Incest, Rape and the Biblical Patriarchs
Artemesia Gentileschi’s version of the popular biblical theme for medieval, renaissance and early modern artists is very different in tone from those of her male counterparts. Lot is shown exhibiting a prurient interest in his daughters, supposedly having been made drunk by them so as to get him to agree to sex. It is he who is seen to be inveigling the object of his attentions, his daughter, to respond to him sexually. Lot’s complexion is painted darker than those of the young women, and more ruddy — in the convention of male depictions as ‘sanguine’ according to the Aristotelian/Galenic theory of the four humors. The young women’s complexions, on the other hand, are palely shining, lunar, pearl-white. They look innocent and ‘pure’, while their father appears sinister and lustful. Behind him looms a black crevice in the rock, betokening the moral abyss into which he is about to fall.
How many daughters do you know who have been the ones to initiate the incest from a familial senior male: father, uncle, close relative or ‘friend of the family’? Patricist documents are suspect, if not wholly political/ideological, on their face. Masculinist monotheism is raw male-dominance-ranking elevated to the status of a religion. “Though shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy daughter” is the one prohibition NOT included in the many itemized in Leviticus or Deuteronomy. It is conspicuous by its absence among all the other incestuous contacts prohibited, and in fact infers a tacit, major perk vouchsafed ranking patriarchs among observant Yahwists of the ancient Hebrew tribes, which is to say the Levite priestly caste, Moses’ caste, whose rule is legitimized in, by and through Leviticus.
The use of an antiquated biblical term, “sodomy,” for the homosexual activity attributed to the male residents of the City of Sodom in Genesis, that ‘God’ thereby destroyed utterly, down to every man, woman and child, except for Lot and his daughters, is wholly repugnant to thinking, ethical, moral people in the 21st century, no matter what their creed, and no matter where they live on Earth. Adducing moral guidelines to the Old Testament is further repugnant. Unless these books are regarded and studied as archaic documents of an aggressively patriarchal ideology, they can’t be parsed for meaning and sense, as they have no historical context.
Added to this is the biblical narrative’s disgraceful detail whereby, prior to fleeing Sodom in the early morning hours at the behest of the two beautiful male strangers (who, according to the narrative, were actually angels sent by God to rescue Lot, the only ‘righteous man’ in all of Sodom), Lot had implored the mob outside his door to please desist in their demands for the two beautiful males to be sent outside so that they could rape them, promising the mob that he would send his two daughters out so they could rape them instead, saying “Look, I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them to you, and you can do to them whatever you want. But do not do anything to these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof.” (Genesis 19:8) The virginal status of the two daughters puts them somewhere between the ages of twelve and fourteen, as daughters of any greater age were summarily married off by the Yahwist Hebrews.
The angels then struck the rape-happy men with blindness, “…so they were unable to find the door,” preserving Lot’s virgin daughters for his own rape of them later, in the cave, after their mother had conveniently been turned into a lump of salt. With no trace of irony, the primitive patriarchal narrative goes on to recount how Lot’s virgin daughters were later to be subjected to incestuous rape by a drunken Lot, in the caves in which they’d taken refuge after the destruction of Sodom, after having first been proffered up for gang rape to the enflamed men of Sodom by their father.
I have always traced this domestic sexual tyranny as an underlying cultural source for the prevalence of child sexual abuse and daughter rape as a major social scourge in Western society basing itself upon Judeo-Christian Abrahamic traditions — the spoken AND the unspoken, tacitly accepted ones. Gentileschi was, herself, a victim of domestic rape. She was attacked at the age of seventeen by a high-ranking apprentice in her father’s studio. Orazio Gentileschi had assigned his top apprentice, Agostino Tassi, to teach his daughter, a prodigy also working in his shop, how to paint hands and draperies — areas in which Tassi was reputedly expert.
She and her father charged Tassi with rape, and the case was heard in court, but the cash penalty award was designated to be paid to her father as restitution for the damage to the girl’s worth, fame as a prodigy, and reputation as an asset in her father’s shop. Tassi was sentenced to jail, but spent not even one night there, as a sympathetic guard allowed him to escape. And it was Artemesia who was subjected to torture, in order to ‘test her evidence,’ as it was believed that females always, inevitably, helplessly lie, given their fluxient, lunar/watery, inconsistent, unreliable, ‘phlegmatic’ humoric nature and their low status as the perceived repositories and transmitters of Original Sin as the Daughters of Eve.
