Note 3 — Chapter I · PRELUDE

The relation of chastity to the birth of the idea of personality among the Hebrews I have touched upon elsewhere. The Hebrew people abhorred promiscuity, or the dishonoring of oneself by indiscriminate mingling. It is instructive that this did not stand in the way of polygamy. Those persons whom the Hebrew received, so to speak, into the sphere of his personality, did not imperil his sense of personal intactness. And personal intactness seems to have been the determining motive in the severe attitude taken toward prostitution. The fact that the worship of other gods, the worst of crimes in the eyes of the Hebrew legislator, was described as “whoring after other gods” is particularly significant. The sacred, sensitive self, the holy thing whatever it might be, which the Hebrew discovered within his own sex experience, was thereafter attributed also to others, and especially to those who had the same aversion to promiscuity as he. Hence perhaps the limited ascription of holiness to members of the Hebrew people.