The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible by Jonathan Kirsch Page A
Authors: Jonathan Kirsch
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up much of the Bible were plainly obsessed by the powerful allure of strange gods and strange women, both of which they regarded as a threat to the very existence of the Israelites, and they used the holy texts as a rhetorical weapon to coax, cajole, threaten, extort, or simply scare the Chosen People into shunning their neighbors in Canaan and marrying only their fellow worshippers of Yahweh.
Much rhetorical ammunition could be found in the writings of the prophets, ancient and contemporary, whose visions and oracles were added to the Five Books of Moses to create the heart of the Hebrew Bible as we know it. One can literally open the prophetic books at random and find some hot-eyed and heavy-breathing tract on thesubject of pagan worship, or intermarriage, or both. Indeed, the sin of apostasy and the sin of sexual promiscuity are treated as interchangeable by many of the prophets, one serving as a metaphor for the other throughout the Bible. All of the woes of Israel—conquest, dispersion, despoliation, and destruction—are depicted in the prophetic books as just punishments inflicted by God on the Chosen People for their spiritual and carnal infidelities.
“I have loved strangers,” boasts a wanton and impudent Israel to an angry and jealous God in the Book of Jeremiah, “and after them will I go” (Jer. 2:25).
“Because of thy filthy lewdness,” God thunders back, “thou shalt not be purged from thy filthiness … till I have satisfied My fury upon thee” (Ezek. 24:13).
The condemnation of marriage with non-Israelites in the Bible is not merely metaphorical. In one remarkable scene in the Book of Ezra, we see the priest called Ezra—“a ready scribe in the Law of Moses” (Ezra 7:6)—as he returns to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon and discovers, to his horror, that “the holy seed have mingled themselves with the peoples of the lands.” After sitting down in the dust, rending his garments and tearing his hair like a man in mourning, Ezra lifts himself up, dusts himself off, and resolves to do something about the “abomination” of intermarriage. So he conducts a public ceremony in which a multitude of Israelite men, abject and weeping, are divorced en masse from the non-Israelite women whom they have taken as wives. “[L]et us make a covenant with out God to put away our foreign wives, and such as are born of them,” exhorts the stern priest as he tears asunder an uncounted number of mixed marriages (Ezra 10:3). “Be of good courage, and do it!” (Ezra 10:3–4).
Ezra’s words of encouragement—“Be of good courage”—consciously echo the words spoken to Joshua by Moses (Deut. 31:23) and by the Almighty himself (Josh. 1:6) on the very eve of the invasion of Canaan, when the Israelites cross the Jordan River and launch a war of conquest that is intended to rid the Promised Land of its native peoples. (See chapter seven.) According to the Bible, God himself endorses a scorched-earth campaign against the Canaanites that is only slightly less horrific in detail—and far greater in scale—than the fate of the innocent men, women, and children who are made to pay for Shechem’s crime, whatever it might have been.
T WO B ELLIES , O NE S PEAR
The massacre of Shechem and his people as recounted in the Book of Genesis foreshadows the carnage that is found in subsequent books of the Bible, a kind of “ethnic cleansing” that is intended to purify the Promised Land by obliterating the idol-worshipping men and women whom the Israelites apparently find so beguiling. By the time we reach the heroic saga of the Exodus from Egypt—the stirring national myth of the Israelites and the centerpiece of the Bible itself—we find a biblical atrocity story that is the mirror image of the tale of Dinah and Shechem; it is a tale in which the victim of seduction is an Israelite prince from the tribe of Simeon and the seducer is a Midianite woman. The two stories differ in one basic and crucial way: The
Much rhetorical ammunition could be found in the writings of the prophets, ancient and contemporary, whose visions and oracles were added to the Five Books of Moses to create the heart of the Hebrew Bible as we know it. One can literally open the prophetic books at random and find some hot-eyed and heavy-breathing tract on thesubject of pagan worship, or intermarriage, or both. Indeed, the sin of apostasy and the sin of sexual promiscuity are treated as interchangeable by many of the prophets, one serving as a metaphor for the other throughout the Bible. All of the woes of Israel—conquest, dispersion, despoliation, and destruction—are depicted in the prophetic books as just punishments inflicted by God on the Chosen People for their spiritual and carnal infidelities.
“I have loved strangers,” boasts a wanton and impudent Israel to an angry and jealous God in the Book of Jeremiah, “and after them will I go” (Jer. 2:25).
“Because of thy filthy lewdness,” God thunders back, “thou shalt not be purged from thy filthiness … till I have satisfied My fury upon thee” (Ezek. 24:13).
The condemnation of marriage with non-Israelites in the Bible is not merely metaphorical. In one remarkable scene in the Book of Ezra, we see the priest called Ezra—“a ready scribe in the Law of Moses” (Ezra 7:6)—as he returns to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon and discovers, to his horror, that “the holy seed have mingled themselves with the peoples of the lands.” After sitting down in the dust, rending his garments and tearing his hair like a man in mourning, Ezra lifts himself up, dusts himself off, and resolves to do something about the “abomination” of intermarriage. So he conducts a public ceremony in which a multitude of Israelite men, abject and weeping, are divorced en masse from the non-Israelite women whom they have taken as wives. “[L]et us make a covenant with out God to put away our foreign wives, and such as are born of them,” exhorts the stern priest as he tears asunder an uncounted number of mixed marriages (Ezra 10:3). “Be of good courage, and do it!” (Ezra 10:3–4).
Ezra’s words of encouragement—“Be of good courage”—consciously echo the words spoken to Joshua by Moses (Deut. 31:23) and by the Almighty himself (Josh. 1:6) on the very eve of the invasion of Canaan, when the Israelites cross the Jordan River and launch a war of conquest that is intended to rid the Promised Land of its native peoples. (See chapter seven.) According to the Bible, God himself endorses a scorched-earth campaign against the Canaanites that is only slightly less horrific in detail—and far greater in scale—than the fate of the innocent men, women, and children who are made to pay for Shechem’s crime, whatever it might have been.
T WO B ELLIES , O NE S PEAR
The massacre of Shechem and his people as recounted in the Book of Genesis foreshadows the carnage that is found in subsequent books of the Bible, a kind of “ethnic cleansing” that is intended to purify the Promised Land by obliterating the idol-worshipping men and women whom the Israelites apparently find so beguiling. By the time we reach the heroic saga of the Exodus from Egypt—the stirring national myth of the Israelites and the centerpiece of the Bible itself—we find a biblical atrocity story that is the mirror image of the tale of Dinah and Shechem; it is a tale in which the victim of seduction is an Israelite prince from the tribe of Simeon and the seducer is a Midianite woman. The two stories differ in one basic and crucial way: The
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