Leviticus 18:22 means what?

A Bible verse supposedly about gay sex isn’t so clear

Homosexuality isn’t Christian. What could be clearer? Just check Leviticus 18:22. It doesn’t matter which translation. God hates gays in all of them.

They’re words that Christians are taught since childhood, that are lodged at the deepest levels of the religiopn As the ESV goes:

“You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.”

The translation seems so clear.

But peek under the hood of the Hebrew original, and the verse gets messy. The original Hebrew text is “so arcane that the entire verse becomes almost untranslatable,” notes the scholar Renato Lings.

Christian translators, it turns out, worked extra hard to make it even readable. The words “as with” aren’t present in the original. Lings offers this direct translation:

“And with a male you shall not lie down the lyings of a woman.”

The Hebrew scholar Jan Joosten has an even more literal translation:

“And-with a male not you-will-lie ‘lyings-of’ a woman.”

This means…what exactly?

There’s problems with Leviticus 18:22.

A 2022 paper by Mark Preston Stone assesses the research on Leviticus 18:22. As he notes, there are twenty-one major theories about what it says.

I keep wondering why the “you” in the verse is assumed to be male. Where does one learn the Bible is written for male readers?

There’s the problem of punishments. The companion verse, Leviticus 20:13, calls this a capital crime. Offenders are supposed to be executed.

“They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.”

Christians lately seem shy of killing people. Instead, they shift the punishment over into…psychological warfare and exclusion? But that isn’t what Leviticus 18:22 & 20:13 call for.

Is Old Testament law to be followed by Christians?

That might seem problematic. The New Testament seems to have repeated urges that Christians not follow ‘the law’. The old covenant is “obsolete” (Heb 8:13; cf. Luke 16:16; Rom 10:4, etc.).

Rape victims are not excluded from punishments. In a 1994 paper on the verse, Saul M. Olyan notes that the ban includes sex acts “coerced and those voluntary…”

If male-male sex is banned, why isn’t woman-woman sex? There are no possible Old Testament references to women having sex with women.

If the verse is banning male-male sex and this is a capital crime, then rape victims have to be executed. This would include children.

The religion doesn’t care. They fight the “gay wars” however they please, throwing their Leviticus 18:22 translation like a bomb.

Scholars were left to the lonely work of examining the verse.

The problems just go on, and on, and on.

Take the different wording in Leviticus 20:13: “If a man lies with a male as with a woman…”

Studying that verse, June Kozak Kane writes:

“Looking at the precise Hebrew words in Leviticus 20:13, it is fascinating to note what we actually see and what is not there. What the text prohibits is a sexual relationship between a ‘man’ (ish in Hebrew) and a male (zachar in Hebrew), not between an ‘ish’ and another ‘ish.’”

Complex maps of scriptures are generated to try and read the verse with reference to other verses and translations. The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, seemed to help a bit. It translated the phrase “lyings-of” as ‘bed’.

That brings a new problem. In the Hebrew version, “lyings” is plural, but in the Greek, “bed” is singular.

Judaism doesn’t use the Greek text.

The rabbis read in Hebrew, so they’re stuck having to deal with that. David Brodsky writes about that process in a 2009 paper, “Sex in the Talmud: How to Understand Leviticus 18 and 20.”

As he explains, the rabbis asked: if the verse is about sex between men, why doesn’t the text just forbid a man “lying with a man”? And what are these “lyings”? Does this mean there are one way of being sexual?

Since women, unlike men, have two possible sexual orifices, the suspicion moved to Leviticus 18:22 concerning anal sex with women. As Brodsky explains:

“The rabbis interpreted the plural ‘lyings of women’ to mean that when a man has sexual intercourse with a woman who is Biblically prohibited to him, both vaginal intercourse and anal intercourse are prohibited, and each carries the same penalty…”

But few Christians seem interested in reading Leviticus 18:22 as prohibiting anal adultery.

Old Testament law has no blanket prohibition on anal sex with women.

That was a big problem in understanding Leviticus 18:22. If anal sex with women isn’t prohibited, then the prohibition of Leviticus 18:22 doesn’t seem to be a ban on non-procreative sex.

It also means the problem isn’t semen and shit mixing. (Old Testament law can get specific about similar concerns.)

Could the verse be speaking of the problem of incest? Jan Joosten thinks the verse is “a prohibition of sexual intercourse between Israelite males when either or both of them are married.”

That view hasn’t really caught on.

Is the point that men aren’t to assume feminine roles?

That might seem to lend some coherence to Leviticus 18:22, if one imaged that God wanted men to be acting like men, etc. As much as such talk can dominate Christian circles, however, it’s not so biblical.

But, in the Bible, many heroes have distinct feminine suggestion. The whole direction of Old Testament narrative can seem to point to feminine values. Jacob Neusner writes:

“Israel is to cultivate the virtues of submission, accommodation, reconciliation, and self-sacrifice — the virtues we have now seen are classified as feminine ones.”

Later in the New Testament, the apostle Paul regularly describes himself as a female (Gal 4:19; 1 Thess 2:7; 1 Cor 3:2). And all Christians seem to be called the ‘Bride of Christ’—as Jews were the bride of Yahweh.

So placing men in feminine situations wouldn’t seem to be a problem.

What about Leviticus 18:14?

The scholar Idan Dershowitz points to a possible problem earlier in Leviticus 18. The verses seem to offer a ban, then an explanatory phrase. For example, Leviticus 18:12 reads:

“Do not have sexual relations with your father’s sister; she is your father’s close relative.

The ban, and then the explanation. That’s the pattern. But in v.14, there’s a hiccup. The explanatory phrase re-locates the context.

“Do not uncover the nakedness of your father’s brother: do not approach his wife; she is your aunt.”

You’re not supposed to have sex with your dad’s brother — or aunt? Had the explanatory phrase not diverted focus away from the brother, as Dershowitz notes, the verse would’ve banned male-male sex with one’s uncle.

The suggestion might then be: other male-male acts are fine?

Dershowitz wonders if the text was edited somewhere along the way.

The debates go on…and on.

To ponder Leviticus 18:22. Susan Pigott, a Christian professor of Hebrew at Hardin-Simmons, suggests this translation:

“And with a male you will not lay (on) the couches/beds of a woman.”

She studies Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, and writes:

“Neither verse actually says ‘Do not lie with a male as with a woman. Instead, both say you should not lay with a male on the couches or beds of a woman.”

She thinks the context suggests some kind of cult religious practice. As she notes, “the law forbidding sacrificing children to Molech appears immediately prior…”

Is it really cause for Christians to go to war against anyone? She writes:

“Isn’t it interesting, that when Jesus quoted Leviticus, he quoted a verse about love (Lev. 19:18)? Maybe, if we’re going to pick one verse out of Leviticus to plaster on signs, that’s the one we should choose.” 🔶