I’ve been following a program to read through the entire Bible in a year.  While I’ve read the Bible before, it seems I keep finding newer and more bizarre things all the time.  Leviticus is ripe for weirdness.  I realize most of those laws were cultural, and may have had good reasons behind them in terms of relationships, sanitation and not emulating the behavior of the pagan Other.

But this morning I read this verse and thought, Whoa!  

“If a woman approaches an animal to have sexual relations with it, kill both the woman and the animal.  They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.”

--Leviticus 20:16

I’ve heard people described as an animal in bed.  Were they speaking metaphorically or from actual experience?  Inquiring minds want to know.

While I can visualize how a man might have sexual relations with an animal (covered in verse 15), this approach thing bothers me.  Does approach imply foreplay and, if so, does petting my dog constitute approaching?  Is petting his head or scratching him behind his ears okay, but not scratching his belly?  I mean, he does get sort of a frisky smile on his face when I do that, but I figured that was because he’s a Golden Retriever.

Most of all I wonder:  Would my dog and I both be put to death if he humped my leg?

Thank the Lord, he’s fixed.

It’s akin to the enigma I went through while reading Portnoy’s Complaint, when Alex Portnoy derided the goyim for talking to their dogs.  For weeks I pondered, do Jews not talk to their dogs? 

And why is it in Leviticus that the man gets to complete the act before being charged with a sin, while the woman doesn’t even get a chance to try out her perverted fantasies?  

Blake and I discussed this and decided approaching an animal might be one of those catchall sins like witchcraft.  If there’s a woman in town who’s getting a bit uppity, all you do is say, “Why, I saw that hussy out in the pasture last night, approaching the ram.”  

Never mind the logistics of whether the ram could actually pull it off.  It’s a slippery slope argument, like gay marriage leading to polygamy, though polygamy is almost exactly the opposite of homosexuality.  

But just think of the freak child you’d end up with if the woman and the ram pulled it off and, heaven forbid, the seed “took.”  Kill it!  Kill them both, before the devil child comes to fruition!  Before my wife finds out that ram is into interbreed breeding!  Lord knows, she’ll want that, too!

Or maybe it did work out sometimes.  Maybe that’s where those freaky half-man/half-beast critters in Daniel’s prophecies came from.  Either that or Daniel, like the Levites, had a wild imagination and a lot of time on his hands.

One of my roommates after college was a pre-veterinary major.  One day, Dale came home and told us about the lab that day, a procedure called “artificial vagina” for gathering semen from a stallion.  Dale was not the one holding up the horsey pornography, either; it was her job to hold the, uh, vagina.

“Those horses come down hard!” she said.

This is why, when I heard those stories in my college history class about Catherine the Great getting it on with horses, I took them with a large grain of salt.  No matter what kind of pulleys or harness they used, I’m pretty sure she’d be seriously injured.

Widowed young, the Empress of Russia would likely be considered a cougar today.  She was not only progressive in her sexuality, but also as a political leader, and was responsible for one of the early mass immunizations for smallpox.  My history-major husband told me it was common in Europe around that time for stories to circulate about such powerful women that masculinized them in a freakishly sexual fashion. Similar stories were told about Marie Antoinette.  Even the devout Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for wearing men’s clothing.

Such legends were the historical equivalent of today’s Birther stories about Barack Obama (whose mother had gotten out of the American “fold”), the demonization of the politically powerful Nancy Pelosi, or the minister casting a witch out of the tomboyish Sarah Palin.

It’s also possible “approaching an animal” may have related to some pagan cult ritual.  If so, it’s not apparent from the context.  

If anything, my reading of Leviticus would suggest a “breeder bias” (“go forth and multiply”) that considers unclean any bodily function--whether wet dreams, menstruation or homosexuality--that detracts from the ultimate goal of reproduction.  I can imagine a Levitical writer catching sight of the well-hung donkey next door, and saying, “Lordy, if my wife gets a glimpse of that, it’s all over for me. Better nip that temptation in the bud."