Pastoral Position Paper - Jeff Moss

“It is the business of these great masters to produce in every age a general misdirection of what may be called sexual ‘taste’. This they do by working through the small circle of popular artists, dressmakers, actresses and advertisers who determine the fashionable type. The aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the other with whom spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages are most likely. Thus we have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male (such as the beard) disagreeable to nearly all the females - and there is more in that than you might suppose….”

—C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

             What’s so important about beards?  Why do men grow them, why do some men shave them, and does it matter?  And why in the world would C. S. Lewis, in his fictional account of the secret life of demons, include some women’s dislike for beards as one of the demonic success stories?

            Let us begin at the very beginning. “God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them…. The LORD God formed man [Adam] of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being…. But for Adam there was not found a helper comparable to him.  And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place.  Then the rib which the LORD God had taken from man He made into a woman, and He brought her to the man.  And Adam said:

‘This is now bone of my bones

And flesh of my flesh;

She shall be called Woman,

Because she was taken out of Man. ’

Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” (Genesis 1:27; 2:7, 20b-24).

            So mankind—both male and female—is created in the image of God.  For this reason, men and women are equal in dignity and honor.  Yet there are differences also. Adam was created first, from the dust; Eve was formed later out of Adam’s side.  Adam was commissioned to work, and Eve to help him in his work.  While man and woman are equal before God, they are different in their roles toward each other.

            Because men and women were created to hold different positions in human society, God has ordained certain physical and societal differences between them.  Obviously, men are distinguished from women by their different body shape and reproductive function.  But in addition to this, God prohibited women from wearing what pertains to a man, and men from wearing women’s clothing (Deuteronomy 22:5).  He decreed that a man or a woman should not take the position of the other in sexual relations, under penalty of death (Leviticus 20:13; Romans 1:26-32).  And by specifying of bishops and elders that such a man should be “the husband of one wife” (1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:6), He restricted the leadership of the church to men, even while linking the salvation of women to childbearing (1 Timothy 2:15)—a role that a man cannot perform.

            And besides all these things, God gave to men (generally speaking) the ability to grow a beard.

            There is no Biblical requirement that men should be bearded, or that they must wear some kind of facial hair.  Yet a beard is one of the natural features that God has given men to distinguish themselves as men and not women.  In fact, while beards are mentioned infrequently in the Bible, this seems to be only because it was generally assumed that men would wear them.  We are told specifically that King David (1 Samuel 21:13), General Amasa (2 Samuel 20:9), Ezekiel the prophet (Ezekiel 5:1), and Ezra the priest (Ezra 9:3) were bearded men.  Psalm 133 compares unity among brothers to the precious anointing oil running down into the beard of the high priest Aaron, who is one of the most important Old Testament foreshadowings of Christ.  It is noteworthy that the Hebrew word for “beard” (zāqān) is closely related to the world for “elder” (zāqēn), which helps to illustrate the symbolic value of the beard as a mark of honor and wisdom. 

            On the other hand, there are only ten Biblical references to shaving the beard, and every one of them is related to either disease, idolatry, judgement for sin, or deep mourning.  Consider the list that follows:

            1. If a man has a skin disease, he is supposed to shave himself as part of the process of quarantining the potential leprosy (Leviticus 13:29-34).

            2. A leper who is healed is to shave his entire head as part of the cleansing ritual (Leviticus 14:9), since his hair and beard were associated with the leprosy that he had before.

            3. God prohibited cutting off the edges of the beard (Leviticus 19:27), a practice which was connected with idolatrous pagan worship, just like making cuts in the skin (1 Kings 18:28).

            4. Priests, because they were holy to the Lord, were especially forbidden to shave the edges of their beards (Leviticus 21:5).

            5. The Ammonite king Hanun seized David's messengers and shaved off half of their beards (along with cutting off half of their robes) as a way to especially humiliate them.  David graciously told them to stay in Jericho until their beards grew back, so that they would not be exposed to public shame (2 Samuel 10:4-5).  In the Greek translation of this passage, it says that the men were “dishonored” (the verb is atimazō), and the Apostle Paul uses the same root word to say in 1 Corinthians 11:14 that long hair is a “dishonor” (atimia, noun) to a man.  Comparing these two passages, both a shaven face and long hair are considered to be dishonorable for men, because they go against what is natural to them and obscure the distinction between men and women.

            6. Isaiah describes the coming judgment on Israel metaphorically by saying that the king of Assyria would cut off their beards and also shave their heads and their legs (Isaiah 7:20).

            7. Isaiah says that in the coming destruction of Moab, the Moabites would shave their heads and cut off their beards—as a sign of either judgment or deep mourning, or both (Isaiah 15:1-2).

            8. Eighty men came to Mizpah with their beards shaved off, their clothes torn, and their bodies cut, to show their profound grief over the ruin of Judah by the Babylonians (Jeremiah 41:5).

            9. Jeremiah also prophesies that the men of Moab would have bald heads, clipped beards, cuts on their hands, and sackcloth on their bodies, because of the coming judgement (Jeremiah 48:37).

            10. Ezekiel was to shave his head and beard as a sign of the destruction of the people of Jerusalem for their wickedness and rebellion (Ezekiel 5:1-5).  (Similarly, Ezra pulled out some of his beard and tore his clothes as a sign of deep mourning over apostasy among the Israelites, Ezra 9:3.)

Along with all of these references to beards, there is Isaiah’s prophecy of the sufferings of Jesus.  He speaks of three ways in which Christ’s enemies dishonored Him: they beat Him, they spit in His face, and they plucked out His beard (Isaiah 50:6).

             Thus a consistent pattern emerges in the Bible’s references to beards: For men, wearing a beard tends to be a mark of honor and even of wisdom.  On the other hand, shaving of the beard is mentioned only in connection with malignant diseases, idolatrous rituals that were banned in Israel , destructive judgements, great disgrace, or deep mourning.    Whatever we may think of it in our day, in the Bible it was normal for men to have hair on their faces—and whenever they deviated from this pattern, something was deeply wrong.

            Throughout the centuries, much Christian writing and tradition has preserved the same positive attitude about beards on men.  Only a few examples from the Church Fathers and the time of the Reformation will be given here.  St. Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-c. 215) wrote of beards as an important God-given distinction between men and women: “How womanly it is for one who is a man to comb himself and shave himself with a razor, for the sake of fine effect, and to arrange his hair at the mirror, shave his cheeks, pluck hairs out of them, and smooth them!…For God wished women to be smooth and to rejoice in their locks alone growing spontaneously, as a horse in his mane. But He adorned man like the lions, with a beard, and endowed him as an attribute of manhood, with a hairy chest—a sign of strength and rule.”  St. Cyprian of Carthage (d. 258) added, “The beard must not be plucked. ‘You shall not deface the figure of your beard,’” citing Leviticus 19:27 as his authority.  The fourth-century “Apostolic Constitutions,” which had great authority in the formation of church law, also quotes Leviticus when it urges, “Men may not destroy the hair of their beards and unnaturally change the form of a man. For the Law says, ‘You shall not deface your beards.’ For God the Creator has made this decent for women, but has determined that it is unsuitable for men.”

            When the Western or “Catholic” Church split from the Eastern Orthodox Church in 1054, they condemned the East for many things, including having non-celibate clergy who wore beards.  The two issues were apparently connected.  Roman Catholic clergy took vows of celibacy and also were clean-shaven, rejecting the beard because of its association with male sexuality.  On the other hand, many of the leading Protestant Reformers grew long beards at the same time that they rejected clerical celibacy and other church traditions that they viewed as unscriptural.  (And although William Shakespeare does not exactly speak for the whole of English Protestantism, he does have Beatrice say in Much Ado about Nothing, “He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man.”)

             It would be wrong to say that for men to be clean-shaven is sinful or wicked.  However, God has generally designed men’s faces to grow hair.  When a society like our own prefers to have men’s facial hair shaved off, it shows that it does not value masculine honor, since it removes one of the natural marks distinguishing men from women.  It is as if either idolatry, shame, illness, or judgment—the Biblical situations in which we see men being shaved—has become the norm for our culture.