A lot of religious people either never read the Bible or stick to the stories that make great Sunday School fodder: Adam and Eve. Noah’s Arc. Jonah and the Whale. David and Goliath.
You hardly ever hear about stories like:
- That Time Lot’s Two Daughters Got Their Dad Drunk and Raped Him So They Could Get Pregnant.
- The Story of David Seducing a Married Woman, Getting Her Pregnant, Trying and Failing to Make the Husband Think It Was His Kid And Finally, Just Arranging to Have the Husband Killed to Cover Things Up.
- The Widow Who Dressed as a Prostitute to Secretly Seduce Her Father in Law Into Getting Her Pregnant After He Tried to Keep Her Chaste and Childless.
Yes, those are all real Bible stories.
- Lot’s daughters were so desperate to have children that they were willing to rape their own father.
- David took desperate actions to hide his sexual immorality with Bathsheba — it isn’t called rape, but it sure looks like a #metoo moment today. What control over her own body did she have? God punished David by letting that baby die. The whole story is David, David, David. Nobody addresses how Bathsheba felt about being jerked around.
- As for Tamar, that’s a tangled tale about a widow who had the right to be married and bear children within her deceased husband’s family, but her father-in-law schemed to keep her from her rights. The rules prohibited her from simply marrying someone else. Seducing one’s father-in-law as a way to conceive a baby is a pretty desperate act.
The Bible has some dark stuff in it.
You like horror? You’ve got plenty of war, murder, rape, sexism, misogyny, infanticide, incest, betrayal, adultery, torture and more — it is not all sweetness and light, especially not the Old Testament.
The holy book is chock-full of misogyny. Plenty of people believe it’s all literally true and — believe it or not — a guide to morality. It’s worth reading it as a way to understand why so many people use religion to justify the subjugation of women.
It’s also full of stories in which God grants people the Promised Land and many descendants to populate their land. Abraham was to have as many descendants as the dust of the Earth. (And that part of the world is dry and dusty indeed.) Ishmael was to father 12 princes and become a great nation.
The various borders are highly disputed today, but if you believe God gave your people rights to the land, you don’t give a hoot what any other authority says.
This brings us to the current war in Israel.
A friend of mine asked me to explain to her what’s going on in Israel. At first, I begged off because I’m no expert, but when she asked about Israel and Hummus, I stepped in.
“Hummus is a yummy bean dip,” I said. “I think you mean Hamas.” She’s a church-goer and I am not, but the more I tried to explain the situation, the further back I kept stepping until finally, I found myself in the middle of Genesis.
So, let’s jump right in. Whether you have a literal belief in the Bible or consider it a book of ancient stories, you have to recognize it as a major cornerstone of Western civilization — and patriarchy.
And yes, the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts go way, way, way back. (You can do a Google search about the belief that the enmity goes all the way back to Isaac and Ishmael; there are a lot of sources that talk about it, all of widely different religious and political views, so I’m not going to recommend one in particular.)
What do some ancient stories about Isaac and Ishmael in the Old Testament and the Quran have to do with what’s happening in Israel today?
A lot. You have to bear in mind two things: First, their ancestral lands were hugely important to these people, and they needed large families to hold onto them. They had to keep the lands populated and they needed many sons to care for the large flocks they depended on.
That’s why you see women in the Bible taking such extreme steps to have children.
In Biblical times, women were nothing without children.
It was their entire reason for being. So, if you were a barren woman, your life was a misery. You would do literally anything to have a child, specifically a son. Your life was meaningless otherwise.
Rachel was a woman who found herself barren, and she didn’t like it one bit. Her husband, Jacob (who would later be known as Israel after wrestling with God — just go with it) was also married to Rachel’s older sister, Leah. While Leah popped out one son after another, Rachel couldn’t conceive at all. Even though Jacob/Israel loved Rachel and didn’t love Leah, Rachel was miserable at her lack of children.
IVF and surrogate births not being an option in those days, Rachel told her husband to have sex with her maid, Bilhah, so she could have children through her. Jacob/Israel already had two wives but didn’t apparently object to being urged to also have sex with his younger wife’s maid, so soon he was having sons with Bilhah, too.
Leah, after having multiple sons, had stopped bearing and didn’t like it that her younger sister was having kids now through her maid. So she brought over her own maid, Zilpah.
“Hey, Jacob/Israel. If you’re going to give my younger sister sons through her maid, you need to give me sons through my maid, too.” (That is not an exact translation, in case you were wondering.) You could say there was some sibling rivalry going on between Leah and Rachel.
It isn’t recorded how Bilhah or Zilpah felt about these arrangements.
My guess is they were not consulted. Women were always being given to some man or other back then.
But then, it says God “remembered” Rachel and “opened her womb.” And she gave birth to Joseph. Later, she died giving birth to her second son, Benjamin.
In all, Jacob/Israel had 12 sons with his two wives and his wives’ maids. You know about the 12 tribes of Israel. Well, this is where they came from, although there’s a further complication because his oldest son, Reuben, sneaked off and had sex with Bilhah and had to be punished. So Joseph’s two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, were elevated to full tribes instead.
Got this so far? Believe me, I’m leaving out a whole lot.
I do want to include the whole mandrake tale in Genesis 30. Reuben, Leah’s oldest son, found some mandrakes in a field. Rachel asked for some of them, because mandrakes were supposed to be a cure for infertility. Leah said she’d hand over some mandrakes under one condition: Rachel had to let Leah have sex with Jacob that night in return. Rachel agreed. That night, Leah got pregnant again, so it was a good deal for her — as she saw it, anyway.
Maybe those mandrakes worked, because Rachel finally got pregnant sometime after that.
OK. Now let’s jump back two generations and talk about the grandparents of Jacob/Israel. They were Abram/Abraham and his wife Sarai/Sarah. There’s lots of name-changing in parts of the Bible.
They were old and childless, so Sarah gave her husband her Egyptian servant, Hagar, to provide a child. I don’t know if this was a common thing, or if Rachel and Leah later got the idea from their family history.
As soon as Hagar got pregnant, she lorded it over Sarah, and Sarah in return dealt harshly with her. Hagar ran off, but then an angel told her to go back, because she was going to give birth to a son named Ishmael who would be the father of a great people.
But then, surprise! Even though they were elderly and Sarah had long since gone through menopause, she gave birth to Isaac.
Now that she had a son of her own, Sarah wanted to get rid of Hagar and Ishmael.
Sarah didn’t want Ishmael to inherit along with her son. So Abraham gave Hagar and her son some bread and water and sent them off. Really, Abraham? Seems pretty harsh if you ask me.
Hagar walked away so she wouldn’t have to watch Ishmael die. Once again, an angel had to save them. He showed them a source of water, and Ishmael grew up to become the father of the Arabs.
And the Israelites and the Ishmaelites have lived unhappily ever after.
To clarify, the whole reason Abraham fathered Ishmael in the first place was because Sarah literally asked her husband to have sex with another woman to get her pregnant. And then she changed her mind and sent that woman and child away.
You know how sometimes a married man gets another woman pregnant and then all hell breaks loose and everybody takes sides? This is like that, except that this fight has been going on since, supposedly, 1800 BC.
One more relevant fact. According to Jews and Christians, God told Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, as a test of his loyalty. But Muslims believe that test involved Ishmael.
Hagar couldn’t bear to watch Ishmael die when they were banished and ran out of water. Abraham was ready to slash the throat of his son (either Isaac or Ishmael, depending on which version you believe) and set him on fire as a burnt offering, until an angel stopped him from going through with it.
We revere Abraham but most people don’t even know who Hagar was.
Go ahead and ask a few people. They will probably answer something like, “Wasn’t Sammy Hagar a really big deal in the 1980s?”
Imagine if the women of the Bible hadn’t felt pressured to have children. What if they could have happily spent their days as childless women who had careers as shepherdesses or what have you?
What if they were respected not for their ability to bear children but for their other qualities?
How different would the world be if women had always had a variety of different lives open to them? What if patriarchy had never been a thing?
Please note: I’m not a Biblical scholar or historian and I’m certainly not an authority on the Middle East. This piece is not meant to be disrespectful of any religion.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michelle Teheux is a an award-winning, senior-level communications strategist with over 20 years of experience in content management and media relations. She is the editor of Minds Without Borders. Contact at michelleteheux@gmail.com.
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