The Ancient Near East

Historians will probably never know when or under what circumstances it first occurred to some ancient king or priest that law would furnish a useful tool for the control of sexual conduct.

Hammurabi’s laws identified and prescribed punishments for a number of sexual offences. The Code provided, for example, that a married woman caught in adultery should be drowned: she and her lover were to be bound to each other and thrown into the water to perish together. Hammurabi also prescribed death by drowning for women who remarried while their husbands were pris­oners of war or who refused to have sexual intercourse with their husbands.^[15] Although Hammurabis laws assumed that men normally had only one official wife at a time, the Babylonians did not define marriage as an exclusive sexual relationship. The laws envisioned stable sexual relationships between free men and concubines in addition to their wives. Concubinage in Babylonia was ap­parently permitted as an exception to the normal rule of monogamy when a wife failed to produce children or suffered from an incurable disease. The Babylonian concubine, who was normally a free woman, served as a supple­mental, second-class wife.²

The slightly later laws of Esnunna, like Hammurabis Code, provided the death penalty for women who committed adultery; unlike Hammurabi’s laws, however, Esnunnas law prohibited husbands from pardoning their adulterous wives. Esnunna did not treat extramarital sexual adventures by men as crimes, but the man who abandoned his wife forefeited his property and was con­demned to exile. The property that the exile lost was assigned to the use of his separated spouse and the couple’s children.³

Assyrian law, in contrast to Babylonian practice, treated adultery and other sex offenses as delicts, or private wrongs, for which the husband or father of the woman was entitled to receive compensation from the seducer.

Early Near Eastern religions also played important roles in shaping attitudes toward sex in antiquity. The peoples of the ancient Near East perceived a con­nection between sex and the sublime. They frequently described religious fulfillment in terms of the human experience of sexual ecstasy and accordingly worshipped great goddesses who were the apotheosis of their sexual ideals. Among the most influential of the ancient sex cults was that of the Phoenician deities Ishtar and Astarte. These androgynous goddesses personified the sexual experiences and yearnings of their devotees, who sometimes referred to Astarte as the Queen of Heaven. Her temples were served by sacred prostitutes, who provided worshippers with opportunities to experience the divine power of the goddess through the ministry of sexual pleasure. Incongruous as this may ap­pear to modern Christian sensibilities, the cult of Ishtar-Astarte offered its de­votees an opportunity to celebrate the joys of physical love and its power to transfigure sensual pleasure into something beyond the humdrum and the commonplace.⁵

Ancient Egyptian society was also concerned with sexual behavior and sought

²Louis M. Epstein, Marriage Laws in the Bible and the Talmud, Harvard Semitic Studies, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), pp. 34-35, 40, 45; Hammurabi, Code § 144-47, ed. Driver and Miles, 2:57.

³Kornfcld, “L’adultere.” p. 100.

⁴Kornfeld, “L’adultere,” pp.

⁵Herodotus, Historiae libri IX 1.105, 131. See also Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, Archaic and Classical, trans. John Raffan (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), ρρ. 152-53. to bring it under control. Egyptian marriage was apparently monogamous, at least under the Old and Middle Kingdoms: the Egyptian language at that pe­riod had no terms for “concubine” or “harem,” which suggests that these con­cepts were not a familiar part of life.⁶ Adultery, however, was a familiar and troublesome problem. Some Egyptian texts referred to adultery as “the great crime” and prescribed death as the penalty for both parties—Uba-aner, for ex­ample, in Khafras Tale had his unfaithful wife burned alive, while her lover was thrown to the crocodiles.⁷ Other cases suggest that adultery, while considered serious, was not usually viewed as a capital crime, but rather was treated as a lesser offense involving the abuse of authority. In practice, adultery by Egyp­tian women most commonly resulted in repudiation and divorce, not in execu­tion. Divorce was clearly quite common throughout ancient Egyptian history.⁸ Prostitution was not a crime in ancient Egypt and, to judge from the racy tales that Herodotus related to Greek audiences, Egyptian prostitutes were highly regarded in the ancient Mediterranean world. Some of them apparently ac­quired wealth as well as fame from their trade.” One of Herodotus’s spicy stories depicts the great pyramid-builder, Cheops, as forcing his own daughter into prostitution in order to raise money to pay for his architectural extravagances.¹⁰