Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (7 page)

The Assyrians shared the Babylonians’ indulgent attitudes, but only up to a point. A man who spread false rumors that another man allowed himself to be regularly penetrated was subject to being whipped, fined, and having his hair cut off. Such punishments were mild by Assyrian standards, and they did not mean gay sex was illegal; but they do indicate that being considered as available for the pleasure of other men was bad for a man’s reputation. Far worse was the rape of a man by another of his own class. For that, the aggressor was punished by rape, followed by castration. Yet we still cannot say with certainty that these laws signaled a general retreat from thousands of years of legal indifference to homosexual relations. The law, after all, only prohibited rape between men of the same class. A master’s forced penetration of his male slave was perfectly legal, as were relations with male prostitutes and consenting male acquaintances. Taken together, however, they probably contributed to a mind-set that viewed same-gender sex as being somewhat inferior to heterosexual relations. The Hebrews would carry this idea to extreme lengths, as they did with their rules forbidding every form of sex that wasn’t intended to produce legitimate children.
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SIN: THE GIFT OF THE HEBREWS

From about 1047 to 597 BC, a collection of contentious Hebrew tribes had held unsteady control over coastal land in Palestine, where they lived by their own religious law. The early Jews developed their legal system with a view to surviving in a region filled with other ethnic tribes, with whom they were at war; but the true accomplishment of their laws was to differentiate the Hebrews by imposing the stamp of “Jewishness” on just about everything they did. Integral to that sensibility was an intense preoccupation with restricting sexual activity. The Jews meant to make their entire lives holy, whether in their business dealings, their food customs, or their methods for having sex. To achieve this, they developed a sprawling range of rules and regulations. The Hebrew kingdoms were short-lived, and, compared to the colossal ancient empires of Persia and the Mediterranean, insignificant. Had Judaism not spawned Christianity and then Islam, Hebrew law would have remained a marginal development in Western history. Like the laws of the Babylonians and the ancient Egyptians, the Hebrew Bible would have been chiefly of interest to later academics. Instead, the moral strictures of the ancient Jews, held together with the molasses of shame and the terror of God’s punishment, have been more influential on Western sexual attitudes than any other collection of ideas.

The body of Jewish law is immense, so broad that it is virtually unknowable to any individual. I shall concentrate here mostly on the rules that were supposedly dictated, word for word, to Moses by God—in particular the book of Leviticus, where most of Judaism’s most significant rules concerning sex are to be found. Maddening in its repetitious hodgepodge of demands, threats, and curses, Leviticus is one of the foundations of Hebrew life, and, along with the rest of the Torah, is meant to be an indispensable guidebook to a godly existence. Nothing before or since has so effectively equated the body, the state, and the collective moral soul.

Jewish law places no distance between flesh and spirit. The body, considered an extension of God, was to be harnessed in building a holy nation. “You shall sanctify yourself and be holy, for I am holy,” commands God, and in Leviticus he instructs the children of Israel how to do this. To follow God’s commandments was to live, to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28); to ignore them was, in extreme cases, to anger God to the point where he would “vomit out” the Jews from the land they held so tenuously. Every passing thought had powerful social and religious significance, and everything a Hebrew did with his or her body, more so. Sex and reproduction were thus at the core of Hebrew lives and law.

The scriptures spell out in detail what may go in and out of the body, particularly via the mouth and genitals. Many foods are forbidden, as God’s decree holds that they cause contamination. A multitude of bodily fluids such as menstrual blood and semen are also regarded as polluting, and must be carefully channeled lest they infect the community. Sexual intercourse was necessary to fulfill the commandment to multiply, but it took very little to transform the sex act from one of blessed procreation into a sin that put the entire nation at risk. While sex was essential to marriage, it was also a political act: Having sex (or rejecting it) according to Mosaic law was both a declaration of faith and a repudiation of the Hebrews’ hostile neighbors.

Before God spelled out the multiple sexual prohibitions in Leviticus, he issued a commandment
not
to “do [have sex] as they do in Egypt, where you used to live,” and also “not [to] do as they do in the land of Canaan, where I am bringing you. Do not follow their practices.” There were many such “practices” to reject, including incest and bestiality (both were prevalent in Egypt), which became death-penalty crimes, and the temple prostitution common in Canaan and Babylon. To further distinguish the Hebrews from the cultures around them, Leviticus also forbade adultery by men as well as women. Violating any of these prohibitions thus not only made one immoral in the eyes of God, but also subverted everyone else’s safety.
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CIRCUMCISION AND FLUID CONTROL

One practice the Jews
did
adopt from their neighbors was male circumcision; the Egyptians had already been snipping off the foreskins of their boys and male adolescents since the third millennium BC, long before the Hebrews began to do so. The ritual, performed by Egyptian “circumcision priests,” was done on as many as 120 males at a time. Although, in Genesis 17:9–11, Abraham receives a divine revelation that male circumcision is to mark a “covenant” between God and his followers, the practice is said to have become institutionalized only when the Hebrews fled Egypt—presumably reinforced by the Egyptian convention. For good measure, the Hebrews also circumcised their slaves, as well as all slaves bought with their money. To be uncircumcised was to be unclean. The practice of circumcision later spread throughout the Near East and became common among Muslims (although it is not required by Islamic law).

The surgical modification of a boy’s reproductive equipment is a strong statement of faith, but there remains the question of whether or not it was also meant to affect his later erotic experiences. The medieval Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides argued that circumcision decreases sexual desire, which he thought was a good thing. He was not alone: In the nineteenth century, circumcision was one of the “cures” used to reduce the urge to masturbate. Some modern researchers agree that the procedure diminishes sensation, which they refer to as “erotic harm.” In many countries where circumcision is common, notes one authority, “women must often become accustomed to performing fellatio (the so-called ‘Berber wake-up call’) on men to spur their sexual response.”

The thirteenth-century Jewish sage Isaac Ben Yedaya argued, by contrast, that circumcision
increases
male erotic sensation to the point of sparking premature ejaculation:

He will find himself performing his task quickly, emitting his seed as soon as he inserts the crown. If he lies with her once, he sleeps satisfied, and will not know her again for another seven days . . . As soon as he begins intercourse with her, he immediately comes to a climax. She has no pleasure from him when she lies down or when she arises . . . [S]he remains in a state of desire for her husband, ashamed and confounded.

To Ben Yedaya, this was preferable, as uncircumcised men give women too much pleasure, which in turn invites a host of different problems:

She too will court the man who is uncircumcised in the flesh and lie against his breast with great passion, for he thrusts inside her a long time because of his foreskin, which is a barrier against ejaculation in intercourse. Thus she feels pleasure and reaches an orgasm first. When an uncircumcised man sleeps with her and then resolves to return to his home, she brazenly grasps him, holding on to his genitals, and says, “Come back, make love to me.” This is because of the pleasure that she finds in intercourse with him, from the sinews of his testicles—sinews of iron—and from his ejaculation—that of a horse—which he shoots like an arrow into her womb.

Whatever its long-term erotic effects, circumcision was rejected by the Greeks and Romans, who found the practice repulsive and barbaric. The Greeks viewed penile foreskins as emblems of virtue and strength; altering nature’s design was nothing more than the odd fetish of oddball religious cults. The Greek king Antiochus IV Epiphanes (175–164 BC) outlawed circumcision altogether, as did later Roman edicts punishing circumcision with death. Some Jews, wishing to escape punishment and integrate themselves into pagan cultures, mutilated themselves trying to restore their foreskins—but such measures are rare in the record.
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Being a Jewish male has always meant, first and foremost, being circumcised. Unless their foreskins were removed, Jewish males were considered impure. Circumcision was only the first step in a sanctified life, however;
staying
pure before God took constant effort, as impurity hovered around all sexual activity. When a husband and wife had sex, for example, the transmission of semen made them both unsuitable for contact with anyone else. Until they were cleansed, everything they touched was contaminated. Even an involuntary discharge of semen, such as sometimes accompanies a man’s erotic dreams, was an unhygienic catastrophe. The bed in which the dream took place was now defiled, the bedclothes unusable until scrubbed, and any clay pots touched by the man were considered so unclean they had to be smashed to bits. This process would continue for a week, after which the hapless wet dreamer was compelled to seek out a priest to help him make a sacrifice of doves or pigeons and beseech God’s forgiveness. Menstrual blood was no less radioactive: Any contact with it required intense cleansing efforts and strict separation of the offending woman from the community until the taint was washed away.

When the body’s fluids were misused through forbidden sex, the risk was multiplied drastically. An individual’s defilement, if bad enough, tempted God to destroy the Jewish nation in its entirety. God makes his position quite clear:

Do not defile yourselves [sexually], because this is how the nations that I am going to drive out before you became defiled. Even the land was defiled; so I punished it for its sin, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. But you must keep my decrees and my laws. The native-born and the aliens living among you must not do any of these detestable things, for all these things were done by the people who lived in the land before you, and the land became defiled. And if you defile the land, it will vomit you out as it vomited out the nations that were before you.

In other words, “Follow my commandments and you will live. Ignore them and I will throw you off the land and will kill all of you.”

If sex between a man and a menstruating woman polluted them both, the mixture of fluids between humans and animals was far worse: Both the human offender and the animal were to be killed.
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Incest was no different, as it represented an intermingling among family that would then infect everyone. In its most intimate forms, such as copulation between a mother and son, the law demanded that both parties be killed.

Given the above, one Bible story is particularly ironic, telling of a man who paid a terrible price for refusing to engage in intrafamily sex. According to Genesis, following the death of a man named Er, God commanded Er’s brother Onan to impregnate the deceased’s wife. Onan obeyed to the point of going to bed with the widow several times, but each time he “spilled his semen on the ground” rather than ejaculate inside her. God was not amused, and struck Onan dead. In the context of ancient life, God’s demand was not unusual. When a husband died without issue, it was common in many societies for his brother to take the widow as a wife and try his best to give her children. Onan’s sin was rebellion against this custom (called levirate marriage) via coitus interruptus.

As the practice of levirate marriage diminished over the years, the story of Onan should have faded from interest as well. But it found new life when Christian theologians seized it to emphasize that any form of semen wastage was forbidden, whether accomplished by masturbation, unfinished copulation, or otherwise. The masturbation angle resonated more than the others, to the point where “Onanism” came to denote self-abuse. In the eighteenth century, the Swiss doctor Samuel-Auguste Tissot named his hugely popular antimasturbation diatribe
L’Onanisme
, after the man who refused to complete the sex act with his sister-in-law.

The Jews also tightened regional prohibitions against adultery, throwing it in the gallery of crimes so abominable they put all Hebrews at risk of destruction. Other Near Eastern laws let the cuckolded husband punish his wife and her paramour—which was logical, given that it was the husband who was “injured” by the wife’s infidelity. Jewish law saw the crime differently. A wife’s straying from her husband was condemned as treason against the entire community, which demanded public involvement and communal retribution. For everyone’s benefit,
both
male and female adulterers were supposed to be publicly strangled. The law was no less strict when sex took place between a man and a girl who was engaged to be married. The pair would be stripped and placed on public ground to suffer large stones dropped on their bodies until they died.
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