ABSTRACT
Acts of sexual violence are not outliers. Sexual violence is omnipresent in social media, literature, art, and music worldwide. Rape culture transcends gender and age. Men denude and humiliate each other sexually. Contemporary rape cultures are underwritten by texts considered sacred and holy across the globe—and those include the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew Bible is, like the rape cultures of our time, filled with images and acts of sexual violence. Female characters are handed over to foreign potentates for their use or made the objects of the male gaze in exhibitionist displays arranged by their husbands. Female characters are not the only victims of sexual violence in the Hebrew Bible. A host of scholars have argued that the Hebrew Bible presents ideas wholly different from our own about what constitutes sexual assault, or rape.
