Part 6 (2/2)

But the relevant legends for our story go back much further. Because mandrake roots sometimes looked like a tiny woman, they were thought to be able to make women fertile. They were also purported to be an aphrodisiac that could be used, as a prominent Bible dictionary delicately puts it, ”to excite voluptuousness.”5 Think of them as the Spanish fly or green M&Ms of their day. There may actually be something to this legend, since their narcotic properties could lower a person's usual inhibitions.

Ancient languages confirm the connection between mandrakes and s.e.x. The Hebrew word for mandrakes (dudaim) sounds like the word for love (dod). Some even suggest translating the word as ”love-plants” or ”love-apples.” The name suggests that the ancient Israelites were well aware of the plant's properties. The name ”love-apples” is especially appropriate in the one other place in the Bible where mandrakes are mentioned. In Song of Solomon, the woman summons her lover and promises to give him her love (dod) ”when the mandrakes have given forth their fragrance.”6 It doesn't take a fan of erotic literature to understand that the image of mandrakes blossoming and opening their leaves or flowers to emit fragrance is probably a metaphor for female arousal. The Arabs too had a nickname for mandrakes-”Satan's apples” or ”the devil's apples,” a clear recognition that mandrake-eating could lead to wild times.

It's no wonder, then, that a tussle broke out between Leah and Rachel over the plant. Both women wanted to bear more children for Jacob. Both seem to have believed that mandrakes could enhance s.e.xual arousal and performance. But whether the mandrakes actually worked is hard to say. Genesis credits G.o.d rather than the mandrakes for the additional births, explaining that G.o.d heard Leah's prayer and remembered Rachel and opened her womb. But from the point of view of the two competing sisters, it's abundantly clear that they believed they were using an ancient fertility drug.

And they may not have kept the mandrakes to themselves. While mandrakes are a.s.sociated explicitly with female fertility and female s.e.xual arousal in Genesis and Song of Solomon, it's not beyond the pale to imagine that Jacob needed some help as well. At this point in life, he had fathered eight children. His equipment must have been tired. He was probably older than both Leah and Rachel, about middle age, perhaps older. He was probably looking for any kind of stimulation he could get. Leah, whose appearance and charm had never done much for him in the bedroom, may have especially wanted to share her mandrakes with him. Leah had also stopped bearing children, suggesting that she may have reached menopause.

We cannot know for certain, but it seems quite possible that Jacob used the mandrakes as a kind of ancient v.i.a.g.r.a, and that the final four tribes of Israel were born with the help of the biblical ancestor of the little blue pill.

23.

Were Samson and Delilah into S&M?

THREE THOUSAND YEARS before Fabio first graced the cover of a romance novel, there lived Samson, history's original tough-'n'-tender hero. Like Fabio, Samson was a long-haired, l.u.s.ty strongman who could heat up a battlefield or a bedroom. And like Fabio, portrayals always show him locked in a steamy embrace with some exotic woman, the tragic lover caught in a pa.s.sionate yet doomed romance.

But the similarities end there. While Fabio went meekly into half-stardom doing b.u.t.ter-subst.i.tute commercials, Samson lived in constant conflict with his enemies (and, as we'll see, his lovers), and his life ended with a bang. Every church and synagogue kid knows that Samson liked to inflict pain on his enemies. But one scholar prompts us to ask a strange question: did he also like to receive pain from his s.e.xual partners?

Let's back up for those of you who snoozed through the Book of Judges in Sunday or Sabbath school. Samson was no ordinary guy. An angel foretold his birth and commanded his parents to raise him as a n.a.z.irite, which was a person who was separated or consecrated, as the Hebrew-derived term implies. n.a.z.irites dedicated their lives to G.o.d and had to follow three rules: (1) avoid grapes and all products made from grapes; (2) never cut their hair; and (3) never come in contact with corpses.1 In Samson's particular case, though not in the case of all n.a.z.irites, not cutting his hair gave him superhuman strength.

But like many strongmen, Samson also had a strong weakness. He enjoyed too much the company of women, and the wrong women at that. The first woman in his life was his wife, an anonymous Philistine whom Samson married against his parents' wishes. We'll spare you the gory details, but this poor, nameless gal came to an unfortunate end when she and her father were burned to death by their fellow Philistines as a result of their a.s.sociation with Samson. Because of this, Samson went completely postal and killed one thousand Philistines with the jawbone of a donkey. (Didn't they have a two-week waiting period for those things?)2 The second woman mentioned in Samson's story was a prost.i.tute he visited in Gaza. When the Philistines discovered that the Big Guy, who was their sworn enemy, was in their city having a tryst with one of their ladies of the night, the men plotted to ambush him as he left through the gate at the break of day. But Samson finished his business prematurely and left at midnight, not even bothering to have a smoke. On the way out he removed Gaza's city gates, posts and all, and carried them on his shoulders all the way to Hebron.3 This qualified as his morning workout, and later he had a shake for lunch and a sensible dinner.

Your Lyin' Heart This brings us to Delilah, the only woman in the narrative with a name, and the only one, we are told, whom Samson loved (cue the dramatic warning music). But let us clear up some misconceptions about dear Delilah that remain in the collective memory. She is most often thought of as a deceitful and conniving woman, a femme fatale who resorted to trickery to get what she wanted. But in actual fact, Delilah never tried to trick or hoodwink Samson, and she was marvelously upfront about what she wanted-to learn the source of his amazing power. Her initial request was blunt and unambiguous. ”Please tell me what makes your strength so great, and how you could be bound, so that one could subdue you.”4 No feminine subtlety there.

At the same time, her motives were selfish because in seeking to hand over her lover to the lords of the Philistines, she hoped to receive the tidy sum of eleven hundred pieces of silver from each of them. Why would she do this? Well, why not? The Bible never says Delilah loved Samson. Her motive was apparently less about heart strings and more about purse strings. She was probably a Philistine herself, so she may also have been acting out of loyalty to her people. If she could turn a profit in the process, so much the better.

So three different times Delilah asked Samson to reveal the source of his strength, and each time he gave her a false answer. (Who was the deceiver, then?) First he told her that he could be bound by seven fresh bowstrings. When she did this, he snapped them like thread. Next he told her that using new ropes would do the trick, but he snapped those too. The third time he instructed her to braid his hair and make it tight with a pin. This reference to his hair implies that he was giving a now-you're-getting-warmer hint at the truth. But this didn't work either. He remained as strong as ever.

Finally, Delilah exploited his affection with a cla.s.sic female strategy: ”How can you say, 'I love you,' when your heart is not with me? You have mocked me three times now and have not told me what makes your strength so great.”5 This major-league pout worked (don't they always?), and Samson, fed up with her badgering, told her the truth. Then he dozed off in her lap. His head was promptly shaved and he was taken prisoner by the Philistines, never to escape. They gouged out his eyes and made him a slave and showpiece at their ancient World Wrestling Federation event.

Egads. Women.

The Games People Play While forgiving Samson his poor relations.h.i.+p choices-after all, he didn't have access to eHarmony's twenty-nine-point personality test-we can still ask, is it possible to know anything more about this iconic biblical couple? Lori Rowlett, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, thinks we can, and she offers an interpretation that will shock many Bible readers the way it shocked even us.6 She believes the relations.h.i.+p between Samson and Delilah contains an element of kinkiness that can be read according to the rules and codes of sadom.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic s.e.x games. We're not real familiar with S/M terms and practices (and our wives very much appreciate that), but to understand this theory we dive ever so briefly into the strange world of leather and love.

S/M involves a partner who is dominant and one who is submissive. Rowlett says that Delilah can be seen as the dominant partner with Samson in the role of the submissive partner-or ”butch bottom,” to use her term. She points to the fact that Samson surrendered himself willingly to Delilah and allowed her to tie him up. Rowlett sees Delilah the Philistine as the exotic Other who dominated the Israelite Samson in a tale of bondage and humiliation that fit the pattern of sadom.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic s.e.x play. Even their banter can be interpreted this way, she says: ”The constant give and take between the two lovers resembles S/M role-play, complete with ritual questions, hair fetis.h.i.+sm and other power games.”7 In Rowlett's a.n.a.lysis, Samson got bored with winning every time and became tired of Delilah's constant questions, so he engaged in an act of deeper submission by revealing his secret to her. This made him even more vulnerable and put her in a position of greater authority over him. In effect, she became the supreme dominatrix who now had complete power. The mighty hero who always dominated others was reduced to a submissive partner whose fate was no longer in his own hands. At the same time Delilah too was transformed from a deceiving temptress into a domineering mistress.

Wowsers. Are we still in Kansas?

A Painful Proposal This is surely an interpretation of the Samson and Delilah story that few of us have encountered before. Before casting a critical eye on it, we should begin by pointing out that elsewhere in her article Rowlett makes some astute and important observations about the power dynamics present within the story itself and in the context out of which it emerged. She observes that the play between Samson and Delilah reflects the cat-and-mouse game G.o.d played with the Israelites throughout the Book of Judges, and it also underscores the political agenda of the author of the story. Reading the narrative from the perspective of S/M s.e.xual games is a creative way of acknowledging and exploring these aspects of the text and its formation.

But that doesn't mean that the text describes Samson and Delilah actually engaging in S/M erotic play. As Rowlett states, the ultimate purpose of S/M is to achieve bodily pleasure. Yet there is no indication in the story that this was the purpose or outcome of what Samson and Delilah did. According to the story, Delilah's primary motivation was money. Samson's motives were less clear, but we are never told that his interaction with Delilah over the source of his power gave him bodily pleasure. In fact, he was asleep when she weaved his hair and bound him with various cords. Sleeping during s.e.x is, we think, a universal sign of disengagement.

And what about the fact that Delilah herself did not actually cut Samson's hair but had a man come in to cut it for her? Rowlett simply ignores this fact. She also does not explain why, each time he was bound, Samson the Supposedly Submissive broke free and a.s.serted his dominance over Delilah. That doesn't fit the pattern Rowlett proposes.

Other questions pop up when we take into account the wider context and recurring patterns of Samson's story. A few chapters earlier, when the Philistines persuaded Samson's wife to pry from him the answer to a riddle he had posed, she, like Delilah, appealed to his affection to get him to spill the beans. ”You hate me, you do not really love me. You have asked a riddle of my people, but you have not explained it to me.”8 Here, as with Delilah, Samson was worn down by her constant pestering, so he eventually relented and told her the answer to the riddle, which she pa.s.sed on to the Philistines.

Another scene also antic.i.p.ated what would happen later with Delilah when Samson's fellow Judahites bound him with rope and handed him over to the Philistines.9 The rope melted like flax, and he reached for the nearest jawbone of donkey and went on the kind of Incredible Hulklike rampage he was becoming famous for at the Palestine Police Department.

Rowlett does not try to give an S/M spin to these earlier scenes, nor should she, because there is no evidence to support it. But the echoes with the Delilah story suggest that the author wanted the reader to understand and interpret the relations.h.i.+p between Samson and Delilah in light of what had happened earlier in his life. Imposing an S/M reading on the later scenes runs the risk of making them so unusual that the similarities with the earlier part of the story are missed or lost.

A final issue concerns the appropriateness of reading a story that is more than two thousand years old through the lens of S/M s.e.x play. Sadomasochism is a relatively recent term that is partially named after Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, a late-nineteenth-century Austrian novelist who wrote extensively about the s.e.xual pleasure he received when he was verbally or physically abused. It may strike some as misguided to apply such a modern concept to such an old story.

At the same time there is ample evidence that people in the biblical world engaged in all kinds of unusual and, in some cases, illegal activities in the pursuit of s.e.xual gratification, including rape, incest, and b.e.s.t.i.a.lity. These still take place today, and it's not inconceivable that some people in the ancient world would have derived satisfaction from the experience of pain and submission. But is it part of the story of Samson and Delilah? We think not.

To be fair, Rowlett never comes right out and says that the text describes Samson and Delilah engaging in S/M s.e.xual activity. Her intent is to explain what kind of interpretation of the story emerges when it is read from a sadom.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic perspective. Such readings have become quite popular in some scholarly circles during the past couple of decades. The Bible has been put in conversation with unusual and atypical aspects of human experience, and the results have run the gamut from insightful to bizarre. It is, in a sense, a way of playing with the text, but it is not, in our opinion, a way that yields much about the Bible story itself.

So Samson's popular image remains intact, in our opinion. He was a strong guy whose lovers exploited his affection like an Achilles' heel. He made a career of killing the enemies of Israel-even killing thousands in his final suicidal act at a great arena-but we're far from convinced that he enjoyed pain and humiliation as part of his lovemaking. Like Fabio, he was probably a romantic at heart.

Conclusion.

There you have it. We hope you've enjoyed our tour of bizarre and bawdy Bible interpretations. You probably didn't guess ahead of time that it would include forays into such topics as pimping, depression, and a.s.sorted s.e.xual proclivities. And this was just the whirlwind seven-day tour. There are plenty more fascinating interpretations that we hope to explore in future books.

We've considered a wide range of proposals in this book. Some, like the suggestion that Joseph was a cross-dresser, are preposterous. Others, like the idea that Eve was created from Adam's p.e.n.i.s bone or that the Bible commands pubic shaving, we found to be more reasonable, if still shocking. And who could ever forget the unsavory but plausible interpretation of Ehud using Eglon's toilet as an escape hatch? As weird and strange as some of these proposals have been, they give us a deeper appreciation of the variety of themes covered in the Bible. And who knows? Perhaps exposure to the seamy side of the Bible will inspire people to enter the field of Bible scholars.h.i.+p, seeing that they can explore s.e.xy and outrageous topics like these.

We've seen that Bible pa.s.sages can be interpreted in many different ways. Some scholars study language and word meanings, while others focus on archaeology and ancient cultural practices. They like to talk in fancy terms like ”interpretive lens” about the approach they use to interpretation. Some of the lenses that have been used in this book are feminism, sociological a.n.a.lysis, and Freudian psychology. One of the reasons for the number and diversity of approaches to the Bible is that they are all dealing with people and events that are thousands of years old. It's not an easy task to describe what people felt and did and thought that long ago-which is why there are sometimes more theories than facts. But as this book shows, it is a task that can produce scintillating, provocative, and even convincing results.

The Bible consistently reminds us that religion, s.e.x, and other sensitive issues often go hand in hand. This does not make the Bible any less the Good Book. It simply shows that the Good Book is also the Real Book. We trust that you've been entertained and informed and that you've been prodded to consider some old stories in new ways. We also hope that you'll keep thinking about them-indeed, some of them may prove hard to forget.

About the Authors.

JOHN KALTNER is an a.s.sociate professor of religious studies at Rhodes College, where he teaches courses on the Bible, Islam, and Arabic. He is the author of several books, including Ishmael Instructs Isaac: An Introduction of the Qur'an for Bible Readers and The Old Testament: Its Background, Growth, and Content, Which he co-wrote with Steven L. McKenzie. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.

STEVEN L. McKENZIE is professor of Hebrew Bible and old Testament at Rhodes College. He is a co-leader of the Middle East Travel Seminar, which tours Syria, Jordan, the Sinai, Israel, and Greece each spring. He has written and edited many books, including King David: A Biography and How to Read the Bible. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.

JOEL KILPATRICK is an award-winning reporter and creator of LarkNews.com, the world's leading Christian satire website, which received the 2005 Gospel Music a.s.sociation's Grady Nutt Humor Award. His work has been featured in Time, the Was.h.i.+ngton Post, the Dallas Morning News, and on CBS Radio. He lives with his wife and family in the Los Angeles area.

Visitfor exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

<script>