Wednesday, February 07, 2007

It says WHAT??!?!

I know that the Bible is full of less-than pleasant things: plagues, wars, death, and even sex. That makes it a very compelling narrative, even disregarding the religious significance many people attach to it. That's why I love Slate's Blogging the Bible series, because I'm too lazy to read the actual Bible. But today I discovered something about the Bible that genuinely shocked me! It's in the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel, Chapter 23. During an extended metaphor likening Samaria and Jerusalem to exceedingly whorish sisters, God rips off these lines:

Men "fondled her virgin bosom and poured out their lust upon her"; "[men] whose members were like those of donkeys, and whose emission was like that of stallions."

Here's a less explicit translation:

8 Neither left she her whoredoms brought from Egypt: for in her youth they lay with her, and they bruised the breasts of her virginity, and poured their whoredom upon her.

20 For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses.

Wow! Ezekiel was one nasty mofo, who probably had some insecurity issues with both the size of his member and the volume of his splooge. Sure, it's metaphorical, but a metaphor is only as effective as the relative familiarity of what you're comparing to. To choose donkey dongs and super streams of horse jism as the ultimate tools of defiling women tells something about the author, in my book, and probably ancient Jewish society as a whole. Also, what does it say that the two women apparently liked it?

I never expected to read anything like THAT in the Bible.