Bible on Homosexuality 2: Leviticus 18 & 20 - I

Leviticus 18:22
You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.

Leviticus 20:13
If a man lies with a male as with a woman both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them.

I continue with part two on a series on the Bible and homosexuality. The this and the next two posts will be dedicated to Leviticus. Seemingly the harshest texts in the Bible on Homosexuality, Leviticus 18 and 20 have regularly been used to argue against homosexuality today. Besides being the harshest texts, they might also be the hardest to interpret. Leviticus was written in the 6th century BCE. To fully appreciate and understand these ancient texts today, we would have to overcome the gap between our culture and norms and those of ancient Israel.
Clearly, ancient Jewish culture is very different from our Western culture. Leviticus in this respect is a case in point. Often cited as a book of law, in fact it is something quite different from our legal constitutions. Whereas Leviticus deals with issues of religion, morality and – more prominently – 'purity', our legal codes are relatively amoral, void of explicit references to a certain religion and is barely concerned with purity, let alone religious purity.

The texts on homosexuality in Leviticus written in the context of religious purification laws, nothing like what we – in the West – are familiar with. According to these text the sexual penetration between men is a religious taboo, and should even be sanctioned by death penalty. Other cases liable for penalty include the wearing of clothing woven with different materials, sex with a woman in her period, and the consumption of lobster or porc.

But what does purification or purity actually mean? The ancient Jews had a simple view of how the world should be. This is reflected in the Genesis creation account. Rather than a literal report about the foundations of the earth and life – as some fundamentalist Christians believe today – Genesis is an account of how things should be. Purity in Leviticus therefore relates to a notion of how the world should be. There seem to be two measures for purity. (1) pure is ‘original, and (2) pure is ‘undiluted’. Both of these purity notions are a reflection of the Jewish creator-god, itself the origin and undiluted.

Leviticus,Bible,homosexuality,gay,sex