IS SEX THE ONLY TOPIC IN THE BIBLE?
Except for historians and professional critics, the current value of a book is found in its present use. For example, because of its obvious racial overtones, few of us would recommend reading Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer tales. The fact that it represents prevalent ideas of racial relationships at the time of its composition is immaterial to educators and parents. Literature, written more than a century ago that includes people of color, are no longer the classics they were in our grandparents’ age.
Similarly, Nabokov’s tales of sexual lust by middle-aged men for young girls or the sexual taboos broken by Lady’s Chatterley’sLover are no longer shocking. D.H. Lawrence’s description of sexual contacts and use of words that were never printed before are deemed tame by contemporary standards. These types of works only hold interest for bibliophiles and those who chart morals. They have little literary interest for present-day readers of fiction. The same with the Bible.
The Bible (the Pentateuch, which I am most familiar) has an entire book- Leviticus - devoted to the sacrifices brought at the time of the Tabernacle, but none of it applies to us, regardless of our piety or commitment to the text. For many of us, it might as well be expunged. The multiple, familiar Biblical stories are childish and best suited for elementary school pageants. Such fabulist tales are mercifully forgotten unless they are given a makeover to bring them into sync with present values and situations.
This bowdlerization of the Bible is an ancient practice. By the5th century, the sages of the Talmud had definitively ruled that portions of the Bible – a work they revered as Divinely written and mined regularly and creatively – were no longer relevant. They excised the parts that deal with the wayward son (ben sorer u’moreh) and a Canaanite city under Jewish sovereignty that turned to paganism (ihr hanidachat), among the many significant portions of the Bible that they deemed irrelevant. Scholars can argue what caused such learned censorship – what is it a displeasure with the moral structure underlining such Biblical laws or changing circumstances? – but at the end of their day, the portions they treated like we do our nuclear waste, were no longer viable, though they merited further study.
Today, most of the laws of the Bible have little relevance to us. To extrapolate regulations from an ox of a farmer goring another beast to a high-speed car crash in a state with required no-fault auto insurance stretches the imagination. You have to be creative and twist your mind into a legal pretzel to perceive a connection.
That leaves only one subject in the Bible that can still engage us: sex. Not only because sex sells, but because it is the only part of the Bible that can be quoted without feeling that ancient relics are being brought to bear on contemporary issues.
No wonder that, except for those who go to religious schools, most people believe that the Bible is composed only of passages that relate to sexual mores. It is the only time we hear the Bible’s take on an explicit subject.
The problem is that the Bible sees sex as one dimensional. It had one primary function: to promulgate. Procreation was the key (if not the only) function of sex; all forms of the act that could not conceivably produce progeny is prohibited. If one looks at all the prohibited sexual acts found in the Bible, this conclusion is inevitable. This one rule of thumb lies at the root of all sexual abominations. It is the common denominator for all of them. Homosexuality, bestiality, sacred sex, and masturbation(with a female involved or not ) are all condemned because of this simple reason: they do no lead to procreation. There isn’t even a pretense that it can.
From this simple rule, one can easily conceive the rest of the prohibited sexual acts, such as oral sex and anal sex. Unless the male semen swims freely in the female uterus, the Bible is against it.
Intimacy and the physical pleasure of sex, while not denied, were not the chief concern of this rule book. The Bible describes a God that that saw Man and Woman as “very good” and wanted them to be “one flesh.” But their purpose on the planet and for which they were principally created is spelled out in sun lit clarity: to multiply.
The second consideration when having sex - after promulgation - was knowing the ancestry of the offspring. Inheritance, tribal affiliation, and priesthood rules were critical in ancient societies. Though it could lead to procreation, but rarely to full legal responsibility by the male partner, any sexual act that failed this litmus test was considered an illicit coupling. Hence, adultery was condemned, but not polygamy. So too was pre-marital sex. Think of an incestuous relation: who would want to be responsible both as the father and brother of their offspring? A legal adoption is unknown in the Bible, or even in the Talmud.
It makes sense that, unless you are fulfilling areligious need or were made to read the Bible from cover to cover, you might conclude that the only topic found in the Bible is related to sex. Only those passages that connect to this topic are quoted, ever. But it’s time to give equal attention (or inattention) to the remaining portions of the Bible.