In the book of Proverbs, a Wise Man asks for our attention, he asks us to listen carefully to the insights he has gathered in his long life. In particular, he wants to warn us (men) about the frivolous woman: ‘From her lips come smooth talk, her mouth speaks honeyed words, but in the end they are like poison, so bitter, so sharp as a double-edged sword.’ He adds that her path leads to the grave, to the realm of the shades, to death.[1] Because a person can never be warned enough, we find many proverbs in the Bible that admonish the unsuspecting young person or man to beware of the ‘strange woman’. That woman has left the love of her youth, is unfaithful in all her ways and now wants to hook up with someone else. We can be grateful to the Wise Man who has so neatly collected all his wisdom for us in a book. It is good that he warns us and he is right, we must beware of life’s pitfalls. But what he says about that seductive woman, that her path leads to the ‘realm of the shades’, we modern people find a bit exaggerated. It’s not going to get that bad, is it? However, the Eastern man knew that whoever got caught in the nets of such a woman would face an early, unfortunate death. That was God’s retribution for this sin. Those who strived for and practised goodness could expect a long life, but the days of the evildoer were numbered. In the ancient Middle East, there were many books other than Jewish wisdom literature that had something to say about women, sex, love and fidelity, or about temptation, adultery, rape and different sexual orientations. Love and lust were celebrated in beautiful, poetic songs, but enemies were also booed with obscene insults. People could be sick of love and they also called on magic to bind the one they desired to them. But sometimes they also had to be careful! Some writings mention mysterious, charming but extremely dangerous beauties who men were advised to stay well away from. This book is about how people in ancient times experienced sexuality, what fears they had and what ideals they cherished. Much of the information we have about this is about men, but we also learn a lot about how women experienced sexuality. These perceptions, fears and ideals were very different. This is not so surprising because the period referred to in the title of this book as ‘antiquity’ spans from the 3rd millennium BC to halfway through the 1st millennium AD, from faraway Mesopotamia to the nearby Roman Empire.

We begin our historical journey in Sumeria, where five millennia ago men told stories in which they expressed their deepest fears. They told of female demons, goddesses and queens who sexually seduced men, had intercourse with them and then killed them. The Sumerian Lilitu or Babylonian Lilit, the succuba who visited men in their sleep to have intercourse with them and suck the life out of them, was notorious. Inanna and Ishtar, goddesses of sex and passion, were equally intent on sexually luring and killing men. We saw above that the Bible also beckons the ‘strange woman’ to the man, and ensures that he descends ‘into the chambers of death.’ That fear of and fascination with the strange woman appear to be characteristics of archaic man, the man of antiquity. Fortunately, modern man is less troubled by it. Usually. We take a trip to the infamous wife of a Roman emperor, in which we are confronted with a life-threatening woman of flesh and blood. Chapter one.
Nowadays, it takes the average person a while to get used to the many forms of sexual orientation that appear to exist and that are expressed in the letters LGBTQ. These different sexual orientations are not new, they have always existed. They also existed in ancient times, only they were experienced differently then, and that was because they were connected to religion. In the second chapter, we look at how people with a different sexual orientation were employed by the goddesses Inanna, Ishtar and Cybele, who themselves also had a somewhat dual sexuality.

Greeks and Romans liked clarity, also when it came to sexuality. Employing people of a different sexual orientation in the service of the gods, as was the case in Mesopotamia, was simply not an option for them. On the contrary: the birth of a hermaphrodite was seen as a curse, and the unfortunate baby was killed to avert the evil. There were also people who changed sex during puberty, which was less difficult to accept. Also because that change invariably happened from woman to man, such a person was better off and that could only be seen as positive, in the eyes of that patriarchal society. Third chapter.

Sex was seen as innocent, something to be enjoyed. In the fourth chapter we are introduced to some poetic verses that sing the praises of coitus. In the Bible this is done in a chaste manner through the use of all kinds of euphemisms, which the uninitiated reader innocently skims over. Non-biblical poetry also uses euphemisms, but these are less veiled, and sometimes the sexual act is openly celebrated. We will read some beautiful love songs from ancient Mesopotamia and from the Bible. We will discover those from the Greco-Roman world in the next chapter.

Chapter five deals with sexuality in the Greco-Roman world. We examine the different expectations in Greece of hetaerae – a type of courtesan, other concubines and legal spouses. In Rome, some wise men were apprehensive about the increased emancipation of women. This emancipation had arisen because women had been given more rights, which in turn was related to a certain emancipation. It gave some men quite a few headaches, and moralists complained about the decline of time-honoured values. We will look at some beautiful love songs and also some more prosaic confessions.

In the next chapter, ‘All kinds of sex’, we look at how sexuality was practised in concrete terms. We start with a less than edifying topic: the use of violence in sex. Then we look at the use of magic, both to eliminate a romantic rival and to win over someone you had your eye on. We also discover the various positions people knew, how people felt about masturbation, how shameful they found the use of dildos, and we encounter some rather bizarre forms of sex: lust for (naked) statues, bestiality and necrophilia. Most of the information on these subjects comes from the Greco-Roman world.
Prostitution was omnipresent in the ancient world. We are investigating how prostitution was regulated and valued in Mesopotamia, Israel, Greece and the Roman Empire. One thing was forbidden in all these ancient cultures: having sex with another man’s wife or with a daughter who had yet to be married off. Otherwise, a man could freely indulge his sexual appetite with the women of his choice: slaves, concubines, courtesans and prostitutes. A woman was not to even consider such a thing; she was to limit herself to sex with her lawful husband. The point was that he had to be certain that the child his wife was carrying was indeed his. Although prostitution was enjoyed carefree for many centuries, Jews from the beginning of our era and Christians in their footsteps began to think differently about it. As Christians gained more political power, ideas about prostitution slowly changed and were then ratified by new laws. Chapter seven.
All the love songs we have enjoyed in previous chapters should not make us forget what sex was mainly about in ancient times: women had to get pregnant to provide offspring. Woe betides the woman who failed in her life’s task! The eighth chapter tells the story of the biblical Tamar, who did everything she could to get pregnant, even pretending to be a prostitute. We discover, perhaps to our surprise, that in those ancient biblical times, prostitution was judged mildly. But later on, Tamar’s behaviour was seen as problematic.

The Bible tells the harrowing story of yet another Tamar. She was raped, cast out and wasted away. A life broken and discarded. It is such a shameful story that it was passed over in silence in the synagogue, and in the church this story was not the subject of a sermon intended to edify. It is about passion that becomes morbid, passion that oversteps the boundaries of others. In a later retelling of the story, in ‘The words of Gad the Seer’, we read how Tamar stands up for herself and bites back. Something that many Christians can learn from, because biting back does not seem to be very Christian. Chapter nine.

Chapter ten deals with a current topic: sexually transgressive behaviour. It is timeless and we also find it in an apocryphal story about the chaste and pious Susanna. This story was added to the book of Daniel in the Septuagint, and can be found in Catholic editions of the Bible. Susanna is pressured into having sex with two villains, and when she refuses they falsely accuse her of having had an illicit relationship with a young man. Susanna does two things: she takes her case to God, and she brings it into the open – even though she is very weak. The contemporary MeToo movement also brings all kinds of unwanted intimacies and worse to light, and making this public is a first condition for obtaining justice.
The eleventh chapter is about a strange case. It is about angels who had sex with women. We also read that women were not entirely innocent in this, promiscuous as they are – according to some ascetic Jewish groups, at least. What is unusual is that in the New Testament there are references to several writings that originated in those ascetic Jewish circles and which apparently had authority for the early Christians. Sex between women and angels is not an acute social problem today, but in the early church it was still feared. In this context, Paul even wrote a few rules that people were advised to follow.

Related to this strange theme is the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Here it is men who want to assault some visitors to the city of Sodom, but these visitors were actually angels. Sodomy is considered to be the sin of homosexuality, but that is a premature interpretation. The Bible itself interprets the sin of the Sodomites very differently, as we shall see. Nevertheless, in the 1st century AD, there were some Jewish sages who interpreted sodomy as homosexuality. Chapter twelve.
In the next two chapters we will take a closer look at homosexuality in ancient times. In chapter thirteen we will briefly examine how homosexuality was experienced in the ancient Near East: among the Egyptians, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians. Then we will examine how the Greco-Roman world viewed homosexuality and what form it actually took. We will also look at what some philosophers thought about it at the time. In this way, we have outlined the background against which we can hopefully better understand Paul’s views on homosexuality. In chapter fourteen, we do a little research into the specific words that Paul uses in this context. We also discover Paul’s typically Jewish, but in modern eyes rather bizarre reasoning in his discussion of homosexuality. We examine what Paul says about lesbian relationships and finally ask ourselves what we should make of his words on this subject today.

And the fascinating story that the evangelist John passes on is that of the adulterous woman who was brought to Jesus by the Pharisees. They asked Jesus if he agreed with them that the woman should be stoned, as prescribed by the law of Moses. We discover here that Jesus does not act as a legal expert, he does not implement the law, but holds it up to the people as a mirror for introspection. An intriguing question in this context is what Jesus may have written in the dust on the tiles of the temple courtyard. Chapter fifteen.

‘It was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman; she transgressed God’s command.’ And that is why women may not have authority in the church. So writes Paul or a Pauline in a letter to Timothy. That is a rather strange, rather one-sided interpretation of the story in Genesis about the fall of man. How come Adam was not deceived? Was it only the woman who transgressed God’s command? In chapter sixteen we look at the possible sources of such an interpretation. Some at the time thought that the serpent turned to Eve of all people because her judgement was rather limited, or they saw Eve herself as the eternal temptress, or as the origin of sin in the world, others thought that Eve was sexually seduced by the serpent. Could any of these beliefs have played a role in the rather unusual interpretation of the story of the fall of man by Paul (or a Pauline)?
In chapter seventeen we discover how the beauty of women was idealised or demonised in the literature of the time. In the Greek novel, both the female and male protagonists are incredibly beautiful, approaching divine levels of beauty. This beauty will also get them into trouble, but they will overcome it; despite all opposition and temptations, they will remain chaste and faithful to each other. In the Jewish novels, the female protagonist is also breathtakingly beautiful, and of course she is very devout. She never abuses her feminine charms to drive the man wild. That is quite different in Jewish ascetic literature, where the beauty of the woman is a danger to the pious man. In these circles, people fulminated against ladies with ostentatiously made-up faces. Beauty was not innocent. Nor were beautiful women.

In the following eighteenth chapter, we will focus on the dangers of cosmetics. What we read about this in Jewish writings – both in the Bible and outside of it – is remarkably similar to what pagan moralists thought in the first centuries of our era and to what Christians thought. In those days, pagans, Jews and Christians shared the same ideas about what was appropriate and inappropriate for women. It basically came down to women being humble, and if they had natural beauty (which was preferable) they were not to accentuate it with excessive adornment.

Another remarkable development at the time, again among Jews, pagans and Christians alike, was that sex actually became a bit of a problem. That was quite a new assessment of what people had always experienced without concern. Pagans began to wonder if sex was healthy, and discovered the new ideal of a friendly marriage with one woman. Jews and Christians felt that sex was at odds with a holy life for God. Surely those who sought God could not be involved in base lusts? More and more believers heeded these new thoughts and endeavoured to live ascetically, sexlessly and thus holy. Because not everyone could meet these high standards, a hierarchy developed among Christians: virgins were at the top, followed by widows and widowers, and at the bottom were the married. Although even they could decide to live chaste lives as brother and sister. Some ascetic Christians knew that sex within marriage was actually a form of porneia, fornication. Other Christians – some Gnostic inspired – believed that women should become masculine. We learn about this in the nineteenth chapter.

The following chapter continues this subject. Here we will look at what the great church father Augustine thought about it. He was plagued by sexual lust in his younger years, and his conversion to the Catholic Church meant a radical rejection of sexuality. For himself, that is, but this rejection still left its mark on his teachings on the good life for others. Sex in marriage was allowed, but only for the purpose of having children. ‘You may only engage in physical intercourse if you want to have children,’ he said. And once that had happened, there was nothing to prevent spouses from continuing to live without sex. Augustine has had considerable influence on the view of sexuality in Western Christianity.

In the final chapter, we will examine how rabbinic Jews viewed sexuality. They took a more relaxed approach to it than many Christians. We will read a short passage from the Talmud in which a group of rabbis are discussing a number of beautiful biblical women. They felt it was advisable to keep a suitable distance from strange women in order to avoid temptation. We end with the legendary Lilit, a distant relative of the Sumerian Lilitu and Babylonian Lilit with whom we began this book. We read several excerpts from rabbinic sources about her. She is seductive but also destructive. One would almost long for the somewhat more boring but good, faithful and caring Eve.

The final word introduces the reader to the antithesis of all lustful women: the Virgin Mary. Without having been defiled by sex, she gave birth to Jesus, and many knew that she had remained a virgin even during and after giving birth. Could anything be too wonderful for God? Because this virgin had not been sullied by lust, her body did not decay and she was taken to heaven to reign as queen for all eternity. And yet, even this holy Virgin was also penetrated by something, something of the spirit of Inanna, the goddess of sex and passion, as we shall see.