LOT.

SOD OM

ONAN

&

PAUL

Men of old, as does a little child of today, endowed things with personalities. A child that stumbles over some object may kick or otherwise punish that object for getting in his way. Did not the earth lie supine as lies a woman and the sky lie over as lies a man? Didn't the sky pour life-liquid as a man, and the earth, swallowing it as a woman receives man-seed, consequently bear fruit? So wasn't a drought the result of the sky's neglecting his family duty? And, that rain might bring good crops and grazing for the herds, what more logical than that men whould signal the sky by themselves doing, in his sight, that which they wished him to do?

Men showed the devil-god how to do. In primitive man's magic (which he didn't think of as magic but as deep science or plain common sense) the guiding principle was, do the thing yourself that you want the devil-god to do. To break a drought he had a woman lie on the ground (out of doors, so the sky-demon could see) and he sprinkled water on her. Or he would take a woman into the middle of the thirsty field and fuck her, he and she both naked. That was to put the sky into the notion: when the sky-god saw the mortal screwing his woman he would get hot pants, follow the mortal's suit and send the fertilizing rain.

Logical for ancient man, such reasoning is foolish for us. Our ancestors of ages agone were ignorant and mistaken but they were not fools. They lived according to such light as they had. Incidentally the magicians frequently fudged on their laity by supplementing their traditional mumbo jumbo with some wisdom born of experience and a lot of shrewdness. But we are fools if we try to live by their lights when we have better lights of our own. In them the fertility obsession was a natural error: in us there is no excusing it; and there exists today a brand of extreme foolishness which makes a few people misinterpret their own tradition and feel superstitious scruples for which they suppose there is religious warrant when there isn't.

Garbled religion is the worst kind. In a way it is regretable that religions die so gradually that seldom does a man say, "Here and now I cease being a Christian," and almost never does a tribe make a clean break with its past. For, because of that murkiness of orientation, we find fragments of an abandoned religion or philosophy living hundreds or thousands of years after the cult to which it belongs has been outgrown by the race. In our generation we meet many people who 10

By J. P. STARR

suppose they believe the Bible but who have never read it. You must have more than once heard a professing Christian ask, "Have you ever read the Bible clear through?" Think how unfamiliar with books and how timid in their company a man must be who can regard that much reading (some three quarters of a million words) as a remarkable feat. Many people would do themselves a kindness if they read their Bible and saw for themselves how much more reasonable it is than they

Any real friend of the Bible will point out that some parts of it were written frankly as fiction, as others are frankly poetry, and that when we take them as anything else we do religion a disservice as we do patriotism a disservice if we take Edward Everett's story, "The Man Without a Country," for face to be taught as inerrant doctrine on pain of treason.

The Bible story of Sodom, the city from whose name we get the word "sodomy," is not essential to Judaism or to Christianity; and if that story were left out it would leave Jewish and Christian teaching clearer and easier of acceptation. Written possibly as late as 350 b.c., ostensibly about events of some 1500 years before, the Sodom-and-Gomorrah story has undergone vicissitudes such as befall pieces of literature first in the mouths and memories of oral recitationists and later at the hands of scribes and copyists. Some things have been left out of the version that has been handed down to us and other things have been put in until the original writer's intention is in doubt. Only by means of interpretations that amount to a rewriting can we make the accounts square with verifiable facts of history. Nearly all of the names of kings and places are impossible to identify; and investigators think those names are fictitious where they are not eponymous. A minor OldTestament tale, this is not a laying-down-the-law part of the Bible.

Sodomy is not exactly condemned or prohibited in the Sodom story: the writer merely takes advantage of a popular antipathy to sodomy (or that antipathy's assumed existence) to allege sodomy as characteristic of a disliked neighbor and to show, by several contrasts, how good and prosperous was the writer's own ancestor, Abraham. What the gravamen of the neighborhood feud was we are not told. In the region concerned the Jordan river flows; and from the tone of some passages we may compare the gossip to the animadversions