I just finished reading a challenging and creative new book by biblical scholar Avaren Ipsen, called Sex Working and the Bible (Equinox, 2009). I will post a few thoughts about it soon, but for now I want to highlight some references Ipsen makes to hip-hop as it helped her think through some theological questions.

One of the book’s chapters investigates how to interpret the figure of the “whore Babylon” in the book in the Christian Bible called Revelation. One of Ipsen’s tasks in Sex Working is to correlate interpretations of sex work in the Bible from two perspectives: those of scholars and those of actual sex workers. When she gets to the “whore Babylon” in Revelation, she wants to think about how the language of “whore” might be functioning in its historical context and today. Does this image contribute to a freeing life for its hearers and those influenced by this text, or does it repeat hate speech in destructive ways? Why is Babylon, typically taken in ancient and contemporary perspectives to represent Rome, called a “whore,” and what is at stake in retaining or rejecting this language today? Such questions are especially acute because the Bible is potentially dangerous on this matter. As Ipsen carefully details, this “whore” is stripped, eaten, and burned in Revelation 17 — by God’s command: “And the ten horns that you saw, they and the beast will hate the whore; they will make her desolate and naked; they will devour her flesh and burn her up with fire. For God has put it into their hearts to carry out his purpose…”

Ipsen wonders if the “whore” language should be read as an ambiguous kind of parody of imperial power, flinging back at Rome a hate word in circulation in the ancient world, and possibly signaling that prostitutes were part of the community associated with Revelation. She gets this idea from hip-hop.

In Ipsen’s words, “The main reason I attempted a reading that inserted prostitutes among the oppressed community of Revelation is because of my own upbringing in the underclass within the revolutionary left. The men of my ghetto childhood were often in a very unstable solidarity with the women [...] But with a lifetime of hearing the reverse slander of calling oppressive leaders and institutions ‘whores,’ Arundhati Roy, Dead Prez and Tupac Shakur gave me the idea of analyzing the whore metaphor in this same way as

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