Jonathan Kirsch, The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible, London: Rider/Random House, 1997, 378 pages.

Psssst… wanna hear a violent/dirty story – from the Bible???

Imagine you’re a trainee pastor/preacher, on a camp with others from your seminary. Your denominaton teaches that ‘all Scripture is [equally] inspired by God and profitable…’ To improve your preaching skills you have to speak off-the-cuff on a Bible passage selected at random. Here’s yours: ‘On the way, at a place where they spent the night, the Lord met [Moses] and tried to kill him. But Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched Moses’ feet with it, and said, “Truly you are a bridegroom of blood to me!”‘ (Exodus 4:24-25). Have fun!

Jonathan Kirsch, a book columnist for the Los Angeles Times and the author of two novels, writes and lectures widely on biblical, literary, and legal topics. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, and a former correspondent for Newsweek, he lives and practices intellectual property law in Los Angeles.

The Harlot… is about Bible stories you won’t hear read aloud at your synagogue or church – or, probably, family devotions – unless the reader has turned to the wrong page. They are ‘some of the most violent and sexually explicit in all of Western literature’ (p.1) – and therefore, says Kirsch, ‘suppressed, censored, or merely ignored over the millennia’ (p.10). The Bible isn’t just about Sunday school stuff, but rather there are sprinkled through its pages (and absent from our lectionaries) ‘accounts of seduction, exhibitionism, voyeurism, adultery, incest, rape, and murder’ (p.305).

The book retells seven colorful (‘tabloidesque’) Old Testament stories, with two chapters on each: the first a novelists’ imaginary reconstruction of the event, the second a commentary. Kirsch has certainly done his homework: many scholarly sources – Jewish and Christian – are cited.. And his sources are generally quite respectable – the Anchor Bible Dictionary, the Encyclopaedia Judaica, Gerhard Von Rad etc. However, here and there he betrays his non-theological training: only a fellow-lawyer (!) would list C.I.Scofield’s dispensational Bible in his bibliography. (I remember a liberated Brethren elder in my childhood suggesting I stick to the material _between_ Scofield’s notes – ie. the biblical text!.) I also wonder why he used the 1962 Masoretic text as his main biblical translation, rather than, say, the New Revised Standard Version. Kirsch, as I said, has consulted the scholars but this is not a scholarly book.

And it would have been nice if Kirsch had included something with more ‘redeeming value’ – like the story of Hosea – a story of grace, par-excellence. But our author’s aim is not to be nice. Or to be evangelical: he doesn’t dwell much, if at all, on David’s penitence (as expressed for example in Psalm 51). He’s not out to preach the ‘Good News’ that God will forgive anything, but to produce a provocative book.

But to his credit Kirsch tackles pretty thoroughly three questions conservative Christians have never really come to terms with:

* Why does an apparently bloodthirsty God lead his chosen people to do terrible things to Canaanites, Amalekites etc?

* Why have redactors sanitized the ancient texts to make them ‘nicer’ or more theologically acceptable?

* And why so much explicit sex in the Bible? My response to the latter would be that the Bible is a book about sex because it’s a book about life. God’s first commandment is ‘Have sex!’ (‘Be fruitful and multiply!’). But because humans are fallen, bed partners in the Bible stories may be chosen (says Kirsch) as a matter of politics, diplomacy, love or lust. The prophets often use explicit sexual imagery (see, for example Ezekiel 23) to berate Israel’s or Judah’s or Samaria’s faithlessness and apostasy.

So why did Kirsch write this book? I can’t help but conjecture that part of his motivation was prurience. Not only does he include such stories as the man in the Book of Judges who threw his concubine to a crowd of marauding men to protect himself from being raped, and the Genesis story of Tamar, who dressed as a harlot to seduce her father-in-law, Judah, to beget a child that Judah’s three sons – now dead – had failed to give her. But he is at pains to have us imagine ‘what the [Israelite prince and his Midianite lover] were _doing_ [emphasis his] when they were both impaled through the belly with a single spear… but there is a form of physical encounter between man and woman that nicely explains it’ (pp. 90-91

Another motivation: iconoclasm. Kirsch’s view of Scripture is, to use the nicest word, liberal. He agrees with Harold Bloom that the Torah is no more and no less ‘the revealed Word of God’ than Dante, Shakespeare, or Tolstoy (p.332). ‘We might conclude,’ he writes, ‘from an open-eyed reading of the forbidden texts of the Bible that the fundamental truth is that there is no fundamental truth’ (p.306). ‘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’ (p.309).

Overall, it’s an interesting, entertaining and provocative read. It will sell, because it’s about sex, nudity and violence. But I wouldn’t add it to the required reading list of seminary students. It’s not a classic – and not overly indexable (my average for most books is about 10 memorable items per 100 pages: here it’s three all-up).

Back to the Exodus story about God, Moses and Zipporah. How would you go preaching about that? To help you, Jonathan Kirsch’s elaboration is on pages 145 – 179. Thirty-four pages!!!

A few interesting quotes:

* Some stories – including the rape of King David’s daughter, Tamar, by her love-crazed half brother (2 Sam. 13) – were so troubling to the rabbis that these stories were not to be read out loud or translated out of biblical Hebrew (p.5)

* Lot is something of a schlemiel who tags along after Abraham and relies on his kindly uncle to get him out of trouble (p.35)

* The Bible is forced to accommodate two very different traditions, one that tolerates and even celebrates marriage with non-Israelites, and one that bitterly condemns and forbids it (p.130)

* Any trafficking by an Israelite with a sacred harlot was not merely a sexual indiscretion but an act of apostasy – an outrage against divine law and a capital offense among the Israelites (p.133) * The Song of Songs, a book of erotic love poetry that somehow found its way into Holy Writ, suggests what a woman might wear around her neck as a symbol of sexual availability: ‘My beloved is unto me as a bag of myrrh, / That lieth betwixt my breasts’ (p.135)

* ‘The whole of Jewish history might have turned out differently,’ a young rabbi once told me, ‘if Abraham had just said “No.”‘ (p.176)

* The handbook of ritual sacrifice that we find in the Book of Exodus ‘loftily ignores’ the sacrifice of a female of _any_ species, human or animal (p.212). [Further] the Bible – and the culture that the Bible defines and describes – treated women with greater care and respect than they generally enjoyed elsewhere in the ancient Near East (p.251)

* The biblical author [of Judges] is eager to show us by gruesome example how badly ordinary people behave when they enjoy too much liberty (p.243)

* A concubine was _not_ equivalent to a mistress or a harlot… according to biblical tradition and rabbinical law; the Bible regards concubinage as an unremarkable and perfectly honorable position in a household, and four of the twelve tribes of Israel descend from the sons of Jacob’s concubines (p.253)

* Jael is the only woman in the Hebrew Bible who slays an adversary with her own hands (p.254)

* David’s [life contains] incidents of exhibitionism, voyeurism, adultery, mayhem, and murder, [but is] ‘a man after God’s own heart’ (1 Sam. 13:14, p.284)

Whatever we make of these ancient stories, we can at least take comfort in the fact (as Isaac Bashevis Singer put it) that the biblical authors weren’t into hiding bad stuff about their heroes: they are ordinary men and women and not plaster saints. I’m encouraged by that!

Rowland Croucher