Biblical Views: Of Philistines and Phalluses

Home > Magazines > BAR > November/December 2008

“There is in the Hebrew Bible, in prose and in poetry, in religious admonition and in secular love songs, a healthy and unabashed outspokenness which, in a sense, constitutes one of the great glories of the Old Testament.” I quote scholar Edward Ullendorff’s 1979 article “The Bawdy Bible”1 to prepare the reader for some explicit examples of the Bible’s “unabashed outspokenness.” Blame it on Aren Maeir’s article in BAR’s May/June 2008 issue about the Philistines and their trouble with “hemorrhoids.”a The discovery at the Philistine cities of Gath (Tell es-Safi) and Ashkelon of situlae (small vial-shaped flasks) in the […]

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Footnotes

Aren M. Maeir, “Did Captured Ark Afflict Philistines with E.D.?” BAR 34:03.

Endnotes

Edward Ullendorff, “The Bawdy Bible,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 24, no. 3 (1979), pp. 425–456.

For example, Isaiah 57:8 where the NRSV demurely translates yad as “nakedness.” Isaiah 57:8 becomes positively raunchy in Hebrew: NRSV has “your desire (yad) rekindled.” In Canaanite mythology, the “hand” of the god El (from whom Biblical scholars think Yahweh evolved) is—in certain poetic contexts—clearly his penis.

See Elizabeth Bloch-Smith, “Israelite Ethnicity in Iron I: Archaeology Preserves What Is Remembered and What Is Forgotten in Israel’s History,” Journal of Biblical Literature 122, no. 3, (Autumn, 2003), pp. 401–425.