Beautiful Union, Part 2: What Do Words Even Mean?
On the savage mistreatment of Greek and Hebrew
In part one we discussed the thesis of this book, how the thesis is unsustained throughout the book, and how the work necessary to articulate and defend the thesis (namely: define sex, define icon, and commit to those definitions) is not completed and even contradicted. Instead, sex is simply treated as a hermeneutic for all reality, and all reality is treated as a hermeneutic for sex.
In this next section I want to look more at how this argumentation works in the text - or more specifically, how it doesn’t work.
The primary way in which this book makes points is by clustering imagery — an association of images with other images to insist on theological meanings by pointing out the connections between them.
For example: in ch 5, the text quotes the following passage from 1 John 3:1, 9:
See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are...No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s seed abides in him; and he cannot keep on sinning, because he has been born of God.
The word that Beautiful Union focuses on is “seed,” Greek sperma, which the text says can mean “agricultural seeds” or “semen.” Because the text is about parents and children in God, the text concludes that the meaning of this phrase is that God’s (metaphorical) semen is in people. This is not crude, claims the text, because semen in the Bible is the source of life, and is associated with the river of life and the Holy Spirit.
Sex, and semen, is the “river of life” in the Bible, because the river that bounded Eden was separated into four rivers.
Separating, Hebrew parad, is (according to Beautiful Union) associated with reproduction.
So, in order:
God’s seed in Christians is sperm.
Semen is associated with the River of Life, which is like the Holy Spirit.
The River of Life is like semen because it is separated into four streams.
Separation in the Hebrew Bible is associated with reproduction.
The words “associated with” are doing a lot of work here, but essentially this is the argument: Semen in the Bible is associated with the River of Life/Holy Spirit, because rivers are separated, and separation is related to reproduction.
This is a stretch. It is a very far stretch. These word associations are so tortured that, if this book were a movie, it would be rated R for violence. The only thing more tortured than Beautiful Union’s readings of the Bible is the joke I made in the last sentence.
Steven P. Hopkins describes erotic poetry in Sappho and Song of Solomon (among others) as “extravagant beholding” – looking at a beloved person and being carried away to other lavish images, such as animals, wine, and flora. I would loosely describe this kind of free association as the extravagant beholding of semen. Semen is discovered, possibly, at a point in the Bible, where it is ascribed divine and symbolic significance, and then continuously reminds the viewer of other things that are like semen, which are also given divine significance, and then the imagery sort of roams around from one narrative to another.
This method of doing theology is adventurous, to say the least. It also shouldn’t necessarily be immediately dismissed — though the inherent sexism and erasure of women from seeing a “river of life,” genetic descent, creation, and generation primarily as the domain of semen requires censure and correction. Nonetheless: theology is creative, and it can emerge from surprising places. It’s not necessarily wrong to riff on images or motifs in a text, or to read against a text, to construct new meanings - though, I suspect that is not what Beautiful Union, which its repeated returns to biblical languages to ground these meanings in the Bible itself, thinks it’s doing. It’s also strikingly similar to the habit in ch. 2 of looking at nature for information about sex, and looking at sex for information about nature - looking for associations and constructing meaning wherever they can be found.
But this raises the question of what interpretive limits Beautiful Union can and does place on this activity. If we can find some association between sex and reality, sex and a biblical text, sex and God, or any of those in reverse — does this tell us something true about God? If so, how do we distinguish true assertions based on these associations from false ones? Or, are all interpretations equally valid?
So the thing is, Beautiful Union actually does insist that some associations and their corresponding interpretations are not valid. For instance, the fact that gay people experience marriage like straight people experience marriage does not mean that they are actually a family. Family requires heterosexual sex. The association between kinship and covenant language and the gay couple/their children is, according to Beautiful Union, not valid.
Likewise, a gay couple is, by virtue of being the same gender, not able to depict unity in diversity the way a straight couple can. The gay people themselves, or the straight people themselves, do not figure into this. Nothing is revealed by two gay men of different nationalities, races, educational backgrounds, skills, or personalities that is not better depicted by a man and a woman, no matter how alike they are. A man and a woman are always more like a “union of diversity” (e.g., the sea and land) than two men or two women - no matter what else is true about them.
So there clearly are methodological controls here. In the above two cases, the methodological control is easy to discern. The control is simply what American evangelicalism considers to be acceptable. Associations cannot reveal truths that are not already agreed upon by evangelical leaders; they can only reinforce or expand upon on the worldview that (platformed, male, straight, culture-defining) evangelicals already have.
(This is going to get really important when we talk about orgasms in Part 3. Remember I said that.)
But this is clearly not the only control Beautiful Union wants to insist upon. It seems that, when engaging the biblical narrative, Beautiful Union wants to insist that these connections can be found in the text of the Bible itself, where they are discerned through an appeal to biblical languages.
So in that spirit: what is going on with biblical languages in this book?
What Is Going On With Biblical Languages In This Book?
Beautiful Union didn’t invent the bad evangelical use of biblical languages - what my sister and I, in high school and then eventually college, once I could read them myself- once called “gratuitous Greek.” But it does liberally dabble in the tradition.
It would be petty to call Beautiful Union out for these obnoxious moments, since it’s hardly the only offender. But it does piss me off.
So let’s go through each step of the above example. Is it true that σπέρμα, per Blue Letter Bible and Beautiful Union, means “the semen virile” or “that from which a plant germinates?”
So I paid for my copywritten lexicon, the BDAG, while Beautiful Union’s is open source and six years older than the invention of the zeppelin, and my lexicon actually has some other definitions It turns out σπέρμα doesn’t only mean semen or seeds from plants. Because of course it means other things. Neither God’s semen nor kernels are in humans.
Character. It means character.
One semen down, two to go. Is the river of life (Eden/Revelation), and thus the Holy Spirit, associated with semen?
The catchword her is that the river in Eden is divided into four. The word “separated,” according to Beautiful Union, is strongly associated with procreation.
But it’s not.
We have two uses of PRD in a niphal stem, Gen 2:10 and 10:5. The division of the people into nations is only associated insofar as nations of people procreate. But joints of a body don’t procreate, and wings don’t reproduce. The only reason we’d have to associate a river with reproduction is if we think the river is associated with semen, but this is obviously begging the question.
So if “separating” isn’t sexual or associated with reproduction, then the separating river is not associated with reproduction. It’s definitely not associated with semen. So that about does it for the entirety of ch. 13.
In the next section we’ll continue to explore the misuse of language, though here we’ll be discussing the misuse of English words. Now that we have examined the misuse of Greek and Hebrew to create meaning from images, we will turn our attention to the way in which words and concepts are misidentified and misapplied - even in English - in this book.
Here’s one of my issues with the “man/woman difference makes sex beautiful” part: The Genesis 2 narrative of man/woman being created is actually a celebration of their SAMENESS! That’s one of the main points of the narrative! God says that the human was not meant to be alone, but instead of immediately providing a partner, God parades animals in front of the human to name them. And what is the human’s response after? “…but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him” (Genesis 2:20). In other words, this garden is fills with animals, but there are none LIKE ME! So what does God do? He takes one side from the human; he essentially cuts the human in half. And what is the human’s response? He celebrates by saying, “Then the man said, “At last this is bone of my bones, And flesh of my flesh; She shall be called ‘woman,’ Because she was taken out of man”” (Genesis 2:23). Genesis 2 is celebration of humanity’s sameness, that two came from ONE! That man was provided a “delivering ally” (Bible Project) in the form of a woman to co-labor in the garden. Certainly there are differences in genders, and such differences can be celebrated too, but for Butler to say that there is “a bodily diversity embedded in our blood and bones…set in the fabric of creation” is just a complete misreading of the creation narrative. So maybe instead of writing an entire book that places such a hard divide in the roles of men and women during sex, it would be more appropriate to talk about the mutuality of the sexual union—that men and women can and should give and receive similarly, distinct at times, yes, but in more aspects, the same as Genesis celebrates.
Thanks for taking the time to parse this. I lack any Greek studies at all, so while the inferences drawn are intuitively silly it helps to see it laid out so clearly. I'm reminded of your intro, where you laid this mess at the feet of the whole collection of people who should clearly have known better and yet pushed this book to publication. I'm embarrassed for them.