A pile of penises

The photo above is of a relief (apparently from a Zondervan Illustrated Bible Commentary), used by Dan Kimball to illustrate a discussion of a curious (and seldom-cited) Bible verse - I Samuel 18:27.

"David took his men with him and went out and killed two hundred Philistines and brought back their foreskins. They counted out the full number to the king so that David might become the king’s son-in-law. Then Saul gave him his daughter Michal in marriage."

Commentary from the cited book includes the following:

Body parts (heads, hands, etc.) often served as trophies of war, and Saul’s unusual choice is designed to assure that David actually kills Philistines—other of Israel’s neighbors were likely circumcised... Merenptah’s Great Libyan War Inscription from Karnak repeatedly mentions that the “phalli with foreskins” were being collected from slain enemies. This shows that the request made of David is not that odd.

If all he needed to bring back were foreskins, one would think he could have just contacted a few dozen mohels to get a supply - but I suppose that would have been cheating.

Via a Mark Frauenfelder post at BoingBoing.

And since we don't cover this topic very often (only 5 penis mentions in almost 10,000 posts - use the search box in the right sidebar if you need to find the others), I'll offer this saved-up-for-two-years link from Got Medieval (which revels in the curiosities of marginalia) to offer a nun picking penises from a tree:

From BnF MS Fr. 25526, a 14th-century copy of the Romance of the Rose... it’s probably just your run-of-the-mill joke about how lusty women (or, in this case, nuns) are. [source]

And a "contemporaneous wooden altar [!!] carving":

More at the Got Medieval link.  And if that's not enough to sate your curiosity, there is an entire book on related subjects, described by Boydell and Brewer as follows:

The essays examine topics as diverse as Norse defecation taboos, the Anglo-Saxon sexual idiom, sheela-na-gigs, impotence in the church courts, bare ecclesiastical bottoms, rude sounds and dirty words, as well as the modern reception and representation of the medieval obscene. They demonstrate not only the vitality of medieval obscenity, but its centrality to our understanding of the Middle Ages and ourselves. 

The book is not available from our library, so I won't be reviewing it. And I'm not going to discuss sheela-na-Gigs (it's the female equivalent of a "goatse.")You can read about them at the Sheela na Gig Project.