She Scooped the Spilled Oil Into Her Hair and He Ran to Court

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He Pulled the Cloth Off Her Head

It took him half a second. She was walking through the market with a basket on her hip and he came past her and took hold of the cloth on her head and pulled, and it came away in his hand, and her hair was out in the open street in front of everybody who had been haggling over fish a moment earlier.

She got her hands up too late. That is the thing about it. There is no version of that moment where the hands get up in time.

People stopped. Somebody laughed. She stood in the middle of it with her hair down and her basket still on her hip, and the man who had done it walked on, because it had cost him nothing yet.

Rabbi Akiva Set the Fine

It cost him in front of the court.

Rabbi Akiva heard the case and fined him, and the fine was heavy. Not damages for a wound, because there was no wound. Damages for shame, which the court in the Land of Israel priced like any other loss, on the reasoning that what a man takes from a woman in a street full of witnesses is a real thing and has a real number.

The man paid and went out furious. In his own account of it he had touched a piece of cloth. He had not hit her. He had not taken anything of hers home. He told anyone who would listen that a court had put a price on a joke.

A Friend With a Plan and a Jar of Oil

Somebody who liked him had an idea.

"You are paying for her modesty," the friend said. "So prove she does not have any. Go to her door with a jar of good oil and break it on her step. She will come out. Watch what she does with her hair."

Olive oil was money. A full jar of it was a week of somebody's work standing in one clay container, and the man went and bought one and carried it across town, which means he thought about this the whole way there.

The Jar Broke on Her Doorstep

He smashed it on the threshold and stepped back.

She heard it from inside and came out and found a week's wages running off the stone and going into the dirt, spreading, thinning, already picking up grit at the edges. She went down on her knees with her hands out.

There was nothing to catch it in. She scooped what she could off the stone with her palms, and there was nowhere to put it, so she wiped her hands into her hair, and then went back down for more, and did it again. The covering came off her head somewhere in there. She was not thinking about the covering. She was thinking about the spilled oil.

By the time she had got most of it up her hair was black with grit and heavy with oil and hanging loose down her back, and her hands were slick to the wrist, and she was still on her knees on her own step.

He was standing in the street watching her do it, and he had witnesses with him, because he had brought them. He had wanted her to be seen and he had paid a week's wages to arrange it, and that was the second time he had bought the same thing.

Voluntary and Forced Are Not the Same

He ran to the court almost happy.

"She uncovers herself in her own doorway in front of the neighbors," he said. "For oil. Why am I paying for something she does to herself for the price of a jar?"

Akiva did not take long.

He had watched his own wife Rachel cut off her hair and sell it, in the years when the two of them slept on straw, so that he could stay in the study house and learn to read. He knew precisely what a woman doing something with her own hair looked like, and he knew what it was worth, and he knew it was hers to spend.

"Voluntary and forced are not the same," he said.

She had chosen to lose her covering to save her oil. That choice belonged to her. The man had taken hers in the street to get a laugh, and no clever second staging of the same event could reach back and turn the first one into her idea.

The fine stood. He paid it a second time.