Beards and the Bible

Jeff Moss is a friend of mine who is currently in training to be a pastor. Part of his training is to write several papers on various topics. Most recently he wrote a paper on beards. Now I love beards, as you can tell, so I was thrilled to read his paper. He goes over the various biblical passages on beards, as well as the historical data. I will not recap the entire paper, but there is one quote from St. Clement that I thoroughly enjoyed and thought I would share.

“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.”