Most of my research has focused on stories in the Bible with which I am already familiar. Often I find in the text aspects to these stories of which I was not previously aware (such as Noah’s sacrifice to God after the flood), but I also find stories that I have never heard mentioned before at all. One of these follows after the stories of the Great Flood and the Tower of Babel in Genesis, about which I have already written. This is the story of Abram, who later came to be called Abraham, and his wife Sarai (later Sarah), and their exile in Egypt.

The story begins some time after Abram has settled his family in the land of Canaan, God having instructed him to go there and having promised him that he will become the father of a great nation.

Now there was a famine in the land. So Abram went down to Egypt to reside there as an alien, for the famine was severe in the land. When he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, “I know well that you are a woman beautiful in appearances; and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife’; then they will kill me, but they will let you live. Say that you are my sister so that it may go well with me because of you, and that my life may be spared on your account.” Genesis 12:10-13, NRSV

My assumption in this is that, in ancient Egypt, a foreigner may be killed and his wife seized, and Abram knows this. I imagine that this would have been common knowledge at the time this story was first authored, but now, today, I can only take it as an implication. Given that, the lie then seems very sensible, a way to protect both of them.

When Abram entered Egypt the Egyptians saw that the woman was very beautiful. When the officials of Pharaoh saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh. And the woman was taken into Pharaoh’s house. And for her sake he dealt well with Abram; and he had sheep, oxen, male donkeys, male and female slaves, female donkeys, and camels. Genesis 12:14-16, NRSV

Putting aside the bizarre composition of the list of gifts, which is confounding but at least (probably) inconsequential to the matter at hand, we see that Abram is not killed for his wife, but she is taken anyway — or, rather, purchased — and apparently without protest from Abram. The text does not say whether Abram anticipated that this might happen, so I don’t know whether it was the intent of Abram to sell his wife in exchange for the great wealth that he ultimately receives, but neither does the text record any words or deeds of complaint or protest against this. Nor does the text seem at all concerned with how Sarai fairs in all this.

Finally God intervenes, though, notably, not when it would have done the most good, nor at any point prior when it might have prevented all of this from going so wrong in the first place.

But the Lord afflicted Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai, Abram’s wife. So Pharaoh called Abram, and said, “What is this you have done to me? Why did you not tell me that she was your wife? Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her for my wife? Now then, here is your wife, take her, and be gone.” Genesis 12:17-19, NRSV

God does not punish Pharaoh for purchasing a woman as property, nor Abram for selling his wife into sexual slavery, but rather Pharaoh for unknowingly taking another man’s wife for his own. What is more absurd still is that, after all of this is resolved, after Pharaoh, embarrassed, sends all of them away (and Abram with all the property that Pharaoh gave him), after they make the long journey back home, this entire scenario happens again. Further on in the text, Abram, now called Abraham, and Sarai, now called Sarah, come to the land of Gerar, and Sarah is taken by Abimelech, the ruler of the land, without protest from Abraham. And God comes to Abimelech and admonishes him, even here admitting, “Yes, I know that you did this in the integrity of your heart” (Genesis 20:6, NRSV). The presence of these two very similar stories within one book may be evidence of the book’s having been compiled from multiple sources (each with its own version of the story). For the time being, let’s take these stories as they are often taken by Biblical literalists, as a literal and thoroughly accurate historical narrative. Throughout this narrative, God has not a word to say against the entire notion of purchasing or enslaving women, and this says a great deal about what the ancient Hebrews thought of women, and how they thought that God thought of women.

I am not presenting any of this by way of denouncing Christianity wholesale, nor is it my intention to denounce the Bible wholesale. I’m presenting this story, and perhaps, in the future, others of its kind, first and foremost because they’re interesting, funny, entertaining stories that grant us literary and historical insight into the ancient Hebrew people. The belief system to which these kinds of stories most present a problem is what I might call Biblicalism, or perhaps Bible fetishism: elevating the Bible beyond what it actually is (which is remarkable) and making it into a holy object, or (to put it in terms that I think will drive the point home to any Christians who might be reading this) an idol.

If you’re going to have a Biblically-based belief system, it has to be founded on what the Bible actually is, or such belief is not, by simple definition, Biblically-based. If you take me out to the ocean and point out over the waters and say “There, I will build my house on that rock,” and there is no rock there, just open water, I’m not going to agree with you that your future house will be built on a foundation of rock. It won’t even be built on a foundation of reality. I would think you’re probably just going to drown.

The Bible is an extensively-edited and -translated compilation of sacred texts authored, transcribed, and preserved by ancient people over millennia. That’s plenty interesting and remarkable in itself; saying that it’s instead something perfect and divine, dictated by God, not only robs us of that, robbing us of knowledge about ourselves as a people, but also simply doesn’t make sense when stories like the above are taken into account. We can appreciate and even laugh at our human failings in these stories if we recognize them as such, but by fetishizing these stories, we are forced to either laugh at God or to not admit that they’re failings at all, which is tantamount to not admitting our own failures, which means never learning or progressing.

Biblicalists are either naive about these kinds of stories, or they’re deliberately using “Biblical morality” as a cover in order to impose their own. They hold up the Bible (or other sacred texts in the context of other religions) as the paragon of morality and ethics, but what they take from the Bible regarding these topics is highly selective. The ones they seem to promote most strongly are not those that mandate peaceful relations, tolerance, or social justice, but rather those that allow them to exercise control over people, and in particular over women and their sexuality. And even those are walked back no small distance from what those ethics must be if we are to take the Bible as infallible and divine, because I don’t see even the most conservative Christians advocating for fathers to sell daughters as commodities on the open market (as is permitted by Exodus 21:7). So it cannot, then, actually be about the Bible in the first place. The anthropology of the book is profaned by being made subservient to poor excuses for bad behavior.

I believe that the ancient Hebrews understood something about God and Satan, but I also know that, like most of the ancient world, they embraced actions and beliefs that we consider today to be wholly abhorrent. Whatever they understood intimately of God, when they wrote about Them, they freely inserted their own biases and prejudices. Perhaps that’s the only way that they could make sense of it, of the wondrous mystery of the universe and of their relationship to what might be the divine, in light of their limited experience and the cultural knowledge they held at the time. I can appreciate that and share their wonder and learn from them without having to take on their often unacceptable morality.

