Sunday, October 26, 2008

Delicacies from Yechezkel's Shabbos Table: Female to Male Spousal Abuse - The First Recorded Case

ויאמר האדם האשה אשר נתתה עמדי הוא נתנה לי מן העץ ואכל

And the man said: The woman that you gave to me, she gave me from the tree and I ate.

This is a bit strange because, from what we know, the woman did not give him a piece of the tree but rather from the fruit of the tree. Why does the pasuk imply that she gave him from the tree itself?

Perhaps we can answer that the woman actually did give him a piece of the עץ. The word עץ sometimes means "tree" and sometimes it means "wood". What the pasuk is telling us is that she gave him some wood from the tree and that caused him to eat. How so?

She beat him with the wood until he consented to eat the fruit!

No, I am not making this up; but - I don't feel like divulging my sources (witness protection).

And so we see that domestic violence has been with us since the first day of Creation.

Battered husbands!

When will it end?

2 comments:

Mindy Schaper said...

What a wonderful piece of scholarship. You should keep up at this.

Unknown said...

Scholarship is when something is revealed that wasn't know before and then goes on to explain how we can use the new information to our benefit. The simple statement: "Battered husbands! When will it end?" Does not do this at all.

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