Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (9 page)

Though Latin lived on after the fall of the Roman Empire, it never again achieved the same grandeur of obscenity it boasted under the Republic and the Caesars. As it retired into its Renaissance role as the source for polite and technical English vocabulary, however, it left behind the model of obscenity that we still employ
today, based on sexually and excrementally taboo body parts and actions. Today we have lost the religious aspects that
obscenitas
possessed—the Shit stands alone, if you will. But, as we will see, the Holy-Shit connection returned in English too, in a slightly different form, in the Middle Ages.

Chapter 2
On Earth as It Is in Heaven
The Bible

Latin showed us how consistent some broad categories of obscenity have been across time and culture, while revealing some interesting differences in the details. But there is another kind of swearing, which was once more powerful than even
landica
could ever hope to be—the oath. Swearing an oath means calling on God to witness that a person is telling the truth or intending to fulfill a promise. I’ve mentioned that such swearing is still important today in courts of law, oaths of office, and personal relations. In the past, oaths were even more important. Sincere oath swearing was seen as the glue that held society together, and when done falsely or badly—when oaths were blasphemous or vain—it threatened to tear the fabric of civil life apart.

For the origins of oaths as we know and use them, we look of course to religion. Or perhaps we should say that for the origins of religion, we look to the oath.
In the Bible, swearing
is the foundational act of the Jewish and Christian faiths. The covenants that God makes with Abraham are oaths, pledged by both Abraham and God. For Jews, these oaths establish God’s special relationship with the Jewish people; for Christians, they create the conditions for Christ’s eventual arrival. Either way, in the beginning was the Word, and the word was an Oath.

Divine Swearing

Almost the first thing we learn about Abram (as Abraham, founder of the three “Abrahamic” monotheistic religions, is originally called) is that God will bless him. God says to him, “
Go from your country
and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing” (Gen. 12:1–2). It takes a while for God to make good on his pledge, though, and Abram doesn’t have much time to waste—he is already seventy-five years old when he gets the call. He leaves his homeland as ordered with his wife, Sarai (later renamed Sarah), spends some time in Egypt, and gets Pharaoh into trouble by claiming that Sarai is his sister, not his wife. The unsuspecting Egyptian marries the still sexy sexagenarian Sarai, and “for her sake” gives Abram “sheep, oxen, male donkeys, male and female slaves, female donkeys, and camels” (Gen. 12:16). In return for Pharaoh’s generosity, God afflicts him with plagues until he finally realizes his mistake—“Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her for my wife?”—and kicks Abram and his entourage out. Abram then wanders into Canaan, and God repeats his promise of numerous offspring, specifying that Canaan is the land he will give him: “I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth; so that if one can count the dust of the earth, your offspring also can be counted. Rise up, walk through the length and the breadth of the land, for I will give it to you” (Gen. 13:16–17). Thus begins a long period of wandering, during which Abram begins to doubt that God will—or is able to—fulfill his promises. How can his descendants be like the dust on the ground if he doesn’t have any children? Who exactly is going to inherit this land he’s living in?

God decides he needs to assuage Abram’s doubts and to bind himself to his words even more strongly than he has done so far. He instructs Abram to collect a three-year-old heifer, she-goat, and ram, as well as a turtledove and a pigeon, and then to cut the bigger animals in half. Abram falls into a deep sleep and sees God, in the form of a smoking firepot and a flaming torch, pass between the pieces of the animal carcasses (Gen. 15:7–21). This is God’s
first covenant with Abraham
, in which he formalizes the promises he has been making to give the land of Canaan to Abraham’s descendants.

God here enters what amounts to a traditional Hittite covenant, which would have been sworn between enemies at the end of hostilities, between rulers and vassals to set up the terms of their relationship, or by a person committing himself to some weighty action.
*
A covenant is “a solemn promise made binding by an oath, which may be either a verbal formula or a symbolic action. Such an action or formula is recognized by both parties as the formal act which binds the actor to fulfill his promise.” In Hebrew, covenants were said to be “cut,” not “made,” because the ritual killing and slicing of animals was an important part of the ceremony. The sacrifice sealed the deal—anyone who broke the covenant was supposed to end up as dead as the doves, heifers, or sheep that were killed. The covenant God cuts here is unilateral—it binds God to do what he has promised, but it doesn’t require Abram to do anything in return. In walking through the animal sacrifices, God is implicitly swearing an oath that if he breaks his word, he will end up like those slaughtered ruminants.

This is the only place in the Bible where God utters
what scholars call a self-curse
. Usually he is on the administering end, and it’s humans swearing, “So may God do to me”—what will be done is often unexpressed and always assumed to be awful—“if I break my word.” (King David swears this way, as do Ruth, Solomon, Saul, and many other figures.) In these oaths, God is expected to carry out whatever horrible punishment the speaker has invited upon him- or herself. But in his first covenant with Abraham, God is putting
himself
under a curse. Who will punish
him
if he breaks his word? Who will ensure that he ends up like the sacrificial animals? (And in what sense would that be possible?) These questions are analogous to the “paradox of the stone,” a staple of college philosophy classes: can God, who is omnipotent and thus can do anything, create a stone too heavy for him to lift? The philosopher Harry Frankfurt, perhaps best known for his
On Bullshit
, offers a succinct reply, which boils down to “
He can, and then he lifts it
.” God “can handle situations which he cannot handle.” Likewise, God could destroy himself if he breaks his oath. God would never need to, however, because he is Truth itself and would never go back on his word. This early in the Bible, though, there are some other possible solutions, which we will get to later. In any case, God has not just made promises to Abram; in cutting the covenant with him, he has pledged himself even more strongly. He has sworn.

When Abram is ninety-nine years old—getting on in years even by biblical standards—God confirms the covenant with him. This time, though, God requires Abram to do something—this new version is a mutual covenant, with responsibilities on both sides. God will make Abram the father of a multitude of nations and give his descendants the land of Canaan, per above; he will also “be God to you and your offspring after you” (Gen. 17:7) and start calling him Abraham (“ancestor of a multitude”). For his part, Abraham promises to “be blameless” (Gen. 17:1) and agrees to circumcise the males of his household, as a sign of the covenant: “So shall my covenant be in your flesh an everlasting covenant. Any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant” (Gen. 17:13–14).
This appears to be divine humor
, by the way. Anyone who breaks the covenant of circumcision will be “cut off.” (This joke actually occurs twice in the Bible, making it the most popular joke in a book not known for its humor. When in the New Testament Paul argues that Christ has abrogated the need for circumcision, he declares of those still in favor of it: “I would they were even cut off” (i.e., castrated; KJV Gal. 5:12).

God reaffirms the covenant one more time, after Abraham obeys God’s command to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, born to him at the age of one hundred. When the boy is weaned, God orders Abraham to “take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering” (Gen. 22:2). Abraham sets off the next day, without hesitation or complaint. He builds an altar, binds Isaac and lays him on top, and is about to plunge a knife into him when an angel tells him to stop; he has proved that he fears God. Abraham looks up and sees a ram caught in a thicket, and sacrifices it instead.

Because Abraham has “been blameless” and obeyed God even in something so heart-wrenching and terrible, God once again reaffirms the covenant. An angel calls down from heaven and tells Abraham, “By myself I have sworn, says the Lord: Because you have done this, and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will indeed bless you, and I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore” (Gen. 22:16–17). God has now committed himself to Abraham in several, increasingly serious ways. He has promised him, made and renewed a covenant with him, and sworn an oath by himself that he will bless Abraham and look after his descendants.

Why does God swear? It seems an odd thing for him to do—perhaps not as odd as when he puts himself under a self-curse by passing through the slaughtered bodies of three-year-old animals, but still. Every word that God says is true, so why does he need the extra security an oath provides? That he swears is both a mark of favor to Abraham and his descendants and a recognition of their frailty. In binding himself here with an oath, and earlier with his self-curse, God is reassuring Abraham that he will fulfill his promises, in language that people can readily understand. This doesn’t increase the probability that he will do what he says, as it is supposed to when people swear; God knows that there is never a difference between his word and his deed. It acknowledges instead that even faithful believers have moments of doubt, that human hearts and
minds are fallible.
As the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo wrote
around
AD
30, God “is said to swear, because of our weakness… . And since He is blessed and gracious and propitious, He does not judge created beings in accordance with His greatness but in accordance with theirs.” God loves his creation so much that he is willing to assume the restrictions and obligations of an oath to assuage our insecurities.

Why God Wants Us to Swear

God also swears to give people a model for the use of this powerful language. He swears a lot in the Bible, almost always by himself or by a part of himself: “By myself I have sworn” that I will be everybody’s God (Isa. 45:23); “As I live, … I will do to you the very things I heard you say: your dead bodies shall fall in this very wilderness” (Num. 14:28–29); “Once and for all I have sworn by my holiness; I will not lie to David” (Ps. 89:35); “The Lord has sworn by his right hand and by his mighty arm: I will not again give your grain to be food for your enemies” (Isa. 62:8); “For I lift up my hand to heaven and swear: As I live forever, when I whet my flashing sword, and my hand takes hold on judgment; I will take vengeance on my adversaries, and will repay those who hate me. I will make my arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh” (Deut. 32:40).

We can infer some rules about swearing from these divine examples. You must swear by God, or by some synecdoche for him, in which an attribute or a part of God stands for God himself—his name, his holiness, or his arm. You must swear seriously and only in weighty matters, and you must never use an oath as expletive or insult. Most of all, you must swear sincerely, as God does—if you are swearing to the truth of something, it had better be true; if you are swearing that you will do something, you had better do it.

The Bible is full of explicit rules about swearing as well,
the most famous of which
is of course the third commandment: “Thou shalt
not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain: for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain” (KJV Ex. 20:7).
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What does it mean to take God’s name “in vain,” or “wrongfully,” “idly,” or “for no good,” as this phrase can also be translated? This commandment is usually understood to prohibit the making of false oaths, picking up on God’s earlier instruction that “you shall not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your God” (Lev. 19:12). False oaths invoke God as a witness to a statement that isn’t true, or to a promise you don’t intend to fulfill. When you swear by God, you ask him to guarantee your words, and to punish you if you have not spoken the truth. If you swear falsely, you are asking God to give his imprimatur to a lie, implicating him in your dishonesty and dishonoring him in turn.
As the catechism of the Catholic Church puts it
in its explanation of this commandment: “Promises made to others in God’s name engage the divine honor, fidelity, truthfulness, and authority. They must be respected in justice. To be unfaithful to them is to misuse God’s name and in some way to make God out to be a liar.”

The commandment also prohibits what scholars call “vain” oaths, which means oaths sworn to no purpose. Vain oaths were seen as a major problem in the Middle Ages, when the swearwords of choice, as I’ve suggested, were “by God” and “by God’s bones [hands, nails, feet, blood, etc.].” These expressions had the form of an oath but the force and register of an expletive. “
Telle us a fable anon
, for cokkes bones!” (Tell us a fable now, for God’s bones!) the Host of Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
swears again, this time at the Parson on the pilgrimage. The Host is not swearing to the truth of his statement, not intentionally asking God to witness his words. He is instead using the oath as an intensifier, to convey how much he wants the Parson to tell a story, and to show his frustration because the holy man is obviously reluctant to oblige. Paraphrased
in modern English, the Host is saying something along the lines of “For God’s sake, tell us a story!” or perhaps rather “Tell us a fuckin’ story already!”