Things Yoram knows: Did Sara Aminu shave her legs?

Noah has a few questions about body hair: From what period did women remove hair from unnecessary places? Did the women shave their legs during the time of the Bible? and how? Were there other periods (besides now) when men also lost their hair?

"Unnecessary places" are, of course, culturally dependent: it is difficult to know which hair is considered "unnecessary" in the eyes of cultures that have not left written evidence of their ideal of beauty (prehistoric hunter-gatherers), but the hairiness of some of the heroines of the Bible can be surmised based on what is known about their habits The snatching of the neighbors. Although the Bible skimps on cosmetic descriptions, it is likely that the heroines of our people did not differ much from their neighbors the virgin girls in their grooming habits.

It is unlikely that Chava, who was not exposed to the dictates of fashion and the only man around her had no alternatives, spent her magical time in paradise shaving her armpits. Even Ruth the Moabite, the poor wandering widow, was probably no more "groomed" than the homeless women nowadays. But what about Sara Imano, Delilah, Batsheva or Queen Esther?

The smooth mothers

Let's start with our lesson Sarah, are there any clues to these details in the biblical story? The answer is positive. When Abraham and Sarah go down to the Egyptians, the Egyptians marvel at her beauty and she is taken to Pharaoh:

"And it came to pass, when Abram came from Egypt; And the Egyptians saw the woman, for she was very beautiful.    And Pharaoh's ministers saw her, and praised her to Pharaoh; And the woman was taken, the house of Pharaoh" (Genesis XNUMX)

 It must be assumed, therefore, that Sarah conformed to the standard of grooming that was accepted in Egypt.

  The beauty ideal of the Egyptians was plucked hair, Egyptian women from the upper classes plucked the hair of the legs, armpits and pubic hair for aesthetic reasons and mainly to get rid of lice (lice and lice eggs preserved on the mummified bodies as well as dense combs testify to the severity of the problem in Pharaonic Egypt). For this purpose, use a razor made of bronze or flint or tweezers. Paintings document that the less they pluck the body hair of their mistresses, it is reasonable to assume that Sarah, who had an "Egyptian slave, and her name was Hagar" (Genesis 20), received similar treatment from her. In addition to shaving, the Egyptians waxed their body hair. At the beginning of the 155th century, writings containing diverse medical and cosmetic knowledge from the first half of the second millennium BC were uncovered. These texts: the Hearst papyri also list recipes for plucking preparations. Those who want to return to their roots (literally) are invited to try the following procedure (from Hirst Papyrus XNUMX):

Materials:

•  boiled bird bones,
•  lard
• Sycamore milk
•  resin
• A block of salt

Heat all the ingredients, apply the resulting paste on the skin, let it cool and then remove the material with the hair.

The other mothers: Rivkah, Leah and Rachel grew up and were brought up in Mesopotamia (Aram Naharim) and there the women's hair was plucked. An inscription from Mesopotamia tells that the king demanded that the women brought to him be clean and smooth (without "unnecessary" hair). This ideal of beauty was inherited from the kingdoms of Assyria and Babylon to Persia (where hair plucking was part of the girl's rites of passage to her status as a man's wife). The preparations of Esther and the rest of the candidates to inherit Vashti are described in the Book of Esther, Chapter XNUMX "And when the turn of a young woman and a young woman came to King Ahasuerus, the end of her life as a woman was twelve months - for indeed They will fill, the days of their marriage: six months, with the oil of myrrh, and six months with incense , and in the Tamruki of the women" according to the Gemara in tractate Shabbat "myrrh oil" is a means of removing hair "with myrrh oil... and why is a knife (applied) with it? That sings the hair and the delicacy of the flesh", Esther therefore joins the list of plucked biblical heroines.

And who kept the natural look? If the Midrash (second translation of the Book of Esther) is to be believed, it was the Queen of Sheba who came to visit King Solomon who in his wisdom found a way to peek under her dress.

"When the king (Solomon) heard that Sheba (Queen of Sheba) had come, he got up and went and sat in a glass house. A thought came to her heart and said that the king was sitting in the water. She exposed her legs to pass and he found hair on her legs. He said to her: Beautify the beauty of women and comb the hair of a man. And the hair is an ornament to a man and a disgrace to a woman"
Even if the author of the Midrash did not see with his own eyes the hair on the legs of the Queen of Sheba, he testifies to the customary attitude of his time to body hair in women and men.

 It turns out that the identification of feminism with hairy legs is not a new invention: Sages already attributed body hair to someone who was a queen in her own right (Queen of Sheba) and a smooth body to someone who owed her position to the men in her life (Esther).

He went so far in adoring the smooth female body as Raba, whose ideal of beauty is mentioned in the Gemara in the Sanhedrin treatise

"Derash Raba Mai Dakhtiv (what is written) "And you will go out there among the nations in your beauty" that the daughters of Israel have neither the gate of the armpit nor the pubic area"

 The Talmudic approach sees the removal of hair as a distinctly feminine characteristic, "said Rabbi Yochanan, who shaves the armpit and the pubic hair is damaged because (Deuteronomy XNUMX) a man shall not wear a woman's dress" (Gemara Tractate Nazir), meaning that according to Rabbi Yochanan, it is forbidden for a man to remove armpit hair or hair The pubis because this is the way of women and a man must not resemble a woman in his appearance.

And really, what about the men in the Bible? Although body hair is considered "masculine" and we tend to think of the heroes of the Bible as macho, but the nation of Israel is named after a man whose only physical characteristic reported in the scriptures is the absence of hair "And Jacob said to Rebekah his mother: Behold, my brother Esau is a hairy man, And I am a single man" (Genesis XNUMX). Our father Jacob (Israel) did not need plucking or laser treatments, but did men in the Bible shave themselves like they are groomed today?

It is probable that Egyptian preparations for removing hair of the kind I have described were used not only by Sarah our mother but also by Moshe Rabbino. The smooth beauty ideal of the Egyptians was egalitarian: men from the aristocracy and the priesthood also shaved their body hair and it is unlikely that Moses, who grew up with Pharaoh's daughter, was the only hairy person in the palace. A hint of this fashion of the Egyptian aristocracy can be found in the purification process of the Levites for temple worship described in the book in the desert "And they shall shave all their flesh and wash their clothes and purify themselves"  

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