The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (3 page)

Even though the Song of Songs was never actually excluded from the Bible, the clergy of both Judaism and Christianity over the centuries have chosen to ignore the plainly erotic content. Instead, they stubbornly insist that the Song of Songs is merely an elaborate metaphor for “the love relationship between God and Israel,” according to Jewish commentators, or “the love relationship between God (Christ) and the Church,” according to Christian ones.
¹⁴

But the single most common technique for making sure that we do not know what the Bible actually says about the ragged edges of human behavior is silence. Today, most Bibles are unexpurgated, and most of the translations in common use in the English-speaking world are largely accurate and unabashed, but casual readers rarely find their way to the “forbidden” stories of the Bible because they simply do not know such stories exist and do not bother to look for them.

Indeed, clergy of all faiths and denominations still tend to shun these stories when they mount the pulpit, and Sunday school teachers still prefer the Bible stories where they know they will find endearing Disneyesque animals and simple uplifting moral lessons. That is why even a regular church- or synagogue-goer, for example, will rarely be exposed to the rape of Dinah by a lovesick prince, the mass circumcision that follows her sexual assault, and the slaughter of innocents that is the climax of Genesis 34, which has been accurately described as “the most graphically human story … [in] the whole of Genesis.”
¹⁵

“I have never heard it given in an Anglican lesson nor mentioned in any sermon,”
¹⁶
observes Julian Pitt-Rivers, a British anthropologist who recalls his shock at discovering at a tender age that rape and mass murder are not the only dirty little secrets of the Bible: “[I]ncest, fratricide, filiocide, wife-lending, polygamy, homosexuality and prostitution” were among the revelations for a curious young boy at home alone with the family Bible. “It seemed positively unfair,” Pitt-Rivers remarks, “that Adam and Eve should have been cast out of Eden for such a trivial peccadillo as eating an apple off the wrong tree.”
¹⁷

So I have attempted in these pages to let the reader see what is actually written in stories that have been suppressed, censored, or merely ignored over the millennia. To be sure, our understanding of the Bible should not end with an open-eyed reading of the stories that are told by the biblical authors with such candor and such passion. But it should certainly begin there.

Nowadays few of us bother to open the Bible at all. But now and then a modern storyteller will resurrect some of these forbidden texts and make them accessible to a readership that has forgotten what’s in the Bible—or never knew in the first place. Andrew Lloyd Webber retells one of the most familiar of Bible stories in his much-performed musical
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
, and yet he feels compelled to footnote his own libretto, so to speak, when he refers to an incident that appears in every version of the Bible but not in the common experience of his audience.

Thus, when Webber shows us the failed seduction of young Joseph by the nymphomaniacal wife of his Egyptian master, the librettist feels obliged to reassure us that he did not just make up the half-comical, half-erotic tale of an embittered seductress who condemns Joseph to prison because he does not succumb to her charms.

“It’s all there in chapter thirty-nine,” croons the narrator of
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
, “of Gen-
e
-sis.”
¹⁸

Other storytellers may be less scrupulous when they scavenge a plot line from the Scriptures. Mordecai Richler, describing a gang of “hardcore show biz expatriates” at play on Hampstead Heath in
St. Urbain’s Horseman
, a novel set in London in the swinging ’60s, introduces us to one enterprising television scriptwriter who knew exactly where to find story ideas that would strike the network executives (and the viewers, too) as stunningly original:

The point of Richler’s story, of course, is that we are so little acquainted with what goes on in the Bible that no one in Hollywood will notice if a plot is cribbed from the Book of Samuel. Only rarely will some secular reader happen across one of the forbidden tales of the Bible, parse out the dense and difficult passages of the typical English translation, and wake up to the fact that the Bible is one hot read.

“From start to finish, it is a book of wild, shattering behavior,” reports Michael Ventura, a newspaper columnist whose thoroughly modern mind was blown by what he found in the Bible. “Women consort with serpents, brothers kill one another, peoples are massacred, tribes roam deserts, babies are abandoned, murder follows prophecy, prophecy follows murder, dancers call for the heads of prophets.” And Ventura comes to the conclusion that any society which elevates the Bible to the stature of Holy Writ is bound to be outrageous. “It is ridiculous,” he concludes, “to expect a civilization based on such a book to be other than wild and shattering.”
²⁰

The forbidden texts of the Bible deal frankly with sex and violence, but there is much more than mere shock and titillation in these stories of human passion. Buried in the dusty old texts, almost like artifacts in an archaeological dig, are treasures of insight and inspiration that remind us of the loftiest values of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam while, at the same time, allowing us to see the traces of much older spiritual traditions that have been ignored or suppressed by all three faiths.

Indeed, these artifacts of ancient spirituality reveal that the Bible is
not
a work of strict fundamentalism. We have been encouraged to think of God as a divine father who bestowed his blessings on a series of men
created in “his” image—but here we will encounter women who are so daring, so powerful, and so resourceful that they outshine even the venerable patriarchs and prophets who are supposedly the moral beacons of the Bible. We are taught that the Bible is a work of strict and highly refined monotheism—but we will find the intriguing remnants of forbidden spirituality, including goddess worship, fertility rituals, and even human sacrifice, all of which were supposedly repudiated by the Children of Israel and expunged from the Judeo-Christian tradition in deference to the One God. Above all, we will be reminded of the humane and compassionate message at the heart of the Bible, both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, a message that has often been overlooked over the centuries, and never more so than in our own times.

Today, fundamentalists of all three Bible-based religions claim to find in the Holy Scriptures a divine excuse for repression and much worse. They cite chapter and verse, literally, to condemn abortion, divorce, and homosexuality; they claim to find in the Bible divine justification to take and keep some of the most hotly disputed territory on earth; they feel empowered by the Almighty to pronounce death sentences on those whose words and thoughts offend them. Yet if we look deeply into the forbidden texts of the Bible, we will discover that men and women, clans and tribes, peoples and nations—despite their differences of race and faith—manage to tolerate each other, to share the earth with each other, and to encounter each other in peaceful and loving ways. It’s a liberating experience to discover what the Bible
really
says about the politics of sex, for example, as well as the politics of nations.

The book you are about to read consists of seven surprising and even shocking stories from the Bible. All of the stories are drawn from the portion of Holy Scripture that is known in Christian usage as the Old Testament, that is, the Hebrew Bible, a book that is regarded as sacred by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Each story is retold in contemporary English prose, and each one is accompanied by a chapter that explores the “backstory” of the biblical narrative: how and when the story found its way into the Bible; how it has been understood and
explained; what it tells us about the lives and beliefs of real men and women who lived in biblical times; and what it can reveal to us about our own troubled world.

The biblical authors were master storytellers, and the Bible survives precisely because its stories are so powerful and so resonant. Indeed, the Bible feeds a primal appetite that is at least as demanding as our hunger for God. “A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species
Homo sapiens’”
writes Reynolds Price in his retelling of tales from the Gospels, A
Palpable God
, “second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter.”
²¹

So, one of my goals in retelling these stories is to tug the sleeve of the reader who does not know or even suspect the richness (and, often, the ribaldry) of biblical narrative. That’s why I have attempted to open up and flesh out the stories, to render them in a prose style that will be more familiar and more accessible to the contemporary reader than the compressed language of the original Hebrew—or, for that matter, the sometimes dense and difficult language of the Bible in traditional English translation. Now and then I have taken the liberty of adding scenes, dialogue, and description that are not actually in the original text of these stories as they appear in the Bible, but I have tried to find some plausible source in biblical scholarship or the Bible itself to justify the exercise of poetic license. As we will see later in this book (see chapter sixteen), the tradition of retelling and reinterpreting the stories of the Bible is a long and honorable one, and I have not been shy about following in that tradition.

To assist the reader in distinguishing between the retelling of each story and the real thing, I have reproduced an English translation of the original and complete text of the stories as they actually appear in the Hebrew Bible in text boxes alongside the retold stories. When I quote the original biblical text, I generally use an English translation of the Bible first published by the Jewish Publication Society in 1917, a translation that closely follows the classic King James Version that has long been used in Protestant churches of various denominations. Occasionally I refer to other English translations of the Bible, and I will let you know when I am quoting another version.

As I have suggested here, readers may be startled, perhaps even shocked, and—I hope—entertained
and
enlightened by what is to be found in the neglected and forbidden corners of the Bible. These stories
reveal the complexity of the human heart and mind; they show us what human beings really feel and what they really do; and they suggest that a good and righteous life is not always a matter of simple obedience to what we imagine to be the moral strictures of the Bible. In that sense, I hope to take back the Bible from the strict and censorious people who wave it in our faces and to restore it to the worldly man or woman who will appreciate the flesh-and-blood passions that are described in the Holy Scriptures.

Someone very near and dear to me once turned to the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer as a kind of balm for the suffering that he expert enced after a messy love affair ended badly. “I didn’t know people like
me
actually did things like
that
,” he said of his own misadventures, “until I started to read Singer.”

What I know now is that he need only have picked up the Bible to discover what Singer already knew: The Bible is a map of the human heart, and no secret chamber or hidden passage is left out. And it’s a map whose creator, whether human or divine, regarded even our most outlandish passions with a kind and compassionate eye. That’s why the forbidden tales of the Bible are not merely a rollicking good read; above all, the Bible affirms the essential qualities that make us human in the first place.