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By Brody Levesque (Bethesda, Maryland) OCT 31 | In a new book released back on the first day of this month, preeminent biblical scholar & popular Professor of Religious Studies at Stonehill College, Michael Coogan, has written an unbiased appraisal of what the Bible says about premarital sex, homosexuality, and even polygamy.
In an interview with TIME magazine writer Alexandra Silver published today, Coogan talks about some of his findings and some of the misconceptions modern day religious leaders, and even scholars have about topics that are lightening rod issues in the so-called cultural war in the United States and elsewhere.
Author Bryce Christensen notes that Coogan argues, for instance, that religious conservatives misunderstand some of the scriptural passages they wield against homosexuality. He reinterprets the Genesis account of Sodom, for instance, as a condemnation not of homosexual practices but rather of callous inhospitality toward vulnerable strangers.
Even more audaciously, Coogan turns the tables on Hebrew prophets’ denouncing the worship of female pagan deities, suggesting that such worship provided a much-needed corrective to patriarchy. In scriptural passages affirming a sexual discipline offensive to modern sensibilities, Coogan sees only a deplorable cultural bias, sustained by worshipping God as a jealous and abusive husband.
From a segment of the TIME interview:
Silver: How important is it to read the Bible in its original languages?
Coogan: It's essential for some of us to do it, if for no other reason so that translations can be made that are as accurate as possible. Often translators reflect their own views and their own biases just as much as the biblical writers do. I was interested recently in this case that the Supreme Court had in the Westboro Baptist Church. I looked at their website, and he lists all the passages that he says the Bible talks about sodomy. Well, in most of them sodomy isn't discussed at all. The term sodomy is a translator's term to translate Hebrew words that never mean sodomy in the sense of anal intercourse between males.
Silver: Were people in biblical times less prudish than we are today?
Coogan: I think in some ways they were, even though they used a lot of euphemisms. When they were thinking about their god, they thought of him in ways not that different from the way other people thought about their gods. If you could describe God as a king or a shepherd or a warrior, then you can also describe him as a husband, and doing the sorts of things that husbands do. In the Greco-Roman world in which Christianity arose, the idea that a deity would come down to earth and have sex with a mortal would have been not surprising at all.
In this book, God and Sex, Professor Coogan examines one of the most controversial aspects of the Bible- What it really says about sex, and how contemporary understanding of biblical literature is frequently misunderstood or misrepresented. In the engaging and witty voice generations of students have appreciated, he explores the language and social worlds of ancient Israel, early Judaism, and early Christianity, showing how much innuendo and euphemism is at play, and illuminating the sexuality of biblical characters, including God.
Coogan is also the author of A Brief Introduction to the Old Testament-The Hebrew Bible in Its Context (2009), The Old Testament: A Very Short Introduction (2008), and The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures (2006; 2010), and editor of The New Oxford Annotated Bible (2001; 2007; 2010).
Professor Coogan is Director of Publications for the Harvard Semitic Museum, Professor of Religious Studies at Stonehill College, and Lecturer on Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at Harvard Divinity School.
In addition to Nova’s The Bible’s Buried Secrets, Coogan has appeared on several television and radio programs, including Morning Edition (NPR), and a National Geographic program on “Lost Cities of the Bible.”
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This is very interesting and in many points perceptive and accurate. I would just like to make a few points:
1. Identifying the sin of Sodom (Genesis 19) as inhospitality is fully in accord with the understanding of the ancient Jewish sages.
2. Did the ancient Israelites worship their God as a jealous husband? I think not. But at least one prophet (Hosea) certainly metaphorizes God as a cuckolded jealous husband. That's probably what the author had in mind.
3. Were the Israelites less prudish than we are? Certainly not! (Unless the author is using the word in a sense that is unknown to me.) The very idea of nudity, for example, was anathema. (When the Old Testament speaks of stripping people of their clothes it does not mean stripping them of all their clothes; appearing in public in a shift was considered absolutely shameful.)
4. Should the bible be read and studied in its original language? Most definitely! Let's give all those good folk in Westboro lessons in Hebrew and Koine Greek.
J F R
The paradox has often been noted that the United States, founded in secularism, is now the most religiose country in Christendom, while England, with an established church headed by its constitutional monarch, is among the least. (Richard Dawkins, 2006)
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J F R wrote:
> 1. Identifying the sin of Sodom (Genesis 19) as inhospitality is fully in accord with the understanding of the ancient Jewish sages.
I was certainly taught - in a typical English "Direct Grant" school in the mid-1960's - that identifying the "Sin of Sodom" with anal intercourse was simply catachrestic: the real sin being the abuse of the conventions of hospitality.
I was similarly taught that the very few other passages in the CofE Bible that are occasionally used to prop up homophobia were based on misunderstandings and poor translations. That is pretty much the view that most of the respectable Christians of my own age in the UK seem to share ... be they Anglican, Methodist, or whatever. The exceptions (until at least quite recently - say this millenium - have been Baptists: the ministers have tended to be a lot more informed in this respect than their flocks!
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night devoid of stars." Martin Luther King
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13751
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Ok, I had to look that one up:
Catachresis
Catachresis (from Greek κατάχρησις, "abuse") is "misapplication of a word, especially in a mixed metaphor" according to the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. Another meaning is to use an existing word to denote something that has no name in the current language.[1]. Catachresis is a very common habit, and can have both positive and negative effects on language: on the one hand, it helps a language evolve and overcome poverty of expression; on the other, it can lead to miscommunications or make the language of one era incompatible with that of another. Catachresis is more a linguistic phenomenon than a figure of speech.
catachrestic |-ˈkrestik| adjective
ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: from Latin, from Greek katakhrēsis, from katakhrēsthai ‘misuse,’ from kata- ‘down’ (expressing the sense ‘wrongly’) + khrēsthai ‘use.’
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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The word was a favourite of Fowler's ("Modern English Usage", etc, which I suspect is where I picked it up from.
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night devoid of stars." Martin Luther King
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God and Sex: What the Bible Really Says 
