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
Does the Bible Mean What It Says?
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love poetry of the Song of Songs as divinely inspired, and some of them even argued that the steamy book ought to be withdrawn from the biblical canon once and for all13
Even though the Song of Songs was never actually excluded from the Bible, the clergy of both Judaism and Christianity over the centuries have chosen to ignore the plainly erotic content. Instead, they stubbornly insist that the Song of Songs is merely an elaborate metaphor for “the love relationship between God and Israel,” according to Jewish commentators, or “the love relationship between God (Christ) and the Church,” according to Christian ones.14
Censorship by Silence
But the single most common technique for making sure that we do not know what the Bible actually says about the ragged edges of human behavior is silence. Today, most Bibles are unexpurgated, and most of the translations in common use in the English-speaking world are largely accurate and unabashed, but casual readers rarely find their way to the “forbidden” stories of the Bible because they simply do not know such stories exist and do not bother to look for them.
Indeed, clergy of all faiths and denominations still tend to shun these stories when they mount the pulpit, and Sunday school teachers still prefer the Bible stories where they know they will find endearing Disneyesque animals and simple uplifting moral lessons. That is why even a regular church- or synagogue-goer, for example, will rarely be exposed to the rape of Dinah by a lovesick prince, the mass circumcision that follows her sexual assault, and the slaughter of innocents that is the climax of Genesis 34, which has been accurately described as “the most graphically human story … [in] the whole of Genesis.”15
“I have never heard it given in an Anglican lesson nor mentioned in any sermon,”16 observes Julian Pitt-Rivers, a British anthropologist who recalls his shock at discovering at a tender age that rape and mass murder are not the only dirty little secrets of the Bible: “[I]ncest, fratricide, filiocide, wife-lending, polygamy, homosexuality and prostitution” were among the revelations for a curious young boy at home alone with the family Bible. “It seemed positively unfair,” Pitt-Rivers remarks, “that Adam and Eve should have been cast out of Eden for such a trivial peccadillo as eating an apple off the wrong tree.”17
So I have attempted in these pages to let the reader see what is actually written in stories that have been suppressed, censored, or merely ignored over the millennia. To be sure, our understanding of the Bible should not end with an open-eyed reading of the stories that are told by the biblical authors with such candor and such passion. But it should certainly begin there.
THE FORGOTTEN BIBLE
Nowadays few of us bother to open the Bible at all. But now and then a modern storyteller will resurrect some of these forbidden texts and make them accessible to a readership that has forgotten what’s in the Bible—or never knew in the first place. Andrew Lloyd Webber retells one of the most familiar of Bible stories in his much-performed musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and yet he feels compelled to footnote his own libretto, so to speak, when he refers to an incident that appears in every version of the Bible but not in the common experience of his audience.
Thus, when Webber shows us the failed seduction of young Joseph by the nymphomaniacal wife of his Egyptian master, the librettist feels obliged to reassure us that he did not just make up the half-comical, half-erotic tale of an embittered seductress who condemns Joseph to prison because he does not succumb to her charms.
“It’s all there in chapter thirty-nine,” croons the narrator of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, “of Gen-e-sis.”18
Other storytellers may be less scrupulous when they scavenge a plot line from the Scriptures. Mordecai Richler, describing a gang of “hardcore show biz expatriates” at play on Hampstead Heath in St. Urbain’s Horseman, a novel set in London in the swinging ’60s, introduces us to one enterprising television scriptwriter who knew exactly where to find story ideas that would strike the network executives (and the viewers, too) as stunningly original:
Not only had he plundered the Old Testament for most of his winning Rawhide and Bonanza plots, but now that his Lilian was obviously in heat again, his hard-bought Jewish education, which his father had always assured him was priceless, served him splendidly once more. Moey remembered his David ha’ Melech: And it came to pass in the morning, that David wrote a letter to Joab, and sent it by the hand of Uriah. And he wrote in the letter, saying. Set Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten, and die. Amen.19
The point of Richler’s story, of course, is that we are so little acquainted with what goes on in the Bible that no one in Hollywood will notice if a plot is cribbed from the Book of Samuel. Only rarely will some secular reader happen across one of the forbidden tales of the Bible, parse out the dense and difficult passages of the typical English translation, and wake up to the fact that the Bible is one hot read.
“From start to finish, it is a book of wild, shattering behavior,” reports Michael Ventura, a newspaper columnist whose thoroughly modern mind was blown by what he found in the Bible. “Women consort with serpents, brothers kill one another, peoples are massacred, tribes roam deserts, babies are abandoned, murder follows prophecy, prophecy follows murder, dancers call for the heads of prophets.” And Ventura comes to the conclusion that any society which elevates the Bible to the stature of Holy Writ is bound to be outrageous. “It is ridiculous,” he concludes, “to expect a civilization based on such a book to be other than wild and shattering.”20
THE LIBERATING BIBLE
The forbidden texts of the Bible deal frankly with sex and violence, but there is much more than mere shock and titillation in these stories of human passion. Buried in the dusty old texts, almost like artifacts in an archaeological dig, are treasures of insight and inspiration that remind us of the loftiest values of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam while, at the same time, allowing us to see the traces of much older spiritual traditions that have been ignored or suppressed by all three faiths.
Indeed, these artifacts of ancient spirituality reveal that the Bible is not a work of strict fundamentalism. We have been encouraged to think of God as a divine father who bestowed his blessings on a series of men created in “his” image—but here we will encounter women who are so daring, so powerful, and so resourceful that they outshine even the venerable patriarchs and prophets who are supposedly the moral beacons of the Bible. We are taught that the Bible is a work of strict and highly refined monotheism—but we will find the intriguing remnants of forbidden spirituality, incl
uding goddess worship, fertility rituals, and even human sacrifice, all of which were supposedly repudiated by the Children of Israel and expunged from the Judeo-Christian tradition in deference to the One God. Above all, we will be reminded of the humane and compassionate message at the heart of the Bible, both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, a message that has often been overlooked over the centuries, and never more so than in our own times.
Today, fundamentalists of all three Bible-based religions claim to find in the Holy Scriptures a divine excuse for repression and much worse. They cite chapter and verse, literally, to condemn abortion, divorce, and homosexuality; they claim to find in the Bible divine justification to take and keep some of the most hotly disputed territory on earth; they feel empowered by the Almighty to pronounce death sentences on those whose words and thoughts offend them. Yet if we look deeply into the forbidden texts of the Bible, we will discover that men and women, clans and tribes, peoples and nations—despite their differences of race and faith—manage to tolerate each other, to share the earth with each other, and to encounter each other in peaceful and loving ways. It’s a liberating experience to discover what the Bible really says about the politics of sex, for example, as well as the politics of nations.
“A NEED TO TELL AND HEAR STORIES”
The book you are about to read consists of seven surprising and even shocking stories from the Bible. All of the stories are drawn from the portion of Holy Scripture that is known in Christian usage as the Old Testament, that is, the Hebrew Bible, a book that is regarded as sacred by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Each story is retold in contemporary English prose, and each one is accompanied by a chapter that explores the “backstory” of the biblical narrative: how and when the story found its way into the Bible; how it has been understood and explained; what it tells us about the lives and beliefs of real men and women who lived in biblical times; and what it can reveal to us about our own troubled world.
The biblical authors were master storytellers, and the Bible survives precisely because its stories are so powerful and so resonant. Indeed, the Bible feeds a primal appetite that is at least as demanding as our hunger for God. “A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens’” writes Reynolds Price in his retelling of tales from the Gospels, A Palpable God, “second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter.”21
So, one of my goals in retelling these stories is to tug the sleeve of the reader who does not know or even suspect the richness (and, often, the ribaldry) of biblical narrative. That’s why I have attempted to open up and flesh out the stories, to render them in a prose style that will be more familiar and more accessible to the contemporary reader than the compressed language of the original Hebrew—or, for that matter, the sometimes dense and difficult language of the Bible in traditional English translation. Now and then I have taken the liberty of adding scenes, dialogue, and description that are not actually in the original text of these stories as they appear in the Bible, but I have tried to find some plausible source in biblical scholarship or the Bible itself to justify the exercise of poetic license. As we will see later in this book (see chapter sixteen), the tradition of retelling and reinterpreting the stories of the Bible is a long and honorable one, and I have not been shy about following in that tradition.
To assist the reader in distinguishing between the retelling of each story and the real thing, I have reproduced an English translation of the original and complete text of the stories as they actually appear in the Hebrew Bible in text boxes alongside the retold stories. When I quote the original biblical text, I generally use an English translation of the Bible first published by the Jewish Publication Society in 1917, a translation that closely follows the classic King James Version that has long been used in Protestant churches of various denominations. Occasionally I refer to other English translations of the Bible, and I will let you know when I am quoting another version.
As I have suggested here, readers may be startled, perhaps even shocked, and—I hope—entertained and enlightened by what is to be found in the neglected and forbidden corners of the Bible. These stories reveal the complexity of the human heart and mind; they show us what human beings really feel and what they really do; and they suggest that a good and righteous life is not always a matter of simple obedience to what we imagine to be the moral strictures of the Bible. In that sense, I hope to take back the Bible from the strict and censorious people who wave it in our faces and to restore it to the worldly man or woman who will appreciate the flesh-and-blood passions that are described in the Holy Scriptures.
Someone very near and dear to me once turned to the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer as a kind of balm for the suffering that he expert enced after a messy love affair ended badly. “I didn’t know people like me actually did things like that,” he said of his own misadventures, “until I started to read Singer.”
What I know now is that he need only have picked up the Bible to discover what Singer already knew: The Bible is a map of the human heart, and no secret chamber or hidden passage is left out. And it’s a map whose creator, whether human or divine, regarded even our most outlandish passions with a kind and compassionate eye. That’s why the forbidden tales of the Bible are not merely a rollicking good read; above all, the Bible affirms the essential qualities that make us human in the first place.
* All quotations from the Bible are from The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1961) unless otherwise indicated by an abbreviation that identifies another translation. “NEB,” for example, refers to The New English Bible With Apocrypha, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). A complete list of Bible translations and the abbreviations used to identify them can be found on page 355.
* The Hebrew Bible has been explored, explained, and embroidered upon by successive generations of rabbinical sages for more than two thousand years. Much of their work is found in the Talmud, a vast collection of Jewish law, lore, and legend, and a separate accumulation of Bible-inspired commentary known as the Midrash. When I refer to “the rabbis” (or, sometimes, “the sages”), I mean the rabbinical commentators whose work appears in the Talmud or the Midrash. Specific citations to Talmudic and Midrashic sources can be found in the works that are referenced in the endnotes to each chapter.
CHAPTER TWO
LOT AND HIS DAUGHTERS
“Come, let us make our father drink wine….”
—GENESIS 19:32
A blood-red moon anally rose after midnight, but a distant glow had been visible on the horizon long before, as if something afire were boiling up from the waters of the Dead Sea and spreading across the desert floor. Ever since that terrible morning when the earth shuddered and fire fell from the sky, the air was full of foul-smelling smoke and greasy ash by day, and the moon was stained red by night.
Day and night, the youngest daughter of the man called Lot watched from the mouth of the mountain cave where they had sought shelter. Her sister refused to come out at all; she lingered in the dark corners of the cavern, curled up alone, arms wrapped around her knees, rocking back and forth like a child in a bad temper. A few feet away, their father dozed in his own stony alcove, occasionally lifting himself up only to nibble something from the basket of food or sip from the bottle of wine that they had thought to bring along, then slipping into sleep again.
The younger one was not afraid to venture out of the cave. She skittered up and down the rocky slope, sometimes daring to go as far as a stoned throw from the mouth of the cave, but never so far that she could not scamper back inside if danger threatened. She looked for something green that they might be able to eat, some small animal that they might be able to hunt and kill, and—God willing—a spring that might replenish the skins of water that they had dragged up from the oasis town far below them.
Above all, the younger one looked for the sign of another human being, whether man, woman, or child. She su
rveyed the jagged peak of the mountain, peered into the cracks of the black and gray rock on the lower slopes, shaded her eyes as she looked out over the empty desert floor, but she saw no one.
“You’re foolish, little sister,” the older one would insist whenever they spoke of her vigil outside the cave. “No one else is alive but us. And it’s a good thing, too, because if anyone did find us, he would be like one of those brutes from back home—he would take you, if and how he wishes, and then he would slay you.”
Then the older one would fall silent, and begin to rock back and forth again.
“But don’t worry, little sister,” she would always say. “No one will come—because no one else is alive but us.”
The older one was right, of course, about the kind of men who lived in Sodom. Back home, the younger one remembered, the menfolk were brutal to any stranger who was unlucky enough to reach the city gates, and they were not much friendlier to their own neighbors. Toward women, they were like beasts. On the day before they fled to the mountains, Lot’s family had learned that lesson once again.
The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible Page 2