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

by Jonathan Kirsch

  Indeed, at least one biblical commandment—the curious tradition of the so-called levirate marriage—actually requires sexual intercourse between a man and the widow of his dead brother (Deut. 25:5–10). We will encounter a torrid example of the levirate tradition in action in the story of Judah and Tamar (see chapter six), and—rather like the story of Lot and his daughters—we will see that the biblical author does not suggest the slightest disapproval of what is otherwise a flagrant violation of the law against incest between a man and his sister-in-law or a father and his daughter-in-law as it appears in Leviticus (Lev. 18:15–16).

  Thus the Bible betrays an attitude toward incest that is far more casual than one might expect from the stern pronouncements of Leviticus. And so, when the rabbis declared that the story of Reuben’s affair with his father’s concubine was not suitable to be read aloud in the synagogue, perhaps they were less concerned about the lurid details of the sexual encounter in Jacob’s marriage bed than about the matter-of-fact quality of the narrative and the mildness of the punishment.

  Indeed, we might wonder whether the catalog of forbidden sexual partners composed by the censorious authors of Leviticus says something about how commonplace the practice of incest may have been among the Israelites; after all, if incest were not regarded as a fact of life in the biblical world, why would the biblical lawgiver feel a need to go on at such length and in such tantalizing detail?29

  SISTER AND WIFE

  The willingness of a father to turn over his daughters to a mob bent on sexual violence is the single most disturbing moment in the story of Lot, and indeed one of the most alarming incidents in the Bible. But it is not the only story in which an otherwise righteous man is perfectly willing to expose a woman to danger in order to save his own skin; for example, a story in the Book of Judges tells us in stomach-turning detail exactly what would have happened if Lot had cast his daughters into the street. (See chapter twelve).

  Not once but three times, the Bible depicts a scene in which a patriarch passes his wife off as his sister in order to protect himself from physical violence. For example, when Abraham and Sarah journey to Egypt to escape a famine in Canaan, Abraham insists on masquerading as Sarah’s brother out of fear that any man who took a fancy to Sarah would be more likely to slay her spouse than her sibling in order to get Sarah into his bed. In fact, Sarah is recruited for service in the harem of the Pharaoh, and the Egyptian monarch lavishes gifts upon Abraham, the man he believes to be Sarah’s brother. Abraham accepts the bounty of Pharaoh without comment, and only the intervention of God himself spares Sarah from actually sleeping with Pharaoh (Gen. 12:10–20).

  We find the very same story in two other passages of Genesis. Abraham resorts to the same deception with yet another lusty monarch, Abimelech, King of the Philistines, and with the same results—Sarah ends up in Abimelech’s bed but God warns him off at the very last minute (Gen. 20:2–10). Abimelech, like Pharaoh before him, is depicted as horror-stricken at the thought that he might have inadvertently slept with another man’s wife, and both monarchs actually scold Abraham for putting them in such moral peril.

  When confronted with his act of deception by the indignant Abimelech, Abraham concedes that Sarah is his wife—but insists that she is his half sister, too, as if that fact explained and excused his ruse. “She is … the daughter of my father,” Abraham riddles, “but not the daughter of my mother” (Gen. 20:12). We cannot be entirely sure whether Abraham’s belated claim that Sarah is his half sister is yet another deception, but rabbis and scholars have taken Abraham at his word and concluded on such sparse evidence that marriage between half siblings were permissible under the laws of ancient Israel. And they have argued that half-incestuous marriage was apparently still acceptable as late as the reign of King David, when his daughter, Tamar, proposes marriage as an alternative; to rape at the hands of her half brother (see chapter fifteen).

  The same ploy is adopted by Isaac, the son of Abraham and Sarah, when he makes his own journey to Abimelech’s kingdom in the company of his wife, Rebekah. Like his father, Isaac resorts to the deception of calling Rebekah his sister out of plain cowardice. “[H]e feared to say: ‘My wife,’” we are told, “‘lest the men of the place should kill me for Rebekah, because she is fair to look upon’” (Gen. 26:7). But the deception fails when Abimelech happens to look out the window of his palace and sees Isaac “sporting” with Rebekah—the Hebrew word used in the original text (t’sahak) suggests “fondling” or what we used to call “petting”30—and the good king figures that Rebekah is not really Isaac’s sister after all. Abimelech realizes that he has been fooled (again!) and scolds Isaac for putting his own moral standing at risk, just as he once scolded Isaac’s father for playing the same dirty trick (Gen. 26:1–10).

  Bible scholars and sermonizers have engaged in much subtle argument to explain away the baffling and cowardly conduct of Abraham and Isaac, which readers have always found “puzzling and disturbing,”31 even “offensive.”32 Perhaps Sarah was merely adopted by Abraham’s father at some undisclosed point in his childhood, they have speculated, and thus she was not a blood relation at all.33 The boldest explanation, and the one that puts the patriarchs in the best light, is based on a long-forgotten tradition of an ancient people known as the Hurrians who placed such importance on the brother-sister relationship that a man might adopt his wife as his sister at the same time he married her.

  Abraham and Isaac adopted the Hurrian tradition of identifying their wives as their sisters, suggests one authoritative Bible scholar, in order to invoke “all the … safeguards and privileges” that were available to a man’s sister (but not to his wife).34 By the time the biblical authors and editors assembled the legend and lore of ancient Israel into what we now know as the Bible, it has been suggested, they simply did not know or understand the Hurrian tradition of wife-as-sister. “Tradition had apparently set much store by these incidents,” Ephraim Speiser explains, “but the key to them had been lost somewhere in the intervening distances of time and space.”35 Rather than discard the three baffling tales, they tried to explain what Abraham and Isaac were doing in terms that their readers might understand.

  The only explanation that made sense to biblical redactors—or, for that matter, makes sense to us—is the one that shows us the otherwise worthy patriarchs as timid souls who are perfectly willing to consign their wives to the beds of powerful men in exchange for their own physical safety and, perhaps, a king’s reward.

  SEX AS POLITICS

  The choice of bed partners as depicted in Holy Scripture is sometimes a matter of politics and diplomacy rather than love or lust. Solomon, for example, is said to have accumulated seven hundred wives (1 Kings 11:3), and it is likely that many of these marriages were meant to seal alliances between an Israelite king at the height of his power and the princes and potentates of the surrounding nations and empires. And even when the Bible reports a sexual encounter that is frankly incestuous, political ambition rather than sexual adventure is sometimes at the heart of the matter, as when Absalom, son of King David, conducts a public orgy with his father’s concubines on the palace rooftop.

  David’s concubines were installed in what can only be called a harem—the kings of Israel, like other monarchs of the ancient Near East, collected wives and concubines in great profusion, and the harem was a symbol of the grandeur and opulence of a king’s court. The much-married Solomon, for example, stocked his harem with an additional three hundred concubines. And we are plainly told that Ahaziah, a descendant of David and Solomon, aped the ways of pagan kings by recruiting (or making) eunuchs* to secure the chastity of his wives (2 Kings 9:32), even though a man whose “privy parts” are “crushed or maimed” is regarded with horror by the biblical author known as the Deuteronomist (Deut. 23:2).

  A harem guard was essential because the chastity of a king’s wife or concubine was another symbol of the monarch’s power and potency. Thus, when the rebellious Absalom goes to war against his fathe
r, King David, and drives the monarch out of Jerusalem, he chooses a striking (and notably Freudian) gesture to symbolize the assumption of his father’s throne: Absalom takes captive the royal concubines who had been left behind by the fleeing monarch, erects a tent on the roof of the royal palace, where he can be seen by all of Jerusalem, and makes love to each of the ten concubines “in the sight of all Israel” (2 Sam. 16:22). The political message was unmistakable: “To lie with a monarch’s concubine,” one Bible scholar has written, “was tantamount to usurpation of the throne.”36

  Unlike Reuben, who also may have been challenging his father’s authority by sleeping with Jacob’s concubine, Absalom pays for his sexual defiance with his life—but, then, he would have been subject to execution for his rebellion against the reigning king whether or not he had crowned his palace coup with a public orgy. And David apparently regards the women as tainted by sexual contact with his son, and he spurns them after he regains his throne and his harem: “So they were shut up unto the day of their death, [living] in widowhood” (2 Sam. 20:3).

  Of course David could not have been too surprised by Absalom’s sexual derring-do. After all, David himself had slept with the wives of his predecessor, King Saul, as a symbol of his kingship (2 Sam. 12:8), thus setting an example for his own randy and rebellious sons. And when Solomon is crowned as king of Israel after the death of David, one of his brothers, Adonijah, ever-so-politely asks permission to sleep with their fathers favorite concubine, the delectable but untouched Abishag; Solomon marks the gesture for what it is—a bid for the throne—and sends an assassin to kill his impudent brother (1 Kings 2:12–25).

  To engage in sexual relations, with the concubine of one’s father—an act that we might liken to sleeping with one’s stepmother—was a violation of a sexual taboo that had been raised to a divine commandment in the Bible. But the real crime of these daring and ambitious men—David, Absalom, Adonijah, and others whose exploits are recorded in the Holy Bible—was treason rather than incest.

  WHAT DOES SARAH SEE?

  The disappearance of four words in an early version of the biblical text raises the intriguing if troubling prospect that the Bible also records an incident of incestuous child molestation, a notion so shocking that it may have been literally written out of the Bible by the rabbinical censors. Did Ishmael, the firstborn son of the patriarch Abraham, molest his five-year-old half brother, Isaac?

  Abraham and Sarah* are childless, as we read in Genesis, and so Sarah sends her husband to the bed of her own handmaiden, an Egyptian woman named Hagar, to find a fertile womb. When Hagar is impregnated, however, a suddenly jealous Sarah has a change of heart and banishes the handmaiden to the wilderness. An angel rescues Hagar from death by thirst and starvation in the desert and sends her back to Abraham’s encampment, where she bears a son named Ishmael (Gen. 16:4–16).

  Later, as Ishmael is growing up, God makes a remarkable promise to the ninety-nine-year-old Abraham and his ninety-year-old wife: Sarah will bear a son who will replace Ishmael as the inheritor of Abraham’s divine blessing. “I will establish my covenant with him, and with his seed after him,” God says of Isaac. “I will make nations out of thee, and kings shall come out of thee” (Gen. 17:19). So remarkable is the news that Sarah laughs out loud—-she laughs, almost literally, in God’s face—and her son is given the name Isaac, a bit of Hebrew wordplay that means “I laughed” (Gen. 18:12, 21:4).

  And now the Bible shows us a deeply enigmatic scene in which we find the fifteen-year-old Ishmael at play with his five-year-old stepbrother at a feast in celebration of the fact that Isaac has been weaned (at last!) from the breast. But the festivities are ruined for Sarah because she happens to see Ishmael doing something to Isaac, something so disturbing that Sarah promptly demands that Ishmael and his mother be “cast out” in the wilderness a second and final time.

  Exactly what does Sarah see, exactly what does Ishmael do, that prompts such anger and outrage in Sarah? All we are told in conventional English translations of the Bible is that Sarah sees Ishmael “mocking” young Isaac—and we are asked to believe that, thanks to a single adolescent taunt by one sibling toward another, Sarah drives mother and son into the desert to die.

  Unless, that is, she saw something much worse than mere mockery.

  A clue to the mystery of Sarah’s murderous rage is to be found in the Hebrew word actually used in the Bible to describe what Ishmael does to Isaac: t’sahak. The word is translated as “mocking” by the Shakespearean-era translators who gave us the King James Version of the Bible. A more recent Jewish translation (JPS), derived largely from the King James Version, uses the phrase “making sport.” So we are given to understand by these translators that Hagar and Ishmael are condemned to death in the wilderness because a teenager makes fun of his little brother. But the real meaning of t’sahak suggests that something else is being hidden in these translations.

  One of the meanings of t’sahak is “laugh”—a play on Isaac’s name—and that’s the one on which the translators, old and new, have relied in suggesting that Ishmael merely “mocked” or “laughed at” Isaac. What the translators are reluctant to let us know is that another meaning of t’sahak is “fondle,” and the original Hebrew text of the Bible may suggest that what Sarah actually saw was some kind of sex play between Ishmael and his little brother.

  Indeed, the very same Hebrew word that is used to describe what Ishmael does to Isaac appears only a few lines later in Genesis to describe Isaac fondling Rebekah outside the window of Abimelech, King of the Philistines. What Abimelech saw through his window was enough to tip him off that Rebekah was Isaac’s wife rather than his sister—and the translators of the King James Version (KJV) do not hesitate to allow us to understand the sexual overtones of the scene: “Behold, Isaac was sporting with Rebekah his wife” (Gen. 26:8).

  The mystery of what Sarah saw deepens when we notice that an entire phrase has been dropped from the passage in some versions of the Bible itself. The authoritative version of the Bible in its complete Hebrew text—the so-called Masoretic Text—includes only a truncated description of what Ishmael is doing when Sarah sees him. “Sarah noticed that [Ishmael] was playing.” But the early Greek version of the Bible called the Septuagint and the Latin version called the Vulgate, which may have been translated from Hebrew manuscripts even more ancient than the Masoretic Text, give the same verse as “Sarah noticed that [Ishmael] was playing with her son Isaac”

  What are we to make of the missing words in the Masoretic Text of the Bible? Some Bible critics have been bold enough to suggest that the biblical text is intended to reveal that Ishmael is engaged in some kind of sex-play with young Isaac, but the pious editors of the Masoretic Text sought to play down the disturbing sexuality of the scene by leaving out the key phrase “with her son Isaac.” The Septuagint and the Vulgate, it is suggested, preserve the original, complete and unexpurgated text—and these translations preserve, too, a hint of what Sarah sees.

  Indeed, the severity of Sarah’s reaction is puzzling and even alarming if Ishmael is only “playing with” Isaac or even if Ishmael is actually “mocking” him. Abraham himself understands that Sarah’s decree that Hagar and Ishmael be driven into the desert is a death sentence; we are told that “the thing was very grievous in Abraham’s sight on account of his son,” and Abraham goes to the trouble of provisioning them with bread and water. Only after God reassures Abraham that Hagar and Ishmael will survive—“[O]f the son of the bondwoman I will make a nation”—does the goodly patriarch actually send them into the wilderness (Gen. 21:11–13).

  Still, the very suggestion that the Bible hides an incident of incestuous child molestation is simply too hot for most Bible scholars to handle. The rabbis explained away the whole episode by suggesting that Ishmael liked to play with a bow and arrows, and “was in the habit of aiming his missiles in the direction of Isaac, saying at the same time that he was but jesting.”37 Even when some commentators are willing to concede that
“mocking” is not justifiable translation of the Hebrew word, they still insist that the encounter between Ishmael and Isaac is wholly innocent.

  “[H]is ‘playing’ with Isaac need mean no more than that the older boy was trying to amuse his little brother,” wrote Ephraim Speiser, one of the most venerated contemporary Bible scholars. “There is nothing in the text to suggest that he was abusing him, a motive deduced by many troubled readers in their effort to account for Sarah’s anger.”38

  But we might reach a different conclusion, if only out of regard for the simple human decency of the matriarch Sarah. After all, Hagar and Ishmael nearly perish in the wilderness to which Sarah has condemned them, and only the reappearance of a guardian angel spares their lives (Gen. 21:16). Unless we are supposed to regard Sarah as so jealous of her son’s birthright that she would literally kill for him—or as an out-and-out paranoid, as one Bible scholar has suggested39—then we might look for a more plausible explanation for her punishing rage than the mockery of an older brother toward his younger sibling.40 And four missing words that have somehow disappeared from the Masoretic Text of the Bible provide one intriguing explanation for what Sarah sees: Ishmael is taking a liberty with his little brother that his stepmother finds too shocking to tolerate.

  “WHO IS THE THIRD WHO WALKS ALWAYS BESIDE YOU?”

  Angelology has always been a big business among theologians, who are commonly accused of spending rather too much time counting how many angels can dance on a pinhead. But the very presence of angels in the Hebrew Bible may be seen as the earliest form of Bible censorship by priestly scribes who did not want to encourage their readers to believe that God was in the habit of calling upon mere mortals without the assistance of priests and their elaborate rituals. To discourage ordinary men and women from entertaining the thought that God himself might show up at their door and sit down to supper, the scribes may have systematically inserted angels into the biblical text as intermediaries between God and humankind.