1.1 The Initial Contact Between Joseph and Mary's Family

A critical feature of the first interaction was who would commence the negotiation. Although ancient Judean sources present an ideal where the father of the groom or the groom approached the bride's father (e. g. Josephus, C. Ap. 2.200; Tob 7.8–9; Jub 30.7; Deut 22.16), the reality was no doubt much messier.Footnote ¹⁷ If both fathers were alive, one of them would probably approach the other about a possible match. If his father was dead, the potential groom would probably contact the father of the potential bride, or any other senior male relative, or her mother if all such males were dead and she was in her mother's care (or any such a person might approach the potential groom). As Joseph is the only male from his family mentioned, and as it is he who will make the decision about divorcing Mary, he is the sole male in the frame for initiating marriage discussions. Since Mary and Joseph have not come together (and are not living in the same house: see the παραλαβɛῖν in vv. 20 and 24), she must still be living with her family, although whether she is under the authority of her father or another relative is unspecified. The Matthean audience probably imagined Joseph approaching the relative responsible for making the vital decision as to whom Mary should marry. Adopting Michael Satlow's recent argument that ancient Judeans were often older when they married than is commonly assumed,Footnote ¹⁸ we should probably understand an ancient audience envisaging Joseph as being in his late twenties and Mary in her mid to late teens at the time of the betrothal.

Such an audience would probably also have expected Joseph to seek and receive an assurance during the meeting that Mary was a virgin. That sine qua non settled, the negotiations would have moved to the matter of central importance, namely, the amount and nature of the dowry. During this period a dowry was a payment made by the family of the bride to the groom to be held in trust for the wife with repayment to her if he divorced or predeceased her, such a sum or other assets to be secured against all his property. A dowry made good social sense in the patrilineal culture of the time as a means of protecting the financial interests of daughters, since the property of a deceased person devolved on his or her sons.Footnote ¹⁹ The anthropological literature on dowries and bride-prices and how they differ suggests that dowries were more common in situations of settled agricultural production.Footnote ²⁰ In the Aramaic documents the dowry is called a ketubba (כתבה; as in P.Murabba‘at 21, line 10, and P.Yadin 10, line 5) or φɛρνή, used as a loanword from Greek, as with פרן in P.Yadin 18, line 78 (part of the Aramaic acknowledgement by the groom).

The older institution of bride-price, a payment made by a groom or his family to the father of the bride, called a mohar in Hebrew and Aramaic, is not mentioned in any of the Judean Dead Sea legal papyri.Footnote ²¹ Joseph would have needed to know how much Mary's family would entrust to him for Mary's benefit. The anthropology of dowries suggests that it is an institution that operates in social contexts where families come together in matrimony that are roughly similar in property and status.Footnote ²²

The fact that Mary was already betrothed (μνηστɛυθɛίσης, v. 18) to Joseph, and that he contemplated divorcing her, meant that they had entered into a wedding contract (a ketubba).Footnote ²³ Accordingly, Joseph's discussion with Mary's relative must also have canvassed the form of that contract, in particular, whether it would be in Greek and aligned with Greek law, or in Aramaic and expressing Judean rather than Greek practices. Judean families from the Dead Sea region opted for either form, with the use of Greek (as in P.Yadin 18) probably facilitating the adjudication of any breaches in the governor's court in the Roman province of Arabia (which operated in Greek), although that did not prevent Babatha's wedding contract with her second husband being drafted in Aramaic. Since the dramatic setting of Matt 1.18–25 is Bethlehem in Judea, ruled over by Herod, a client king of the Judeans under the Romans, the Matthean audience would probably have assumed that the wedding contract was drafted in Aramaic and reflected the Aramaic legal tradition of Judea rather than in Greek and reflecting Greek law. This means that the most relevant comparators are the three Aramaic wedding contracts: P.Murabba‘at 20 and 21 and P.Yadin 10. Using these as precedents, we can draft Mary's ketubba.

1.2 Mary's ketubba and its Execution

Here, then, is an imagined text for Mary's ketubba:

The act of executing the wedding document deserves close attention. Matthew's original audience would have been familiar with this process and for modern interpreters with an ethnographic interest it offers the best opportunity for ‘being there’. Since a party or parties (and even witnesses) to a legal deed may have been illiterate, it was probably read out aloud before it was signed.Footnote ²⁴ The Matthean audience, on the basis of personal experience in many cases, would have envisaged a group of people gathering for an important social occasion: the scribe (if, as usually happened, one was employed to draft the deed), Joseph and Mary, and between four and seven witnesses (probably some of Joseph and Mary's relatives or friends). Joseph would have signed, then the scribe, then Mary and lastly witnesses.Footnote ²⁵

Matthew's audience (many of the men among whom would have served as witnesses to wedding contracts themselves) would also have been familiar with the main features of the contract: its date and place of execution; Joseph's statement that he took Mary as his wife according to the law of Moses;Footnote ²⁶ his undertaking to maintain her; his all-important obligation to protect her dowry and to restore it to her if her divorced her, with its amount in silver then becoming public knowledge; the moving promise to redeem her with his property if she were captured;Footnote ²⁷ provisions relating to Mary's predeceasing Joseph and his predeceasing her; a statement that his present and future acquired property were security for her dowry;Footnote ²⁸ and a promise to provide a copy of the ketubba if asked. Would the Matthean audience have understood this to be the first occasion on which Joseph and Mary met? Possibly, although there could have been chaperoned meetings between them earlier.

These details of the execution of the document mean that in any local, especially village, context the fact that the wedding contract had been signed would quickly have become general knowledge. There would probably have been a keen interest in the nature and size of the dowry, since this indicated the wealth of the bride's family and, if (as is likely) the families were roughly equal in status and property, that of the groom's as well. If Joseph had been married previously, village gossip may well have extended to how Mary's family and its wealth, and Mary herself, compared to his first wife and her family. It is not clear if the dowry was entrusted to the husband at the time when the wedding contract was signed, or when the couple began to live together for, as we will now see, on occasion at least (including the case of Joseph and Mary) there was an interval of time between these two events.

1.3 The Period between Betrothal and Commencement of Cohabitation

Matthew 1.18–25 presupposes a temporal gap between the betrothal and Joseph taking Mary into his house. In Luke, too, Mary is engaged to Joseph (1.27) but has not yet had sexual relations with him, suggesting that she has not yet begun living with him, as confirmed in 1.34. Michael Satlow and Lynn Cohick describe such an arrangement as an ‘inchoate marriage’.Footnote ²⁹ In some quarters (especially where the focus is on the Mishnaic and Talmudical picture), a period of time between betrothal and completion of a Judean marriage by the bride moving into the groom's house (or his father's) is regarded as commonplace. Thus Leonie Archer cites a considerable amount of Talmudical evidence for an elaborate betrothal ceremony and a twelve-month betrothal period,Footnote ³⁰ but it is unclear to what extent this later material reflects first- or early second-century ce realities. Nevertheless, the fact that some of the phrases used in the Judean legal papyri appear later in the Mishnah (and are cited in Aramaic not Hebrew)Footnote ³¹ suggests a very conservative legal tradition that provides grounds for caution in distinguishing too sharply between the situation in the first and early second centuries and that of later centuries when the Mishnah and the Talmud were being compiled.

Yet Satlow is sceptical of the evidence for a period between betrothal and completion of the marriage in the Second Temple period, even if this occurred in the biblical period.Footnote ³² He argues that

Nevertheless, he concedes that Matt 1.18–19 constitutes evidence that some Judeans in the first century ce, ‘probably in rural Galilee, were practicing a form of inchoate marriage’.Footnote ³⁴ His attempt to exclude Luke 1.26–38 from the evidence is, however, unsuccessful. Luke was probably writing for a mixed audience of Judeans and non-Judeans, not just for the latter.Footnote ³⁵ Luke is not using the same material that was before Matthew; and the different details in the Lucan account are irrelevant to the point: in Luke we also have Mary engaged to Joseph yet without having had sex with him and that indicates a betrothal period. Further New Testament evidence for a period of time between the wedding contract and cohabitation is found in 2 Cor 11.2, in the period of time Paul presupposes between the betrothal of the bride and her presentation.

Another objection to Satlow's position is that it is incorrect to assert that Judeans followed Greek legal practices. Sometimes they did and sometimes they did not. The usual Roman approach to law in the provinces – to recognise other legal systems in Roman courts – was a policy of ‘legal pluralism’ as first explained by Ludwig Mitteis in 1891.Footnote ³⁶ For example, after the replacement of the Kingdom of Nabatea with the Roman province of Arabia in 106 ce, legal documents from towns within the new province, such as Maoza (from which some of the documents mentioned in this article originated), reflected a play of Roman, Greek, Nabatean and Judean law, as Giles Rowling has comprehensively shown.Footnote ³⁷ Often the law followed was that of the language used (and Greek was useful if litigation in Roman courts operating in Greek was likely). That is exactly what we find with the Dead Sea legal papyri. Both P.Murabba‘at 20 and P.Yadin 10 (in Aramaic) are expressed so as to be in accordance with the law of Moses and P.Murabba‘at 21 might have had the same provision, but its lacunose early lines mean we will never know. On the other hand, in P.Yadin 18, even though everyone concerned was Judean, important provisions were expressed so as to be in accordance with Greek custom (line 51).

Perhaps the best solution is to recognise that sometimes there was a gap between betrothal and commencing co-habitation and sometimes not. The wording of P.Murabba‘at 20, for example, implies that the two events occurred on the same day, since the editors reasonably construed ‘and forever’ (ולעלם) at the start of line 4 as having been preceded in the lacunose previous verse by the words ‘and I will feed you and clothe you from this day (מן יומא דנה)’ in a formula known from elsewhere.Footnote ³⁸ Contrariwise, two of the Aramaic marriage contracts from the Dead Sea, P.Murabba‘at 21 and P.Yadin 10, lack such a clause, suggesting that the bride entered the house of the groom on the day the wedding contract was signed. Moreover, the stated obligation to restore the dowry on divorce (P.Murabba‘at 21, lines 9–10), or generally to be liable to the wife for it (P.Yadin 10, lines 6–9), can be construed as having a future operation, namely, from the day when the dowry is delivered. An interval between the wedding contract and the provision of the dowry is also implied in one of the Judean documents from Herakleopolis considered below (P.Polit.Jud. 4). The picture in the Matthean Gospel is consistent with these provisions (as in Mary's ketubba above), since the evangelist clearly expected his audience to recognise a Judean practice of an act of betrothal – expressed in the execution of a wedding contract – that was followed by a period before the couple began to live together.

1.4 The Honour and Shame Dimensions of Marriage

Such a temporal gap between betrothal and cohabitation bore directly on the honour and shame dimensions of Judean marriage. Interpreters now realise how central honour and shame were in the social dynamics of the ancient world, largely in consequence of Bruce Malina's pioneering application of Mediterranean ethnography to the New Testament.Footnote ³⁹ Honour was a form of social credit rating that was applicable both to individuals and groups. It could be ascribed to one because of his or her family, or acquired in various forms of social interaction. Its opposite was shame (although how honour and shame were related varied depending on local context).Footnote ⁴⁰ Ethnographers who worked in the Mediterranean region in the late twentieth century recognised that sexual relations between men and women represented a particularly fraught area for the intersection of honour and shame. Men strove to protect the honour of themselves and their family by shielding their women from any sexual contact other than within a marriage agreed between two families, especially by gender separation and ensuring their daughters were virgins when married.Footnote ⁴¹ Thus Maureen Giovannini observed, ‘Consistent with this pattern is male control over female sexuality since men are usually responsible for protecting the chastity of their female relatives.’Footnote ⁴²

Satlow has drawn our attention to a significant body of evidence ‘that Jews in antiquity shared with their non-Jewish neighbors a value of honor and shame’.Footnote ⁴³ A wedding was an occasion for maintaining the respective honour of the two families. Certainly both sides would have sought to avoid any shame in arranging the match. A minimum condition for that was a rough equality of wealth and social status (as tends to be present in social contexts featuring a dowry as part of the marriage arrangements, as noted above). Another factor relevant to marriages in Judean society but not mentioned in Matthew was the type of ‘family stocks’ involved in the marriage: priestly, Levitic, Israelite, impaired priestly, proselyte, freedman etc.Footnote ⁴⁴

But what if things went wrong? One instructive source is Sir 42.9–11, which forms part of a body of instruction ‘on shame’ (αἰσχύνη) occupying 41.16–42.14 and demonstrates how a father's honour was tied to his daughter's behaviour:

In addition, Sirach 26 describes the good wife and the bad, bringing out at one point that the husband's honour is at issue: ‘A woman honouring (τιμῶσα) her own husband shall seem wise to everyone, but she who dishonours (ἀτιμάζουσα) him in her pride shall be known as impious by all’ (26.26).

Satlow aptly sums up the situation in the following way:

We conclude this section of the argument, therefore, with the happy event of the betrothal of Joseph and Mary, which would usually continue during the period before the marriage was consummated. Yet there was always the concern that the wife would bring dishonour on her father and on the groom. In Mary's case such anxiety would soon crystallise.

2.1 Joseph's Response

The problem posed by her pregnancy to Mary and Joseph and their respective families was the major damage it would cause to everyone's honour, especially that of Joseph, Mary and Mary's father (if he was still alive). Matthew describes Joseph's response to the discovery that Mary was pregnant in a statement dense with cultural resonances (v. 19):

We come now to the all-important question of the righteousness of Joseph. Some commentators read the καί after δίκαιος adversatively: ‘being a just man but not wanting …’, or concessively: ‘although a just man, he did not wish …’ This approach drives a wedge between the righteousness of Joseph and his decision not to disgrace Mary: if he had been acting righteously, he would have not have thought to divorce her secretly. Thus Daniel Harrington argued that being δίκαιος meant obeying the law, in particular Deut 22.23–4, which prescribes that a betrothed virgin who lies with a man in the city and the man are to be stoned.Footnote ⁵⁶ R. T. France, similarly, suggested that ‘[a]s a law-abiding man Joseph would be expected to repudiate his errant fiancée publicly in a trial for adultery’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Raymond Brown's discussion is to similar effect.Footnote ⁵⁸

These critics convey the idea that by describing Joseph as δίκαιος Matthew characterised him as someone who normally acted strictly in accordance with the law of Moses. Yet this would align Joseph's righteousness with that of the scribes and Pharisees, whose righteousness the Matthean Jesus later tells his followers they must exceed in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven (5.20). How likely is it that Matthew would thus represent Joseph as failing to embody the righteousness his own stepson would later advocate? A more likely hypothesis is that Joseph, the first person mentioned in this Gospel as righteous, acts towards Mary in a way that is prototypical of the righteousness that Jesus valorises (e.g. Matt 5.20; 6.33; 21.32; 25.37, 46). We will now test this hypothesis against the textual data, which involves interpreting καί in 1.19 in its usual meaning of ‘and’. This task requires considering the full array of courses of action open to Joseph that he rejects and then focusing on the one he adopts.

W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison claim that Joseph had only two options: accusing his betrothed before a public authority and asking for a trial in line with Deut 22.23–7 or drawing up a bill of divorce.Footnote ⁵⁹ But they are mistaken in so limiting Joseph's choices. The options available to Joseph with regard to Mary's pregnancy fall into three categories:

1. (a) Public action against her, judicial or extra-judicial, that would have led to her being shamed or even killed. This can be construed as what a Judean who was δίκαιος in the Torah-focused sense (suggested by Harrington, France and Brown) would have favoured;

2. (b) Private action against her, in the form of a secret divorce;

   and

3. (c) Taking no action against her at all, the option Joseph eventually chose.

Let us now consider these in turn.