![]() | This article was nominated for deletion on October 12 2006. The result of the discussion was Delete. |
![]() | This article is rated B-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
This article unequivocally paints the Hebrew Bible as misogynistic. Perhaps we could make it a tad more balanced? There are, after all, many Christian/Jewish feminists who do not see the Hebrew Bible as demeaning to women. Sure, there are a couple of sentences in this article which do not support the idea that the Hebrew Bible is pro-rape, but they are too few and far between.
@ StAnselm:, care to comment? :) Johanna (formerly BenLinus1214) talk to me! see my work 02:37, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
Dear Johanna, With all do respect, let's not pretend that you created this article for any reason other than making the Bible look bad. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:18D:4501:C8FF:6DE2:6F03:534D:5784 ( talk) 02:57, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
@ MagicatthemovieS: I see you're active on the page, so could you possibly respond to some of the comments on this thread? Johanna (formerly BenLinus1214) talk to me! see my work 01:51, 6 October 2015 (UTC)
I agree with StAnselm that the section on Deuteronomy 22 needs to be more balanced, however I think that the "Major Prophets" section of this page could especially use some quotes from works defending the Bible. That section also needs a sentence or two about the difference between approving of rape and using a rape metaphor. Also, what on earth does Isaiah 1:16–17 have to do with rape?
@ Johanna:Thanks for your edits; however, I see no reference to rape in Isaiah 3:16–17, and there is only a relatively short passage in the "Major Prophets" section that defends the Bible.
@ MagicatthemovieS: I was wondering if you could give me an update on your thoughts on the neutrality of the article now. :) Johanna (formerly BenLinus1214) talk to me! see my work 03:26, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
@ Johanna:The beginning of the "Analysis, interpretation and criticism" section desperately needs balancing.
Finding a bizarre line about the "scientifically documented beaver of a rapist", I changed it to "scientifically documented behavior of a rapist" as an obvious Freudian slip. However, when I checked the source, I found no such line in the book cited (Scholz, Susanne (2000)). I checked the author's other cited publication, but it also does not appear. A Google search revealed several texts in which the line appears, with this [1] seeming to be the direct source (though the phrase appears to come from a digest of questions about Genesis, found here and elsewhere). The words are quoted, and a footnote number is given, but there are no footnotes present in the online version. More worryingly, the text surrounding this quotation seems to have been copied word for word from the web-source. So we appear to have problem of plagiarism, supplemented by the possibly intentional mis-attribution of a quotation which could not easily be sourced. This is the only part of the text I have checked. I think it may require a more detailed going over. At the moment I have time only to tag it. Paul B ( talk) 09:45, 27 June 2015 (UTC)
As for the wrong niqqud signs, any Hebrew dictionary will do. עִנָה and עָנָה are completely different words, but both are words. This is why you can find both in biblehub.com. This wiki dictionary article has both words: <ref>
https://he.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%A2%D7%A0%D7%94Cite error: The opening <ref>
tag is malformed or has a bad name (see the
help page). you can also use morfix, an English Hebrew online dictionary, that again makes the distinction. <ref>
https://www.morfix.co.il/%D7%A2%D7%A0%D7%94Cite error: The opening <ref>
tag is malformed or has a bad name (see the
help page). as for the niqqud of the other words, I suggest you type them into morfix without niqqud and see the niqqud and meanings it spits out, morfix is a great tool.
Yotsuba-Nyaa (
talk) 07:13, 2 June 2021 (UTC)
You are welcome! I'm happy to contribute to Wikipedia when I can, as for whether the pronunciation has shifted in modern Hebrew, to my best of knowledge, we can't know for sure, but I happen to know an expert in the field and I will ask him (and of course find a citable source, to avoid OR). I will fix the niqqud in a few days, as I need to ask the man and also quite busy. Yotsuba-Nyaa ( talk) 19:42, 2 June 2021 (UTC)
I have added a "refimprove" tag to the article. At the moment, the sourcing is rather poor. Having opinion pieces from HuffPost and Alternet when there has been so much serious scholarship published on the subject is a very bad sign. St Anselm ( talk) 02:22, 4 July 2015 (UTC)
Should a discussion of Lot's daughters be included here? Some scholars use the word "rape" in relation to the incident of Genesis 19:30-36. See Esther Fuchs, Sexual Politics in the Biblical Narrative: Reading the Hebrew Bible as a Woman, p. 209, " presenting his daughters as the initiators and perpetrators of incestuous 'rape'". However, I note this isn't mentioned in the article on Lot (biblical person) - no, indeed, is there an article here on Lot's daughters. St Anselm ( talk) 19:55, 7 July 2015 (UTC)
I plan to create the article when I get a free moment. St Anselm ( talk) 03:53, 8 July 2015 (UTC)
There is nothing in the Bible to state that the angels were male. That's later interpretation. -- KimYunmi ( talk) 00:30, 27 May 2018 (UTC)
Dear colleagues,
I noticed that the verb שָׁגַל (šāgal, shagel) is
used 4 times in the Hebrew Bible, namely Deuteronomy 28:30, Isaiah 13:16, Jeremiah 3:2, Zechariah 14:2. As stated, the verb could mean '(vulgar) to ravish, to rape, to violate, (euphemistic translation) to lie with'. I'm convinced that 'to rape' is the best translation for Deut 28:30, Isa 13:16 and Zech 14:2, but Jer 3:2 poses a special problem. Superficially, the context of Jer 3:2 (which I take to be Jeremiah chapter 1 to 3) seems to fit the pattern of a prophetic passage in which a personified capital city (in this case Jerusalem, representing the Kingdom of Judah) is threatened with rape, but on closer examination, the verse Jer 3:2 doesn't fit in, for 3 reasons:
Importantly, I was also unable to find any Bible translations nor good scholarly sources which interpret Jer 3:2's שָׁגַל šāgal as 'to rape'. I think something like 'Is there any place where you have not been ravished?' (NIV) or 'Is there any place where you have not allowed yourself to be sexually defiled / deviant?' is a good approximation of the original Hebrew. Jerusalem allowed it to happen with her consent, and seems to have enjoyed it, but Yahweh / the author essentially thinks she's a dirty slut who has made herself unclean, immoral, promiscuous, but doesn't seem to think she was raped.
Other than that, Jeremiah 1–3 seems to fit the whole established pattern, except that 'rape' is not one of the threatened punishments. There is also some metaphorical confusion as to what kind of woman Judah/Jerusalem is in relation to Yahweh: a wife? A daughter? The sister of his (other) ex-wife / daughter Israel/Samaria? The other prophets either portray the capital city as the wife or the (virgin) daughter of Yahweh; but in Jeremiah, Judah/Jerusalem and Israel/Samaria seem to be both simultaneously, as well as each other's 'sisters', with Yahweh having 'divorced' Israel/Samaria already in 3:8 (probably a poetic reference to the Assyrian conquest of Samaria in 722 BCE). These are my findings:
So, it becomes clear that it almost fits the pattern we see in the other prophets, but as there appears to be no rape in Jeremiah 3:2, it cannot be included in our list. Scholars also do find the pattern in Jeremiah 13, but not in Jeremiah 3. Greetings, Nederlandse Leeuw ( talk) 11:11, 18 November 2021 (UTC)
Dear colleagues,
I'm going to introduce the
New International Version (NIV) as the standard English translation for quotations in this article, and will refer to Biblehub for references. There are too many arbitrarily chosen editions in this article, resulting in an inconsistent treatment of the source texts and thus the topic. Especially the King James Version (KJV) is, scholarly speaking, an unreliable, often incomprehensible and thus unhelpful edition for this article's purposes. The NIV is arguably the most widely accepted modern critical English translation, and strikes a very good balance between accurate translation and understandable formulation. Some editions such as the NRSV are arguably even more reliable from a scholarly point of view, but not as widely accepted (and not, for example, available on Biblehub). Whenever it seems necessary or helpful, I will quote other translations along with or even instead of the NIV (e.g. in the case of Dinah). In particular, the KJV does retain its importance in the history of English-language interpretation and commentary of the Bible, although it is no longer the standard in modern Anglophone society. I will also write '[Yahweh]' instead of 'the Lord' for consistency's sake and because this is standard practice amongst scholars. I will uphold American spelling as used in NIV quotations, but my own texts follow British English. Cheers,
Nederlandse Leeuw (
talk) 12:12, 17 December 2021 (UTC)
The description of the account given of
Joseph with
Potiphar's wife fails as "rape" in three areas.
1) The author(s) of Genesis never mention intercourse actually taking place. Potiphar's wife propositions Joseph repeatedly, but she never, consensually or otherwise, has physical relations with Joseph.
2) The ancient Levant had no concept of rape against men, and the concept some editors of this page hold of rape against men did not arise in a vacuum. The definition of rape, held by those who insist on maintaining a section in article on Genesis 39 with its original wording, which includes adult, male victims, arose very recently, in only certain parts of the world. The layers of coincidence and serendipity of chronology and location which had to coalesce for someone to even conceive of Genesis 39 depicting rape or sexual harassment is astounding. Even if the authors of the sources cited in the article believe with all their hearts that Joseph could lawyer up in some rich, Western nation and file a harassment suit against Potiphar's wife, this does not mean that the author(s) of Genesis would have held remotely the same view, or seen the actions of Potiphar's wife in remotely the same light. It is chronological snobbery to impose very modern, very Western, very bourgeois definitions of rape (or, for that matter, sexual harassment) on ancient texts.
3) The terms used for rape in the Tanakh are never used as transitive verbs to describe sexual acts with a grown man as the subject. Any postulated instance of rape (or sexual harassment) against men in the Tanakh necessarily requires eisegesis.
Exodvs (
talk) 04:20, 18 December 2022 (UTC)
![]() | This article was nominated for deletion on October 12 2006. The result of the discussion was Delete. |
![]() | This article is rated B-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
This article unequivocally paints the Hebrew Bible as misogynistic. Perhaps we could make it a tad more balanced? There are, after all, many Christian/Jewish feminists who do not see the Hebrew Bible as demeaning to women. Sure, there are a couple of sentences in this article which do not support the idea that the Hebrew Bible is pro-rape, but they are too few and far between.
@ StAnselm:, care to comment? :) Johanna (formerly BenLinus1214) talk to me! see my work 02:37, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
Dear Johanna, With all do respect, let's not pretend that you created this article for any reason other than making the Bible look bad. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:18D:4501:C8FF:6DE2:6F03:534D:5784 ( talk) 02:57, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
@ MagicatthemovieS: I see you're active on the page, so could you possibly respond to some of the comments on this thread? Johanna (formerly BenLinus1214) talk to me! see my work 01:51, 6 October 2015 (UTC)
I agree with StAnselm that the section on Deuteronomy 22 needs to be more balanced, however I think that the "Major Prophets" section of this page could especially use some quotes from works defending the Bible. That section also needs a sentence or two about the difference between approving of rape and using a rape metaphor. Also, what on earth does Isaiah 1:16–17 have to do with rape?
@ Johanna:Thanks for your edits; however, I see no reference to rape in Isaiah 3:16–17, and there is only a relatively short passage in the "Major Prophets" section that defends the Bible.
@ MagicatthemovieS: I was wondering if you could give me an update on your thoughts on the neutrality of the article now. :) Johanna (formerly BenLinus1214) talk to me! see my work 03:26, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
@ Johanna:The beginning of the "Analysis, interpretation and criticism" section desperately needs balancing.
Finding a bizarre line about the "scientifically documented beaver of a rapist", I changed it to "scientifically documented behavior of a rapist" as an obvious Freudian slip. However, when I checked the source, I found no such line in the book cited (Scholz, Susanne (2000)). I checked the author's other cited publication, but it also does not appear. A Google search revealed several texts in which the line appears, with this [1] seeming to be the direct source (though the phrase appears to come from a digest of questions about Genesis, found here and elsewhere). The words are quoted, and a footnote number is given, but there are no footnotes present in the online version. More worryingly, the text surrounding this quotation seems to have been copied word for word from the web-source. So we appear to have problem of plagiarism, supplemented by the possibly intentional mis-attribution of a quotation which could not easily be sourced. This is the only part of the text I have checked. I think it may require a more detailed going over. At the moment I have time only to tag it. Paul B ( talk) 09:45, 27 June 2015 (UTC)
As for the wrong niqqud signs, any Hebrew dictionary will do. עִנָה and עָנָה are completely different words, but both are words. This is why you can find both in biblehub.com. This wiki dictionary article has both words: <ref>
https://he.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%A2%D7%A0%D7%94Cite error: The opening <ref>
tag is malformed or has a bad name (see the
help page). you can also use morfix, an English Hebrew online dictionary, that again makes the distinction. <ref>
https://www.morfix.co.il/%D7%A2%D7%A0%D7%94Cite error: The opening <ref>
tag is malformed or has a bad name (see the
help page). as for the niqqud of the other words, I suggest you type them into morfix without niqqud and see the niqqud and meanings it spits out, morfix is a great tool.
Yotsuba-Nyaa (
talk) 07:13, 2 June 2021 (UTC)
You are welcome! I'm happy to contribute to Wikipedia when I can, as for whether the pronunciation has shifted in modern Hebrew, to my best of knowledge, we can't know for sure, but I happen to know an expert in the field and I will ask him (and of course find a citable source, to avoid OR). I will fix the niqqud in a few days, as I need to ask the man and also quite busy. Yotsuba-Nyaa ( talk) 19:42, 2 June 2021 (UTC)
I have added a "refimprove" tag to the article. At the moment, the sourcing is rather poor. Having opinion pieces from HuffPost and Alternet when there has been so much serious scholarship published on the subject is a very bad sign. St Anselm ( talk) 02:22, 4 July 2015 (UTC)
Should a discussion of Lot's daughters be included here? Some scholars use the word "rape" in relation to the incident of Genesis 19:30-36. See Esther Fuchs, Sexual Politics in the Biblical Narrative: Reading the Hebrew Bible as a Woman, p. 209, " presenting his daughters as the initiators and perpetrators of incestuous 'rape'". However, I note this isn't mentioned in the article on Lot (biblical person) - no, indeed, is there an article here on Lot's daughters. St Anselm ( talk) 19:55, 7 July 2015 (UTC)
I plan to create the article when I get a free moment. St Anselm ( talk) 03:53, 8 July 2015 (UTC)
There is nothing in the Bible to state that the angels were male. That's later interpretation. -- KimYunmi ( talk) 00:30, 27 May 2018 (UTC)
Dear colleagues,
I noticed that the verb שָׁגַל (šāgal, shagel) is
used 4 times in the Hebrew Bible, namely Deuteronomy 28:30, Isaiah 13:16, Jeremiah 3:2, Zechariah 14:2. As stated, the verb could mean '(vulgar) to ravish, to rape, to violate, (euphemistic translation) to lie with'. I'm convinced that 'to rape' is the best translation for Deut 28:30, Isa 13:16 and Zech 14:2, but Jer 3:2 poses a special problem. Superficially, the context of Jer 3:2 (which I take to be Jeremiah chapter 1 to 3) seems to fit the pattern of a prophetic passage in which a personified capital city (in this case Jerusalem, representing the Kingdom of Judah) is threatened with rape, but on closer examination, the verse Jer 3:2 doesn't fit in, for 3 reasons:
Importantly, I was also unable to find any Bible translations nor good scholarly sources which interpret Jer 3:2's שָׁגַל šāgal as 'to rape'. I think something like 'Is there any place where you have not been ravished?' (NIV) or 'Is there any place where you have not allowed yourself to be sexually defiled / deviant?' is a good approximation of the original Hebrew. Jerusalem allowed it to happen with her consent, and seems to have enjoyed it, but Yahweh / the author essentially thinks she's a dirty slut who has made herself unclean, immoral, promiscuous, but doesn't seem to think she was raped.
Other than that, Jeremiah 1–3 seems to fit the whole established pattern, except that 'rape' is not one of the threatened punishments. There is also some metaphorical confusion as to what kind of woman Judah/Jerusalem is in relation to Yahweh: a wife? A daughter? The sister of his (other) ex-wife / daughter Israel/Samaria? The other prophets either portray the capital city as the wife or the (virgin) daughter of Yahweh; but in Jeremiah, Judah/Jerusalem and Israel/Samaria seem to be both simultaneously, as well as each other's 'sisters', with Yahweh having 'divorced' Israel/Samaria already in 3:8 (probably a poetic reference to the Assyrian conquest of Samaria in 722 BCE). These are my findings:
So, it becomes clear that it almost fits the pattern we see in the other prophets, but as there appears to be no rape in Jeremiah 3:2, it cannot be included in our list. Scholars also do find the pattern in Jeremiah 13, but not in Jeremiah 3. Greetings, Nederlandse Leeuw ( talk) 11:11, 18 November 2021 (UTC)
Dear colleagues,
I'm going to introduce the
New International Version (NIV) as the standard English translation for quotations in this article, and will refer to Biblehub for references. There are too many arbitrarily chosen editions in this article, resulting in an inconsistent treatment of the source texts and thus the topic. Especially the King James Version (KJV) is, scholarly speaking, an unreliable, often incomprehensible and thus unhelpful edition for this article's purposes. The NIV is arguably the most widely accepted modern critical English translation, and strikes a very good balance between accurate translation and understandable formulation. Some editions such as the NRSV are arguably even more reliable from a scholarly point of view, but not as widely accepted (and not, for example, available on Biblehub). Whenever it seems necessary or helpful, I will quote other translations along with or even instead of the NIV (e.g. in the case of Dinah). In particular, the KJV does retain its importance in the history of English-language interpretation and commentary of the Bible, although it is no longer the standard in modern Anglophone society. I will also write '[Yahweh]' instead of 'the Lord' for consistency's sake and because this is standard practice amongst scholars. I will uphold American spelling as used in NIV quotations, but my own texts follow British English. Cheers,
Nederlandse Leeuw (
talk) 12:12, 17 December 2021 (UTC)
The description of the account given of
Joseph with
Potiphar's wife fails as "rape" in three areas.
1) The author(s) of Genesis never mention intercourse actually taking place. Potiphar's wife propositions Joseph repeatedly, but she never, consensually or otherwise, has physical relations with Joseph.
2) The ancient Levant had no concept of rape against men, and the concept some editors of this page hold of rape against men did not arise in a vacuum. The definition of rape, held by those who insist on maintaining a section in article on Genesis 39 with its original wording, which includes adult, male victims, arose very recently, in only certain parts of the world. The layers of coincidence and serendipity of chronology and location which had to coalesce for someone to even conceive of Genesis 39 depicting rape or sexual harassment is astounding. Even if the authors of the sources cited in the article believe with all their hearts that Joseph could lawyer up in some rich, Western nation and file a harassment suit against Potiphar's wife, this does not mean that the author(s) of Genesis would have held remotely the same view, or seen the actions of Potiphar's wife in remotely the same light. It is chronological snobbery to impose very modern, very Western, very bourgeois definitions of rape (or, for that matter, sexual harassment) on ancient texts.
3) The terms used for rape in the Tanakh are never used as transitive verbs to describe sexual acts with a grown man as the subject. Any postulated instance of rape (or sexual harassment) against men in the Tanakh necessarily requires eisegesis.
Exodvs (
talk) 04:20, 18 December 2022 (UTC)