“…metaphors that associate sex with eating, sexual partners with food, and/or sexual desire with hunger/appetite are not unique to rabbinic Judaism”

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One detail that stands out in this particular attempt to bring the Torah of sex into discourse (if not into direct observation) is its use of a metaphor of food and eating as a way to describe sexual activity. Certainly, metaphors that associate sex with eating, sexual partners with food, and/or sexual desire with hunger/appetite are not unique to rabbinic Judaism. Indeed, such metaphors were also quite evidently in use in the ambient Greco-Roman and early Christian cultures in which much of rabbinic literature was composed. Anthropologists, psychologists, linguists, and metaphor theorists (among others) have all recognized that food and eating are frequently linked linguistically and culturally with sex and sexuality (and gender), and that this family of metaphors is quite common in a variety of languages/cultures across both time and location (including modern English).

Gail Labovitz, “Is Rav’s Wife ‘a Dish’? Food and Eating Metaphors in Rabbinic Discourse of Sexuality and Gender Relations”, in Studies in Jewish Civilization, Vol. 18; Love – Ideal and Real – in the Jewish Tradition from the Hebrew Bible until Modern Times, ed. Leonard J. Greenspoon & Ronald A. Simkins (Omaha: Creighton University Press, 2008), 147-148.

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