The Dead Sea Scrolls have an erotic poem to the divine.
Jonathan | sex & theology · Mar 26, 2019 · Medium.com
Growing up in church, I don’t recall hearing that the Bible has an erotic poem to God. I’d surely have noticed? It’s not a secret, exactly. My pastor could’ve pulled out Patrick W. Skehan’s 1971 paper “The Acrostic Poem in Sirach 51:13–30” in The Harvard Theological Review, and read it to us aloud—with feeling?
I burned with desire for her, never turning back.
I became preoccupied with her, never weary of extolling her.
My hand opened her gate and I came to know her secrets.
For her I purified my hands; in cleanness I attained to her. (v.19–20)
The ‘hand’ that opens her ‘gate’, as in Song of Songs 5:4, is a penis. The ‘secrets’ means, literally, ‘nakedness’.
A sex scene is happening. The ‘female’ . . . is God.
We Protestants didn’t talk about the book of Sirach, maybe because the Catholics liked it? It’s in the Septuagint (LXX), the Greek translation of the ‘scriptures’ as Jesus knew them.
Jesus seems to quote or works off Sirach, including in the Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer. Can it be dismissed?
To turn to the usual text of Sirach 51:13–30, admittedly, there isn’t anything too sexy. Here is the Greek version of v.19–20:
My soul has grappled with her,
And in the performance of the law I was exacting.
I spread my hands on high,
And I thought about ignorance of her,
I directed my soul to her,
and in purification I found her. (NETS)
In the Dead Sea Scrolls, however, a version in Hebrew—the sexual version—was discovered. What to do?
T. Muraoka, the great scholar of Hebrew, notes his puzzlement in a 1979 paper, “Sir. 51, 13–30: An Erotic Hymn to Wisdom?”
“The Greek is totally innocuous and puritan in spirit, entirely free from any signs of offensive, obscene language,” he says.
Is the sexual version ‘offensive’ and ‘obscene’? A phrase like “my hand forced open her portals,” he notes, “could hardly be understood otherwise…”
I love the idea of a vagina as a portal—here to Wisdom, to mystic insight of God, and of fellow humans.
Muraoka adds even more sexual suggestion. The phase translated, in v.19d, “never weary of extolling her,” might be, he thinks: “in the moments of her exaltation [i.e. orgasm], I will not let up…”
Wisdom is orgasmic, but the spiritual seeker doesn’t stop. He wants God to remain in that heightened state, and he develops the skill to keep her there?
Spiritual insight and understanding continues to flow from their coitus.
I’d long suspected that ‘Wisdom’, the recurring aspect of God in the ‘Wisdom literature’ of the Old Testament—Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, etc.—was to be understood, in human terms, as a woman.
There were clues? In the Wisdom of Solomon, another LXX text, Solomon says: “I was charmed by her beauty and wanted her for my bride.”
Or Sirach 15:2: “She will meet him like a mother; like a young bride she will receive him . . .” (cf. 14:23–24).
‘She’ would seem to be a gendered being, a woman, even in texts that Protestants prefer to read. “Wisdom calls out in the street, she lifts her voice in the square,” goes Proverbs 8:1.
The Christian establishment, never that fond of women’s voices, or women, with typical penetrating insight realized she was just an effect of grammar, a mere happenstance that happens when men talk.
Michael Heiser, a go-to Hebrew scholar for Evangelical audiences, assures us that Wisdom is not “an actual woman or feminine entity,” as he says. “The language simply reflects the grammar.”
Strange to have overlooked Muraoka’s warning against this very position. Though a “linguistic minefield,” he says, “it should not facilely be taken for granted that Hebrew speakers of the second century B.C. in Palestine thought in these grammatical categories as we are wont to.”
Muraoka notes that Wisdom seems, in Jewish writings, to often be embodied as an unusually beautiful and sexual woman. It wouldn’t seem too strange that in Sirach 51:13–30 . . . they have sex.
Even if your pastor or priest has somehow overlooked it, many scholars discuss Sirach’s sex poem to God.
“Remarkably, an openness on sexual issues, including sexual intercourse, female nakedness, and orgasm, is found along with lines about praising God,” notes William Loader. “Eros and the sacred are not at odds.”
Muraoka had read Sirach 51:13–30 as a “secular, erotic love-song,” but Edmée Kingsmill, in The Song of Songs and the Eros of God, challenges that. In all its sexual detail, Sirach, she suggests, tells us how the Song, the great love poem of the Jewish scriptures, is to be read.
“The language of ardent love, the overwhelming sense of human eros responding to divine eros, was, it appears, an element in the teaching of the ascetics of the Judean desert,” she says.
There she, unfortunately, falls for the idea that the Jews who were the owners of the Dead Sea Scrolls were anti-sexual.
Paul Heger, in a 2013 paper, “Celibacy in Qumran: Hellenistic Fiction or Reality?” demolished that particular hoax. It had been repeated by many respected writers—Philo! Josephus! Pliny!—but the Scrolls had disproven it.
Those guys were just writing up, he suggests, how they “imagined their Greek readers would expect a venerated sect or group to behave.”
There is nothing in the Bible critical of sex in itself. He documents this fact in detail. Many said otherwise, but it was all a tissue of assumptions, and perhaps lies.
“The desire for legitimate sexual intercourse implanted by God in humans,” as Heger says, “cannot be perceived as something wrong, nor can we infer that one may not enjoy the satisfaction of its accomplishment.”
It was Annette Schellenberg’s 2018 paper “May Her Breasts Satisfy You at All Times” that really threw me for a loop.
She takes Sirach 51:13–30 as a cue to the possibility that many references—perhaps all references to Wisdom are sexual.
The “loving” of Wisdom (cf. Prov 4:6; 8:17, 21; 29:3), or “embracing” Wisdom (Prov 4:8), do seem, as she says, “erotically loaded.”
Then, elsewhere in Sirach, “loving” wisdom (4:14), dwelling in her “inmost chambers” (4:14–15), moving to “reveal/uncover” her (4:18) might be “understood sexually.”
I suddenly realized . . . the Bible is very sexual.
Spiritual currents are seen as embodied, sexual forms.
Christianity had certainly read Wisdom’s opposing figure, the malign female of Proverbs 6:20–35 & 7 (cf. Sirach 26:19, 22) out to deceive and destroy the hapless man, as a real sexual figure.
Do not lust in your heart after her beauty
or let her captivate you with her eyes. (Prov 6:25)
This is how Christianity thought of women in general? But this was one image, and the Bible had two: the Dark Lady, and Wisdom.
The two versions, the standard, ‘non-sexual’ one in Greek, and the sexual Hebrew text, I realized, could be two versions of the same idea: one for a new spiritual seeker, orienting his senses to God.
Then the Hebrew text, sexual, sweaty, illuminated. A path into the cosmic and the beautiful.
It’s not like the writers of these texts are here explaining it to you.
But the idea that Christian clerics—or scholars—know all about them is clearly untenable.
The prompt is there? Get sexy with God. As man and woman, God (being both energies) draws humans into a personal embrace.
I thought of the grim, misogynist, asexual men who developed what we call ‘Christianity’. The ones for whom Sirach 51:13–30 is ‘obscene’.
Did they know the supple, sexual female spirit the Jews knew as God? She speaks in Sirach 24:24–27, as you realize she’s the most wonderful woman you’d ever want to know.
I am the mother of fair love, and of fear, and of knowledge, and of holy hope. In me is all grace of the way and of the truth, in me is all hope of life and of virtue. Come over to me, all ye that desire me, and be filled with my fruits. For my spirit is sweet above honey, and my inheritance above honey and the honeycomb.
This language is very familiar in the New Testament. But it’s all connected? A cosmic opera that brings us to a vast embrace with the divine, and each other?— even if the traditions have labored to conceal it.
Christianity has yet to have the honor of meeting Wisdom, or entering her portal, or learning her secrets.
It’d be hot?
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