The Rabbis, Gender, and the Yetzer Hara: The Origins and Development of the Evil Inclination
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Yetzer hara, commonly translated as the ‘evil inclination,’ is a key concept in rabbinic discourse concerning the human propensity to sin. This paper traces the origins of the concept and its subsequent development in rabbinic literature, in which it is intrinsically entwined with gender. Firstly, only men are considered to possess the self-restraint necessary to subdue the evil inclination. In contrast, rabbinic texts characterize women as lacking the self-restraint necessary to overcome the yetzer hara, particularly in the arena of sexuality. Secondly, rabbinic texts represent Torah study as the antidote to yetzer hara. The male culture of Torah study in late antiquity precluded women from this important tool deemed necessary to master yetzer hara. Additionally, the female form embodies the seductive powers of yetzer hara to lead astray and constitutes a threat to masculine self-restraint. The gendering of relations to yetzer hara has significant implications for gender hierarchy, legitimizing the regulation of women’s social behaviour.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".