existing marriage of conversion of husband or wife to Christianity. The rabbis held the current contemptuous opinion of women; Hillel is quoted as saying, "More women, more witchcrafts."[1] Woman, according to the current belief, was not saved through the Law, but through child-bearing.[2] Philo gives as the reason why the Essenes did not marry that "a wife is a selfish creature, immoderately smitten with jealousy, terrible at shaking to their foundations the natural habits of a man, and bringing him under power by continual beguilements. For as she practices fair false speeches and other kinds of hypocrisy, as it were upon the stage, when she has succeeded in alluring eyes and ears, like cheated servants, she brings cajolery to bear upon the sovereign mind. Moreover, if there are children she begins to be puffed up with pride and license of tongue, and all the things which before she speciously offered in a disguised manner in irony, she now summons forth with a more daring confidence, and shamelessly forces her way into actions, every one of which is hostile to communion. For the man who is bound under spells of wife or children, being made anxious by the bond of nature, is no longer the same person toward others, but is entirely changed, having become, without being aware of it, a slave instead of a free man."[3]
The status of women in Egypt was so free that the Greeks ridiculed the Egyptians as woman-ridden; Herodotus[4] says that the women went to market and the men wove at home. Descent was through women and was marked by the mother's name, which the child bore, while the tie of father and child was slight.[5] In the tombs of the old kingdom (before 2000 B.C.) the wife and
