What Was The Role of Sex in Israelite and Jewish Tradition?
Now that the Israelite culture has been described, I now want to focus on the role of sex in Israelite and Jewish tradition. This is an important topic since Christian teachings are moored in Jewish thought and tradition, which is itself influenced by other cultures. In many contemporary Christian writings, readers are told that sex, as seen in the Old Testament, was a valuable gift from God and included both procreative and pleasurable purposes. We are told that marriage was viewed by the Jews as a divinely ordained way for men and women to satisfy their emotional and sexual needs and to continue the race. Yet, there are many Jewish writers who take the opposite view and claim that Judaism was sexually repressive. The basis of sexual repression, these writers claim, was grounded in the biblical laws of sexual purity. The priestly purity code stated that sexual intercourse caused ritual impurity for one day (Lev. 15:16-18). This seems strange in light of the repeated blessings of ferti
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- What Was The Role of Sex in Israelite and Jewish Tradition?
