Free Sex Au Naturel by Patrick Coffin

honored, and they shall not be small.”
     
Jeremiah 33:22: “As the host of heaven cannot be numbered and the sands of the sea cannot be measured, so I will multiply the descendants of David my servant, and the Levitical priests who minister to me.”
     

Barrenness and Blemishes
    What about the flip side? How does the Bible treat sterility? To our modern ears, some of the biblical accounts sound harsh, even a little bizarre, especially in the Book of Leviticus. But blessings and curses are a recurrent Old Testament theme. The prophet Jeremiah identifies Yahweh’s punishment with childlessness: “Therefore deliver up their children to famine; give them over to the power of the sword, let their wives become childless and widowed” (Jer. 18:21).
     
    The same theme is echoed later in Hosea: “Like grapes in the wilderness, I found Israel; Like the first fruit on the fig tree, in its first season, I saw your fathers. But they came to Ba’al-peor, and consecrated themselves to Ba’al, and became detestable like the thing they loved. Ephraim’s glory shall fly away like a bird—no birth, no pregnancy, no conception.… Give them, O L ORD— what wilt thou give? Give them a miscarrying womb and dry breasts” (Hos. 9:10-11, 14).
     
    Leviticus 21:17 describes congenital sterility as a blemish in Israel’s high priests (due to their special role in embodying God’s holiness), and Deuteronomy 23:1 forbids men with crushed testicles or who are castrated from entering the assembly.
     
    In preparing His chosen people for their entry into Canaan, the Lord promised the Israelites two blessings: protection from disease, and a complete absence of miscarriage and sterility (Ex. 23:25–26), a promise renewed in Deuteronomy 7:13–14 immediately following the reception of the Ten Commandments. Traditional Judaism has always taught that a home without children is a home without blessing. Not surprisingly, there is no Old Testament word for bachelor. Sorrow is the universal emotion of childless Old Testament women.
     
    Deuteronomy records an interesting prohibition: “When men fight with one another, and the wife of the one draws near to rescue her husband from the hand of him who is beating him, and puts out her hand and seizes him by the private parts, then you shall cut off her hand; your eye shall have no pity” (Deut. 25:11–12). The editors of the New Jerusalem Bible tag this scene “Modesty in Brawls.” Is that really all that is going on? As a moment’s thought will verify, the wife had far less modest avenues available with which to intervene. What’s at stake in protecting the integrity of the sex organs goes beyond merely fighting fair. It’s at least curious that there is no mention of punishment for grabbing or cutting off any other part of the enemy’s body.
     
    The Mosaic civil laws regulating sexual practice stem ultimately from a positive view of fertility. Leviticus 20 lists a number of sexual perversions that earned the death penalty: adultery and incest (Lev. 10–12); sodomy (Lev. 20:13), male-animal bestiality (Lev. 20:15); and female-animal bestiality (Lev. 20:16). The first ten verses of Leviticus 20 prescribe death for anyone “who gives any of his children to Molech”—the ancient equivalent of being offered up to a Planned Parenthood clinic.
     
    This is not to imply that the Mosaic punishments are still in force. They are not. The Old Law, with its ritual purities and strict sanctions for the sake of community order, was fulfilled by the coming of Christ, and is no longer binding in its minutiae.
     
    Yet Christ did not throw out the baby of truth with the bath water of the old rituals, and neither does the Church. Contrasting Moses with Christ, the Letter to the Hebrews affirms the basic validity of the Mosaic moral logic: “For if the message declared by angels was valid and every transgression or disobedience received a just retribution, how shall we escape if we neglect such a great