The Bible and Sexuality by Mark Rich
Following is a snip from a recent NPR interview between Lulu Garcia-Navarro, the host of Weekend Edition Sunday, and Kathryn Ross, a Methodist churchgoer and mother to a son who is gay. The whole interview is well worth reading or listening to, but I want to begin this set of articles with just one portion of it. The title of the interview is silly – “Growing Closer after Changing Faiths” – because changing faith is exactly what this mother didn’t do. Rather, she kept faith while others are changing and/or abusing their faith and her church.
“GARCIA-NAVARRO: Why do you think it’s so hard for the United Methodist Church to come to a decision where it embraces members like your son?
“ROSS: Well, there’s no denying that the Bible says some pretty harsh things regarding homosexuality. There’s no turning away from that. And it’s – you know, it took me many nights on my knees, many nights of prayer and tears and heartache trying to process through myself what I thought that meant. So I don’t – you know, I don’t begrudge those who believe that it is sinful…”
It is still largely and wrongly assumed by most Christians such as this woman, and even by most Christian leaders, that “the Bible” forbids any and all homosexual expression and behavior, which just is not true. It is also also largely and wrongly assumed by just about everyone, it seems, that the point of being Christian is to obey the Bible. Again, not true.
When Cynthia asked me to write a week of essays on ecclesio about homosexuality and the Bible, I accepted with some sense of duty but little excitement. This field has already been much plowed, even though the lies continue to cover over the furrows and kill the new growth of knowledge. Then the unnecessary, politically-engineered and -motivated church fight over homosexuality erupted again within the United Methodist Church. So now this topic becomes relevant and necessary again.
In these essays I will dutifully go over the biblical evidence for those who haven’t been paying attention, or who have been suckered by the foolishness and lies. But the more important issues are at least three that go to the heart of the gospel of Jesus Christ – first, that we followers of Jesus are not allowed to make victims and scapegoats, ever; second, that sex or sexuality do not in any way constitute the church; and third, that Jesus calls us to follow him, not to obey the Bible. Jesus gives us no commandments of hate or exclusion, but only of love and inclusion. This, I think, is the faith that keeps so many people – straight, gay, and otherwise – in the faith and in the pews. This is the point we really have to get to – that we Christians are to follow Jesus in his mission of love, not to obey the Bible. But we begin with the Bible.
Leviticus 20:13
There is a very similar prohibition in Lev 18, so I will just discuss 20:13.
wə·’îš, ’ă·šer yiš·kaḇ ’eṯ- zā·ḵār miš·kə·ḇê ’iš·šāh, tō·w·‘ê·ḇāh etc.
And a man who lies with a male (in) beds of woman, abomination etc.
The translations that bother to translate mishkəbe usually say “as he lies with” or so, even though the Hebrew word is clearly a plural noun and not a verb. This is not the main point I want to get to in this essay, but it does raise the interesting possibility that what is being prohibited here in this verse is not simply the sex act between men, but doing it in a certain place. This would not be uncharacteristic of this part of Leviticus, what scholars call the Holiness Code, which is very touchy about what things can touch or not touch other things.
But the main thing to get from this verse is the pairing of man and male, ‘ish and zakar. The translations that render both these nouns as “man” are simply lying (yes, that’s you, NIV, NIRV, The Message, Good News, CEV, CEB, CJB, NLT!). ‘ish has much the same resonance as ‘man’ in English – a free adult male citizen, fully invested with the rights and powers of being a man in a patriarchal society. By contrast, zakar is male but not a man, not a citizen, a slave. The word ‘ish cannot be used of a slave; zakar must be so used and cannot be used of a man. Zakar is thus different from the English word ‘male’ in that it cannot be used of a man, while in English ‘male’ can be so used. So this combination of ‘ish and zakar indicates unmistakably that the situation being addressed in Leviticus, both in chapters 18 and 20, is about sexual relations between a free man and a male slave.
This verse DOES NOT address the situation of two free adult men. I repeat – it does not address that situation. Its concern is only for a free man and a male slave. Two quick points from this: 1) no similar protection is given to female slaves (sexual abuse of enslaved women was considered to be simply part of slavery); and 2) it is actually a limitation on a slavemaster’s sexual rights. Unlike Roman law, Israelite law did not allow an ‘ish unlimited rights over his own property. This even extends to prohibiting certain injuries to slaves (male and female – Ex 21:26f).
The Torah does not prohibit consenting sexual relations between two free men.
| The prohibition here in Leviticus may have a couple of motivations. One might be to prevent a slaveowner from taking sexual advantage of his male slave – who might one day become free and a citizen once again (according to Lev. 25 and Deut. 15). Or it might also be a prohibition on frequenting a male prostitute, whether cult-based or not. This latter prohibition is more explicitly laid out in Deut. 23:17, but it seems that this prohibition in Lev. 20 may also apply to that situation, although I doubt it does.
The Hebrew scriptures do, however, bear the case of David and Jonathan. “When David had finished speaking to Saul, the soul of Jonathan was bound to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. Saul took him that day and would not let him return to his father’s house. Then Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul. Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that he was wearing, and gave it to David, and his armor, and even his sword and his bow and his belt.” (1 Sam 18:1-4) Here’s a relationship between a very high-status man, the prince Jonathan, and another man, David, who is quickly becoming high-status, in part through the help of Jonathan. To make a long story short, the judgment of David about Jonathan at the latter’s death was “I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; greatly beloved were you to me; your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.” (2 Sam 1:26) It would be irresponsible to fail to hear the positive erotic tone of that last part of the verse. The unabashedly patriarchal culture of most of the Hebrew scriptures steer us toward reading “the love of women” as clearly sexual. There is no platonic conception of love available between men and women in these scriptures. So when David says that Jonathan’s love was “wonderful, passing the love of women,” we can easily see that their love was both homoerotic and praiseworthy in David’s eyes. To be clear, there is no story of David and Jonathan having sex. There isn’t even a story of them kissing. But the erotic cast of that verse is also unmistakable. We should also observe that the high status of the two men involved is not unimportant, as high-status people have always gotten preferential social, cultural, economic, and political treatment. But that also doesn’t allow us to dismiss the significance of the story. My point in bringing up this story is not to court salaciousness for its own sake. My point is that this story, like all the stories in the Bible, has the force of a moral and even legal precedent. The passage in Leviticus does NOT prohibit any and all varieties of homosexual expression, but only the cases of either a (male, obviously) slaveowner with his male slave or some free male with an enslaved male. Furthermore, there is no mention in all of Hebrew scriptures prohibiting female homoerotic relations. Finally, there is also one positive homoerotic story in 1 and 2 Samuel. The Septuagint |
The Jewish translation of this Leviticus verse into Greek must also be noted before we move on to the New Testament tomorrow. Here it is:
καὶ ὃς ἂν κοιμηθῇ μετὰ ἄρσενος κοίτην γυναικός βδέλυγμα …
And he who lies with a male in a bed for a woman, abomination…
As the Greek-speaking Jew Philo interpreted the Torah, the prohibitions in Leviticus link with the prohibition in Deuteronomy 23:17 against prostitution and temple-prostitution. So in Philo’s interpretation the prohibition against arsenos koitēn in Lev 20 became specifically a prohibition on temple prostitution. I think his likely reasoning would have been because of the prominence of temple prostitution in the majority-pagan culture of Alexandria. This is important for interpreting 1 Cor 6:9 and 1 Tim 1:10. Paul (in 1 Cor) and deutero-Paul (in 1 Tim) directly use these same words from the Septuagint for their discussions of this matter, and both of them were writing from similar cultural situations as Philo. It’s not necessary here to go into more about temple prostitution. As with the Hebrew version of Leviticus, it is clear that they do not refer to contemporary consensual adult homosexuality.
Tomorrow we will look at the biggest club used against LGBTQ people, Romans 1.
Mark Rich is a lecturer in theology and New Testament with ELCA Global Mission in East Africa.