Extreme obesity

Just saw at bbw chan .

In the northern Israel kingdom, where the capital was Samaria, in the eighth century BCE, there lived a Biblical prophet named Amos, who, in the name of God, reproached the Israelites for their hedonism and refusal to submit to God, prophesying terrible punishments for them in God’s name. He particularly lashed out at the women from the capital district of the kingdom. This is Amos 4:1-3. He calls these women there "young cows (parah, in translations usually just 'cow,' but in Hebrew it is specifically young cows&apos of Bashan"

Bashan is a region with the best pastures in the entire area, where the cattle grazed there grew the fattest and most prosperous. This region was specifically used to fatten cattle to the maximum. Psalm 22:12 speaks of "fat cattle of Bashan," and the prophecy of Ezekiel 39:18 declares that in the time of future bliss, the Israelites will eat the meat of the fattest and most abundant cattle available—the meat of "cattle fattened in Bashan." In Deuteronomy 32:14-15, it is metaphorically said that by God’s mercy, eating the butter, milk, and fat of Bashan’s cattle of all kinds, "Israel grew fat and became rebellious; he grew fat, thickened, and became obese; and he abandoned the God who made him and despised the rock of his salvation."
So, the meaning of Amos’s phrase "young cows of Bashan" is not just "heavily fattened," which is already implied by the comparison to young cows as such, but specifically record-breakingly fattened women.

I provide the text in Hebrew, followed by a literal translation. The understanding is very difficult d in some places, and some words spark much debate there. I give it literally.

4:1
שִׁמְע֞וּ הַדָּבָ֣ר הַזֶּ֗ה פָּר֤וֹת הַבָּשָׁן֙ אֲשֶׁר֙ בְּהַ֣ר שֹֽׁמְר֔וֹן הָעֹשְׁק֣וֹת דַּלִּ֔ים הָרֹצְצ֖וֹת אֶבְיוֹנִ֑ים הָאֹמְרֹ֥ת לַאֲדֹֽנֵיהֶ֖ם הָבִ֥יאָה וְנִשְׁתֶּֽה׃
4:2
נִשְׁבַּ֨ע אֲדֹנָ֤י יְהוִה֙ בְּקָדְשׁ֔וֹ כִּ֛י הִנֵּ֥ה יָמִ֖ים בָּאִ֣ים עֲלֵיכֶ֑ם וְנִשָּׂ֤א אֶתְכֶם֙ בְּצִנּ֔וֹת וְאַחֲרִיתְכֶ֖ן בְּסִיר֥וֹת דּוּגָֽה׃
4:3
וּפְרָצִ֥ים תֵּצֶ֖אנָה אִשָּׁ֣ה נֶגְדָּ֑הּ וְהִשְׁלַכְתֶּ֥נָה הַהַרְמ֖וֹנָה נְאֻם־ יְהוָֽה׃

Literally:
4:1
Hear this word, you young cows of Bashan, who are on the hill of Samaria, you women who oppress the poor, who crush the needy (both verbs mean to suppress, oppress, or afflict, but they also carry the connotation of pressing down heavily from above, bearing down with huge weight), and (merely) say to their husbands, “Bring us something to drink (wine)!”

In some translations, to immediately clarify what these Bashan cows are, an expanded meaning is provided:
“You women on the hill of Samaria, who have grown fat like the overfed heifers of Bashan…”

4:2
The Lord Yahweh has sworn by His holiness that behold, days are coming upon you when they will lift you up with hooks, and "the rest of you/your remnant"will be lifted up with fishing hooks. (Literally, it says "the rest of you, your remnant," which can be understood either as "your backsides, your asses" meaning the rear as your hindmost, last part, or as "the last of you," or even as "your offspring," though the latter is especially unlikely. The most probable translation is "backsides, asses."

4:3
And through breaches (in the wall) you will go out, each woman in turn/one after another, and you will cast out onto h-r-m-n (what this "Harmon" means, remains unknown; it is currently often suggested that this is a scribal error, and "Harmon" stands for the graphically nearly identical Hebrew mdmn , "a pile of dung, a heap of manure", says the Lord.

In the text, it is in the active form, "you will cast out, you will expel": scholars, not understanding what the active form of the verb could mean here, suggest treating it as a scribal error for the passive form "you will be cast out onto Harmon." What Harmon is remains unclear; even if we assume it’s a mountain or some other place, as is often proposed, it’s not clear what kind of divine punishment this would be—to cast someone from Samaria onto some "Harmon." If we assume it means "a pile of dung," it would read "you will be cast out, that is, thrown onto/in a heap of manure," but this doesn’t quite fit with the previous phrase, because it says, "you will go out through breaches in the wall." And on its own, it’s not very clear what kind of punishment this is. There’s a theory that it refers to being taken captive by enemies from their ruined dwellings, but it’s entirely unclear why captivity would involve going through breached walls rather than regular doors and gates. Moreover, throwing someone onto a dung heap would only make sense for dead bodies. But "You will go out of your city/homes through breaches, after which you will be killed and thrown onto a dung heap" sounds somewhat absurd.

Keeping all this in mind, for now, I’ll repeat what is absolutely certain in the text. There are some women who are fat—not just fat "like cows," but record-breakingly fat, specifically like the fattest cows on the fattest pastures—yet young (it’s not just cows, but specifically young cows), who are so spoiled and lazy (and, apparently, so fat that it’s hard for them to get up and walk) that they order their own husbands, without getting up themselves, to bring them wine. Normally, a woman should not only go get wine for herself but also serve it to her husband at the table, yet here it’s the opposite. And the husbands, according to Amos, fully indulge this behavior of their "heifers."

Next, it says they oppress the poor and crush the needy. Married women cannot oppress the poor and needy themselves; they live off their husbands’ support—it’s their husbands who might oppress someone, not the women themselves, directly. In Israelite and Judean society of that time, women were not independent property owners; as daughters, they depended on fathers and brothers, and as wives, on husbands. This means that the elite exhausts the people with taxes and spends them on these women, who demand luxurious upkeep from their husbands, making them too costly for the people and thus oppressing the people indirectly.

At the same time, the verbs themselves again suggest that they weigh a lot—they literally press down too heavily on the people with their weight.

What remains unclear is the list of punishments. "Lifted up on hooks"—yes, it’s long been suggested this is an analogy to how butchers hoist meat carcasses on hooks. But still, nothing is clear about "going out through breaches." Nothing is clear about the phrase "cast out onto Harmon/a dung heap."

What also draws attention is that this series of punishments implies a contrast: right now, things with you are this way and that way (and this way is very good), but they will be completely different, your brilliant situation will be changed to the most bad situation. Right now, your going out is like this and that, but you will go out through breaches. Right now, you cast out in this way, but you will cast out onto Harmon/a pile of filth.

The riddle was solved by Richard Losch (who was himself a priest, a rector, as well as a mathematician and biblical scholar), who simply consulted specialists among Jews knowledgeable about the Talmud and other traditions of commentaries on the Old Testament, took into account ethnographic materials about the fattening and extreme obesity of Jewish women in northwestern Africa, and noted that Amos compares these Samarian women not just to cows, but to cows record-breakingly fattened in the entire region, and that these women, according to Amos, without getting up themselves, demand that their husbands bring them food and drink, and the husbands comply.

He presented his conclusion as follows:
Richard R. Losch. All the Places in the Bible. An A-Z Guide to the Countries, Cities, Villages, and Other Places Mentioned in Scripture. Bloomington, 2013. P. 288, 468.
Amos’s "cows of Bashan" refers to the aristocratic women who, as a visible token of their wealth, intentionally became so fat that they could not walk by themselves. They loved to display their wealth by being carried on litters by their slaves among the poor who were on the verge of starvation (288). It became the fashion for the rich women, as a public display of their wealth, to become so obese that they could not possibly do any work. Amos called them "fat cows of Bashan" (468).

Developing and supplementing this viewpoint, in 2018, the authors of a specialized monograph on the perception of various animals in antiquity (Sian Lewis, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones. The Culture of Animals in Antiquity: A Sourcebook with Commentaries. New York: Routledge, 2017, 2.7) specifically noted that the fattest cattle in the ancient Near East were fattened to such a degree of obesity that they could not move under their own weight, and such bulls and cows were transported on special carts and sledges (this is primarily known from Egyptian sources), and that Amos in 4:1 likely compared the women he condemned to precisely this kind of most overfed cattle (indeed, the epithet "Bashan" confirms that it refers to cattle known to the ancient Hebrews as record-breakingly fattened).

Jewish tradition’s commentaries on this passage align with all of this. In the Talmud, tractate Shabbat, 32b-a, it says in such a commentary: "The heifers of Bashan are like the women of the city of Mehuza... who only consumed but did not labor." The city of Mehuza, located in Babylon, where Jews lived very richly, was in ancient Hebrew tradition something akin to the fairy-tale lands of luxury, gluttony, and laziness in European folklore—an ordinary place where people lived who drastically surpassed the rest of the world in fatness, spoiledness, luxury, and idleness.

Rashi, for instance, comments: the people of Mehuza "were spoiled and fat"; and to the Talmudic phrase, he adds: "they consumed but did not labor—and thus lived off the plunder of their husbands, and worse, since they were accustomed to expecting and demanding the best food and drink, this forced their husbands into dishonest gaining of wealth"


In his seminar, Losch and his students, as well as other commentators, managed to explain the infamous punishments that had caused such difficulty for previous commentators. I will give their explanation in summary.

"They will lift you up on hooks"—meaning, you are accustomed to being lifted by the hands and litters of slaves because you don’t walk due to obesity and laziness, but God will punish you and instead you will be lifted up like meat carcasses, on hooks. This shouldn’t be taken literally, because the subsequent curses make it clear they remain alive; it’s simply a metaphor for some general punishments.

"And the rest/last part of you (i.e., your rear parts, buttocks) will be lifted on fishing hooks"—you are accustomed, when lying on your stomach for sex (because when you’re on your back, access to your female parts is less convenient), to having your buttocks and thighs parted ("raised, lifted" for getting access to your female parts, by hand, but the Lord God will part them for you as if by hooking fishing lines into your buttocks and pulling them apart with those lines. This is indeed the most plausible explanation, because alternative interpretations—taking this text as referring to offspring or the last of these women—make no sense. Why would offspring or the last of these women be lifted specifically on fishing hooks rather than meat hooks—what’s the point of that distinction? But if the first part of the sentence is metaphorically said about lifting the whole body and the second part of the sentence is metaphorically said about parting the buttocks, the difference makes sense: the whole body needs a larger hook, while the buttocks would be parted with several smaller hooks. Of course in reality it would be extremely painful procedure, and this sadistic metaphor is a part of Amos' wrath against these women.

"You will go out through breaches in the walls"—this immediately recalls modern media reports about how an extremely obese person couldn’t be carried out through a door because they simply didn’t fit, and a wall had to be broken to get them out through the opening. Here, it means: you’re used to not leaving the house at all because you can no longer fit through doors on your litters—but you’ll have to leave your homes through breaches in walls destroyed by God’s punishments.

"One woman after another in turn"—because in a house, there are several such women living together: wives of different brothers, women of different generations, and they’ll have to be pulled out through the breach in the wall one by one, because a breach wide enough to drag them out simultaneously won’t be made, and there simply won’t be enough hands for it.

"You will cast out onto a pile of filth." The meaning is also extremely clear: you’re accustomed to relieving yourselves with the help of servants who place you on some containers , or turn and and spread your body parts apart, but no one will do that anymore, so you’ll simply relieve yourselves sitting in your own pile of filth. The active form "you will cast out" is not a textual error—there’s no need to replace it with "you will be cast out"—it’s precisely meant that they will cast out, i.e., relieve themselves.

This isn’t about being taken into captivity, as is usually assumed—that always seemed unlikely from the start, because no one takes captives specifically through breaches in walls, and no one throws anyone onto a dung heap in the process. Nor does anyone lead captive women out of a house and drive them onward single-file, one by one...

In other words, Amos had in mind very real images of the lives of extremely obese women—women like those later described in various Arab medieval texts—and he threatens them with everything being the exact opposite of the care they currently receive.

So ... what was the point of this?

I mean I'm all for SSBBW admiration but I don't know how a bible is depicting what they witness as being obese women back then. OP, what are your thoughts and why bring this over from chan?

I mean, this isn't even admiration. The Bible depicts these women as a sign of corruption, which makes sense in context. These women grew fat at the expense of others. But that has nothing to do with the context of this kink.

As a whole, no one here is getting fat at someone else's expense. Most of us are working-class. Sure, you had to really work to become morbidly obese back in the day, but in modern times, even the poor are fat.

And I could pontificate. I know quite a bit about the Bible, having read it numerous times. But I'd rather not make assumptions and put words in OP's mouth.

That’s exactly why I am not religious! These quotes cited by the OP depict extremely fat women in a very negative light and seemingly enjoy their cruel treatment. Mysoginistic bs as far as I am concerned. Goes right along with declaring gluttony a deadly sin. As a fat man and husband of a fat woman I find that very offensive!

For me its just interisting info about fat admiration and ultra ssbbws in ancient times.
We often can get such info only through speeches of haters who speak about this with indignation.

Yes, but for me it's interesting not the fact that Amos hates these women, but the fact that they existed and that Northern Israel people loved them and pampered them. We have info about this fact only through Amos with his hatred.

That's not why he was mad. He was mad that they were taking food from the mouths of those without. This is a class and corruption issue.