Sex in the Old Testament: Ruth 2: 1-17

It is always helpful to use real texts in teaching especially at KS5. </p> I would urge caution regarding some of the texts used here, however. The Old Testament is a wonderful mixture of many books and different genre of writing from a period of perhaps thousands of years. The oldest stories in Genesis are from Oral Tradition, the ancient histories, songs, stories and poems of tribes from a time before the written word was invented.</p> When I studied Theology at Uni our Professor compared the Hebrew Bible to the handbag of a very old woman who has never thrown anything meaningful away. Her handbag includes stories she learned as a child, her first experiences of love, the pain of childbirth, articles about deaths in the family, wars and disasters in the land, all with her efforts to make sense of these events and her encounters with and reflections upon her God. </p> But in the case of the Hebrew Bible, this record is not the treasures of one old lady but of a people, and it spans not a lifetime but several thousand years. In this context many of the accounts you have collected together here can be seen in a wider context, recorded because they were dramatic or painful, not because they reflected the accepted practise of that time. </p> On a personal note, when I was in my teens I tried to read the Bible. I got as far as Lot's daughters making him drunk to ensure they could continue the family line - and I gave up on it in disgust, deciding that this was not a book which could teach me anything useful about God or my spiritual life. It was not until as an adult I came to study Theology that I ever looked at it again. So perhaps some of these stories should come with a 'health warning.'