The last days of sodom and gomorrah erotica
Many people think they know what the Bible teaches about sexuality. In it, Paul addressed seventeen of the thirty-seven topics that should be addressed in a comprehensive sexuality curriculum. When I read the New Testament for the first time, I was most surprised by First Letter to Corinthians. I was surprised during this first semester to realize as I studied the Hebrew Bible that it was replete with sexual references: I chronicled more than thirty-five sexually themed stories in the book of Genesis alone. My first semester in seminary was as a research fellow at the Yale Divinity School during a sabbatical from my position as the president of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. I think it’s also important to note that I first read Scripture as a sexologist. When a professor there said, “Read this passage like you are reading it for the first time,” I was! I was taught at an early age by my grandmother, who was a Holocaust survivor, that the New Testament was a book that had been used to kill my relatives, and so I never read the New Testament until 1996 during my first semester at divinity school. In Sunday school growing up Jewish but not having a bat mitzvah, I never got past Genesis and Exodus. I love the Bible, but I am relatively new to its teachings.
And, it is only one of the places in Scripture where physical beauty is affirmed where pleasure is good, where there are many forms of blessed relationships, and where sexuality is a source of pleasure and pain in our lives. The emphasis is on passion and intimacy there is no discussion of marriage or fertility. Their desire for each other is mutual their passion is mutual their fulfillment is mutual.
The Song of Songs is a delightfully erotic, sensual dance between an unmarried man and an unmarried woman, who, given what we know about marriage at the time the Bible was written, are probably in their early teen years.