Leviticus-shmiticus

Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 (L18/20) prohibit sexual intercourse between men. Opponents of same sex relationships frequently produce this passage as evidence that God forbids male/male relationships. The language of L18/20 occurs inside of the broader context of laws describing sexual unions that are prohibited or that are deemed “unclean.” These include adultery, incest, and bestiality.

To begin, I want to acknowledge that two thousand years worth of commentators have tried to understand and interpret these laws. So I am not sure what I, an untrained novice with out any legal or linguistic background, am going to have to offer this conversation. As far as I am concerned these laws were written to help govern an ancient people, the people and the culture for which these laws were written have passed. We no longer routinely slaughter cows and sheep as sin sacrifices. Nor do we put people to death for adultery. So it is a curious thing that people would look at these passages and use them to condemn homosexuality. Still I am curious about these passages and the power that they seem to hold over others; particularly because they seem to evoke such powerful and passionate responses, and so I want to understand them better.

On first glance I think anyone reading the two passages from Leviticus will see that there is something strange about them. It doesn’t say: “homosexuality is a sin.” It also doesn’t say that “men who engage in sexual acts with other men are sinners.’ What it does say, quite literally is “that a male shall not lay down with a man, as he would with a woman.” Noted scholar Saul Olyan notes that the verb usage here specifically references penetration (as for example the verb “penetrate” evokes a specific image) and that the prohibition seems to say that a person should not penetrate another man like he would a woman.

The language is bizarre, almost comical. “Don’t lay with a man is if he were a woman” seems to beg the question, well then should I lay with him as a man? Also, it make no reference to woman/woman relationships, and it seems to suggest that even in the confines of the male/male relationship, it is the penetrator and not the penetratee that is at fault. We might turn to other Jewish sources on law to compare but, unlike adultery, for example, there is no other parallel to be found in Jewish law that includes a prohibition on male/male couplings.

Historically commentators have suggested that the L18/20 passages have been included here either as a response to Egyptian or Semitic sexual practices deemed as impure or unholy by the Israelites. Another interpretation observes that the variety of sexual proscriptions are all non-procreative, that is they do not yield offspring, essential to the livelihood of an agrarian people and are as such and anathema. Both of these interpretations look at the groupings of laws collectively.

Another way of reading these laws is to look at them individually. The passages could been seen as having arisen independently of one another and were grouped together in Leviticus only later by their similarities of thematic content, in which case the meanings of these passages may not conform to a literary interpretation of the reading and may instead draw from a wide variety of traditions from an earlier history.

Did Israelites abhor male couplings, as has been generally assumed up to the present? There is the prohibition, but beyond this there is nothing to suggest that other homosexual acts, or even homosexual acts between women were taboo. Thus the evidence of the Hebrew Bible is insufficient to support the view that the Israelites discriminated against homosexuality. Such a generalization is more easily defended for adultery, incest, and human-animal couplings, all of which are prohibited in legal materials outside of Leviticus. But intercourse between males is mentioned in no other Israelite legal setting.

In all likelihood, no one contributing factor may explain the presence and meaning of these prohibitions in Leviticus. The more we try to understand one reading or another, for example that it is reaction to the practices of other cultures or that it is tied to notions or reproduction, the more it seems that these explanations, by themselves are not enough. It is helpful for me to imagine all of these factors, namely that first they arose out of separate and distinct traditions, that then they were eventually tied together thematically, and that in the final version someone at some point, probably in reaction to some perceived social stigma, went in and modified the code of law to level the most extreme punishments for certain types of behavior.

So then why is homosexual intercourse mentioned at all? Well if we try to break these saying down and look at them one at a time, we can begin to enfold the plethora of influences that have shaped these sayings and help us to understand their presence and their power within the context of Leviticus. In the first place, Lev. 18, it seems to be connected to a larger picture of purity laws in which the intermingling of semen causes one to become unclean. Leviticus 15:16-18 even goes so far as to suggest that heterosexual intercourse would make a man and a woman unclean for a time. Thus homosexuality is included in a litany of prohibited acts. In the second place, Lev. 20, the extreme nature of the extent to which homosexual penetration is condemned, namely death, is perhaps derived from the social taboos arising out of views of role reproductive acts and their importance for producing progeny.

Instead of asking why this was important to the Israelites, a better question might be why is it important to us? The idea that these laws should somehow govern or be connected with our own contemporary code of ethics, in my mind, is a mistaken association with an idea that arose in the 1950’s that homosexuality was aberrant behavior that arose from some mental defect, a psychosis perhaps, and that this stigma was associated with the reproductive stigma that appears in Leviticus. While the two are not the same and do not come from the same ideology, the passages in Leviticus are continually drawn out to support a lingering social prejudice.

Mr. Insecure

I have terrible insecurity when I write, I am sure that most writers do. The problem is that I am not a writer, I am a painter. But because I am an artist, I can appreciate what a writer, what a true wordsmith, goes through every time they sit down to work. When I write I have a subject in my head I want to tell you about. I go about my business of trying to supply details and when I am done I simply publish my thoughts. As a painter I do much the same thing, I stretch canvas over frame, I gesso, I begin to layer pigment until I am finished. The difference being that somewhere along the process of painting I can look at what I have done, and I know that it is ether going well or not, and more I can see the little inconsistencies, the areas that I need to work on, that need to flesh out and give more attention. That is not something I can do in writing.

The other night I was lying in bed with my wife. We were having one of those wonderfully intimate nights sharing ideas, talking about the day, kissing, and staring at each other till eventually time and the pressure of having children and the necessity of having to get up in the morning wore on us and we turned out the light.

Laying there in the darkness feeling my eyes adjust to the dim I began to feel the presence of crazy mind creeping in and taking over. I could see the images of unresolved conflicts, the stresses of daily life, work or even events of the past creeping in and at once I knew that I was in danger of going insane. My friend calls it monkey mind. I sat up, and not wanting to wake my wife, almost tripped trying to get out of the room. Minutes later she found me sitting on the couch. “What are you doing?” she asked. “Come to bed.”

In a daze I dumbly followed her and lying down again beside her she asked, “why did you leave?”

“I could feel my mind going crazy,” I said.

“Oh that?” Was her reply, “It usually takes me an hour every night to get past my mind and finally be able to settle into sleep.” I was dumbfounded. I couldn’t imagine trying to fall to sleep like that every night. “My trick” she continued, “if you want to call it that, is to try and name the voices that are speaking to you.” Lowering her speech she continued “Oh there is Mrs. Grumpy.” Then, her voice rising, “and there is Mrs. Insecure.”

“Her comes Mr. Unappreciated,” I said with a light chuckle.

“Oh sure” she said, “I know HIM.”

I lay there for a minute trying to decide which was better, trying to name the plethora of voices that were keeping me awake at night, or pacing up and down my living room trying to match them for strength and endurance.

“Mr. Insecure, Mrs. Self-loathing, Mr. Anxious, Mrs. Confused…” I drifted,

In a painting I can look at the surface, the texture of the paint, the color, the forms and usually know in an instant where I have gone wrong. Everything is simple in a painting, at least simple from the perspective of knowing where the proper place of things ought to be. In writing I have no idea. I stare at the words on the page, and if they seem to flow from the words on the tip of my thoughts I am usually satisfied, I have no great patience for writing. Things are better, I tell myself, if I just let them lie.

Fortunes favors...

I haven’t been blogging much and my blogging content is way down. Not that it was ever way up but I find it harder and harder to put two coherent thoughts together these days or even to find the time to sit down and try. Worse, I feel this strange, even unsettling feeling that I am out of sync with the universe right now. I was thinking about this the other day while watching a show on Pompeii. One of the things the program talked about was the Roman ideal of virtue. Romans didn’t measure virtue in terms of how good or how bad a person was, that is, with notions of sin. Rather, Roman virtue was tied to success. The virtuous person was the most successful. As Cicero said "Jupiter is called the best (Optimus) not because he makes us just or sober or wise, but because he makes us healthy, rich, and prosperous." Lacking prosperity, people would beseech the favor of the Gods, in hopes of increasing their chances for prosperity. One of the most prominent of these was Fortuna, the goddess of luck. People would beseech the goddess to help them become more successful in business, in politics and in war. In this way, good fortune, or luck was tied to deeds, labor and creativity. Signs of luck went hand in hand with talent, ingenuity and, of course, success. The question of luck was not individual, or personal as in “do you feel lucky” but relied on the preparedness of a whole, as in “fortune favors the prepared” or perhaps even “the lord helps those who help themselves.” As the goddess of fate Fortuna also had the power to foretell the future. This means that she was worshiped as an oracle and someone who could tell you how to proceed. Romans would sacrifice to her at the start of the New Year in hope for a prosperous year. This means that her power extended over the cycle of time and the changing of seasons. Fortune foretold the coming of an early spring or a late harvest, and knew the destinies of newborn children and grown-ups alike. As a goddess of action and deeds fortune is not an ephemeral force beyond our control, one that that steers the course of events towards us. Rather, we looked to fortune for guidance even as we proceeded forward. We tend to think of fortune now-a-days as something that happens to us, something good or bad. The difference between these differing views on fortune is that in one we take action towards fortune, in the other fortune is something that happens to us, like winning the lottery or finding a four-leaf clover. I think that I believe in both types of fortune, in some cases I have no manner of luck at all, in others I feel that fortune has somehow abandon me, rendering all of my efforts useless and futile. I find myself waiting for Fortuna to relent, like Toole writes in the Confederacy of Dunces: “Fortuna had relented. She was not depraved enough to end this vicious cycle by throttling him in a straitjacket, by sealing him up in a cement block tomb lighted by florescent tubes. Fortuna wished to make amends. Somehow she had summoned and flushed Myrna minx from a subway tube, from some picket line, for the pungent bed of some Eurasian existentialist, from the hands of some epileptic Negro Buddhist, from the verbose midst of a group therapy session.” Anyways, I am not really sure what any of this has to do with anything. As I said, I feel out of sync with the universe, so here I am musing on fortune, biding my time trying to figure out what action Fortune wants.