Tag / Religion and Sexuality

by Annie Newman

Romans 01 – A Second Clobber Passage

26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error. (Read the rest of the chapter here!)

Clobber Passage Context: Sex was not viewed the same in Paul’s Day

We’ve stumbled across another Clobber Passage! Clobber Passages are Bible quotes used by more conservative circles to uphold their beliefs that God condemns homosexuality.  There are six – give or take – so-called Clobber Passages.  I discussed the first one last February when we read the story about Lot and his family leaving Sodom and Gomorrah. I go into more detail in that blog post, but in a nutshell: the “wicked thing” being condemned in the Genesis passage is rape, not consensual sex.  Today, we can deconstruct the condemnation of homosexuality even further.

First and foremost, it is important to remember context.  While there were certainly gay people through-out history, including ancient history, the full expression of sexuality as we know it today was seldom – if ever – possible.  As this article does an excellent job of explaining, sex was transactional and driven more often by power than by love or attraction.  Again, there were surely loving couples out there, but with arranged marriages, extreme gender inequality, and a need to reproduce (more kids meant more workers, and could be married off to cement alliances and family ties), sex carried much larger socio-political implications, at a personal level, than it does today.

Paul’s condemnation of homosexuality a symptom of upholding the patriarchy

So that’s the context within which Paul is operating: where sex is a tool (or sometimes weapon) of a patriarchal society.  Paul radically changed the faith landscape of the early church with some very progressive ideas, but in vv. 22-27, he’s upholding the patriarchy in three primary ways:

First, Paul alludes to cultic prostitution.  This continues the tradition of vilifying Canaanite religious practices to uphold Judeo-Christian beliefs and the primacy of Hellenistic culture.  Canaan was a near-by Middle Eastern kingdom.  In fact, it was where God led Moses as the Promised Land.  There were a fair number of related cultural and religious practices between early Canaanites and Israelites.  In order to distinguish themselves as God’s chosen people, early authors of the Bible began to sensationalize some Canaanite religious practices.  Early Greek historians, keen on proving their culture was superior, continued to portray the Canaanites (and others) as barbaric, primitive tribes.   You can read a little more backstory on Canaan (and why they were so reviled by the authors of the Bible) here, but long story short, a lot of vv. 24-25 have more to do with rejecting an entire belief system than specific sexual practices.

Second, control of sex means control of women.  When a woman isn’t allowed to control her reproductive rights, who she marries, or even how she can appear in public because she might inadvertently cause a man to sin, all of her agency is taken away.  Female sexuality was a huge threat to patriarchal societies.  Acknowledging a woman’s sexual desires meant acknowledging that women have desires, and may even – gasp! – want to express them.  If that stopped in the bedroom perhaps that would be alright, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  If women got what they wanted in bed, they may want to start expressing their desires in other ways, like having more control over household finances or having a say in religious matters.  Patriarchal leaders understood this, even if they perhaps did not state it so explicitly.  By tying female sexuality to female morality, men found a way to control women in a physical and emotional way.  This is why Paul condemns women alongside men in v. 26.  It was his knee-jerk reaction to women possibly becoming too free in a society that had long built itself around male dominance.

Finally, I think Paul had a real personal fear of gay men.    A lot of straight men find male homosexuality uncomfortable.  Women walk around in a world where half the population is physically stronger than them, and we are used to navigating this.  But for men it’s the opposite: they’re used to walking around a world where they’re automatically stronger than half the population.  The average man’s fear of being physically overpowered at any given time is much lower than the average woman’s.  In other words, it’s hard for a woman to rape a man. But a man raping a man?  That’s a much more even playing field, and I think this fear of physical overpowerment – however unfounded it may be – is what made Paul (and many other straight men) uncomfortable with gay men.  Add the fact that Paul was “afflicted,” in other words physically incapacitated somehow, he may have felt particularly vulnerable to a physical or sexual attack.

The real message of this chapter is to love and respect God and eachother.

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to be completely objective in your writing, however divinely inspired it may be.  I think that’s what we see here with Paul.  He’s telling his readers that, as followers of Christ, it is important to behave in a loving and respectful manner to each other and to God.  He gets back on the right track when he condemns a lot more than just potential homosexuality in the verses following this clobber passage: Evil, greed, envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice, gossip, slander, insolence, arrogance, boastfulness, disrespect of parents; lack of fidelity, lovelessness, unmerciful.  These charges are all charges that stem from a lack of love and respect.  You don’t deceive someone you love, nor gossip about them nor disrespect them.  If God is someone you love, then you also wouldn’t turn from “the glory of Immortal God” to worship “images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.”

That’s the larger message of this passage: to act out of love and respect.  It’s hard, people are tedious.  We get tired and aren’t our own best selves.  Sometimes love and respect come with gray areas.  For example, am I acting in my girls’ best interest if I let them sort out sharing a toy, even if there’s some physical altercation involved between them, or do I need to step in and intervene every time?  Arguments can be made for both positions. But we have a lifetime to keep practicing love and respect, and like any habit, the more you do it, the easier it becomes.  Hopefully, one of the first things we can leave behind us is clobbering people with maligned Bible passages.

by Annie Newman

Hosea 03 – Women in the Bible: Gomer

The Lord said to me, “Go, show your love to your wife again, though she is loved by another man and is an adulteress. Love her as the Lord loves the Israelites, though they turn to other gods and love the sacred raisin cakes.” (Read the rest of the chapter, here!)

I wanted to talk a little more about Gomer, because this is the last time she is mentioned in the Book of Hosea.  The metaphor of Hosea’s personal marriage is abandoned for direct charges against Israel and Ephraim after this chapter.

There is no way to know whether Gomer was real or not.  Some scholars argue that Hosea’s whole relationship to Gomer was simply a religious vision, an allegory either dreamed up or divinely inspired (or both) to make a point. Whether she was real or not, Gomer does serve as a metaphor for many things.  The most apparent and universally accepted metaphor is that Gomer, and her infidelity, are the embodiment of an unfaithful Israel.

There are two other metaphors we can see in Gomer to which I want to draw your attention.  First is a theme we unfortunately see throughout the Bible:  (male) authors trying to establish male dominance over female sexuality and fertility.  It is an idea not my own, but I first introduced it on this blog when writing about Sarai and Hagar. Again, the overarching theme of Hosea is God’s relationship with Israel, but it is not only God speaking of Israel but also Hosea speaking of Gomer in 2:3 when he says “I will make her like desert, I will turn her into a parched land,” and in 2:12 when he says “I will ruin her vines and her fig trees.” Deserts are a symbol of infertility, vines and fig trees a symbol of fertility.  I’m not exactly sure how Hosea would make Gomer infertile (as God could make Israel infertile), but the imagery is very clear:  the female character, whether it is Gomer or Israel, is not the one in control of her own fertility, her own sexuality.

Conversely, only when the male character (again, God – as God was considered masculine at the time – or Hosea) decides to reconcile with the female character, is any sexual expression allowed.  As mentioned in my first post about Hosea, the “door of hope” in chapter two is a euphemism for vagina, and “sing as in the days of her youth” means orgasm.  These sexual references are only allowed under the full control of the male character.  Indeed, Gomer is mute and nameless in the short chapter of today’s blogpost.  She is bought, as a slave, and told how to conduct herself sexually.  I’m a big fan of monogamous relationships, and again, it’s important to remember that this whole marriage is an allegory. But even given those constraints, it is telling that Hosea, a man, is the one who decides when Gomer will be monogamous or not.  She doesn’t even get to answer, even in meek agreement, in this chapter.  Hosea’s domination of her sexuality is complete.

Secondly, I see Gomer as a necessary metaphorical stop on our journey to a redemptive God.  I read a handful of articles on Gomer in preparation for this post, and the one that most informed this idea was this article by Pulitzer prize winning author and religious scholar Jack Miles.  To paraphrase, Miles says that there is a journey in the Old Testament from “God as Master” to “God as Father.” That transition to “God as Father” is even more fully completed in the New Testament.  In a nutshell, I think it was a theologically murky time when these prophets were writing – not much different than today, in that respect.  They were trying to figure out their relationship, indeed, humankind’s relationship, with God.  And the journey to that understanding almost always goes from a punitive God to a redemptive God – or from that of a master to a father.

We can find metaphorical aspects of a loving God in any loving and intimate relationship.  I think we see an early, and therefore a little wonky, attempt at creating a metaphor for a loving relationship between God and humanity in Hosea’s marriage to Gomer.  Hosea was burdened by the biases of his time, which again, at their base aren’t all that different than many biases we may encounter today: sexism, xenophobia, probably a rigid belief that his truth was the only truth in God.  As such, his marriage to Gomer, real or visionary, comes across to the modern reader as unequal, controlling, and quite frankly unenviable, especially if you’re on the Gomer side of it.  But there is strong possibility here, and that is why I think Hosea chose the metaphor of marriage as a metaphor for Israel’s, and our, relationship with God.  You don’t have to dig very deep to say that, while imperfect, Hosea and Gomer’s marriage is also a relationship with aspects of forgiveness, acceptance, and mutual enjoyment.  I know I just used this as a metaphor for sexual control, but Hosea does give Gomer that metaphorical orgasm in the desert, people.  Not all husbands – then or now – are that in tune to female pleasure.  That verse could have just as easily read something about only Hosea’s own sexual fulfillment.  He also redeems her from slavery and gives her the protection of his house, two things that may not be as necessary and valuable to the female population at large in modern, first-world countries, but back then was a big deal.

I think Hosea and Gomer illustrate something really beautiful about the Bible and it’s authors:  our fallibility.  Yes, I think the Bible is divinely inspired, but it was recorded (and re-recorded, and re-recorded, untold number of times), by imperfect people.  It is easy for past generations to cast judgment on Gomer the prostitute.  It is easy for more recent generations to cast judgement on Hosea the male chauvinist.  But who are we to do so?  Who are we to cast the first stone? I certainly hope that I have benefited from some collective spiritual growth in the past twenty-some centuries since Hosea was prophesying, but I’m not perfect. What is important is that we also see God’s working in the Bible, indeed, in all things.  It wasn’t God who made the marriage between Hosea and Gomer an unequal one.  That, again, was how society functioned at the time.  What God did do was open the door to all those positive aspects: forgiveness, acceptance, mutual enjoyment.  What we can do is continue to act in and promote the qualities we so desire in our own relationship with God.  And that, above all, is love.  Will we get it wrong from time to time? Of course.  Scholars of future centuries will probably look back at our own religious leaders, even the forward-thinking ones, with raised eyebrows.  But if we keep God, and love, in our hearts, we are already on the right path.  We may have far to go, just like Hosea and Gomer, but we’re getting there, one step at a time.

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by Annie Newman

Hosea 01 – Hosea is Cuckolded and Likes It

2 When the Lord began to speak through Hosea, the Lord said to him, “Go, marry a promiscuous woman and have children with her, for like an adulterous wife this land is guilty of unfaithfulness to the Lord.” 3 So he married Gomer daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a son. (Read the rest of the chapter here!)

I like to spend Advent reading the prophets – it seems like a fitting thing to do while preparing your heart for the return of Christ.  Advent is still a few weeks off, but I thought we’d get a head-start on Hosea, and get the whole book finished by Christmas.  I’m going to tell you right now, though, that this isn’t going to be some warm-and-fuzzy pre-Christmas reading.  Hosea is kinda kinky in some places, and downright dark in others.

We’ll get to the dark in some future chapters (oh, boy, will we get to some dark!), but let’s start with that kink.  Actually, let’s back up a step.  I think it’s important to say now: Whether you believe Hosea and his wife, Gomer, were both real people, or whether you believe Hosea’s marriage was simply a vision and not “real,” or even if you believe that Hosea himself was not “real” but this whole story is just an allegory, the point remains that Gomer’s faithlessness to Hosea is a very direct allegory to Israel’s faithlessness to God. I’m not even going to attempt to count the number of times the word “adultery” or some form thereof is used in this book.  Not to mention words like “promiscuous” or “unfaithful.”  The theme is pretty clear.

Okay, now with the kink.  If you skim through the book of Hosea, you get the impression that this guy digs being cuckolded.  He enjoys talking about adultery and infidelity, which becomes more and more apparent in the later poetry of the book.  Intrigue and relishing in the misdeeds of others from afar is, unfortunately, just a natural part of human nature. Perhaps Hosea’s excitement over all this could be chalked up to exactly that, or it may be chalked up to true religious fervor for his divinely appointed message.  But the thing I find interesting is how desirable Hosea finds his unfaithful wife, Gomer, even after all of her infidelities.  Now, we all love a juicy story, but not usually when we’re a part of it.  Gomer’s adultery is more than just some good gossip, it’s Hosea’s own wife.  Even when casting her out, he seems attracted to her.  And they did have three kids together.  But there’s two quotes from later in the book that I want to skip ahead to in order to make my point.

This first racy quote is technically God speaking about Israel, but again, Hosea’s whole marriage to Gomer is an allegory for God’s relationship with Israel.  “I am now going to allure her,” God says through Hosea, “I will lead her into the desert and speak tenderly to her, I will give her back her vineyards and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.  There she will sing as in the days of her youth.”  (2:14-15)  That bit is about sex, people.  Wild, crazy sex.  First, he’s straight up “alluring her.”  Not only that, he’s alluring her into the desert, a place of untamed wildness, away from prying eyes and inhibitions; a place where even Jesus himself was tempted in his own ways.  Then, he will “make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.”  First off, “Valley of Achor” means “Valley of Trouble,” which can certainly be a reference to the space between a woman’s thighs.  A door is definitely a vagina reference.  This adulterous woman, with her valley of trouble, is going to finally succumb to his wooing, open her door and give her vagina – oh, I mean, her heart – to him.  Then she’s going to sing as in the days of her youth?  Sounds like an orgasm to me!  I honestly think Hosea is looking forward to being able to satiate a woman who has been with so many other men. By alluring her into the desert and getting her all hot and bothered to the point of orgasm, he essentially claims sexual primacy over all of her other lovers.

Then, in chapter three, Hosea is commanded by God to “show your love to your wife again.” (3:1)  And Hosea does.  He brings Gomer fifteen shekels of silver, a bunch of barley, and kind words.  It’s very possible he buys her out of slavery for that much and she isn’t being gifted that silver and barley, but the kind words remain, as does the protection of his house.  Hosea let this woman under his protection fall into prostitution – perhaps even pushed her into it (more about that in chapter 2), and then welcomes her back with open arms.  Not only with forgiveness, but, it sounds like from the verses in chapter two, with an eager sexual anticipation.

So in the grand scheme of things, what does this matter?  Does it prove some more patriarchal bullshit going on in the Old Testament? Maybe.  Is Hosea’s marriage any less of a metaphor if he was a willing cuckold as well as a prophet of God?  Not necessarily. One might even say his whole-hearted dedication to his role of cuckold shows his full dedication to God’s message.  Should we take Hosea’s prophetic career less seriously because he had some unusual sexual preferences – or, much more damning – some very poor taste in kid’s names and parenting tactics?  I don’t think so – lots of prophets had some serious lapses in judgement, so Hosea is no different.  But this unorthodox relationship Hosea has with Gomer was the first thing I noticed, and I didn’t want to let it go unremarked.  The Bible is full of not-so-Sunday-school themes, and we do it, and ourselves, a disservice to gloss over or ignore such themes.

Long story short, Hosea’s sexual preferences and personality quirks probably don’t matter – but it does make for interesting reading.  Second to the hypocrisy with which Christianity can be accused of throughout the ages, I think it’s second-biggest sin is being boring.  You know how many more young women would pay attention if we celebrated the bravery and brilliance of some of the lesser-known women in the Bible, like the Caleb’s daughter Achsah? How many more young boys would pay attention if you led into a sermon talking about the gory end of some king, like Zedekiah’s eyes being put out?  How many more teenagers would pay attention if you talked about King David very possibly having gonorrhea? We probably don’t want to stick only to the realm of STD’s and violence (female intelligence is good, though), but these interesting stories get people, well…interested!

In the end it is important to remember we are looking for big-picture truths here.  And, spoiler alert, the big-picture truth of the whole book of Hosea is God’s unending love for us.  The first three-quarters of this chapter detail Hosea’s (supposedly) unhappy and definitely ignominious marriage, with warnings through his kid’s names that get increasingly worse: Israel’s defeat in Jezreel, the loss of God’s love in Lo-Ruhamah, the loss of God Xyrself in Lo-Ammi.  God couldn’t be angrier with Israel, accusing them up one side and down the other of their unfaithfulness, threatening to turn Xyr face and favor away from them.  But yet, the chapter ends this way: “The Israelites will be like the sand on the seashore, which cannot be measured or counted. In the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ they will be called ‘children of the living God.’ ”  God may be angry with Israel, but in the end, they are still Xyr children.  God’s love returns. And returns. And returns.   Through all the scary, weird, depressing and sexist stuff we’re going to read in the next few chapters, remember that.  God’s love will always return.

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