The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (9 page)

Unlike Reuben, who also may have been challenging his father’s authority by sleeping with Jacob’s concubine, Absalom pays for his sexual defiance with his life—but, then, he would have been subject to execution for his rebellion against the reigning king whether or not he had crowned his palace coup with a public orgy. And David apparently regards the women as tainted by sexual contact with his son, and he spurns them after he regains his throne and his harem: “So they were shut up unto the day of their death, [living] in widowhood” (2 Sam. 20:3).

Of course David could not have been too surprised by Absalom’s sexual derring-do. After all, David himself had slept with the wives of
his predecessor, King Saul, as a symbol of his kingship (2 Sam. 12:8), thus setting an example for his own randy and rebellious sons. And when Solomon is crowned as king of Israel after the death of David, one of his brothers, Adonijah, ever-so-politely asks permission to sleep with their fathers favorite concubine, the delectable but untouched Abishag; Solomon marks the gesture for what it is—a bid for the throne—and sends an assassin to kill his impudent brother (1 Kings 2:12–25).

To engage in sexual relations, with the concubine of one’s father—an act that we might liken to sleeping with one’s stepmother—was a violation of a sexual taboo that had been raised to a divine commandment in the Bible. But the real crime of these daring and ambitious men—David, Absalom, Adonijah, and others whose exploits are recorded in the Holy Bible—was treason rather than incest.

The disappearance of four words in an early version of the biblical text raises the intriguing if troubling prospect that the Bible also records an incident of incestuous child molestation, a notion so shocking that it may have been literally written out of the Bible by the rabbinical censors. Did Ishmael, the firstborn son of the patriarch Abraham, molest his five-year-old half brother, Isaac?

Abraham and Sarah
*
are childless, as we read in Genesis, and so Sarah sends her husband to the bed of her own handmaiden, an Egyptian woman named Hagar, to find a fertile womb. When Hagar is impregnated, however, a suddenly jealous Sarah has a change of heart and banishes the handmaiden to the wilderness. An angel rescues Hagar from death by thirst and starvation in the desert and sends her back to Abraham’s encampment, where she bears a son named Ishmael (Gen. 16:4–16).

Later, as Ishmael is growing up, God makes a remarkable promise to the ninety-nine-year-old Abraham and his ninety-year-old wife: Sarah will bear a son who will replace Ishmael as the inheritor of Abraham’s divine blessing. “I will establish my covenant with him, and with his seed after him,” God says of Isaac. “I will make nations out of thee, and kings shall come out of thee” (Gen. 17:19). So remarkable is the news that Sarah laughs out loud—-she laughs, almost literally, in God’s face—and her son is given the name Isaac, a bit of Hebrew wordplay that means “I laughed” (Gen. 18:12, 21:4).

And now the Bible shows us a deeply enigmatic scene in which we find the fifteen-year-old Ishmael at play with his five-year-old stepbrother at a feast in celebration of the fact that Isaac has been weaned (at last!) from the breast. But the festivities are ruined for Sarah because she happens to see Ishmael doing
something
to Isaac, something so disturbing that Sarah promptly demands that Ishmael and his mother be “cast out” in the wilderness a second and final time.

Exactly what does Sarah see, exactly what does Ishmael do, that prompts such anger and outrage in Sarah? All we are told in conventional English translations of the Bible is that Sarah sees Ishmael “mocking” young Isaac—and we are asked to believe that, thanks to a single adolescent taunt by one sibling toward another, Sarah drives mother and son into the desert to die.

Unless, that is, she saw something much worse than mere mockery.

A clue to the mystery of Sarah’s murderous rage is to be found in the Hebrew word actually used in the Bible to describe what Ishmael does to Isaac:
t’sahak
. The word is translated as “mocking” by the Shakespearean-era translators who gave us the King James Version of the Bible. A more recent Jewish translation (JPS), derived largely from the King James Version, uses the phrase “making sport.” So we are given to understand by these translators that Hagar and Ishmael are condemned to death in the wilderness because a teenager makes fun of his little brother. But the real meaning of
t’sahak
suggests that something else is being hidden in these translations.

One of the meanings of
t’sahak
is “laugh”—a play on Isaac’s name—and that’s the one on which the translators, old and new, have relied in suggesting that Ishmael merely “mocked” or “laughed at” Isaac. What the translators are reluctant to let us know is that another meaning of
t’sahak
is “fondle,” and the original Hebrew text of the Bible may
suggest that what Sarah actually saw was some kind of sex play between Ishmael and his little brother.

Indeed, the very same Hebrew word that is used to describe what Ishmael does to Isaac appears only a few lines later in Genesis to describe Isaac fondling Rebekah outside the window of Abimelech, King of the Philistines. What Abimelech saw through his window was enough to tip him off that Rebekah was Isaac’s wife rather than his sister—and the translators of the King James Version (KJV) do not hesitate to allow us to understand the sexual overtones of the scene: “Behold, Isaac was
sporting
with Rebekah his wife” (Gen. 26:8).

The mystery of what Sarah saw deepens when we notice that an entire phrase has been dropped from the passage in some versions of the Bible itself. The authoritative version of the Bible in its complete Hebrew text—the so-called Masoretic Text—includes only a truncated description of what Ishmael is doing when Sarah sees him. “Sarah noticed that [Ishmael] was playing.” But the early Greek version of the Bible called the Septuagint and the Latin version called the Vulgate, which may have been translated from Hebrew manuscripts even more ancient than the Masoretic Text, give the same verse as “Sarah noticed that [Ishmael] was playing
with her son Isaac”

What are we to make of the missing words in the Masoretic Text of the Bible? Some Bible critics have been bold enough to suggest that the biblical text is intended to reveal that Ishmael is engaged in some kind of sex-play with young Isaac, but the pious editors of the Masoretic Text sought to play down the disturbing sexuality of the scene by leaving out the key phrase “with her son Isaac.” The Septuagint and the Vulgate, it is suggested, preserve the original, complete and unexpurgated text—and these translations preserve, too, a hint of what Sarah sees.

Indeed, the severity of Sarah’s reaction is puzzling and even alarming if Ishmael is only “playing with” Isaac or even if Ishmael is actually “mocking” him. Abraham himself understands that Sarah’s decree that Hagar and Ishmael be driven into the desert is a death sentence; we are told that “the thing was very grievous in Abraham’s sight on account of his son,” and Abraham goes to the trouble of provisioning them with bread and water. Only after God reassures Abraham that Hagar and Ishmael will survive—“[O]f the son of the bondwoman I will make a nation”—does the goodly patriarch actually send them into the wilderness (Gen. 21:11–13).

Still, the very suggestion that the Bible hides an incident of incestuous child molestation is simply too hot for most Bible scholars to handle. The rabbis explained away the whole episode by suggesting that Ishmael liked to play with a bow and arrows, and “was in the habit of aiming his missiles in the direction of Isaac, saying at the same time that he was but jesting.”
³⁷
Even when some commentators are willing to concede that “mocking” is not justifiable translation of the Hebrew word, they still insist that the encounter between Ishmael and Isaac is wholly innocent.

“[H]is ‘playing’ with Isaac need mean no more than that the older boy was trying to amuse his little brother,” wrote Ephraim Speiser, one of the most venerated contemporary Bible scholars. “There is nothing in the text to suggest that he was abusing him, a motive deduced by many troubled readers in their effort to account for Sarah’s anger.”
³⁸

But we might reach a different conclusion, if only out of regard for the simple human decency of the matriarch Sarah. After all, Hagar and Ishmael nearly perish in the wilderness to which Sarah has condemned them, and only the reappearance of a guardian angel spares their lives (Gen. 21:16). Unless we are supposed to regard Sarah as so jealous of her son’s birthright that she would literally kill for him—or as an out-and-out paranoid, as one Bible scholar has suggested
³⁹
—then we might look for a more plausible explanation for her punishing rage than the mockery of an older brother toward his younger sibling.
⁴⁰
And four missing words that have somehow disappeared from the Masoretic Text of the Bible provide one intriguing explanation for what Sarah sees: Ishmael is taking a liberty with his little brother that his stepmother finds too shocking to tolerate.

Angelology has always been a big business among theologians, who are commonly accused of spending rather too much time counting how many angels can dance on a pinhead. But the very presence of angels in the Hebrew Bible may be seen as the earliest form of Bible censorship by priestly scribes who did not want to encourage their readers to believe that God was in the habit of calling upon mere mortals without
the assistance of priests and their elaborate rituals. To discourage ordinary men and women from entertaining the thought that God himself might show up at their door and sit down to supper, the scribes may have systematically inserted angels into the biblical text as intermediaries between God and humankind.

The angels of the Hebrew Bible, as we see in the story of Lot and his daughters, resemble not at all the fat cherubs of Renaissance art or the herald angels of which we sing in Christmas carols. In fact, the angels who appear at the gates of Sodom more closely resemble a couple of drifters who wander into town—and turn out to be mass murderers. And a close reading of the Bible suggests that, in some profoundly mystical and even slightly spooky sense, when we behold an angel in the Bible, we may be encountering God himself in the guise of changeling, trickster, and destroyer.

The mysterious figures who appear at the city gates of Sodom are among the first angels whom we encounter in the Bible; the biblical author describes them first as “messengers” (Gen. 19:1) and later as “men” (Gen. 19:10), neither of which necessarily suggests that they possess any divine powers. We know that they eat and sleep, because Lot—like his uncle Abraham back in Mamre—serves them a meal before they go to bed (Gen. 19:3). We are given to understand that they travel to Sodom by foot, “about forty miles of difficult road.”
⁴¹
And we know that they exert a certain carnal appeal to ordinary human beings because the lusty men who gather outside Lot’s door prefer the two strangers to Lot’s virgin daughters as sexual playthings.

“One must think of the heavenly messengers as young men in their prime,” explained the stately Bible scholar von Rad, perhaps betraying a certain lustiness of his own, “whose beauty particularly incited evil desire.”
⁴²

So how do we know that the destroyers are angels at all? The Bible refers to them by the Hebrew word that means “messenger” (
mal’akh
), a term used to refer to all kinds of emissaries, some human, some divine. The English word “angel,” as we understand it today, derives from the Greek word
angelos
, which originally meant only “messenger” and was used to render
mal’akh
in early Greek translations of the Bible. Only when the Bible was translated into Latin were celestial messengers routinely distinguished from flesh-and-blood ones by the use of the Latin term angelus, from which the English word “angel” is derived.
⁴³

The mysterious strangers in the story of Lot
are
presented as messengers on a mission from God, armed with celestial powers and ready to carry out their orders. The first clue that they are something more than merely bringers of bad news comes when the townsfolk try to break down the door of Lot’s house in order to gang-rape them—the mob is struck with blindness by the strangers (Gen. 19:11), and the Hebrew word used in the original biblical text suggests that the strangers literally dazzle their attackers with a supernatural explosion of light, “a blinding flash emanating from angels.”
⁴⁴

But the mystery as to the nature of these two messengers only deepens when the biblical storyteller describes the devastation that befalls Sodom and Gomorrah: Is it the angels, or is it God himself, who does the dirty work? At first the two strangers announce themselves as the destroyers of Sodom and Gomorrah. “We will destroy this place,” they tell Lot, “because … the Lord has sent us to destroy it” (Gen. 19:13). Moments later it is God himself who is depicted as the destroyer: “The Lord rained down fire and brimstone from the skies upon Sodom and Gomorrah” (Gen. 19:24–25 NEB). Characteristically, the biblical author never allows us to know with clarity whether God is acting on his own or empowering his angelic messengers to act on his behalf.

Or perhaps God is doing both at once, appearing interchangeably as a man (or several men) and an angel (or several angels). The same curious phenomenon of God as changeling is found throughout the Hebrew Bible: Is it God, or an angel, or merely a mortal man who wrestles with Jacob by night and is defeated by Jacob at sunrise (Gen. 32:25)? Is an angel of death or the Almighty himself who sets upon Moses in a murderous rage on the road to Egypt (Exod. 4:24–26)? (See chapter eight.) All of these strange encounters between God and man betray a certain nagging anxiety and a deep, almost neurotic conflict that besets the biblical authors whenever a human being draws near to the deity.