The general consensus amongst Christians and most likely Israelites (I haven't really asked around about it) is if a man has hair below his ears his hair is too long. As a man with hair down to about four inches above the bottom of his rib cage, you could say I disagree. All the hubbub surrounding the length of a man's hair comes from 1st Corinthians 11:14. In the King James it says, "Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him?". The next verse, and I paraphrase, tells us that women having long hair is glorious. When viewed in a vacuum, that verse seems pretty clear cut. If A) men have long hair, then B) they should be ashamed. However, like all things, the Word does not exist in a vacuum. To understand what he means specifically by "long hair", we need to look at the context of when, where, and why Paul is writing.
To begin establishing context, let's look at what this particular book of the Bible actually is. Corinthians, like other books in the Bible, is a letter from Paul to a group of believers in another city. He'd give advice, explain things, etc. etc. In this case, as the name would suggest, he's writing to the people of Corinth. Corinth was a city in more or less the center of Greece. For reference, here's where Corinth was located.
Now that we've established the when and where, let's talk about the why. Paul was writing to Corinth to address specific concerns of the congregation there. There were quite a few issues going on in the city, but one of the biggest, one talked about very often in these letters, was the problem of fornication. Now this wasn't some run of the mill fornication you see going down in clubs and bars in America. No, this was on a whole different scale. There was incest, prostitution (religious and otherwise), adultery, homosexuality, and most importantly for this article, homosexual prostitution.
In 1st Corinthians 6:9-10 we get a list of bad people who are getting the short end of the stick. "Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, Nor theives, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God." Safe to say Corinth wasn't doing so hot. The important word in that big long list is effeminate. You'll see that word translated different ways in different versions, but I like the way the KJV has done it. Paul was writing to the Greeks in Greek. In the words of my father-in-law, "I can't read Greek, but I can look it up". The word translated to 'effeminate' is from the Greek word "malakos". The word translates roughly to softness, or feminine, etc. In the context he's using it, it is referring to a homosexual male who is feminine. This means being the receiver of the homosexual relationship, but it goes further, the man is also demonstrating female attributes.
I said earlier that the people of Corinth acting Greek was important. It is important in that the Greek world didn't view homosexuality in a negative light. Specifically sexual relations with young boys or men dressed as women. In Corinth there was rampant prostitution. This extended to homosexual male prostitutes dressed as females. They'd wear the clothing of women, they'd wear makeup like a woman, and most importantly for this article, they'd grow their hair long and style it like a woman. This is what Paul is referring to when he says that even nature shows that long hair is shameful on a man.
Now I've said all of these things in order to say this; the long hair that is used to make you look feminine that Paul is talking about is not what modern religious people believe it is. I'll be approaching this from two angles. The first, that the definition of "long" is quite different from what many may think, and the second, that the length is less important than the style and intention of said long hair.
When figuring out what "long" hair is, you need to realize that it is a very relative term. The hair is long as compared to what? If the long hair is meant to be like a woman's, then the length must be compared to the average man's hair, no? Not only that, we must see what a woman's hair would look like in order to compare it to that as well. So I'll be showing you what various cultures around the world and throughout time have seen as long hair. Since we're talking about turn of the millennium Greece, we'll start there first.
Note the man on the left's hair. It was far from uncommon to have men with shoulder length hair. Now let's look at how the women held their hair.
Women in Greece wore their hair in extremely intricate braids and buns (said extravagant braids are addressed in 1 Timothy 2:9). They may look short, but it is from the style. Note the top left woman. Her hair extends significantly further than the shoulder length hair men often wore.
Now let's move on to some different cultures to illustrate that long hair is a completely subjective term. Let's visit Renaissance Italy next.
This length of hair was very fashionable at the time, and was not considered long by any means. Now let's look at what his contemporary females were sporting.
That's a pretty significant difference. To have long hair in the Renaissance, you'd need to grow it for quite some time.
So let's move to one of the more fun periods to look at for this, the time of the Vikings.
The man in this painting has very long hair by today's standards (I use this because his hair is about my length in the back) but the length of the woman's hair is longer by quite a significant amount (in this painting I'm pretty sure that's a valkyrie, but it's not particularly important).
In Victorian England, in order to be considered extremely feminine your hair had to be quite long, let's look at what length it was considered long.
Impressive, no? Makes that Viking or that Greek man look downright bald in comparison.
What skews the modern American's view on the relative length of hair is our own fashion sense. In the 1950's, it was common for women to have hair well past their shoulders. Now, one's hair is considered long if it barely reaches your collar bones. Just look at the prevailing 'in' hairstyle for women.
So, I now come to my second angle of approach. When Paul is talking about long hair, he's meaning more than the length. He is also making a comment on the styling of the hair in order to appear like a female. If he was simply referring to length, he'd be contradicting the Bible itself, which we all (hopefully) know, the Bible just doesn't do. For proof I'll demonstrate two points in the Bible where long hair is not shameful in the least.
First, we turn to 2 Samuel. In 2 Samuel 14 we learn about Absalom. In 2 Samuel 14:25-26 we read "But in all Israel there was none to be so much praised as Absalom for his beauty: from the sole of his foot even to the crown of his head there was no blemish in him. And when he polled his head, (for it was at every year's end that he polled it: because the hair was heavy on him, therefore he polled it) he weighed the hair of his head at two hundred shekels after the king's weight." Personally I prefer the translation to handsome than beauty, but it comes across mostly the same. So in there we learned three things. One, that he was praised above anyone else for being really really good looking. Two, he had not a blemish on him. Three, that man had a LOT of hair. At least according to the internet, 200 shekels converts to just under 73 Troy Ounces, or around 5 pounds in standard american weights. That is one hefty amount. Sure, his hair was obviously thick, but it must have also grown at a downright inhuman speed for it to get that heavy every single year. So, if it's quite long, but also very handsome and without blemish, that can only lead to the conclusion that having long hair must not be too bad.
As my other example, we'll look at probably the most famous person in Judges: Samson. The man who had not cut his hair from birth. By the time of his death, his hair was unto a Sikh's, at least down past his butt. Was Samson shameful for having very long hair? Absolutely not. He was under a Nazarite vow. It was a holy thing for his hair to be long. If it was within God's will to have extremely long hair, how can Paul say that having long hair is shameful? Because he's simply not talking about the length as much as he is the intent of said hair. Now some might argue that long hair does in fact make you look feminine by default, and as such is wrong, to them I show these photos.
So, to sum up, when Paul was writing to Corinth, he was addressing the issues of the city. The important one for us here, is that there were male prostitutes parading as women. To achieve this, they had long feminine hair. The cultural definition of long hair is significantly different than what many modern people believe. The length of the hair isn't even as important as the usage of it, as evidenced by Nazarites and Absalom.
Thus ends the first edition of Sven Speaks. I promise any future posts by me will be significantly shorter, or at least be in multiple parts if they are this long.
