Sex & Violence in the Bible

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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Struggling with the idea that there's “explicit content” in the Bible (sex, violence, and the like) and yet Christian sermons, education, and literature tends to veer towards the G-rated (unless someone's trying to make a name for himself for being “edgy”), Smith set out to survey the texts that cover those topics to see if he could help Christians be able to talk the way the Bible does about the topics. He says he soon learned that

I might amass 40 or 50 texts. Yeah, right. After an entire summer of work and study, I had collected not a few dozen but rather several hundred such passages—giving me plenty of work to do and also yielding a basic thesis: there's a lot of sex and violence in the Bible.

unpack, clarify, and explain some of these graphic passages, many of which have been obscured by idiom, figurative language, and overly genteel English translations—not to mention the vast geographical and chronological distance between the culture in which the Bible was originally written and that of our own time.