‘Leviticus 18:22’ is a Christian hoax
The religion made up its favorite verse
For many Christians it’s the #1 Bible verse—the sacred words that center the religion. But Leviticus 18:22 has a problem you won’t hear about in church.
I’ve been going over a pile of papers by Bible scholars who say that the verse, in the Hebrew text, is very different from its English translations.
I don’t remember that Leviticus 18:22. I remember this one:
“You shall not lie with a male as with a woman”
I read it again and again.
“And with a male you shall not lie the beds of a woman.”
What does “the beds of a woman” mean? I thought I knew a bit about the Bible, but I’m at a loss. The beds of a woman.
Do gay guys get into that? I learn new things all the time.
Many scholars have written about the mysteries of Leviticus 18:22. Renato Lings notes the Hebrew text is “so arcane that the entire verse becomes almost untranslatable.”
For a literal translation, he tries this:
“With (a) male you shall not lie (the) lyings (of a) woman”
The Hebrew scholar Jan Joosten offers this very literal translation:
“And-with a male not you-will-lie ‘lyings-of’ a woman”
Tamar Kamionkowski has this literal translation:
“You shall not lie the lying downs of a woman with a man, it is an abomination.”
The “lyings-of” is often thought to mean “beds.” Accepting this, the scholar Bruce Wells gives his literal translation:
“And with a male you shall not lie on the beds of a woman”
He adds: “Scholars have generally avoided this interpretation without saying exactly why.”
‘Leviticus 18:22’ guides much of Christianity.
The familiar translation is the basis of endless arguments, splits, wars of every kind. What everyone knows about ‘Christians’, very often, is just the religion’s negative view of ‘homosexuality’.
They don’t even tell you that the Leviticus 18:22 as presented in translated Bibles is highly processed.
The “Christian” translation, indeed, is barely even connected to the Hebrew original. Two words were just made up and inserted into the sentence to create another sentence.
The Christian translation has “as with,” so the reader thinks two kinds of sex—a good kind and a bad kind—are being compared.
There is no “as with.” In the Hebrew text, as Joosten notes, “this particle is absent.”
Susan Pigott is an Evangelical professor of Hebrew at Logsdon Seminary. She translates Leviticus 18:22 this way:
“And with a male you will not lay (on) the couches/beds of a woman.”
Looking at that, and Leviticus 20:13, she 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.”
What does it mean?
Pigott answers: “Well, first it means that translators have taken great liberties in smoothing out these verses.”
She notes that the verse is layered in a context of idolatry, so she thinks maybe that was the subject. One thing Christians never understood about the Bible is that a temple is called a bed.
In Isaiah 57:7–9, we see a “bed” on a mountaintop. They’re not taking a nap. They’re performing sacrifices, etc.
Jews don’t tend to read Leviticus 18:22 as even concerning ‘homosexuality’.
I learn that surprising fact in David Brodsky’s 2009 paper, “Sex in the Talmud: How to Understand Leviticus 18 and 20.”
As he explains, the rabbis were puzzled by the verse, like this “lyings-of” being plural. To be plural means there’s at least two of something, but two of what? Bodily orifices in the area of the groin capable of having a penis inserted in them?
If that’s what God had in mind, then there’s a problem with the ‘anti-gay’ reading. Such a wealth of orifices is not found on men.
On women, it’s another story. 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…”
So for Jewish rabbis, Leviticus 18:22 ended up prohibiting anal adultery with women. You’d definitely avoid that.
Or maybe it means a lot of other things?
A paper in 2022 by Mark Preston Stone assesses the academic research on Leviticus 18:22. There are, he says, twenty-one major approaches to the verse, which include:
- Same-Sex Eroticism (‘homosexuality’)
- Gender Confusion (male acting as female)
- Improper Mixture of Defiling Substances (semen & excrement)
- Male Same-Sex Intercourse (both partners culpable)
- Social Humiliation (male treated as female)
- Failure to Ensure Procreation (waste of semen)
- Sexual Intercourse between Israelite Males in The Promised Land
- Pederasty
- Improper Placement of Semen (i.e., not wastage)
- Unrestrained Bisexuality
- Male-Male Rape
- Sexual Intercourse with Intersex Persons
- Idolatry
- Male Same-Sex Incest
- Fear of Demons
- Male Cult Prostitution
- Ambiguous Paternity from Male-Male-Female Threesome
How is Leviticus 18:22 to be punished?
Christians tend to do a rewrite on the fly, shifting the punishment into insults and exclusions. But the offense is a capital crime. God calls for violators to be executed.
What about rape victims? In a 1994 paper, Saul M. Olyan notes reads Leviticus 18:22 to ban sex acts “coerced and those voluntary…”
But the reality is that Christians have no answers. They didn’t know what Leviticus 18:22 meant. They mistranslated a very hazy verse in the Bible whose meaning isn’t known to this day.
With that mistranslation, Christians created a “religion” that required nothing of them. They didn’t have to be helpful, wise, or kind.
They only had to be straight.
The Bible’s God doesn’t sit around angry that some people like people of the same sex.
I read paper after paper. All the hoax readings that Christians do to conjure the “anti-gay” God just dissolve in a burning heap of crazy.
- Sodom and Gomorrah wasn’t about ‘gays’. The religion just invented a goofy story of a man putting his daughters out to be raped by a gang of rabid homosexuals. It is a hideous misreading of the text.
- The Bible has same-sex relationships, like the Centurion and his boy (cf. Luke 7:2, etc.), or the book of Philemon.
- Jesus was probably raped during the crucifixion ordeal. If Christians want to kill someone for ‘gay sex’, they can kill him?
- Romans 1 isn’t about gays either. The chapter is about some very bad but unnamed offenders. The Dead Sea Scrolls clarified the context. The offenders were “bad” angels.
- The word arsenokoita in 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10 is translated “homosexual,” even though there are no other period usages of the word and the concept of being ‘homosexual’ didn’t exist in the 1st century. The word’s etymology is “man” and “bed,” and Christianity made up the rest.
Christians made it all up. 🔶
