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.