Personal Saturday

On weekends, I want to blog about a non- art element of my week. I'm a little cautious writing this post because it's about religion. But, it was on my mind all week long.

This week, I attended what I would call a shocking lecture about rape in the Hebrew Bible. The lecturer was Susanne Scholz, a professor at SMU. Anyways, the gist of her lecture is that depictions of rape in the Hebrew Bible has been overlooked for over 2,000 years. What particularly shocked me were her examples through which she demonstrates God legitimizing rape. I don't consider myself to be very religious, but I wondered how the world is supposed to deal with the idea that God is depicted as a rapist in the Hebrew Bible. It bothered me all week long (in a good way).  The title of her book is Sacred Witness: Rape in the Hebrew Bible. (I copied the photo of the book cover from Amazon.com. The woman in the picture is Bathsheba.)