Marriage and Metaphor

Book excerpt: Beginning with the opening of Mishnah Kiddushin, 'A woman is acquired (in marriage)...by money, by document, or by sexual intercourse, ' and using other examples of commercial language applied to marriage across the rabbinic canon, this work demonstrates that rabbis used information from the realm of property and commercial transactions to structure their understanding and reasoning about marriage and gender relations through a metaphor of women as ownable and marriage as a purchase or acquisition