James Finn
2 min readMay 24, 2022

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I don't know if I have particular comments on each verse, but as Jonathan Poletti and I have often publicly discussed on Medium, modern Christians seem to have a pretty strange understanding of the Bible. The lovers in the song of Solomon, for example, were not married as far as anybody can tell. As Jewish scholars would be very quick to point out, that's not surprising. Jewish culture for much of the historical period when the Old Testament was being collected and written down did not seem to prohibit sex outside of marriage, at least not for men. Sex workers did not seem to be looked down on, but instead can be seen celebrated in the Old Testament.

As for nudity seeming strange, it would not have seemed at all strange to people living in the Levant during biblical periods. Extreme nudity taboos are common to modern European cultures, but historians do not think they were common over the several hundred years when books of the Bible were being written down.

Much of modern Christian understandings of biblical sex and nudity issues are "back readings," meaning interpretations of what we're reading through a lens of today's cultural values.

I think that's why many conservative Christians have a lot of difficulty coping with the Song of Solomon. It's clearly a celebration of erotic joy, but because that doesn't fit traditional narratives in modern Christianity, conservative Christians tend to flounder with it rather than accept it for what it is on its face. That acceptance, after all, would put "sola scriptura" principles to a tough test.

Roman Catholics are less challenged, of course, not burdened by "sola scriptura," and therefore able to focus on sexual proscriptions stemming from the "natural law" they developed in the Middle Ages rather than on inconveniently erotic biblical readings.

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James Finn
James Finn

Written by James Finn

James Finn is an LGBTQ columnist, a former Air Force intelligence analyst, an alumnus of Act Up NY, and an agented but unpublished novelist.

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