Free Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture by Daniel Boyarin Page B

dissolved. Literature is one practice among many, but for this as for many past cultures it is virtually the only practice to which we have access. Since no assumption is made of an essential difference between literature and other texts or between textual and other practice, we read what we have as a textual practice, co-reading many different sub-texts in search of access to the discourse of the society in which they were produced. The specific research and critical strategy deployed here is thus cultural poetics, a practice that respects the literariness of literary texts (that is, as texts that are marked by rhetorical complexity and for which that surface formal feature is significant for their interpretation), while attempting at the same time to understand how they function within a larger socio-cultural system of practices.
Because, as I have said, the culture of the Talmud is a formation for which we have virtually no evidence "outside the texts," we must substitute some other kinds of correlations for the powerful and exciting ones of document to literary text. There would seem to be no point of entry from
25. The major implication of this shift is that it no longer implies that a particular theory (beyond the axioms and postulates I have outlined above) is at stake here, but rather proposes a new disciplinary formation that grows out of those axioms and postulates. Practitioners of cultural poetics are not thereby committed to the philosophical doctrines of historicism, implying radical irreducible difference between historical periods. Some practitioners of cultural poetics may be historicists, while others may wish to question historicism as a doctrine. As a more generic name, as well, it separates the research paradigm from the specific work of the Berkeley school (whatever that meansGreenblatt's work is, after all, thoroughly different in style and theme from that of the late Joel Fineman, for example). This work has been largely concerned with the early modern period, where projects of domination and colonialization, as well as power-relations between genders, were particularly live issues. "New historicism" has also been characterized by a particular Foucauldian theoretical base, in which power is read as the dominating feature of nearly all cultural work. Broadening the paradigm to "cultural poetics" thus allows for that school to be conceived of as one tributary to a river of research in which theoretical issues are at question, debatable and debated.

 
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The difference between the Babylonians and the Palestinians seems to be predicated on a cultural division in the understanding of male sexuality. While the Palestinians seem to have adhered to the general Hellenistic notion that sexuality was something that a human being could do without, and all that was required was self-control, sophrosyne, the Babylonians apparently did not think so (Gafni 1989, 2021). 11 This suggestion is supported strongly by the continuation of the text itself, which proceeds with a story that clarifies both the intensity of the Babylonian allegiance to early marriage and the reason for it:
Rav Huna [the Babylonian] said, "Anyone who is twenty years old and not married, all of his days are sinful." Can you really think that he is sinful? Rather I will say, "All of his days are in thoughts of sin." Rava said, and thus also the One of the House of Rabbi Ishmael teaches, ''Until the twentieth year, the Holiness, May it be blessed, waits for the man; when will he marry. When he is twenty and unmarried, He says, 'Blast his bones!'" Rav Hisda said, "I am preferable to my fellows, for I married at sixteen and if I had married at fourteen, I could have said to the Satan, 'An arrow in your eyes!'" 12
The discourse of these two major Babylonian Rabbis suggests strongly that the primary motivation (or, at least, one primary motivation) for marriage as