The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible

by Jonathan Kirsch

  More praise for The Harlot by the Side of the Road

  “Jonathan Kirsch’s new book is guaranteed to turn the heads of bookstore browsers from coast to coast. In a time when so many decry biblical illiteracy, The Harlot by the Side of the Road is a welcome addition to the growing genre of Bible scholarship that has slowly been moving from the rarefied confines of universities and cloistered seminaries into the hands of everyday believers and skeptics alike.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Fascinating reading … Demonstrating meticulous research and an enticing style.”

  —Booklist

  “Kirsch succeeds in bringing these ancient stories to vivid life, and in revealing the human passions and frailties often left out of the telling of familiar Bible tales.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Also by Jonathan Kirsch

  Moses: A Life

  King David

  The Woman Who Laughed at God: The Untold History of the Jewish People

  To Ann, Adam, and Jennifer

  With love, as always.

  Remember us in life,

  and health, and strength,

  O Lord who delighteth in life,

  And inscribe us in the Book of Life…

  “When the kings had died, a pauper, barefooted and hungry, came and sat on the throne. ‘God,’ he whispered, ‘the eyes of man cannot bear to look directly at the sun, for they are blinded. How then, Omnipotent, can they look directly at you? Have pity, Lord; temper your strength, turn down your splendor so that I, who am poor and afflicted, may see you!’ Then—listen, old man!—God became a piece of bread, a cup of cool water, a warm tunic, a hut, and in front of the hut, a woman giving suck to an infant. ‘Thank you, Lord,’ he whispered. ‘You humbled yourself for my sake. You became bread, water, a warm tunic and my wife and son in order that I may see you. And I did see you. I bow down and worship your beloved many-faced face!’”

  —NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS

  THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST

  CONTENTS

  Maps

  Chapter One Forbidden Tales of the Bible

  Chapter Two Lot and His Daughters

  Chapter Three Life Against Death: The Sacred Incest of

  Lot’s Daughters

  Chapter Four The Rape of Dinah

  Chapter Five “See What a Scourge Is Laid upon Your Hate”:

  The Strange Affair of Dinah and Shechem

  Chapter Six Tamar and Judah

  Chapter Seven The Woman Who Willed Herself into

  History: Tamar as the Harlot by the Side of the Road

  Chapter Eight Zipporah and Moses

  Chapter Nine The Bridegroom of Blood: Zipporah as the

  Goddess-Rescuer of Moses

  Chapter Ten Jephthah and His Daughter

  Chapter Eleven A Goddess of Israel: The Forbidden Cult of

  Jephthah’s Daughter

  Chapter Twelve The Traveler and His Concubine

  Chapter Thirteen God and Gyno-sadism: Heroines and Martyrs

  in the Book of Judges

  Chapter Fourteen Tamar and Amnon

  Chapter Fifteen The Rape of Tamar: The Politics of Love and

  Hate in the Court of King David

  Chapter Sixteen God’s Novel Has Suspense

  Appendix Who Really Wrote the Bible?

  Chronology

  Endnotes

  Acknowledgments

  Recommended Reading and Bibliography

  CHAPTER ONE

  FORBIDDEN TALES OF THE BIBLE

  THE NAKED NOAH THE FORBIDDEN BIBLE

  THE FORGOTTEN BIBLE THE LIBERATING BIBLE

  “A NEED TO TELL AND HEAR STORIES”

  The 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 that’s 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 work—a 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 don’ts. 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.

  THE NAKED NOAH

  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.

  At the end of the story of Noah, after the flood has subsided and God h
as signaled his good intentions toward humanity by painting a rainbow across the sky, we came upon 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. So Shem and Japheth took a cloak, put it on their shoulders and walked backwards, and so covered their fathers naked body; their faces were turned the other way, so that they did not see their father naked (Gen. 9:20–24 NEB).*

  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 book you are now reading. 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 the juicy parts. And so my son’s question is answered here: The stories collected in these pages are the ones that I—like so many other shocked Bible readers over the millennia—was tempted to leave out.

  THE FORBIDDEN BIBLE

  The stories that are retold here will come as a surprise to many readers precisely because, over the centuries, they have been suppressed by rabbis, priests, and ministers uncomfortable with the candor of the biblical storytellers about human conduct, sexual or otherwise. At times, the instruments of censorship have been subtle and even devious, and that’s why even regular church- and synagogue-goers may not know that these stories, bold and blunt as they are, can be found in the original text of the Bible.

  The Bible as a Banned Book

  At certain times and places, some of the more lurid stories in the Bible have been banned outright. For example, the prayer service in Judaism is built around the public reading of the Torah, that is, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, and selected passages from other books of the Hebrew Bible. Since the typical Jewish congregation was (and is) unfamiliar with the ancient Hebrew in which the Bible is written, the text was translated into the languages spoken by the Jewish people outside of the Holy Land. The Torah is read out loud to the congregation, word by word, in a cycle that lasts an entire year and then begins again—but, long ago, the rabbis set down strict rules that were expressly designed to prevent their congregants from hearing or understanding certain passages of the Holy Scriptures.*

  For example, the rabbinical authorities once decreed that the story of the seduction of Jacob’s concubine, Bilhah, by his firstborn son, Reuben (Gen. 35:22), and the frank account of King David’s lust for Bathsheba (2 Sam. 11)—a tale that features voyeurism, seduction, adultery, bastardy, and the murder of a loyal and heroic soldier by vile and cowardly means—were permitted to be read aloud in the synagogue in the original Hebrew but were not to be translated from Hebrew into a language that the congregation was more likely to understand. And some stories—including, for example, the rape of King David’s daughter, Tamar, by her love-crazed half brother (2 Sam. 13)—were so troubling to the rabbis that these stories were not to be read out loud or translated out of biblical Hebrew.1

  Similarly, an English bishop of the eighteenth century named Porteus produced an index to the Bible that was designed to identify exactly which passages the goodly churchman considered to be suitable for the lay reader. A star was used to mark the sayings of Jesus and the approved portions of the Psalms and the Book of Isaiah, and the numerals 1 and 2 were used to designate other approved chapters and verses of the Holy Writ. Any passage of the Bible not marked with one of these symbols was considered by Bishop Porteus to be off-limits to the ordinary Bible reader—and he declared nearly half of the Hebrew Bible (and some of the New Testament) to be too hot to handle. Of course, the so-called Porteusian Index, if used in reverse, was an ideal tool for the curious Bible reader seeking out precisely the stories that the bishop sought to ban.2

  Some efforts to bowdlerize the Bible are even more blunt. One enterprising and easily offended woman in late eighteenth-century America was so fearful of letting her children read the Bible that she published a version from which she simply omitted “indecent expressions” that she found in the original text. In fact, she blue-penciled so much “bad language” that she ended up cutting out and throwing away nearly half the text that the rest of the world regards as the Revealed Word of God. Like biblical exegetes of all ages, however, she went on to add so many of her own notes and comments that her edition bulked up to six volumes.3

  The Rewritten Bible

  Even in antiquity, some sages and scribes were so appalled by what they found in the Bible that they were moved to rewrite the Holy Scriptures and simply leave out the passages that they found awkward or objectionable. Some of these rewritten texts are found in the earliest translations of the Hebrew Bible into Greek or Aramaic, the language of late antiquity that was probably spoken by Jesus. For example, the pious translators who rendered the Bible into Aramaic felt at liberty to tamper with the original text in an effort to explain away the bloody and baffling tale of God’s attempt to stalk and kill Moses (Exod. 4:24–26), and other authors of the ancient world who collected and retold the stories of the Bible simply leave the tale out altogether.4

  One rewritten version of a biblical narrative actually found its way into the Bible itself. The First and Second Books of Chronicles, the very last books of the Hebrew Bible, are essentially a sanitized version of the court history of King David that appears in its unexpurgated form in the First and Second Books of Samuel. The author of Samuel is admirably honest about David, sparing no detail of the various sexual excesses and crimes of passion that tainted his reign, but the author of the Chronicles insists on cleaning up David’s reputation by simply cut’ ting the more lascivious stories. The Book of Samuel, for example, devotes considerable attention to the deadly love triangle between David, Bathsheba, and her husband (2 Sam. 11). To judge from the Book of Chronicles, however, none of it ever happened. “See what Chronicles has made out of David!” exclaimed Julius Wellhausen, an early and important German biblical scholar who allows us to understand that the real authors of the Bible were ordinary human beings who were perfectly willing to engage in a cover-up.5

  “What Is Written” and “What Is Said”

  One of the more curious approaches to cleaning up the Bible was adopted by the Masoretes, a succession of rabbinical scholars who sought to preserve an authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible starting as early as the fifth century CE. Among the helpful notations added to the so-called Masoretic Text are a series of cautions that distinguish between “What is written” (Kethib) and “What is said” (Qere)—that is, the rabbis identified certain words that were supposed to be read aloud differently than they were actually written in the text.

  For example, the Book of Deuteronomy includes a long list of curses that will befall the Israelites if they do not obey the commandments of the Lord. When we read the curse that appears in Deuteronomy 28:30 (NEB)—“A woman will be pledged to you, but another shall ravish her”—the biblical text plainly uses the Hebrew word that indicates sexual intercourse, but the Masoretes instruct us to pronounce the Hebrew word for “recline” in place of the word for “ravish” when reading the text out loud.

  “Passages written with unclean expressions,” the rabbis of “hoary antiquity” decreed, “are changed to more seemly readings.”6

  The Translator as Censor

  Some passages of the Bible are bawdier than we suspect because idiomatic expressions in the text are translated literally in order to conceal their real meaning. The best example is found in the familiar s
tory of Ruth, where the young widow’s mother-in-law sends her to the threshing-floor of a wealthy landowner named Boaz. “And it shall be, when he lieth down,” says the wily mother-in-law, “thou shalt go in, and uncover his feet, and lay thee down; and he will tell thee what thou shalt do” (Ruth 3:4). The scene is a bit baffling—why, after all, is she uncovering his feet?—until we discover what the translators have failed to tell us: the word “feet” (or “legs”) in biblical Hebrew is sometimes a euphemism for the male sexual organ.7 What Naomi is telling Ruth to do to Boaz, we realize now, is to expose his genitalia while he sleeps—and see what happens when he wakes up: “[H]e will tell thee what thou shalt do.”

  What actually happens between Boaz and Ruth is obscured by yet another untranslated euphemism. Boaz wakes up to find his genitals exposed and lovely young Ruth beside him. “Who art thou?” he asks. “I am Ruth thy handmaid,” she replies, “spread therefore thy skirt over thy handmaid” (Ruth 3:9). But, once again, the translator neglects to tell us that “spreading one’s skirt” is a biblical euphemism for sexual intercourse: “For a man to spread his ‘skirt’ over a woman,” cracks Bible scholar Marvin H. Pope, “meant more than merely preventing a chill.”8

  Another favorite trick of self-appointed censors is the use of translations that are misleading or intentionally wrong. For example, the Book of Joshua includes a Bible-era cloak-and-dagger story about two spies who are sent into the land of Canaan in advance of the invading army of Israel to scout out the enemy defenses (Josh. 1:1–19). The spies are sheltered by a Canaanite woman named Rahab whom the original text plainly identifies as a harlot, not once but several times. Indeed, the Hebrew words can be read to suggest that the spies are availing themselves of Rahab’s professional services when they are interrupted by an enemy patrol.9 Yet some Sunday school teachers prefer to tell their impressionable young charges that the kindly and courageous Rahab is an “innkeeper,” and Bible scholarship has tried to validate the little white lie by pointing out that “the inn and the brothel have been found in one establishment often in the history of mankind.”10