A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism, Third Century BCE to Seventh Century CE, First Edition. Edited by Naomi Koltun-Fromm and Gwynn Kessler. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Introduction Sexualities and /licit relationships in late ancient Jewish literatures 1 appear as a series of principles culled from the Hebrew Bible and usually evaluated positively with respect to the order of Creation. Namely, that sexuality is an accepted component of human reality that determines the subordination of women to men due to the female sexual appetite described in Genesis 3: 16 (Ilan 1995, 122ff). These literatures conform to heteronorma- tivity through specific legal, cultic, and cultural presuppositions but offer different regula- tions of human sexual behavior. The Hebrew Bible provides a large set of rules for sexual behavior conduct. The primarily heteronormative nature of this text covers most private and public sexual conduct due to a number of social‐legal presuppositions: the designa- tion of an adult male as the principal legal subject, the inflection of most of the biblical laws in the gendered masculine form (probably as an imitation of Akkadian law collec- tions; see Dohrmann, Chapter 17), and the major concern for the legal consequence of intercourse (legitimate or illegitimate lineage and heirs). The various late ancient Jewish texts select and emphasize specific aspects of scriptural legislation, according to their own theological agendas. Pseudepigraphic texts tend to emphasize moral issues and manifest a generally pessimistic view of sexuality, often blam- ing external sources for sexual misconduct among humans. The Community of Qumran shared this same moralistic attitude but concerned itself with issues of ritual purity in order to protect the holy community they formed in the desert. Finally, the tannaitic (early rab- binic) literature recasts the whole biblical legislation in rigorous juridical terms, creating and developing a corpus of rabbinic literature and rabbinic legislation in which sex, sexual- ity, and sexual behavior forms one integral part. In the present context, sexuality – or, Sexualities and Il/licit Relationships in Late Ancient Jewish Literatures Federico Dal Bo CHAPTER NINETEEN 0004546296.INDD 307 12/4/2019 7:31:51 PM UNCORRECTED PROOFS