A Year of Biblical Womanhood

by Rachel Held Evans

  According to Debi Pearl, the Bible says that even physical pain is no excuse for a woman to take a rain check on sex one night. “Don’t talk to me about menopause,” she wrote in Created to Be His Help Meet. “I know all about menopause, and it’s a lame excuse. Don’t talk to me about how uncomfortable or painful it is for you. Do you think your body is special and has special needs? Do you know who created you, and do you know he is the same God who expects you to freely give sex to your husband? Stop the excuses!”7

  Such an interpretation fails to take into account the specific context of 1 Corinthians 7 in which the “deprivation” in question relates to religious asceticism. Worse yet, it overlooks the passage’s striking emphasis on mutual satisfaction between husband and wife. Paul never placed women in the role of submissive sex slaves to husbands, who get to call all the shots. The pleasures of sex are meant to be mutual.

  I like Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 7:4–5 in The Message: “The marriage bed must be a place of mutuality—the husband seeking to satisfy his wife, the wife seeking to satisfy her husband . . . Marriage is a decision to serve the other, whether in bed or out.”

  Sometimes you serve by getting in the mood for your spouse. Sometimes you serve by waiting. But when sexuality gets relegated to the realm of religious absolutes, the focus tends to shift from serving one another to servicing one another. And that’s no way to love.

  For the project this month, I had originally planned to bestow upon Dan a homemade “SEX ANYTIME” coupon for Valentine’s Day, (along with some other coupons that shall remain undisclosed on account of the fact that my mother will read this book). But this proved biblically, and practically, unnecessary.

  Sex is fun for both of us; no one “owes” the other anything. When one of us isn’t in the mood, the other lets it go. We don’t keep tallies or make demands. We don’t throw Bible verses at each other to get our way. And believe it or not, we have a great sex life . . . mainly, I’m told, because we don’t have kids yet.

  Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like a blazing fire, like a mighty flame.

  —SONG OF SONGS 8:6

  It is a hallmark of Southern evangelical culture that the youth group has its own reserved seating on Sunday mornings. These two rows of pews are typically located to the extreme left or right of the sanctuary, far enough from the front to avoid eye contact with the preacher and far enough from the back to escape the cries of fussy babies. The Sunday after my first week of high school, I was invited to join the motley assemblage that made up “the youth”: rebellious missionary kids, pimply outcasts, Goths, Goody Two-shoes, pretty girls whose Sunday skirts violated public high school dress codes, and awkward teenage boys whose arms and legs hung over the pews like the limp limbs of forgotten marionettes. The boys were spaced exactly four feet apart from one another, the girls exactly two. On Easter, when the nominally religious suddenly showed up and we all had to scrunch together to make room for the “lukewarm,” the whole enterprise would collapse into a seething cauldron of sexual tension.

  Although I fit rather definitively in the Goody Two-shoes category, having signed my name to a virginity pledge that was stuck to a corkboard at the Baptist church and all, sometimes, when the pastor preached from the book of Isaiah, and my Bible sat open across my lap, I’d sneak a glance at the pages that preceded the prophet’s dire warnings to Israel. And there, right in the middle of my Holy Bible, was this:

  My beloved is to me a sachet of myrrh resting between my breasts. . . .

  How handsome you are, my beloved!

  Oh, how charming!

  And our bed is verdant. . . .

  Your stature is like that of the palm,

  And your breasts like clusters of fruit.

  I said, “I will climb the palm tree;

  I will take hold of its fruit.”

  (SONG OF SONGS 1:13, 16; 7:7–9)

  Filled with guilt, I’d flip back to Isaiah, desperate to ignore the way the gangly guy to the right suddenly didn’t seem so gangly after all.

  How can this be in the Bible? I wondered. Does the pastor know it’s there? Do my parents know it’s there? Does God know that I’m thinking about . . . fruit . . . right in the middle of church?

  Apparently I wasn’t the only one stirred by these words.

  Although it never mentions God, prayer, worship, or religion, Song of Songs is rivaled only by Genesis and the Psalms in the number of commentaries that have been written about it. The eight chapters that make up this small book between Ecclesiastes and Isaiah contain a titillating love poem that invites readers to listen in on the impassioned romantic exchange between a young Shulamite girl and her handsome lover. The Hebrew title Song of Songs means “the most superlative, or best, of songs.”

  The poem is drenched with rich imagery from the time of Solomon’s reign, but most scholars believe that the linguistic evidence points to a later date of composition and that the nod to Solomon in the title and the references to his kingdom throughout are employed by the author to recall that glorious period in Israel’s history. I always used to think that the male subject of the poem was Solomon himself, but that is unlikely, which is fine by me. Nothing ruins a good love poem like knowing the hero went out and got himself a harem.

  Jewish philosopher Saadia Gaon said, “Know, my brother, that you will find great differences in interpretation of the Song of Songs. In truth they differ because the Song of Songs resembles locks to which the keys have been lost.”8

  Indeed, sometimes it seems like all a person requires to take a stab at interpreting Song of Songs is a vivid imagination.

  On the one hand, we have centuries of medieval Christian theologians who went to great lengths to render the poem entirely allegorical, interpreting the intimacy between the man and the woman as the love between Christ and the Church. This required some interpretive gymnastics that at times preclude common sense. According to Origen, the two breasts that the suitor is so eager to grasp represent the Old Testament and the New Testament. The lips he longs to kiss represent the Eucharist, noted another medieval scholar. The luxurious bed on which the lovers lie represents the convents of the Church, said Saint Bernard.

  Sure. And Hooters represents the American affinity for owl culture.

  On the other hand, we have contemporary readers who essentially treat the book as soft porn, mining every last metaphor for Freudian insinuations. Some pastors have gone so far as to turn the poem into a Christian sex manual. Pastor Driscoll took this approach and says he owes much of his early success to it.

  “I assumed the students and singles were all pretty horny,” he wrote in his memoir, “so I went out on a limb and preached through the Song of Songs . . . Each week I extolled the virtues of marriage, foreplay, oral sex, sacred stripping, and sex outdoors, just as the book teaches . . . This helped us a lot because apparently a pastor using words like ‘penis’ and ‘oral sex’ is unusual, and before you could say ‘aluminum pole in the bedroom,’ attendance began to climb steadily to more than two hundred people a week.”9

  Now, I’ve got nothing against aluminum poles, sex outdoors, “sacred stripping,” and that sort of thing, but you should be able to tell your spouse that you’d like to try it in the backyard without insisting your instructions come directly from God. Poems were never meant to be forced into commands.

  I think Ellen Davis offers the best advice for making sense of the Song of Songs when she says we must “learn it from the poets”—not psychoanalysts, not theologians, not pastors using sex sermons to fill the pews. Like any good poem, the Song should tickle the imagination. It should deliver its meaning indirectly, through metaphor and rhythm and rhyme. It should speak to the heart, not the mind. It “should not mean, but be.”10

  But what interested me the most about Song of Songs was the fact that it presents us with the longest unmediated female voice in the entire
Bible. Where much of the Old Testament seems to regard female sexuality as something to be regulated and feared, Song of Songs unleashes a vivid and erotic expression of woman’s desire. In fact, the female perspective so dominates the poem that some scholars believe it may have been written by a woman.

  So what does this ancient, uninhibited female voice say?

  To sum it up, she says she’s beautiful, and she knows what she wants. (Basically, the lyrics to Beyoncé’s next hit.)

  “Do not stare at me because I am dark, because I am darkened by the sun,” she tells the Daughters of Jerusalem, who act as a sort of chorus throughout the poem. “Dark am I, yet lovely” (Song of Songs 1:6).

  “I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys,” she insists (2:1). “I belong to my beloved, and his desire is for me” (7:10 UPDATED NIV). When the Daughters of Jerusalem make a remark about her small breasts, the Shulamite counters, “I am a wall, and my breasts are like towers. Thus I have become in his eyes like one bringing contentment” (8:10).

  In addition to speaking boldly about her own unconventional beauty, the Shulamite girl initiates much of the action in the romance. She is the first to speak in the poem, declaring, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth” (1:1). She actively seeks out the handsome shepherd in his fields, saying “Why should I be like a veiled woman beside the flocks of your friends?” (V. 7). When the two are separated, she goes out into the streets, looking for him, and at one point is accosted by the city guards. When she finds him, she brings him into a private room. There, she says, “I held him and would not him go” (3:4).

  It is she who initiates a sexual encounter in a vineyard in the countryside, and it is she who offers her lover a frank invitation to drink her wine and to enter her “garden” to taste its choice fruits. Indeed some of the most beautiful lines of the poem—and arguably of the Bible—are hers: “Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death” (8:6).

  Her suitor is more than happy to oblige, showering her with a litany of compliments that I’m sure would drive any Ancient Near Eastern girl wild, but which lose a little of their potency to the modern reader.

  Her eyes are like doves (1:15).

  Her hair is like a flock of goats (4:1).

  Her teeth are like a flock of sheep recently shorn; “each has its own twin, not one of them is missing” (6:6 NIV UPDATED)

  Her cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate (4:3).

  Her neck is like the tower of David (4:4).

  Her nose is like the tower of Lebanon (7:4).

  Her breasts are like two fawns (4:5).

  Her legs are like jewels (7:1).

  Her navel is like a rounded goblet (7:2).

  Her waist is like a mound of wheat (7:2).

  While most girls these days would insist that under no circumstances should their waist be compared to a mound of wheat, these images held cultural and poetic significance that proves the young man took seriously the ancient proverb about delighting in the love of your youth. He didn’t care what the Daughters of Jerusalem said. The beauty of his beloved surpassed every other woman’s.

  All in all, the Song of Songs struck me as surprisingly liberating this time around. I had much more fun reading it as a married woman than as a guilt-ridden teenager afraid of her own libido.

  The Song reminds me of another biblical poem, this one from the book of Proverbs:

  There are three things which are too wonderful for me,

  Four which I do not understand:

  The way of an eagle in the sky,

  The way of a serpent on a rock,

  The way of a ship in the middle of the sea,

  And the way of a man with a maid.

  (30:18–19 NASB)

  Believers should be wary of overzealous attempts to prescribe “biblical sex,” when sex—like beauty and like God—remains shaded with mystery. Paul likened it to the mystery of Christ’s love for the Church, the writer of Proverbs to the inscrutable way of an eagle in the sky. If Christians have learned anything from our rocky two-thousand-year theological history, it’s that we make the most beautiful things ugly when we try to systematize mystery. Even the writers of Scripture knew that some things were simply beyond their grasp.

  RUTH, THE MOABITE

  No Ammonite or Moabite or any of their descendants may enter the assembly of the Lord, not even in the tenth generation.

  —DEUTERONOMY 23:3 UPDATED NIV

  By far the most common qualification for a good wife found within the pages of Scripture is that she not be a foreigner. Endogamy was a recurring concern in the narrative of Israel’s history, the writers of Scripture insistent that the descendants of Abraham eschew any form of assimilation to foreign customs and gods. Of all the threats to national security, beautiful foreign women were seen as the most surreptitious, blamed, at least in part, for everything from King Solomon’s downfall to the Babylonian captivity.

  The Law includes a command that when God delivers a nation to Israel, the Israelites must “destroy them totally. . . . Do not intermarry with them,” it states. “Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your children away from following me to serve other gods, and the Lord’s anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you” (Deuteronomy 7:2–4 UPDATED NIV).

  Foreign wives, young Israelite boys were warned, were seductive, idolatrous, and the demise of kings. For the sake of their lives, they must stay away.

  And so it is ironic, perhaps even poetic, that the Bible’s exemplary daughter-in-law and one of the most celebrated women in Jewish and Christian history is a Moabite by the name of Ruth.

  Ruth, like so many of the Bible’s heroines, was a widow. In the violent and uncertain days when judges ruled Israel, a woman named Naomi and her husband, Elimelech, left a famine in Bethlehem for the hill country of Moab, where their sons married Moabite women—Orpah and Ruth. Tragically, both Elimelech and his sons died, leaving Naomi and her childless daughters-in-law with no male family members to protect their future and preserve their name. Grief-stricken and penniless, Naomi decided to journey back to Bethlehem. On the way, she urged her daughters-in-law to leave her.

  “Go back, each of you, to your mother’s home,” she said. “May the Lord grant that each of you will find rest in the home of another husband” (Ruth 1:8, 9).

  The women wept together, and Orpah took her leave. But Ruth refused to go back home.

  “Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay,” she declared. “Your people will be my people and your God my God” (V. 16).

  It was a bold declaration of both loyalty and liberation, for Ruth would not concede their future to despair simply because of an absence of men. When Naomi saw that she could not convince her daughter-in-law to leave her, she allowed Ruth to come along, and the pair finally reached the city of Bethlehem, just as the barley harvest began. The narrative continually refers to Naomi’s companion as “Ruth the Moabite.” (See, for example, Ruth 1:22 and 2:2.)

  Perhaps the only thing more surprising than Ruth’s stubborn loyalty to her mother-in-law is her unconventional love story.

  Once settled in Bethlehem, Ruth went to the nearby fields to glean the barley left behind by the reapers for the poor to gather, a provision stipulated by Jewish law (Leviticus 19:9). Ruth found herself working a field owned by a wealthy and respected man from Bethlehem, named Boaz. When Boaz came out to greet his harvesters one day, he took notice of Ruth and asked his workers about her. They told him that she was a Moabite and companion to Naomi who gleaned from the field each day, working tirelessly for long hours.

  Intrigued, Boaz spoke to Ruth, encouraging her to continue gleaning in his field and to avail herself of his water and the help of his servants. He invited her to share lunch with him, and warned the men working in the field not to harm or harass her in any way.

  And so Ruth gleaned daily from Boaz’s field until the barley harvest was
finished. One night, Naomi pulled Ruth aside. She told her daughter-in-law that Boaz was a close relative and may therefore function as a go’el, (often translated “kinsman-redeemer”), a male relative who would undertake a levirate marriage, so family property remained in the family and the widows wouldn’t be forced to enter into slavery.

  “Tonight he will be winnowing barley on the threshing floor,” Naomi divulged. “Wash, put on perfume, and get dressed in your best clothes. Then go down to the threshing floor, but don’t let him know you are there until he has finished eating and drinking. When he lies down, note the place where he is lying. Then go and uncover his feet and lie down. He will tell you what to do” (3:2–4 UPDATED NIV).

  Naomi offered a rather brazen plan, for uncovering a man’s feet was a euphemism for uncovering his genitals, and the threshing floor was commonly associated with extramarital activity (Hosea 9:1). But Ruth agreed, prepared herself as Naomi had suggested, and at midnight, after Boaz had enjoyed much to drink and fallen asleep, she sneaked down beside him on his bed of barley. He awoke, startled, and Ruth asked him to spread his cloak over her. (In contrast to her mother-in-law’s instructions, Ruth told Boaz what to do.)

  Boaz was overjoyed, but confessed that he was not technically Naomi’s closest relative.

  “Stay here for the night,” Boaz said, “and in the morning if [the closest kin] wants to do his duty as your guardian-redeemer, good; let him redeem you. But if he not willing, as surely as the Lord lives I will do it. Lie here until morning” (3:13 UPDATED NIV).

  Ruth slept at Boaz’s feet until morning, and left before the sun rose, so she wouldn’t be recognized. When she told Naomi what happened, Naomi wisely noted, “The man will not rest until the matter is settled today” (V. 18).