Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage. Matthew Levering
with a scab the heads of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts” (Is 3:16–17).
•“Lift up your eyes and see those who come from the north. Where is the flock that was given you, your beautiful flock? What will you say when they set as head over you those whom you yourself have taught to be friends to you? Will not pangs take hold of you, like those of a woman in travail? And if you say in your heart, ‘Why have these things come upon me?’ it is for the greatness of your iniquity that your skirts are lifted up and you suffer violence” (Jer 13:20–22).
•“Thus says the Lord God, Because your shame was laid bare and your nakedness uncovered in your harlotries with your lovers, and because of all your idols, and because of the blood of your children that you gave to them, therefore, behold, I will gather all your lovers, with whom you took pleasure, all those you loved and all those you loathed; I will gather them against you from every side, and will uncover your nakedness to them, that they may see all your nakedness. And I will judge you as women who break wedlock and shed blood are judged, and bring upon you the blood of wrath and jealousy. And I will give you into the hand of your lovers, and they shall throw down your vaulted chamber and break down your lofty places; they shall strip you of your clothes and take your fair jewels, and leave you naked and bare. . . . Because you have not remembered the days of your youth, but have enraged me with all these things; therefore, behold, I will requite your deeds upon your head, says the Lord God” (Ezek 16:36–39, 43).
•“Plead with your mother, plead—for she is not my wife, and I am not her husband—that she put away her harlotry from her face, and her adultery from between her breasts; lest I strip her naked and make her as in the day she was born, and make her like a wilderness, and set her like a parched land, and slay her with thirst” (Hos 2:2–3).
•“Therefore I will take back my grain in its time, and my wine in its season; and I will take away my wool and my flax, which were to cover her nakedness. Now I will uncover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers, and no one shall rescue her out of my hand. And I will put an end to all her mirth, her feasts, her new moons, her sabbaths, and all her appointed feasts. And I will lay waste her vines and her fig trees, of which she said, ‘These are my hire, which my lovers have given me.’ I will make them a forest, and the beasts of the field shall devour them. And I will punish her for the feast days of the Baals, when she burned incense to them and decked herself with her ring and jewelry, and went after her lovers, and forgot me, says the Lord” (Hos 2:9–13).
•“Behold, I am against you [Nineveh], says the Lord of hosts, and will lift up your skirts over your face; and I will let nations look on your nakedness and kingdoms on your shame. I will throw filth at you and treat you with contempt, and make you a gazingstock” (Nahum 3:5–6).
•“Come down and sit in the dust, O virgin daughter of Babylon; sit on the ground without a throne, O daughter of the Chaldeans! For you shall no more be called tender and delicate. Take the millstones and grind meal, put off your veil, strip off your robe, uncover your legs, pass through the rivers. Your nakedness shall be uncovered, and your shame shall be seen. I will take vengeance, and I will spare no man” (Isa 47:1–3).
With regard especially to Nahum 3 and Isaiah 47, Gerlinde Baumann argues that it is a simple matter: “YHWH appears as the rapist.”145 Drawing on the work of Majella Franzmann, Baumann adds that although “[t]he image of YHWH as rapist can be explained from the context in which the texts originated,” nonetheless “[t]his kind of male God-as-rapist image has been handed down for thousands of years without being subjected to any kind of fundamental critique.”146
Is this claim true? I note that in Jerome’s commentary on Nahum 3:5–6, Jerome first emphasizes that Nahum 3 and Ezekiel 16 are using a “metaphor of an adulterous woman” that is not meant to be taken literally.147 Specifically with respect to Nahum 3:5, where the Lord appears to be describing himself in an act of rape, Jerome hastens to make clear that one would be profoundly misinterpreting the passage if one interpreted it along such lines. On the contrary, says Jerome, in Nahum 3:5 the Lord intends to communicate the following: “although you do not deserve it, I will make you see my virtues, precepts, and words, which you have hidden behind your back. For I commanded that my words should always be moving before your eyes, and should be bound and hanging down.”148 Far from refusing to subject “to any kind of fundamental critique” the “male God-as-rapist image” found in Nahum 3:5–6, Jerome insists sharply that God must not be thought of as a male rapist. For Jerome, the real meaning is that God, as “the true doctor [who] comes from heaven” (namely Christ), will show Nineveh his “virtues, precepts, and words.”149 It may seem that such an interpretation is quite a stretch, but this is precisely the point: Jerome, subjecting the seeming “God-as-rapist image” to a “fundamental critique,” insists upon reading it in an allegorical sense.150
Likewise, in his reading of Ezekiel 16, Jerome proposes that the fornicating “Jerusalem” stands for all of us who pass from one sin to the next without repentance. Tropologically, the “brazen harlot” of Ezekiel 16:30 is none other than “every Christian soul that has abandoned the worship of God, indulged in vices and excess, and having pursued a worldly life, has not done well even in that respect, but has both lost the wealth of religion and has not received the riches of the world.”151 Interpreting Ezekiel 16:38–40, where God promises to gather Jerusalem’s “lovers” and allow them to see her naked, strip her bare, and destroy her by stoning and the sword, Jerome first postulates that the literal sense must not be understood as signifying a real woman, nor can the metaphor be limited to adultery. Rather, this is a “metaphor of an adulterous and homicidal woman, who not only fornicated against her own husband, but also killed her children.”152 The metaphor has in view the Babylonian exile, as well as the future destruction of the (second) Temple. In the metaphor, says Jerome, the killing of children stands for rejecting “good thoughts” given by God and instead choosing to “[turn] away unto evil works.”153 Moreover, lest we get the wrong idea even about this metaphor, Jerome develops a tropological reading which makes clear that Ezekiel 16 is not about women but rather is about “every soul” who has received a gift from God but who chooses instead to worship “demons and contrary powers.”154 Jerome insists upon not attributing to God any violating action toward any woman.
Along similar lines, Mark Sheridan has observed that John Chrysostom is constantly concerned that readers of the Old Testament will read literalistically and assume that the portrayals of God’s anger, threats, and abusive actions toward men and women are meant to describe the character of God or what is permissible for God.155 Chrysostom fears that believers will imagine that God is bodily, that God commits (or desires to commit) acts of brutality, and/or that God has human passions such as anger. According to Chrysostom, God only allows vivid and potentially deeply misleading metaphors to be used about himself in Scripture because God wants to get through to dull readers and to alert them to seek for a spiritual meaning. It is this deeper spiritual meaning, and no other, that must be gleaned from metaphors that otherwise would demean God.
For Baumann, the difficulty is not answered by these positions, since Baumann’s concern is why God permitted abusive metaphors to be used in Scripture even if they were always meant to signify allegorically.156 In Hosea, she finds that “a parallel is drawn between land and ‘woman/wife’ in order to denounce the ‘whorish’ behavior of both. Divine punishment of ‘woman’ Israel follows, stated in images of sexual violence, but also in metaphors applying to the land and its fertility.”157 Jeremiah 13:22 is likewise impossible for her to accept, given that she thinks that the meaning that readers will receive is “unmistakable,” namely that YHWH “acts against Jerusalem in the role of a perpetrator of sexual violence.”158 As Angela Bauer says, “The image of God the rapist haunts theology and biblical interpretation.”159
Along similarly critical lines, John Barton remarks that “biblical texts do . . . portray God as having a dark side.”160 In his view, the prophetic literature depicts a two-faced God. He warns, “Commentators have always been tempted to fudge the issue of just how unjust the God of the prophets is when evaluated in human terms—and not simply in our terms . . . but in the moral terms the prophets themselves apply to human conduct.