SEXIS WRONG

Here is a good example of what can transpire in the course of
a few biblical words. You scan the line, scan it again, and say
to yourself: In place of the angels, did Lot just offer the crowd
his virgin daughters to do with what they will? I mean, being
a good host is nice and all, but that seems a bit extreme. The
mind reels—not unproductively—at what would befall the innocents
if they were cast to the awaiting wolves.
Thankfully, the angels intervene. They pull Lot back into the
house and blind the Sodomites pressing against the door.
Then they facilitate Lot’s exit, with wife and daughters in
tow, but, in their flight across the plain, Lot’s wife makes the
mortal mistake of looking back (like many of us toward old
relationships) and is turned into a pillar of salt.
Yet the saga of Lot and his daughters is not over. Having fled
to the town of Zoar, he eventually becomes afraid and moves
himself and his daughters to the mountains. Apparently it
was a little underpopulated up there, and his
daughters begin to despair of ever getting
nookie. The older says to the younger, “Our
father is old, and there is not a man in the earth
to come in unto us after the manner of all the
earth. Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie
with him, that we may preserve the seed of the father.”
Ah, the old Get Dad Drunk and Have Him Impregnate Us
trick—pretty sneaky, Sis! So on consecutive nights the
daughters get Lot schnookered and go lie with him (again,
a nice euphemism, though not as good as “come in unto”).
Lot, the sod, doesn’t seem to notice either time. Eventually
each of his daughters gives birth to a son.
Now, mind you, all this has happened in the first 20 pages of
the Bible (at least in my edition). This is some kind of book.
By comparison, the first 20 pages of a Best American Erotica
contain nowhere near as much sex and a fraction of the scandal.
True, conventional erotica tends to have more adjectiveheavy
descriptions of sex than one finds in the Holy Book (the
Song of Solomon is the exception, as we will see), but for
sheer quantity of nudge nudge, the Bible is up there.
By and large, the Old Testament is a very weird document,
full of bizarre and rather unsavory tidbits that the New Testament
tried to smooth over. Even God himself had to be rendered
kinder and gentler the second time around, for in the
Hebrew books he was forever casting plagues and famines
down on the people and insisting on himself as a “consuming
fire” and a “jealous God.” In Isaiah 3, for example, the
“haughty” daughters of Zion, with their “wanton eyes, walking
and mincing as they go and making a tinkling with their
feet,” will be smote down by the l o r d, and he will discover
their “secret parts.” Ooh. Best take off those bangles before
it’s too late.
But my favorite Old Testament oddity occurs in Deuteronomy
23, where, in a list of all those who will not be making it to
Heaven, it is written: “He that is wounded in the stones, or
hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation
of the Lord.” Rum thing: not only do you have to go
through this life without the priviest of privies, but the gates
of Paradise are closed to you, to boot (and the fact that you
can sing a decent falsetto is pretty minor recompense). Yet
the intrigue of this passage doesn’t end there: Why, in fact,
are the memberless or the crushed-testicled not welcome in
the New Jerusalem? Interesting question. There are numerous
medieval theological debates about whether angels eat
and drink, piss and shit (and where it would go if they do), but
I’ve never heard anyone ask if they screw. Yet here, perhaps,
Why, in fact, are the memberless or
the crushed-testicled not welcome in
the New Jerusalem?
is evidence that the celestial nightclub serves up more than
just juice and cookies.
Perhaps this is not the venue to reinscribe us in thirteenthcentury
scholastic arguments, but the point is still intriguing:
If it was just sex the elect were after, the penis would be
enough. But if the balls are also necessary, this suggests a
certain import to the male ejaculate as well. To my mind, this
complicates Aquinas’ notion that the postprandial material
discharge of angels is only a vapor (but not a flatulence, mind
you); for even if we agree that angel excretion is but gas,
what are we to do with angel jizz? Aquinas would probably
have described it as some kind of noumenal hand lotion.
Even in the briefest introductions to sex in the Old Testament,
no account can ignore one of the most erotic, exquisite texts
not just in the Bible, but in the whole history of Western literature:
the Song of Solomon. In all the reams of Biblical interpretation,
this is the text that has received the most treatment.
The reasons are twofold: The Song of Solomon is sufficiently
explicit to be embarrassing to the anti-sensuality of the later
Christian church, and thus required extensive backpedaling.
This is the obvious, confessed reason so many monks spilled
their ink on its pages. The other, only slightly less obvious, is
that it is very fun to read and decidedly arousing, especially if
the only other thing you’re reading is Samuel and Jeremiah’s
accounts of the punishments visited upon the wicked.
In effect, the Song of Solomon is generally agreed to be a dialogue
between two lovers (although I, for one, detect more
THUMPING IN THE BIBLE 325