God Hates Rape

As demonstrated by the recent discourse around rape from Donald Trump and Bill Cosby, our culture is confused and ambivalent about rape.  Trump’s spokesperson displayed this misunderstanding when he told The Daily Beast that “you can’t rape your spouse.” Bill Cosby revealed a deeply dysfunctional idea of rape and consent when he argued that his actions had not constituted sexual assault because he is a “pretty decent reader of people and their emotions in these romantic sexual things,” implying that his 46 victims had wanted to be drugged. Sadly, the mindsets of these two public figures point to a more widespread confusion about sex and the violation of the female body. It doesn’t take much pondering to recall Representative Todd Akin’s legitimate rape comment and how the case of rape in Steubenville was not taken seriously.

Many of these comments come from those on the political right of our 1.5 sided political system. I do not point this out to exonerate the left, which has failed to challenge rape culture in a meaningful way and which, though the left is just slightly better at watching its mouth than its conservative counterpart. Rather, I point out the conservative political location of these nuggets of rape culture because there are instructive connections between the values of the Right (imperialism I mean patriotism, a nostalgic view of the past, traditional family values which may or may not but probably do include subordination of women) and the perpetuation of rape culture. One of these values is church and religiosity.

Historically, the church has been at best mute and at worst an accomplice to the crime of rape culture. Most bystanders would agree that if there’s anyone who perpetuates a lack of respect for women’s bodies and well-being, it’s the institution stubbornly holding onto women-free leadership and waging a war on choice.  Surprisingly, though, those who want to end rape will find allies in scripture. The Bible talks more about rape and accountability for rape than the churches who claim to follow it in 2015. In fact, it declares over and over that God hates rape and considers it something requiring the utmost accountability.

Probably one of the most despised passages of the Bible, the one describing the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, has been widely misinterpreted as God’s condemnation of homosexuality. But Genesis 19 actually describes God’s anger at how the cities’ men treated foreign visitors —who were divine messengers in disguise—namely, in that they tried to rape them. The passage also shows how rape is about power, not sexual gratification, since in the story the men of the two cities attempt to use rape as a tool of territorialism and xenophobia- i.e. as a way for them to show the foreign men who was boss. Inside the story’s logic, it is the wickedness of rape and xenophobia that God punishes by destroying the city. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah should still be despised for the sheer amount of hatred toward the LGBTQ community that it has aided. But a more honest reading of it reveals that God does not hate gays, instead God hates rape.

The story of Dinah also depicts God as taking rape seriously and punishing it as much as God punishes anything. Genesis 34 describes how a prince named Shechem raped a Jewish woman, Dinah, and then, per the ancient (and, yes, biblically condoned) practice of legally rectifying a rape by marrying the survivor, convinces her father give her to him as his wife. Her brothers, however, are enraged by the rape. They devise a plan to trick Shechem and the men of his town into being circumcised, and while they are bedridden from the pain, they take siege of the town and kill all the males (including the perpetrator), and then rescue Dinah. This type of trickery is often presented in biblical narratives as something done by the heroines and heroes, so Dinah’s brothers come off as the protagonists and their punishment of the rapist as a proper conclusion.  Of course, a responsible reading of this text would not celebrate the massacre of innocent men as a response to one man’s crime.  The Bible treats war far too lighlty in general and presents the writers’ fantasies about overcoming enemy nations as history and as something God accomplishes.  Using the problematic motif of punishing many for the crime of one, this story communicates that God considers rape a serious offense, punishable in the extreme.

The most explicit biblical comment on rape comes in the gruesome story of the unnamed woman in Judges 19-20. A man travelling with his concubine comes across a group of men who threaten to rape him, and as in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, he instead offers his wife to them.  The men “wantonly rape her and abuse her all through the night until morning.” The description of her suffering is disturbing: her husband leaves her with the rapists until morning when he tells her to get up, but “there is no answer.”  He is outraged at what these men have done (though seemingly not remorseful about his own part in her rape and murder), and cuts her body into 12 pieces that he sends throughout Israel, attempting to communicate with this morbid gesture the seriousness of the crime. In response, Israel comes together to invade the area where this group of men live and execute the rapists. When the nation refuses to hand over the perpetrators, the Israelites declare war on the entire area. According to the story, God is on the side of those seeking vengeance for the rape and murder, and eventually the Israelites conquer the nation with God’s help. This grotesque story of rape and revenge, while not at all showing what should be done as a response to rape, does show how very seriously God takes rape; what happened to the unnamed woman mattered so much to God that God started a war on her behalf.

In a world that is not mad enough about rape, stories of God’s anger at rape and rapists could become resources to remind those less convinced among us how serious it is. These stories, fraught with all the problems of a biblical logic that is misogynistic and war-mongering, need to be interpreted with caution and suspicion, but they should not be ignored. Interpretations of stories like Sodom and Gomorrah have had immeasurable impact on our culture, fueling homophobia that forms everything from dysfunctional parenting, hate crimes, suicide and federal policy.  Many of those who are fond of using the Bible to legitimate their position, frequently the ones carelessly supplying fodder for rape culture, should turn a couple of chapters over and read what it says about rape.  In a culture where politicians like Richard Mourdock suggest that God might intend rape, a prestigious university like Columbia ignores a rape survivor’s calls for justice even when she carries it on stage in the form of a mattress, and it takes 46 women’s stories and 11 years before Cosby is prosecuted, we clearly need new tools to help us dismantle the world we see and build a new one.  The biblcal representation of God’s hatred of rape is one such tool.