Abstract
The biblical Hebrew texts of sexual politics (often involving sordid sexual violence, especially against women) have been studied in the last forty years with an ideological bent that employs contemporary literary analysis. This essay is an attempt to allow the biblical text to furnish strategies for reading its troubling narratives rather than imposing external ideologies over it. An ethical narrative close reading of the text of primeval desire (Gen 3) led me to the discovery of four themes—desire, particularly its derivative, sexual passion; power-play; alterity; and peril— and to the biblical authors’ characterization of God in divine response to human deviant behavior as heuristic tools for reading these texts of desire.