The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (49 page)

J
ack Kerouac tells a story in
On the Road
about a young drifter who has just been released from a prison where he served time for grand theft. To avoid sitting on the cold stone floor of his cell during a long stretch in solitary, he used a prison-issue Bible as a kind of cushion. But the jailors objected to his impiety (or, more likely, his comfort) and replaced the fat tome with “a leetle pocket-size one so big,” as the chatty ex-con puts it.

“Couldn’t sit on it so I read the whole Bible and Testament,” says the young man of his prison revelation. “[Y]ou know they’s some real hot things in that Bi-ble.”
¹

At first blush, of course, what’s “hot” about the forbidden stories of the Bible are the shocks and surprises that await the reader who expects to find only Sunday school stuff—the frank and mostly nonjudgmental accounts of seduction, exhibitionism, voyeurism, adultery, incest, rape, and murder. Sometimes it is hard to make out the moral example that the biblical authors intend us to see in these tales of human passion. And that is why the stories we have explored here have been censored, banned, mistranslated, or simply ignored by preachers and teachers who found them too hot to handle.

But these stories are “hot” in quite another sense. As we have seen, the Bible is littered with the artifacts and relics of ancient beliefs and
practices that come as a surprise to anyone who has been taught to regard the Bible as a single-minded manifesto of ethical monotheism. The depiction of God as a mischievous and sometimes even murderous deity is shocking to anyone who envisions the Almighty as a heavenly father and “King of the Universe,” benign and compassionate, slow to anger and quick to forgive. By the time we finish reading and pondering these troubling stories, we are left with the unsettling realization that something very odd was going on in ancient Israel before the priests and scribes came along and cleaned up the biblical text—and we have only a faint if provocative notion of what it was.

So the theological hot spots in the Bible turn out to be even more unsettling than the incidents of human misconduct. While it may seem scandalous that in both Jewish and Christian tradition David is regarded as “a man after God’s heart,” the very model of a just and righteous king, and the progenitor of the Messiah, it is even harder to explain away the fact that his son and successor, the wise King Solomon, sacrifices to the Canaanite goddess called Ashtoreth, among other pagan deities, and yet is never punished for his “abominations.” David’s sins are purely human failings, but Solomon’s act of apostasy defies what we are taught to regard as the essential teaching of the Bible and the three religions that regard the Bible as Holy Writ: “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me” is, quite literally, written in stone by the finger of the Almighty (Deut. 5:7)!

So we might conclude from an open-eyed reading of the forbidden texts of the Bible that the fundamental truth is that there is no fundamental truth. Instead, we are invited to join the rest of humanity in a restless, ceaseless search to discern some moral order in a chaotic universe. We are challenged by the Bible itself to figure out who God is and what God wants—and that is the most disturbing revelation of all. The plain fact is that the Bible offers many visions of God, many explanations of God’s will, many prophecies of humankind’s destiny, and the real challenge is to discern the ones that make sense and ring true, the ones that hold out the promise of peace in a troubled and dangerous world.

“A god-shaped hole” is how the French existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once described the fundamental yearning for the divine that aches in the hearts and minds of human beings in all ages and all places. Gods and goddesses have been depicted in the sacred art of
every
culture, ranging from the crude stick figures of cave paintings to the glorious images that adorn the Sistine Chapel. But the fantastic variety of these images explains why we cannot agree on the outline of that god-shaped hole in the human soul. Even the Bible does not pin itself down on who God is, what God looks like, why God acts the way he does, or what God wants of us.

Starting with the very first words of the Bible, the biblical authors simply cannot agree on how to describe and depict the One True God, and so we are given
two
versions of what happens “in the beginning.”

The first account of Creation in Genesis depicts God only as a cosmic something-or-other, the kind of abstract deity that astrophysicists invoke when they gaze on some far-distant supernova and describe what they have seen as “the face of God.” “Now the earth was unformed and void,” goes Genesis 1:2, “and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters.” When the formless God of Genesis 1 pauses to create man and woman “in His own image” (Gen. 1:27), he accomplishes the feat with hands-off verbal commands. Indeed, as we read the first account of creation in Genesis, we cannot really say that God
has
hands: “Let the earth bring forth the living creature after its kind,” God decrees. “And it was so,” the biblical author concludes (Gen. 1:24).

Quite a different deity shows up in the second account of Creation, where we are introduced to a strikingly earthy version of God who hunkers down in the muck and mire of the newly created planet and sculpts the first man out of clay with his own hands: “Then the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Gen. 2:7). Later, the touchy-feely God of Genesis 2 is seen strolling through the Garden of Eden “in the cool of the day” and chatting up the man and woman whom he has created with his own hands (Gen. 3:8–9). Significantly, the all-knowing and all-seeing Yahweh does not see or know where Adam and Eve are or what they have been up to or why they are suddenly wearing those famous fig leaves.

“Where art thou?” God calls out to the mortals he has just created, suddenly full of urgent questions. “Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? … What is this thou hast done?” (Gen. 3:9, 11, 13).

The Bible goes on to conjure up countless visions of God. Sometimes the Almighty is a vagrant who shows up at the door with dusty feet and gratefully tucks into a meal of chops and curds (Gen. 18:8). Sometimes he is “the pillar of cloud by day, and the pillar of fire by night” (Exod. 13:22). Sometimes he is the “ancient of days,” a white-haired celestial monarch on a fiery throne, attended by angelic courtiers numbering a “thousand thousands” (Dan. 7:9–10). Sometimes he is a changeling—an ordinary human being one moment, trudging through the desert on foot, and a thundering mountain god the next, casting down hellfire and brimstone from the heavens (Gen. 19:23–24).

Significantly, the biblical vision of God that is often invoked by clergy nowadays is an elusive and oblique one, a kind of postmodernist deity who disdains the flash-and-dazzle that he displayed in the Book of Exodus or the pomp-and-circumstance that surrounds him in the Book of Daniel. The existentialist version of God appears in the First Book of Kings, where the biblical author describes how the Almighty agrees to manifest himself for the prophet Elijah on a rocky mountaintop in ancient Israel.

Today, we are struggling to hear that still small voice amid the cacophony that attends the birth of a new millennium. A great many voices are shouting out
their
versions of what God wants us to believe, to know, to do. But the whole point of the Bible is that God cannot be understood as
one
manifestation to the exclusion of all others. God is capable of acting in ways that we find baffling, troubling, even outrageous. If the first principle of the Bible-based religions is Imago Dei—
the human aspiration to make ourselves over in the image of God—then we must be prepared to tolerate a range of human behavior that goes beyond the bland certainties that are taught in the typical sermon or Sunday school class. God and humanity are simply not that simple.

“God is no saint, strange to say,” writes Jack Miles in
God: A Biography
. “Much that the Bible says about him is rarely preached from the pulpit because, examined too closely, it becomes a scandal.”
²

The Bible encompasses so many contradictory laws, rituals, and commandments that we are forced to pick and choose the moral instruction that we find most compelling. Of course, there are plenty of people who are willing to make the choice for us, and that is one of the reasons why the Bible is such an unfamiliar book to so many people—many of us rely on teachers and preachers to tell us what matters in the Bible and what can be disregarded.

Over the centuries, and never more so than today, we have tended to be drawn to the kinder and gentler moral imperatives that can be found in the Bible. “And what doth the Lord require of thee?” writes the prophet Micah, whose message is especially compelling because it is so compassionate—and so simple. “Only to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God” (Mic. 6:8).

But a simple credo does not go far enough; wars have been fought (and are still being fought), men and women have been tortured (and are still being tortured), and lives have been lost (and are still being lost) over the question of what is just and what is merciful. The history of the Bible-based religions is also the history of book-banning and book-burning, inquisition and excommunication, holy war and holy crusade, martyrdom and mass murder, the rack and the auto-da-fé, martyrdom and murder. “[R]eligious intolerance,” as Freud observed, “was inevitably born with the belief in one God.”
³
The real challenge of the Bible, then, is to reach some common understanding of how an article of faith translates into a concrete act of human conduct—and that is why we hunger for words of moral instruction from the Almighty to fill
Sartre’s god-shaped hole in our soul, words that can be understood and acted on, not in heaven but here and now.

Much attention has always been paid to the externals of religious practice, but the Bible depicts God as having little interest in such matters. Elaborate ceremonies of worship, no matter how solemn and reverent, are meaningless in the eyes of God if they are not accompanied by mercy and justice, as we are told by the prophet Isaiah. “Your new moons and your appointed seasons, My soul hateth; they are a burden unto Me; I am weary to bear them,” God warns Isaiah. “Yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear” (Isa. 1:14–15). In a passage from Isaiah that is read aloud in contemporary Jewish congregations on the fast day of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, the prophet tells us what God really wants of us in simple, straightforward, and specific terms:

Perhaps even more crucial in our afflicted and benighted world is a fundamental biblical teaching that suggests the Bible itself should not be used as a weapon to punish someone whose beliefs or skin color or nationality are different from our own. If the biblical authors were capable of tolerating such a wide range of human conduct, so many different conceptions of God, so should we. Spoken in the still small voice of a compassionate God, the teaching is often hard to hear in our noisy world. But the civilizing moral instruction that we find in the Book of Exodus ought to be taken to heart no less urgently in London or Los Angeles than in Belfast or Sarajevo or Jerusalem.

“And a stranger shált thou not wrong, neither shalt thou oppress him; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt,” the Almighty reminds us in the Book of Exodus. “[F]or if they cry at all unto Me, I will surely hear their cry” (Exod. 22:20–22).

In fact, God requires us to do something more than respect and protect the stranger. As we have now seen, the Bible often regards the stranger
(ger)
as an object of fear and loathing. At certain ugly
moments, a genocidal rage toward the stranger breaks forth. And yet, remarkably enough, the Bible also commands us to
love
the stranger, a fact that has been as thoroughly suppressed as any of the stories in this book over the last couple of millennia.

Only three times in the Torah we are
commanded
to love. “[T]hou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,” goes Deuteronomy 6:5. “[T]hou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,” we are told in Leviticus 19:18. But Leviticus 19:34 elevates the love of the stranger to a sacred duty: