First published February 4, 2004, in the Chicago Free Press.
One of the biblical trump cards for fundamentalist Christians and Jews in their opposition to homosexuality and gay equality is the passage in the Old Testament book of Leviticus 20:13 which reads:
"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." (Revised Standard Version)
But there are problems here. First, notice that this passage says absolutely nothing about a woman lying with a woman. In fact, nowhere in the Hebrew Bible is there any injunction against women engaging in lesbian sex. Ruth and Naomi may not have had a lesbian relationship, but they could have had they wanted to. So fundamentalists cannot cite this passage as a prohibition against anything regarding lesbian equality.
Second, although the passage clearly calls for (non-celibate) gay men to be executed, few fundamentalists except "Reconstructionist" Christian followers of the late theologian R.J. Rushdoony advocate execution for homosexual acts. But if most fundamentalists do not accept the Bible teaching about execution why do they accept the biblical condemnation itself? Both are in their Bible.
Third, as with other topics, the Old Testament is not without contradiction on the issue of homosexuality. Leviticus itself just two chapters earlier provides an alternative view, seldom cited by fundamentalists. Leviticus 18:22 and 29 reads:
"You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination. ... For whoever shall do any of these abominations, the persons that do them shall be cut off from among their people."
The point to notice here is that while gay male sex is again described as an "abomination" - that is, a violation of cultic purity - this passage mandates no punishment. It is simply an injunction to Hebrew men on how to please Yahweh and achieve prosperity. Men who engage in gay sex are only to be ejected from the religious community. This plainly contradicts Lev. 20:13, yet fundamentalists explain neither the contradiction nor why they generally cite the later passage.
That said, it is worth pulling back from fundamentalist literalism and looking at these passages in their historical context. Both passages are part of a larger unit including Leviticus chs. 17-26 that Bible scholars call the Holiness Code.
The Holiness Code in the form it comes down to us consists of a repetitious and disorderly collection of several smaller law codes containing overlapping regulations written at different times and under different circumstances. Biblical scholar Otto Eissfeldt in his The Old Testament: An Introduction, puts it this way: "Whoever united them wished to alter their content as little as possible and had to let the duplicates stand."
Thus, for instance, Lev. 20:10-26 is more or less a parallel to 18:6-30, except that the second version has penalties attached where the first version does not. The likeliest explanation is that, as the New English Bible observes, "The two chapters were once independent, self-contained units."
It is not definitely known when the Holiness Code was patched together, but it was well after the Hebrews became numerous in Israel because Lev. 25-29 refers to the Canaanites having already been expelled. Clearly the compiler forgot that he was supposed to be impersonating a scribe at the time of Moses. According to Eissfeldt, the Code probably dates from sometime after the Hebrews returned from exile but in any case no earlier than 550 B.C., although it contains some older material.
It is tempting to imagine that the prohibition of male homosexuality without penalties was written when the Hebrews lacked political power to mandate penalties and the prohibition with penalties was written when they did have that power.
However that may be, nowadays we might wonder why the Hebrews condemned homosexuality. The Old Testament explanation is that Yahweh condemned the male prostitution that was a religious practice of the rival Canaanites. But this answer has difficulties.
For one thing, it is hard to see why disapproval of sacred male prostitution by a rival religious cult should lead to disapproval of non-religious, non-prostitutional sex between males. For another, the Levitical language actually seems to come into the Hebrew codes as a late borrowing from the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism which the Hebrews came into contact with during the exile and which condemned "the man who lies with mankind as man lies with womankind."
Third, despite the Old Testament claim, there is little evidence that Canaanite religious practice actually included sacred male prostitution. The accusation seems merely to have been part of the backdated fifth-century polemic against the Canaanites.
After a comprehensive examination of the available historical evidence for sacred prostitution, Kenyon College religion professor Robert Oden wrote in his book The Bible without Theology, the accusation of sacred prostitution "played an important role in defining Israel and Israelite religion as something distinctive. ... However, that it existed in ancient Syria-Palestine or Mesopotamia is not demonstrated in any of the evidence to which appeal is so frequently made."
{Author's note: Since the first publication of this piece, my attention has been drawn to sociologist Stephen O. Murray's recent comprehensive study Homosexualities (University of Chicago Press, 2000) in which, drawing on different sources and different evidence, he also concludes that Canaanite sacred prostitution did not exist. Referring to the supposed cult prostitutes or "qdeshim" mentioned in the Old Testament, Murray says, "There is no evidence that their sexual services were sold to men or that having sex with them had any religious significance" (p. 295).}