The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (60 page)

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 from Genesis. I chose the New English Bible, with its plainspoken translation of the hoary old 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 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 G rated, 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 across 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.

“When Ham, father of Canaan, saw his father naked, he told his two brothers outside,” we read in Genesis. “So Shem and Japheth took a
cloak, put it on their shoulders and walked backwards, and so covered their father’s naked body; their faces were turned the other way, so that they did not see their father naked” (Gen. 9:20–24).

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 HARLOT BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD
. 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 from the juicy parts. And so my son’s question is answered here: The stories collected in its pages are the ones that I—like so many other shocked Bible readers over the millennia—was tempted to leave out.

—Jonathan Kirsch
May 1997

THE FORBIDDEN TALES OF THE BIBLE

GENERAL QUESTIONS AND DISCUSSION TOPICS

• In
  THE HARLOT BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD
  , Jonathan Kirsch examines seven of the Bible’s most controversial and most frequently suppressed stories. As you read through these tales, think about other Bible stories that receive little attention from sermonizers and Sunday school teachers. What can these other stories tell us about the lives and beliefs of the real men and women who lived in ancient times? And what can they reveal to us about our own troubled world?
  

• Why is it important to understand the Bible?
  

• Why aren’t Americans more familiar with the Bible?
  

• Once upon a time it could be assumed that everybody who went to college had been exposed to at least one Bible course. Despite the separation of church and state, should this practice be reinstated in our schools?
  

• Does the Bible celebrate or denigrate women? Is it possible, as one feminist Bible critic suggests, that certain books of the Bible were written by a woman?
  

• Have fundamentalists made the Bible less appealing to mainstream readers?
  

• How can we increase interest in the Bible among young people today? How can we do the same for adults?
  

• There has been a growing number of books, articles, and television programs about the Bible in recent years. What accounts for this increased attention to the Bible and the lessons it has to offer?
  

STORY ONE

LOT AND HIS DAUGHTERS
(Gen. 19:30–38) Having narrowly escaped the carnage brought down on Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot and his two daughters face the possibility that they are the last survivors on earth. In order to insure the continuation of their race, the two girls ply their father with wine and couple with him while he’s in a drunken stupor
.

READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND DISCUSSION TOPICS

1. Some Bible scholars believe Lot’s wife looked back at Sodom because she was curious about what was happening there and could not resist the impulse to look and see. Others believe she was saddened at the prospect of leaving Sodom, a place that she loved despite (or, perhaps, because of) its sinfulness. Kirsch suggests she might have turned back because she despairs of the fate of her other daughters—the ones whose husbands laughed at Lot’s warnings and refused to flee the city. Do you think it was curiosity, longing for her beloved hometown, or motherly concern that made Lot’s wife look back?
   

2. Women in the Bible are often depicted (and mostly condemned) as the willful and wily seducers of men—other examples include Eve (Gen.), Potiphar’s wife (Gen. 39:7), Delilah (Judg. 16:5), and Salome (Matt. 14:6–8). But neither Lot’s daughters, nor Lot himself, is criticized in the Bible or the religious literature that tries to explain away their sexual misadventure. Why does the Bible seem to regard the incest of Lot and his daughters as sanctified?
   

3. How did the rest of the biblical world regard incest? The Book of Leviticus contains a long and detailed catalogue of forbidden sexual partners. Does this suggest that incest might have been commonplace among the Israelites? After all, if incest were not regarded as a fact of life in the biblical world, why would the biblical lawgiver feel a need to address it at length and in such tantalizing detail?
   

4. When it comes to the most grotesque conduct of Lot’s—his willingness to cast his daughters to the mob—apologists offer two thin excuses: the ancient laws of hospitality imposed on Lot a sacred obligation to protect his guests, even at the risk of his own family and his own life; children were regarded as something less precious in biblical times than they are today, more nearly chattel than loved ones, and so a father was at liberty to do with his children exactly as he pleased. Are these reasons enough to exonerate Lot for offering his daughters to the mob? Why have scholars and sages over the centuries tended to overlook this episode of abhorrent conduct on the part of Lot?
   

5. Kirsch explores the shocking notion that Ishmael, the firstborn son of the patriarch Abraham, molested his five-year-old halfbrother Isaac. Reread Kirsch’s arguments and the biblical texts to which he refers. Do you agree with his theory?
   

6. Kirsch writes, “To discourage ordinary men and women from entertaining the thought that God himself might show up at their door and sit down to supper, the scribes may have systematically inserted angels into the Bible text as intermediaries between God and humankind.” What are the angels of the Hebrews really like? Is it possible that they are, as Kirsch suggests, tools of censorship used by priestly scribes who did not want to encourage their readers to believe that God appeared to mortals without their assistance and their elaborate rituals?
   

STORY TWO

THE RAPE OF DINAH
(Gen. 34) Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, is raped by Shechem, a princely Canaanite suitor, who then begs for her hand in marriage. The bride-price, demanded by her brothers, is the circumcision of every man in Shechem’s kingdom. After the ritual is carried out, the weakened Canaanites—recovering from their ordeal—are easy targets for Dinah’s brothers who kill them all, much to the dismay of Jacob
.

READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND DISCUSSION TOPICS

1. One voice alone is not heard in the Bible’s account of the rape of Dinah, the voice of Dinah herself. While the men make speeches and haggle and plot among themselves and against each other, no one bothers to ask her whether she wants to marry Shechem or see him slain. What do you think Dinah’s silence tells us about the biblical author?
   

2. Who is the true hero of Dinah’s story? Is it her sword-wielding brothers who slaughter a whole people in her name? Or is it Dinah herself—a young, unwed woman living among strangers who ventures out of her father’s encampment to seek the companionship of local women and who defies the strict and narrow protocols that govern the lives of wives and daughters of the patriarchs?
   

3. Was Dinah really raped by the lovesick prince Shechem? Or were they a couple of star-crossed lovers who dared to love each other across tribal boundaries?
   

4. What do you think of the theory that the story of Dinah was inserted in the Bible to combat a threat to the very survival of Israel—a warning to men or women not to consider marrying a non-Israelite who might lure them to worship pagan gods?
   

5. The punishment for the crime of rape in the ancient Near East was
   that the rapist pay his victim’s father fifty shekels, and marry her as well. To avoid adding insult to injury, of course, the rapist was obliged to marry his victim only if the woman and her family were willing. And, unlike an ordinary marriage, the Bible decreed that the rapist was never permitted to divorce his victim turned wife. Does this transform Shechem’s bizarre marriage proposal into a form of reparation?
   

6. At the time this event occurred, the legal codes of nearby Assyria suggested that a man might actually claim a wife by forcing himself upon her. Does this suggest that Shechem’s motive (if not his method) may have been rather more honorable than the biblical text allows us to understand? Could he have been trying to win her hand in marriage?
   

7. According to Kirsch, a close reading of Genesis 34 allows us to see that the Bible offers two visions of the stranger and two approaches to dealing with him, one that exhorts us to make war, the other that encourages us to make peace and even, as the story of Dinah and Shechem may secretly suggest, make love. What lessons can be learned from the story of Dinah and Shechem about making peace in the modern Middle East?
   

STORY THREE

TAMARAND JUDAH
(Gen. 38) Tamar, a Canaanite widow of an Israelite, is involved in a failed “Levirate marriage”—a custom that obliges a man to impregnate his dead brother’s widow if the brother dies without a male heir. Since her brother-in-law has failed to sire the child who has been promised her, she positions herself at the side of a road, disguised as a harlot, to seduce—and be impregnated by—her father-in-law, Judah
.

READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND DISCUSSION TOPICS

1. Is this story scandalous or sexist? What does it tell us about the deadly peril that confronted women of the biblical era who did not submit to the mastery of a male, whether father or husband? Is Tamar’s desperation due to the fact that women in biblical times were defined by their ability to produce children and that childless women were sometimes seen as people cursed by God?
   

2. Old Testament themes consistently condemn marriage outside the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Kirsch suggests that Tamar’s Canaanite nationality might have been even more embarrassing to rabbinical authorities than the fact that Judah slept with her and fathered a pair of sons by her. Do you agree?
   

3. Why is the Bible torn between hatred and loathing of the stranger and the commandment to love the stranger? In what way does the Bible accommodate two very different rabbinical traditions: one that tolerates and even celebrates marriage with non-Israelites, and one that bitterly condemns and forbids it?
   

4. The Levirate marriage was a custom that obliged a man to impregnate his dead brother’s widow if the brother died without a male heir. What social or political reasons allowed biblical-era society to sanctify sexual union between a woman and her brother-in-law?
   

5. Kirsch writes, “The story of Tamar confirms that there were at least two kinds of prostitutes whom an Israelite man might have encountered in Canaan—a common whore (Zonah, according to the original Hebrew) and a temple or ‘cultic’ prostitute (Qedeshah) whose sexual practices were sanctified among the Canaanites because they functioned as a form of worship of the goddesses of fertility.” Do you think there’s a particular significance to the Bible’s differentiation between these two classifications?
   

6. Is the reference to Tamar as a sacred prostitute, rather than a common whore, a suggestion that the biblical author was trying to dignify and elevate Judah’s dealings with her?
   

7. Rather than being a cautionary tale, is it possible that the story of Tamar and Judah is really an erotic love story that was somehow slipped into the pages of the Holy Bible? Was Judah really fooled by Tamar’s disguise or is the disguise merely a game that each of them plays by prior arrangement or by tacit consent—either to provide “plausible deniability” for a love affair or to titillate each other?
   

STORY FOUR

ZIPPORAH AND MOSES
(Exod. 4:24–26) Moses, his wife, Zipporah, and their son Gershom are camped at an oasis while en route to Egypt In the middle of the night, God (Yahweh) appears and attacks Moses. Zipporah uses the blood ritual of circumcision to defend her husband and son
.

READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND DISCUSSION TOPICS

1. The original Hebrew text of Exodus 4:24–26 is especially difficult to decipher because only two of the players in the scene are identified by name. The Bible tells us that it is Zipporah and Yahweh who encounter each other by night at the lodging place, but Moses is not named at all. Nor are we allowed to see with clarity who is doing what to whom—or why. Who do you think God’s attack is aimed at?
   

2. Why would God seek to kill Moses so soon after befriending him, anointing him as a prophet, and sending him on the crucial mission to liberate the Israelites from Egyptian slavery?
   

3. The traditional explanation of this story—known as the “Bridegroom of Blood”—is that Yahweh seeks to kill Moses because he has violated the single most important clause of the covenant between God and Abraham by failing to circumcise his firstborn son, Gershom. Do you agree? What do you think of Kirsch’s suggestion that it might have been some priestly editor, rather than God, who cared so passionately about circumcision?
   

4. Some scholars believe that the night attack on Moses reveals the hidden traces of pagan gods and goddesses in the Hebrew Bible. Do you agree?
   

5. Throughout his life, Moses is forced to depend on women to preserve his life or rescue him from deadly peril—both human and divine. As an infant, he is spared from Pharaoh’s death sentence on
   the firstborn of the Israelites by two courageous midwives who refuse to carry out Pharaoh’s decree. Moses’s mother fashions an ark out of bulrushes and sets him adrift in the river, thus saving her son’s life while appearing to comply with Pharaoh’s order. His sister watches over the ark from afar to make sure that he is rescued, and it is Pharaoh’s daughter who draws him out of the river and raises him as her adopted son. In this story, it is his wife who saves him. How does this revise our perceptions of Moses as a powerful and potent figure, a prophet who is privileged to encounter God face-to-face because he is so nearly godlike himself?
   

6. Kirsch theorizes that Zipporah might be patterned after goddesses of the ancient and classical world, such as Isis or Athena, who traditionally intervened on behalf of imperiled heroes. He also sees a specific link to one pagan goddess-rescuer in particular, the deity of ancient Egypt known as Isis. Do you agree with Kirsch’s theories?
   

STORY FIVE

JEPHTHAH AND HIS DAUGHTER
(Judg. 11) Jephthah, a mercenary, is asked to lead the armies of Israel against an invading force from a neighboring kingdom. He accepts the offer and impulsively promises God that, in exchange for victory, he will sacrifice whoever first comes out of his house to greet him on his return from battle. He emerges victorious from the conflict but, to his horror, has no choice other than to sacrifice his only daughter to fulfill his vow She goes willingly to the slaughter, but only after taking two months to go to the mountains with her friends and “bewail her virginity”