Джеймс Миченер - The Source

When he was gone she whispered to herself, “God of Moses, what must I do?” and like many women who face this ultimate indignity she made a fatally wrong decision. Alone and bleeding on the floor she was so mortified by what had happened that she did not immediately cry out. During the rape she had tried to do so; she had done all that a woman could possibly do to defend herself, but her mouth had been smothered so that the cries she did utter were not heard. Now, when others were within hearing distance, she remained mute in terror and shame, and the hours passed, confirming her silence. A cold rain fell on the Galilee and winter was at hand.

That night Aaron reported to the evening meal with scratches across his face, but glowing with an animal contentment. Satisfied that the silence of his sister-in-law proved her enjoyment of the morning tussle he smiled at her with open longing, and she was distraught when she realized the interpretation he was placing on her muted behavior. His daughter asked what had scratched his face, and he replied, leering at Shimrith, “A kitten with an olive face.”

The next two days were marked with terror. Outside, the storm continued, with dark clouds riding in from the sea so that Ptolemais was hidden in darkness, while inside the house of the brothers Aaron stalked his sister-in-law as primitive hunters in this region had once stalked the lioness. Finally he trapped her near the kitchen, where with a grandiose gesture he opened his robe, revealing himself naked and hungry for her, confident that she too had been plotting for this moment, and he had so convinced himself that Shimrith loved him that he ignored her anguished retreat. Moving toward her he offered to repeat the game, but this time she was prepared. Producing from her dress a brass knife she stood ready to stab him if he touched her, and for a moment he was halted by this surprising development.

Then, with bewildering speed, he threw aside his robe completely, and with a deft feint toward her head caught her off guard, and with one hand wrested away the knife and with the other silenced her mouth before she could scream. It could have been a game, Aaron thought. It could have been that she had grabbed the weapon only so that she could be disarmed and overpowered, as if that were her pleasure, heightening her wild responses to the sexual act. Responding to her strange sense of play he struck her across the chin, and before she fainted undressed her and threw her upon the floor.

Too late, too late she ran sobbing from her violated home to seek refuge with the rabbi, but when she entered his disheveled room and found him nesting behind a clutter of scrolls she had a premonition that she had come to the wrong man for help. Sitting with his pale hands folded beneath his beard he listened as she gave her account of Aaron’s behavior, and before he was willing to comment either yea or nay he rummaged among his scrolls until he found one to his liking, and after having consulted it, asked simply, “So Aaron raped you?”

“Yes.”

“How many times?”

“Twice.”

“The first time?”

“Two days ago.”

“And you didn’t cry out?”

“I couldn’t.”

“And later you told no one?”

“I was too ashamed.”

The rabbi tugged at his beard and asked a most significant question. “Where did the attack take place?”

“At our house?”

“By the synagogue?”

“Yes.”

The rabbi sat back and studied the distraught woman with what he thought was understanding. It was an old story, familiar to all judges, of the woman who had half eagerly, half hesitantly encouraged her lover, only to react with shame and humiliation some days after the experience. The Torah was filled with accounts of wild sexual behavior, for the patriarchs were men of lust and their women were worse, tricking and seducing and procuring. It had taken nearly a score of centuries to subdue the wilder impulses of the Jews, and rabbis had spent much effort trying to formulate logical codes, but of one thing they were certain: even the most circumspect woman could trap herself into seducing a man one day and charging him with rape the next. The essential test had always been, even in the Torah: “Had she cried out to protect herself at the first opportunity?” The Jewish moralists knew that when a woman did not make this normal and primitive response any subsequent behavior must be viewed with suspicion. The present case of Shimrith, wife of Judah, merely presented new proof of this old truism.

“An evil thing has been committed,” the fumbling rabbi granted, “but it is not the evil that you charge against your brother-in-law. It is the evil you did in luring a man and then charging him with rape.”

“Rabbi!” The stunned woman let her shoulders slump as if she had been clubbed across the back.

“Yes,” the legalistic man continued, fumbling among his scrolls for a passage to fortify his judgment. “I have the words right here some place,” and finally he found what he wanted, the determinative passage in Deuteronomy: if “a man find her in the city and lie with her; then ye shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city, and ye shall stone them with stones that they die; the damsel, because she cried not, being in the city …” Putting aside the scroll he said gravely, “The Torah continues that if the supposed rape took place in the country, the woman shall not be stoned to death, for there perhaps she cried and no one heard. By your own confession, Shimrith, I could condemn you to death. For you enticed your brother’s husband in the city, and had you cried out even I could have heard you in the synagogue next door. You seduced your brother-in-law twice and now come complaining. This time I shall let you go, but keep away from Aaron, for whom you have conceived this lustful desire. And when your husband Judah returns from Ptolemais try to be a good wife to him.”

Having delivered his judgment the rabbi rose amid the dusty jumble of his life, but Shimrith could not. She was stunned and unable to move. “If I go home,” she said, “Aaron will force me again.”

This posed a new problem and the rabbi sat down, searching his folios until he found a section of the Talmud covering this eventuality, which he summarized for the supplicant: “If a woman be faced with rape, against her virtue and against her will, it were better that she should die.” Smiling at her in a kind of greenish compassion he said gently, “You had the knife, didn’t you? You knew the law, didn’t you? Confess, Shimrith. You did tempt him, didn’t you? You were gratified, in a womanly sort of way?” He hesitated, then asked, “Was it perhaps because you knew that Aaron could have children and Judah not?”

She drew back from the ugly man, realizing at last how gravely she had compromised herself by having remained silent. She had an excuse. Silence had been forced upon her by physical choking and by mental confusion, but that it was silence she had to admit. At the door of the rabbi’s cluttered room she looked back with dismay. She had come to him with perhaps the gravest problem a woman could present to a spiritual guide and had received no consoling response. She fled the place, not appreciating the fact that the pettifogging rabbi had given her the sagest advice on this matter of rape that the world had so far evolved, and one that would never be superseded. If women did not entice timid men by every subtle trick used by birds and beasts, how would the human race be perpetuated? And if men did not force their way upon timid women, within the rules of decency, how would the hesitant female ever find a partner? In this animal-like swamp of human passion the most careful rules had to be drawn, and once drawn, observed. Rape had been scientifically described in the Talmud, and no woman who had entertained her husband’s brother once, waited two days, entertained him again, and had then decided to cry “Violation” could claim protection under that careful description.