Send Her Back to Herself

An Israelite soldier comes home from war with a woman.

He saw her among the prisoners. He wanted her. The Torah allows him to bring her into his house. But first he must wait.

The woman cuts her hair, tends her nails, and removes the clothes she wore when she was captured. She sits in his house for a month and cries for her father and mother. Only after that month may he marry her.

Picture the scene. The war is over for him. For her, it has followed her inside. Her family may be dead. Her city may be gone. She is living under the roof of the man who helped destroy her world. Every day he hears her crying.

The Israelite that brought her home moves quickly: וְרָאִיתָ, וְחָשַׁקְתָּ, וְלָקַחְתָּ. You see. You desire. You take. Three verbs.

Then time slows down.

That change in speed may be the beginning of the Torah’s wisdom. Desire is fast. It creates a picture and moves toward it. Grief is slow. It reveals a history the picture left out.

The rabbis are unsentimental about the soldier’s desire. The Talmud says, לֹא דִּבְּרָה תּוֹרָה אֶלָּא כְּנֶגֶד יֵצֶר הָרָע: the Torah speaks here in the face of the evil inclination. The Torah meets a man at the point where power and appetite have fused. It begins separating them. (Kiddushin 21b)

The law gives the woman a month. It also gives the man a month in which he cannot pretend that beauty is the whole truth about his captive.

A person first appears within someone else’s concern: attractive, threatening, useful, disappointing, promising. The concern opens a view and closes one at the same time. The beautiful stranger appears as beauty. The employee appears as competence. The favored child appears as promise. The difficult child appears as trouble. Each judgment may describe something real. Each can also become a world in which the other person is reduced to an object.

The captive woman enters the soldier’s house as אֵשֶׁת יְפַת־תֹּאַר, a woman beautiful of form. For a month, the law makes that description fail. The beautiful woman becomes a crying daughter. The object of desire becomes a person with a past.

The captive woman is only the first law in a sequence.

The next law concerns a man with two wives, one loved and one hated. The hated wife has borne his firstborn son. The father prefers the loved wife and wants to give her son the rights of the firstborn. The Torah forbids it.

Then comes the law of the stubborn and rebellious son.

War. Marriage. Inheritance. Rebellion.

The subjects seem to jump. But the rabbis read them as a narrative arc. Midrash Tanchuma says that one transgression drags another behind it. The man takes the beautiful captive. In time he hates her. The divided marriage damages the house. The damage reaches the child. (Midrash Tanchuma, Ki Teitzei 1)

A household begins with a person seen through desire. The first glance becomes a structure. One woman is loved. Another is hated. One child carries the father’s preference. Another carries his rejection.

This pattern is painfully familiar. Favoritism seldom remains a private feeling. The favored child may receive opportunity and also the burden of carrying a parent’s unrealized life. The passed-over child learns the shape of absence. Brothers and sisters begin reading one another through the parent’s eyes. A mood becomes an inheritance system.

The Torah has seen this family before.

Sarah and Rebecca are described as beautiful. Rachel is the first woman given the exact phrase יְפַת־תֹּאַר, beautiful of form, the very phrase Deuteronomy later gives the captive woman.

Rachel is also the beloved wife. Leah is the hated wife. Leah bears Jacob’s firstborn, Reuven. Jacob gives his deepest preference to Rachel’s son Yosef.

The sequence in Deuteronomy now begins to sound like a compressed retelling of Jacob’s house: Rachel is יְפַת־תֹּאַר; the captive is אֵשֶׁת יְפַת־תֹּאַר. Rachel is loved; Leah is hated. Leah’s son Reuben is the firstborn. Jacob elevates Joseph, the son of the loved wife, over him.

Near the end of his life, Jacob adopts Joseph’s two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, and gives them standing alongside Reuven and Shimon. Joseph receives the structural equivalent of a double portion. Deuteronomy later says that the father may not make the loved wife’s son firstborn over the hated wife’s actual firstborn. (Genesis 48:5–6; Deuteronomy 21:15–17)

The Torah learns law from a founding family’s pain.

Joseph inherits more than his mother’s place in Jacob’s heart. Genesis describes mother and son with the same words: Rachel: יְפַת־תֹּאַר וִיפַת מַרְאֶה. Joseph: יְפֵה־תֹאַר וִיפֵה מַרְאֶה.

Beautiful of form and beautiful of appearance.

The phrase appears just before Potiphar’s wife lifts her eyes toward Joseph and says, “Lie with me.” Joseph, the beautiful son made vulnerable by his brothers, becomes the object of another person’s gaze inside a foreign house. (Genesis 39:6–7)

Rachel’s beauty drew Jacob’s preference. Joseph inherits the beauty and the preference. The preference helps turn his brothers against him. They strip him, sell him, and send him into captivity. The beautiful beloved person becomes a captive.

Rachel and Leah know what it means to be treated as property. Before fleeing Laban, they say of their father: הֲלוֹא נָכְרִיּוֹת נֶחְשַׁבְנוּ לוֹ כִּי מְכָרָנוּ וַיֹּאכַל גַּם־אָכוֹל אֶת־כַּסְפֵּנוּ

Laban considers them foreign women; he sold them; he consumed their money. (

Deuteronomy says of the captive: וּמָכֹר לֹא־תִמְכְּרֶנָּה בַּכָּסֶף. You may never sell her for money.

The warrior is in danger of becoming Laban. Laban sees women through the economy of his house. They are labor, marriage arrangements, wealth, extensions of paternal control. Their personhood appears only when they break the arrangement and leave.

Rachel carries one more thing out of her father’s house. She steals his teraphim. Laban calls them אֱלֹהָי, “my gods.” She leaves the father and carries the father’s gods with her. (Genesis 31:19, 30, 34–35)

This makes an old rabbinic disagreement about the captive woman feel newly alive. The Torah says the captiv woman must cry for “her father and her mother” for a month. Rabbi Eliezer says the words mean her actual parents. But Rabbi Akiva says they mean her former gods. (Yevamot 48b) Here, we see that Rachel, the beautiful captive woman brings the gods with her.

The two readings disclose two losses. The woman has lost people. She has also lost a world of stories through which life had made sense. The past has become hidden cargo.

The captive’s month gives that hidden cargo time to appear. Her grief is allowed to occupy the victor’s home. The house can no longer imagine itself as the simple destination of a successful conquest. It has become the place where two destroyed worlds meet.

If Rachel gives Deuteronomy the language of beauty, love, and preference, Dinah gives it a darker sequence of verbs.

Shechem sees Dinah. He takes her. He lies with her and afflicts her. His father later says that Shechem’s soul חָשְׁקָה, desires her. Shechem wants her as a wife because he חָפֵץ, desires her. (Genesis 34:1–4, 8, 19)

Deuteronomy addresses the warrior with the same sequence of verbs. You see the woman. You desire, וְחָשַׁקְתָּ, her. You take her as a wife. Later you may cease to desire, לֹא חָפַצְתָּ, her. The law ends by saying that you afflicted, עִנִּיתָהּ, her.

The resemblance suggests the Torah imagining the Israelite victor in Shechem’s grammatical place. That is a severe, but realistic, way for a sacred text to address its own people. Victory has not purified the victor’s sight. Covenant has not made appetite trustworthy. An Israelite can stand inside a permitted war and still become an aggressor.

Bereishit Rabbah applies the captive woman’s protection to Hagar, intensifying the point that one can be on the morally right side and still behave in a way that is morally flawed.

Sarah gives Hagar to Abraham for the family’s reproductive need. Hagar moves from servant to surrogate and then back toward servitude. Sarah afflicts her:

The midrash hears Deuteronomy answer Sarah: לֹא תִתְעַמֵּר בָּהּ תַּחַת אֲשֶׁר עִנִּיתָהּ—you may not enslave her, because you afflicted her. Then it asks: after causing her pain, shall the household also enslave her? (Bereishit Rabbah 45:6)

If the soldier later loses interest in the woman, the Torah says: וְשִׁלַּחְתָּהּ לְנַפְשָׁהּ.

Translations usually say, “You shall let her go free.” The Hebrew gives the sending a destination: לְנַפְשָׁהּ, to her own person.

Send her to herself.

That phrase becomes sharper in the house of David. The rabbis say that Tamar was the daughter of a beautiful captive woman. (Sanhedrin 21a) Her brother Amnon becomes consumed by desire for her. He arranges to be alone with her. She begs him, אַל־תְּעַנֵּנִי, do not afflict me, again the same words used in our parasha, and used by the Torah to describe the treatment of Dinah and Hagar. He overpowers her and וַיְעַנֶּהָ, afflicts her.

Then his desire collapses. The text says that the hatred with which he hated her became greater than the love with which he had loved her.

Amnon calls a servant and says: שִׁלְחוּ־נָא אֶת־זֹאת מֵעָלַי הַחוּצָה. Send this one away from me. Outside. (2 Samuel 13:11–19)

He no longer says her name. He no longer calls her sister. She has become זֹאת, “this one,” an intolerable remainder of his own act.

The two sendings point in opposite directions.

Amnon: מֵעָלַי. Away from me.

Devarim: לְנַפְשָׁהּ. Toward herself.

Amnon’s world has room for Tamar while she serves his desire. When the desire disappears, she becomes an obstruction. Her presence shows him what he has done. He sends away the evidence.

The Torah’s command begins where that world breaks. Amnon’s loss of interest reveals the objectification and self-centeredness that the law in Ki Teitzei seeks to mitigate.

The month of mourning and the final release belong to the same wisdom. Both interrupt the man’s tendency to encounter the captive only through himself. Her crying reveals a past that did not begin with him. Her freedom opens a future that does not end with him.

Rachel, Leah, Joseph, Laban, Dinah, Hagar, and Tamar gather around one short law. Each story shows a way another person can become trapped inside a powerful person’s vision: beauty, preference, usefulness, debt, desire, shame. Deuteronomy remembers those stories and turns their memory into restraint. It cannot change human nature, but by inserting a long pause in the structure of desire, it forces self-reflection and interrupts a pattern of egotism.

At first the soldier saw a beautiful woman among the captives. The law asks a question: who is there when the beauty is no longer useful to him?

Read psychologically, we can relate to the dynamic of the beautiful captive in the following way - we are captive when we are used by others used to satisfy their needs, rather than beheld and acknowledged as subjects in our own right.

The removal of our own beauty might serve not just to stunt or test the desire of our narcissistic captors, but also to challenge our own attachment to that beauty, to correct our belief that we must keep up appearances to merit love. Then, even in the case where we are rejected - no longer seen as useful - we can become free.

וְשִׁלַּחְתָּהּ לְנַפְשָׁהּ