Yada. Yada. Yada.

I’ve got a little sexy etymology for you.  Ready?

And Adam knew [yada] Eve, his wife; and she conceived.

Genesis 4:1

Yada is not just a fill-in word like blah-blah-blah. It’s the original nudge-nudge, wink-wink. I “know” him. 

Yada Yada Yada.

Ever see that Seinfeld episode where they start using “yada, yada, yada” to fill in the details in a story instead of saying what really happened? George asks if you can “yada, yada, yada” sex… OF COURSE you can “yada, yada, yada” sex.

“What’d you do last night?”  “Oh, you know, we had dinner and watched New Girl and yada, yada, yada.”

Actually, “yada, yada, yada” is not really an innuendo or replacement phrase at all. In the old days, this was no polite way to cover details.

This was the actual King James version of: Fornicate, Have Sex, Copulate, Do it, Business Time, Yada.

*****

Have you ever heard someone use the phrase “I know her in the Biblical sense”? 

Did you ever wonder where that came from?

I did. Today. Because I told people to think about sex and now I am thinking about sex and following rabbit trails so we can have good conversations that make all of our lives better… and I thought, “Where does that phrase about ‘knowing someone in the biblical sense’ come from?”

*****

To know someone “in the Biblical sense” is to have sex with them.

To have sex with someone in the biblical sense is to KNOW them… To YADA them.

Do you see how we have mixed this up a bit in our lives?  We’ve taken the “knowing” out of sex.  Some of the original language surrounding sex {Hebrew, specifically, here} involved not just bodies bouncing together, but actually knowing another human intimately.  Usually, knowing {yada} meant a deep connection tied to an agreement of faithfulness to a promise.

There’s two things I am taking away from this lesson today:

I make a promise every time I have sex. When you yada someone, you make a promise. It is an important statement of faith and love that I make with my whole self.

which brings me to the other takeaway…

Am I bringing my whole self to sex?  Is my whole self there to be known?  As we started mentioning yesterday, there are a lot of things that make it easy to have sex with just the surface of ourselves and not our deeper, whole selves.

Are you bringing as much attention and feeling and honesty to sex as you do to coffee with a friend or a yoga class or even drinks after work?  Sometimes, people have sex just to get it over with or do it out of obligation or because it’s an itch they want to scratch… instead of treating the time like the best possible way to get to know their spouse better. What other activity has space for your entire personality and body to participate?

I’m not saying it’s easy. Not many important things are easy.

I’m saying there’s an infinite space to play and know each other… really know each other.

Every physical activity, especially sex, has the ability to involve our soul or not. Sex is meant to involve your soul too. Maybe soul is too mystic a word.  When I say soul, I mean the things that matter to you… your hopes, fears, desire, longings, the things that make you laugh, the things that hurt… YOU. Involve YOU in sex so you can be known.

So, tonight, don’t just have sex with your spouse… really, yada them!

In the Biblical Sense