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Books & Culture, September/October 2007

The Joy of Texts
Sex in the Bible.
by Sam Torode

Sex in the Bible, A New
Consideration
J. Harold Ellens
Praeger, 2006
180
pp., $44.95

Whenever someone starts talking about "God's
way of X" or "what the Bible says about X," I'm tempted to
turn and run. Especially when X involves food or sex. It's
very hard not to read our own opinions back into the
Bible, picking and choosing verses to defend whatever it is
we're defending—I know because I've been guilty of it. But
here's one book on Sex in the Bible that does a better
job than most at prodding us to encounter the biblical texts
in all their strangeness.

"The most interesting thing about sex in
Bible," J. Harold Ellens insists, "is the fact that the Bible
does not moralize sex." Now this may sound like an all-too
familiar prelude to some special pleading. Taken at face
value, it's obviously misleading. (Start with that injunction
against adultery, for instance, and other inconvenient
counter-examples readily spring to mind.) But there's a good
deal more to Ellens' case than this pronouncement
suggests.

The Bible resists our attempts to distill it
into a universal rulebook because it's mainly a collection of
stories and poems crafted over a span of centuries by many
different authors, often with conflicting implications. When
it comes to sexual mores, the Bible is actually full of
"situational ethics." For example, Ellens notes, polygamy is
the most common model of marriage in the Bible, and one can
still make a strong biblical argument for polygamy in
societies where women greatly outnumber men (such as in areas
ravaged by war).

Driving home this point, Ellens cites the Old
Testament stories where women, most notably Ruth and Esther,
employ their feminine charms to seduce men for the furtherance
of God's aims (and their own). Far from being condemned, these
women earn nothing but praise from the biblical authors. It's
ironic that Ruth is upheld as a role model for conservative
Christian girls today. Instead of "waiting on God" for a
husband, she spotted a good man, followed him home from a
party, and jumped into bed with him—violating three "Biblical
Rules for Dating" at once.

Ellens also devotes a chapter to the Song of
Songs, that "uproariously successful erotic celebration of
robust sexual play" between partners who are never identified
as a monogamous husband and wife (another assumption we tend
to bring to the text today). Ellens pokes fun at the celibate
theologians over the centuries who flattened the Song into an
allegory of Christ and the Church, or Christ and the celibate
soul, sublimating sexuality into spirituality to the point of
neurosis. Does the poem have an allegorical dimension? Yes—but
that doesn't warrant a reading that treats the plain sense of
the text as nothing but an elaborate code. By exorcizing
earthly eroticism from the Christian life, Ellens believes,
these commentators unwittingly drove people to seek sexual
pleasure in harmful ways. "The church owes the world of humans
an enormous apology for the centuries-long lie it perpetrated
in this regard, and for the psychological and social pathology
it produced."

Does such an argument have any resonance
today, in the era of Sex and the City and internet porn
and Girls Gone Wild? Having sat through enough skewed
presentations on sexual purity to earn a free pass out of
Purgatory, I can testify that even today the church too often
focuses on the bad to the neglect of the good. I remember one
high-school youth group presentation in particular, a video in
which James Dobson interviewed a serial rapist and killer
about the lure of pornography. The implication—inadvertent,
perhaps, but unmistakable—was that any boy attracted to images
of nudity and sex was likely to go on a rampage someday.

Ellens argues that the Bible treats sex as a
normal and important part of life that connects us both to
other humans and to God. Of course, it can go wrong, as in
promiscuity, abuse, adultery, incest, bestiality, and rape,
all of which make appearances in the Bible. But the problem is
not with sex itself.

And yet, more deeply than many other "normal
and important" parts of life, sex is interwoven with
personhood—hence the seriousness with which the church has
traditionally regarded sexual sin. That this emphasis has
often clouded our appreciation of the essential goodness of
sex is undeniable, just as a distorted emphasis on the reality
of our fallenness has obscured the essential goodness of
creation. But until the dawning of a new heaven and a new
earth, our sexuality will always be a tangled affair.

The Bible reminds us of the enigmatic
character of fallen sexuality again and again, in passages
that can't readily be made to fit any agenda. Ellens focuses
on three such stories from Genesis—one well-known and two
obscure: the seduction of Eve by the serpent (Gen. 3:1–24),
the sons of God mating with the daughters of men (Gen. 6:1–8),
and God's slaying of Onan (Gen. 38:7–10).

Ellens reads the story of Eve, Adam, and the
serpent as an allegory of human maturation—a story which,
unfortunately, implies that sexual awakening unleashed evil
into the world. The serpent, he notes, was a common phallic
symbol in the ancient Near East, and the fruit a corresponding
fertility symbol. While the point of the story is not that sex
is bad, Ellens says, still it casts a negative light on the
exploration required to transition from childhood to maturity.
"Should we look at adolescent alienation, pain, and anxiety as
difficult but inevitable stages in the evolution of persons,"
he asks, "or as an unfortunate aberration of a sinful or
destructive behavior that makes God exceedingly
disturbed?"

Here, Ellens can't help but adding what he
wishes the Bible had said:

What if our loving and lovemaking,
our sex and sensuality, had been cast from the beginning as
the positive and beautiful thing that it is? That would have
been the truth, and would have provided our sexual
experimentation, exploration, achievement, and union a
positive and celebrative aura, marking lovemaking as the
supreme expression of the unique nature of human
spirituality.

While I sympathize with Ellens, the biblical
story reflects a tension that is true to human experience.
Genesis holds two things in balance: there is the divine
celebration of fruitfulness and multiplying, the consummate
delight promised in the story of Eve's creation ("the two
shall become one flesh"); and there is also the Fall. Neither
aspect of sexuality can be ignored.

I grew up in a literalist church where a
talking snake was a talking snake, and a forbidden fruit was a
forbidden fruit. We were taught to take every biblical story
at face value—which is probably why I never heard a sermon
about Genesis 6, where the "sons of God" swoop down and mate
with human women, giving rise to a race of supermen. (This
gives new meaning to Touched by an Angel.)

According to Ellens, this troublesome tale
actually runs parallel to that of Eve and the serpent, as an
alternate account of the origin of evil. Here, sin enters the
world through the sexual desire of angels, not human beings.
Wickedness abounds among the ungodly offspring of the angels,
leading directly to God's judgment with the Flood.

Nor do I recall any sermons about poor Onan,
who refused to produce a child with his sister-in-law Tamar.
Knowing well that his offspring would simply provide an heir
for his deceased brother, Onan spills his seed on the ground
before sleeping with Tamar. Angered, God himself swoops down
and slays Onan on the spot. In Ellens' view, this is a
ridiculous story that presents God in a most ungodly light.
(God's response can be inferred from his conversation with
Job.)

Despite its weirdness and obscurity, the
story of Onan has had a profound influence on church history.
"First of all," Ellens writes, "for centuries Jews and
Christians used this scripture as an argument to turn the very
natural experience of masturbation into an evil behavior, even
a terrifying sin against God." More than this, early Christian
commentators like Augustine and Jerome used the Onan story to
condemn coitus interruptus and, by extension, all other
methods of birth control.

These early theologians believed that "semen
is a sacred fluid" and that to deliberately waste or misuse it
is a grave sin worthy of damnation. But, Ellens argues, they
misread the text. Onan was not punished for separating sex
from procreation or for spilling his sacred semen: "His error
was that he refused to perpetuate the memory, name, and
lineage of his brother."

The consequences of this confusion, in
Ellens' view, have been tragic. "Had it not been for this
strange story of Onan, misinterpreted by the church's
theologians for centuries … the Roman Catholic Church could
have led the world into a wise and wholesome course of action
that would have approved and encouraged preconception birth
control and forbidden abortion."

I can't summarize Ellens' entire book, which
includes chapters on polygamy, the status of women under Old
Testament law, and homosexuality—timely subjects indeed. We're
awash these days in "Bible-based" arguments both for and
against homosexuality, patriarchy, the celibate priesthood,
dating, premarital sex, divorce and remarriage, and a host of
other sex-related issues. About the only sexual issue in the
Bible not being hotly debated right now is the morality
of cavorting with angels.

It seems there are at least two ways to
respond: by becoming more entrenched in our respective
interpretive traditions, or by returning to the biblical
texts, in cultural and literary context, with humility in the
face of ambiguity. For those inclined to the former approach,
Sex in the Bible will be unsettling and subversive. For
those inclined to the latter, Ellens is a welcome guide, worth
reading and learning from and arguing with and reading
again.

Sam Torode is coeditor of Aflame: Ancient Wisdom on Marriage
(Eerdmans, 2005).
Copyright © 2007 by
the author or Christianity Today International/Books &
Culture magazine.
Click
here for reprint information on Books &
Culture.
September/October
2007, Vol. 13, No. 5, Page
16

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