If we look to the Bible for historical accounts of ancient life, we make a profound error. So contends Calum Carmichael in this original and incisive reading of some of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament’s most famous narratives. Sifting through the imaginative layers of these texts with an uncanny sensitivity and a panoptic critical eye, he unearths patterns connecting disparate passages, providing fascinating insights into how ideas were expressed, received, and transformed in the ancient Near East. Ranging from Jacob’s encounter with Leah to the marriage at Cana to Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well, these readings demonstrate the remarkable subtlety and sophistication of the biblical views on marriage, sexuality, fertility, impurity, creation, and love.
If we look to the Bible for historical accounts of ancient life, we make a profound error. So contends Calum Carmichael in this original and incisive reading of some of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament’s most famous narratives. Sifting through the imaginative layers of these texts with an uncanny sensitivity and a panoptic critical eye, he unearths patterns connecting disparate passages, providing fascinating insights into how ideas were expressed, received, and transformed in the ancient Near East. Ranging from Jacob’s encounter with Leah to the marriage at Cana to Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well, these readings demonstrate the remarkable subtlety and sophistication of the biblical views on marriage, sexuality, fertility, impurity, creation, and love.
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If we look to the Bible for historical accounts of ancient life, we make a profound error. So contends Calum Carmichael in this original and incisive reading of some of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament’s most famous narratives. Sifting through the imaginative layers of these texts with an uncanny sensitivity and a panoptic critical eye, he unearths patterns connecting disparate passages, providing fascinating insights into how ideas were expressed, received, and transformed in the ancient Near East. Ranging from Jacob’s encounter with Leah to the marriage at Cana to Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well, these readings demonstrate the remarkable subtlety and sophistication of the biblical views on marriage, sexuality, fertility, impurity, creation, and love.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300153781 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/30/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Sex and Religion in the Bible
By CALUM CARMICHAEL
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Yale UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-15378-1
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Procreation
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply.
—Genesis 1:28
I begin with a discussion that raises the question of developments in social history: the duty to procreate. The observations bring out, however, the difficulty in writing much that is actually historical about the topic. Emerging instead are ideas that prove compelling at all times and reveal just how sophisticated biblical narratives are in conveying them.
The first text in the Bible to raise the topic of sex and religion is in Genesis 1:28. There is increasing recognition that Genesis through 2 Kings is a fully coherent composition and that we should view its chronicle of events through the eyes of its composer, who probably produced the work at the end of Israel's existence as a nation, either just before or shortly after the Babylonian exile. Attempts to use Genesis through 2 Kings for dating events to satisfy our historical curiosity are consequently fraught with difficulties. It is best to go along with the narrator's chronological account so that we can enter into his world of thought.
We immediately encounter a surprise. Both Judaism and Christianity traditionally view the text in Genesis 1:28 as laying down a duty to procreate, and even modern scholars take its words to be a commandment. But, as David Daube observed, the words do not in fact command. Rather, the full text of the passage constitutes a blessing: "And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply." When we wish a person good fortune, we understandably use the language of command, rather than some authoritative remark that may meet with resistance, because the addressee will be receptive of a wish to participate in the blessing. The phrase "Have a nice day" does not leave one duty bound to do so. The same is true for the statement "Be fruitful and multiply." Ordinarily, one will feel inclined, even bound, to participate in the pleasure of producing offspring (or having a pleasant day), but such an inclination is quite different from being under a requirement to do so. We have, then, in Genesis 1:28 a blessing, not a duty.
Are there texts in the Bible that lay down a duty to produce children? Daube duly took up the question and found none. To be sure, if an Israelite's firstborn son is married and dies without having produced a male child, a law in Deuteronomy 25:5–10 requires a living brother to have intercourse with the widow so as to produce one by her. The child so born continues the name and estate of the dead husband, an outcome that doubtless also contributes to a better life for the widow. A legal fiction comes into play: a matter is interpreted as a fact, a dead man has a son, but remove the construal put on it and it is no fact at all; he is the living brother's son.
If a man is under an obligation to produce a child for a dead brother, does it not follow that he is also duty bound to perpetuate his own name and inheritance? Would the levirate rule not point to a general duty to procreate in the Bible? The answer is that it does not, and in making the distinction between the specific and the general we confront a universal phenomenon. Duties are laid on persons to help others, but as far as one's own person is concerned, one is free to receive or reject a blessing. There is a biblical requirement to aid a person with a broken-down beast (Deut 22:1–4), but if an Israelite's own animal breaks down it would be quite in order for him to leave it to die. Israelites are to assist others if they lack food, but they are free to starve themselves (Deut 24:19–22), the Bible recognizing no prohibition against suicide. It was only later that the rabbis read one into Genesis 9:5, "And surely your blood for your lives I will require," and Augustine into Exodus 20:13 (=Deut 5:17), "Thou shalt not murder." In a parable in Luke's Gospel, a host who is out of bread to serve to a guest arriving at midnight asks his neighbor for some. The host is under an obligation to be hospitable, though if he himself were in need, he would never make a request of his neighbor at that time of night (Luke 11:5–7). The duty to help others will, in fact, have its origin in the primordial instinct to procreate. The powerful compulsion to look after the resulting helpless infant spills over into many other areas of life.
Although no duty to produce children is found in biblical sources, it is worth asking what historical factors might eventually have made for such a requirement. Why, in particular, does procreation eventually become a duty in Judaism and Christianity? The answer points to down-to-earth political realities, although a religious dimension is not lacking. Where those who govern perceive a state interest to increase the birthrate, they lay down a duty to procreate, which, we might note in passing, raises the issue of centralized control over marriage. In our own time we might not come upon a particular state that imposes an actual duty to procreate, but we are familiar enough with the problem a government faces because of the lack of future workers to fund pensions for an increasingly aging population. Governments typically respond to the problem by offering inducements to encourage an increase in the birth-rate.
In ancient Greece, the shortage of fighting men to do battle in the Persian wars (ca 500 BCE) is such that a duty to procreate is imposed. Further, the duty comes wrapped in the sentiment that those who produce offspring will partake in immortality as well as ensuring a continuous stream of worshipers of God. It has to be pointed out, however, that the support of religion in the form of philosophical and theological beliefs enters in as a second best by way of justifying state policy. The military-political necessity comes first, and religious sentiment serves to buttress it. To be sure, high-minded reflection may be around long before the need for political action. What occurs is that a necessary change in policy brings in its wake a need to assert that the topic has always been of great significance. Cynically, one could say that often religion confers respectability on an unpleasant requirement—for example, to produce more fighting men. A religious belief in immortality through one's descendants is exploited because the belief, related as it is to death (including death in battle), gives comfort by its primary focus on a future renewal of life (including the production of more male children to ensure a strong military). Less cynically, the necessity to increase the birthrate brings out what may have been taken for granted all along and now needs to be articulated, namely, that the production of children constitutes a great blessing.
Sometimes the duty to procreate comes with sanctions. Sparta, for instance, imposes both a fine and a measure of civic disgrace on single men, and Plato's Laws do the same. Single women at Sparta are not penalized, but in Plato's Republic women as well as men come under a duty to procreate. Various schools of thought, especially the Stoics, spread Plato's views on the topic throughout the Mediterranean world, and later generations would have articulated them to adherents of Judaism and Christianity.
Closer to the inception of Christianity, the legislation in 18 BCE of Augustus, the first Roman emperor, imposes a legal (as against a moral) duty to procreate. In previous centuries in Rome, the concern with a low birthrate shows up, but no general legal sanction befalls those refraining from producing children. Augustus brings about change. He penalizes men between twenty-five and sixty and women between twenty and fifty if they are unmarried or married but childless, but he rewards parents producing three or four children. The influence of Greek philosophy and statecraft is readily detectable in the presentation of the legislation. What differs at Rome is that the primary motivation is the need to do something about the declining birthrate among the ruling classes.
At some point, from the second century on, the obligation to procreate begins to appear in Jewish and Christian sources, but not in the New Testament. The fateful destruction of the Temple in 70 CE and the Bar Kochba revolt in 132–135 CE, with their accompanying loss of Jewish life, are probably decisive in the duty being taken over into Judaism from the surrounding culture. The task is confined to males. The peculiarity of the emerging Christian position, which we primarily associate with Paul in 1 Corinthians 7, is the view that if you cannot do without sex, marriage for the sake of procreation is the proper course to pursue. Abstention is superior because of a view that goes back to Jesus: marital union falls short of the ideal type of union, which is to remain celibate for the sake of the kingdom of heaven (Matt 19:10–13). Essentially the view is that, in mystical embrace, the Christian should unite with Jesus only. A deviation from the Jewish position is that the post-Pauline Church Fathers require both males and females to fulfill the duty.
As an exercise in social history, the inquiry into when the duty of procreation comes into Christianity and Judaism is less than satisfying, because the sources limit us in pursuing it. More stimulating is Daube's insight in noting that, down through the centuries, there are countless examples of blessings becoming transformed into duties: acquiring wealth; receiving an education; saving for old age; undergoing medical checkups; and prolonging life. The topic brings to our attention the ebb and flow of attitudes and values at different periods and in different milieus and sharpens our awareness of modern life. Duties wane as circumstances change, for example, that of procreation in the face of concern about overpopulation or in deference to women achieving parity with men in the workplace. Or duties may proliferate: in Australia, the duty to vote, and in the United States, the duty to wear a seat belt. In any event, a topic of vast scope begins from a single observation on an ancient text that is almost universally interpreted wrongly. Daube's correction of the error opens up the possibility of thinking about an idea, the relationship between blessings and duties, which has never previously come under scrutiny, and how it plays out in many areas of life, ancient and modern.
Jesus on Marriage and Procreation
In a discussion between Jesus and some Pharisees, Jesus rejects the institution of divorce. He argues on the grounds that Moses permitted divorce only as a concession to human sinfulness, but because the end-time exists in their current situation, the accommodating attitude no longer applies. His position is contrary to the plain meaning of a law in Deuteronomy 24:1–4, where Mosaic permission to divorce a wife is taken for granted ("writes her a bill of divorcement, and giveth it in her hand, and sendeth her out of his house"). After the interchange, the disciples of Jesus, puzzlingly in some ways, react by saying that in light of his dismissal of divorce it is consequently not expedient for a man to marry in the first place. Jesus responds: "All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given. For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it" (Matt 19:12).
When Jesus enunciates to his disciples the second-best nature of marriage in Matthew 19:10–13 and asserts the ideal of sexless existence in the kingdom (as in Mark 12:25: "For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage"), we should bear in mind that he does so in his role as a master with a circle of disciples. A major aim of the master is less to lay down an actual duty to avoid marriage, which if he had the power he would require in real life, than to oblige his disciples to seek spiritual enlightenment. It is instruction, nonetheless, of a kind that seeks to transform their way of being in the world. The master takes up ordinary matters, marriage and the production of children in this instance, and pursues analogous spiritual ideas. These disciples, some at least, will have wives and children, but in their pursuit of learning they are to contemplate another kind of union, namely, a disciple with his master. The sense communicated is not all that different from the claim of Alexander the Great. He revered his tutor Aristotle no less than his father because "to the one he owed life, to the other the good life." By becoming like your master in thought and practice, you become not just like him but in a way one with him.
What I am pointing to here is the intellectual liveliness inherent in the position of Jesus. In suggesting such an element it is important to stress the original setting in the life of Jesus, namely, a master with his disciples and how instruction is conveyed in the culture of the time. The influence of the death of Jesus on the writing up of the Gospels will have so colored the presentation of his life that Matthew, in this instance, may have no interest in highlighting any original liveliness of mind. The quality is detectable when, after Jesus makes known his elevated view of marital union, we learn that the disciples rebuke those who bring children to appear before him in order that he might lean his hands on them (Matt 19:13). We go from a learned dispute about the legal topic of divorce and the fallout from Jesus' view on it to the physical appearance of children. Their presence at this point seems somewhat out of place after certain Pharisees have asked him about divorce and his disciples, in turn, about marriage. While the children's appearance may ring false, the actual subject of children is in line with the preceding topic of marriage. The point is that the narrative account exists more to convey ideas than to record what might have actually occurred. The emphasis is on Jesus' opposition to his disciples' restraint of the children and on his speaking positively about their appearing before him "for of such [the nature of children] is the kingdom of heaven" (Matt 19:14).
The disciples express their negative stance about marriage because they draw the inference from the master's teaching. To become a eunuch is to downgrade marriage and diminish the standing of children. The master then sees an opportunity to lay down another teaching, which derives from his raising the status of children. The implicit rebuke he delivers to the disciples is to the end that they think further. As disciples who have repented of their past sins and live in expectation of the Kingdom of God, they are becoming transformed into new beings in the sense familiar to them from the world of conversion to their Jewish religion. Converts to that religion undergo a passage from death to life and become newborn little children: "begotten again," "a newborn babe," "a new man," "a new creation" (b. Yeb. 22a, 48b; 1 Peter 1:3, 2:2; Col 3:10; 2 Cor 5:17). John the Baptist (or Baptizer) is given this nickname precisely because he applies proselyte baptism to people who are already Jewish. Repentance, for which he calls, is like conversion, a movement from the death of one's old life to a new life. It is an idea powerful enough to spill over into the situation where a teacher instructs his pupils in new ways of thinking. The initiate to a new spiritual world, Judaism, early Christianity, or special knowledge of one kind or another, is but a child in his first exposure to it. He receives milk before being fed meat (1 Cor 3:2; Heb 5:12; 1 Peter 2:2).
The Creation of Male and Female
The text in Genesis 1:28 about being fruitful and multiplying might be the first biblical reference to the topic of procreation but a more profound probing of the subject is also present in Genesis 1. I refer to the view underlying the notion that "God created man in his image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them" (Gen 1:27). No text exceeds this one in influencing later thinking, for example (as I shall shortly note), the detailed argument underlying Jesus' view of marriage and divorce, but also much later notions about human dignity and equality. We even see the idea brought into economics. "The image of God," says Michael Novak, "underlying socialist thought is Nous: the all-seeing, commanding intelligence. The image of God underlying both the free market and the triune system of democratic capitalism is Phronimos, the practical provident intelligence embodied in singular agents in singular concrete situations."
What has not been appreciated is the narrow focus of Genesis 1:27. Its aim, I submit, is to explore the question of why males and females are essentially the same, yet the differences that exist between them are so important that they serve to bring them together. Rabbinic interpreters are accurate when, puzzling over why the text switches from the use of the singular to the use of the plural—from "so God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him" to "male and female created he them"—they see a reference to an original, androgynous being (Gen. Rab. on Gen 1:26; Mek. on Exod 12:40). The first human is both male and female in one body according to Genesis 1:27.
The next section of Genesis, the Adam and Eve story, continues to explore the topic of sameness and difference, first, between man and animals and then between male and female. After Adam unsuccessfully seeks a companion from among the animals, God creates Eve from Adam's anatomy. Why, we might ask, does the Genesis myth depict Adam as seeking a mate among the animals? The answer is that the ancient author perceives humans as showing features of animals. He contemplates, in turn, the differences between humans and animals, males and females, humankind and divinity, not by means of philosophical inquiry but by imagining that the developments of the kind in question took place in primeval history. Robert Graves and Raphael Patai take Adam's congress with the beasts for granted but explain it differently: "the tradition that man's first sexual intercourse was with animals, not with women, may be due to the widely spread practice of bestiality among herdsmen of the Middle East." They infer from the Gilgamesh Epic that Enkidu, too, first mates with the animals until civilized by Aruru's priestess.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sex and Religion in the Bible by CALUM CARMICHAEL. Copyright © 2010 by Yale University. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface.................... vii
Introduction.................... ix
1. Procreation.................... 1
2. The Marriage at Cana.................... 12
3. A Sexual Encounter.................... 28
4. Seduction.................... 44
5. Contamination.................... 64
6. Adultery.................... 85
7. The Suspected Adulteress.................... 108
8. Incest.................... 135
9. Desexing.................... 158
Abbreviations.................... 177
Notes.................... 181
Index of References.................... 201
Subject Index.................... 208