Jonathan Kirsch - Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three Life Against Death: The Sacred Incest of
Lots Daughters

Chapter Four

Chapter Five See What a Scourge Is Laid upon Your Hate:
The Strange Affair of Dinah and Shechem

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven The Woman Who Willed Herself into
History: Tamar as the Harlot by the Side of the Road

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine The Bridegroom of Blood: Zipporah as the
Goddess-Rescuer of Moses

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven A Goddess of Israel: The Forbidden Cult of
Jephthahs Daughter

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen God and Gyno-sadism: Heroines and Martyrs
in the Book of Judges

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen The Rape of Tamar: The Politics of Love and
Hate in the Court of King David

Chapter Sixteen

T HE N AKED N OAH T HE F ORBIDDEN B IBLE
T HE F ORGOTTEN B IBLE T HE L IBERATING B IBLE
A N EED TO T ELL AND H EAR S TORIES

T he stories you are about to read are some of the most violent and sexually explicit in all of Western literature. They are tales of human passion in all of its infinite variety: adultery, seduction, incest, rape, mutilation, assassination, torture, sacrifice, and murder. And yet every one of these stories is drawn directly from the pages of the Holy Bible.

You mean thats in the Bible? is the common reaction of the reader who knows the Bible, if at all, only from the occasional sermon or some dimly remembered Sunday school lesson.

Even readers who think they know the Bible may be unfamiliar with these stories precisely because embarrassed rabbis, priests, and ministers have sought to hide the plain language of the original Hebrew text behind fuzzy euphemisms, unlikely interpretations, or intentional mistranslations. Although the Bible is Holy Writ to three religions, a few of its most shocking stories have been banned outright by clergy who were not entirely comfortable with telling their congregants what really happens in the Bible.

As a result of these efforts at bowdlerizing, we are sometimes given the impression that the Bible is mostly a dry and preachy worka list of stern shalts and shalt nots that condemn all but the narrowest range of human behavior, a forbidding black book with little to say to worldly men and women whose lives are far messier than what we imagine the Bible to allow. But the fact is that the Bible offers some surprising insights that we might profitably recall when confronting the toughest issues of our own times, from the debate over abortion to the search for peace in the Middle East, from sexual politics to world politics.

To be sure, the Hebrew Bible includes generous portions of strict moral instruction, starting with the Ten Commandments and bulking up to include some 613 other dos and donts. For that matter, there is little that one cannot find in the Bible, which is actually a fantastic grab bag of law, legend, history, politics, propaganda, poetry, prayer, ethics, genealogy, hygienic practices, military tactics, dietary advice, and carpentry instructions, among many other things. But, as we will see, the Bible is also a treasury of storytelling that recounts the lives of men and women who were thoroughly human, which is to say that they were as confused, conflicted, twisted, tortured, and vulnerable to the weaknesses of the flesh and failure of the spirit as any character in Homer, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, or any of the soap operas, bodice rippers, and tabloids that amount to the literature of our own times.

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.