Notable instances of incest in the Hebrew Bible
are: Lot's daughters contriving to have children by him (see LOT AND HIS DAUGHTERS); Tamar contriving to
have a child by her father-in-law Judah (see JUDAH AND TAMAR); Jacob marrying Leah and Rachel, who were
sisters, and Reuben having sex with his father's wife Bilhah (see
JACOB AND LABAN'S DAUGHTERS); Abraham's
marriage to his half-sister Sarah (Gen. 20:12); and Amnon's rape of
his half-sister Tamar (see AMNON AND TAMAR). In the New Testament, Herodias, the wife of Herod Antipas (both her brother-in-law and uncle), manages to have John the Baptist beheaded for telling Herod, "It is not lawful for thee to have thy brother's wife" (Mark 6:18; see HEROD AND THE DANCE OF SALOME).
It should be noted that if Adam and Eve were
the first human beings, incest, for population growth, was a
practical necessity during the first few human generations (see
CAIN: THE FIRST HELL EVER RAISED). It
should also be noted that all of the above cited instances of
incest in the Old Testament, except for Amnon's rape of Tamar,
antedate the so-called Holiness Code in Leviticus (ch. 17-26) that
prohibits them. Even the rape may antedate the code in its written
form.
That does not mean, of course, that Amnon telling Tamar, "Come lie
with me, my sister," then forcing her to do so, is therefore to be
excused. And what about the Holiness Code's
author? Though the espousals are allegorical, Yahweh himself
violates Lev. 18:18 by marrying two women who are sisters--and
rather lewd ones at that! (See EZEKIEL: TALKING LEWD WOMEN.)
The servant dutifully journeys to the Mesopotamian town of Nahor,
and at a well runs into just the right woman, a virgin "fair to
look upon," and a cousin of Isaac's, named Rebekah. Her brother
Laban, impressed by the gold ring and bracelets that the servant
bestows on Rebekah, invites the man to the house. There the family,
on hearing the servant describe the great wealth that Isaac is to
inherit from his father Abraham, agrees to a marriage, and sends
Rebekah off to Canaan with the servant, with these parting words:
"Thou art our sister, be thou the mother of
thousands of millions, and let thy seed possess the gate of those
which hate them."
Isaac is meditating in the field when he sees the camels coming.
When Rebekah sees Isaac, she alights from her camel, and Isaac
takes her into his late mother's tent. Rebekah "became his wife,"
we are told, "and he loved her: and Isaac was comforted after his
mother's death."
Rebekah is barren, but when Isaac makes
entreaty of the Lord, she conceives. She has twins who struggle
within her womb. First out is a boy with shaggy red hair,
appropriately named Esau ("hairy"); he will be a hunter and the
favorite of Isaac. The other twin is prophetically named Jacob
("supplanter"), who at birth grabs Esau by the heel. Rebekah will
be partial to Jacob.
When a famine hits the land, Isaac and Rebekah
head toward Egypt, but the Lord stops them at the Philistine town
of Gerar. (Two problems with this interlude are: no mention of Esau
and Jacob, and the fact that Philistine towns did not exist in the
days of Isaac and Rebekah.) "Sojourn in this land," Yahweh tells
Isaac, "and I will be with thee . . . I will make thy seed to
multiply as the stars of heaven, . . . and in thy seed shall all
the nations of the earth be blessed."
Isaac and Rebekah stay in Gerar, but Isaac, fearing the men there
might kill him to take his beautiful wife, tells them that Rebekah
is his sister. But King Abimelech of Gerar (who earlier had the
same trick pulled on him by Abraham and Sarah) looks out a window
one day and sees Isaac playing around (Hebrew sahaq, KJV "sporting") with Rebekah. Called in, Isaac
admits that Rebekah is his wife. Under Abimelech's protection
thereafter, Isaac prospers in Gerar, till the locals grow so
envious that Abimelech tells him to leave.
Settling in Beersheba, Isaac and Rebekah
are crushed when their firstborn son Esau marries a Hittite woman.
This prompts Rebekah to help Jacob, through deception, obtain the
dying Isaac's blessing, and thus supplant the firstborn Esau. Jacob
will father the twelve tribes of Israel, while Esau has to settle
for founding Edom.
As for Isaac, he dies at the age of one hundred
and eighty, the only Hebrew patriarch, as Jeremiah Unterman notes,
who was monogamous and had no concubines. (Gen. 24-26, 27:1-38) (On
to JACOB AND LABAN'S DAUGHTERS)
The first sign (7:1-9) is Isaiah's offspring himself, whose name
Shearjashub means "a remnant shall return." Ahaz should understand
by this that his people will not be completely wiped out. Isaiah
then tells Ahaz, "Ask thee a sign of the Lord thy God," but Ahaz is
too weak-kneed to ask. Isaiah then angrily gives him a second sign
(7:10-17). "Behold, a young woman shall
conceive and bear a son," says Isaiah, "and you shall call his name
Immanuel." (This is later interpreted by the Gospel of Matthew--out
of context, and through mistranslation of "young woman" [Hebrew
almah] as "virgin" [Greek parthenos]--as a prophecy of
the virgin birth of Christ [see VIRGIN BIRTH: "CHILD OF THE HOLY GHOST"].) Before the child Immanuel
("God is with us") is old enough to know good from evil, Isaiah
prophesies, the land will no longer be under siege.
The Lord now commissions a third sign (8:1-4),
for which Isaiah commissions help from his wife ("the prophetess").
She conceives and bears a son. Yahweh tells Isaiah, "Call his name
Maher-shalal-hash-baz," a mouthful meaning "the spoil and prey
hasten." For before Maher-shalal-hash-baz is old enough to say
Da-da and Ma-ma ("my father, and my mother"), the wealth of
Damascus (capital of Syria) and Samaria (capital of Israel) will be
carried away by Assyria.
Isaiah later becomes a sign himself, to Egypt
and Ethiopia, by walking naked and barefoot for three years. So
shall the king of Assyria lead away Egyptian and Ethiopian
captives, "with their buttocks uncovered" (20:3-4).
Isaiah, like Hosea before him, refers to the
Israelite people collectively as Yahweh's wife (54:5), a metaphor
to be used also by Jeremiah and Ezekiel. He calls unfaithful
Jerusalem "a harlot" (1:21), and warns that the people will pay
dearly for cheating on Yahweh with their idolatry and foreign
alliances. "Tremble, ye women," says Isaiah (32:11), for "ye shall
conceive chaff, ye shall bring forth stubble" (33:11). The Lord
will uncover "the secret parts" of the "daughters of Zion" (3:17),
children will be slaughtered, and men will see "their wives
ravished" (13:16; on the troubling nature of these images, see
RAPE: "LEWDNESS AND FOLLY IN ISRAEL" and YAHWEH: "THY MAKER IS THINE HUSBAND").
Yet Isaiah also prophesies reconciliation: "For as a young man marrieth a virgin, so shall thy sons marry thee: and as the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God rejoice over thee" (62:5). And with reconciliation comes progeny: "I will bring forth a seed out of Jacob," says Yahweh
(65.9), "I will loose the loins of kings" (45:1), and "all the seed
of Israel," the "offspring of thy bowels," shall be "seed which the
Lord hath blessed" (45:25; 48:19; 61:9). (Isaiah) (On to TOBIAS AND SARAH)
This leads eventually to the Exodus: the
Israelite people are led out of Egypt by Moses. Yahweh, as if now
wondering himself how many Hebrews there are, orders Moses to do a
census, counting all the Hebrew males age twenty and older. But the
resulting number (hence "the book of Numbers") is over six hundred
thousand (Num. 1:46; 2:32; 26:51), which is unrealistically high.
(Five or six thousand adult Hebrew males would be more like it; see
the notes on Numbers ch. 1 in Metzger and Murphy.) Whatever the actual number, all the men of the
Exodus except Joshua and Caleb die during a forty-year wandering in
the wilderness. Some of them die from plagues as punishment for
orgiastic idolatry at Mount Sinai (see AARON AND THE GOLDEN CALF) and "whoredom" with the daughters of
Moab (see COZBI AND ZIMRI). When the
Israelites reach Canaan, their new leader Joshua conducts a mass
circumcision--at a place appropriately called the "hill of the
foreskins"--of the new generation of males born since the Exodus
(Josh. 5:2-9; see CIRCUMCISION: "SIGN OF THE COVENANT").
The Hebrews invade Canaan, the land promised
by Yahweh to their forefather Abraham (Gen. 12:7, 26:3), though the
incursion is less a sweeping conquest (as idealized in the book of
Joshua) than a tumultuous settling-in with the land's inhabitants
(as reflected in Judges). The Israelites are commanded in
Deuteronomy not to intermarry with the Canaanites, for "God hath
chosen thee to be a special people unto himself," and intermarriage
will lead to apostasy (7:2-8). And indeed, though Israel--becoming
a monarchy (soon divided into the kingdoms of Israel and
Judah)--gains ascendancy in the land, Canaanite religious practices
remain such a temptation to the Hebrews that Israel, "as a
backsliding heifer" (Hosea 4:16), habitually goes "a-whoring," a
favorite biblical term for idolatry (see HARLOTRY).
For her idolatrous ways, compounded by
questionable political alliances with foreigners, Israel is
portrayed by the prophets--beginning with Hosea--not only as a harlot
but as an unfaithful wife, whom husband Yahweh shall violently
punish. (On this seeming endorsement of domestic violence, see
YAHWEH: "THY MAKER IS THINE HUSBAND.")
Final punishment for the northern kingdom of
Israel is destruction by Assyrian invaders, instruments of the
cuckolded Yahweh, in 722 B.C.E. The
southern kingdom, Israel's "treacherous sister Judah" (Jer. 3:8),
is also guilty of playing the harlot (see JEREMIAH: "THY LOVERS WILL DESPISE THEE"), and falls to the
Babylonians in 587 B.C.E.
In the wake of these catastrophes, however, the
Old Testament prophets offer words of hope, prophesying Israel's
restoration. "Take ye wives, and beget sons and daughters,"
declares Yahweh, for "I will sow the house of Israel and the house
of Judah with the seed of man, and with the seed of beast" (Jer.
29:6, 31:27), and all the seed of Israel shall "be justified, and
shall glory" (Isa. 45:25). "Let them put away their whoredom,"
Yahweh says of his people, "and I will dwell in their midst
forever" (Ezek. 43:9).
School of Rembrandt
Gerard Hoet et al., Judah Giveth His Signet / Figures de la Bible (1728)
INTERCOURSE, SEXUAL
See LOVEMAKING: TO KNOW IN THE BIBLICAL SENSE.
ISAAC AND REBEKAH
In his old age the Hebrew patriarch Abraham, dwelling in prosperity
among the Canaanites, wishes to find a Hebrew wife for his son
Isaac, who, still single at forty, is mourning the death of his
mother. Calling in his oldest servant (probably Eliezer), Abraham tells him, "Put, I
pray thee, thy hand under my thigh." The servant does so, in an
ancient form of oath-taking (see GENITALS: "THEY KNEW THAT THEY WERE NAKED"), and Abraham makes him swear
that he will not take a wife for Isaac from among the daughters of
Canaan. The servant promises to go instead to Abraham's
Mesopotamian homeland, to find a wife for Isaac among Abraham's
kindred. Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, Rebecca at the Well / National Gallery, London
ISAIAH: "Tremble, Ye Women"
When Israel and Syria invade Judah in 734 B.C.E., for Judah's refusal to join a defensive alliance against
Assyria, the heart of Judah's king Ahaz is faint. Yahweh sends the
prophet Isaiah and his son Shearjashub to King Ahaz to give him
some signs.
ISRAEL: "Beget Sons and Daughters"
In his old age the Hebrew patriarch Jacob, whom Yahweh has long
since renamed Israel ("he who strives with God"), moves from Canaan
to Egypt with eleven sons and their families (Gen. 46:8-27; Ex.
1:1-5). They are welcome in Egypt, for there Jacob's long-lost
favorite son Joseph, sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, now
governs as the Pharoah's prime minister (see JOSEPH AND POTIPHAR'S WIFE). But Jacob/Israel's descendants
wear out this welcome with a population explosion. The Bible in
effect describes the Hebrews in Egypt as breeding like rabbits:
"And the children of Israel were fruitful, and increased
abundantly, and multiplied, . . . and the land was filled with
them" (Ex. 1:7). The Egyptians try enslavement as a birth control
method, but this only adds fuel to the fire--"the more (the
Egyptians) afflicted them, the more (the Hebrews) multiplied and
grew" (Ex. 1:12). Rembrandt, Jacob Blessing the Children of Joseph / Staatliche Museen, Kassel
Judah and Tamar
c. 1650-1660
Residenzgalerie Salzburg
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