Currents

Some years ago in a sermon, I remarked on seeing a TV clip featuring those cheerful folks from the Westboro Baptist Church. And, yes, they were proudly brandishing placards bearing delightful slogans like “GOD HATES FAGS” and “GOD SAYS KILL FAGS.” I told my congregation, “I hope that for a moment, some of these people might see themselves in this footage as others see them. Then maybe they might be moved to reflect, ‘How have I come to the point of howling for the blood of homosexuals — in the name of Jesus?!’”

How indeed?

But I already know the answer. First, of course, they have been led to this hideous irony by, as they see it, taking biblical teaching seriously. And, in a sense, they are. In another, they are not. The whole subject can get quite complex. Making sense of it requires us to first grasp the difference between “exegesis” on the one hand and “hermeneutics” on the other — a distinction that matters greatly to those who take Scripture as binding authority, as Baptists certainly do.

“Exegesis” attempts to explain biblical texts by clarifying the historical and cultural settings silently presupposed within them. We want to know what an ancient writer was trying to say to his original audience. Still, sometimes, the distance between the biblical world and our own is so great that the texts no longer seem directly applicable to modern readers who seek guidance.

“Hermeneutics” (from Hermes, messenger or interpreter for Zeus to mankind) refers to methods we may use to infer how the same basic principles may be applied to us today.

Extreme fundamentalists insist there is an exact fit between biblical injunctions and the moral choices facing people today. They see the issue as a simple, binary question of whether you will obey a commandment or disobey it. An extreme example would be the Dominionist or Christian Reconstructionist groups who want to replace the US Constitution with the laws of the Pentateuch (Genesis through Deuteronomy). You know, stoning adulterers as well as LGBT people to death.

What Did the Sodomites Want to “Know”, Anyway?

The story in Genesis, chapter 19 of the Cities of the Plain (Sodom and Gomorrah) and their catastrophic destruction is probably the cornerstone of the supposed biblical argument for condemning homosexuality. Two messengers (angels) from God have taken refuge in Sodom with Abraham’s nephew, Lot, an immigrant who has become one of the most prominent citizens in town because of his great wealth. That evening, the men of Sodom gather on Lot’s doorstep, pounding on his door and demanding he present his visitors to them for examination and interrogation.

“Bring them out, that we may know them!” they yell.

Lot panics, realizing the mob has hostile plans for the strangers, so he tries to bargain for their safety. “Look, ah, I have two virgin daughters inside here. Why don’t I just turn them over to you for an evening’s entertainment?”

The mob rejects this offer and demands to see the visitors.

Before we go further, we have to ask two obvious questions. First, what was Lot thinking? Why would he rather abandon his daughters to these hooligans than turn over his visitors?

What may look to us like the foulest cowardice and indifference to the fate of his own daughters would instead impress the ancient reader as a supreme, heroic sacrifice by Lot. He was willing to offer up his own children in order to avoid the most heinous of sins: failing to provide hospitality (protection) to traveling strangers. That’s the core issue of this story, as we can see by contrasting the mob’s behavior with Abraham’s warm and kind welcome of said strangers (together with Yahweh himself in human form) in the previous chapter.

Second, what does the crowd intend to do with the visitors? Many Christians have inferred that the men of Sodom were all homosexuals who were in a raping mood. Aha! They were Gay, and “God hates fags!” But these men don’t actually come out and say gay or mention sex, do they?

Well, they do say, “Bring them out, that we may know them.”

There are several occurrences of the original Hebrew word for “know” scattered throughout the Old Testament. In a few cases, it denotes carnal knowledge (as in Genesis 4:1). The rest of the time, it usually just means to know something cognitively. Other times it denotes “choose”, as in Genesis 18:19, where God muses to one of his angels, “Him alone have I known,” i.e., chosen.

Which usage is in view in Genesis 19:5? If they meant sexual knowledge, well, there’s the gang rape interpretation.

But this seems ridiculous to me. The text explicitly specifies that the entire population of the city was present — so are we supposed to imagine that every last one of them was gay? And if Lot was a community leader in Sodom, he must have been aware that the entire town was gay, so why the hell would he offer them his daughters?

Ezekiel 16:49 makes it very clear what was wrong with the men of Sodom. “Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, surfeit of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.” Sex, gay or otherwise, is conspicuously absent from this list of sins.

This becomes even more clear when we look at later Midrashic teachings. Rabbis told the story of Sodom as a parallel to the Greek myth of Theseus and the evil innkeeper Procrustes. In the original story, Procrustes would lure in weary travelers, offering them one of two bedrooms. To those who were tall, he offered a room with a bed sized for a dwarf. The guest would complain, of course, that it was too short. Procrustes would then draw the bedspread away from the footboard, revealing a pair of holes, and proclaim, “One size fits all! Just put your legs through these holes and you’ll sleep like a baby!” Tired from their long journey, the guest would shrug off the oddity of it all and get ready for bed. Procrustes would then go back to his office and wait there till he heard the sound of snoring. Then he’d get his hacksaw — and kill his guest by sawing off however much of their body was too long for the bed. To guests who were short, he offered a room with an extra-long bed. That night, he would kill them by brutally stretching them to fit.

Theseus, a hero praised as “the second Hercules”, heard rumors of Procrustes’ cruelty and decided to pay him a visit. Theseus faked snoring as he waited for his would-be murderer to arrive and turned the tables on Procrustes, killing him in the manner he’d inflicted upon so many others. The rabbis told essentially the same story, only in their version, the town was Sodom, and its citizens were the ones who waylaid strangers, killing and robbing them. This makes it quite clear that they understood the story of Sodom to be a parable about the sin of being cruel to guests.

We find a third version of this admonition in Judges chapter 19. This one begins with a spat between a man of the tribe of Levi and his concubine (sort of an unofficial second wife, but without inheritance rights). She goes home to her father’s house in the territory of the Benjamin tribe, and he follows, flowers and candy in hand. They reconcile, and the Levite spends several days gabbing and drinking with his father-in-law. Eventually, he and his concubine set off for home. Long story short, they wind up staying with an old man in the town of Gibeah. There, word gets out about the visitors, and a xenophobic mob shows up at the door, demanding, “Bring out the man who came into your house, that we may know him!”

Just as in the story of Sodom, the old man admonishes the crowd not to commit the wickedness of harming his guest and offers them women instead — his own virgin daughter and his guest’s concubine (women’s lives clearly didn’t count for much). And this time, the drooling mob accepts the deal. They grab the concubine and take turns raping her until they notice she isn’t breathing anymore! At dawn, her husband finds her dead in front of the house. So he takes her body home and summons a war council of the tribes. Filling them in on his misadventure, he says of the mob, “They tried to kill me.” Notably, he makes no mention of rape or sex at all. This makes it even more clear that the mobs in Gibeah and Sodom had the same evil intent: murder and violence. But, unlike the men of Sodom, the men of Gibeah did allow the offer of female flesh to distract them from their desire to harm the guest in their midst.

These examples make a strong case that the story of Sodom does not have anything to do with homosexuality. Instead, it is all about flagrant inhospitality, the gravest sin in the ancient Near East, where there were no hotels or motels for travelers.

Leave-it-alone-icus

Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 both prohibit male-male sexual congress. The second one even stipulates capital punishment for those caught doing it! This is, of course, the favorite verse of Westboro Baptists. But that's a rather selective interpretation. Reverend Troy Perry was quite right to point out how those who take these verses as binding seem to have no problem dining on lobster or Easter ham — both equally prohibited in Leviticus!

I think theologians are right to venture that Paul regarded only the ceremonial laws, not the moral laws, of the Old Testament as obsolete and non-binding for Christians, at least for non-Jews who converted to Christianity. He saw no point in requiring, in effect, Gentiles to become Jewish proselytes as well as Christian believers. Why burden these ex-pagans with a bunch of alien mores like circumcision and kosher laws? These laws were intended to prevent the easy assimilation of Jews to (sinful) Gentile customs and beliefs. Not only modern anthropologists, but even ancient Jews (in the Epistle of Aristeas) understood this. But, again, that was not a consideration for people jumping directly from worshiping Zeus and Apollo to worshiping the Christian God and Christ.

So, preventing Jewish assimilation was the purpose of the ceremonial laws; they were all ethnic markers of Jewish identity. But what was the inner rationale that distinguished permitted versus forbidden behaviors? As the anthropologist Mary Douglas has shown, these laws were based on taxonomy, the system by which they believed God had structured Creation. One had to color within the lines drawn by Him. Why was it ritually (not morally) “wrong” to eat shellfish? Because they were not considered true fish. Proper fish could be distinguished as creatures who lived in the water and swam with fins. Lobsters and shrimp did not meet the requirements because, though they inhabited the water, they moved on legs instead of swimming. Pigs were not true “cattle”, defined as those beasts who possessed cloven hooves and chewed the cud. Porky and Petunia had cloven hooves all right, but they digested food in a single stomach, making their meat unsuitable for Jewish consumption. And so on. If you ate these non-kosher animals, you were flouting the divine system of categories.

The question arises as to why God would have created such anomalous critters in the first place. My guess is that they thought he didn’t. What became rabbinic Judaism, originally Pharisaism, was essentially a Judaized version of Persian Zoroastrianism, imposed by Persian rulers following the Exile. Adherents were dubbed “Parsees”, which became “Pharisees.” And Zoroastrianism posited that it was not God (Ahura Mazda) who had created unpleasant species like snakes and vermin, but rather his rival Ahriman, whom Persianized Jews equated with the Hebrew Satan. You can still catch vestiges of this idea in Luke 10:19: “Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions and all the power of the Enemy; and nothing shall hurt you.” Get that? Snakes and scorpions are Satan’s pets.

But what does this have to do with sex? Simply (or maybe not so simply!) because of the taxonomy of permitted sexual partners. Sex required the crossing of boundaries, but such crossings needed to be sanctified by prescribed ceremonies. Adultery violated the marriage bond. Pederasty transgressed the child-adult boundary, and no ritual existed to legitimate it. Incest was committed within the category of the family and thus did not entail a ritually sanctified boundary passage. Bestiality transgressed the animal-human border and similarly had no ritual to legitimate it. And necrophilia — well, you know.

By now, we can see what was “unholy” about male homosexuality. Not exactly wrong morally, but an “abomination”, literally a “mixing” or “confusion.” None of this, I reiterate, was moral in character. It was all ceremonial and ritual, like eating beef but abstaining from pork. Conversely, eating a ham sandwich was ritually but not morally wrong.

I am suggesting that male homosexual behavior (the female version is never mentioned) is only a ceremonial infraction. How do we know that? Besides the fact that it is best explained in terms of the taxonomy issue, there is the placement of these two prohibitions amid other ritual sins in the midst of the section of Leviticus known as the Holiness Code, which appears to be an existing set of rules subsequently patched into the larger text.

It might be pointed out that, unlike male-male sexual congress, eating lobster does not carry the death penalty! True, but the severity with which homosexuality is dealt with reflects the pervasive agenda of safeguarding the Jewish people: as Monty Python put it so lyrically, “Every sperm is sacred… if a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate.”

Was Paul Appalled?

I am less sure than most that the so-called Pauline Epistles stem from a single writer; indeed, I am quite convinced that they don’t. This is worth mentioning because, while some Christians deem the biblical text infallible and obligatory because it’s divinely inspired, others regard the epistles in particular as authoritative. After all, they partake of the authority invested in Paul as an apostle of Jesus Christ. If some unnamed disciple or admirer of Paul took it upon himself to ghostwrite for Paul on some subject he never addressed, should such writing be regarded as sharing Paul’s own clout?

We begin with two passages. 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 (KJV) reads:

“Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind…”

This epistle is deemed by most as authentically Pauline. The second is more likely a second-century imitator of Paul: 1 Timothy 1:10 (KJV), which lists “whoremongers, them that defile themselves with mankind, menstealers, liars, perjured persons” as serious offenders.

I have quoted from the King James Version because, in spite of its Elizabethan language, it comes closer to a literal translation of the original texts than do most modern versions, which use the words “homosexuals” and “immoral persons.” The KJV’s “effeminate” translates the Greek malakoi, “soft ones”, which probably denotes “catamites” — effeminate, powdered, and perfumed call-boys.

On the other hand, both passages speak of “abusers of themselves with mankind,” translating the Greek “arsenokoitai”, which rarely occurs in our ancient Greek sources; thus we are not sure what it’s supposed to mean. It might refer to homosexual male prostitutes or to their “Johns.” Or, more simply, it might just be a very literal Greek translation of that phrase in Leviticus, “Men who lie with men.”

The problem here is obvious. We may just be talking about male homosexual prostitutes (catamites and arsenokoitai), in which case it is unfair to cite these verses in condemnation of homosexuality per se. We don’t know, and we have no right to pretend that we do. Can you imagine some preacher proclaiming, “Brothers and sisters, there’s a decent probability that God is condemning gays!” Sort of loses its punch, doesn’t it? Better maintain a modest silence — even if you are a biblical literalist!

The last passage we should discuss is Romans 1:26-27 (RSV):

“God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error.”

The subject in context is the standard ancient Jewish theme that the flagrant immorality of pagans is the inevitable outcome of worshiping gods who are a notorious bunch of adulterers and rapists. The pagans were living down to the example set by their corrupt deities. Sexual perversion was one of the results. What is the sexual sin of pagan women? Lesbianism? Possibly, but I rather think the reference is to Leviticus 20:16, which forbids bestiality as committed by women. That verse occurs cheek by jowl with the prohibition of male sexuality in the immediate context.

What does it mean by “men giving up natural relations with women” and being “consumed with passion for one another”? First, there was much discussion of pederasty in the Greco-Roman world, with many writers approving it, and just as many condemning it. The latter often based their argument on the “unnaturalness” of such liaisons between boys and adult men. The theologian Robin Scroggs infers that this may well be the understanding presupposed in Romans 1:26. But, once again, we can’t say for sure. Second, the passage obviously assumes that the natural sexual orientation of males is to be attracted to females. Anything else would be perversion and decadent sexual experimentation. It apparently did not occur to the writer that many males are naturally attracted to other males. Thus, the writer's perspective fails to account for or even acknowledge the existence of gay and bisexual people as understood in contemporary society.

And did the Apostle Paul even write this? I am convinced that he did not. The whole section Romans 1:18-2:15 makes better sense as the text of a Diaspora synagogue sermon. The theme is that while widespread Gentile sin stemming from idolatrous polytheism is serious, self-righteous Jews ought not to boast of their moral superiority simply because of their Jewish credentials. If they wind up committing the same sins as their pagan neighbors, they stand no higher in the sight of God, and on the Day of Judgment, smug believers may be in for some big surprises, just as in Luke 13:28-30:

“You will weep and gnash your teeth, when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God and you yourselves thrust out. And men will come from east and west, and from north and south, and sit at table in the kingdom of God. And behold, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.”

In short, none of the (possibly) relevant biblical verses is directly applicable to Christian ethics or any Christian view of homosexuality. Of course, unless one is committed to biblical authority, this is admittedly just a mind game. But if one does want to live according to biblical teaching, it is far from clear that homosexuality or bisexuality is an impediment to doing so. Any pretensions to the contrary are an exercise in the reader projecting their own biases onto an ancient text.

Published Mar 8, 2024