The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (2 page)

Nowadays, we have come to associate the Bible with bluenoses and “Bible-thumpers.” We expect Bible readers to be narrow-minded and highly disapproving of the slightest degree of human misconduct, especially in sexual and spiritual matters. But, as we shall soon see, the Bible describes and even seems to encourage a range of human conduct that goes far beyond what is permitted in the Ten Commandments.

I first discovered what is hidden away in the odd cracks and corners of the Holy Scriptures when, many years ago, I resolved to acquaint my young son with the Bible as a work of literature by reading aloud to him at bedtime from Genesis. I chose the New English Bible, with its plainspoken translation of the hoary text, so that my five-year-old would understand what was actually going on in the stories without the impedimenta of the antique words and phrases that give the King James Version such grandeur but sometimes make it hard to follow.

We began In
the beginning
, of course, and we continued through the highly suggestive tale of Eve and the serpent, then the bloody murder of Abel by his brother, Cain. I already knew that Genesis was not exactly Gyrated, but I reassured myself that we would soon reach the tale of Noah and the Ark, an unobjectionable Sunday school story that would distract my son from the more disturbing passages that we had just read. Nothing had prepared me for what we found there, right after the familiar moment when the animals come aboard the ark, two by two.

At the end of the story of Noah, after the flood has subsided and God has signaled his good intentions toward humanity by painting a rainbow across the sky, we came upon a scene that does not find its way into the storybooks or Sunday school lessons: Noah is lying alone in his tent, buck naked and drunk as a sailor on the wine from his own vineyards. One of his sons, Ham, blunders into the tent and finds himself staring at his nude and drunken father.

After
that
scene, so comical and yet so disquieting to any parent mindful of Freud, I read the Bible more slowly, rephrasing certain passages as I went along and omitting others altogether. My son, already media wise at five, soon began to protest. If I paused too long over a troublesome passage, trying to figure out how to tone down or cut the earthier parts, he would sit up in bed and demand indignantly: “What are you leaving out?”

In a sense, his question prompted the book you are now reading. As I read the Bible aloud to my son, I found myself doing exactly what overweening and fearful clerics and translators have done for
centuries—I censored the text to spare my audience the juicy parts. And so my son’s question is answered here: The stories collected in these pages are the ones that I—like so many other shocked Bible readers over the millennia—was tempted to leave out.

The stories that are retold here will come as a surprise to many readers precisely because, over the centuries, they have been suppressed by rabbis, priests, and ministers uncomfortable with the candor of the biblical storytellers about human conduct, sexual or otherwise. At times, the instruments of censorship have been subtle and even devious, and that’s why even regular church- and synagogue-goers may not know that these stories, bold and blunt as they are, can be found in the original text of the Bible.

At certain times and places, some of the more lurid stories in the Bible have been banned outright. For example, the prayer service in Judaism is built around the public reading of the Torah, that is, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, and selected passages from other books of the Hebrew Bible. Since the typical Jewish congregation was (and is) unfamiliar with the ancient Hebrew in which the Bible is written, the text was translated into the languages spoken by the Jewish people outside of the Holy Land. The Torah is read out loud to the congregation, word by word, in a cycle that lasts an entire year and then begins again—but, long ago, the rabbis set down strict rules that were expressly designed to prevent their congregants from hearing or understanding certain passages of the Holy Scriptures.
*

For example, the rabbinical authorities once decreed that the story of the seduction of Jacob’s concubine, Bilhah, by his firstborn son, Reuben (Gen. 35:22), and the frank account of King David’s lust for Bathsheba (2 Sam. 11)—a tale that features voyeurism, seduction, adultery, bastardy, and the murder of a loyal and heroic soldier by vile and cowardly means—were permitted to be read aloud in the synagogue in the original Hebrew but were not to be translated from Hebrew into a language that the congregation was more likely to understand. And some stories—including, for example, the rape of King David’s daughter, Tamar, by her love-crazed half brother (2 Sam. 13)—were so troubling to the rabbis that these stories were not to be read out loud
or
translated out of biblical Hebrew.
¹

Similarly, an English bishop of the eighteenth century named Porteus produced an index to the Bible that was designed to identify exactly which passages the goodly churchman considered to be suitable for the lay reader. A star was used to mark the sayings of Jesus and the approved portions of the Psalms and the Book of Isaiah, and the numerals 1 and 2 were used to designate other approved chapters and verses of the Holy Writ. Any passage of the Bible
not
marked with one of these symbols was considered by Bishop Porteus to be off-limits to the ordinary Bible reader—and he declared nearly half of the Hebrew Bible (and some of the New Testament) to be too hot to handle. Of course, the so-called Porteusian Index, if used in reverse, was an ideal tool for the curious Bible reader seeking out precisely the stories that the bishop sought to ban.
²

Some efforts to bowdlerize the Bible are even more blunt. One enterprising and easily offended woman in late eighteenth-century America was so fearful of letting her children read the Bible that she published a version from which she simply omitted “indecent expressions” that she found in the original text. In fact, she blue-penciled so much “bad language” that she ended up cutting out and throwing away nearly half the text that the rest of the world regards as the Revealed Word of God. Like biblical exegetes of all ages, however, she went on to add so many of her own notes and comments that her edition bulked up to six volumes.
³

Even in antiquity, some sages and scribes were so appalled by what they found in the Bible that they were moved to rewrite the Holy Scriptures and simply leave out the passages that they found awkward or objectionable. Some of these rewritten texts are found in the earliest translations of the Hebrew Bible into Greek or Aramaic, the language of late antiquity that was probably spoken by Jesus. For example, the pious translators who rendered the Bible into Aramaic felt at liberty to tamper with the original text in an effort to explain away the bloody and baffling tale of God’s attempt to stalk and kill Moses (Exod. 4:24–26), and other authors of the ancient world who collected and retold the stories of the Bible simply leave the tale out altogether.
⁴

One rewritten version of a biblical narrative actually found its way into the Bible itself. The First and Second Books of Chronicles, the very last books of the Hebrew Bible, are essentially a sanitized version of the court history of King David that appears in its unexpurgated form in the First and Second Books of Samuel. The author of Samuel is admirably honest about David, sparing no detail of the various sexual excesses and crimes of passion that tainted his reign, but the author of the Chronicles insists on cleaning up David’s reputation by simply cut’ ting the more lascivious stories. The Book of Samuel, for example, devotes considerable attention to the deadly love triangle between David, Bathsheba, and her husband (2 Sam. 11). To judge from the Book of Chronicles, however, none of it ever happened. “See what Chronicles has made out of David!” exclaimed Julius Wellhausen, an early and important German biblical scholar who allows us to understand that the
real
authors of the Bible were ordinary human beings who were perfectly willing to engage in a cover-up.
⁵

One of the more curious approaches to cleaning up the Bible was adopted by the Masoretes, a succession of rabbinical scholars who sought to preserve an authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible starting as early as the fifth century CE. Among the helpful notations added to the so-called Masoretic Text are a series of cautions that distinguish between “What is written”
(Kethib)
and “What is said”
(Qere)
—that is,
the rabbis identified certain words that were supposed to be read aloud differently than they were actually written in the text.

For example, the Book of Deuteronomy includes a long list of curses that will befall the Israelites if they do not obey the commandments of the Lord. When we read the curse that appears in Deuteronomy 28:30 (NEB)—“A woman will be pledged to you, but another shall ravish her”—the biblical text plainly uses the Hebrew word that indicates sexual intercourse, but the Masoretes instruct us to pronounce the Hebrew word for “recline” in place of the word for “ravish” when reading the text out loud.

“Passages written with unclean expressions,” the rabbis of “hoary antiquity” decreed, “are changed to more seemly readings.”
⁶

Some passages of the Bible are bawdier than we suspect because idiomatic expressions in the text are translated literally in order to conceal their real meaning. The best example is found in the familiar story of Ruth, where the young widow’s mother-in-law sends her to the threshing-floor of a wealthy landowner named Boaz. “And it shall be, when he lieth down,” says the wily mother-in-law, “thou shalt go in, and uncover his feet, and lay thee down; and he will tell thee what thou shalt do” (Ruth 3:4). The scene is a bit baffling—why, after all, is she uncovering his
feet?
—until we discover what the translators have failed to tell us: the word “feet” (or “legs”) in biblical Hebrew is sometimes a euphemism for the male sexual organ.
⁷
What Naomi is telling Ruth to do to Boaz, we realize now, is to expose his genitalia while he sleeps—and see what happens when he wakes up: “[H]e will tell thee what thou shalt do.”

What actually happens between Boaz and Ruth is obscured by yet another untranslated euphemism. Boaz wakes up to find his genitals exposed and lovely young Ruth beside him. “Who art thou?” he asks. “I am Ruth thy handmaid,” she replies, “spread therefore thy skirt over thy handmaid” (Ruth 3:9). But, once again, the translator neglects to tell us that “spreading one’s skirt” is a biblical euphemism for sexual intercourse: “For a man to spread his ‘skirt’ over a woman,” cracks Bible scholar Marvin H. Pope, “meant more than merely preventing a chill.”
⁸

Another favorite trick of self-appointed censors is the use of
translations that are misleading or intentionally wrong. For example, the Book of Joshua includes a Bible-era cloak-and-dagger story about two spies who are sent into the land of Canaan in advance of the invading army of Israel to scout out the enemy defenses (Josh. 1:1–19). The spies are sheltered by a Canaanite woman named Rahab whom the original text plainly identifies as a harlot, not once but several times. Indeed, the Hebrew words can be read to suggest that the spies are availing themselves of Rahab’s professional services when they are interrupted by an enemy patrol.
⁹
Yet some Sunday school teachers prefer to tell their impressionable young charges that the kindly and courageous Rahab is an “innkeeper,” and Bible scholarship has tried to validate the little white lie by pointing out that “the inn and the brothel have been found in one establishment often in the history of mankind.”
¹⁰

God himself is sometimes the victim of bland and blurry euphemisms that are left unexplained by embarrassed translators. For example, we are told in Exodus (33:18–23) that Moses, alone among all humankind, is permitted to actually look upon the Almighty, but only from the back; God takes care to cover Moses’ eyes “while My glory passeth by.” The word used in the Hebrew text and translated as “glory” is
kabod
—but we are not often told that
kabod
also may be translated as “liver” and is sometimes used idiomatically to refer to the male reproductive organ. “The fact that the Lord wants to be seen only from behind,” writes Jack Miles in
God: A Biography
, “may suggest that he is concealing his genitalia from Moses.”
¹¹

Finally, when neither outright censorship nor a convenient mistranslation is practical, religious authorities have resorted to the desperate measure of arguing that the Bible does not really mean what it says.

The Song of Songs, for example, is nowadays recognized by scholars for what it is: “The Song clearly deals explicitly with sexual love between a man and a woman.”
¹²
Indeed, it’s impossible to read the work and conclude otherwise: “Let him kiss me with kisses of his mouth,” goes the very first line, “for thy love is better than wine” (Song of Songs 1:2). Precisely because of its frank sensuality, the rabbis who decided what books belonged in the Bible debated among themselves whether we ought to
regard the torrid love poetry of the Song of Songs as divinely inspired, and some of them even argued that the steamy book ought to be withdrawn from the biblical canon once and for all
¹³