The climate of Egypt forced people from prehistoric times to wear light, airy clothing. Linen, made from flax, was the most common material. In later periods, wool and cotton were used. On the earliest predynastic palettes, men are shown naked except for a belt around the waist with a cloth to cover their loins or a kilt with a thick fringe of plant material.
Common people wore simple garments, or in the case of boatmen, fishermen, and papyrus gatherers, no clothing at all. Servant girls wore only a skirt or apron. Farmers and other workers wore a simple apron. They wore a kilt when bringing produce to town or visiting relatives or temples. By the Middle Kingdom, the kilt became daily wear in the countryside, sometimes topped with a loose-fitting shirt or tunic.
An important point here is that being completely "naked" or being "naked" under a linen cloth was very common, especially for ordinary working men at the bottom strata of society. So while we would think it abnormal to see men who essentially just had a towel wrapped around them in public, outdoors, that would be pretty normal in antiquity. It had more to do with custom, with poverty, with status, and with utility than it had to do with sexual availability or activity. Ancient clothes that covered up a lot were both expensive and impractical when doing physical work. There's no sensible reason to take such clothes, even if you had them, out into the field or on to a fishing boat, since cleaning clothes wasn't a very easy or effective endeavor. Presumably they would try to dress up further for only a special occasion, if they could afford the clothes.
John 21:7 is an example of a "naked" man - Peter while fishing - where nobody tries to read sexuality into it.
We really should read things the other way -- if a fisherman was in robes, that is remarkable. A man with just a linen cloth isn't unusual, and referring to someone this way is to refer to the common dress/undress of lower class men in antiquity.
Here we see a bunch of men with only a linen cloth, along with women and higher status men with more.
Clothing and being sure to wear substantial clothing was a way of communicating status; not affording clothing or stripping someone of all clothing communicated lack of status.
https://sarahemilybond.com/2014/06/28/t ... l-display/
In Roman antiquity, slaves often had bare chests. For example, mill slaves likely only wore the subligaculum. The example I usually refer to when I speak about bakeries is from the relief of Eurysaces the baker outside the Porta Maggiore in Rome. We can often discern slaves in certain contexts based on their complete lack of clothing or their wearing of nothing more than a bit of a loincloth. Notably, slaves stood naked on the platform to be sold, and thus in this spatial context, nudity was tied directly to servility. Others that appear partially nude or in underclothes were similarly degraded: prostitutes, actors, and gladiators all appeared in public in various states of undress.
Clearly clothing could communicate status to others, but there was an added component found in beliefs surrounding the Roman gaze. For this we turn to the Theodosian Code (7.1.13), and a law of 391 addressed to Richomer, a Count and Master among both military branches. In it, soldiers that stopped along rivers were not allowed to defile the water with dirt and sweat from washing their horses, or allowed to defile the public gaze (‘deproperus publicos oculos nudatus incestet ‘) by washing said horses in the nude. At its heart, the passage is about pollution–both environmental and visual–and demonstrates the gravity with which emperors approached nudity at times. Soldiers were required to leave the public sight in order to wash their horses in the nude, and to do so downstream. It was not just that they were naked, but that they were Roman soldiers appearing in the public gaze!
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
