Thread by @JoelBaden

#Leviticus 18:22

Do not lie with a male as one lies with a woman. It is an abomination.

How should we understand this verse? What does it mean that the Bible seems to prohibit male homosexual intercourse?

Let me start simply: it says what it says. It does prohibit it.

Do I like it? Of course not. But I don’t like plenty of what’s in the Bible. And neither do you - I don’t care what religion or tradition you claim. So we can begin there. Everyone picks and chooses, and everyone has always picked and chosen. Even in the Bible itself.

So holding this verse up and saying homosexuality is wrong is silly, unless you’re also in favor of slavery, or stoning disobedient children, or, I don’t know, keeping kosher. Especially, obviously, if you declare all the laws to have been voided by the coming of Jesus.

BUT. You can’t go the opposite direction and say that this verse doesn’t mean what it seems to mean. Liberal scholars try this constantly, emending the text or trying other interpretive tricks. That’s what we call pink-washing, trying to make the Bible gay-friendly. It isn’t.

Now, it is decidedly the case that the Bible isn’t anti-homosexual, since, as is often pointed out, the ancient Israelites didn’t share our modern concept of sexuality as an identity marker, such that homosexual wasn’t even a real category back then. This is true.

But that’s something of a misleading argument, on its own grounds: if they didn’t think in categories of sexuality, but only in types of sexual behavior, then here they are dealing with behavior - that is, with the concepts that they were familiar with. This is how they say it.

The issue isn’t what the Bible says, but what we do with it. And one thing we might do is recognize that this is one single verse from one biblical author. Like everything else, one verse, one author, doesn’t speak for all of ancient Israel, or for the entire Bible.

We might also put this in the category of cultural views that are no longer in sync with our modern understandings of the world. Like slavery, or stoning disobedient children. There’s nothing wrong with that. *Everyone* does it.

The Bible verses we hold up as prooftexts for our own moral or religious positions don’t reveal anything except what our current positions are. Conservative or liberal, we all lift up those texts we already agree with. So lifting you this one just means you’re already anti-gay.

But we need to remember that it does go both ways. The same Bible that tells us to care for the stranger also says this. We can’t act one way because the Bible says so, and not act another way even though the Bible says so.

So I’m not here to tell you that the Bible is a great text for modern liberal values. It isn’t, and this verse especially isn’t. We shouldn’t try to interpret this verse away. We should be using its existence to think about how we use the Bible, and what it means for us.

We should be holding this text up to the light, and asking why it gets more attention than any other, especially those that have long since been abandoned by virtually all readers, sometimes going back to antiquity.

For every biblical text that enters the public domain as a proof of any modern position, we should ask: why this text? whom does it hurt? whom does it benefit? And then we judge the people who are using the text, before we judge the text itself.

If we don’t like this text, that’s totally normal. There are lots of biblical texts that people don’t like, and everyone has texts they disregard on moral/ethical (or other) grounds. The Bible isn’t moral or immoral; it’s a static, ancient, fossilized text.

It’s us, those who use the Bible (or not), who are moral or immoral. This verse, like the rest of the Bible, has only whatever power and authority we grant it. Who grants power and authority, and how, and why - that’s where the real issues lie.