E*****m
发帖数: 25615 | 1 http://www.newsweek.com/2011/02/06/what-the-bible-really-says-a
What the Bible Really Says About Sex
New scholarship on the Good Book’s naughty bits and how it deals with
adultery, divorce, and same-sex love.
Lisa Miller
by Lisa MillerFebruary 06, 2011
©SuperStock
Photos: A History of Multiple-Partner Relationships
More Ways Than Two
The poem describes two young lovers aching with desire. The obsession is
mutual, carnal, complete. The man lingers over his lover’s eyes and hair,
on her teeth, lips, temples, neck, and breasts, until he arrives at “the
mount of myrrh.” He rhapsodizes. “All of you is beautiful, my love,” he
says. “There is no flaw in you.”
The girl returns his lust with lust. “My lover thrust his hand through the
hole,” she says, “and my insides groaned because of him.”
This ode to sexual consummation can be found in—of all places—the Bible.
It is the Song of Solomon, a poem whose origins likely reach back to the
pagan love songs of Egypt more than 1,200 years before the birth of Jesus.
Biblical interpreters have endeavored through the millennia to temper its
heat by arguing that it means more than it appears to mean. It’s about God
’s love for Israel, they have said; or, it’s about Jesus’ love for the
church. But whatever other layers it may contain, the Song is on its face an
ancient piece of erotica, a celebration of the fulfillment of sexual desire.
What does the Bible really say about sex? Two new books written by
university scholars for a popular audience try to answer this question.
Infuriated by the dominance in the public sphere of conservative Christians
who insist that the Bible incontrovertibly supports sex within the
constraints of “traditional marriage,” these authors attempt to prove
otherwise. Jennifer Wright Knust and Michael Coogan mine the Bible for its
earthiest and most inexplicable tales about sex—Jephthah, who sacrifices
his virgin daughter to God; Naomi and Ruth, who vow to love one another
until death—to show that the Bible’s teachings on sex are not as coherent
as the religious right would have people believe. In Knust’s reading, the
Song of Solomon is a paean to unmarried sex, outside the conventions of
family and community. “I’m tired,” writes Knust in Unprotected Texts: The
Bible’s Surprising Contradictions About Sex and Desire, “of watching
those who are supposed to care about the Bible reduce its stories and
teachings to slogans.” Her book comes out this month. Coogan’s book God
and Sex: What the Bible Really Says was released last fall.
Conservative critics say that coherence is precisely what the Bible offers
on sex. Reading it in the context of the Christian tradition, and with an
awareness that the text is “divinely inspired”—that is, given to people
directly by God—a believer can come to only one conclusion on questions of
sex and marriage. “Sexual intimacy outside of a public, lifelong commitment
between a man and woman is not in accordance with God’s creating or
redeeming purposes,” explains Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological
Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. Liberals may wish the Bible were more
permissive on sex, conservative religious scholars say, but it’s not.
These battles over the “right” interpretation are, of course, as old as
the Bible itself. In today’s culture wars, the Bible—specifically a “one
man, one woman” argument from the Book of Genesis—is employed by the
Christian right to oppose gay marriage. This fight, as well as those over
the efficacy of abstinence-education schools and intra-denominational
squabbles over the proper role of women in church-leadership roles, have led
many Americans (two thirds of whom rarely read the Bible) to believe that
the Good Book doesn’t speak for them. Knust, a religion professor at Boston
University, is also an ordained minister in the American Baptist
denomination. Coogan, director of publications at Harvard University’s
Semitic Museum, once trained as a Jesuit priest. With their books, they hope
to steal the conversation about sex and the Bible back from the religious
right. “The Bible doesn’t have to be an invader, conquering bodies and
wills with its pronouncements and demands,” Knust writes. “It can also be
a partner in the complicated dance of figuring out what it means to live in
bodies that are filled with longing.” Here, in summary, are the arguments:
The Bible is an ancient text, inapplicable in its particulars to the modern
world.
In the Bible, “traditional marriage” doesn’t exist. Abraham fathers
children with Sarah and his servant Hagar. Jacob marries Rachel and her
sister Leah, as well as their servants Bilhah and Zilpah. Jesus was celibate
, as was Paul.
Husbands, in essence, owned their wives, and fathers owned their daughters,
too. A girl’s virginity was her father’s to protect—and to relinquish at
any whim. Thus Lot offers his two virgin daughters to the angry mob that
surrounds his house in Sodom. Deuteronomy proposes death for female
adulterers, and Paul suggests “women should be silent in churches” (a
rationale among some conservative denominations for barring women from the
pulpit).
The Bible contains a “pervasive patriarchal bias,” Coogan writes. Better
to elide the specifics and read the Bible for its teachings on love,
compassion, and forgiveness. Taken as a whole, “the Bible can be understood
as the record of the beginning of a continuous movement toward the goal of
full freedom and equality for all persons.”
Sex in the Bible is sometimes hidden.
Those who follow the gay-marriage debate are likely familiar with certain
bits of Scripture. Two verses, from Leviticus, describe sex between men as
“an abomination” (in the King James translation). Another, from Romans,
condemns men who are “inflamed with lust for one another.” But as Coogan
quips, “there is sex in the Bible on every page, if you just know where to
look.” A full understanding of biblical teachings on sex requires a trained
eye.
When biblical authors wanted to talk about genitals, they sometimes talked
about “hands,” as in the Song of Solomon, and sometimes about “feet.”
Coogan cites one passage in which a baby is born “between a mother’s feet
”; and another, in which the prophet Isaiah promises that a punitive God
will shave the hair from the Israelites’ heads, chins, and “feet.” When,
in the Old Testament, Ruth anoints herself and lies down after dark next to
Boaz—the man she hopes to make her husband—she “uncovers his feet.” A
startled Boaz awakes. “Who are you?” he asks. Ruth identifies herself and
spends the night “at his feet.”
From this, Coogan makes a rather sensationalistic exegetical move. When he
is teaching to college students, he writes, someone inevitably asks about
the scene in Luke, in which a woman kisses and washes Jesus’ feet—and then
dries them with her hair. Is that author speaking about “feet”? Or feet?
“As both modern and ancient elaborations suggest,” Coogan writes, “sexual
innuendo may be present.” Scholars agree that in this case, a foot was
probably just a foot.
That which is forbidden is also allowed.
The Bible is stern and judgmental on sex. It forbids prostitution, adultery,
premarital sex for women, and homosexuality. But exceptions exist in every
case, Knust points out. Tamar, a widow without children, poses as a whore
and solicits her own father-in-law—so that he could “come into” her. Her
desire to ameliorate her childlessness trumps the prohibition against
prostitution. Knust also argues—provocatively—that King David “enjoyed
sexual satisfaction” with his soulmate, Jonathan. “Your love to me was
wonderful,” laments David at Jonathan’s death, “passing the love of women
.”
Divorce is permitted in the Old Testament—but it’s forbidden in the
Gospels. Jesus didn’t like it: that much is clear. “Whoever divorces his
wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces
her husband and marries another, she commits adultery,” he says in the
Gospel of Mark. But in Matthew’s telling, Jesus softens his position
slightly and leaves a loophole for the husbands of unfaithful wives. “When
it comes to sex, the Bible is often divided against itself,” writes Knust.
Accepted interpretations are sometimes wrong.
The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is, as everyone knows, a story of God’s
judgment against homosexuality, promiscuity, and other kinds of illicit sex.
Except, Knust argues, it’s not. It’s a story about the danger of having
sex with angels. In the biblical world, people believed in angels, and they
feared them, for sex with angels led inevitably to death and destruction. In
the Noah story, God sends the flood to exterminate the offspring of “the
daughters of man” (human women) and “the sons of God” (angels, in some
interpretations). Non-canonical Jewish texts tell of angels, called Watchers
, who descend to earth and impregnate human women, who produce monstrous
children—thus inciting God’s terrible vengeance. God razes Sodom not
because its male inhabitants are having sex with each other, as so many
contemporary ministers preach, Knust argues, but in part because the men of
the town intended to rape angels of God who were sheltered in Lot’s house.
And when the Apostle Paul tells women to keep their heads covered in church,
he’s issuing a warning against inciting angelic lust: “The angels might
be watching,” Knust writes.
Coogan and Knust are hardly the first scholars to offer alternative readings
of the Bible’s teachings on sex. What sets them apart is their populism.
With provocative titles and mainstream publishing houses, they obviously
hope to sell books. But their greater cause is a fight against “official”
interpretations. Knust, who was raised in a conservative Christian home,
recalls with intensity reading the Bible on the couch with her mother, and—
with a mixture of faith and skepticism—talking aloud about what it might
mean. With her book, she encourages readers to do the same.
A person alone on her couch with Scripture can also come to some dangerous
conclusions: the Bible has, at certain times in history, been read to
support slavery, wife-beating, kidnapping, child abuse, racism, and polygamy
. That’s why Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological
Seminary, that citadel of Christian conservatism, concludes that one’s
Bible reading must be overseen by the proper authorities. Just because
everyone should read the Bible “doesn’t mean that everyone’s equally
qualified to read it, and it doesn’t mean that the text is just to be used
as a mirror for ourselves,” he says. “All kinds of heresies come from
people who read the Bible and recklessly believe that they’ve understood it
correctly.” As the word of God, he adds, the Bible isn’t open to the same
level of interpretation as The Odyssey or The Iliad.
Yet in a democracy, even those who speak “heresies” are allowed a voice.
And whether readers accept Coogan’s and Knust’s interpretations, the
authors are justified in their insistence that a population so divided over
questions of sex and sexual morality cannot—should not—cede the field
without exploring first what the Bible actually says. The eminent Bible
historian Elaine Pagels agrees. To read the Bible and reflect on it “is to
realize that we have not a series of answers, but a lot of questions.” | E*****m
发帖数: 25615 | 2 聖經裡的性愛
‧NEWSWEEK 2011/02/15
對聖經中的歡愛內容，以及其對通姦、離婚，和同性愛之說明的新研究
【撰文／台灣英文雜誌社】
這首詩描述了兩個年輕戀人對彼此的強烈渴望。這種痴迷是相互的、肉體的、徹底的。
該名男子流連在他情人的眼睛、頭髮、牙齒、嘴唇、頸部和胸部，「我的愛，妳的一切
都是如此美麗，妳是完美無缺的。」
這個女孩以慾望回應他的慾望。「我的愛人將手推進這個洞內，而我的內部則因他而呻
吟著。」
這些歌頌性愛的圓滿的內容，在聖經內四處可見。這是雅歌，詩歌的起源可能是耶穌出
生前1200年在埃及的異教徒情歌。兩千年來聖經的翻譯者一直努力要緩和這樣激烈的描
述，並認為其實際的意味超過了字面的意義。他們說，這裡講的是上帝對以色列的愛，
或者講的是耶穌對教會的愛。但不論這詩歌所可能包含的其他層面含意，其在表面上就
是一個古老的色情片，歌頌性慾的履行。
聖經裡到底是怎麼談性的？兩本大學學者針對普羅大眾所撰寫的新書，試圖要解答這個
問題。保守基督徒堅持認為聖經所支持的性愛，僅能限制在「傳統婚姻」範圍內，這樣
的說法在公共領域內佔有相當的優勢，但這個現象也使得這些作者感到惱怒，並試圖證
明事實並非如此。詹妮弗賴特克努斯特（Jennifer Wright Knust）和邁克庫根（
Michael Coogan）仔細搜尋聖經，以瞭解其內對於性愛最自然真實也最令人費解的故事
（如將自己還是處女的女兒奉獻給神的耶弗他，以及誓言彼此相愛至死方休的拿俄米和
路得的故事），並證明聖經所教導的性愛，並非像基督右派所要讓大家相信的那樣。根
據克努斯特的解讀，雅歌是傳統家庭和社區以外非婚性行為的讚歌。 |
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