I am pleased to have reached season six of Game of Thrones! The last episode of season five includes a scene that shares similarities with a ritual described in several passages of the Bible, and I want to explore this subject, especially since I have rarely, if ever, seen a right Biblical understanding of it laid out.
Skip this paragraph if you want to pass over spoilers for season five of Game of Thrones. In the final episode of the season, Cersei Lannister, having confessed to the offense of adultery with her cousin Lancel, is stripped and escorted naked through the city of King's Landing at the behest of the Faith Militant as a punitive measure to humiliate her. The Militant are those who carry out punishments for specific sins in their service of the Seven, a seven-faced deity they worship.
Some readers of the Bible will notice that a similar procedure is described in a passage of Scripture.
Hosea 2:2-3--"Rebuke your mother, rebuke her, for she is not my wife, and I am not her husband. Let her remove the adulterous look from her face and the unfaithfulness from between her breasts. Otherwise I will strip her naked and make her as bare as on the day she was born . . ."
When I read Hosea 2:3 and several similar verses (for instance, see Ezekiel 16:35-42) a few years ago, I inwardly recoiled at forced nudity, something that offended my conscience and struck me as wrong. I mentally associated such an action with illicit humiliation and thought it, in some cases, even a mild form of sexual abuse. I've never known of someone addressing Hosea 2:3 in a sermon or commentary in the exact manner that I am now. But, hey, that's one of the primary purposes of my blog--to convey information readers may not hear about elsewhere, whether about how to prove to yourself that you are not dreaming, or how to prove if your memory is reliable, or why many beliefs professed by contemporary Christians are sheer nonsense! Perhaps others have wondered about this issue in Hosea 2:3, bothered in conscience at the thought of God and the Bible condoning such a thing. Sometimes things like this are completely neglected in contrast to the very generous amount of attention people may give to the divinely-authorized genocides of the Old Testament.
Nudity itself is not sinful at all on its own [1], so the issue at hand in Hosea 2:3 is forced nudity. There is a huge difference between the two. One is voluntary and can be liberating and pleasurable, the other is involuntary and can bring great vulnerability, degradation, and humiliation. Forced nudity can be part of psychological torture or sexual abuse. So what does the Bible actually teach about this? When discussing issues about torture or punishment I often see Christians 1) using some extra-Biblical moral system to answer, 2) appealing to totally irrelevant New Testament passages that have nothing to do with the specifics of issues (or the issues themselves at all), or 3) saying that what really matters is that governments punish criminals and we shouldn't or can't condemn many/any of their exact methods (the only logical conclusion of a Christian ethicist who is not a theonomist). All of these are purely fallacious answers.
Forced nudity can indeed be a type of psychological torture, and at times a form of sexual abuse. But I will show why this verse need not trouble anyone in the way it did to me. I will give several reasons why Hosea 2:3 and Ezekiel 16 objectively cannot mean that the Bible prescribes stripping some criminals naked--although there may be one situation nudity where it is involved in punishment.
Never once does a single passage in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, or Deuteronomy prescribe the stripping of a man or woman to punish them for a crime.
The whole of Mosaic Law never mentions any penalty where a criminal is stripped naked, whether for adultery or for some other offense. This differentiates Mosaic Law from the legal codes of other societies in the Old Testament world, with some examples of disparity being the Assyrians stripping captives and criminals naked and flaying their skin off and the Romans crucifying men and women naked for maximum humiliation. Mosaic Law routinely condemns both broad and specific aspects of the sadistic criminal punishments that existed in such nations, as I have discussed elsewhere.
But there may be one punishment involving the nudity of the criminal, which is incidental, secondary but still present. The only circumstance I can think of where stripping someone naked for punishment would possibly be Biblically supported is in a case of assault and battery resulting in permanent injury where a man or woman cut off someone's genitals and was sentenced to have his or her own genitals removed (Exodus 21:23-25; and as I've said before no crimes other than battery with permanent injury received mirror punishment). Other crimes are prescribed financial penalties, temporary servanthood, limited flogging, or execution.
Mosaic Law dictates what terrestrial criminal punishments are just according to the Christian worldview, not prophetic writings like Hosea or Ezekiel. Read Deuteronomy 22:22 and Leviticus 20:10 where the Bible talks about executing people who commit adultery. Neither verse says to strip and parade the offenders, only to execute them. And Deuteronomy 4:2 says to not add to the Law. A procedure like that the Faith Militant carried out with Cersei, or the one described in Hosea 2:3, is not among the prescriptions of Biblical justice, and to carry it out would inescapably violate a command of the Bible.
Deuteronomy 25:3 condemns degrading punishments.
Indeed, since forced nudity used as punishment is intended to socially degrade and/or emotionally/psychologically humiliate its recipients, violating the natural autonomy of the man or woman to control his or her body, this punishment would be prohibited by Deuteronomy 25:3, which condemns the infliction of more than forty lashes (compared to the much higher numbers permitted by other nations of the time) so that the one flogged will not be "degraded." By logical extension this verse condemns all degrading punishments--punishments that are degrading according to Biblical revelation, not arbitrary subjective human perceptions, which may judge even the Biblical 1-40 lashes as degrading and unjust. Combined with the fact that Mosaic Law never prescribes periods of forced nudity as its own penalty or stripping before execution, this demonstrates that the Bible opposes use of forced nudity as punishment (with the one possible exception mentioned above). If Biblical morality is just, then, since any deviation from justice is injustice, forced nudity must be unjust, since it is both something that is not prescribed and something that degrades.
Thankfully it did not take me long all those years ago to realize that I did not need to panic over Hosea 2:3 (or other passages that brought about confusion, like Luke 23:41 [2]). The way to resolve such moral difficulties is twofold. Firstly, acknowledge that feelings do not prove that something is right or wrong [3]. Secondly, inspect the text objectively. In many cases you might find that the Bible does not or cannot teach what it seems to or what some claim it does.
[1]. See here for a Biblical and logical analysis of simple nudity:
A. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/08/bible-on-nudity-part-1.html
B. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/02/bible-on-nudity-part-2-refutation-of.html
C. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-naturalness-of-nudity.html
[2]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/12/we-are-getting-what-our-deeds-deserve.html
[3]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-nature-of-conscience.html
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