Changing sex in the Bible

UNPROTECTED TEXTS: The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions About Sex and Desire, by Jennifer Wright Knust. HarperOne, San Francisco. 2011. 343 pp.

Reviewed by Eugene J Fisher

Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions About Sex and Desire is a book by a scholar who knows how to write for a general, educated readership, as Jennifer Wright Knust’s witty title indicates. While footnoted with an extensive bibliography and index, the scholarly apparatus does not intrude on what is basically a good read for anyone interested in better understanding the Scriptures of Judaism and Christianity. I mention the former because Knust is adept at using rabbinic as well as ancient, medieval and modern Christian interpretations of the passages she interprets so well for the modern reader.

Knust is an American Baptist, so there are some places in which Catholic readers will take Catholic tradition into account in a way she does not. But she is a superb biblical scholar, so readers can rely on her interpretations, and at times multiple interpretations citing ancient and modern commentators, of biblical texts.

Knust argues, convincingly, that the Bible cannot be used as a simple guidebook for sexual conduct. Written over such a long period of time, it reflects the changing mores of vastly different generations and times.

The patriarchs of Israel, as depicted in Genesis, practised polygamy, as did the kings of Israel as depicted in later books. Mere fornication in the Hebrew Scriptures does not cause major disruptions in Israel’s relationship with God, though adultery does. The crime of the people of Sodom was not “sodomy” in its modern understanding, but the violation of hospitality and the crime of rape, as is shown in a parallel story of the rape of the daughter of a Levite. Paul in his time, though, understands homosexual sex as a more serious sin.

Sex in the Bible is at once a divine command, a source of joy and a reflection of divine love between God and Israel and God and humanity, and a powerful desire that, out of control, can disrupt and even break the covenantal relations between God and the people of God.

Knust notes that the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament charge non-Jews and non-Christians with sexual deviance, turning other religions into purveyors of cultic prostitution, when there is no evidence such practices existed. Prostitution in the Hebrew Scriptures and in the New Testament becomes a central metaphor for idolatry.

Knust describes the fascination with and abhorrence of the ancient biblical writers of both testaments with the possibility of sexual relations between angels, the “sons of God”, and human women.

In her concluding chapter, she examines the changing theology of circumcision and the emissions of men and women—semen and the products of a woman’s womb, both menstrual and at childbirth—and how these precluded people from going into the temple to offer sacrifice and, later, Jewish men and women from going to synagogue and Christian men and women from going into churches (the Christian replacement for the destroyed Jewish Temple).

This book will give Catholic readers a new perspective on the Scriptures. It is recommended not only for personal reading but for Catholic-Protestant and Catholic-Jewish dialogue groups.—CNS