God is a dickhead and Israel's fucked
Dozens of feminist studies over the past twenty years have explored the way in which images of male deities authorize male domination in the social order. As these studies have well demonstrated, a 'divine' male both legitimates male authority and deifies phallocentric masculinity.
What exactly is evoked by the maleness of God in ancient Judaism?
The first is homoeroticism: the love of a male human for a male God. The issue of homoeroticism arises in ancient Israel because the divine-human relationship is often described in erotic and sexual terms. Marriage and sexuality are frequent biblical metaphors for describing God's relationship with Israel. God is imagined as the husband to Israel the wife; espousal and even sexual intercourse are metaphors for the covenant. Thus when Israel follows other gods, "she" is seen to be whoring. Israel's relationship with God is thus conceptualized as a monogamous sexual relation, and idolatry as adultery. But the heterosexual metaphors in the ancient texts belie the nature of the relationship in question: it is human males, not females, who are imagined to have the primary intimate relations with the deity. The Israel that is collectively imagined as a woman is actually constituted by men, men like Moses and the patriarchs. And these men love, in ways that are imagined erotically and sensually, a male deity.
The archaeological record suggests that many Israelites may have imagined the goddess Asherah to be a partner of Yahweh, but in the Hebrew Bible, and in the variety of Judaisms that flourished subsequently, Israel imagined God as having no sexual partners. Despite the fact that God metaphorically gets married (e.g., Hosea 1-2; Jeremiah 2:2), and even has sexual intercourse with the entity Israel (Ezekiel 16:8), who is imagined as a woman, this metaphorical union differs from the couplings of male and female deities found in the mythology of many other religious traditions.
For more on sex and the Bible see ' Hobrad' and ...' Freethinkers ' Also the link between SOME gay's and fascism a ' seminal' text by Johann Hari.
What exactly is evoked by the maleness of God in ancient Judaism?
The first is homoeroticism: the love of a male human for a male God. The issue of homoeroticism arises in ancient Israel because the divine-human relationship is often described in erotic and sexual terms. Marriage and sexuality are frequent biblical metaphors for describing God's relationship with Israel. God is imagined as the husband to Israel the wife; espousal and even sexual intercourse are metaphors for the covenant. Thus when Israel follows other gods, "she" is seen to be whoring. Israel's relationship with God is thus conceptualized as a monogamous sexual relation, and idolatry as adultery. But the heterosexual metaphors in the ancient texts belie the nature of the relationship in question: it is human males, not females, who are imagined to have the primary intimate relations with the deity. The Israel that is collectively imagined as a woman is actually constituted by men, men like Moses and the patriarchs. And these men love, in ways that are imagined erotically and sensually, a male deity.
The archaeological record suggests that many Israelites may have imagined the goddess Asherah to be a partner of Yahweh, but in the Hebrew Bible, and in the variety of Judaisms that flourished subsequently, Israel imagined God as having no sexual partners. Despite the fact that God metaphorically gets married (e.g., Hosea 1-2; Jeremiah 2:2), and even has sexual intercourse with the entity Israel (Ezekiel 16:8), who is imagined as a woman, this metaphorical union differs from the couplings of male and female deities found in the mythology of many other religious traditions.
For more on sex and the Bible see ' Hobrad' and ...' Freethinkers ' Also the link between SOME gay's and fascism a ' seminal' text by Johann Hari.
posted by professor rat at 5:27 AM
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