The Test Of All Else

Outside its own boundaries, ancient Israel encounters a world of sexual anomie in which anything goes. It associates this with other moral failings: murder, abduction, and in the case of Joseph—accused of an act he did not commit— injustice. Two propositions are taking shape. The first is that sexual relationships are the test of all else. Do I respect other people as persons in their own right, or do I see them as means to my ends, instruments of my pleasure? Do I relate to you in freedom and dignity, or do I simply use you? The nature of the sexual encounter will—not immediately, but eventually — affect all other social relationships. Marriage is the moralization of sex, and the breakdown of marriage is the beginning of the disintegration of society, a fact that virtually every civilization has learned too late. The second is that the sign of the covenant will be circumcision, because man needs to be reminded in one place more than others of the binding force of moral obligation.