A Fact-Check for the Four-Color World

Sunday, March 12, 2006

'Testament' Gets Kinky

To follow up on my previous Testament post, I wanted to comment on something said in Cliff Biggers' interview with Rushkoff. In that interview, the author makes several unusual arguments, but only one that I want to address here:

"Moses has man-to-man sex up on Mount Sinai...Joshua was Moses’s apprentice, and the Bible talks of their encounters ‘face to face’—which, as any Greek knows, is the sexual position reserved for man-to-man sacred sex - women are to be done from behind."

This is inexplicably erroneous on Rushkoff's part for two reasons. First, what "any Greek knows" is totally irrelevant. The Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament (which includes the story of Moses), was written in ancient Hebrew, not Greek. And Hebrew had no such meaning for "face-to-face."

(And if you're as confused as I was about how man-to-man sex could be face-to-face to start with, it seems that the ancient Greeks did things a little differently.)

Second, I've perused several Bible translations, and I can't find one that ever refers to Moses and Joshua meeting "face to face." Not a single verse, whether relating to Mount Sinai or otherwise. There are several that refer to Moses and GOD's meetings being "face to face," (Exodus 33:11, Numbers 12:8, Deuteronomy 34:10, etc.), but I imagine that a sexual liaison between Moses and the Lord might be a little too much for even Rushkoff to propose.

So I'm at a total loss as to where Rushkoff pulled this particular interpretation from. And I'm guessing that he plans to use it in a future arc. Does anyone have any idea what he thinks he's talking about?