Requiring what I had snippets on n the other thread.
God’s first sexual encounter occurs long before the birth of the Nephilim. In the Garden of Eden, food from the sacred tree might have been off the menu, but sating sexual appetites was divinely ordained. God’s pairing of Adam and Eve seemingly comes to fruition when Eve bears Cain–the first human child. But her emphatic declaration at the birth of her son credits God, not Adam, with paternity: ‘I have procreated a man with Yahweh!’[ 10]
This more literal translation of the Hebrew is rarely seen. Most renderings of this verse default to a theologically fudged interpretation, so that Eve is merely presented as claiming that Yahweh has ‘helped’ her to ‘acquire a man’, as any good fertility god might. But the very language of this Hebrew text signals a bodily dynamic well beyond this, for the woman’s words are pointedly precise: she is claiming that Yahweh has fathered her first child. There is nothing virginal about this birth. Eve’s boast is indicative of a female sexual agency wholly unlike the sanitized passivity of her later biblical antitype, the ‘Virgin’ Mary. Her words reveal she is God’s collaborative partner in the creation of new human life. But this proactive role also points to a long-lost mythic backstory to Eve’s character. Although in her biblical form she is a human woman, her choice of vocabulary is the language of goddesses: in asserting that she has ‘procreated’ a man, she uses a specialized, technical term for divine reproduction also used of goddesses in the myths from Ugarit.[ 11]
Indeed, like the Ugaritic goddess Athirat, Eve is called ‘Mother of all Living’, and even her name (hawwah in Hebrew) likely means ‘life giver’ or ‘living one’, evoking an epithet of Athirat in her glorious title ‘the Lady, the Living One, the Goddess’.[ 12] These features of Eve’s characterization in Genesis suggest that, before her biblical career, she was more akin to a life-bearing goddess appropriately located in the heavenly Garden of Eden–and hence a most suitable sexual partner for a male deity. In the Bible, however, God’s most significant and sexualized relationship is not with a goddess or a goddess-like figure, but with his other wife, Israel. The personification of a city, territory, nation or social group as a woman is well attested in (often masculinist, patriarchal) cultures across the globe, but in the biblical texts, the female personification of Israel plays a sustained and crucial role in articulating the intense and exclusive relationship between God and his worshippers. It is a relationship so intimate that his love for them is frequently expressed in the language of sexual desire. And yet, in some books of the Hebrew Bible, the erotic tone of this imagery not only moves from the emotional to the physical, but takes on a much darker hue, casting God as a powerful sexual predator, and Israel as a coquettish young girl. The book of Hosea offers a vivid example. Here, Israel is a capricious teenager whose sexual allure so intoxicates God, he falls to scheming obsessively and possessively to make her his wife. ‘I will now seduce her’, he says of Israel; ‘I will take her walking into the wilderness and speak to her heart… and there she will cry out’.[ 13] These words betray more than the romantic fantasy of a love-struck deity. God’s language here marks a shift from passion to threat: in claiming he will ‘seduce’ her, he uses a Hebrew expression more usually employed in the Bible to describe the rape of captive women.
And in describing Israel’s vocal response, he uses a term that can convey both the noise of sexual gratification and religious joy. God’s dangerous sense of sexual entitlement skews his planned attack on the girl into the distorted conviction that she will enjoy her rape–and scream in orgasmic ecstasy.[ 14] This image of sexual violation is unsettling enough. But nowhere in the Bible is the portrayal of God’s sex life more disturbing than in two stories in the book of Ezekiel. Like other biblical narrators, Ezekiel reasons that the military defeat and imperial subjugation that befell Yahweh’s people in the sixth century BCE was a divine punishment for worshipping other gods. Here, too, Israel is cast as God’s wife, but her whoring after foreign deities provokes her husband’s fury and punishment. According to Ezekiel, her wanton behaviour in marriage is the culmination of a long history of social and sexual deviancy. Their relationship begins in the wilderness, where God finds an abandoned baby girl, her umbilical cord still attached, deliberately cast away from the rest of humanity: ‘You were abhorred on the day of your birth’, scorns God, as he reminds her that she had been neither washed of birth blood, nor rubbed with a protective salt scrub and swaddled.[ 15] And yet God acknowledges her, commanding her to live and grow. Only when she has obediently matured to puberty does he notice her again. Reminiscing lasciviously about this subsequent encounter, God comments: ‘... your breasts were formed, your [pubic] hair had grown; you were naked and bare! I passed by you and looked at you: you were at the age for lovemaking. I spread the corner of my cloak over you, and covered your nakedness; I pledged myself to you and entered into a covenant with you… You became mine.’[ 16]
The voyeuristic tone to his words is not lost in this English translation, which barely manages to soften the graphic sexual nature of his actions: God’s gaze is upon the girl’s exposed sexual organs, moving him to cover her genitals (‘ nakedness’) with his own–his spreading cloak politely functioning here as an image of his mounting her, much as in the book of Ruth, in which the eponymous heroine urges a sleepy Boaz to have sex with her by spreading the corner of his cloak over her.[ 17] The sexual euphemisms continue, for it is by penetrating the girl’s body that God ‘enters into’ a binding covenant with her–an unequal power relationship in which the forging of the deity’s exclusive and proprietary claim to Israel is presented as the sexual consummation of a man’s possession of a bride: ‘you became mine’.[ 18] Jewish and Christian interpreters have tended to soften and sanitize this encounter–either by reductive means, so that the episode is ‘merely’ a metaphor or allegory depicting intense religious intimacy, or by fantasizing that romantic notions of a committed, heteronormative love find their archetype in God, so that he is the paradigmatic devoted husband. But this is wishful thinking–and it will not do. Ezekiel’s story is reflective of a patriarchal, masculinist culture, in which girls and women tended to be valued and defined in terms of their bodily configurations with men: as daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, or sex-workers.
The biblical God cannot and should not be let off the hook. Here, he is a predatory alpha male, whose sexual entitlement entirely shapes the identity and fate of this displaced and vulnerable young girl. Indeed, it is only after sex that God formally rehabilitates his young bride by means of actions reminiscent of the rituals denied her at birth: he bathes her, washing away the dried blood of birth and the wet blood of puberty, and then rubs her not with salt, but with sacred oil. Her objectification continues as he dresses her in rich fabrics and puts soft leather sandals on her feet; he decorates her with earrings, a nose ring, bangles, a necklace and crown, so that she looks like a statue of a goddess in a temple. He gives her the ritual foods commonly offered to deities–choice flour, honey and fragrant oil–and transfers her from the wilderness to civilization, where she is rapturously celebrated for the beauty God has bestowed upon her. And here she is fixed: an unspeaking, passive ornament of her husband’s hegemonic, sexualized masculinity.
I’m glad to hear you’re enjoying it. It only gets better. I hope to get back and provide some other pieces and thoughts. I’m excited though. Glad it is already working to inspire you.