10 Sex Facts About the Bible
Did the traditions get a few things wrong?
When I set out to learn about sex in the Bible, I kept saying: Can this be true? A God who really likes human sexuality?
In church, one tends to get a G-rated version. But Bible scholars evoke a text alive with sexual details. Here’s ten that got my attention.
1. The human body is divine!
In the Bible, humans resemble God. This is the meaning of the line in Genesis: “made in the image of God” (1:26–28; 5:1–3; 9:6).
Christian tradition often explains this as meaning humans can reason or think. Except the ‘image’ language, as David J.A. Clines notes, refers to “a three-dimensional object.”
Being the “image of God” means we look like God.
As Benjamin Sommer notes in a study of the subject: “The God of the Hebrew Bible has a body.” The deity is often seen as a human-like form (cf. Exo 33:19–23; Isa 6:5; Ezek 1:27–28; Amos 9:1).
God made humans to look like Him, and seems to like the erotic body He has made. We listen to the man in Song of Songs 7:1: “The curves of your thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a master craftsman…”
