Womb Worship

The Greek koilia can mean belly (Matthew 15:17) or womb (Mathew 19:12). What happens when we try out the second translation on passages that normally use the first?

John 7:38 now reads, “He that believes on me . . . out of his womb shall flow rivers of living water.” That is the only use of koilia in John other than 3:4, where Nicodemus wonders whether humanity ( anthropos , anarthrous) can repeat Adam’s birth by going back into mother earth to be born again. There, koilia clearly means womb, and it would make a neat literary-theological echo to translate 7:38 as “womb.” More, a womb flowing with rivers of living water makes sense in a way that a belly flowing with water does not.

At the end of Romans, Paul warns against those who cause divisions and offenses by teaching contrary to the received truth of the church (16:17), and adds the charge that these dividers serve their bellies rather than Jesus (v. 18). Gluttony would be an odd thing to introduce at this late stage in a letter that has given no hint that self-indulgence is a problem. Perhaps koilia here is a trope for something like “bodily desire,” but if so that would be unprecedented in the New Testament. What would it mean, on the other hand, to say that Paul’s opponents worship their own “womb”? Given Paul’s frequent charge that his enemies, particularly those who judaize, are infatuated with “flesh,” and specifically the flesh of bodily descent and the flesh of the circumcised foreskin, it seems natural for him to say that they are obsessed with the womb, with bodily descend and ancestry and genealogies. Do we have a hint of a matrilineal view of Jewish identity?

The same might well be the case in Philippians 3:19. Again Paul charges that his opponents worship their koilia in a context where gluttony and bodily indulgence has little purchase. The chapter (vv. 2-3) begins with Paul’s claim that Christians are the true circumcision ( peritome ) and his warning about the false circumcision, the castrati ( katatome ). Paul reviews his own fleshly standing only to declare that it is all nothing (vv. 4-11). The issue in the chapter is confidence in fleshly identity and fleshly descent and fleshly achievements. People who pursue flesh worship the “womb” when they find their standing and identity in the mother who birth them, the fleshly mother, the earthly Jerusalem.

The rest of Philippians 3:19 fits the translation of koilia as “womb.” They glory in their shame – that is, they seek glory in the shameful katatome , the fleshly mark in which the Judaizers glory. Their minds are on earthly things, the things of the old world rather than on the heavenly Christ.

In short, it seems plausible to think of belly-worshipers as womb-worshipers instead, and to identify the womb-worshipers with Paul’s Jewish opponents.