Her name was Tzafnat, daughter of Peniel, and her father had been high priest of Israel. She had grown up in the holiest household in the land, with the aroma of incense in her clothes and the gold of the breastplate flashing across the breakfast table.
Then Jerusalem fell. In 70 CE the Temple burned, the priests were killed or scattered, and their daughters were herded onto the slave markets of the Roman world, where women of noble blood fetched the highest price.
Tzafnat was put up for sale. The auctioneer began stripping her in the public square so that buyers could inspect the merchandise. Piece by piece, her clothing came off. When he reached for the last garment, she tore it off herself before he could touch her and stood fully exposed before the crowd. Then she spoke.
Behold, she said, there is no more beautiful woman in the world than I am.
It is an unbearable line, and the rabbis preserved it precisely because it is unbearable. They wanted the horror on the page. She was not boasting. She was taking the last scrap of power left to her, the power of naming what was being done, out of the auctioneer's mouth and into her own. The crowd had come to gaze; she made them witnesses.
This brief, devastating story in The Exempla of the Rabbis (Gaster, 1924) is a relic of what the destruction of the Second Temple actually did to families. The high priest's daughter ended up naked in a Roman market, and she refused to let the world look at her in silence.