What the Book of Genesis Tells Us About Sexual Harassment and #MeToo

The weekly portions of the Bible that Jews across the world are currently reading are taken from the Book of Genesis. It is a book notable for its lack of laws and abundance of stories, which are some of the most famous in the entire Bible—Adam and Eve, the flood of Noah, the Binding of Isaac, and Jacob and Esau. But a curious feature of the Book of Genesis is that many of its stories are about the very kind of sexual impropriety that is currently deluging the news on a daily basis: powerful men (and occasionally powerful women) seeking to force vulnerable women and men into unwanted sex.

The first recorded instance of this in the Bible occurs when Abraham and Sarah travel to Egypt in order to escape a famine in the Land of Canaan. Abraham, knowing that a beautiful woman in Egypt is in danger of being kidnapped by pharaoh’s minions and that her husband is in danger of being killed, tells his wife Sarah to pretend that she is his sister, hoping to keep them both from harm.

Sarah is abducted anyway and only a miracle saves her from being assaulted by pharaoh. The same pattern repeats itself when Abraham and Sarah and Isaac and Rebecca journey to the land of the Philistines: in order to prevent themselves from being killed should Avimelekh, the Philistine king, abduct their wives, Abraham and Isaac pretend that Sarah and Rebecca are their sisters.

There’s more. When Abraham’s nephew, Lot, entertains guests in the city of Sodom, a gang of Sodomites clamor around his house, demanding that Lot release his male visitors so that the Sodomites can rape them. (The gang does not realize that these visitors are actually angels.)

Dina, the daughter of Jacob and Leah, is raped by Shechem, a Hivite prince. And when Joseph is a servant in Egypt in the house of Potiphar, Potiphar’s wife demands sex from him. When he refuses, she has him thrown in jail.

What do all of these biblical narratives of sexual harassment have in common? Abraham diagnoses the problem in Philistia, after Avimelekh abducts Sarah and another miracle occurs preventing Avimelekh from molesting her: Avimelekh confronts Abraham, asking him why he lied and called Sarah his sister.

Abraham tells Avimelekh, “I said to myself ‘there is surely no fear of God in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife’” (Genesis 20:11). And we see this explanation echoed in Egypt a few generations later when Joseph refuses to give in to Potiphar’s wife’s demands because, as he says, “how can I perpetrate this great evil and have sinned against God?” (Gen. 39:9)

The message of these stories is clear: Where there is no fear of God—when a society forgets that “God sees,” as the protagonist of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story “Alone” puts it—primal instincts go unchecked and powerless people are at risk of having sexual violence perpetrated upon them by powerful, unrestrained potentates.

Many Jewish biblical scholars throughout the ages have wondered what the purpose of the book of Genesis is. If the Torah (a term derived from the Hebrew word for “instruction”) is a book of laws, then why does it begin with an entire volume devoted to stories?

Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin, an influential nineteenth century Lithuanian scholar, explains that the purpose of the Book of Genesis is to teach us uprightness [“yashrut”]—ethics, morality, proper values; in short, basic decency. In fact, in rabbinic literature, Genesis is often referred to as “Sefer ha-Yashar,” which translates to “The Book of the Upright.”

“Good manners must come prior to the Torah” (Leviticus Rabba, Chapter 9), the rabbis of the Talmud teach. Because if there is a lack of basic decency, then what good is law? The Book of Genesis is the first book of the Bible in order to teach us that if we cannot manage to act with basic decency—for instance, if we cannot understand something as basic as not forcing people into sexual activity against their will—then the rest of the Bible, and the rest of our endeavors, are essentially worthless.

We have a difficult time nowadays talking about concepts such as “holiness,” “humility,” and “fear of God” (or “fear of Heaven,” as it is often called in rabbinic literature). We are much more comfortable talking about “tolerance,” “equality,” or “rights.” But if there’s anything that today’s stories about sexual harassment can teach us, it’s that the rights of others—the right of each individual to be unmolested, the right of every individual to never be forced into sex against his or her will—could be better respected if we saw one another not as objects of sexual gratification but as holy beings created in the image of God.

And if there’s anything that Genesis can teach us about sexual harassment today, it’s that without a fear of Heaven—without the fear that there is a higher power who will hold those with earthly power accountable for their misdeeds—then it is very, very difficult to prevent people from exploiting others.

Without the fear of Heaven, you must rely on earthly laws alone for justice. As Harvey Weinstein and the rest have demonstrated, that’s not much of a shield. When you untether the law from belief, you rob it of its power.

Abraham and Isaac in Philistia knew this; so did Abraham and Joseph in Egypt. And now we in the land of Rose, O’Reilly, Conyers, and Lauer know it, too. When there is no fear of God, fundamental human rights begin to weaken.

As Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks—somewhat prophetically—wrote last year, “When a society loses faith, eventually it loses the very idea of a sexual ethics, and the result in the long term is violence and the exploitation of the powerless by the powerful. . . . So it was the days of the patriarchs. Sadly, so it is today.”

Daniel Ross Goodman, a writer and rabbi, is a Ph.D. candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and is studying English & Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He has published in numerous academic and popular journals, magazines, and newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, Tablet, and Harvard Divinity School Bulletin.