ABSTRACT
Sexual licentiousness and promiscuity is one of the common reproaches against the foreign nations in the Bible. The foreigners are depicted as being sexually and morally degenerate. Contact with foreigners, especially on the part of Israelites with foreign women, seduces the lawful man into fornication and makes him unclean and morally inferior. By accusing the foreign nations, the moral and the religious become two sides of the same coin. Israel must not behave like the nations because contact with them leads astray from the ‘uniqueness’ of the ‘unique’ Israelite God, although that uniqueness is based on establishing an image of sexual deviance on the part of other nations. Thus, bowing down before foreign gods becomes synonymous to sexual engagement and vice versa. From the nineteenth century onward scholars have often been too quick to take these portrayals as reflecting the reality of religious practice, rather than recognizing this as a form of intra-religious polemic between Syro-Phoenician religions in the Southern Levant, of which the Israelite religion was one; an Israelite religion living side by side with a Canaanite religion is the wrong appreciation. Preoccupation with this form of sexualized demarcation and willingness to accept it as indicative of actual cultic practices in the region suited Victorians’ own rhetorical efforts to remove or denigrate sex within the public sphere.
