New International Version Bible. Moses saw that the people were running wild [ie: naked] and that Aaron had let them get out of control and so become a laughingstock to their enemies.

interview by Johnathan Bi. That’s the moment when Moses asks his followers, “Who is on the Lord’s side?” And then Moses gave the command that you have cited: put each man his hand on his sword and walk from one gate to the other of the camp and slay everyone, his friends and family members. […]

by William G. Dever. https://archive.org/details/DidGodHaveAWife/mode/2up Page 34 The Scandinavian branch of this school tended to be more extreme, positing not only celebrations of “divine kingship” in ancient Israel, but even of the hieros gamos, or “sacred marriage” of the gods. In these rites, priests and priestesses, the king and queen, or even “cult prostitutes” supposedly […]

by Marko Marina. We may suggest, then, that the priestly work was later than Deuteronomy and Ezekiel, at a time when a restored community in the Promised Land was a practical possibility, perhaps even as early as the late sixth century B.C.E.

by Diarmaid MacCulloch. Much was now purged from Judaic religion that had once been acceptable, even in the Jerusalem Temple: notably Asherah, God’s long-standing wife, now recast as one of the seductresses who had turned the people of God from the right path. She was the most prominent victim of Jerusalem’s theological spring clean, which […]

Clip source: Ba&apos Ba’alei Ha-Nefesh by Biti Roi In Brief Ba’alei Ha-Nefesh is a halakhic work written by Rabbi Abraham ben David (Rabad) of Posquieres, a Provençal rabbi, in 1180. It focuses on the laws of behavior during niddah (menstruation), and lays out Rabad’s theology of self-control, sexuality, and the role of Jewish women. The […]

Why an Invented Past Won’t Give Women a Future. By Cynthia Eller. Steinem had been speculating about the origins of the patriarchy as early as 1972 … The discovery of paternity, of sexual cause and childbirth effect, was as cataclysmic for society as, say, the discovery of fire or the shattering of the atom. Gradually, […]

by Kenneth Maxwell 1996. The Sex Wars https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-1-4899-3462-8_5 In ancient Rome there were several categories of marriage having different and confusing legal status. Divorce was easy, often with no more formality than the husband’s declaration that the marriage was ended. The system encouraged promiscuity, and because of the uncertainty of fatherhood, the practice was to […]

by Karen Armstrong. One of the consequences, [of our scientific culture] however, is that we have, as it were, edited out the sense of the ‘spiritual’ or the ‘holy’ which pervades the lives of people in more traditional societies at every level and which was once an essential component of our human experience of the […]

by Peter Brown. For the Roman population to remain even stationary, each woman needed to produce 5 children, so pressure on young women was “inexorable”. Median age at marriage may have been low as fourteen.

by Sigmund Freud. They concern impressions of a sexual and aggressive nature and also early injuries to the self (injuries to narcissism) . We should add that children at that early age do not yet distinguish between sexual and purely aggressive actions so clearly as they do later on; (the ” sadistic ” misunderstanding of […]

by Niccolò Machiavelli. It was necessary, therefore, to Moses that he should find the people of Israel in Egypt enslaved and oppressed by the Egyptians, in order that they should be disposed to follow him so as to be delivered out of bondage.