Rewriting‘Arakhin: Women and Tannaitic Vows of Valuation

Abstract

The Levitical laws of 'arakhin name only males as those who can actively donate the monetary value of another person to the sanctuary or temple. In contrast, tannaitic texts about 'arakhin explicitly name females among those who can donate the monetary value of another to the temple. However, this legislation of females as valuers should not be attributed to a rabbinic desire to ameliorate the status of women, but rather should be viewed as part of the larger rabbinic project of rewriting Scripture. In this case, tannaitic literature recategorizes 'arakhin with votive legislation instead of sanctuary/temple legislation. Close attention to gender enables us to notice the tannaitic rewriting of 'arakhin and thus investigate the rabbinic reconfiguration of its biblical inheritance, not only for the ways in which rabbinic texts rewrite biblical law concerning gender but also for a richer understanding of the scholastic process itself.Although destroyed more than a century before the Mishnah's redaction, the temple and its ritual retained a central place in rabbinic thought and imagination. Almost the entirety of the mishnaic order Kodashim is dedicated to temple ritual, as are a number of tractates in other orders.1 As recent scholarship has convincingly demonstrated, although rabbinic writing on the temple may preserve some kernel of a historical record, its depictions often reflect rabbinic imaginations of temple ritual rather than any historical account of "events as they occurred."2 Approaching the study of gender through the lens of the temple necessitates a similar consideration: mentions of gender in conjunction with the temple likely teach more about rabbinic assumptions about gender than those of the Second Temple period itself.3 This article aims to extend our understanding of the process of I would like to thank Jonathan Pomeranz for inviting me to present some of these ideas at the Yale Ancient Judaism Workshop in 2012, and the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the Taube Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford University, for sponsoring a Summer Collaboratory in 2015 where I developed these ideas further. I am also grateful to