In the Tal­mud, women are most­ly iden­ti­fied as ​“moth­er of” or ​“wife of,” but not by name. For cen­turies, women were for­bid­den to even study the sacred work. In this unique book, Gila Fine dis­cuss­es six women, all named, whose sto­ries are told in the Tal­mud. She uses lit­er­ary analy­sis to give us a con­tem­po­rary look at the neg­a­tive arche­types usu­al­ly ascribed to these women.

The result is an entire­ly new per­spec­tive not only on the six women, but also on the rab­bis who wrote and edit­ed their sto­ries and on the his­tor­i­cal con­text as a whole. Thus, a sin­gle sur­face read­ing does not suf­fice. For a deep­er, fuller under­stand­ing, each sto­ry must be reread ​“with fresh eyes” so that it can be approached ​“from a new crit­i­cal direc­tion,” as Fine writes, quot­ing poet Adri­enne Rich.

This is typ­i­cal of Fine. She employs what­ev­er sources illu­mi­nate her sub­ject, whether they are tra­di­tion­al or sec­u­lar, ancient or con­tem­po­rary. The Tal­mud sto­ries are not revised by Fine, per se, but revi­sioned, under­stood anew. 

Fine restruc­tures each nar­ra­tive as a three- or four-act dra­ma, cross­ing the bound­aries of lit­er­ary gen­res. In her analy­ses, rab­binic fig­ures inter­sect with mod­ern lit­er­ary char­ac­ters, Jew­ish stud­ies meets con­tem­po­rary lit­er­ary analy­sis, and psy­chol­o­gy explains motivations. 

Like many works of lit­er­a­ture through­out the ages, rab­binic lit­er­a­ture includes a num­ber of seduc­tion sto­ries in which the woman is the temptress, and the man, her vic­tim. One fig­ure Fine exam­ines in her study is ​“the great femme fatale of the Tal­mud — Homa.” A sin­gle woman, three times a wid­ow, Homa was seen as dan­ger­ous to the men she encoun­tered; even the most pious, it was thought, could be tempt­ed by a beau­ti­ful woman. To pro­tect the soci­ety, Homa was even­tu­al­ly expelled from the town. 

This is, Fine main­tains, a case of pro­jec­tion: Homa embod­ies flaws that the peo­ple dare not acknowl­edge in them­selves. Yet, as Fine notes, the rab­bis are not with­out sym­pa­thy for her. Her sto­ry has not been edit­ed out of the text but is part of the ​“ques­tion­ing, cri­tiquing, even direct­ly con­tra­dict­ing” of a halachic posi­tion that appears in the Talmud.

What can be learned from this tale, accord­ing to Fine, is that ​“we must be espe­cial­ly care­ful, espe­cial­ly com­pas­sion­ate, toward the Oth­ers in our midst.” It’s a time­less mes­sage from an ancient text.