In the Bible, prostitutes are great

Over and over, they save the day.

Growing up Christian, I was told a lot of “facts” about the Bible, like that it was a long, long book about God hating sex. I decided to read up on the subject for myself, and found I’d been deceived. There’s no biblical laws, for example, against prostitution. It’s not a close call. It’s obvious. “Many states and countries today have made prostitution illegal. But nowhere in the law codes of the Hebrew Bible does any such prohibition appear,” notes An Introduction to the Hebrew Bible.

“Outside the cultic and priestly circles, however, no laws seem to have banned prostitution or denounced it,” as Ilan Peled puts it in Law and Gender in the Ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible.

“Prostitution in the narratives and in the corpora is neither a criminal act nor an illegal activity,” as Irene E. Riegner puts it in The Vanishing Hebrew Harlot.

So let’s buckle up and get some facts on the Bible and prostitutes. They’re usually heroines.

So let’s go through some basic facts about the Bible and sex because Christians are often deeply misled on this subject.

The body and sexuality are, in general, good—from Genesis 1 on. There is no assertion of human evil in the Bible. And sex, throughout the Old Testament…