Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (12 page)

The famous “Ram in a Thicket,” formerly known as the “ram eating the tree that grows out of Asherah’s vagina.”

Out with the Old, In with the New

In the New Testament, Christ changes the rules. In contrast to what his Father commands over and over in the Old Testament, Jesus appears to tell his followers not to swear, ever.
In the Sermon on the Mount
, he preaches:

Again, you have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, “You shall not swear falsely, but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.” But I say to you, Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let your word be “Yes, yes” or “No, no”; anything more than this comes from the evil one. (Matt. 5:33–37)

Scholars have argued about this passage almost since it was written (around AD 80 or 90). Is Christ contradicting earlier scripture and really telling his audience not to swear at all? Is he in effect urging people to abandon the very means by which God established his dominion? Or is he asserting something less revolutionary, something like “Swear only when you really
have
to, as required in legal cases or by certain authorities”?

The argument starts within the New Testament itself, with James asserting that it is not allowable to swear in any case: “Above all, my beloved, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or
by any other oath
” (5:12; italics mine). Other almost equally venerable authorities contend that Christ would never ban all oaths, because they are so crucial for the functioning of society. St. Augustine (fourth century) and Thomas Aquinas (thirteenth century) claim that Christ forbade only false or vain swearing; oaths are too important to dispense with entirely. Philipp Melanchthon, the German reformer who collaborated with Martin Luther, provides a concise summary of this view: to prohibit swearing is “a destruction of secular government and justice, for government and justice are based on oaths.”

These were not abstract academic arguments. In the early fifteenth century, proto-Protestants called Lollards were persecuted because they would not swear oaths on the Bible, though they would swear by God alone.
*
Many were imprisoned and some were executed because of their belief in the lawfulness of one form of swearing but not another.
The Quakers, in contrast
, believed (and still believe) that all forms of swearing were forbidden. The movement’s founder, George Fox, argued in the late seventeenth century that Christ means exactly what he says when he tells people not to swear: “
plainer words than these
, cannot be in the scriptures.” This refusal
led to endless problems for the Quakers. They could not take the oath of allegiance to the king, or the oath of supremacy acknowledging that the king was head of the English Church, which made them liable to a sliding scale of punishments that increased with each repeated offense, from a five-pound fine to transportation to America. They also couldn’t give testimony in court, whether as a witness in a criminal trial or in their own defense. A good technique for getting rid of a Quaker you didn’t like was to accuse him of doing something illegal. Whether or not he was guilty, when he refused to take an oath his property would be confiscated and he would be thrown in jail for contempt of court.

So who is right here? The Quakers whose lives were ruined because they insisted that Christ forbade people to swear? The Lollards who would swear in some ways, but not on a Bible? The many theologians who, through the years, have argued that it is perfectly fine to swear under any circumstances? George Fox had a point when he said that nothing in the scriptures could be clearer than Christ’s command not to swear at all. But God is no less clear when he has Moses tell the Israelites that they should swear by his name—and Christ declares that he has “come not to abolish but to fulfill” the law (Matt. 5:17). Other parts of the Gospels support both the anti-oath and pro-oath positions. We have seen that the letter of James restates even more clearly the command not to swear. But the other time Christ himself talks about oaths, he condemns the scribes and Pharisees only for chopping logic about which oaths are binding and which are not (Matt. 23:16–22). He tells them not that they shouldn’t be swearing but that they should be swearing
properly
.

There is no right answer, at least for us wandering in the wilderness of error. But in a sense the debate doesn’t matter. History has resolved that swearing is permitted. In fact, it is more than permitted, it is necessary—our government and legal system would have a hard time functioning without it. The indications are that for Christ, swearing wasn’t very important—it certainly wasn’t as much of an issue for him as it was for his Father. When Yahweh was insisting that
people swear by him and only him, there were, as we’ve seen, hundreds of other gods competing for the affections of the polytheistic Israelites.
More than a thousand years later
, when Christ arrived on the scene, these other gods were no longer so much of a concern—the Jews were monotheistic. Yahweh had won his battle to be the only God of the Israelites, and Christ could lay down his father’s arms.

Thou Shalt Not Piss on the Wall: Obscenity in the Bible

The Hebrew Bible has its share of obscenity as well as oaths. When the Assyrian king Sennacherib is planning to besiege Jerusalem, he sends an emissary to the city to ask its people to surrender. This official paints the horrors of the coming siege as vividly as possible, telling the Jewish leaders and the ordinary people of the town, “the men which sit on the wall,” that they “may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss” (KJV 2 Kings 18:27). They will starve, the Assyrian warns, until they are so hungry and thirsty that they eat and drink their own waste in desperation. It is a powerful image, helped by the forthright, vulgar language, but it doesn’t do the job. The Jews don’t surrender, and Yahweh ends up killing 185,000 Assyrians, forcing Sennacherib to withdraw to his capital, Nineveh, where he is murdered by two of his sons while worshipping his (obviously powerless) god Nisroch.

To the ancient Israelites, excrement
and bodily effusions such as semen and menstrual blood were defiling. The Bible details an elaborate code of purification for various emissions so that people do not dishonor God’s tabernacle by approaching it in an unclean state. Here is a small sampling of the rules:

When any man has a discharge from his member [actually
flesh
, in Hebrew], his discharge makes him ceremonially unclean. The uncleanness of his discharge is this: whether his member flows with his discharge, or his member is stopped from discharging, it is uncleanness for him… . If a man has an emission of semen, he shall bathe his whole body in water, and be unclean until the evening… . When a woman has a discharge of blood that is her regular discharge from her body, she shall be in her impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. (NRSV Lev. 15:2–19)

God also tells the Israelites how and where they can relieve themselves—they must go outside the camp, dig a hole with a trowel each must carry among his tools, and cover it up. Depositing excrement inside the camp would be defiling, obscene in the second Roman sense of the word. The Lord is with the Israelites, and “therefore your camp must be holy, so that he may not see anything indecent among you” (NRSV Deut. 23:14). Yahweh is not only a jealous god but a fastidious one. Cleanliness is next to godliness.

Many versions of the Bible shy away from rendering all this excrement in its full glory. With a passage like “eat their own dung and drink their own piss,” translators usually keep the slightly vulgar
dung
but go for the more decorous “drink their own urine” (
NRSV, NIV, ESV
, NASB, Douay-Rheims; the Vulgate uses
stercora
, “excrement,” and
urinam
). Some go more formal and have the Israelites eating “excrement” and drinking their own “water” (Young’s Literal, Word English, ERV). And some just do their own thing: one version has the Israelites devouring their “vilest excretions” (Webster’s), while another leaps from the toilet into the crib without a look back: “they’ll be eating their own turds and drinking their own pee” (The Message).

If eating dung and drinking urine make translators hesitate, another famous crux stops them short. Several times God makes dire threats like the following: “Therefore, behold, I will bring evil upon the house of Jeroboam, and will cut off from Jeroboam
him that pisseth against the wall
” (KJV 1 Kings 14:10).

What does this phrase mean? Some scholars argue that “him that pisseth against the wall” is simply a vivid way of saying “all men.” In
biblical times (and right up to the Victorian era), it was socially acceptable, indeed the normal practice, for men to urinate in public.
All
men would pee on walls, trees, or whatever was handy when the urge struck. God is not using bad language, in this view. The translators of the King James Bible used
pisseth
to render the Hebrew
shathan
, “to make water, to urinate,” because that was their usual, though still slightly vulgar, word for it. Englishmen of 1611 shared the ancient Israelite disregard for micturational modesty, and they had no problems saying what they were not embarrassed to do.

Other scholars insist that “him that pisseth” is derogatory, that God
is
in a sense using obscene language about these men who have displeased him. By defining them through a low bodily function, God’s language makes members of the house of Jeroboam seem like dogs, marking their territory the only way they know how.

In any case, two things are clear. The phrase does not pertain to women, to whom stricter standards of modesty were applied (and who probably would have trouble pissing against a wall). And the translators of the King James Version had a different sense of the register of
piss
, or perhaps simply a greater toleration for vulgarity, than we do today. Modern translations of the Bible uniformly reject the richness of “him that pisseth,” replacing it with “every last male” (New International), “every male person” (New American Standard), or “every male” (English Standard).

As these various translations show
, many people today would prefer to ignore the bad language in the Bible. But how shocking was this language to the ancient Hebrews? Would words such as
gelel
and
shathan
have been obscene, and thus best translated as
shit
and
piss
, respectively, or would they have been polite words for indelicate subjects, more like our
defecate
and
urinate
? It is almost impossible to tell.
Hebrew is like Latin
, in that it was a vernacular language that became frozen in time as a religious, scholarly one. For hundreds of years it was read and studied, not spoken, until it was resurrected as the lingua franca of Jews in Palestine in the nineteenth century. Huge numbers of Latin texts have come down to us, from the basest graffiti
to the most high-flown oratory, allowing us, as we saw in the last chapter, to reconstruct the hierarchy of genres and assess the registers of words. But unlike Latin, there is no such record for ancient Hebrew—it comes to us from the Bible and from the Mishnah (c.
AD
200), the first part of the Talmud, itself a commentary on the Bible. These texts are too similar in purpose and vocabulary to reveal anything about the register of words when they were written.

Most of the Bible’s obscenity is in deed, not in word, though. The language is often quite chaste, even when the acts being described feature the most flagrant “whoredoms,” as the King James Version likes to call them. As translated in the New Revised Standard Version, Ezekiel 23:20 depicts things that would fit right into a pornographic movie, but in language that is G-rated (okay, maybe PG): “Yet she increased her whorings, remembering the days of her youth, when she played the whore in the land of Egypt and lusted after her paramours there, whose members were like those of donkeys, and whose emission was like that of stallions” (Ezek. 23:19–20).
Biblical Hebrew is extremely euphemistic
—it often substitutes an indirect and inoffensive term for one thought to be blunt or offensive. It never refers to the
genitals
when
hand
, or
foot
, or
side
, or
heel
, or
shame
, or
leg
, or
thigh
will do. It never says
have sex with
when a man can
know
a woman, or
go into
her, or
approach
her, or
touch
her, or
lie with
her, or just
go up to the bed
, or when, sexiest of all, the two can
eat bread
together. For defecation, the euphemism of choice is
covering the feet
. Here
feet
means feet, not genitals—when you defecate, you’ve got your trousers, skirt, or robe around your ankles, covering up your feet.

Some of these euphemisms are obvious, as in the Song of Songs.

My beloved thrust his hand into the opening,

and my inmost being yearned for him.

I arose to open to my beloved,

and my fingers dripped with myrrh,

my fingers with liquid myrrh,

upon the handles of the bolt. (Song 5:4–5)

If
hand
= “genitals,” and
fingers
= “genitals,” and
dripped
= … well, you get the idea. It is almost painful to watch scholars insist that this passage has nothing at all to do with sex. No, it is truly and only about God’s love for Israel, Christ’s love for the Church, or the soul’s spiritual union with God. The esteemed eighteenth-century commentator Matthew Henry explains, for example, “
In this chapter we have
… Christ’s gracious acceptance of the invitation which his church had given him, and the kind visit which he made to her.”