concludes her petition by repeating the theme of having no supporter except God and Samuel and that attention should be given to the plight of the munqaṭiʿ:

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