It's libelous against the Talmud."Īs a white male, and as a member of the conservative Church of the Brethren, Snyder is something of an outsider at the seminary. "People should stop reading their own prejudicial ideas into the Talmud. "The professor made an innocent statement and he quoted the Talmud correctly," says Rabbi Aaron Soloveichik, a noted Talmudist and dean of Brisk Rabbinical College in Chicago. "Do contemporary concerns about harassment and equality mean we need to abandon the reading of these old texts?" he asks. points to ripe sexual passages in the Koran and the Hindu Scriptures, as well as anti-homosexual statements in Leviticus, among other places in the Bible. Miller, director of library services for the Nazarene Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Mo. "I can see why women would raise questions, but it seems to me ludicrous for the school to reach a punitive decision because so much of our work is studying old texts," says Walter Brueggemann, professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. "If I lose this suit," he says, "it may mean that some sections of the Bible can't be taught."Īlthough Snyder remains a pariah at the feminist-oriented Protestant seminary, he is emerging as a hero to other scholars for fighting back. Humiliated and angry, Snyder is now suing the seminary though not the student, who will not comment on the case-for defamation of character. He has also been ordered to apologize to the offended seminarian, urged to get therapy and warned never to be alone with a female student. Based on a complaint from a former student, who charged that his lecture "unreasonably interfered with her academic performance," Snyder, 63, was put on probation last month by seminary officials. But unlike Snyder, neither Jesus nor the rabbis had to contend with a Sexual Harassment Task Force. He uses it to illustrate how Jesus' well-known dictum from the Sermon on the Mount-"anyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart"-resembles the later Talmudic doctrine on the importance of intention when judging sinful acts. Graydon Snyder, a Protestant Scripture scholar at the Chicago Theological Seminary, has been discussing that Talmudic passage with Christian students for 33 years. Since the man did not intend sexual intercourse, the rabbis concluded, he was liable for her pain and expense but not for the injury known as "degradation." Among the many hypothetical questions posed by the Talmudic rabbis is the case of a workman who falls from a roof and lands on a woman, accidentally penetrating her in the process.
Along with spiritual wisdom there's plenty of carnal knowledge in the story of King David's adultery, for example, and in the exquisitely erotic Song of Songs. THE TORAH AND THE TALMUD AREN'T for the sexually squeamish.
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