Since starting seminary I’ve had the opportunity to read through the Old Testament in ways I haven’t done since I was in youth group at a conservative evangelical church. While I think building biblical literacy is something evangelicals do very well, reading through these passages as an adult reminded me in a humorous way the ways my culture context back then shaped how I read the bible. And it all had to do with sex.
If you’ve ever read through the Old Testament, you know that it’s a pretty racy text. From rapes and seductions to concubines and harlots, it’s hard to avoid the presence of sex – often illicit sex – in the pages of scripture. That is unless you are a teenage evangelical. Amusingly, my most poignant memory of my years of bible studies of such passages in youth group is how hard the leaders tried to convince us that those sex passages actually had nothing to do with sex at all.
Like how when the most beautiful virgin in the land was selected to come lay with an elderly King David to keep him “warm” it had nothing to do with her trying to get him to respond sexually since in the Ancient Near East a King’s power was tied to his virility. We were instead told that she literally was chosen to raise his body temperature since elderly people get cold often. Or when reading how when Rehoboem tries to assert his prowess as compared to his father Solomon and says his little finger is bigger than his fathers sexual organ (1 Kings 12), we were told that the Bible would never include something so base so therefore what he was really referring to was his fathers waist or thigh.
Whenever I heard the story of the Israelite spies’ visit to Rahab, the leaders made sure we understood that the spies only visited a prostitute because it would be a good place to gather information. And we were told that Ruth getting under the covers with Boaz and laying at his “feet” had no sexual connotations whatsoever – she just wanted to get him to listen to her. Other leaders even tried to tell us that Esther’s one night with the king truly was just a beauty contest and not like what typically happens when a member of the harem spends a night with the king.
Although we were told that we had to read the Bible literally – since we believed it to be inerrant – the conservative evangelical attitude towards sex (especially in regard to teenagers) forced us to read those passages as meaning the opposite of what they truly mean. Lessons on sexual purity being the highest virtue we could strive for were drilled into us. Any sexual deviancy was condemned in very publicly humiliating ways. Given these strict views on sex, there was no way supposed biblical heroes could ever be seen as dallying in inappropriate sexual behavior. Granted, sometimes it was hard to avoid the obvious stories, but those usually were directly connected to some dire consequence (as with David and Bathsheba). As Christian teenagers our primary spiritual command was to be pure and so our study of the bible had to be just as pure – even if that meant some creative explaining away for the obvious.