The Harlot by the Side of the Road

CHAPTER ONE
 
FORBIDDEN TALES OF THE BIBLE
 
THE NAKED NOAH  THE FORBIDDEN BIBLE
THE FORGOTTEN BIBLE  THE LIBERATING BIBLE
“A NEED TO TELL AND HEAR STORIES”
 
The stories you are about to read are some of the most violent and sexually explicit in all of Western literature. They are tales of human passion in all of its infinite variety: adultery, seduction, incest, rape, mutilation, assassination, torture, sacrifice, and murder. And yet every one of these stories is drawn directly from the pages of the Holy Bible.
 
“You mean that’s in the Bible?” is the common reaction of the reader who knows the Bible, if at all, only from the occasional sermon or some dimly remembered Sunday school lesson.
 
Even readers who think they know the Bible may be unfamiliar with these stories precisely because embarrassed rabbis, priests, and ministers have sought to hide the plain language of the original Hebrew text behind fuzzy euphemisms, unlikely interpretations, or intentional mistranslations. Although the Bible is Holy Writ to three religions, a few of its most shocking stories have been banned outright by clergy who were not entirely comfortable with telling their congregants what really happens in the Bible.
 
As a result of these efforts at bowdlerizing, we are sometimes given the impression that the Bible is mostly a dry and preachy work—a list of stern “shalts” and “shalt nots” that condemn all but the narrowest range of human behavior, a forbidding black book with little to say to worldly men and women whose lives are far messier than what we imagine the Bible to allow. But the fact is that the Bible offers some surprising insights that we might profitably recall when confronting the toughest issues of our own times, from the debate over abortion to the search for peace in the Middle East, from sexual politics to world politics.
 
To be sure, the Hebrew Bible includes generous portions of strict moral instruction, starting with the Ten Commandments and bulking up to include some 613 other dos and don’ts. For that matter, there is little that one cannot find in the Bible, which is actually a fantastic grab bag of law, legend, history, politics, propaganda, poetry, prayer, ethics, genealogy, hygienic practices, military tactics, dietary advice, and carpentry instructions, among many other things. But, as we will see, the Bible is also a treasury of storytelling that recounts the lives of men and women who were thoroughly human, which is to say that they were as confused, conflicted, twisted, tortured, and vulnerable to the weaknesses of the flesh and failure of the spirit as any character in Homer, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, or any of the soap operas, bodice rippers, and tabloids that amount to the literature of our own times.
 
Nowadays, we have come to associate the Bible with bluenoses and “Bible-thumpers.” We expect Bible readers to be narrow-minded and highly disapproving of the slightest degree of human misconduct, especially in sexual and spiritual matters. But, as we shall soon see, the Bible describes and even seems to encourage a range of human conduct that goes far beyond what is permitted in the Ten Commandments.
 
THE NAKED NOAH
 
I first discovered what is hidden away in the odd cracks and corners of the Holy Scriptures when, many years ago, I resolved to acquaint my young son with the Bible as a work of literature by reading aloud to him at bedtime from Genesis. I chose the New English Bible, with its plain-spoken translation of the hoary text, so that my five-year-old would understand what was actually going on in the stories without the impedimenta of the antique words and phrases that give the King James Version such grandeur but sometimes make it hard to follow.
 
We began In the beginning, of course, and we continued through the highly suggestive tale of Eve and the serpent, then the bloody murder of Abel by his brother, Cain. I already knew that Genesis was not exactly G-rated, but I reassured myself that we would soon reach the tale of Noah and the Ark, an unobjectionable Sunday school story that would distract my son from the more disturbing passages that we had just read. Nothing had prepared me for what we found there, right after the familiar moment when the animals come aboard the ark, two by two.
 
At the end of the story of Noah, after the flood has subsided and God has signaled his good intentions toward humanity by painting a rainbow across the sky, we came upon a scene that does not find its way into the storybooks or Sunday school lessons: Noah is lying alone in his tent, buck naked and drunk as a sailor on the wine from his own vineyards. One of his sons, Ham, blunders into the tent and finds himself staring at his nude and drunken father.
 
When Ham, father of Canaan, saw his father naked, he told his two brothers outside. So Shem and Japheth took a cloak, put it on their shoulders and walked backwards, and so covered their father’s naked body; their faces were turned the other way, so that they did not see their father naked (Gen. 9:20–24 NEB).
 
After that scene, so comical and yet so disquieting to any parent mindful of Freud, I read the Bible more slowly, rephrasing certain passages as I went along and omitting others altogether. My son, already media wise at five, soon began to protest. If I paused too long over a troublesome passage, trying to figure out how to tone down or cut the earthier parts, he would sit up in bed and demand indignantly: “What are you leaving out?”
 
In a sense, his question prompted the book you are now reading. As I read the Bible aloud to my son, I found myself doing exactly what overweening and fearful clerics and translators have done for centuries—I censored the text to spare my audience the juicy parts. And so my son’s question is answered here: The stories collected in these pages are the ones that I—like so many other shocked Bible readers over the millennia—was tempted to leave out.
 
THE FORBIDDEN BIBLE
 
The stories that are retold here will come as a surprise to many readers precisely because, over the centuries, they have been suppressed by rabbis, priests, and ministers uncomfortable with the candor of the biblical storytellers about human conduct, sexual or otherwise. At times, the instruments of censorship have been subtle and even devious, and that’s why even regular church- and synagogue-goers may not know that these stories, bold and blunt as they are, can be found in the original text of the Bible.
 
The Bible as a Banned Book
 
At certain times and places, some of the more lurid stories in the Bible have been banned outright. For example, the prayer service in Judaism is built around the public reading of the Torah, that is, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, and selected passages from other books of the Hebrew Bible. Since the typical Jewish congregation was (and is) unfamiliar with the ancient Hebrew in which the Bible is written, the text was translated into the languages spoken by the Jewish people outside of the Holy Land. The Torah is read out loud to the congregation, word by word, in a cycle that lasts an entire year and then begins again—but, long ago, the rabbis set down strict rules that were expressly designed to prevent their congregants from hearing or understanding certain passages of the Holy Scriptures.
 
For example, the rabbinical authorities once decreed that the story of the seduction of Jacob’s concubine, Bilhah, by his firstborn son, Reuben (Gen. 35:22), and the frank account of King David’s lust for Bathsheba (2 Sam. 11)—a tale that features voyeurism, seduction, adultery, bastardy, and the murder of a loyal and heroic soldier by vile and cowardly means—were permitted to be read aloud in the synagogue in the original Hebrew but were not to be translated from Hebrew into a language that the congregation was more likely to understand. And some stories—including, for example, the rape of King David’s daughter, Tamar, by her love-crazed half brother (2 Sam. 13)—were so troubling to the rabbis that these stories were not to be read out loud or translated out of biblical Hebrew.
 
Similarly, an English bishop of the eighteenth century named Porteus produced an index to the Bible that was designed to identify exactly which passages the goodly churchman considered to be suitable for the lay reader. A star was used to mark the sayings of Jesus and the approved portions of the Psalms and the Book of Isaiah, and the numerals 1 and 2 were used to designate other approved chapters and verses of the Holy Writ. Any passage of the Bible not marked with one of these symbols was considered by Bishop Porteus to be off-limits to the ordinary Bible reader—and he declared nearly half of the Hebrew Bible (and some of the New Testament) to be too hot to handle. Of course, the so-called Porteusian Index, if used in reverse, was an ideal tool for the curious Bible reader seeking out precisely the stories that the bishop sought to ban.
 
Some efforts to bowdlerize the Bible are even more blunt. One enterprising and easily offended woman in late eighteenth-century America was so fearful of letting her children read the Bible that she published a version from which she simply omitted “indecent expressions” that she found in the original text. In fact, she blue-penciled so much “bad language” that she ended up cutting out and throwing away nearly half the text that the rest of the world regards as the Revealed Word of God. Like biblical exegetes of all ages, however, she went on to add so many of her own notes and comments that her edition bulked up to six volumes.