I knew not everyone would agree with me, but I didn’t think it was an especially hot take. In fact, I thought I was offering an olive branch of sorts to complementarians, saying that we agree on more than is usually assumed.

It didn’t go over that way.

I think I got more pushback on that Note than I have on anything else I’ve posted on Substack. I got so much pushback that a couple of my friends messaged me about the pushback I was getting! But—as is typical of my corner of Substack—(almost) all my interlocutors were thoughtful and polite, so I’m grateful that they took the time to engage.

The sort of objections that they were raising were bigger than what can be hashed out in the comments section of a Note on a holiday weekend. So I decided to launch a six-week series on the household codes in Ephesians 5:21–6:9 and Colossians 3:18–4:1. (There’s a lot to cover!) These verses contain instructions for husbands and wives, children and parents, and slaves and masters in the churches in Ephesus and Colossae.

As is undoubtedly already obvious, I approach these passages as an egalitarian.1 But I try to handle the text as evenhandedly as I can. My goal here isn’t to make you an egalitarian. If you’re a firm complementarian, know that you’re welcome to join us on this ride. I hope that, by the end of this series, we’ll all understand the household codes better than we did when we started. And maybe we can even build some common ground and mutual understanding along the way!

What Are the Household Codes?

In Ephesians 5:21–6:9 and Colossians 3:18–4:1, Paul addresses three pairs of household relationships—wives and husbands, children and parents, and slaves and masters. Each passage goes something like this:

Wives, submit to your husbands.
Husbands, love your wives.

Children, obey your parents.
Parents, do not provoke your children.

Slaves, obey your masters.
Masters, don’t threaten your slaves.

They’re essentially mini manuals of household order, answering this question: “What should relationships look like in a Christian household?”

Consistency Is Key

Here’s the biggest mistake that I think most twenty-first-century Christians—complementarians and egalitarians alike—make when reading the household codes: We pull them apart, as if we can separate out each of the three pairs and pick and choose the ones that “still apply.”

Almost everyone agrees that the instructions to slaves/masters don’t apply literally to today. (Some people try to draw parallels to employee/employer relationships, but we don’t think that these verses permanently endorse the institution of slavery.)

Almost everyone agrees that the instructions to children/parents do apply literally to today. It seems like common sense. Kids and teens need the guidance of their parents because their brains aren’t fully formed, right?

And when it comes to wives/husbands, there isn’t a broad consensus—some Christians believe that these passages endorse hierarchy and/or one-way submission in all times and cultures, while others don’t.

But there’s a pretty big problem with this framing—regardless of where you land on the husband-wife relationship. The Ephesians passage and the Colossians passage are each a single literary unit. We can’t pull them apart like … well, cinnamon pull-aparts. If we want to take the text seriously, we must use the same interpretive principles when interpreting and applying each pairing. If we find ourselves using different exegetical methods for wives/husbands, children/parents, and slaves/masters, we’re not interpreting the text on its own terms.

“Okay,” you might say. “The husband/wife relationship is a picture of Christ and the church, and the parent/child relationship is grounded in one of the Ten Commandments. This is treated differently than the slave/master relationship.”

But the slave/master relationship is also used metaphorically. In Ephesians 6:5, the enslaved are entreated to obey their masters “as to Christ.” And throughout his letters, Paul uses the slave/master relationship as a metaphor for Christ and the Christian far more often than he uses marriage as a metaphor for Christ and the Church. (Also, in the Colossians passage, marriage isn’t used as a metaphor at all; the slave/master relationship is the only one of the three pairs that you could argue is used metaphorically there.)

“Okay,” you might continue, “but marriage and parenthood are natural institutions, and slavery isn’t. And marriage, which parenthood naturally follows, is a pre-Fall institution,”

And this is a good point! The Bible treats marriage and parenthood as a natural good; it treats slavery as something to coolly tolerate (and strictly regulate), both in the Old and New Testaments. But that still doesn’t give us license to treat the household codes like cinnamon pull-aparts. We certainly bring those distinctions to bear on our readings of marriage, slavery, and parenthood in the Bible. But we still need to read each of these passages consistently, as a unit, because Paul wrote them as a unit.

Does this mean that we have to either endorse slavery or give fourteen-year-olds permission to defy the curfew their parents have imposed on them? By no means! But we may need to rethink the way in which these particular passages give us guidance about relationships within a Christian household.

How to Read New Testament Letters

Before we move forward, I want to go over a little bit of New Testament 101.

When we read New Testament letters, it’s easy to forget that the letter wasn’t written to us. They’re written to real people in real cultures in response to real situations. And their recipients were usually asking different questions than we are.

In short, even the letters are embedded in a story. Take 1 Corinthians, for example. The story behind 1 Corinthians is that Paul founded the church in Corinth and stayed there teaching them for many months. After he left, fractious divisions broke out in the church. Church leaders sent a letter to Paul asking for his advice about specific situations. (But we don’t know what their letter said; we have to take our best guess.) Separately, Paul heard additional details about what was going on from people in Chloe’s household—perhaps these were details that the church leadership hadn’t really wanted him to hear. And so Paul writes a sharp but loving letter, telling them to put aside their fractious disagreements and love each other. He also weighs in on some of their big questions.

In short, reading New Testament letters is like hearing one half of a phone call. We know that Paul was writing the words of God, but we have to be careful not to misapply his words, especially if we might be asking different questions than the letter’s original audience.

For an example, I’m going to pick on the Church of Christ. (Sorry to any CoC readers—I’m only using y’all as an example because my mom’s family has deep CoC roots.) Ephesians 5:19 says, “Sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making music to the Lord in your hearts.” Because early Church of Christ thinkers were using Ephesians to answer their questions (in this case, “How should we organize our church services today?”) instead of first focusing on what Paul was saying to the original audience, they concluded that using instruments in worship was unauthorized. The music should be made singing and in our hearts, not by instruments!2

And so, for many years, Churches of Christ taught that using instruments in worship would send you to hell. I’m not even exaggerating. (My understanding is that the vast majority of the CoC has relaxed on this point in recent years—a cappella music is still a CoC distinctive, but few congregations would call instrumental worship a damnable sin.)

So, in this series, we’ll get to application: How do we apply these passages to our own time and culture? But we’re not going to start with us. We’ll begin by asking, “How would these verses have sounded to their original audience?”

Next week, we’re going to dive into historical context and look at the typical household structure in Paul’s day. What would have been the church’s baseline understanding of household relationships? What questions might they have been asking?

I hope you’ll join us.

If you’d like to participate in the work I’m doing, here are the links!

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ICYMI

For me, it’s been a long time. So long, in fact, that I can’t remember if I’ve ever heard a sermon on Philemon.

And I understand why. Philemon’s contents can seem uncomfortable to our modern ears. It’s also Paul’s weirdest letter—it’s not immediately obvious how a pastor should preach it.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not weird that Paul wrote Philemon. Paul probably wrote a number of personal letters over the course of his ministry.

But it’s odd that the Church preserved this one, isn’t it? Philemon is totally unlike the other canonical letters—it’s written to an individual to address a household matter.

So why did it make it into our Bibles? Let’s explore the letter’s background.

How Did Onesimus Run Into Paul?

Like the rest of Paul’s letters, the letter is named for its recipient—it’s the Epistle (Letter) to Philemon. But the letter isn’t only addressed to Philemon. Paul also addresses it to Apphia (perhaps Philemon’s wife), Archippus, and the church that meets in Philemon’s house.

Why is this detail important? Because this letter wasn’t intended as private correspondence—Philemon hosts a house church, and the whole church would have gathered to hear Paul’s letter read aloud.

The letter, of course, concerns an enslaved man named Onesimus. Somehow, Onesimus left Philemon’s house in Colossae and ended up at least a hundred miles away, visiting an imprisoned Paul, probably in Ephesus.1 Now, Paul is sending Onesimus back to Philemon and passive-aggressively twisting Philemon’s arm to ensure that Onesimus is treated kindly.

You’ve probably been taught that Onesimus was a runaway slave, and maybe that he stole some household goods on his way out the door. But Paul doesn’t actually say that Onesimus was a runaway. The letter doesn’t tell us how Onesimus ended up with him. We have to fill in those blanks.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Interpretation inevitably involves imagination. And I suspect that the traditional interpretation is wrong, and that Onesimus wasn’t a runaway. I have a hard time imagining how or why a runaway Onesimus would’ve crossed paths with Paul.

Paul was imprisoned—it wasn’t like they happened to recognize each other on the street. Onesimus, who was not a Christian, came to Paul. Why would a runaway slave waltz up to their enslaver’s imprisoned friend? To me, it doesn’t pass the smell test.

It seems more likely that Onesimus went missing specifically to seek Paul out, to ask for help in dealing with a difficult situation at home. In Paul’s day, the enslaved sometimes went AWOL in order to seek out one of their enslaver’s friends to advocate on their behalf, particularly if they felt they were being exceptionally mistreated or if some sort of conflict had exploded between themselves and their enslaver.2 Legally, this wasn’t considered the same thing as running away. However, when the slave returned, we can imagine that an enslaver might still be angry—whether about the initial conflict, the slave’s absence, or the involvement of a third party—and might rain down severe consequences on the hapless slave.

So, Onesimus has likely come to Paul because he knows that Paul has influence on Philemon. And in the course of their conversations, Onesimus becomes a Christian. We don’t know the details of his interaction with Paul, but we can conclude that it proved a far more compelling draw to faith than his experience in Philemon’s house.

Paul, Passive-Aggressive by the Will of God

Let’s talk about the text of the letter to Philemon.

Y’all.

Paul pulled out all the stops when he wrote this letter. The letter is short, so I’m going to quote it in full here, interjecting some commentary—but please don’t just skim over the text. I want you to read it—out loud, if you can—and imagine the scene.

Onesimus returns to Philemon’s home carrying a letter from Paul. Remember how the letter is addressed to Philemon, Apphia, Archippus, and the whole church in Philemon’s house? That means that the reading of this letter is going to be an event. Philemon isn’t going to read it to himself in private. It will be dramatically read aloud to everyone—perhaps even read by Onesimus. (In the Roman world, urban slaves were often educated and literate.)

So, imagine Onesimus reading the letter out loud to the whole church. Where does he pause? Choke up? Give lingering looks? How does Philemon’s rich neighbor react? What about the enslaved members of Philemon’s household?

Pay particular attention to the lines I’ve bolded. (Translation is NRSVUE.)

Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus, and Timothy our brother,

To Philemon our dear friend and co-worker, to Apphia our sister, to Archippus our fellow soldier, and to the church in your house:

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

When I remember you in my prayers, I always thank my God because I hear of your love for all the saints and your faith toward the Lord Jesus. I pray that the sharing of your faith may become effective when you perceive all the good that we may do for Christ. I have indeed received much joy and encouragement from your love, because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you, my brother.

So, everyone is hearing Paul shower compliments on Philemon for his love for all the saints. (Do the household slaves agree with this assessment?)

Paul prays that Philemon’s sharing of his faith may become effective when Philemon perceives the good he may do. Has Philemon been ineffective at sharing the faith with the enslaved members of his own household, perhaps because he has not refreshed them as he has refreshed the saints?

For this reason, though I am bold enough in Christ to command you to do your duty, yet I would rather appeal to you on the basis of love—and I, Paul, do this as an old man, and now also as a prisoner of Christ Jesus. I am appealing to you for my child, Onesimus, whose father I have become during my imprisonment. Formerly he was useless to you, but now he is indeed useful both to you and to me. I am sending him, that is, my own heart, back to you. I wanted to keep him with me, so that he might be of service to me in your place during my imprisonment for the gospel; but I preferred to do nothing without your consent, in order that your good deed might be voluntary and not something forced. Perhaps this is the reason he was separated from you for a while, so that you might have him back forever, no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother—especially to me but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord.

Again, remember, everyone is hearing this. Maybe Paul isn’t forcing Philemon’s hand, but he’s certainly twisting his arm.

A side note: What does it mean for Onesimus to be Philemon’s brother in the flesh and in the Lord? Tim Gombis has argued that Philemon and Onesimus may have been biological half-brothers, and I’m very intrigued by this idea.

So if you consider me your partner, welcome him as you would welcome me. If he has wronged you in any way, or owes you anything, charge that to my account. I, Paul, am writing this with my own hand: I will repay it. I say nothing about your owing me even your own self. Yes, brother, let me have this benefit from you in the Lord! Refresh my heart in Christ. Confident of your obedience, I am writing to you, knowing that you will do even more than I say.

One thing more—prepare a guest room for me, for I am hoping through your prayers to be restored to you.

Epaphras, my fellow prisoner in Christ Jesus, sends greetings to you, and so do Mark, Aristarchus, Demas, and Luke, my fellow workers.

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.

Again. Y’all. EVERYONE IS HEARING THIS. And Paul even suggests that he’s going to come check up on the situation himself—as soon as he’s no longer imprisoned.

How can Philemon possibly give Onesimus anything but a warm welcome after this? He’d lose face—which would have been far more intolerable in his culture than it is in most of ours—if he rained down severe consequences on Onesimus.

In short, Paul doesn’t send back a defenseless slave to an uncertain fate. He sets up the situation so that Philemon ostensibly has a choice—when, really, Paul has constrained Philemon’s choices. (At least if Philemon ever wants to show his face among members of the church again.)

Did Philemon Free Onesimus?

So, what happened to Onesimus after he returned to Philemon? Perhaps Philemon manumitted him and sent him back to Paul. If we date Paul’s letter to the Colossians in the years after the letter to Philemon, this seems the likeliest outcome—Tychicus and Onesimus bring the letter to the Colossians to Colossae (Colossians 4:7-9).

Or perhaps Philemon welcomed him back home as a beloved brother and freed him either right away or at a later date. We can only speculate about the details. But I believe we can say with a fair bit of certainty that Onesimus did, indeed, get a happily-ever-after. Here’s why.

We still have the letter.

If Onesimus had been harshly treated, why would the Colossian church have preserved the letter at all? It’d have been an embarrassing episode that everyone tried to forget. But they preserved the letter.

Some scholars believe that Onesimus, later, was instrumental in gathering, compiling, and circulating the earliest collection of Paul’s letters.3 As Onesimus decided which letters to include, it makes sense that he saw particular value in this one. If Onesimus wasn’t the compiler of Paul’s letters, then perhaps he knew the compiler. Perhaps the compiler was someone else from Colossae who remembered this situation, someone who loved Onesimus. Or maybe Onesimus became someone well-known in the church, and so it made sense for them to preserve this piece of history.

Onesimus may even have become the bishop of Ephesus! (Ignatius writes glowingly of Ephesus’s bishop, named Onesimus.)4 The theory that this is Paul’s Onesimus has a ring of plausibility to me, but we can’t hold to it with any certainty—Onesimus was a common slave name.

But here’s what we can say—in the early second century, a former slave became the bishop of Ephesus (for the name Onesimus was only given to enslaved boys) and was praised by Ignatius, using language that closely echoes the letter to Philemon. Even if they’re not the same person, Ignatius seems to be aware of Paul’s letter to Philemon and eager to draw parallels between the two Onesimuses.5

That’ll Preach

The letter to Philemon is almost certainly in the Bible because Paul’s arm-twisting worked.

This strange little book of the Bible shows us how words can shape the trajectory of a person and a church, that advocacy matters. It shows that broken relationships can be mended when we repent and change the way we treat people—as beloved brothers and sisters in the Lord. It shows how the Kingdom of God overturns hierarchies of status, that the people society deems unimportant matter greatly to God—and should matter in the Church.

In short, this book preaches. I hope we’ll hear more sermons on it.

If you’d like to participate in the work I’m doing, here are the links!

Have a question or an insight? Agree or disagree with something I’ve said? Have another passage that you’d like to see me wrestle with in an upcoming post? Or just wanna hit “like”?

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ICYMI

It goes something like this:

“Women should stay pure until marriage, but men should gain experience.”

In the comments, you can invariably find retorts along the lines of: “How are these men gaining experience if the women are all virgins?”

We’ll get there.

The ancient lie has never fully gone away—for most of human history, women have suffered the brunt of sexual double standards. But today, I’d like to bring this lie into conversation with an ancient writer who had a thing or two to say about it: the Apostle Paul.

Roman Purity Culture

In Paul’s day, a woman’s social value hinged on her sex life. (Or, more accurately, on the public’s perception of her sex life!)

A respectable Roman woman was expected to remain a virgin until she married and to remain faithful to her husband thereafter—and to publicly behave in ways that didn’t call her chastity (or purity) into question. Roman “purity culture” was exacting—even experiencing unwanted catcalling in public could damage a woman’s reputation. (A man could be sued for the damage he caused to a free woman’s reputation by harassing her on the street!)

Roman men, on the other hand, freely engaged in premarital and extramarital sex. Adultery, which was a crime, meant extramarital sex with a married woman. A man couldn’t commit adultery against his wife. He only committed adultery if he slept with another man’s wife. And the Romans weren’t unique on this point—this was pretty standard in the ancient world.

(It was also a crime—of lesser severity—to sleep with a respectable marriageable woman.)

“But wait,” you might ask. “If the women were sexually off-limits, who were the men sleeping with?”

But it’s an easy answer: Disposable women.1

All societies that demand chastity of women while permitting men to satisfy their lusts cultivate a class of honorless women—usually enslaved women and prostitutes—to sate men’s sexual appetites.

At times, the Romans could muster sympathy for enslaved prostitutes. But they rarely questioned the necessity of prostitution. These women played an indispensable role in society—with their bodies, they paid “the price of the chastity of freeborn wives [and] daughters.”2 The Romans couldn’t conceive of a world in which men must limit themselves. So they separated women into two categories: the chaste and the unchaste, the virgin/matron and the whore. Prostitution was integral to Roman “purity culture.”

In the second-century novel Leucippe and Clitophon, the respectable heroine maintains her virginity against all odds—as the heroines always do in these stories. In the course of the adventure, Leucippe meets her doppelgänger, an “ill-starred woman,” a prostitute who ends up beheaded in Leucippe’s place. The novel does not pretend that the prostitute deserves death in some moral sense. But neither does it question the ultimate fittingness of the outcome—fate has destined the honorable woman for one path and the honorless woman for another.3

Paul Would Like a Word

But Paul rejects the sexual double standard.

When he hears that Christian men in Corinth are visiting brothels, he sharply rebukes them (1 Corinthians 6:12-20). These men have internalized the norms of their culture and are dressing up their behavior in (incorrect) theological language, claiming that they have the right to go to brothels. After all, the body is disposable, so it doesn’t matter what they do with their bodies!

(Yet, imagine their reaction if their wives, daughters, or sisters claimed that same bodily freedom!)

In response, Paul does the unimaginable—he restricts male sexuality in the same way that female sexuality was restricted. Throughout 1 Corinthians 7, his longest treatment of sex and marriage, he pairs reciprocal statements about men and women. I cannot overemphasize how radical Paul was about marriage.

Each man should have his own wife? Each woman should have her own husband!

The husband has authority over his wife’s body? The wife has authority over her husband’s body!

For Paul, men and women have equal rights and responsibilities in their sexual behavior.

The Great Reversal

This might be striking enough on its own, a blow against the sexual double standards that have destroyed the lives of so many women over the centuries. But it’s especially arresting in light of Paul’s discussion of honor in the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12.

In this chapter, Paul begins with a discussion of spiritual gifts. Some members of the congregation are ranking spiritual gifts, especially speaking in tongues. But Paul insists that gifts are given by the Holy Spirit and that everyone—regardless of spiritual gift—is equally a member of the body, interdependent on every other member. This controversy over spiritual gifts may have fallen along socioeconomic lines. It’s possible that this was yet another division between the “strong” and the “weak” (which probably means “rich” and “poor,” respectively), and that speaking in tongues was especially practiced and valued by the wealthy.4

In any case, Paul takes the opportunity to extend the metaphor of the body of Christ to the question of social status.5 Paul writes, “Those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect” (1 Corinthians 12:23).

This contrasts sharply with typical Greco-Roman usage of the body as a metaphor for human society. Paul, with a sly wink, refashions a common metaphor into something radically topsy-turvy—“the genitals may seem to be the most shameful part of the body, but our very attention to them—our constant care to cover them and shield them from trivializing and vulgarizing public exposure—demonstrates that they are actually the most necessary of the body’s members, those with the highest status.”6

In short, Paul weaponizes an image of Roman hierarchy against itself while assuring the weak that they belong, fully and completely, to the body.

But Paul does not merely argue for flat equality but for a reversal of hierarchy, where those with the lowest worldly status receive the most honor.7 Driving the point home, he claims that this reversal comes from none other than God himself: “God has so arranged the body, giving greater honor to the inferior member” (1 Corinthians 12:24).

If, in the body of Christ, the weaker members are indispensable and the members thought less honorable are clothed with greater honor, then God does not simply make room for the low. He reverses the normal scales of human valuation. Neglected, devalued people aren’t pushed to the margins of the church’s concern but drawn toward its center.

And this ought to impact not just how the Corinthians see themselves spiritually, but how they treat each other in real, embodied ways—that “there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it” (1 Corinthians 12:25-26).

In this ordering of the Kingdom of God, an honorless woman sits atop the hierarchy. She is more valued than the men in the congregation, more honored than their respectable, chaste, freeborn wives and daughters. And if she possesses that much honor, it follows that there ought to be no class of dishonored women to satisfy the sexual appetites of men.

Paul makes chastity a male virtue, but he also strikes a blow at the very logic of dishonor that makes the Roman sexual system possible. For if an enslaved woman, too, is a woman of honor, she ought not be sexually available so that “better” women can remain chaste.

Instead, the men ought to exercise the same level of self-control as the women.

A Christian sexual ethic does not hold double standards.

Addendum: How, Then, Should We Live?

Chastity is an old-fashioned word, but I like it. In our current cultural moment, it comes with less baggage than some of its close synonyms. As Christians, men and women alike, we ought to live chastely—which, at the risk of oversimplification, means celibacy if unmarried and faithfulness if married—and teach others to do so.

(Lest I be misunderstood, our methods shouldn’t heap shame on people. We need to talk about these issues with immense care and remain pastorally sensitive in our approach. And after a person has repented, God looks forward, not backward. May we do likewise.)

And when we see Christians promote a sexual double standard—especially when we see it happen in person or among people we know in real life—let’s follow Paul as Paul follows Christ, and push back.

You can tell them, “The Apostle Paul would like a word.”

If you’d like to participate in the work I’m doing, here are the links!

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ICYMI

Also, I graduated on Saturday! (So … hopefully I pass this class.)

Since I’m in class for eight hours a day this week, I don’t have a full-length post for you. But I wanted to bring you a mini-post based on class notes—and make an announcement about something new I’m adding on Substack!

Daily Bread

You’re probably familiar with the Lord’s Prayer (or the Our Father). It’s the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples, used liturgically in Christian worship from the earliest days of the Church. Let’s focus on two lines of the prayer (Luke 11:3-4, NRSVUE):

Give us each day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins,
for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.

“Daily bread” evokes God’s provision of bread in the wilderness in ancient days, when honey-tinged manna fell from heaven (Exodus 16). But! There’s a potential translation issue here. This line likely should be translated as: “Give us today our bread for tomorrow.”1

Tomorrow’s bread, not today’s.

But … doesn’t that mess up the reference to manna in the wilderness? God gave a rule: the Israelites gathered only the manna that they would eat that day—maggots infested the leftovers. In this way, the people practiced trust in God’s ongoing provision.

Well, the answer is found in the exception to the rule. On Fridays, the Israelites gathered two days’ worth of food so that they could rest on Sabbath and still eat their fill.

Paul Sloan draws a connection to the Jubilee year described in Leviticus 25. In that text, God promises to provide extra crop in the sixth year so that the Israelites can refrain from planting in the seventh, letting the land rest.2 After seven of these seven-year cycles, the people were to observe a year of Jubilee, forgiving all debts and returning land that had been sold off, so that generational poverty could never grow roots in the land.

We don’t have evidence that Israel ever observed Jubilee in a widespread fashion, but its inclusion in the Law speaks to the heart of God.

In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus teaches us to pray that God would give us our bread for tomorrow and that he would forgive our sins as we forgive the debts of others. Sounds like Jubilee!

What would it mean to let this aspect of the Lord’s Prayer shape how we pray and how we practice?

Announcement: We Have a Group Chat!

For a few weeks, I’ve been thinking of taking advantage of Substack’s subscriber-only chat feature, and I’ve decided to open up a chat for my paid subscribers.

As my list of paid subscribers has grown, I’ve found that many of you have big, important questions on similar themes. I think it’s valuable to have a place to wrestle with those questions in a semi-private community rather than on the truly open internet. And looking down the road, as our community continues to grow—and especially once I start my next degree program in August—individual DM exchanges are going to become less and less sustainable.

So, if you’re joining us there, bring your questions, your ideas, your interesting textual connections. Let’s walk and wrestle with God together.

Subscribe now

For everyone else, we’ll continue having these conversations in the comments section—and I’m looking forward to it! Let’s learn from each other, in community.

If you’d like to participate in the work I’m doing, here are the links!

Have a question or an insight? Agree or disagree with something I’ve said? Have another passage that you’d like to see me wrestle with in an upcoming post? Or just wanna hit “like”?

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ICYMI

Abraham obeys, taking Isaac up the mountain, raising his knife to slay him as a sacrifice … and then an angel’s voice cries, “Do not harm him!” A ram caught in a nearby thicket becomes the acceptable sacrifice on Isaac’s behalf.

If we stop to think about it, it’s a disturbing story.

Often, we don’t stop to think about it, because Christian interpreters have long glossed over the episode by focusing on typology—saying that Isaac and the ram both point forward to Jesus, the Son of God, who was sacrificed on our behalf.

And sure—that’s one level of meaning. But by itself, that explanation doesn’t feel fully satisfying, does it? Why would God put Abraham (and Isaac!) through all that just to give us a little bit of dramatic foreshadowing? And didn’t this story need to have a point back when it was written? (I’m just saying.)

“Well, God is testing Abraham’s faith,” you might say. “By his willingness to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham proves that he is willing to remain faithful to God no matter what.” The story is often taught that way.

writes that the point isn’t Abraham’s faith but God’s intervention. In a world in which human sacrifice was normal, Abraham behaves according to expected tropes:

Abraham does not demonstrate tremendous faith in this story, nor does he fail significantly, he does exactly as you would expect someone in his time and culture to do. It is God’s interruption that is shocking. …

It is the shouting from the angel of the Lord that suddenly breaks the tension that had been building the entire narrative. This is the central point of the text, that Abraham acts exactly as you would expect, but Yahweh does not. …

In a world where the gods demanded the death of children, the God of Israel stopped the knife.

So, in Dodson’s reading, the story serves as a polemic against human sacrifice, demonstrating that, unlike the gods of the other nations, God does not require the sacrifice of his people’s children. In unison with the angel who intervenes to save Isaac, the story calls, “Do not harm him!” to parents who are contemplating the sacrifice of a child. Many Jewish readers—who don’t accept the typological reading for obvious reasons—concur on this interpretation.

That’s another puzzle piece that helps us make sense of the story.

But I want to propose another reading: We cannot understand the Binding of Isaac in Genesis 22 apart from Abraham’s treatment of Hagar in Genesis 21.1 These two narratives have striking structural parallels and are separated by only one other story. They’re designed to be read side by side.

So, let’s put these two stories in conversation with each other and see what happens. Pay attention to the color-coordinated highlights in each set of passages that draw attention to parallel language or events! And let me know in the comments if you find additional connections that I didn’t highlight!

Beginning

Now Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, mocking Isaac. Therefore she said to Abraham, “Drive out this slave woman and her son, for the son of this slave woman shall not be an heir with my son Isaac!” The matter distressed Abraham greatly because of his son Ishmael. But God said to Abraham, “Do not be distressed because of the boy and your slave woman; whatever Sarah tells you, listen to her, for through Isaac your descendants shall be named. And of the son of the slave woman I will make a nation also, because he is your descendant.” (Genesis 21:9–13, NASB)

Now it came about after these things, that God tested Abraham, and said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then He said, “Take now your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I will tell you.” (Genesis 22:1–2)

So, Sarah—who has a history of badly mistreating Hagar—has turned her attention to Ishmael. Now that Sarah has birthed her own son, she resents Ishmael’s presence. It’s unclear if Ishmael is doing anything wrong here—the word translated as “mocking” can also just mean “laughing.” (It’s also a pun, because Isaac’s name means “laughter.”)

Perhaps Sarah has good reason for wanting to get Ishmael away from Isaac. Or maybe she’s just angry and resentful. Yet, this moment evokes an earlier incident in the Abraham-Sarah-Hagar saga—during Hagar’s pregnancy, a conflict arose between Hagar and Sarah. Then, Sarah treated Hagar so badly that Hagar fled into the wilderness, where she encountered God. With the memory of that story fresh in our minds, it takes little creativity to imagine what will happen next if Hagar and Ishmael remain with Sarah.

Whether to protect Isaac from Ishmael or to protect Ishmael (and Hagar) from Sarah—or both!—God tells Abraham to do as Sarah says and send them away. Abraham’s legacy will continue through Isaac, but God will not forget Ishmael. The enslaved Egyptian woman goes out, free, from Abraham’s household, just as the enslaved descendants of Abraham will one day go out from Egypt.

Fast forward to the next chapter. God again speaks to Abraham about a son: “Take now your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac.”

“Your only son.” That’s pointed wording, isn’t it? And in a sense, it’s true. Ishmael has been sent away fatherless; he is no longer a member of Abraham’s household. Isaac is the remaining son. But the language catches us, because we know that Abraham does have another son, now distant and estranged. The story takes this moment to remind us of Ishmael.

Provisions

So Abraham got up early in the morning and took bread and a skin of water, and gave them to Hagar, putting them on her shoulder, and gave her the boy, and sent her away. And she departed and wandered about in the wilderness of Beersheba. (Genesis 21:14)

So Abraham got up early in the morning and saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him and his son Isaac; and he split wood for the burnt offering, and set out and went to the place of which God had told him. (Genesis 22:3)

In both stories, Abraham gets up early in the morning and prepares supplies for a journey. For his own trip, he takes two enslaved men and a pack animal; they are well supplied for their week in the wilderness. But Hagar—embarking on a wilderness journey of indefinite length—receives only the bread and water she can carry on her shoulder.

Why is this detail so important? Well, God told Abraham that he could send out Hagar and Ishmael. He did not say that Abraham could send them out so poorly provisioned. And Abraham was wealthy! He could’ve easily spared a well-laden donkey, a couple of male bodyguards/guides to make sure she reached a city safely, and some personal wealth to ensure she could set herself up with something to live on. (We are invited here to remember, perhaps, Exodus 12:35–36—that when the Israelites left Egypt, they asked their Egyptian neighbors for clothing and gold and silver jewelry! But here, Hagar receives no such gifts.)

Abraham verbally expresses concern for Ishmael, but with his actions, he exhibits shockingly little concern for the lives of both Ishmael and Hagar.

Parent

When the water in the skin was used up, she left the boy under one of the bushes. Then she went and sat down opposite him, about a bowshot away, for she said, “May I not see the boy die!” And she sat opposite him, and raised her voice and wept. (Genesis 21:15–16)

On the third day Abraham raised his eyes and saw the place from a distance. Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey, and I and the boy will go over there; and we will worship and return to you.” And Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he took in his hand the fire and the knife. So the two of them walked on together. Isaac spoke to his father Abraham and said, “My father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” And he said, “Look, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” Abraham said, “God will provide for Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” So the two of them walked on together.

Then they came to the place of which God had told him; and Abraham built the altar there and arranged the wood, and bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. And Abraham reached out with his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son. (Genesis 22:4–10)

We reach the moment of highest tension in both stories—in each, the boy is about to die. Notice how differently each parent reacts. Hagar cannot watch; she lays Ishmael under a bush, walks away, and weeps.

But Abraham walks with his son. He is not only willing to watch his son die; he will plunge the knife into him with his own hand. He neither weeps nor cries out to God to spare his son.

Salvation

God heard the boy crying; and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What is the matter with you, Hagar? Do not fear, for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. Get up, lift up the boy, and hold him by the hand, for I will make a great nation of him.” Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water; and she went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink. (Genesis 21:17-19)

But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Do not reach out your hand against the boy, and do not do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me.” Then Abraham raised his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram caught in the thicket by its horns; and Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering in the place of his son. And Abraham named that place The Lord Will Provide, as it is said to this day, “On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.”

Then the angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time from heaven, and said, “By Myself I have sworn, declares the Lord, because you have done this thing and have not withheld your son, your only son, indeed I will greatly bless you, and I will greatly multiply your seed as the stars of the heavens and as the sand, which is on the seashore; and your seed shall possess the gate of their enemies. And in your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because you have obeyed My voice.” (Genesis 22:11-18)

In both stories, the angel of the Lord calls from heaven to intervene. Hagar and Abraham look up and notice the salvation that God has already provided—in one case a well, in the other a ram for sacrifice. And the angel reiterates that each boy will father a great nation.

When the angel speaks to Abraham the second time, he reiterates God’s promises from Genesis 12, 15, and 18. The link to Genesis 18 is especially interesting. In Genesis 18, right after the Lord tells Abraham that Sarah will give birth to Isaac, he reveals to Abraham the impending destruction of Sodom:

The LORD said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, seeing that Abraham shall become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? No, for I have chosen him, that he may charge his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing righteousness and justice; so that the LORD may bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.” (Genesis 18:17-19)

(An aside: Abraham then pleads for God to spare Sodom, negotiating over and over again. It’s interesting that Abraham is willing to negotiate with God for the city of Sodom, but he never pleads for his son’s life. I’ll likely return to this story in a few weeks to tease this idea out more. But this might suggest that there was more than one way for Abraham to pass God’s test.)2

Here, Abraham’s family is charged to do righteousness and justice so that the Lord may bring about what he’s promised. God suggests that there is some level of conditionality to his promise to Abraham and his descendants—they must do righteousness and justice.

It’s significant, then, that the text lingers on Hagar, that the story of Hagar and Ishmael in the desert parallels the Binding of Isaac.

Abraham has not done righteousness and justice for Hagar. He used her sexually for her fertility. He permitted Sarah’s abuse of her. And once Isaac was born, he sent Hagar and Ishmael out into the desert with nothing but the food and water they could carry.

Abraham has already sent one son out to his death—only divine intervention saves Ishmael. And then God commands Abraham to take the promised son to his death—and only divine intervention saves Isaac. The Binding of Isaac serves as both a limited judgment and a warning. Because Abraham, with his failure to do righteousness and justice, has violated the terms of the deal, God has every right to deal out judgment—to declare the covenant broken, end Abraham’s line, and choose someone else.

But he doesn’t. Because God is faithful even when we aren’t.

But Abraham still has to come face to face with what he’s done to Hagar and Ishmael. He, too, must experience the horror of nearly watching his son die, the dread of traveling for days in the wilderness, awaiting the inevitable.

Wives

And God was with the boy, and he grew; and he lived in the wilderness and became an archer. He lived in the wilderness of Paran, and his mother took a wife for him from the land of Egypt. (Genesis 21:20–21)

Then Abraham returned to his servants, and they set off together for Beersheba. And Abraham stayed in Beersheba.

Now it came about after these things, that Abraham was told, saying, “Behold, Milcah also has borne children to your brother Nahor: Uz his firstborn, Buz his brother, Kemuel (the father of Aram), Chesed, Hazo, Pildash, Jidlaph, and Bethuel”— and it was Bethuel who fathered Rebekah. These eight Milcah bore to Nahor, Abraham’s brother. His concubine, whose name was Reumah, also gave birth to Tebah, Gaham, Tahash, and Maacah. (Genesis 22:19–24).

Both accounts wrap up with a postscript about the wives of Ishmael and Isaac. Hagar finds Ishmael a wife from among her own people; though the full story of Isaac and Rebekah comes later, the text here alludes to Rebekah, who comes from Abraham’s own people.

This may just be another point of parallelism in the stories, and I don’t want to press it too hard. But I find it interesting that it ends here, on the subject of Ishmael’s and Isaac’s wives, since these stories are downstream of the conflict between Abraham’s wives (or more accurately, the primary wife’s behavior toward the secondary wife).

Between

One final detail—remember how I said that there’s one story that happens between these two accounts? It’s Abraham’s covenant with Abimelech. There, an exchange happens—Abraham gifts ewe lambs (sheep!) and Abimelech returns a well of water.

I don’t know exactly how this story fits in with the episodes on either side of it, but it strikes me as significant that the two men exchange a well of water (corresponding to Ishmael’s salvation) and sheep (corresponding to Isaac’s salvation). It’s yet another sign that the verbal echoes aren’t incidental—they’re central to what the author of Genesis is doing.

The God Who Sees

Abraham didn’t see Hagar. But God did.

Chapters earlier, when a pregnant Hagar fled into the wilderness, she encountered and named God: El Roi, the God who sees. God saw Hagar then. God saw the mistreatment she was subjected to in Abraham and Sarah’s household. God saw her parched with thirst in the desert, weeping over her son.

The authors of Genesis didn’t have to include these details. They didn’t have to write the story of Hagar’s exodus and the Binding of Isaac as parallel accounts. It’s worth asking why they did.

It’s important that God has always seen Hagar—the powerless, abused, discarded character. It’s important that God gives Abraham a taste of her pain. And it’s important for all of us to reckon with how seriously God takes our treatment of the vulnerable.

May we do righteousness and justice.

If you’d like to participate in the work I’m doing, here are the links!

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(If you’re joining us for the first time, I recommend starting with Part 1, which discusses the cultural context that shaped Paul’s worldview. If you wanna skip the context and jump straight into 1 Corinthians, that starts in Part 3.)

We reached two conclusions:

1. Sexual abusers violate sacred space and invite the wrath of an avenging God. Sexual violence—by either force or coercion—is a matter of profound importance, because the body matters. The Christian is a temple of the Holy Spirit; an enslaved woman is the Lord’s freedwoman. Any attack on her is an offense against the Lord.

2. Paul does not condemn the victim. His counsel to the enslaved is, in essence: “Do the best you can to live chastely. But when you are coerced, know that the guilt belongs not to you but to the perpetrator—and God will judge.”

In short, in an immoral sexual act, the presence of coercion means that guilt is not distributed symmetrically—the enslaver is engaging in an offense of uncommon severity; the enslaved ought to live chastely so far as it depends on them.

So, what does this reading of 1 Corinthians 6–7 mean for the Church today? How do we think and live, in light of Paul’s words? In particular, how ought we respond to the clergy sexual abuse crisis?

(I approach this with fear and trembling. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer.)

Modern Day Slavery

Chattel slavery has become a thing of the past.1 (Thanks be to God!)

Yet, tens of millions of people remain functionally enslaved worldwide. Many of these victims (mostly women and children) are trafficked in the commercial sex trade; many others experience sexual violation at the hands of their enslavers. Traffickers use various tactics to gain control of their victims—including but not limited to grooming, deception, threats, and coercive control. (Victims also often suffer physical violence, but it doesn’t usually look like the movies. Violent abduction is hyper-rare—traffickers more often take advantage of desperation and proximity.)

It looks different than the sexual exploitation of ancient slavery, but the important ingredients remain: Victims are coerced and controlled, their bodies exploited for the gain or gratification of others.

In my lifetime, as far as I’ve seen from my little corner of the world, the Church has done pretty well on this issue. We’ve mobilized to raise funds for anti-trafficking organizations like IJM. We’ve purchased en masse the handicrafts of formerly trafficked women who are learning new skills. We give former victims the microphone to share their testimonies.

And, critically, we speak about these victims as victims.

God has given us eyes of compassion for victims of sex trafficking.

(There are a couple of areas in which I’d quibble with our approach … but I’ll save those for another day.)

Overall: Well done, twenty-first-century Church. May we continue to work for justice and healing for these women and children, and to create a world where this kind of victimization ceases.

Let’s Talk About Clergy Sexual Abuse

But how do we respond when the situation hits closer to home?

Here, our track record is spottier.

Sexual abuse is psychologically complex. The dynamics of grooming, trauma responses, and power dynamics create environments of coercive control—serial abusers use many of the same tactics that traffickers use to gain control of their victims.

When we talk about sex in our churches, what does our teaching sound like to victims of sexual abuse? And how does our reading of Scripture shape how we respond to sexual abuse?

Churches and Christian institutions have often handled sexual abuse poorly. The clergy sexual abuse crisis has been unfolding for decades, documented across denominations. These stories have exposed not merely the crimes of individual abusers but the institutional assumptions that have enabled those crimes and, too often, compounded the suffering of the survivors.

By now, the grim patterns are well-worn. A pastor, priest, or other spiritual leader grooms the victim—sometimes from a young age—gradually manipulating or intimidating them into sexual talk or activity. When the abuse is discovered, the pastor may be moved by the denomination or allowed to resign quietly, only to end up working in another church where they victimize another congregant. Or sometimes there’s a restoration process designed to return the pastor to his original pulpit!

In many cases, the shame and guilt are distributed symmetrically: Both parties are urged to confess sin, the abuser and victim placed on parallel tracks of repentance as though they were equally culpable. In other cases, the asymmetry of guilt runs the wrong direction—the victim is painted, explicitly or implicitly, as a temptress who caused a man of God to stumble or as a liar bearing false witness. Often, this is worsened by status disparities between abuser and victim—the abuser is a popular, well-liked pastor, and the victim just doesn’t seem … as important of a person.

In recent years, as the scale and devastation of clergy sexual abuse have been made plain by the tireless advocacy of brave survivors, many churches have made strides in a positive direction, implementing more robust safeguards and permanently removing offenders from ministry.

Yet, the problems of individual abuse and institutional failure persist. My own denomination, the Anglican Church in North America, is embroiled in a scandal—a credible allegation against the archbishop, and evidence of an internal culture that is slow to investigate the conduct of bishops.

“A Passage That Differentiates”

In 2018, Jennifer Lyell, an executive at the publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) came forward with a story of years-long abuse at the hands of her seminary professor and father figure. Within days, the professor admitted to an inappropriate relationship and resigned. When the professor landed another ministry job, she went public to protect other women.

Her disclosure sparked a reckoning within the SBC but ruined her life. Baptist Press reported her story as a morally inappropriate relationship. (The article has since been retracted.) She was painted online as a willing affair partner in an adulterous relationship. She left her job. Her health declined. In 2025, at the age of 47, she died after a series of massive strokes.

Lyell has said that some of the sexual contact was forcible, over her verbal and physical resistance; in other cases, she complied out of fear that he would be upset with her. (The professor denies forcible sexual contact.)

She has also said that the professor used spiritual manipulation to silence her, telling her to repent after a sexual encounter and warning her that, per 1 John 1:9, it was blasphemous to speak of anything you’d repented of. (How advantageous for him!)

In a deposition, the professor said, “I would defy anyone to find in the eyes of God in the Bible a passage that speaks—that differentiates between sexual sin and sexual abuse and then tells us this is why this is sexual abuse and not just sexual sin.”

The professor’s claim seems … convenient. Yet, it reflects an interpretive tradition that reads Paul’s sexual ethic teachings as flat prohibitions, distributing guilt symmetrically among all parties regardless of interpersonal dynamics (often with the exception of truly forcible sexual contact). The abuser and victim dissolve into the single category of sexual sinner, and the greater burden of social shame falls on the person with the least power to resist it.

But 1 Corinthians gives us a textual basis to differentiate between sexual abuse and other sexual sin. Paul’s teachings on sex reflect an ethic of mutuality and self-giving love (1 Corinthians 7:1–4), an ethic that assigns guilt in relation to culpability and consent, an ethic that honors women who have been treated as expendable.

That the Church has often failed to see this is not merely a failure of policy or institutional courage—although it is certainly both of those things. It is a failure of theological imagination—a failure to read the Bible with someone like Prima in mind. When we read 1 Corinthians with only the freeborn in view, we risk producing a framework that can be weaponized against the vulnerable. But when we read the letter with an exploitable, dishonored, coerced character in view, a different picture emerges.

The God of the Bible is not neutral about what happens to vulnerable bodies. He saw Hagar weeping in the desert. He heard the cries of the enslaved in Egypt. He will, Paul insists, raise abused bodies to life just as he raised the pierced and broken body of Jesus. He clothes the dishonored with greater honor. He names the vulnerable slave as his own freedwoman. And he judges those who use their power to violate those who were bought with a price.

If you’ve experienced—or are experiencing—clergy sexual abuse, I am so very sorry. God sees your suffering.

If you don’t have a safe person in your life to reach out to for help, you can find resources here.

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Addendum: Addressing Objections

I want to preempt three objections that I’ve seen play out in online conversations.

Imaginary interlocutor: Are you suggesting that the person with less power could never sin sexually?

Of course not. The world is more complicated than that. I don’t think consensual sex is impossible whenever a power dynamic exists.

But we’re on safer ground if, when these cases come into the light, we view such power dynamics with intense suspicion. We have a vested interest in more strictly policing the sexual behavior of those with spiritual authority. We must protect the flock.

Jennifer Lyell said that she’d engaged in some level of sin in her situation, in some moments. When I hear her story, I have a hard time imagining her as culpable at any level, but maybe she was right. Or maybe she hadn’t yet worked through the layers of self-blame and was carrying a burden that she wasn’t meant to carry. That’s a question that strangers on the internet can’t answer—and we probably shouldn’t try. I leave those judgments between victims and God. Ideally, survivors can sort that out over time within a godly, trauma-informed community that loves them fiercely and that—and this is important—is not in any way still attached to the perpetrator. When survivors don’t have that community, the tragedy is compounded.

Also, when we hear of situations like Jennifer’s, we shouldn’t armchair-quarterback all the things she could’ve done. That’s not our job. Why heap shame on our suffering sister? She has been wronged, and she most assuredly is already living with many, many what-ifs.

Imaginary interlocutor: But there’s a difference between an enslaved woman in Paul’s day and an adult woman targeted by a pastor today. Psychological manipulation isn’t the same thing as the threat of violence.

Sure, but Paul doesn’t set out to define coercion. He speaks to a particular situation of coercion.

Remember the story of Lucretia from Part 1 of this series? Even in Paul’s day, sexual coercion wasn’t limited to threats of physical harm—Lucretia was coerced not with physical danger but with the threat of postmortem disgrace. That’s psychological coercion.

And today, we understand and recognize additional dynamics of coercive control and trauma—including that trauma responses can look very different from person to person—so we’re able to apply Paul’s underlying principle to an appropriately broad range of situations. We already do this with trafficking victims. We should bring that same instinct to clergy abuse situations.

Imaginary interlocutor: But what about grace? Shouldn’t we try to restore the perpetrators?

We should pray for their repentance and welcome all who are penitent back into the fellowship of the Church. (Unfortunately, serial offenders rarely demonstrate long-term repentance. I wish it were otherwise.)

This should almost never mean restoration to a leadership role. It should never mean restoration to the same kind of leadership role in which they perpetrated abuse or one that gives them access to or spiritual authority over people who are similar to their victim.

It may also require the penitent person to accept and live within certain boundaries (including staying away from the victim) for the sake of their soul and the safety of others.

If you’d like to participate in the work I’m doing, here are the links!

Have a question or an insight? Agree or disagree with something I’ve said? Have another passage that you’d like to see me wrestle with in an upcoming post? Or just wanna hit “like”?

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(If you’re joining us in this series for the first time, I strongly recommend that you read Part 3 before diving into today’s post.)

We left Prima (our reconstruction of an enslaved Christian woman in Corinth) facing a dilemma at the end of 1 Corinthians 6.

If her body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, that means that the men who sexually abuse her violate sacred space and invite the wrath of an avenging God.

But it also means that, because she belongs to the Lord, she should glorify God in her body. And yet, this truth leaves her in a difficult position:

But even as we trace the liberating possibilities of Paul’s argument, it’s plain that this final statement produces a dilemma for Prima. What does it mean to glorify God in her body when she is, in real and tangible ways, vulnerable to the choices of others? I want us to pause there, to sit with the layers of that fear.

How can a legally vulnerable woman live up to that standard?

Today, we turn to Paul’s second use of the “bought with a price” metaphor, which comes in the very next chapter.

“Do Not Let It Concern You”

In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul addresses the enslaved directly. He interrupts a longer discussion about marriage and sex to articulate the general principle he’s working from—that it’s generally best for each of the Corinthians to remain in the situation they were in when God called them.

Having just addressed the men and women in his discussion on marriage, he directs a word to the circumcised and the uncircumcised and then to the enslaved and the free. Do these three categories seem familiar? To me (and most scholars), it sounds a bit like Galatians 3:28: that in Christ there is no Jew/Gentile, slave/free, or male/female.1

All three of these categories deal with a Christian’s embodied life within their social contexts. So, what does Paul say here about slavery and freedom?

²¹ Were you called as a slave? Do not let it concern you. But if you are also able to become free, take advantage of that. ²² For the one who was called in the Lord as a slave, is the Lord’s freed person; likewise the one who was called as free, is Christ’s slave. ²³ You were bought for a price; do not become slaves of people.

(1 Corinthians 7:21-24, NASB)

(Quick note on translation—the NASB uses italics when it’s adding words that aren’t in the original text but that are important to capture the meaning of the Greek.)

So, Paul’s first piece of advice for the enslaved is that they needn’t be concerned about their enslaved status. Given the violent realities of slavery, this is … easier said than done.

Some might suggest that Paul, from his position of freeborn privilege, is merely out of touch with the physical and psychological realities of slavery. Here, I’d counter that Paul was no stranger to enduring physical abuse for the sake of his mission. (As a Roman citizen, he should’ve, by law, been exempt from beatings. But since he didn’t always invoke his citizenship, he suffered abuse that was reserved for noncitizens and the enslaved.) There’s even a possibility that Paul was a freedperson, that he himself had been born into slavery.2

But the central question for Prima—if she believes that Paul is truly an apostle—is this: Does Paul mean what he says?

Is it true that Christians must glorify God with their bodies, yet the enslaved needn’t be concerned about the social reality that makes their bodies vulnerable? If both of these statements can be true in any meaningful sense, it suggests that Paul believes that nothing that is done to a slave can separate them from Christ. Their place in the body of Christ, in the church itself, is secure, regardless of the actions of others.

We might want Paul to be more focused on the here-and-now in this verse, but I don’t think he’s actually downplaying the importance of what’s done to the body. Hang with me while we trace his theological logic and its implications.

“If You Are Also Able To Become Free”

Paul’s second piece of advice (7:21b) is so grammatically opaque in Greek that I can only assume he was trying to do scholars a favor by giving them a puzzle to argue about. In the NASB, it’s translated as: “But if you are also able to become free, take advantage of that.” But your translation might suggest the opposite—that Paul is telling enslaved to turn down freedom if it’s offered!

To oversimplify, the problem is that the sentence is missing a word. Paul says, literally: “but if you also are able to become free, rather make use of.” (MAKE USE OF WHAT, PAUL? HELP A GIRL OUT HERE.) So we have to fill in the blank and take our best guess as to what he’s saying: make use of the offer of freedom or make use of the present condition of enslavement?

I’m going to skip the arguments about the grammar because they’re very technical and don’t actually end up solving the problem of the missing word one way or the other. Our best guidance comes from this verse’s historical and literary context.

Historical context: The evidence doesn’t suggest that the enslaved could refuse manumission in Paul’s day. Perhaps a slave could try to persuade the slaveholder to change his mind, but a slaveholder could manumit (free) someone with or without their consent. It makes little sense for Paul to urge an enslaved person to turn down an offer they couldn’t, in fact, refuse.

Literary context: Throughout this chapter, Paul gives rules … and exceptions to the rule. And this clause is structured as if it’s an exception to his general “remain as you are” rule. It’d be weird for Paul to give an exception that turned out to be a doubling-down rather than a real exception.3

For both of these reasons, a slim but growing majority of interpreters take this clause to mean that Paul is encouraging the enslaved to pursue opportunities for freedom.4 Paul thinks that freedom is to be preferred over slavery in the here-and-now.

Jennifer Glancy—not one to let Paul off the hook when she thinks he’s being problematic—suggests that Paul offers this exception because the enslaved were sexually available to the slaveholder, that Paul shows awareness of the difficulties that enslavement posed to a chaste sexual ethic.5

Is Paul advising the enslaved to take opportunities for freedom because of the specter of abuse? If so, his reassurance that they need not be concerned about their enslaved status only makes sense if such abuse does not jeopardize their membership in the body of Christ.

“The Lord’s Freedperson”

Then, in 7:22, Paul writes that the enslaved is the Lord’s freedperson, and the free believer is the Lord’s slave. Here, Paul overturns the status binaries that the Corinthians took for granted. Status is not merely irrelevant to identity in Christ—in some mysterious way it is reversed.

This statement is especially striking in conversation with Roman law and custom, which gave freedwomen equal access to sexual honor and respectability as a matron, despite the presumption of sexual history within the slaveholder’s household.6 A respectable freedwoman was not a licit target of sexual violence in Roman society. Only her husband and, in limited circumstances, her patron (former enslaver) had the “right” to sexual activity with her. Any attack on her was an offense against her patron, who could bring her attacker to judgment in court.

But here, she is not the freedwoman of a slaveholder but the Lord’s freedwoman. An attack on her is an offense against the Lord.

We can hope that a Christian Corinthian slaveholder might hear in this line a warning against sexually abusing his slaves. And though this would be of little practical help to enslaved members of non-Christian households, it might afford a victim some measure of dignity and a promise that the Lord himself takes offense at her mistreatment and will render judgment against her abusers.

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“Bought With a Price”

Finally, we reach the second usage of “bought with a price,” in 7:23: “You were bought for a price; do not become slaves of people.”

Paul says that free Christians ought not sell themselves into slavery. The Christian has already been purchased at a slave market, bought at the cost of the Lord’s own life. Here, again, Paul may demonstrate a sensitivity toward the difficulties the enslaved face in living out the chaste sexual ethic that Paul teaches. Though he offers no word of condemnation to slaves in difficult situations, he does forbid free Christians from voluntarily entering into a social context that makes chaste living impossible.

Free Christians, for whom the slave market metaphor could remain safely spiritualized, may have brushed over the metaphor’s callback to Paul’s argument about sexual immorality in 6:12-20. But the enslaved, who felt the full force of the slave-market metaphor, knew in an intimate, embodied, visceral way that sexual coercion and slave status were intertwined realities. To them, this verbal echo probably didn’t seem like a coincidence.

I don’t mean to suggest that every enslaved woman in Corinth would’ve heard Paul’s teaching in exactly this way. But by reading these passages with the social realities of slavery in mind, we can ask questions that we haven’t thought to ask before. And these questions open up possibilities in the text—implications of Paul’s theological logic—that we might not have seen otherwise.

We may surmise that, to Prima, each of these two passages might comment on the other, contextualizing both Paul’s sexual morality teachings and his advice to people in her situation.

Paul says that the body matters. That the Christian’s body is sacred space—a temple of the Holy Spirit. That slaves need not be concerned about their status. That an enslaved woman is the Lord’s freedwoman. Again, the all-important question for Prima is, “Does Paul mean what he says?”

I believe Paul’s message to the enslaved is: “Do the best you can. But when you are coerced, know that the guilt belongs not to you but to the perpetrator—and God will judge.”

The impact of sexual violence cannot be brushed away with spiritualized language—if the body matters, then what happens to the body matters. Perhaps Prima, unaware that this letter will come to be accepted by the church as inspired Scripture, brushes off Paul’s words as offering an out-of-touch perspective, the inconsistent ramblings of a privileged freeborn man who cannot understand the plight of an enslaved woman or the implications of his own theology.

Or perhaps in his moral logic, she recognizes the words of God.

Perhaps the two passages interpret one another, exposing how Paul’s theology of the body intersects with the painful realities of her life.

Perhaps, in his words, she hears a message of hope: that God does not condemn her, that the God of the Exodus sees the suffering inflicted on her and will judge the men who abuse her, that like Hagar in the desert, she has cause to name God as El Roi—the God who sees her.

Thank you for joining me on this journey! Next week, we’ll wrap up this series with a discussion of what this reading of 1 Corinthians 6-7 means for the church today.

If you’d like to participate in the work I’m doing, here are the links!

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ICYMI

In Part One and Part Two, we looked at the cultural waters in which Paul swam. Because the ancients thought about sex differently than we do, we asked: Is it historically plausible that Paul could have distinguished between coercive violation and consensual sex?

The answer to that question turned out to be a resounding yes. Both Roman and Jewish contexts point to a shared norm: women were not legally or morally blamed for coerced sex, though they still endured social shame. In some cases, illicit sex could even be presumed coercive because of a patriarchal power dynamic.

In isolation, that doesn’t prove Paul’s view. It gives us a place to start—we can say that it’s probable that Paul shared this worldview. But now, let’s turn to the pages of 1 Corinthians to see what Paul himself has to say.

(We’re going to end up in 1 Corinthians 6 today, which gives us more language for addressing the perpetration of sexual abuse than it does for addressing victimization; next week, our focus will be on victims as we read 1 Corinthians 7 and 12.)

Seeing Corinthian Christians

The church in Corinth was a hot mess.

First Corinthians tells us that the church was diverse—men and women; well-off, middle-class, and poor; Gentiles and Jews; freeborn, freedpersons,1 and the enslaved; people with Greek and Latin names; followers of Paul and followers of Apollos. It also tells us that the church was fractious.

(Isn’t it comforting to realize we’re not unique—Christians have always dealt with conflict?)

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a member of the Corinthian church. Tensions are running high. Everyone’s fighting.

And then, a well-off man named Stephanas and two of his freedmen—Fortunatus and Achaicus—return home from Ephesus with a letter from Paul.

The whole church gathers together. Then Fortunatus begins to dramatically read the letter—sometimes rolling his eyes to communicate Paul’s sarcasm, sometimes speaking with loving gentleness, sometimes staring at a particular member of the congregation who should feel especially called out.

Meditate for a moment on these words from Paul’s introductory greeting (1 Corinthians 1:4-5 NRSVUE):

I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus, for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind.

Now, think about the character you’re imagining yourself as.

Are they freeborn? Perhaps of your same socioeconomic class (or a little richer)? That’s normal!

Even when we try to put ourselves in the sandals of the “original audience” of the New Testament, we usually imagine a character who shares a lot in common with us—someone who seems like a “default early Christian.” Even though we know that the early church was diverse!

Unless we’re reading a passage that specifically talks about slavery, we don’t usually imagine how the enslaved would’ve heard the New Testament. (Think about your favorite New Testament passage—have you ever thought about how an enslaved person from that period might’ve understood it? Because until halfway through seminary, when I started formulating the ideas that ended up becoming my thesis, I definitely hadn’t.)

Today, I’d like us to consider a different member of the congregation, one we usually don’t see—an enslaved woman who couldn’t legally defend the boundaries of her own body. Roman law declared her devoid of honor and gave her enslaver the legal right to sexually abuse her, or even pimp her out.2

So, to humanize her, to help us see her, let’s imagine her name—we’ll use Prima again.

As Prima sits in the gathering of Corinthian Christians and listens to Fortunatus perform the letter we now call 1 Corinthians, how does she understand the text? What do Paul’s teachings on sexual morality mean for her? As she makes sense of Paul’s words, might she find, in his moral logic, a message of hope and freedom?

In short, what insights might her experience give us into Paul’s theological logic? How can we learn from the kinds of questions she might ask?

“Bought With a Price”

Paul talks about sex a lot in 1 Corinthians.

But I want to zero in on one particular metaphor. In 1 Corinthians 6:20, while blasting a group of churchgoing men for visiting prostitutes, Paul tells Corinthian Christians that they were “bought with a price.”

He uses “bought with a price” again in the very next chapter, in a discussion of slavery and freedom. After giving some brief instructions to enslaved Corinthians, he commands free Corinthians to not become slaves because they’ve been “bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 7:23).

So, this metaphor is used once in the context of sex and once in the context of slavery/freedom. Interesting, right?

More interesting—what sort of picture does “bought with a price” evoke? We tend to skip right over the word picture and think about what the picture points to—the death and resurrection of Jesus.

But in Paul’s world, it was the enslaved who were bought with a price.

“Bought with a price” is a metaphor rooted in the slave market.

Now, Paul routinely uses slavery metaphors, but this language is unique in the New Testament—and nowhere else in any of his surviving letters does he explicitly evoke the slave market.

When a biblical writer uses a unique phrase more than once like this, that’s a signal that we should pay attention. It invites us to examine both uses closely to see if there might be a connection between the two passages. And that’s especially true if the verbal echoes occur close together. Yet, most commentators haven’t noticed a clear connection between these passages. The verbal echo is usually treated as incidental.3

But might we find a connection if we read these passages with the concerns of enslaved women in mind?

Let’s imagine ourselves back in Corinth, listening to Paul’s letter. What emotions might the phrase “bought with a price” provoke in us?

A freeborn Christian, who’d never known the market as a place of terror, might have brushed past it with hardly a second thought—though they would have, of course, recognized it as a slave market metaphor.

For a freedwoman, the phrase might recall trauma—her former enslaver enforcing compliance with the threat of sale, or even a memory of standing naked on a platform, exposed and vulnerable, awaiting her fate.4

But for the enslaved—for Prima—the force of the metaphor would’ve been unavoidable, neither an abstraction nor merely a memory but an ever-present danger. On any day, her life—as difficult and demoralizing as it might be—could be upended in that market, her relationships severed, any sense of stability stripped away. She might be sold to a harsher enslaver, or to a brothel, or to a rural estate, never to be heard from again.

So, this week and next, I want to let the metaphor speak on its own terms, tracing each usage of “you were bought with a price” in its immediate context and asking how the echoes between them sound when heard from the floor of the Corinthian gathering.

This week, we’ll look at 1 Corinthians 6.

1 Corinthians 6:12-20

In 1 Corinthians 6:12-20, Paul rebukes Corinthian men for engaging in sexual immorality by visiting prostitutes. These men claim that “all things are lawful”—that bodily appetites for sex and food are neutral, because the body is essentially disposable.5

Though the men use these arguments to claim sexual license for themselves, the enslaved might hear a more chilling implication—for they have always been seen as essentially disposable bodies. These men are claiming the right to use prostitutes—who are usually enslaved women—as sexual outlets. If these men think their own bodies are meaningless, how much more the body of a woman whose enslavement renders her legally permeable, devoid of honor, disposable?

Their slogan does not simply defend their own behavior; it reinforces the very logic that makes enslaved women vulnerable. The brothel becomes an extension of the auction block where bodies are taken, used, abused, and discarded without consequence.

But Paul says that the body matters. Sex isn’t a momentary indulgence; it forges a union between two people. Members of the church, who are united with Christ, should not forge a union with a prostitute in a brothel.

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I find it interesting that Paul doesn’t address the prostitute directly. This may be because there are no prostitutes in the Corinthian church; perhaps, as some scholars believe, he thought it obvious that prostitutes were excluded from Christian fellowship.

But it’s also possible that he focuses on the men because he views them as culpable—they are the ones seeking out immoral sex while boasting in their own bodily freedom.6 (Remember, the Romans and Jews could deem a sex act immoral without morally condemning the coerced woman who participated—and enslaved prostitutes lived and “worked” in a constant state of coercion.)

Prima, who lived on the lowest rung of Roman hierarchy, may have heard a message of hope in Paul’s sharp condemnation of men exercising power over this class of vulnerable women. In 6:17, Paul writes that “anyone united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him.” For those accustomed to having their bodies claimed by others, such language might signal a different kind of belonging—one that invites everyone to imagine themselves joined to a Lord who does not treat their bodies as expendable.

Then Paul goes even further. He calls the Christian’s body a temple of the Holy Spirit, set apart as sacred space. For a legally permeable slave, such a statement is especially groundbreaking. If she, too, is a temple of the Holy Spirit, anyone who sexually abuses her is not merely committing violence against an easy target—they are defiling sacred space and inviting the wrath of an avenging God.

When Paul tells her that “you are not your own,” this wouldn’t come as news. She already knew she wasn’t her own. But neither does she belong, in the truest sense, to her enslaver, for she has been bought with a price. Because she belongs to the Lord, she should glorify God in her body.

But even as we trace the liberating possibilities of Paul’s argument, it’s plain that this final statement produces a dilemma for Prima. What does it mean to glorify God in her body when she is, in real and tangible ways, vulnerable to the choices of others? I want us to pause there, to sit with the layers of that fear.

How can a legally vulnerable woman live up to that standard?

Next week, we’ll answer this question by looking at the second usage of “bought with a price,” in 1 Corinthians 7. We’ll trace Paul’s theological logic to discern whether Prima might hear a message of condemnation—or a message of hope.

But today’s takeaway: 1 Corinthians 6 gives us a textual basis for condemning the perpetration of sexual abuse. Sexual abusers treat another person’s body as if it is disposable and violate sacred space.

May the church treat such violation with the seriousness that it deserves.

If you’d like to participate in the work I’m doing, here are the links!

Have a question or an insight? Agree or disagree with something I’ve said? Have another passage that you’d like to see me wrestle with in an upcoming post? Or just wanna hit “like”?

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ICYMI

While writing my thesis, I faced a number of difficult questions: Did Paul blame enslaved Corinthians for the ongoing sexual abuse that they suffered? (The sexual abuse of the enslaved was ubiquitous—members of the church in Corinth almost certainly experienced ongoing abuse.) Did he view these enslaved victims as complicit? Did he lump them in with the “sexually immoral”? Or did he look on their situation with understanding and compassion, recognizing them as honored members of the Church?

But ancient people thought about sex differently than we do. So before we can dive into 1 Corinthians, we need to learn what assumptions about consent were common in Paul’s world. Last week, in Part One, we began with this question: Is it historically plausible that Paul could have distinguished between coercive violation and consensual sex?

In pursuit of an answer, we looked at Roman perspectives. For the Romans, consent didn’t really matter when judging whether a sexual act was moral. However, if a sexual act was deemed immoral, a lack of consent—due to either force or coercion—meant that the non-consenting woman was not deemed morally or legally guilty, though she still suffered dishonor and social stigma.

Today, we’re going to examine the question of historical plausibility again, this time from the perspective of the other cultural context that heavily influenced Paul’s worldview: first-century Judaism. What did the Jews of Paul’s day think about consent, coercion, and culpability?

Ready? Let’s do this.

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So … What Did the Jews Think?

I’ll be up front here—our Jewish sources from this time period talk about sexual violation less often than Roman sources do. It’s hard to say with precision whether Jews thought of consent in the exact same way as the Romans. Nor should we assume that there was one Jewish view! Hellenized Jews (who spoke Greek and adopted more Roman customs) may have had more Roman ideas than more traditional Jews in Judea or Galilee.

So I want to look at two of our most detailed sources from this time period, representing very different forms of Jewishness—Josephus and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Josephus

Josephus (37-100), a contemporary of Paul, was born and raised in Jerusalem but later defected to Rome. (He was definitely a Hellenized Jew.) He wrote a book called Antiquities of the Jews, a history of the Jewish people designed to appeal to the Romans—basically, he was trying to improve the reputation of the Jews after the major uprising that had resulted in the destruction of the Temple.

The first half of Antiquities is pretty much just Josephus retelling Old Testament stories. So, by looking at the way he retells each story—especially the details he adds or omits—we can figure out his perspective on what’s happening in the story. (Or … at least what he wants the Romans to think!)

When Josephus retells biblical rape narratives, what choices does he make? Let’s speed-run through his adaptations of five stories involving victims of forcible or coercive sex: Hagar, Dinah, the concubine of Judges 19, Bathsheba, and Tamar.

Hagar: In Josephus’s telling, Abraham is blameless in regard to Hagar—Sarah gives Hagar into his bed at God’s command;1 Hagar stirs up conflict with Sarah;2 Abraham thinks it barbarous to expel Hagar and Ishmael, but God agrees with Sarah’s decision.3 Now, Josephus doesn’t portray Hagar as sinful for her relationship with Abraham; she is blamed only for her disrespect toward Sarah. This lines up nicely with a Roman moral framework: There’s nothing morally wrong with sex between an enslaver and an enslaved woman, so neither Abraham nor Hagar are condemned. Since the sexual activity is perfectly moral, Hagar’s consent is beside the point. (Sound familiar?)

Dinah: Jacob’s only daughter attends a festival, eager to see the finery worn by the other women. There, Shechem forcibly rapes her (by violence, Josephus specifies). In addition to emphasizing the violence of the act, Josephus communicates Dinah’s innocence by setting the scene at a festival. (A trope in Greek and Roman comedy involves a virtuous woman raped at a festival. In these plays, it’s “funny” because she later ends up accidentally married to her rapist. How … amusing.)4

The concubine of Judges 19: In his retelling of this horrific, violent gang rape, Josephus echoes the story of Lucretia, which we read last week.5 The victimized woman dies of shame, despite the husband’s comforting words that place sole blame on her assailants. With this woman as a rallying cry, the people take up arms against the inhabitants of that region—just as the people of Rome use Lucretia as a rallying cry to overthrow the king and establish the Republic.6

Bathsheba: Josephus does seem to assign Bathsheba some level of blame—in that regard, she is unique among these five women. His description of the affair emphasizes David’s culpability—Bathsheba is in her own home, washing herself in cool water (a detail he usually uses to describe a ritual bath) before David sends for her and lies with her. However, afterward, Bathsheba sends David the news of her pregnancy so that David “should contrive some way for concealing her sin (for, according to the laws of their fathers, she who had been guilty of adultery ought to be put to death).”7 So, David and Bathsheba are both guilty of adultery, in Josephus’s telling.

Josephus’s reading may be motivated, in part, by his desire to depict David positively.8 Though he unambiguously condemns this sordid episode as sin, he otherwise depicts David as, essentially, sinless.9 I wonder, also, if he is eager to distance the story from any allusions to Lucretia, which he evoked with precise parallels in his portrait of Judges 19. The rape of a freeborn woman, even by a king, wouldn’t have been especially palatable to a Roman audience shaped by Lucretia’s story. (The rape of Lucretia was not merely one semi-mythical story among many—it was one of the foundational myths of Rome.) It would’ve undermined his positive narrative of David to depict Bathsheba as wholly innocent. Even so, David remains the most active participant in the matter. Bathsheba goes along with it but doesn’t set out to seduce David.

One further interesting detail about portrayals of Bathsheba in this time period: The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, was completed in the third century BC and used widely in this time period. The translation choices made in the Septuagint suggest that its translators deemed Bathsheba to not be guilty.10

Tamar: In contrast to Bathsheba, Tamar is presented as a perfect victim when her half-brother rapes her—she cries out, promises that the king will condone an incestuous marriage, and goes away weeping, living as a widow in the house of her other brother.11 Tamar’s story is a bit less useful to us because Josephus makes relatively few changes—although he does suggest more explicitly than the biblical account that her promise of marriage is merely a ploy to escape.

To sum up, Josephus emphasizes force in his depictions of rape and seems to classify the assaults of Dinah, the woman of Judges 19, and Tamar as rapes while avoiding such characterizations in the stories of Hagar and Bathsheba.

However, his retellings of both Hagar and Bathsheba sit comfortably within the framework of Roman sexual conventions. Abraham has a “right” to Hagar’s body. David transgresses both the law of God and Roman moral codes by engaging in an affair with a free woman—and Josephus condemns his sin—but falls short of the infamous behavior of Lucretia’s rapist. It’s reasonable to conclude that Hellenized Jews in this period generally shared the Romans’ baseline assumptions about sex, though they had a few additional prohibitions on certain sexual pairings/acts.

The Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered at the Qumran Caves in the Judean Desert in the 1940s and ’50s. Part of this discovery included fragments of the Damascus Document, which details the laws of the Qumran Essenes, a strict, austere, mystic, very non-Hellenized Jewish sect.12

(Throughout this section, I’m citing the work of Cecilia Wassen, but I was alerted to this material in Lynn Cohick’s excellent book Women in the World of the Earliest Christians. Highly, highly recommend!)

The Essenes viewed some sexual activity between husband and wife as immoral.13 This illicit married sex was likely some form of intentionally non-procreative sex, perhaps sex during pregnancy.14 Yet, only the husband suffered the penalty of excommunication. And wives were required to testify against their husbands in these sorts of purity violations.

The asymmetry is striking. If the woman reported her husband and testified against him, she suffered no penalty, even though she had also engaged in immoral sex.15 There’s no indication in the Damascus Document that she’s expected to cry for help or demonstrate other signs of resistance to prove her innocence.

Though the Damascus Document treats illicit sex as an act that contaminates the community, the husband alone is deemed culpable. The wife is a witness whose report can cleanse the community by exposing hidden impurity.

This suggests an acknowledgment of power imbalance—in a world where the husband is his wife’s authority, immoral sex is presumed coercive, and the woman remains morally unblamed. This tells us that the idea that a coerced woman was not morally or legally culpable was comprehensible within the social world of first-century Jews—and even had the force of law among the desert ascetics most removed from Roman influence!

The Bottom Line

Putting it all together: The two cultural streams that most influenced Paul’s worldview distinguished between consensual and coercive sex when assessing a woman’s culpability for an immoral sexual act.

The cultural waters that Paul swam in assumed that a woman victimized by either force or coercion remained morally blameless, even if the sexual act itself was worthy of condemnation.

So, we return to our main question for these first two weeks: Is it historically plausible that Paul could have distinguished between coercive violation and consensual sex?

Last week, I said:

Yes, it is plausible.

Our survey of ancient history doesn’t, yet, tell us anything definitive about Paul’s views. But it does tell us that these categories existed in his cultural context—and so he, too, could have made these distinctions, especially if he viewed the moral innocence/guilt binary as more important than the honor/shame binary.

This week, I go one step further: It’s not only plausible; it’s probable. When our Jewish and Roman sources agree on something (even the Essenes!), that means it’s a wide-ranging cultural assumption. It was in the air Paul breathed. That doesn’t mean that Paul, without a doubt, shared these views—Paul adopted countercultural stances on a number of issues—but it does tell us that he more likely than not made these distinctions, too.

Next week, we’ll dive into the biblical text, asking what 1 Corinthians tells us about Paul’s thoughts on consent, culpability, and coercion.

Are you excited? I’m excited!

I hope you’ll come along for the journey.

If you’d like to participate in the work I’m doing, here are the links!

Have a question or another insight into this passage? Agree or disagree with something I’ve said here? Have another passage that you’d like to see me wrestle with in an upcoming post? Or just want to hit the “like” button?

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ICYMI

He chastises the Corinthian church for tolerating a case of sexual misconduct so bad that even their Roman neighbors would’ve gasped in horror (1 Corinthians 5). He blasts a group of churchgoing men for frequenting prostitutes (1 Corinthians 6:12-20). He takes almost a whole chapter to talk about issues related to marriage (1 Corinthians 7).

I wrote my MA thesis on sex and slavery in 1 Corinthians. And I’ve written here about the brutality of Roman slavery. As a rule, the enslaved experienced sexual abuse. That means that the Corinthian church almost certainly included sexual abuse victims facing ongoing violation—today, we would classify them as victims of sex trafficking.

In my research, I had to face searing questions: Did Paul blame these victims? Did he view them as complicit in their own violation? Or did he understand them as both victims of violence and honored members of the body of Christ?

We’re starting a series—I think four posts, though it may turn into five—on Paul’s understanding of sexual consent. This week and next, we’ll set the table by looking at Paul’s cultural context: Is it historically plausible that Paul could have distinguished between coercive violation and consensual sex?

To answer that question, we’ll look at consent, coercion, and culpability in both the Roman and Jewish worlds, the two cultural streams that most influenced Paul’s worldview. Today, we’ll examine what the Romans thought.

Why is this background information important? Well, we can’t read our modern-day notions of consent back into the ancient world. The ancients asked fundamentally different questions about sex than we do. Exploring this context will tell us about the cultural water that Paul swam in. From there, we’ll be better positioned to interpret what he says in 1 Corinthians.

So, let’s dive into the murky water of the ancient world.

So … What Did the Romans Think?

When the Romans talked about sex, they cared far more about honor, status, and power than they did about consent.

In our world today, the existence of any power dynamic raises suspicions about the possibility of full and free consent—in most corporate workplaces, a supervisor can get fired for engaging in a sexual relationship with a subordinate, for example.

But for the Romans, moral sex required a power dynamic. They treated sex, in a sense, as a picture of proper social order. I can’t be clear here without being a bit crass: The “real man” was always the penetrating partner, never the passive one; he always sexually penetrated someone less powerful than himself—usually a woman or a slave.1 Structuring sex in this way reinforced the Romans’ hierarchical social order.

At the same time, we cannot imagine that the Romans were ignorant of distinctions between consensual and coerced sex—their laws and stories demonstrate that they were well aware of the difference.

Roman Law

In Paul’s day, rape was a crime—sometimes.

Several laws addressed sexual violence against women,2 but the identities of perpetrator and victim (rather than the details of the assault) dictated the severity of the offense. Of utmost importance was the relationship between the perpetrator and victim—did the perpetrator have a “right” to the woman’s sexuality? A woman’s husband or enslaver couldn’t be prosecuted for forcing himself on her.3 (But free Roman women controlled their own money—if they had any—and could initiate divorce for any reason, which gave them some leverage.)

The Romans divided women into two categories: honorable and honorless.4 Honorable women (which, in this context, means free Roman citizens of good reputation) had more protection under the law, but they could be criminally prosecuted for engaging in adultery or premarital sex. Honorless women (especially prostitutes and the enslaved) lacked these basic protections but couldn’t face criminal prosecution for their sexual conduct.

A man who raped an honorable woman committed a criminal offense—and the rape was prosecuted as a form of violence rather than as a form of sexual immorality.5 Rape victims were not legally or morally blamed6—which is to say that they weren’t prosecuted for engaging in illicit sex. But they still faced social consequences—the loss of their reputation as honorable women and a sharp drop in their status. Even experiencing street harassment could damage a woman’s reputation—so she (or her male guardian) could sue a man for harassing her.7

But enslaved women had no reputation to defend—and the law didn’t care about their well-being. For the most part, the rape of an enslaved woman was treated as a household matter—the family patriarch had a “right” to her body and could offer her to others. The law only got involved if someone from outside the household raped or seduced her—and rape and seduction, in this case, were treated equivalently under the law.8 The rapist couldn’t be criminally prosecuted, but the woman’s enslaver could sue him for property damages in a civil case.9

Now, the Romans obviously knew that slaves could be coerced or forced into unwanted sexual activity—but consent wasn’t the lens they used for determining whether a sexual act was moral or immoral. It only came into play when determining culpability for illicit sexual activity. In short, if a sexual act was deemed immoral, a lack of consent meant the victim had not acted immorally and was not to blame.

Roman Stories

Rape victims—and would-be victims who narrowly escape—figure prominently in Roman stories, from the sexual exploits of their predatory gods to the rapes that precede major developments in the history of Rome, to plays and romance novels.10 Taken together, these stories demonstrate that the Romans absolutely understood the difference between consensual and coercive sex.

Zeus (or Jupiter), king of the gods, is famously a rapey sex pest. The Rape of Io remains a particularly vivid example.

The mythical founder of Rome is conceived when the vestal virgin Rhea Silvia is raped by the god Mars. Several writers—including Ovid and Ennius—recount Rhea’s trauma in moving language, with deep compassion for her plight.11

Of Rhea, Ovid writes:

… unsightly in her garb, bearing the marks of her nails on her locks, the marks of her nails on her cheeks. Bewailing both the crimes of her uncle, and the fault of Mars …

… she casting on the ground her modest eyes, as she wept, besprinkled her warm breast with her tears. Thrice did she attempt to fly; thrice did she stop short at the deep waves, as fear deprived her of the power of running. Still, at last, as with hostile fingers she tore her hair, with quivering lips she uttered these bitter words; “Oh! would that my bones had been gathered up, and hidden in the tomb of my fathers, while yet they could be gathered, belonging to me a virgin! Why now, am I courted for any nuptials, a Vestal disgraced, and to be driven from the altars of Ilium? Why do I hesitate? See! by the fingers of the multitude am I pointed at as unchaste. Let this disgrace be ended, which marks my features.”

Thus far did she speak, and before her swollen eyes she extended her robe; and so, in her despair, did she throw herself into the rapid waters.

The semi-mythical story of the rape of Lucretia goes further, explicitly affirming the victim’s innocence. A group of elite men, drunkenly boasting about their wives, decide to pay each woman a visit to test her character. (What could go wrong?)

Most of the wives are found feasting with their friends, but one woman, Lucretia, is up late, working at the loom with her maids—the very picture of wifely industry and virtue.

The king’s son, enraptured by her beauty and purity, is inflamed with lust and plots to have her. Some nights later, he enters Lucretia’s bedchamber with his sword drawn. But she says she would rather die than yield her body to him.

After all manner of threats and pleas, he threatens to disgrace Lucretia by laying a slave’s naked corpse alongside hers, so that it will be said she was killed in the act of adultery with a slave—a reputation-destroying disgrace. At this, Lucretia’s resolve falters, and she yields.

The next day, she summons her father and husband to tell them through tears what has happened. They try to console her by assigning all blame to the king’s son, for “where there has been no consent there is no guilt.”12 The coercion makes it a rape rather than an act of adultery, even without physical force. Lucretia concedes that she is innocent of the sin. Yet, she declares she will still bear the penalty rather than live with the shame. (Remember how Roman rape victims suffered social shame even when they weren’t considered legally or morally guilty?) Then she plunges a concealed knife into her heart. With Lucretia as a rallying cry, the people overthrow the wicked king and establish the Roman Republic.

Lucretia’s story shows that the Romans could explicitly call a woman innocent, even if that woman was coerced rather than physically overpowered. Her story also suggests that innocence/guilt and honor/dishonor are mapped on different (though perhaps overlapping) axes—that a woman can be both innocent and dishonored.

The historian Livy describes a mass rape of prostitutes in the early Roman Republic. A group of prostitutes are “carried off” amid a festival atmosphere during an athletic competition. Here, Livy deploys the same language that he used earlier in this same text to describe a mass rape of respectable women. This episode of sexual violence against prostitutes almost provokes a war, and the citizens begin discussing the creation of a dictatorship that will prevent such things from happening again.13 The inclusion of this event suggests that Livy understood that honorless women—prostitutes had absolutely no honor to preserve—can experience rape, and that this violation can have broader social consequences.

The Bottom Line

So, let’s put all of this together. The Romans could distinguish between consensual and coercive sex. They could classify coercive sex as violence, even when the victim was honorless or of low status.

(Of course, that recognition didn’t yield broad moral condemnation of coercive sex. Even when the Romans recognized something to be violent, they couldn’t interpret the moral or legal meaning of that violence without knowing the identities of the involved parties.)

A raped woman was not considered morally guilty, but the status of the victim and perpetrator came into play when determining the rapist’s level of guilt. If an enslaved man raped a free woman, he was guilty and she was innocent but dishonored. If a free man raped an enslaved woman, no one was guilty—and, well, she didn’t have honor to begin with. But if she belonged to someone else, he might have to pay her enslaver for property damages.

(Are you feeling glad that you don’t live in the first century? Because I definitely am!)

Let’s return to the question I asked toward the beginning: Is it historically plausible that Paul could have distinguished between coercive violation and consensual sex?

Yes, it is plausible.

Our survey of ancient history doesn’t, yet, tell us anything definitive about Paul’s views. But it does tell us that these categories existed in his cultural context—and so he, too, could have made these distinctions, especially if he viewed the moral innocence/guilt binary as more important than the honor/shame binary. More on that later in this series!

Next week, we’ll look at our next piece of historical context: how the Jews of Paul’s day thought about consent, culpability, and coercion. I hope you’ll join us.

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ICYMI

Psalm 137:9: Happy is the one who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks (NRSVUE).

Last week, we read Psalm 137:9 as a visceral response to trauma—as permission to come to God when we’re raw and raging, even before we’ve found a way past our worst impulses.

This week, we’re going to look at a second possibility for this text: The Babylonian babies envisioned in this verse may not be literal babies at all—this line may be a metaphor for the Babylonian oppressors who destroyed Jerusalem. Psalm 137:9 sings not of unbridled vengeance but of the justice God has already promised.

Why Two Readings?

As we interpret the Bible, we must learn how to weigh competing readings. Often, there are multiple plausible interpretations of a passage. We get to sort through the evidence in community, considering the perspectives of other interpreters as we figure out which reading (or readings) we find most plausible.

Why am I doing two readings of Psalm 137:9, specifically? Well, my degree is in New Testament, which means I want to be extra careful when playing in the Old Testament sandbox. So, after I developed my first draft, I asked Old Testament scholar extraordinaire Brittany Kim to check one of my paragraphs for nuance.1 (Sale alert: As of today, Brittany’s book Understanding Old Testament Methodology: Mapping the Terrain of Recent Approaches is 60% off on Amazon!)

Brittany told me that her study suggests that the babies of Psalm 137:9 aren’t literal babies but the Babylonian oppressors—the metaphorical children of Lady Babylon. And I knew immediately that I wanted to walk through both readings with you.

Skeptical of the idea that it’s a metaphor? Suspicious that this is taking the easy way out? Well, Brittany was also kind enough to send me a copy of the paper she presented on the subject at ETS 2015 so that I could cite her work for you. So let’s dig into the evidence so you can weigh it for yourself.

The Story of Psalm 137

A quick refresher: Even though Psalm 137 is a poem and a prayer, it’s also a story. The Babylonians have sacked Jerusalem, unleashing unspeakable violence on the city’s inhabitants and dragging the survivors into exile, far from home.

The speaker of the poem—last week, we named him Jonathan—sings “a haunting lament over the destruction of Jerusalem.”2 In their all-consuming grief, Jonathan and his fellow musicians put away their instruments.

By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.

On the willows there
we hung up our harps.

Yet, their Babylonian captors mock them—and God!—by demanding entertainment:

For there our captors
asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

Jonathan and his friends will not sing one of the Lord’s songs to amuse their oppressors—but neither can they forget Jerusalem, the city of the Lord.

If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand wither!
Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy!

And so they begin singing a prayer that God would bring justice.

Lady Zion, Lady Babylon

The Old Testament prophets often personify cities as women.3 But this motif isn’t limited to the Prophets—Brittany Kim identifies cities-as-women imagery in a number of places in the Psalms. Psalm 137:8 evokes this image explicitly, referring to Babylon as “Daughter Babylon.” But this is not the first such moment in this psalm. Consider Psalm 137:7:

Here, the psalmist calls God to judge the Edomites—“the children of Edom”—for their support of Babylon’s campaign against Jerusalem. The children of Edom call for Jerusalem’s destruction using language that accentuates the emotional devastation of the scene by evoking an exposed, vulnerable woman.

The personification of Jerusalem as a woman is strengthened by the psalmist’s direct address to her two verses earlier: “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!” He speaks to the city imagined as a person—as Lady Zion.

Then, in Psalm 137:8, the psalmist addresses Daughter Babylon:

In this verse, the psalmist uses language that suggests familiarity with Jeremiah’s oracle against Babylon (Jeremiah 50-51): Jeremiah refers to the city as “daughter” (50:42, 51:33), speaks of God repaying Babylon (Jeremiah 51:6), and describes God destroying her (51:55). “Thus,” Brittany Kim writes, this verse “conveys the psalmist’s trust that YHWH will do what he has said by bringing judgment against Babylon.”4 The psalmist need not take his own vengeance—God will judge Lady Babylon for the violence she has visited on his people.

Then we reach our problem verse: Psalm 137:9.

Happy shall they be who take your little ones
and dash them against the rock!

We have already seen that Babylon is personified as a woman. We’ve seen the Edomites described as “the children of Edom.” Now, we have to dig into a little bit of Hebrew grammar, but I’ll try my best to do the “explain it to me like I’m 5” version.

“Your little ones” is one word in Hebrew. The part of the word that we translate as “your” is feminine singular. That means that the “you” in this verse is a single “person,” not a group of people. We’re talking about one parent, not many parents. If this verse were talking about the little ones of many Babylonian parents, that “you” would be plural (and masculine), to show that there is more than one parent being addressed.

But it’s singular and feminine, which means that there is one “parent” in view—the city of Babylon. The “little ones” are the children of (Lady) Babylon, not the children of the Babylonians.

Other Old Testament passages mention the children of Lady Zion (the term used when Jerusalem is personified as a woman). Scholars agree that these passages aren’t referring to literal children. Rather, the inhabitants of Jerusalem are the metaphorical children of Lady Zion (see, for example, Isaiah 49:22-23; Lamentations 1:5).

So, putting this all together: the “little ones” are the Babylonian oppressors—the rulers who spread their empire with vicious violence, the soldiers who conquered and burned Jerusalem using the brutal tactics of ancient warfare, the captors who torment and mock the war captives, and the people who benefit from the exploitation of Jerusalem’s former residents. Seen in this light, Psalm 137 is not an outlier among the imprecatory psalms (the psalms that call for judgment and justice). It anticipates not the deaths of the young and innocent specifically, but the shattering of the oppressor who defies God by enacting injustice.

In short, the psalmist longs for the justice God has already promised. When this oppressive empire falls—and empires always fall—the children of Lady Babylon will be repaid for their callous brutality.

The Songbook of Israel

In the end, God tempered his judgment of Babylon with mercy. The fall of Jerusalem was still in living memory when the Persians conquered the Babylonian Empire. Babylon fell almost anticlimactically. The sources are sparse, and ambiguous on how much blood was shed in the battle(s), but it seems to be less than we’d expect from our knowledge of ancient warfare—and concentrated among soldiers rather than civilians.5 After a rout of her army on the field of battle, Babylon herself surrendered peacefully to Cyrus the Great, who allowed the exiles of Judah to return home to rebuild Jerusalem.

It was in this period of time, after the return from exile, that the song we now know as Psalm 137 was compiled into the Psalms—the songbook of Israel. So the Jews sang this song communally after the fall of the Babylonian Empire. They sang it in times of freedom, when they ruled their own land, and (more often) in times of oppression by other empires, passing down the psalmist’s words through the generations. In this way, their children prayed—remembering the exile and its end, praying for the deliverance of the oppressed, singing the world toward justice.

Let Justice Flow Like Waters

So, how might this reading of Psalm 137 teach us how to pray?

We, too, can sing the world toward justice. We lift our voices in prayer—for our own lives, for those we love, for the world—that God would bring the deliverance, restoration, and justice he has promised in this life and the life to come. We pray for true peace among and within the nations. We pray that the Lord will defend the vulnerable who suffer at the hands of the strong. We pray that all will be made well.

For an example of what that can look like: In my own church, we prayed The Great Litany every Monday in Lent. I leave you with a selection of these prayers, but I commend it—or a similar form from your own tradition—to you in whole:

To make wars to cease in all the world, and to give to all nations unity, peace, and concord,
We beseech you to hear us, good Lord.

That it may please you to show mercy on all prisoners and captives; refugees, the homeless, and the hungry; and all those who are desolate and oppressed,
We beseech you to hear us, good Lord.
…
To forgive our enemies, persecutors, and slanderers, and to turn their hearts,

We beseech you to hear us, good Lord.

To strengthen those who stand; to encourage the faint-hearted; to raise up those who fall; and finally to beat down Satan under our feet,

We beseech you to hear us, good Lord.

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ICYMI

Whaaaaat is happening here? For most of my life, I winced when reading this verse—and then quickly moved on. Do you resonate with that?

We aren’t alone. Some lectionaries, such as the Revised Common Lectionary, skip this verse altogether, especially in the readings for Sunday morning worship. Most Christians just avoid it.

But Psalm 137:9 is in the Bible for a reason—and it’s not because God condones bashing babies’ heads against rocks.1

When we encounter a difficult passage, we might want to turn the page and move on to something that feels simpler, less fraught, more in line with the character of Jesus. But this week and next, I’d like to invite you to lean into this text with me, sitting with its weight, discovering what we might learn from it.

Difficult Psalms and How to Find Them

The Psalms are, of course, poetry. But they’re a particular kind of poetry. They were the songbook of ancient Israel, used in public worship, designed to teach the people of God how to pray together. Today, we are far removed from the world of the Psalms in both time and culture, but these ancient prayers still shape our own. Many of the poems in the Psalms feel evergreen, always appropriate for our use. With the songwriters, we yearn for God’s presence, praise his goodness and mercy, and plead for the innocent. But some of these songs feel like they haven’t aged well.

Chief among these is Psalm 137. It has inspired many an anti-theist to wax poetic on the bloodthirsty vindictiveness of the Old Testament and its God. Even C.S. Lewis called Psalm 137:9 a “devilish” response.2

But I believe that we can find the goodness of God in this text, if we look for it.

We’re going to wrestle with Psalm 137 over the course of two weeks, looking at two possible readings, both of which show us a way toward God’s goodness. Both readings are plausible, and elements of both readings can coexist as true at the same time, although there will be some points of incompatibility between them.

Today’s reading: Psalm 137 gives us permission to be brutally honest with God about our pain in the aftermath of trauma.

As we explore the text, let’s frame our thought process with two questions: What is happening in this psalm in its ancient context? And how can this psalm teach us how to pray?

(Content warning: This post is not intended for young children and includes graphic descriptions of war violence, including mentions of sexual violence. If you’re worried that you might find that difficult, feel free to skip ahead to part two, which is much tamer in content.)

The Psalm in Context

Even though Psalm 137 is a poem and a prayer, it’s also a story. Let’s look at the beginning of the psalm to get a little more context.

By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.

On the willows there
we hung up our harps.

These lines orient us in the biblical story. Here’s what’s happening.

The Kingdom of Judah has been conquered by Babylon, many of its inhabitants slaughtered, and most of the rest dragged away into exile, far from home. The vividness of the language suggests that this psalm was likely written in Babylon during the exile—though it may be a later composition based on the memories of the community.3 This means that the psalmist has survived an intense trauma. (Or they’re recounting the memories of their parents and grandparents.) They are also writing this song for a people who have survived an intense trauma.

We don’t have much information about the writer (or writers) of this psalm, but to humanize them, to help us see them, let’s enter into the story. Let’s imagine a name for one of the poem’s speakers (main characters)—Jonathan.4

In reaction to this unhealed trauma, Jonathan and his fellow musicians put away their harps. He can’t play music while his grief is this fresh (Psalm 137:2). Perhaps he still has nightmares, forced to relive the trauma every night in his dreams—seeing his father killed and his mother and sisters gang-raped, smelling the smoke of burning wood and flesh, hearing the screams of the neighbor girl as her pregnant mother is torn open by a sword. Perhaps he was raped alongside his sisters, and his injuries never fully healed—and the ongoing pain reminds him of the all-consuming powerlessness and shame every single day. Perhaps one of the Babylonian soldiers snatched his baby brother by the leg and, laughing, hurled the baby headfirst against a pile of rubble in front of his wailing mother.

We can’t reconstruct exactly what happened to Jonathan when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem, but we know that scenes like this played out across the city. These were the realities of ancient warfare. The survivors arrived in Babylon profoundly traumatized. If we don’t sit with the weight of their experiences, we will be unprepared to navigate the bitter honesty of 137:9.

The psalm continues:

For there our captors
asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

How could we sing the LORD’s song
in a foreign land?

Now Jonathan’s captors—the same people who burned his city and devastated his family and friends—are, at best, demanding that he entertain them by performing a cheery song from back home (Psalm 137:3). Most scholars argue that it’s even worse than that—the Babylonians are taunting their captives, akin to asking, “Where is your God?”5

Jonathan and his fellow musicians refuse. To sing one of the songs of Zion would be to mock God.6 Instead, Jonathan sings of his unwillingness to forget Jerusalem and his desire that God pay back Edom for its betrayal and Babylon for her brutality. He concludes with the infamous verses:

O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall they be who pay you back
what you have done to us.

Happy shall they be who take your little ones
and dash them against the rock!

The structure of the psalm suggests that these lines may even be part of the song that Jonathan and his fellow musicians sing to their captors—in Hebrew—in response to the Babylonians’ demand for entertainment. They take the opportunity to pray for justice—or vengeance—right under the noses of their captors.7

A Trauma Response

Is it any wonder that the psalmist feels such overpowering rage? He wants the Babylonians to pay in kind for what their army has done to his people, for them to feel the same loss that they have inflicted on him. But the dealing out of this vengeance is left to the hand of God. He does not take his own revenge.

And his cry of agony and anger was compiled in the songbook of Israel as sacred Scripture.

Here, genre matters. The Psalms are poetry, not prescription. God never commanded Israel to bash Babylonian babies’ heads on rocks. This poem was preserved not to teach Israel what to do but to show them how to pray. They bring their unvarnished anger to God. And then they step back and leave the work of justice in God’s hands.

So, how might this psalm shape the way we pray, now, after thousands of years?

First, I want to say that Psalm 137 doesn’t give us license to celebrate war, especially if—as is true of me and most of my readers—we have not experienced the brutality of war in our own homelands. If your story includes the destruction of your hometown at the hands of armies or warlords, I am so very sorry for your losses. For you, this is a fraught, complicated conversation, and I lament the grief you carry. May God bring justice. For the rest of us, who do not share the experience of ancient Jerusalem, let us remember that Psalm 137 was written in response to the horrors of war.

To celebrate war is to celebrate the atrocities that make laments like Psalm 137:9 thinkable.

How does this psalm teach us to pray, then?

Psalm 137:9 gives us permission to pray when we’re raw and raging. It tells us that we don’t have to hide the dark parts of ourselves from God or wait until we’ve found a way through the pain. God meets us in the darkness. He can handle our trauma responses and our wounded words. He sees our suffering. And he has given us a model of what it looks like to pray through our most visceral anger even as we refrain from taking vengeance.

There are some wounds so gaping that, in the immediate aftermath, only the imprecatory psalms seem like honest responses. In the face of the devastation wrought by murder, or rape, or the kind of gut-wrenching betrayal that brings us to our knees, tamer prayers can feel as thin as platitudes. Psalm 137 doesn’t encourage us to put on shiny, plastic smiles while we’re still in the anger phase of grief. It provides a way for us to approach God until we can manage other, better prayers.

We don’t want to stay there, in that rage. But sometimes, in the face of catastrophic pain, we have nowhere else to start.

So, we begin with prayer, grasping with trembling fingers for the God who seeks us in our desolation, until we can dare to hope that the night will somehow give way to dawn.

Remember to come back next Wednesday for part two! Next week, we’ll examine a second possible reading of Psalm 137:9: Could the babies be metaphorical? Does it matter that Psalm 137 was sung communally by those who had not experienced the trauma of exile? And how should we ask God to bring justice in the wake of violence?

Do you have a question or another insight into this passage? Do you agree or disagree with something I’ve said here? Is there another passage that you’d like me to wrestle with in an upcoming post? Click through to leave me a comment—I’d love to hear from you!

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ICYMI

Kind of an awkward moment, right? For a long time, I dealt with the awkwardness by … thinking about it as little as possible. Full-on avoidance mode. But then, last year—unexpectedly—I fell in love with this story while trying to answer a different question about bread: Why does Jesus feed a crowd of 5000 and a crowd of 4000?

Let me explain.

If you’re not familiar with the Dog-gate Scandal, let’s recap by reading Matthew 15:21-28 (NIV):

²¹ Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. ²² A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.”

²³ Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.”

²⁴ He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”

²⁵ The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said.

²⁶ He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”

²⁷ “Yes it is, Lord,” she said. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”

²⁸ Then Jesus said to her, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed at that moment.

(In Mark’s version of the story, the woman is described as Syrophoenician. See Mark 7:24-30.)

Is Jesus Being Racist, Or … ?

Some readers have suggested that this episode shows Jesus being racist and that the woman teaches him a better way. An acquaintance with a penchant for internet trollery once claimed on the Lord’s internet that Jesus was racist and that this shows us that racism isn’t a sin!

Other commentators have pointed out that the word Jesus uses for “dog” is a diminutive that might evoke a small, domestic dog. N. Clayton Croy proposes that we translate the word as “little dog” or even “puppy”—evoking an ancient family pet rather than a mangy street dog.1 (It’s only a matter of time before a millennial preacher in Converse suggests we read the word as “doggo.”)2 Others, like Jeannine Brown, point out that, while such a translation might soften the interaction, it can’t erase the sting of Jesus’ words entirely.3 Ben Witherington makes an interesting observation: The woman is comfortable pushing back—perhaps because of her own desperation, but perhaps because there is something in Jesus’ words or manner that invites pushback.4

These all seem like fair points. Perhaps Jesus is less harsh here than he sounds in translation. Interpretation inevitably involves imagination. So, how do we imagine the scene in our heads?

Is Jesus’ tone harsh? Inviting? When and how does he look at her? Does he offer her a little smile and tilt his head toward his disciples, as if to suggest that he’s leading her through this conversation for their benefit? Mark’s version of the story tells us that they’re inside a house—is a nearby puppy eating a scrap from the hand of a mischievous child as they speak? For many stories, our whole perspective can change based on how we block the scene in our heads.

But we’ll come back to this imaginative exercise in a minute. For now, I want to focus on how this scene fits within its immediate context—the stories that come before and after it. Because, as it turns out, there’s a lot about meals in Matthew 15 and Mark 7-8.

“Wash Your Hands For At Least 20 Seconds”

Right before this story, some hypocritical Pharisees and scribes—Jewish religious leaders—come at Jesus (see the whole story in Matthew 15:1-20; Mark 7:1-23). They want to know why Jesus’ disciples aren’t washing their hands before eating.

Today, with our knowledge of germs, we all want to tell the disciples to wash their hands. But these Pharisees weren’t concerned about germs. They’re outraged that the disciples are breaking Jewish tradition about hand-washing. This may be selective outrage—because this group already has it out for Jesus, they’re looking for ways to discredit him. Jesus retorts that these hypocritical religious leaders are willing to break God’s commands for the sake of their tradition—they’re even creating loopholes to help people avoid financially supporting their aging parents!

Quick note: The Pharisees get a bad rap in a lot of preaching and teaching—I’m not going to rehash the academic conversations today, but I’ll say that we don’t want to paint with a broad brush. We’re talking about the specific group of people who are trying to entrap Jesus in this particular scene, not about Pharisees as a whole.

Look at the contrast between these Pharisees and this woman: They are male, Jewish religious leaders—she is a Gentile woman with a demon-possessed daughter. It’s hard to imagine a stronger contrast. And yet she is the one who recognizes Jesus as the Son of David. They rebuke Jesus for how his disciples eat; she just wants some crumbs from his table.

Why Does Jesus Feed Two Crowds?

Now let’s look at what happens after Jesus’ interaction with this woman: First, he heals some people (Matthew 15:29-31; Mark 7:31-37), and then he feeds the 4000 (Matthew 15:32-39; Mark 8:1-10).

Isn’t it odd that Jesus feeds both a crowd of 5000 and a crowd of 4000? Is Jesus just reprising his greatest hits? (Possibly.) Could this be the same event counted differently? (Seems promising until you realize that Matthew and Mark record both events, and Jesus discusses them as separate feedings in Matthew 16:9-10. The feeding of the 5000 comes first, before his interaction with the Canaanite woman.)

But Mark gives us an interesting detail—after talking with the Canaanite woman, Jesus is still in Gentile country, in the Decapolis. Mark focuses in on a specific miracle: Jesus heals a deaf man. Matthew records the whole healing tour, in which the people “praise the God of Israel.” And then Jesus has compassion on the gathered crowd and tells his disciples to get them something to eat.

The disciples—who’ve recently witnessed Jesus feed 5000 people with five small loaves of bread and two fish—have absolutely no idea how they’re supposed to feed the crowd. Not one clue. Not even the faintest hint. So Jesus performs another miracle—I imagine him rolling his eyes when the disciples ask where they’re supposed to get food. Everyone eats until they’re full, and the disciples gather up seven baskets of leftovers.

The Feeding of the 5000 was a crowd of Jews. But the 4000 are largely Gentiles.

So, after his interaction with this woman, Jesus begins healing other Gentiles—just as he healed her daughter—and then literally. gives. bread. to. Gentiles!

And he does this by repeating a miracle that he’s already done for his own people. The children’s bread has indeed come to the little dogs. But he gives this crowd far more than table scraps. Because there are leftovers. Seven baskets full of them.

When Jesus feeds the 5000, earlier, the 12 baskets of leftovers symbolize the 12 tribes of Israel. Here, seven baskets may signify the number of completion—that Jesus is bringing in all peoples—or it may be a reference to the seven nations in the land of Canaan, signaling the radical inclusion in Jesus of those who were once driven out (see Deuteronomy 7:1; Acts 13:19).

Nevertheless, She Persisted

So, let’s return to our scene: Jesus and his disciples, in a house. At some point, the woman arrives.

Try to play two or three versions of this scene out in your head. At what point does she enter the house? What else is happening around them? What is Jesus’ tone and expression? What are the disciples doing? Who makes eye contact with who, and when?

The woman comes to Jesus in faith, asking for healing for the daughter she loves. She comes in humility, pleading for his mercy, calling him the Son of David, demonstrating that she understands Jesus’ place in Israel’s story better than the group of religious leaders that just tried to entrap him.

He is quiet, at first. Is she in front of him yet? Is she yelling from outside the house?

But his disciples sure aren’t quiet! They’re annoyed. They want Jesus to send her away. How loudly are they speaking? What are they saying about her? Does one of the disciples mumble the more-derogatory version of the word for dog?

Jesus says that he was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel. Is he speaking to her? To the disciples? Both? Others in the home?

She kneels before him. “Lord, help me.”

He answers that it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the little dogs. How does he say it? Does his tone or manner invite pushback?

She flatly contradicts him: “Yes, it is, Lord. Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.” (“Lord” and “master” are the same word in Greek—though it’s awkward in English, we could say, “Yes, it is, Lord. Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the lord’s table.”)

He replies, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.”

When she leaves the house, she finds her daughter healed and whole. And when Jesus leaves the house, he embarks on a new phase of his ministry—it’s time to bring the bread of life to the Gentiles.

The Other Women Who Persisted

As I’ve meditated on this story, I’ve found two intriguing (potential) parallels.

Let’s think about Mary, Jesus’ mother, in John 2:1-12—the Wedding at Cana.5 Mary knows that Jesus is a miracle-worker. When the bride’s family runs out of wine, Mary brings the problem to Jesus—this family, with whom Mary must be very close, is about to suffer a huge public shame. Jesus tells his mother that his hour hasn’t yet come—it isn’t time for him to perform public miracles. But she persists, and Jesus agrees and embarks on a new phase of his ministry—his public miracles.

Do these women change Jesus’ mind? That’s one possible reading, though I wouldn’t frame it in quite that way—the Old Testament portrays Israel’s destiny as lighting the way for the nations. Matthew bookends his gospel with the visitation of foreign magi at the beginning, and the great commission to make disciples of all nations at the end. Jesus was always going to do miracles, and he was always here for both Jews and Gentiles. At most, the women accelerated his timeline.

Perhaps these women acted as unwitting messengers—the Father used them to tell Jesus that the time had come for the next phase of his ministry.

Or perhaps Jesus knew all along how these episodes would play out and invited these women into the process of his unfolding ministry. If he had no intention of ministering to the Gentiles, we might ask why he went to the region of Tyre and Sidon at all. His give-and-take with the Canaanite woman, in particular, may have been for the benefit of his disciples, that they might contrast her understanding and faith with their own confusion and doubt—or with the outright resistance of some Jewish religious leaders.

(Two other minor parallels between these passages deserve a mention, though they may or may not be relevant. First, the water jars in John 2:6 are for ceremonial washing; my Bible has a note connecting John 2:6 to Mark 7:3-4, which describes the Pharisees’ purification rituals—you know, the ones that they think Jesus’ disciples should be observing. These verses are right in the “Wash Your Hands” passage we talked about earlier! Second, Jesus addresses both women as “Woman.” This isn’t unique in the gospels—Jesus uses this word as direct address five or six times in John6 and once in Luke—but it is the only use of this form of the word in Matthew. It is not used anywhere in Mark.)

Let’s also think about the Parable of the Unjust Judge in Luke 18:1-8. In this story, a widow pleads for justice from an unjust judge, a man who neither fears God nor respects the people. Though he refuses at first, the widow wears him out with pleading until, in exasperation, he grants her request. Jesus describes the judge as a foil to God—if this unjust man eventually grants justice, how much more will the just and righteous God respond to the pleas of his people? Luke interprets this parable as a lesson “to pray always and not to lose heart.”

So, Matthew and Mark tell us of the Canaanite/Syrophoenician woman who pushes back against Jesus to plead for her daughter.

Luke relates the parable of the widow who wears out the unjust judge in seeking justice.

John shows Mary insist that Jesus save a family she loves from social shame.

Every gospel describes a woman who pushes God in pursuit of what is right—even though it looks like God has said no—until she receives her miracle.

May we follow her example and do likewise.

A Rule for Difficult Texts

Does this reading leave us entirely comfortable with the story? Probably not. Difficult texts are … well … difficult. But I hope it helped you see possibilities in the text, that you’re better able to fit this story into the narrative of Scripture and the character of God than you were before. These stories invite us to study and to meditate, to wrestle with God and to refuse to let go until we receive a blessing.

So, my first rule for difficult texts: When you’re staring at a weird or unsettling passage … take a deep breath. Fear not, as the angels always say in the stories. It’s an invitation to the Church to meditate on it in community. We’ll figure it out together.

Do you have a question or another insight into this passage? Do you agree or disagree with something I’ve said here? Is there another passage that you’d like me to wrestle with in an upcoming post? Click through to leave me a comment—I’d love to hear from you!

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ICYMI

This week, we enter into the high point of that narrative in the church calendar. It felt like the right time to share this piece. Have a blessed Holy Week, friends. If you can make it to an Easter Vigil service on Saturday night, I recommend going—it’s my favorite service of the whole year, in large part because it retells the whole story.

Speaking of Holy Week—last Friday, I went to a gorgeous stage production of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, a book I’ve read many times. But during the performance, for the first time, I realized why it’s Susan and Lucy who accompany Aslan to the Stone Table.

It’s because Jesus’ female disciples remained at the cross and first witnessed the resurrection. Susan and Lucy stand in the tradition of Mary Magdalene, Salome, the other Mary, Joanna, and Mary of Nazareth.

And now, for the story of the Bible … and the story of all things.

Before the beginning, there was only Yahweh. Then, Yahweh began everything. Yahweh created the world and all that is in it—earth and stars, the fruit of the vine and the birds of the air, wheat and fish and olives and pygmy hippopotamuses.

From the dust of the earth and the breath of life, Yahweh formed humankind in Yahweh’s own image and likeness, to live in peace and reign as regents. Yet, the people chose sin over shalom, bringing death upon their own heads and darkness and disorder upon the world, forgetting the God of the garden. The voices of blood cried out from the cursed ground until Yahweh cleansed the earth in the floodwaters of baptism, restoring it anew, washing away the stain of violence.

Still, Yahweh showed mercy. Yahweh brought Noah and his wife, and his sons and their wives, alive through the deluge. As the waters receded, Yahweh pledged to never again destroy the earth by flood. He bid humankind to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth with persons in Yahweh’s own image and likeness, to live in peace and reign as regents. Yet, the people chose sin over shalom, walking in the ways of kings, conceiving exploitation and violence among themselves, bearing the fruit of empire and injustice upon the world, forgetting the God of the flood. The voices of the oppressed cried out from among the bricks of Babylon until Yahweh confused the tongues of humankind, scattering the nations over the face of all the earth.

Still, Yahweh showed mercy. Yahweh enacted a covenant with Abram, decreeing that his descendants would become a great nation and inherit the land, outnumbering the stars of the sky. These sons and daughters would be the people of Yahweh, and through them the nations of the earth would be blessed. “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you,” Yahweh said to Abram (Genesis 12:1 NRSVUE). And Abram obeyed. Yet, as the inexorable years bore Abram and Sarai to old age and the candle of promise flickered, Abram and Sarai chose sin over shalom, exploiting and abusing their Egyptian slave, Hagar. The voice of Hagar cried out in the desert until Yahweh saw Hagar, and Hagar saw that Yahweh saw her.

Still, Yahweh showed mercy. Yahweh drew near to Abram and Sarai and renamed them Abraham and Sarah—the father and mother of a nation from whom all other nations would be blessed, whose children would do what is right and just. And in the fullness of time, Sarah birthed Isaac, the father of Israel. Yet, the sons of Israel chose sin over shalom, selling their brother into slavery and suffering in Egypt and unleashing slavery and suffering upon their own descendants. The voices of the exploited and abused cried out from among the bricks of Egypt until Yahweh heard their groaning.

And Yahweh showed mercy. Yahweh sent Moses, born of Abraham’s descendants and raised within the household of Pharaoh, to defy the king who set himself up as a god. With signs and wonders, Yahweh showed himself greater than the gods of Egypt and led the children of Israel through the paths of the sea to the shores of salvation. At the holy mountain, Yahweh covenanted with the people he had saved, decreeing that they would be his treasured possession, a kingdom of priests, a holy nation, if only they obeyed and kept his covenant. By holding fast to Yahweh’s law, this people—now a nation—would do what is right and just, as Yahweh had said to Abraham long ago. And Yahweh would dwell with them as their God and faithfully lead them into the land promised to their ancestors. Yet the people chose sin over shalom, forgetting the God of the covenant, fashioning for themselves a golden idol. The voices of the singers cried out in the camp until the judgment of Yahweh fell upon them in sword and plague.

Still, Yahweh showed mercy. In time, Yahweh dwelt among them and blessed them and brought them into the land of milk and honey. Yet the people chose sin over shalom, forgetting the God who brought them out of slavery in Egypt, giving themselves to other gods and adopting the customs of other peoples, offering themselves into the hands of other nations. The voices of the people cried out from among the idols until Yahweh heard their groaning.

And Yahweh showed mercy. One by one, Yahweh sent judges, born of Abraham’s descendants, to drive back the kings who set themselves up as sons of the gods. Yet the people chose sin over shalom again and again and again, forgetting the God of justice and righteousness, doing what was right in their own eyes, embracing idols and exploitation and ever-darkening deeds of violence. The voices of wounded women cried out from the land until Yahweh heard their weeping.

And Yahweh showed mercy. Yahweh sent Samuel, prophet and priest, to do what is right and just. Samuel called the people to return to Yahweh with all their hearts, to worship Yahweh alone, to serve Yahweh as their king. Yet the sons of Samuel chose sin over shalom, forgetting the God of their father, exploiting and abusing the people by accepting bribes to do injustice. The voices of the people cried out for a king even as Yahweh warned them of the ways of human kings.

Still, Yahweh showed mercy. Yahweh sent David, a poet and shepherd, a man after Yahweh’s own heart, to scatter the enemies of Israel and shepherd the people. Yahweh declared that David’s kingdom will be unending, that his heir will sit on Israel’s throne forever. But in time, David chose sin over shalom, forgetting the God of his youth, seizing a beautiful woman to satisfy his untamed lust. And then, to cover his crime, he abandoned her husband to bleed out on the field of battle. The tears of Bathsheba and the blood of her husband cried out from the ground until Yahweh lifted his protection from the house of David, letting the sins and intrigues of the princes destroy the peace of David’s reign.

Still, Yahweh showed mercy. Bathsheba’s son sat upon the throne and built a temple for Yahweh, and the cloud of Yahweh’s presence filled it. At the rumors of Solomon’s divine wisdom, a foreign queen visited the land, praising Yahweh’s justice and righteousness and eternal love for Israel. But in time, Solomon chose sin over shalom, forgetting the God of David, walking in the ways of human kings, acquiring innumerable instruments of warfare, exploiting the bodies of a thousand women, and giving himself to other gods. The voices of the faithless cried out in worship to Chemosh and Molech until Yahweh tore the kingdom in two pieces.

Still, Yahweh showed mercy. At the urging of a servant girl, a foreign commander sought healing from a prophet of Yahweh and declared that “there is no God in all the earth except in Israel” (2 Kings 5:15). The songs of the people called the nations to acknowledge Yahweh’s glory, and the prophets saw visions and dreamed dreams. The word of Yahweh came to the prophet Isaiah, that “the mountain of [Yahweh’s] house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills, and all nations shall stream to it” (Isaiah 2:2). And Yahweh declared that he will renew heaven and earth: “I am coming to gather all nations and tongues; and they shall come and shall see my glory. … They will proclaim my glory among the nations” (Isaiah 66:18-22). Yet, the children of Israel chose sin over shalom, forgetting the God of the promise, embracing the worship of idols and the exploitation of the poor again and again and again. The voices of the powerless cried out from the promised land until Yahweh said, “Enough.” The armies of Assyria and Babylon scattered the children of Israel, conquered their lands, and threw down Yahweh’s temple.

Still, Yahweh showed mercy. In exile, the people cried out in repentance. They centered their lives on the practice of Yahweh’s Law and represented Yahweh to pagan rulers, until the kings of Babylon and Persia gave glory to Yahweh. Then Yahweh, in his faithfulness, moved Cyrus the Great to deliver the children of Israel back from exile, into the land promised to Abraham, that they might rebuild their city and temple. Yet, the troubles of the people had not reached their end. A succession of empires demanded their loyalty. Yahweh’s presence did not fill this new temple like a cloud, as it had in the days of Solomon. Still, the people clung fast to Yahweh’s promises, anticipating a glorious restoration when Yahweh would throw down their enemies and exalt Israel as a light to the nations, when all the earth would stream to the holy mountain in awe. The voices of the hopeful cried out in expectation until Yahweh heard their hunger and thirst for righteousness.

And Yahweh showed mercy. Yahweh’s spirit overshadowed a daughter of Sarah. In the fullness of time, she birthed Jesus, God-with-us, who was there before the beginning. Jesus, a descendant of David’s royal line, invited Jew and Gentile alike to live in peace in the cruciform Kingdom of God. He did what is right and just, keeping the covenant and yet bearing the covenant’s curse, representing Yahweh to humankind and humankind to Yahweh, redeeming the children of Adam and Eve. And after Jesus defeated death and ascended into heaven, Yahweh’s own spirit came upon the church in fire at Pentecost, the divine presence once again filling Jerusalem, reversing the curse of exile. They spoke in the tongues of the once-scattered nations, reversing the curse of Babel. The Gentiles to whom they preached, through the fire of Pentecost and the floodwaters of baptism, were grafted into the covenant people of Yahweh, to be his treasured possession, a kingdom of priests, a holy nation, in a reversal of the curse of sin itself.

Yet, the people of Yahweh still so often choose sin over shalom, walking in the way of violence and exploitation rather than the way of the cross. Still, Yahweh will show mercy, executing a final judgment on violence and abuse and exploitation, even on death itself. He will renew the world and all that is in it—earth and stars, the fruit of the vine and the birds of the air, wheat and fish and olives and pygmy hippopotamuses. And Yahweh will resurrect his people, flesh and bone and sinew made imperishable, to live in peace and reign as regents. They will stream to the city of God, to the tree of life that will heal the nations. There, the people of Yahweh will choose shalom over sin, doing what is right and just, embracing life and light in Yahweh’s glorious Kingdom, in the land of milk and honey where Yahweh makes all things new.

If you missed it …

I wrote my thesis on the intersection of slavery, status, and sexual ethics in 1 Corinthians. My central question is “How would enslaved Corinthian women, who didn’t have the legal right to defend the boundaries of their own bodies, have heard Paul’s sexual ethics teachings?”

Today, I’d like to give some context for the Bible and slavery by talking about what first-century Roman slavery—in the time of Jesus and Paul—actually looked like. I am absolutely begging you not to repeat the common talking point that “it wasn’t that bad.”

Roman Slavery in the Real World

If you open most evangelical commentaries on 1 Corinthians (or, really, any of the letters that deal with slavery), you’ll find some variation on the idea that first-century Roman slavery wasn’t that bad.1 Maybe it wasn’t ideal, but it was definitely a kinder, gentler institution than the word slavery suggests. Surely it was different in every way from slavery in the United States … right?

Narrator: “It was not a kinder, gentler institution.”

That’s not to say there were no differences between Roman and American slavery.2 But those differences should not be used to distract from the fact that, as a rule, Roman slavery was an incredibly brutal institution.

I want to introduce you to a little girl named Prima. When we meet her, Prima is three years old; her baby brother, Secundus, has just begun to walk. Picture them. Hold them in your mind’s eye.

The story I’m about to tell you is a reconstruction, rooted in scholarship on first-century slavery. The names and stories of most slaves have been lost to us because no one cared enough to preserve them. But I don’t want to leave you with a cold, bare recounting of abstracted history. As Candida Moss observes, “Abstractions can be useful, but they are also shorn of humanity.”3 So, to humanize our subjects, to help us see them, I’ll interweave the historical record with brief sketches of one representative family.

Sexual Abuse

Prima knows that she has to keep Secundus from getting into too much trouble while her mama is working. And it feels like Mama is always working. If she and Secundus make too much ruckus, Despoina—the lady of the house—will storm into the room and beat them.4 Prima is scared of Despoina.

Despoina’s husband, Despotes, isn’t mean like Despoina. Well, not most of the time, anyway. Sometimes he brings Prima sweet treats and caresses her hair. Mama says that Prima looks just like him. But Prima doesn’t like how he touches her when Despoina leaves the house.

Time passes. Prima is six, Secundus four. Prima is starting to think that Secundus looks a lot like Despotes. And now she knows what that means. She knows what Despotes likes to do to Mama in his bed, and that’s where babies come from. Mama’s belly is growing again with another baby, and that’s made Despoina even meaner. Prima wonders if her belly will start growing soon, too, like Mama’s.

Sexual abuse was ubiquitous. The sexual use of enslaved women, girls, and boys wasn’t just tolerated—it was encouraged!5 One Roman writer observed that a man showed respect for his wife by visiting his appetites for “debauchery” on enslaved women.6 Impregnating enslaved women financially benefited the householder—any child of an enslaved woman was enslaved by default, regardless of the identity of the father. Lactating women worked as wet nurses, either within the household or for hire. Sexual abuse started horrifyingly young.7 Rabbis wrote that a girl freed by age three could marry as a virgin once she was grown, because they believed her hymen would close back up again. But if she were still enslaved at age four, she was labeled a nonvirgin.8

The enslaved possessed no parental rights over their children—enslaved men were not even acknowledged as the fathers of their biological children.9 Slaves could do nothing to protect their children from physical or sexual abuse. (Imagine the sense of powerlessness and rage!) They could not legally marry.10 They could engage in informal quasi-marriages if the enslaver permitted it, but a “married” slave woman was still her enslaver’s sexual property—and often his sexual plaything.11

Exposure and Prostitution

Just when Prima thought Mama’s childbirth was over, it begins again. There are two babies—first a girl, then a boy. Prima helps wash the babies and wrap them up in blankets.

Despotes names the boy Tertius. He doesn’t even look at the girl before he tells Prima to get rid of her.

With wooden steps, Prima carries her sister into the chilly winter air, onto the bustling street. When the baby gurgles, she can’t bring herself to look down at her.

When she reaches the old pool, the place where people go to look for abandoned babies, she tucks the blanket tightly around her sister, then sets the wailing bundle down several paces from the filthy water. She tries to tear herself away. But she can’t leave. Not yet. So she crouches in the shadows to watch and wait.

She doesn’t have to wait long. A woman gathers up the crying baby, shushing her softly. Prima allows herself a flash of hope. Perhaps the woman is barren, and her sister will be raised in freedom. As the woman walks away, Prima steals after her, hanging back just far enough that she won’t be spotted.

Prima follows them until they disappear through a doorway, and her hope fades. Her baby sister has been claimed by a brothel-keeper.

Many—I would argue most—prostitutes were enslaved.12 When a Roman paterfamilias decided he wanted to get rid of a child born in his house—whether the child of his wife or his slave—he could command the child be abandoned shortly after birth. Brothel-keepers “rescued” many of these abandoned babies and raised them as enslaved prostitutes, first pimping them out as young children.13 Though it would be anachronistic to apply such terminology to the legal slave and sex trades of the first century, today we would call most Roman prostitutes victims of sex trafficking.

Physical Abuse and Violence

Time passes. Prima is nineteen, pregnant with her second child, running errands in the market. She feels sick to her stomach. Six months ago, Despotes, deeply in debt, sold Tertius to a rich man who thought him pretty. And now, the rumor on the street is that Tertius’s new master might be disloyal to the emperor.

Prima chokes back her growing sense of fear. Tertius is his master’s favorite—his master always keeps him close. And that means that Tertius knows almost everything that goes on in that house. If the authorities force Tertius to testify … she doesn’t want to think about it. They’ll torture him. Because they don’t trust any slave to tell the truth.

Someone shoves her from behind, and a gruff male voice says, “Get out of my way!”

She staggers forward, losing her grip on her basket, and half the food she’s just purchased goes flying. Whirling around, she dips her head and murmurs an apology to the free man she’s just inconvenienced. Then she drops to her knees, scrambling to pick up the bruised fruit and dirty bread. When she stands, she lets out a heavy sigh. Despoina will surely beat and berate her for the condition of the food.

In public, the enslaved had no recourse against verbal or casual physical abuse, such as a slap, from anyone.14 If a slave was sexually assaulted or badly beaten by a third party, their enslaver could legally prosecute the perpetrator, but only for civil damages—the case was treated as a sort of property vandalism.15 When authorities called upon a slave to testify in a legal matter, they presumed her to be a chronic liar, and her testimony was always taken under torture.16

The enslaved, as a rule, were vulnerable to every bodily violation imaginable: “summary execution, flogging, chaining, imprisonment, and torture.”17 Sandra Joshel writes, “Whipping or beating slaves was so much a matter of common sense that it is a joke in comedy, a line in poetry, a scene in novels, or a phrase in philosophical tracts.”18 Crucifixion was closely associated with slavery; Cicero called the cross a punishment appropriate to slaves alone,19 and Roman law called for the mass crucifixion of all of a household’s enslaved workers if any slave murdered the head of the household.20 Tacitus reports a particular case that provoked some horror, even among the Romans, because it involved a large household of 400 slaves, including many women and young children. All were crucified.21

The logic of the law is undeniable. Roman law was designed to protect first the social order and then the well-being and honor of citizens,22 especially the paterfamilias (the male head of household). So, imagine that you’ve been enslaved in a Roman household. You know that your friends and family—your four-year-old child!—will be crucified if you kill your enslaver. You probably won’t harm him, no matter what degradations he subjects you to. And you’ll likely fight tooth-and-nail to save him if another slave attacks him.

Manumission—For Some

Time passes. Prima is thirty-two. Despoina’s death has given her some peace around the house, and Despotes has just made an announcement: he wants to manumit Secundus. It’s almost enough to distract her from the grief she feels over Mama and Tertius. At least Mama’s illness took her quickly.

Despotes moves slowly these days, and a racking cough has come on him, so fierce he gasps for breath. She helps Despotes to bed and brings him water, murmuring that she hopes he’ll sleep well. She can feign affection for him easily enough. She’s had years of practice.

She lies down on the floor near her three living children. Her oldest reminds her of Tertius. She wishes she knew if her brother was dead yet. She hopes he is. When Tertius fell out of his master’s favor, he fell hard. He was sold, then sold again. Last she heard, he’d been sent to do farm work on a rural estate. And once a slave went there, he never came back.

Despotes’ cough turns worse, and soon he is dead. And in his will, Prima receives an unexpected gift: freedom. Perhaps she should have expected it—he’d dangled the hope of manumission over the years, in exchange for faithful service. But somehow she hadn’t expected that he’d really do it. Or that she would live to see it. She’d thought she would die a slave.

Now, she’s a freedwoman, and the air smells a little sweeter. But she will remain where she is, nonetheless, serving Despotes’ heir. Her children are still slaves. And where else could she go? How would she support herself?

Enslaved men in urban centers were often manumitted (freed) around the age of thirty. Women could also be manumitted young, but more often received freedom later, after their childbearing years.23 However, we should not take this to mean that most slaves were eventually manumitted. The majority died in slavery.24 Also, freedpersons—the technical term for ex-slaves—remained in the orbit of their former enslaver and often stayed in the household. Freedpersons retained a lifelong obligation to their former enslaver—they were to respect the enslaver and perform a reasonable amount of unpaid labor for him every year.25 (If they failed to fulfill these obligations, they could be re-enslaved!) Some freedpersons became Roman citizens, but they remained second-class citizens for the rest of their lives.

What About the Bible?

“So, why does the New Testament tolerate such a terrible institution?” you might ask.

I’ll dig into questions about the Bible and slavery over the next few months. (Not next week, though. We’re going to take a breather and enjoy some lighter, happier material next week.) For now, it will suffice to say that the Bible, properly understood, is fundamentally anti-slavery. Paul certainly seems to take a dim view of the institution. But we should not (and cannot) “rescue” the Bible from itself by repeating bad history about first-century slavery. (As if the Bible needs our help!) Bad history is no foundation for good theology.

If we believe the Bible is true, then we know that the God who heard the cries of the Israelites in Egypt heard the cries of first-century slaves. The God who saw Hagar and her tears in the desert sees the tears of the oppressed in every time and place.

The first step is acknowledging the brutality of Roman slavery. Tell your pastor. Tell your small group. Push back on claims that it was a kinder, gentler institution. Let’s replace bad history with the truth, as accurately as we can state it, so that we have a better foundation on which to interpret the Bible’s slavery passages.

So, I quit, for the most part.

But I still have some things to say. And in conversations about my thesis—rejoice with me, for I turned it in last Friday!—and other areas of the Bible that I’m passionate about, people keep asking me if I have a Substack.

So I’m here to write about the Bible.

What Is This About?

If you stick around, you’ll hear a lot about my thesis topic, which is slavery + status + sexual ethics in 1 Corinthians. (Elevator pitch: How might the enslaved, who did not have the legal right to defend the boundaries of their own bodies, have heard Paul’s sexual ethics teachings?)

We’ll talk about difficult texts that force us to wrestle with God, about the rich web of connections that run through Scripture, about how the Bible is a wild, untamed story of God’s work in the world, not a tidy manual of systematic theology. We’ll meet lesser-known biblical characters and dust off obscure verses—and engage some modern controversies along the way.

For the time being, none of my posts will be paywalled. If I ever write on more personal topics or on issues where I’m still tentatively feeling out what I think, I may choose to put those behind a paywall for the illusion of a little privacy. I welcome any paid subscribers who choose to support what I’m doing here, but for now, at least, I want to operate from a mindset of abundance—giving freely and accepting God’s gifts with gratitude.

A Little About Me

I’ve been married for twelve years to Brendan, best of men and best of husbands. We have three cats.

In my previous life, I was a fantasy fiction writer/editor, which fuels my love of the Bible-as-story. My new mission is to use my writing and editing skills to help bring great biblical scholarship to the Church in creative ways. For anyone coming to this post from my fiction circles—yes, I’m going to finish that long-overdue conclusion to the Fire Dancer trilogy as soon as I possibly can. I also owe a book to a cowriter. (Sorry, Andrew!) Beyond that, I expect I will return to fiction at some point, but I don’t know what that will look like or when it will be.

I believe that the Bible is true. I believe we should honestly wrestle with hard passages, searching for relevant pieces of ancient context and for connections to other biblical texts to help us understand what God is doing. I believe we should be honest when we don’t know something and humble when we’re pretty sure we do. The scariest thing about blind spots is that we can’t see our own.

As I have lingered in the Bible’s tensions, I have found the text to be a well of life. It does not give easy, pat answers; like life, it is layered, rough-edged, messy. It demands that I wrestle with it, refusing to let go until I have received a blessing. And why would it be any other way? The Christian life is not a series of propositions, but the story of God’s work in a sin-haunted world, a story God invites us into.

Let’s explore the Bible together.