In order to properly understand the theme of prostitution in the story of scripture, one must first have a biblical understanding of sexuality, and therefore marriage. In Genesis 2:24, Adam indicatively states that marriage is a man’s reprioritization of his relationships in favor of his wife and by metonymy of sexual union, their oneness of flesh. The semantic categories of two available words for prostitution in the Hebrew language allow for a differential definition of prostitution here. véd∂q is used to identify a temple prostitute who has sex with worshippers and exists as an object of liturgy, whereas hÎnÎz is used to identify any woman who has sex outside of marriage. Although there is confusion and overlap between these two words in some of the major relevant passages (Tamar makes herself hÎnÎz, but is confused as véd∂q, and Jewish men use véd∂q, but are themselves called hÎnÎz in Hosea), a focus on hÎnÎz will be preferred. For the purpose of this paper, namely, to identify and explain how a theme that recurs in the Bible relates to the entire scriptural narrative, prostitution will be defined as the utilization of one’s ability to provide sexual union for purposes other than marital participation.
Genesis 38 is an example of this kind of prostitution. In a proper evaluation of this text, it would be inappropriate to assume any kind of Levitical or Deuteronomic understanding by the characters because of the historical setting and a proper understanding of progressive revelation. This is an isolated narrative within the larger story of Joseph, describing Judah’s interaction with his daughter-in-law Tamar, whom he had found and given as a wife for his firstborn son Er (v. 6). God killed Er for his textually ambiguous wickedness (v. 7) as well as his brother Onan for his unfaithfulness to his responsibility to impregnate Tamar so that she could provide children in Er’s name (v. 10). Because of this, Judah was responsible to provide Tamar with Shelah as a husband when he was of age, but due to the death of his own wife (v. 12), he never did (v. 14). Tamar then dressed as a prostitute and anonymously seduced Judah to sleep with her in order that she might have a child (v. 15-16). As a pledge that he would pay her a sheep for her prostitution, she demanded that he gives her his seal, an engraved stone, which was, as Kenneth A. Matthews paraphrases, Tamar “shrewdly requesting the undeniable evidence of Judah’s identity.” (v. 18)
Three months later, her pregnancy became obvious, and because she was still technically pledged to marry Shelah, she was declared guilty of prostitution by the town elders and was ordered by Judah himself to be burned. This was an extreme response, even for a case of prostitution, for in the Code of Hammurapi, burning is only called for in cases of extreme religious or sexual transgression such as desecration or rape. Her response to Judah was by means of revealing his seal to him (v. 25), which acted as an imperative to mentally recapitulate the entire prostitution narrative with himself as the one who had committed the greatest sin against his family, namely, sleeping with his daughter-in-law as an adulterous act against his own son. He then declares her more righteous than himself because of his reluctance to give her his son (v. 26). Gordan Wenham notes that the only cause for such a response and justificatory indicative was her concern to “perpetuate the family line, to produce descendants for Abraham.” The point of this narrative is that this sinful prostitute who was declared worthy of being burned to death for her unfaithfulness was more righteous than the Jew who would be the forefather of the most powerful tribe in Israel, the forefather of David, and the forefather of Christ. Despite the obvious divine abhorrence of the act of prostitution, it is through this abhorrent act that a self-righteous Jewish man is shamed and declared unrighteous because of his actions and the line of the son of Jacob with the birth right is perpetuated. This narrative ends with a prostitute being declared righteous and a noble Jew condemning himself.
A second significant narrative in scripture that furthers the theme of prostitution begins in Joshua 2:1-21 and ends in 6:25. In this passage, we can appropriately assume a working knowledge of Levitical anti-prostitutional laws (such as ch. 18 forbidding all forms of sexual union outside of marriage, and ch. 21 creating a strong social divide between the priestly line and prostitutes for the sake of cultic purity) among the Israelites. This passage contains the narrative of Rahab’s interaction with the Israelite spies. To first help understand the purpose of Israel’s espionage, Trent C. Butler comments, “God used human spies. Why? The obvious answer would be that the spies should help develop military strategy. That is not the case…Rather, the biblical spies convince Israel that God can and will give the land to Israel.”
Because of Rahab’s reputation as a prostitute, it would not have been conspicuous for two men to enter her house because of her profession. Because she feared God due to his redemptive act in Egypt, she made a deal with the spies to hide them from the king in return for the sparing of the lives of her and her family when Israel conquered Jericho, which required her dsx (“covenant faithfulness”) to keep her family inside of her house. Rahab acted with a concern for the people of God and was therefore vindicated and justified into the people of God in the end. This is implicit in text of 6:25, for it states that she continued to live with them when the text was written, and it is explicit in Joshua and the author’s redundant declaration that Rahab and her family were not to be harmed (6:17, 22-23). One has textual warrant to assume that if it were not for Rahab’s act of faith, her condemnation would have been death by Israel’s sword (v. 21).
However, simply because this particular sub-narrative is concluded, the role of our theme should not be thought to have solidified quite yet, as it is braced thematically with chapter 7, the subsequent narrative. Directly after this story, the character named Achan is introduced. He fought for Israel, was married, had children, and possessed valuable livestock, all of which contributed to his honor and communal respect (v. 24). At Jericho, although he was commanded to devote all things to the Lord (6:18), he coveted and took things for himself (7:1), which resulted in the death of Israelite men, but more importantly the destruction of Israel’s morale (v. 5). As a result, Achan was stoned and burned (v. 25). This narrative functions juxtapositionally with the story of Rahab through its thematically parallelistic inversion. It is through the righteousness of Rahab’s concern for the victory of the people of God that the unrighteousness of Achan’s responsibility for their defeat at Ai is magnified. It is through the risk that Rahab took hiding the Israelite spies in her house that Achan’s risk of hiding the things he stole from the Lord in his tent is seen clearly. It is through a gentile prostitute’s salvation that a circumcised Jew’s condemnation is truly understood.
A third Old Testament passage that advances this theme of prostitution is Hosea 1:1-3. God calls Hosea to marry a prostitute as a prophetic speech-act, its illocutionary force being the explicit labeling of Israel as a prostitute, for God says, “land is guilty of the vilest prostitution in departing from the LORD.” (v. 2). The word used here is again hÎnÎz, meaning, very simply, fornication. Duane Garrett suggests that this book may be a Toranic/historical-theology of prostitution, because its imagery is very similar to passages in Exodus (34:15-16), Leviticus (17:7; 20:6), Numbers (15:39), and Deuteronomy (31:16), all of which exhort Israel not to commit idolatry via the metaphor of prostitution, the parallel being God’s covenant with Israel and a man’s covenant with his wife. Unfortunately, King Ahaz, to whom Hosea ministers (1:1), sacrificed his own son to a false god, set up altars and burnt incense to false gods, and relied on the Assyrians for political aid, all of which defied the aforementioned verses. Hosea, through his prophetic marriage to the prostitute Gomer, revealed the whorish nature of the actions of the kingdom of Israel in regards to their covenant with God.
John 8:1-11 introduces the furtherance of this particular theme of prostitution in the story of scripture in the New Testament. The only in-text reference worthy to be made concerning the integrity of John 8:1-11 as an original Johannine manuscript is this: due to its grammatical and textual attributes, there is a consensus among biblical scholarship that this passage is non-Johannine, but as Merrill C. Tenney points out, “To say that it does not belong to the gospel is not identical with rejecting it as unhistorical…It may be accepted as historical truth.”
This pericope begins with Jesus in the temple about to teach when the Pharisees bring an adulteress before him and ask him how they should respond to the Mosaic imperative to stone such a woman. The greek word used here is not po/rnh, the normal greek word used for a woman who sells sex for money, but rather moiceia, which strictly refers to the act of a married woman having sex with another man. Fortunately for exegetes and the development of the theme at hand, the law under which the Pharisees are condemning this woman remains bound by the semantic categories set forth to define prostitution in the beginning of this paper. This woman, although she may be accused of moiceia in the text, is really being accused of hÎnÎz in the context of the temple court.
N. T. Wright notes in his study of 2nd Temple Judaism that “sinners” were seen as second-class citizens on a national scale, second-class Jews on a cultic scale, and second-class humans on an eternal scale. This harsh personal categorization was a product of intra-Judaio-cultic conflict between the Qumran community, Pharisees, Sadducees, and other small Jewish movements, each of them fighting for the right to theo-national exclusivity. Although the value of communal purity can be traced back to Genesis, this type of ethical cleansing was a product of a self-righteous pursuit of a community that would stimulate the coming of their messiah-king who would rescue whichever group was in the right.
This woman was a victim of this self-righteousness as a prostitute in her specific cultural system, which therefore naturally prompted the Pharisees to bring her to be judged in the temple. What is significant is that Jesus’ response to the Pharisees’ accusation interrogatively points out the second-classness of the Jews themselves (v. 7), rendering them unable to execute the terminal judgment. Their very own sin as Pharisees was necessarily self-deceptively dualistic in that their accusation of the woman was a condemnation of their later self-admitted hypocrisy as well as their ultimate motivation, which was their intent to create an accusation against the Son of God himself, for v. 6 says, “They were testing him so that they might have grounds for accusing him.” Through this woman’s prostitution, their own prostitution was made vividly clear. Through their demand for divine condemnation to fall upon this prostitute, God himself condemned them. Through a prostitute’s sin that was sufficient to make her no better than a gentile in the eyes of the Pharisees, their Jewish heritage and so-called “obedience” was revealed to be an inutile and indeed false righteousness.
The conclusion of this narrative fragment explicitly perpetuates a biblical theology of prostitution through the prostitute’s redemption. Jesus says, “Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?” (v. 10). His vocative address with the word gunh is a primary restoration of personal dignity, as she would have been, because of her sin, addressed as pornh or kuwn, meaning whore or dog respectively. To her confession that no one has condemned her, he invites her to participate in the true covenant community with his imperative statement, “Go and sin no more.” (v. 11).
The final passage that carries this biblical theology of prostitution to its climax is Revelation 17:1-6. John sees the prostitute of Babylon as drunk on the blood of the saints. There is speculation as to who the historical referent of this prostitute actually is. Some, like Grant R. Osborne, believe that she represents Rome because of the parallel between the Babylonian captivity that initiated the second spiritual exodus under which Israel still believed herself to be under and the captivity-type submission they owed to the Roman government, who ruled the land of Israel. A better parallel that would seem to be more consistent with 2nd temple Judaism, a context which must be taken into account if one is to attain a correct understanding of the eschatology of a 1st century Jewish cult, is to see Babylon as the one who persecuted the righteous remnant, which would therefore make the prostitute in Revelation whoever the main persecutor of the church was at John’s time, namely, the Jewish people. This interpretative paradigm of persecution works better than that of governing authority, because (1) John’s intention was to encourage those who were being persecuted, (2) the main persecutor at the time of John’s authorship in his realm of influence was still Jerusalem, although Rome was on the rise, (3) despite the fact that governmental authority was valuable to the Jews, even more valuable was their right and ability to exclusively worship God according to the Torah, which is revealed in the Maccabean and pseudo-Isaianic narratives, and (4) v. 5 borrows specific maternal-prostitution language from Hosea. The prostitute of Babylon has “Mother of Prostitutes” written on her forehead, and God calls to Israel, “Contend with your mother…let her put prostitution from her face.” (1:2), and “For the men themselves go apart with prostitutes…Though you, Israel, play the prostitute.” (4:14b, 15a).
An insistence upon this parallel demands that further lines be drawn here. In v. 4, we learn that “The woman was clothed with purple and scarlet” not unlike the royal robe that Achan hid in his tent, that she was “adorned with…precious stones” not unlike the stone seal that Judah gave to Tamar, and that she holds “in her hand a gold cup full of…the blood of the saints,” not unlike the third cup of the Passover representing the blood of the lamb which the Jews condemning the unnamed prostitute drank every year. Again the Jews persecute the righteous, and in so doing, explicitly wage of war against the climactic redemptive testimony of their very God through their prostitution to their own self-righteousness, and are therefore condemned. It is through the prostitution of the harlot of Babylon that the Jewish people are finally condemned, and the true people of God finally purified through martyrdom. God uses this disgraceful age-old sin to shame, condemn, justify, and glorify throughout the scriptural narrative, contributing to all major aspects of our salvific identity.
Some scholars, such as Raymond Ortlun, believe that we as the church should identify with the prostitute metaphor throughout scripture because of the sinful nature of humanity, but this is inappropriate and indeed unbiblical application for the church. It is through a biblical theology of prostitution that the unfaithfulness of Israel is shown, but it is through a biblical theology of marriage, upon which a biblical theology of prostitution is founded, that the church is properly understood. The church is the bride of Christ (Eph. 5), and whose hope for purity, as John sees it in Revelation 17, is through her unwavering faithfulness to the new covenant in martyrdom and persecution.
Grant R. Osborne, Revelation (ed. Moises Silva; BECNT; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2002), 609.
