Something Interesting
Until recently I wasn’t aware that there was a person in the Bible named Reuben. He was the first son of Jacob, who in turn was the son of Isaac and grandson of Abraham. If your memory of Sunday School is a little foggy, these are essentially the first three generations of the Jewish people. According to the Bible, Jacob was married to two sisters, Leah and Rachel, each of whom also provided Jacob with a concubine, Zilpah and Bilhah respectively.
Reuben’s claim to fame was that he had sex with Bilhah. Today, we would view this as Reuben having sex with his step-mom; Jacob viewed it as Reuben having sex with one of his baby-factories. Either way, the result was that it caused Reuben to lose his birthright as the first-born son of Jacob.
The reason I became aware of this story is that in the telling of Reuben’s disinheritance, the original Hebrew text includes the word “mishkab” (מִשְׁכְּבֵ֣י) which translates into either the act of lying down, or a bed. This word only appears in the Bible in two other places, in Leviticus 18 and 20, when Moses is issuing sexual purity laws, specifically the law against “lying with a man as with a woman.” Which has been interpreted for millennia as the forbidding of gay sex.
However, contemporary scholars have questioned whether that interpretation is accurate since the original Hebrew text does not include a word for “as,” and that the correct phrasing would therefore be “lying with a male lying woman.” Accordingly, this interpretation implies that the recipient of the sex is a male serving as a “lying woman.” Some scholars believe that in this context, the verse is a rule against pederasty, the act of an older man having sex with a minor boy.
Which also adds an alternative, and arguably more correct meaning to the Reuben story. Instead of saying Reuben “went up to [his] father’s bed,” you can more logically read that Reuben “had sex with [his] father’s lying woman.”
Supporting this conclusion is that “mishkab” doesn’t appear anywhere else in the Bible, even in Genesis 19, during the telling the story of Lot. You may recall that Lot was a resident of Sodom who welcomed two male strangers into his home, only to have all of the men in town show up at his door demanding that they be allowed to have sex with the two strangers. Lot refused and offered the mob his two virgin daughters instead. As all good fathers would do. Despite the name of Sodom living on in connection with gay sex, the point of the story of Lot is not that gay sex is bad, but that it’s bad to rape strangers when then they visit your town.
Something I Worked On
I’m currently wrapping up a short story I’ve titled “Ophelia.” It’s about a woman who has broken up with her crazy boyfriend, but finding that he still influences her attempts to have a peaceful life without him. It’s posted on my Patreon.
Something Beautiful
For some reason, I’ve always found Edouard Manet’s painting “Olympia” to be particularly beautiful. I think I appreciate the frontal nature of it, that the woman is placed so directly on display for the viewer. My understanding of art history is that this painting was controversial at the time for this reason, because it was displaying a nude woman in the context of sexual desire, not as an object of idealized beauty.
When I travelled to Paris several years ago, I had the opportunity to see Olympia in person, at the Musée d’Orsay. The museum is essentially a large, high ceiling room, with partial walls added to create little naves along the central path. Olympia was in one of these naves and I got to step into that space and view the painting without anybody else.
Here’s a drawing I did a few years ago that was an obvious interpretation of Olympia.
A Final Thought
One of our dogs is now 14 years old and must be carried down the stairs and escorted outside. If you don’t stay with her in the backyard, she whimpers and barks, and causes a scene. This has caused me to spend at least half an hour each morning outside, watching her do her business. But while it’s an inconvenience to have my schedule dictated by a dog, I do enjoy watching her appreciate the morning sun and how she turns her nose up into the air to smell the morning news.