Jewish laws were stipulating that a man must have sex with his wife at least once a week, and seek her permission before taking a job that would require prolonged absences from the marital bed:
Onah applies only to women; men do not have similar rights, as they do in the Paul’s marital debt.130 This assymmetry is connected to the sharp distinction the rabbis drew between the sexuality of men and women: “A man’s sexual impulse is out in the open: his erection stands out and he embarrasses himself in front of his fellows. A woman’s sexual impulse is within and no one can recognize her [arousal].”131 Nevertheless, “a woman’s passion is greater than that of a man.”132 Women were thus considered to be highly sexual but incapable of asking for sexual satisfaction. Men must attend to these needs to ensure a peaceful household: “It is a man’s duty to pay his wife a ‘visit’ before a journey, for it is said ‘and you shall know that your tent is in peace’” (Job 5:24).133 Women who take the sexual initiative are so rare that if they do solicit their husbands to perform the marital obligation, they will “have children the like of whom did not exist even in the generation of Moses!”134 This text seems to suggest that women who act against female nature are praiseworthy: rabbinic culture, like its biblical predecessor, cannot be labeled unequivocally patriarchal.
Given these implicit connections between pleasure and procreation, the rabbis’ attitude toward nonprocreative sex was ambiguous. On the one hand, they permitted a wide variety of sexual practices designed purely for pleasure and they mandated marital sex even when a woman was unable to conceive. On the other hand, they were opposed to sexual acts such as coitus interruptus that could never be procreative, even with a fertile woman; coitus interruptus was considered the crime of Er and Onan in Genesis 38.144 Other types of nonprocreative intercourse, such as anal and oral intercourse, were more problematic. The law frowned upon, but did not technically forbid, nonvaginal intercourse, which it labeled “unnatural” (she-lo ke-darkha), possibly because it assumed that Jews did not engage in such practices.
Ezekiel 1.27-28 refers to ‘loins’ which accurately refers to genitals:
Prof. Eilbeg-Schwartz agrees:
‘I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, tall and lofty! His lower extremities filled the temple!’ (Isaiah 6.1, 5) the Hebrew term he employs to refer to the deity’s ‘lower extremities’, shul, is more commonly used by biblical prophets not to refer to the edges of garments, but to pointedly allude to the fleshy realities of the sexual organs:
The interpretation here proposed for sûlîm “extremities” (or the like) rather than “skirts” has also the advantage that it agrees strictly with “thy heels” or perhaps rather “back-parts” which are exposed (C), as the Pesh.’s “are uncovered” and Targ.’s “are seen” suggest. No certainly cognate verb is known; and the LXX’s “was made an example,” Aquila’s “were defiled” and Vulg.’s pollutae sunt, suggest that the ancient translators were uncertain of its meaning.7 8 The important point is that, if parallelism of thought is a true criterion, both nouns must denote parts of the body. This conclusion is confirmed by the biblical “her impurity is in her lower regions (besûlêàh),” i.e., “her belly” or the neighboring parts of her body (F) ; and the Mishnaic “the impurity” (sc., that collected in the bowels of a dead dog which has eaten filthy food) comes out by way of its buttocks (derek sûlàywfi8 here puts any kind of clothing out of the question. Only the famous “His train” or “skirts filled the temple” (A), as the clause is usually translated (R.V.), remains to be discussed. Clearly the “hem” of God’s robes cannot be right; for the hem cannot possibly have filled the temple, and “skirt” seems nowhere to be the meaning of the noun. The only possible rendering, then, as Geiger has seen (Op. cit., p. 391) is “his lower limbs” or “extremities filled the temple.”
God is depicted in ultraanthropomorphic imagery as having lower limbs or extremities exactly as He is said elsewhere to have arms (Exod. 15:16, Deut. 4:24 plus), and hands (Is. 10:32, 49:23 plus) and feet (Exod. 24:10 plus), and so on. This inter¬ pretation alone explains the renderings of three of the ancient versions : the LXX’s “glory” and the Targum’s “the splendor of His glory” as well as the Vulgate’s ea quae sub ipso erant. These are obviously euphemisms to avoid the somewhat coarse (as these translators will have thought) anthropomorphism of the ancient prophet. The Rabbis similarly sought to avoid the anthropo¬ morphism; so Sacadyäh and Ibn Janâh have “his rays,” while Ibn Ezra thinks of the “hanging draperies” covering God’s throne. None of these interpreters can have objected to the notion of God being clothed in flowing robes10 and have attempted to conceal them under a euphemism, if only because such an idea is found elsewhere in the Old Testament (e.g., Is. 63:2, Dan. 7:9). Only the notion of His lower limbs can have seemed to require a euphemism to avoid it. The picture of God sitting on a throne with His extremities filling the body of the temple can be illustrated by Assyrian sculptures depicting this or that god seated on a throne within a shrine which his “extremities,” i.e., skirt and feet, completely fill (Pritchard, op. cit. [1954], pp. 178/529 (Shamash) and 221/693). These pictures show that the Hebrew prophet may have meant either the skirt or the extremities, but Hebrew usage seems to show that the extremities, i.e., all the limbs below the trunk, are meant. Let no one suppose, however, that the prophet will have imagined God’s extremities or lower limbs as exposed to view; the pictures suggest that he will have regarded Him as clothed in a long robe reaching to the ankles and leaving only the feet uncovered.
Translated as genitals (Isaiah 6):
The divine penis-bow has indeed been remembered – although not quite as Marduk might have expected. Instead, it is associated with Yahweh, the God of the Bible. He too is a warrior deity, whose signature weapons of thunderbolts, lightning strikes and torrential rains are equated with the devastating impact of his mighty bow and speeding arrows:
If Adam was made in the image of God, as it is twice claimed in Genesis, he must have been circumcised, the rabbis reasoned, for God was circumcised, too:
