Dressing Judeans and Christians in Antiquity

Kristi Upson-Saia, Carly Daniel-Hughes, Alicia J. Batten

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317147961
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The past two decades have witnessed a proliferation of scholarship on dress in the ancient world. These recent studies have established the extent to which Greece and Rome were vestimentary cultures, and they have demonstrated the critical role dress played in communicating individuals' identities, status, and authority. Despite this emerging interest in ancient dress, little work has been done to understand religious aspects and uses of dress. This volume aims to fill this gap by examining a diverse range of religious sources, including literature, art, performance, coinage, economic markets, and memories. Employing theoretical frames from a range of disciplines, contributors to the volume demonstrate how dress developed as a topos within Judean and Christian rhetoric, symbolism, and performance from the first century BCE to the fifth century CE. Specifically, they demonstrate how religious meanings were entangled with other social logics, revealing the many layers of meaning attached to ancient dress, as well as the extent to which dress was implicated in numerous domains of ancient religious life.

PART 1
Dress and the Social Body

Chapter 1
What to Wear: Women’s Adornment and Judean Identity in the Third Century Mishnah¹

Naftali S. Cohn

Introduction

For the early third-century rabbis who created the legal text known as the Mishnah, there was more than one way to understand the function and import of women’s adornment. Most often the mishnaic rabbis considered makeup, jewelry, and other adornments as simply a part of what a woman donned in her everyday life. At times, though, they saw adornment as having a certain power: it could be used by a woman to attract the sexual attention of a man, or, even outside of her sexuality, she could employ it to express and negotiate her place within the social world.

Adornment, in the rabbinic view, had larger connotations as well. Wearing various types of ornaments was not only a practical way of acting and of interacting with others, but a means of expressing Judean identity.² The Mishnah’s laws and narratives make female adornment subject to a nuanced set of rules regarding how and when a woman may or may not adorn herself. This was a key part of the mishnaic project as a whole—to determine in minute detail how Judeans ought to act, under a wide variety of circumstances, in accordance with the traditional, biblically based way of life. Whatever the specific practical function ornamentation played in a woman’s life, her acts of self-adornment and her interactions influenced by her ornamentation were to be framed by the schema of traditional law that the rabbis developed in the Mishnah. Thus when a woman adorned or refrained from adorning herself in conformity with the Mishnah’s laws, she signaled her adherence to the traditional way of life and expressed that she was a Judean.³

This connection between the acts of the individual woman and her Judean culture and society is particularly strong because, as Mary Douglas showed nearly five decades ago, there is a cross-cultural phenomenon in which the individual body and its boundaries are associated on a metaphoric level with the body and boundaries of the social group. According to Douglas, it is necessary to “see in the body a symbol of society.”⁴ In the Mishnah, the regulated adornment and display of the female body was as much about the larger Judean social body as it was about individual Judean women. Adorning in a uniquely Judean way linked individual women to the larger group, to the people as a whole.⁵

Regulating the adornment of the female body, for the rabbis, also had a wider significance in that it hinted at their more encompassing goal of determining how the entire social body of Judeans (the whole people of Israel) should act in accordance with the biblically based Judean way of life. According to the Mishnah itself, rabbis were a relatively small group within the complex social landscape of Roman Palestine and the majority of Judeans did not follow rabbinic teachings. Other sub-groups, which likely intersected and overlapped in complicated ways, and which may have included the influential leaders of towns, followers of Jesus, Samaritans, Judeans who embraced Roman culture to a greater extent, and perhaps others, likely had their own unique visions of how to define Judeanness and how to practice the traditional Judean way of life. Even though the rabbis were not particularly powerful or influential, they still saw the relationship between themselves and the entire Judean people as one of instruction. They pictured themselves primarily as legal authorities to whom Judeans would turn for guidance on how to practice the traditional way of life.⁶ Thus when a woman followed the laws of adornment as the rabbis developed them, she displayed her Judean identity and also the centrality of the rabbinic vision in defining what made that identity unique.

Adornment and the Traditional Way of Life: Rabbinic Laws of Sabbath, Festivals, and Marriage

The Mishnah’s laws frequently recognize that wearing various kinds of jewelry, accessories, and makeup was a normal part of a woman’s daily life.⁷ And as with many aspects of the everyday, the rabbinic authors of the Mishnah believed that women’s acts of ornamentation must be framed by traditional law. This can be seen in the Mishnah’s most extensive discussion of the topic, in the sixth chapter of tractate Shabbat, which deals with numerous types of adornments that a woman may have wished to wear when going out of her house on the Sabbath.

The Sabbath is an important context for rules about wearing ornaments because one of the fundamental restrictions on the Sabbath is not to carry any kind of objects out of or into the home or within public space.⁸ Clothing was permitted to be worn, but adornments were ambiguous—were they clothing that could be worn or something extraneous that was being carried? Whether any particular adornment could be worn out of the home on the Sabbath, according to the Mishnah, depended on rabbinic law and legal opinion. In Mishnah Shabbat Chapter 6, the rabbis specify that various ornaments are either: (1) forbidden to be worn out on the Sabbath; (2) permitted to be worn outside; or (3) in a legal gray category, not strictly forbidden but not permitted either. These categories may be somewhat confusing in the abstract, but become clearer when considering the many cases in detail.

Even before spelling out specific laws, the chapter begins with a rhetorical question that highlights the importance of the rules that will follow: “With what [i.e. wearing what] may a woman go out and with what may she not go out [on the Sabbath]?” The question implies that certain objects that are worn are allowed and others are not allowed. There are nuances to observing the Sabbath law and a woman must know these nuances in order to go out of her home on the Sabbath wearing jewelry. With this brief introduction, the Mishnah begins to set out the various cases that fall into the ambiguous category:

A woman should not go out [of the home] with wool threads [or: bands], linen threads [or: bands], or with the strap/ribbon/band that is on her head [in her hair].⁹ … And not with an ornament [totefet; perhaps worn on the forehead] nor with a headdress hanging to the cheeks [sanbutim]—when they are not sewn. And not with a hairnet [qabul] into the public domain. And not with a city of gold. And not with a necklace and rings [nose rings], and a ring that does not have a seal on it. And not with a needle that has no hole. But if she went out [of the home wearing these items], she is not obligated to bring a sin offering [for having transgressed Sabbath law]. (Mishnah Shabbat 6: 1)¹⁰

As noted, this category is betwixt and between the more obvious categories of forbidden and permitted. It classifies items that should not be worn, but do not merit the biblically mandated punishment if they are indeed worn.¹¹ The list is not extensive, but the cases are quite specific: particular types of hair accessories and jewelry that ought not be worn out of the house, but do not incur a punishment if they are worn.

The chapter continues and lays out the next category of things that must not be worn and do merit the biblical punishment (and thus should be treated much more seriously). Again these examples are very specific:

A woman may not go out [of the home] with a needle with a hole in it, a ring which has a seal, a cochlear [spoon-shaped pin for removing snails from their shells; or, snail or spiral shaped ornament], or a bottle or bowl of foliatum [spikenard oil]. And if she went out [of the home wearing these items], she is obligated to bring a sin offering [this is a theoretical punishment, as the Temple had been long destroyed]. These are the words of Rabbi Meir. But the sages exempt her [from the sin offering] in the case of the bottle or bowl of foliatum [treating it like necklaces or rings]. (Mishnah Shabbat 6: 3)

The Mishnah itself provides no rationale for why some items are simply not recommended (or, forbidden but not punishable) and others forbidden outright (and punishable). Whatever the reason, the particular types of adornments listed in this second paragraph are considered most problematic and forbidden.

The third category, those types of adornment permitted outright, once again includes a number of very specific examples, many of which are minor variants on the cases in the first category:

A woman may go out [of the home] with strings/bands made of [human] hair, whether her own or that of her friend, or from an animal. And with an ornament [on the forehead] and a headdress hanging to the cheeks, when they are sewn [as opposed to when they are not sewn, see 6: 1 above]. And with a hairnet and with a wig into the courtyard [as opposed to the public domain above]. And with a spongy substance for the ears, the sandals, or that she prepared for her menstruation. And with pepper and a piece of salt or anything she might place in her mouth, so long as she does not place it there intentionally on the Sabbath. And if it falls out, she should not put it back in. And in the case of an inserted human tooth or gold tooth—Rabbi [Judah the nasi] permits. The sages forbid. […]
Girls may go out [of the home] with threads [or: bands] and even small sticks in their ears. Arab women [namely, Judean women of Arabia] may go out veiled [in an Arabian fashion]. Median women may go out with their cloaks thrown over their shoulders. And these apply to all people, but the sages used actual examples. (Mishnah Shabbat 6: 5–6)

The similarity between several of the cases permitted outright and those at the beginning of the chapter forbidden but not punished begs the question never addressed in the Mishnah of what distinguishes the analogous cases. What, for instance, is the difference between wool or linen hair bands, forbidden in 6: 1, and human hair bands, permitted in 6: 5? What difference does sewing make for head ornaments (6: 1 vs. 6: 5)? Why are these ornaments and not necklaces or rings? Why is a young girl different than a grown woman?

The absence of a rationale keeps the emphasis of the chapter on what is given: an array of three distinct categories and a larger picture of many specific types of ornaments classified within the three-part schema.¹² Similarly, the lack of an explanation as to why a woman is allowed to wear one type of adornment and not another highlights the fundamental obligation itself not to transport objects on the Sabbath. Fulfilling this obligation is what is crucial, and to do so one must have knowledge of the nuanced rules of whether a given ornament falls into one category or another. When a woman wears certain adornments and refrains from wearing others on the Sabbath, her bodily comportment demonstrates her adherence to the obligations of the traditional way of life and it advertises visibly her Judeanness.

For the Mishnah, what is demanded is not merely a generic type of Judeanness that would have been shared by other Judeans more widely, but a rabbinic one. This is highlighted by the uniquely rabbinic nature of the schema developed in the Mishnah that frames a woman’s adornment on the Sabbath. Compared with available earlier Judean texts, including the sections of rules in Jubilees and the Damascus Document, as well as other texts that do not present systematic rules of Sabbath observance, such as the works of Philo, the works of Josephus, and the Gospels, only the Mishnah goes into such detail and classifies specific examples to such an extent.¹³ Further, there are no other texts but rabbinic ones that even mention the ambiguous category central to the chapter, forbidden but not punished if violated. What the Mishnah sets out is very much the rabbinic version of the traditional way of life, highlighted yet further by the legal opinions attributed to named rabbis sprinkled throughout the chapter. To properly fulfill the obligations associated with the traditional way of life and exhibit one’s Judeanness, in the rabbinic view, one had to follow the rabbinic understanding of what defined that traditional way of life and that Judeanness.¹⁴ This, they believed, was what God demanded.

A very similar paradigm of the rabbinic legal framework informing a woman’s everyday practice of adornment can be seen in the Mishnah’s prescriptions for the use of makeup on the Sabbath and festivals. Unlike its treatment of jewelry, hair ribbons, and other worn ornam...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction “What Shall We Wear?”
• Part 1 Dress and the Social Body
• Part 2 Dress and Relationality
• Part 3 Dress and Character Types
• Part 4 Dress and Status Change
• Part 5 Dress, Image, and Discourse
• Part 6 Dress and Material Realities
• Bibliography of Secondary Sources
• Index