The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (8 page)

Ever since Sigmund Freud replaced the Heavenly Father as a source of moral law, we have been taught to regard the taboo against incest as something deep and powerful, ancient and universal, and that is why the scenes of sexual intercourse between Lot and his own daughters are so shocking and unseemly when we encounter the story in the Holy Bible. But the fact is that the biblical world (and, as we shall see, the Bible authors) regarded incest with far less horror than we might suppose by reading the catalog of sexual prohibitions in the Book of Leviticus.

Sexual relations between blood relatives were
not
universally condemned in the faiths and cultures of the ancient Near East. For example,
the civilizations of Mesopotamia, the place where Abraham and Lot were born, tolerated incest among gods if not among ordinary human beings. Although a prohibition against sexual intercourse between a father and his daughter is literally chiseled in stone in the Code of Hammurabi, the sacred myths of ancient Mesopotamia depicted the gods in sexual couplings with their own offspring and siblings.
²⁶

The laws and customs of ancient Egypt, the place to which Abraham and Lot traveled in search of sustenance during a famine, were more evenhanded: Gods and human beings alike were permitted to engage in incestuous marriages under certain circumstances. Since under Egyptian law property descended from a mother to her eldest daughter, rather than from father to son, a father might resort to marrying his own daughter (or a son might marry his sister) in order to prevent the family wealth from falling under the control of an outsider.
²⁷
And a reigning pharaoh might wed his own sister in imitation of the myth of Isis and Osiris, the sibling-lovers with whom the rulers of Egypt identified themselves.
²⁸

The land of Canaan, located to the west of Mesopotamia and to the north of Egypt, fell within the contesting spheres of influence of both civilizations, and the Israelites who came to live in Canaan encountered a local tradition that imagined the Canaanite god called Baal in sexual union with his sister, Anat. Still, by the time the Israelites conquered and settled in Canaan after the Exodus from Egypt, the laws that are preserved in the Five Books of Moses—the first five books of the Hebrew Bible—plainly and pointedly condemned all forms of incest as practiced by non-Israelites:

“After the doings of the land of Egypt, wherein ye dwelt, shall ye not do,” the Bible commands in the Book of Leviticus, “and after the doings of the land of Canaan, whither I bring you, shall ye not do” (Lev. 18:3).

Thus, the Bible specifically forbids sexual intercourse between an Israelite and any blood relative: mother or father, sister or brother, aunt or uncle, children or grandchildren, even in-laws and stepparents. “None of you shall approach to any that is near of kin to him, to uncover their nakedness: I am the Lord,” is how the King James Version introduces the whole notion of incest, using a common biblical euphemism for sexual intercourse. And then, lest anyone start looking for loopholes, a veritable catalog of forbidden sexual conduct begins: “The
nakedness of thy father, and the nakedness of thy mother, shalt thou not uncover…. The nakedness of thy sister…. The nakedness of thy father’s wife’s daughter …” and so on (Lev. 18:6–30).

Of course, according to the sequence of events described in the Bible itself, Lot and his daughters were not subject to
any
formal law against incest, since the legal codes found in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy were not handed down until God revealed them to Moses several centuries later. But modern biblical scholarship generally assumes that much (if not all) of the Bible was compiled and reduced to writing in its present form sometime around 600
B.C.E
.
*
by editors (or “redactors”) who drew on sources and traditions of great antiquity, added glosses and even whole new passages of their own, and tacked on new books of more recent authorship. For that reason, the authors and editors who compiled the stories that we find in Genesis were thoroughly familiar with the law codes that appear in Leviticus, and so it seems likely that they regarded incest as a forbidden act when they were retelling the story of Lot and his daughters. (See appendix: Who
Really
Wrote the Bible?)

Yet the very first act of incest reported in the Bible—Lot and his daughters—draws no punishment at all. Even when Reuben, the eldest son of the patriarch Jacob, slips into the bed of his father’s concubine, Bilhah, he faces no consequences of any kind until the final illness of his father, when he finds out for the first time that he will be denied the inheritance that is due to him as the firstborn son. “[T]hou shalt not excel,” says the dying patriarch to Reuben when the time comes to hand out the blessings and the curses, “because thou wentest up to thy father’s bed; then defiledst thou it” (Gen. 35:22, 49:4).

Indeed, at least one biblical commandment—the curious tradition of the so-called levirate marriage—actually
requires
sexual intercourse between a man and the widow of his dead brother (Deut. 25:5–10). We will encounter a torrid example of the levirate tradition in action in the story of Judah and Tamar (see chapter six), and—rather like the story
of Lot and his daughters—we will see that the biblical author does not suggest the slightest disapproval of what is otherwise a flagrant violation of the law against incest between a man and his sister-in-law or a father and his daughter-in-law as it appears in Leviticus (Lev. 18:15–16).

Thus the Bible betrays an attitude toward incest that is far more casual than one might expect from the stern pronouncements of Leviticus. And so, when the rabbis declared that the story of Reuben’s affair with his father’s concubine was not suitable to be read aloud in the synagogue, perhaps they were less concerned about the lurid details of the sexual encounter in Jacob’s marriage bed than about the matter-of-fact quality of the narrative and the mildness of the punishment.

Indeed, we might wonder whether the catalog of forbidden sexual partners composed by the censorious authors of Leviticus says something about how commonplace the practice of incest may have been among the Israelites; after all, if incest were not regarded as a fact of life in the biblical world, why would the biblical lawgiver feel a need to go on at such length and in such tantalizing detail?
²⁹

The willingness of a father to turn over his daughters to a mob bent on sexual violence is the single most disturbing moment in the story of Lot, and indeed one of the most alarming incidents in the Bible. But it is not the only story in which an otherwise righteous man is perfectly willing to expose a woman to danger in order to save his own skin; for example, a story in the Book of Judges tells us in stomach-turning detail exactly what would have happened if Lot
had
cast his daughters into the street. (See chapter twelve).

Not once but three times, the Bible depicts a scene in which a patriarch passes his wife off as his sister in order to protect himself from physical violence. For example, when Abraham and Sarah journey to Egypt to escape a famine in Canaan, Abraham insists on masquerading as Sarah’s brother out of fear that any man who took a fancy to Sarah would be more likely to slay her spouse than her sibling in order to get Sarah into his bed. In fact, Sarah is recruited for service in the harem of the Pharaoh, and the Egyptian monarch lavishes gifts upon Abraham, the man he believes to be Sarah’s brother. Abraham
accepts the bounty of Pharaoh without comment, and only the intervention of God himself spares Sarah from actually sleeping with Pharaoh (Gen. 12:10–20).

We find the very same story in two other passages of Genesis. Abraham resorts to the same deception with yet another lusty monarch, Abimelech, King of the Philistines, and with the same results—Sarah ends up in Abimelech’s bed but God warns him off at the very last minute (Gen. 20:2–10). Abimelech, like Pharaoh before him, is depicted as horror-stricken at the thought that he might have inadvertently slept with another man’s wife, and both monarchs actually scold Abraham for putting them in such moral peril.

When confronted with his act of deception by the indignant Abimelech, Abraham concedes that Sarah is his wife—but insists that she is his half sister, too, as if that fact explained and excused his ruse. “She is … the daughter of my father,” Abraham riddles, “but not the daughter of my mother” (Gen. 20:12). We cannot be entirely sure whether Abraham’s belated claim that Sarah is his half sister is yet another deception, but rabbis and scholars have taken Abraham at his word and concluded on such sparse evidence that marriage between half siblings were permissible under the laws of ancient Israel. And they have argued that half-incestuous marriage was apparently still acceptable as late as the reign of King David, when his daughter, Tamar, proposes marriage as an alternative; to rape at the hands of her half brother (see chapter fifteen).

The same ploy is adopted by Isaac, the son of Abraham and Sarah, when he makes his own journey to Abimelech’s kingdom in the company of his wife, Rebekah. Like his father, Isaac resorts to the deception of calling Rebekah his sister out of plain cowardice. “[H]e feared to say: ‘My wife,’” we are told, “‘lest the men of the place should kill me for Rebekah, because she is fair to look upon’” (Gen. 26:7). But the deception fails when Abimelech happens to look out the window of his palace and sees Isaac “sporting” with Rebekah—the Hebrew word used in the original text (
t’sahak
) suggests “fondling” or what we used to call “petting”
³⁰
—and the good king figures that Rebekah is not really Isaac’s sister after all. Abimelech realizes that he has been fooled (again!) and scolds Isaac for putting his own moral standing at risk, just as he once scolded Isaac’s father for playing the same dirty trick (Gen. 26:1–10).

Bible scholars and sermonizers have engaged in much subtle
argument to explain away the baffling and cowardly conduct of Abraham and Isaac, which readers have always found “puzzling and disturbing,”
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even “offensive.”
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Perhaps Sarah was merely adopted by Abraham’s father at some undisclosed point in his childhood, they have speculated, and thus she was not a blood relation at all.
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The boldest explanation, and the one that puts the patriarchs in the best light, is based on a long-forgotten tradition of an ancient people known as the Hurrians who placed such importance on the brother-sister relationship that a man might adopt his wife as his sister at the same time he married her.

Abraham and Isaac adopted the Hurrian tradition of identifying their wives as their sisters, suggests one authoritative Bible scholar, in order to invoke “all the … safeguards and privileges” that were available to a man’s sister (but not to his wife).
³⁴
By the time the biblical authors and editors assembled the legend and lore of ancient Israel into what we now know as the Bible, it has been suggested, they simply did not know or understand the Hurrian tradition of wife-as-sister. “Tradition had apparently set much store by these incidents,” Ephraim Speiser explains, “but the key to them had been lost somewhere in the intervening distances of time and space.”
³⁵
Rather than discard the three baffling tales, they tried to explain what Abraham and Isaac were doing in terms that their readers might understand.

The only explanation that made sense to biblical redactors—or, for that matter, makes sense to us—is the one that shows us the otherwise worthy patriarchs as timid souls who are perfectly willing to consign their wives to the beds of powerful men in exchange for their own physical safety and, perhaps, a king’s reward.

The choice of bed partners as depicted in Holy Scripture is sometimes a matter of politics and diplomacy rather than love or lust. Solomon, for example, is said to have accumulated seven hundred wives (1 Kings 11:3), and it is likely that many of these marriages were meant to seal alliances between an Israelite king at the height of his power and the princes and potentates of the surrounding nations and empires. And even when the Bible reports a sexual encounter that is frankly
incestuous, political ambition rather than sexual adventure is sometimes at the heart of the matter, as when Absalom, son of King David, conducts a public orgy with his father’s concubines on the palace rooftop.

David’s concubines were installed in what can only be called a harem—the kings of Israel, like other monarchs of the ancient Near East, collected wives and concubines in great profusion, and the harem was a symbol of the grandeur and opulence of a king’s court. The much-married Solomon, for example, stocked his harem with an additional three hundred concubines. And we are plainly told that Ahaziah, a descendant of David and Solomon, aped the ways of pagan kings by recruiting (or making) eunuchs
*
to secure the chastity of his wives (2 Kings 9:32), even though a man whose “privy parts” are “crushed or maimed” is regarded with horror by the biblical author known as the Deuteronomist (Deut. 23:2).

A harem guard was essential because the chastity of a king’s wife or concubine was another symbol of the monarch’s power and potency. Thus, when the rebellious Absalom goes to war against his father, King David, and drives the monarch out of Jerusalem, he chooses a striking (and notably Freudian) gesture to symbolize the assumption of his father’s throne: Absalom takes captive the royal concubines who had been left behind by the fleeing monarch, erects a tent on the roof of the royal palace, where he can be seen by all of Jerusalem, and makes love to each of the ten concubines “in the sight of all Israel” (2 Sam. 16:22). The political message was unmistakable: “To lie with a monarch’s concubine,” one Bible scholar has written, “was tantamount to usurpation of the throne.”
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