The following is about 2 different Jewish practices in 2 different locations in ancient times.
While the ideal age at marriage for both men and women was the teens, men tended to marry later. In Palestine, men married at around thirty to women who were ten or fifteen years younger, while in Babylonia, the expectation was that men would marry at around twenty to women in their teens. Great emphasis was placed on a woman’s beauty, and certain complex strategies for arranging marriages by the couples themselves are assumed, including taking advantage of proscriptions concerning rape. (Although one must note that such proscriptions, requiring the accused rapist to marry the victim,
