Libel

BETWEEN THE COVERS

The Bible will never shock you, as long as you never open it.

I have no memory of Sunday School, except a dim feeling we used an abridged coloring-book translation of the Bible where everyone had chubby cheeks and smiled all the time. I later learned that no one had chubby cheeks in Ancient Israel (except a few wicked kings) which makes me question the accuracy of that translation. After a series of confirmation classes, also forgotten, I was allowed to attend regular services during which I would sketch in the leaflet. But I didn't draw Bible scenes because I'd been taught that everyone always got along in them, which didn't really fire my adolescent imagination.

During these services I would get my weekly portion of Scripture, four sections arranged like a microwave dinner: meat-loaf (Gospels) starch (Epistles) wilted vegetable matter (the Old Testament) and a little lump of cobbler (Psalms). And these helpings, bland and homogenous, did not stimulate any strong appetite to dig into the rest of the Bible – I had no idea about the steamy scandals, the spicy escapades, the raw violence. It turns out the adolescent pictures I drew, comics I read and movies I watched, which my father found so distasteful, were pretty wholesome compared with some of the shocking stories between the covers of that Book.

While being served these prepackaged Biblical microwave dinners, I was also being taught to interpret the Bible backwards from end to beginning: using Paul's uptight perspective to interpret Jesus as a compassionate but emotionally distant god-man through those eyes we might pity, forgive and sometimes even admire the faith's primitive ancestors in the Old Testament. And yet interpreting the Bible from Paul to Jesus to Genesis can provoke difficult questions. Paul wished everyone could be happily unmarried and celibate like him, Jesus doesn't seem to have been married, and yet those renegades in Genesis kept getting married and making babies. Well obviously it was God's plan for humanity to be fruitful and multiply – within monogamous wedlock.

And yet our saintly ancestors in Genesis kept fructifying and multiplying with multiple wives, servant-girls, even a prostitute. What is “the Bible” teaching us? Oh! These polyamorous patriarchs lived before the Law was revealed in the days of Moses – they hadn't got the word yet. But we read on, Moses gives the Law, and then David commandeers nineteen wives and mistresses, Solomon collects a thousand. And that's not the darkest or dirtiest scriptural gossip by far – there are lines in the Bible I'd be shocked to see written on a men's room wall. ...Wait, people don't write on bathroom walls anymore. There are lines in the Bible I'd be shocked to see posted on the Internet!

Enlightenment thinker Thomas Paine was scandalized by “the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled.” If they were teaching the Bible in public schools, I'd have to pull my children into private schools to shelter them from all that rampant rape, incest and predation. While studying Scripture, I'm often reminded of those road-signs, “Don't Text While Driving,” which also applies to playing the Bible on audiobook, since some of the graphically sexual sections might cause you to swerve off the road in shock.

But I didn't learn about any of this in church – ironically, my Biblical education began when I'd stopped attending services. Reading Daniel Quinn's exploration of the Eden story in his book Ishmael inspired me to explore the Bible. Because I learn by teaching, I offered my services as a Bible teacher at an inner-city childcare facility, drawing coloring/activity pages to teach the stories I considered most relevant to ghetto children. And I got totally fired (by “totally” I mean they also condemned my eternal soul to burn in Hell). And then I applied to seminary where, it turns out, they teach you all the hot stuff in the Bible, and then say “but don't repeat this from the pulpit.” You could fill a book with what the average baptized, Sunday-schooled, confirmed and regularly sermonized Christian does not know about the Bible. ...Actually they did. It's called The Bible, and it's fourteen hundred pages long.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

SHAMELESS (AN EXPLORATION OF THE SONG OF SONGS)

Sacred And Profane

WEDLOCK (HOSEA AND WHOREDOM)

Coming Of Age In Canaan

Priests And Kings

“Prophets”

Pro-Creation (The Hebrew Goddess in the Book of Proverbs)

EXPLOITATION

The Honeymoon Tax (Prima Nocta In Genesis)

Midwife Crisis (The Midwives Of Egypt In Exodus)

Most Blessed Of Women (Jael And Deborah)

Lecherous Messiahs (A Messianic Mess) (David And Absalom)

A Cabinet Of Concubines (Solomon)

Twin Sisters (Ezekiel)

Damsel Under Duress (Susanna)

Miss Persia -or- One Thousand And One Persian Nights (Esther)

TEXTCRIME, PART I: ABOMINATIONS

Atrocity (Sodom)

The Genesis Of Biblical Family Values

The Way Of The Cross Dresser (Joseph)

Passing The Love Of Women (David And Jonathan)

Civilization And Its (Sexual) Discontents

TEXTCRIME, PART II: FORNICATION

The Naked Man In The Garden Of Gethsemane

Love And Liberty (Christianity Before Paul)

Corinth Vegas

Aflame With Passion

Timothy

No Longer Jew/Greek, Slave/Free, Male/Female

Prostitutes, Politicians And Pharisees

MISCONCEPTION (or, MISADVENTURES IN CONCEPTION)

Tamar

Madame Rahab

Ruth

The Wife Of Uriah (Bathsheba)

Joseph And Mary

BACK-WORDS

A Bad Breakup (Banishing The Hebrew Goddess)

Love Shack (Temple Prostitutes)

Solomon's Edifice Complex

Sacred Cows

Witch-Doctors

House Cleaning (Josiah's Reform)

Erotic Cakes (Jeremiah)

RECREATION

Here Comes The Bride (Lekha Dodi)

Vindication? (Jesus And Eden)

Stranger In Paradise (Revelation)