On the Exposing of Women's Secret Parts

It really embarrasses me to have to use such a title.

But before you accuse me of perversion, of tastelessness or of writing to titillate, please understand that I am only quoting from the Bible here.

Isaiah 3:16,17: "Moreover the Lord saith, Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet: Therefore the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will discover their secret parts."

"Discover" here means uncover or expose. (This is the King James Version of the Bible and the word had that meaning until about a century ago).

Translations since the King James have tried to soften this verse by deliberately and dishonestly mis-translating it.  (Odd to see such changes, since all Christians accepted the KJV as the pure unchanging word of God for three centuries).

The word used here, translated into English as "secret parts", is Poth - which refers to the vagina, literally "hinged opening".   Pseudo-translations such as the NIV have tried to cover up this embarrassing image of a molesting deity by dishonestly translating poth as "scalp".*

This threat was made by a scribe who was perverted; perverted by religious power and the desire to control the behaviour, dress and thoughts of others.  There is no difference between the ugly threats here, and the behaviour of the Taleban which we witnessed in Afghanistan several years ago, when men were filmed beating women in the street for showing an ankle or wearing jewellery - or trying to get an education.  Little surprise that Islam and Christianity both come from the same religious roots.  (See "Stonings" for an eye-witness account of such behaviour still practised in religiously-dominated countries.)

Once again the Bible is shown to be a tool of control, used by kings and priests to govern the unthinking, untutored majority. It is a woman-hating book.
Other similar verses can be found:

Nahum 3:5,6  "I will discover thy skirts upon  thy face, and I will show the nations thy nakedness and thy kingdoms thy shame".

This verse is a metaphor - it is a threat to the nation - not to individual women.  But what a sexually obsessed and repressed writer we have here - using metaphors which assume that a body is a shameful, dirty thing.  The author probably fantasized about looking up women's skirts! He was a frustrated scribe - not an all-loving, all-pure god.

Other appalling demonstrations of the crudeness of "god's" threats:

Malachi 2:3 "Behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your solemn feasts." Ezekiel 4:12 "The Lord commanded: And thou shalt eat it as barley cakes, and thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of a man, in their sight".

In other words, god is telling people to eat shit, human shit, while other people watch.  Is this really a moral example to us? Christians bring up their children to bow the knee to an imaginary being that would say something like this.

Geoff Mather 2007
*Brief extract from "Losing Faith in Faith" by Dan Barker

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