10 Most Sexual Bible Heroes

God’s favorites are ready for action

The Christian religion can often seem just like a lot of “rules” for sex—which is bizarrely at odds with the Bible. God’s heroes are all supersexual!

I didn’t learn that in church, but from Bible scholars. Let’s dig into the surprisingly sexy scriptures—like the deity’s favorite people, and their libidos from Heaven.

1. Eve and that “fruit”

Christianity hasn’t been so fond of the Bible’s first female. The religion seem to regard as ‘Eve’ as one step away from ‘evil’. But her name means ‘life’. She’s a totally positive character, and a very sexual one.

The Eden story is a sex story. Adam and Eve started out as children. They grow up together, and Eve first sees a possibility—and thinks the “fruit” is “good” (Gen 3:6).

Christianity didn’t know that to “eat fruit” is a biblical idiom for having sex (cf. Song 4:16b & 5:1; Prov 30:20, etc.). The kids are getting busy.

In Genesis 2:24, after all, God told the humans to live as “one flesh.” This is long before they’re told to “be fruitful and multiply.”

As the scholar David M. Carr notes, God here “emphasizes a sexuality that is not focused initially on having children.” The humans are to be “intimately bound together by an erotic, bodily connection.”

2. Sarah loves sex

The hero Abraham seems to have a pretty high sex drive—with a wife, Sarah, and two concubines (Gen 16:3; 25:1). Abraham is a busy guy.

But Sarah is right in there with him. She’s super-beautiful—not a 10, but a 20 (cf. Gen 12:11). She oozes sex, and her thoughts are sexual too. Take the scene in Genesis 18:12, when Abraham and Sarah are old, and God shows up to say they’ll finally be having a kid. Sarah laughs, and thinks:

“After I have grown old and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?”

Christian readers like to say this ‘pleasure’ is in being a mother. That’s not what’s on Sarah’s mind. In a study of the verse, Sandra Collins finds Sarah “expressing the hope of her husband’s touch once again.”

3. Tamar bangs three guys in a row

When teaching Genesis in church, pastors often skip over Genesis 38. It’s a pretty amazing story. A woman named Tamar married into the family of Judah, the son of Jacob. But something about her husband doesn’t seem too divine, and God kills him. She’s owed a pregnancy by a male relative — but God kills the second son too!

Judah isn’t going to risk his third and last son, leaving Tamar in a lurch. She’ll be sidelined, childless, for the rest of her life. But in an inventive move, she dresses up as a prostitute and has sex with Judah himself.

God is a big fan. This bold, sexual woman is the first woman mentioned in Matthew’s lineage of Christ (cf. Mt 1:3).

4. Rahab the…Harlot?

Her name means “female genitals.” You wouldn’t hear that in church. But Christians try not to talk much about Rahab, the heroine of Joshua 2.

She’s a major figure, held out for special praise in Hebrews 11:31 and James 2:25. She’s the second woman in Matthew’s genealogy of Christ (1:5). She was a major role model for early Christians.

Rahab’s story begins when the Israelites, freed from Egypt, arrive at the ‘pagan’ city of Jericho. They need to get past it, but don’t know how. They send in spies to study the city’s weaknesses. The spies go directly to a whorehouse.

They knew what they were doing. Rahab, the madam of the establishment, tells the spies exactly what they need to know. In translation, it’s a strange speech about how the men of Jericho are “fallen” and “melting” (2:9).

A Christian reader isn’t told a key fact about the Old Testament narratives. When non-Israelite men act against God, their penises go limp. It happens over and over (cf. Gen 12:17; Gen 20:3–4; 1 Sam 5:1–12).

The spies went to a whorehouse because that’s where they’ll learn about the penis situation in Jericho. As the scholar Erin Runyon notes, it’s “a fact to which Rahab would have had access.”

5. Gideon the superslut

A Biblical hero so often has a lot of sex, but Gideon is the first biblical hero who just goes into another league. We learn in Judges 8:30:

“He had seventy sons of his own, for he had many wives. His concubine, who lived in Shechem, also bore him a son…”

There’s more sexual details in Gideon’s story, but I’ll just say that this erotic hyperdrive is part of the profile of a biblical hero. Christians never understood that God likes very sexual people.

6. Samson and his three women

In the course of his adventures, Samson frolics with three women. His wife doesn’t work out, then in Judges 16:1, he sleeps with a prostitute. It’s not a quickie behind the barn: “He went in to spend the night with her.”

Then comes the great relationship of his life. Samson and Delilah are a cosmic match. Her name means ‘night’, as his name means ‘sun’. Their engagement is difficult, and has edges of S&M.

God isn’t too vanilla. He likes it hottt.

7. Jael has sex with three guys (and kills one)

A biblical female is always a very dangerous presence. A savagery is often found, and flows directly from God, who is seen in Hosea 13:8 as a mother bear. Her enemies should know she “will attack them and rip them open.”

But of the many violent Biblical women, there’s nobody like Jael. She has three lovers in the narrative space of Judges 4–5. The really exciting one is her run-in with an enemy general who is on the loose. Jael takes Sisera into her tent, as if hiding him.

The gender cues around Jael are strange, as if she’s a female with male suggestion. She gives Sisera milk, then has sex with him. The grammar positions her on top. “Jael is acting like a male in the sexual encounter with Sisera,” notes Gershon Hepner.

Then as Sisera is sleeping, Jael gives him another pounding—taking a tent peg and driving it into his skull.

8. The Girl in the Song of Songs

One of the great ironies of history is Christianity setting itself up as an anti-woman, anti-sex religion—when the Bible has portrait after portrait of very sexual female heroines. Take the girl in the Song of Songs.

“My beloved thrust his hand through the latch-opening; my heart began to pound for him.” (Song 5:4)

The terms are sexual. This is the story of a girl who has found a man she likes, and they go at it. There’s no talk of marriage. The girl doesn’t care. She’s in it for the experience.

Many lines have been mistranslated. The refrain of the Song, “Do not stir up or awaken love until it desire!” (2:7; 3:5; 8:4), was often said by Christians to be a prompt to be abstinent until marriage.

As the scholar Brian P. Gault notes, the Hebrew text actually says: “Do not rouse nor disturb this lovemaking as long as it desires.”

It means the lovers are not to be interrupted.

9. ‘Wisdom’ is coming

Several Old Testament books are written in praise of ‘Wisdom’. This is a female figure. She is “loving” (cf. Prov 4:6; 8:17, 21; 29:3), or “embracing” (Prov 4:8), and called a wife. She seems to have breasts in Proverbs 5:19–23—but the religion doesn’t see a woman.

Wisdom is “erotically loaded,” as Annette Schellenberg notes. This is God in a feminine aspect. It’s hardly unusual to find the deity as a female. A key name of God, ‘El Shaddai’, means ‘breasted one’.

But even scholars were startled to find a Dead Sea Scroll with an alternate text of a biblical book called Sirach. Here, the human worshipper was seen as a man having sex with Wisdom.

“I burned with desire for her, never turning back. I became preoccupied with her, never weary of extolling her. My hand opened her gate and I came to know her secrets. For her I purified my hands; in cleanness I attained to her.”

The ‘hand’ that opens her ‘gate’, as in Song of Songs 5:4, would be a penis. The ‘secrets’ means, literally, ‘nakedness’. A sex scene is happening.

The ‘female’…is God. Don’t think She just wants it once. The deity is ready for a second coming—and a third.

The scholar T. Muraoka notes that the phrase “never weary of extolling her” likely means that when the woman is “in the moment of orgasm” the man “will not let up…”

10. Jesus the sexy “bridegroom”

Back in the Old Testament, the messianic prophesies were of a very hot man, as in the wedding song of Psalm 45:

“Gird your sword on your thigh, O powerful one, in your bloom and beauty…”

Christianity hates it, but scene after scene in the gospels has sexual suggestion around Jesus. His meeting with the Samaritan Woman, for example, is clearly telegraphed as a man chatting with a woman in a romantic setting.

In the gospels, typically, Jesus is not seen as a deity. He presents as a man—and men get married. Everyone around him would expect him to.

But he’s on earth to marry humanity! He’s the cosmic “bridegroom” (Jn 3:29, etc.). This is an erotic figure, a future husband. I was amazed to trace the references as presented by Brant Pitre in his 2014 study Jesus the Bridegroom: The Greatest Love Story Ever Told.

I remember reading that book, and thinking: Jesus is a sexual figure.

Back in the early 1920s, the artist Eric Gill was puzzling through the Christian story on his own. He writes a friend: “It’s like getting married and, speaking, analogically, we are fucked by Christ.”

Christianity might talk about that ‘Bride of Christ’ stuff. But the religion was never in the mood. 🔶