My Body is my bible

My body is my bible.

I’ve been told that scripture and church tradition have equal theological weight. I’ve heard others retort that only scripture has any relevance to theology. I’ve seen people have never-ending debates about biblical inerrancy, whether or not infallible means the same as inerrant, and other perhaps petty things.

We use, waste (?), thousands of pages writing about other pages. We write about what the Bible says about bodies, what it says about gender, what it says about sex, but there are, as far as I’m aware, less pages written about bodies which start with bodies.

My body is my bible. 
Like the Bible it’s been written by many people. 
When I came out of my mother, the nurses wrote boy across my dick. 
When mum and dad held me they wrote Alan across my forehead. 
Some people at school carved faggot into my limp wrist. 
Others tried to bottle my voice and call it queer. 
Doctors scrawled depression on their pads, Christians glued Leviticus 18:22 to my thighs, pastors whispered their ‘redemptive’ prayers into my ears. 
All this and more is written on my body; it’s my own theological text. I may not be the author of every single word but I am the editor. I can take a red pen and cross out what doesn’t work and I can underline, circle, and highlight what I will.
True theology begins when we respect everyone as their own editor. You don’t get to take away my red pen, you don’t get to tell me what I can and cannot emphasise, I’ll insert what I want into my text, and if you write something on me I don’t want, I reserve the right to amend it, to edit it, to expand it.
I also get to tell you what my body means,
What the verse on my dick says,
What the passage on my heart tells,
What the lines on my palms impart.

My body is my bible. It’s my tradition. Your Bible can tell you about your body, but don’t use it to impose anything on mine. My bible, my body, is the text from which I pray.

 

Is Adam’s “Rib” Actually His Penis Bone?

In 2001, Ziony Zevit (a biblical scholar) published, along with Scott F. Gilbert (a biology professor), a letter in the American Journal of Medical Genetics (101:284-5), entitled Congenital Human Baculum Deficiency: The Generative Bone of Genesis 2:21-23.

In the letter, the authors essentially suggest that the bone which was taken by Yahweh to form the woman was Adam’s penis bone, his baculum. They write, “Whereas most mammals [...] and most primates [...] have a penile bone, human males lack this bone and must rely on fluid hydraulics to maintain erections.” If we assume “it was Adam’s baculum that was removed in order to make Eve,” the authors write, then the story in Genesis 2 which has Yahweh apparently create woman using a rib (Hebrew, tsela), which lacks “any intrinsic generative capacity,” makes much more sense. Not only would the “rib” then be associated with generation and procreation, but it also explains, for the ancient Israelites, why the human male did not have a penis bone.

There are a few problems with this theory, and personally I don’t think it holds much water. Firstly, the Hebrew text of Genesis 2:21 does not support the authors’ thesis. It reads, “Then Yahweh of the gods caused a trance to fall upon the man (Adam), and while he slept, he took ahat missalotayv…” The phrase ahat (lit. “one of”) missalotayv (“from his tselas) implies that whatever Yahweh took from man, there was more than one of them to begin with. The construct form of ahad (one) coupled with the plural of tsela lends more weight to the traditional idea that this is a rib bone, and not the baculum.

Secondly, I believe the authors are mistaken when they claim the rib lacks “any intrinsic generative capacity” and “[a] rib has no particular potency nor is it associated mythologically or symbolically with any human generative act.” The major problem here is they are discounting Genesis 2 as possibly the first instance of this, but thankfully we do have evidence from Sumerian culture which links the rib with generation. In Enki and Ninhursag (a Sumerian text which I’m working with at the moment), the god Enki becomes ill, and the mother goddess Ninhursag cures parts of his body by giving birth to gods who can help his ailments. One of these is Ninti,

[Ninhursag said]: “My brother, which part of you hurts?”

“My rib hurts me.”

She [Ninhursag] gave birth to Ninti out of it (lines 268-69).

This text works based on the pun between the goddess Ninti and the rib (in Sumerian, ti). The goddess’ name literally means “Lady of the Rib,” and through her Enki’s rib pain, presumably, departs. Interestingly, the Sumerian word for “to make live” is also ti, and so Ninti may also mean “The Lady who makes live.” The pun between life and ribs is thus preserved in Sumerian mythology. In Genesis 2, Eve is both made from a rib and called the “mother of all living” (Gen. 3:20), and this account is likely a preservation of this mythic association.

My last criticism of the theory is its reliance on a medical and demythologising paradigm not operational when the biblical authors wrote their texts. It’s in a similar vein to those who would explain the Levitical prohibition on pork by recourse to the idea that its purpose was to stop disease spreading in the arid Israelite climate. Such approaches ignore larger mythic tropes operational at the time these texts were written, or at least orally transmitted. Just as you can’t use Genesis 1 to explain astrophysics, it would be inappropriate to use a 21st century biological framework to categorically explain parts of quite complex mythologies.

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See further, http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/researchers-in-museums/2012/11/26/how-did-man-lose-his-penis-bone/

Non-Existent Temple Prostitutes in 2 Kings 23:7

“And he [King Josiah] brake down the houses of the sodomites [Heb. haqqĕdēšīm], that [were] by the house of the LORD, where the women wove hangings for the grove [Heb. אשרה, lit. Asherah]” (2 Kings 23:7, KJV).

Yesterday I posted a Twitter update regarding the translation of the term haqqĕdēšīm in 2 Kings 23:7. In the King James Version the term is translated “sodomites,” and in the NRSV it’s rendered “male temple prostitutes.”

The problem with these translations is that the radicals qdš denote holiness, and moreover the context of 2 Kings 23:4-7 does not, in my opinion, legitimate a translation of “male temple prostitutes.” A more fitting translation would be “holy ones,” or as Adam Couturier suggested, “consecrated ones.”

Jim West took issue with my Tweet, and replied, “Words don’t have meaning. They have usage. Meaning is determined by context [and] the context is male prostitution. It’s best to know the facts of the context before one isolates a word and then critiques the translators.”

There is nothing, bar the context being male prostitution, that I disagree with in Jim’s Tweet. It is simply the case that the term haqqĕdēšīm is not used in the context suggested. The context we have from 2 Kings 22-23 is Hilkiah’s discovery of the Book of the Law in the Temple (2 Kgs. 22:8), and King Josiah’s subsequent removal of all those things apparently condemned by the book Hilkiah discovered. He commands the accoutrements of Baal, Asherah, and the ṣĕbāʾ haššāmāyim (“heavenly host”) to be taken away, he puts away the (foreign?) priests, and he removes Asherah’s cult statue from the Temple and burns it in the Kidron valley (2 Kgs. 23:4-6).

The verse in question, verse 7, follows on from Josiah’s destruction of anything considered illicit to Yahweh. We are told he destroys the “houses of haqqĕdēšīm” in/by the Temple, where “the women wove clothes for Asherah.” Given that from vv. 5-20 we have the constant condemnation or mention of altars and various classes of priests (vv. 5, 8, 9, 12, 15, 19, 20), it is likely that v. 7 too falls within this framework, i.e. it concerns cult functionaries and objects. Since haqqĕdēšīm are located where the women weave for Asherah, it is probable, in my opinion, that haqqĕdēšīm are male priests consecrated to Asherah, where v. 7 expands the subject material of v. 6 (“And Josiah removed Asherah from Yahweh’s Temple…”). It is interesting to note that the root qdš is used in one of Asherah’s epithets, Qudshu (“Holy One”), and this arguably strengthens the association between haqqĕdēšīm and the goddess.

At Ugarit, we find the term qdš also used, and the majority of scholars do not link the role of the qdš with cultic prostitution. In KTU 1.112.21 the qdš is portrayed as a cultic singer and diviner, and in a fair number of other Ugaritic texts the qdšm are paralleled with the khnm (“priests,” cf. Hebrew כהנים).

In conclusion, I believe the above goes some way to dispel the idea that Asherah’s priests are cultic prostitutes in this text. The rhetoric which seeks to couple haqqĕdēšīm with sexual impropriety belongs to the same outdated tradition which holds those naughty Canaanites were all orgy-loving, baby-sacrificing pagans.

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Sources:

Essays on Ancient Anatolia and Syria in the Second and Third Millenium B.C. (ed. HIH Prince Takahito Mikasa).

Women in Ugarit and Israel: Their Social & Religious Position in the Context of the Ancient Near East (H. J. Marsman).

The Religions of Ancient Israel: A Synthesis of Parallactic Approaches (Z. Zevit).