How Much Freedom Did Rebecca Have?
Originally published on Gimme Some Torah by Rabbi Eli Garfinkel on November 4, 2026.
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
וַיֹּאמֶר אֵלָיו הָעֶבֶד אוּלַי לֹא־תֹאבֶה הָאִשָּׁה לָלֶכֶת אַחֲרַי אֶל־הָאָרֶץ הַזֹּאת הֶהָשֵׁב אָשִׁיב אֶת־בִּנְךָ אֶל־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר־יָצָאתָ מִשָּׁם׃
And the servant said to him, “What if the woman does not consent to follow me to this land, shall I then take your son back to the land from which you came?”
Abraham sends his servant, probably his majordomo Eliezer, to Ḥaran for the purpose of finding Isaac a wife. The servant wisely alerts Abraham to a possible problem, asking what he should do if the woman does not consent to the proposed marriage.
There are cultures based on guilt and there are cultures based on shame. A guilt culture, which treasures individual freedom and responsibility, values the independence of a woman to choose her husband freely.
By way of contrast, a shame culture values the clan’s social norms as a form of inviolable law. In such a culture, women typically must marry the man selected for them, often a first cousin. A man whose daughter marries against his will is considered to be dishonored, hence the phenomenon of honor killings that supposedly repair the injury done to the family’s reputation.
You can see a global map of guilt, shame, and fear societies here.
Rabbi Asher Wassertheil (bio), also known as the Birkat Asher, expresses surprise that a woman who lived so long ago would have the freedom to choose her husband:
The very raising of the possibility of independent will on the part of a young woman at that time seems strange to me, given the lifestyle we attribute to that era. Is there perhaps a big mistake here and the status of women at that time was not so submissive at all?
R. Wassertheil’s question does make me wonder. We tend to think that any notion of women’s rights is a modern concept. But is that really true? Were women perhaps more free in some ancient cultures than we assume?
It turns out that, in some places, the answer is a qualified yes. While it would be a vast exaggeration to say that the women of Sparta were free in the modern sense, they had more freedom than other Greek women. Likewise, women in Mesopotamia had the right to purchase land and engage in commerce.
I could, however, find evidence of only two ancient cultures that valued a woman’s consent to marry. One was ancient Egypt and the other was the ancient Hindu practice of Gandharva marriage. While it is possible that ancient Israelite women gave consent for their marriages, as seems to be the case in Gen. 24:5, cherry picking a biblical verse does not constitute proof.
By the time of the Talmud, and perhaps earlier, Jewish marriages conducted without the woman’s consent were considered invalid (see B. Kiddushin 2b). It is eye-opening that Jewish women living in the Roman Empire had more marital freedom than contemporary women who live in shame-based communities.
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