Adam and Steve (what the Bible says about homosexuality)

In 1 Corinthians and in Thessalonians, we have this idea. It’s better to be celibate, but if you can’t hack celibacy, go ahead and get married. However, sex within marriage should be without passion, because that’s for the dirty, dirty Gentiles. And it should be basically prophylactic. You only have enough sex to keep a lid on sexual desire. Not to say you must keep it at a level zero at all times, but to say whenever it starts bubbling up, you don’t want it to boil over. And so sex is really prophylactic within Paul’s sexual ethic, but he would prefer people just didn’t have it.

Consider me Team Dirty, Dirty Gentile on that one.

But that’s…

That’s just me.

Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we try to increase public access to the scholarly study of the Bible and religion and combat misinformation about the Bible and religion. How are you today, Dan?

I’m doing great. I’m just… I’m just ready to… To combat some misinformation or, you know, expose people to scholarship. You never know. What… What’s going to happen here.

Little from column A, little from column B. We’re gonna…

Yeah, exactly. And this week we are… We’re having some fun. We’re… We’re only doing one segment because it’s an important issue.

It’s a complex issue.

It’s a difficult one. And… And we’re… We’re going to dive into it head first.

Are we not?

We are.

All right, so, Dan. Dan, what are we talking about?

I think today we’re going to be talking about homosexuality in the Bible.

Oh, yeah.

Something that comes…

Brace yourselves.

Comes up all the time. Yeah, my… My family and I watched Airplane last night. We… I was just stumbling around HBO Max, and they happen to have Airplane on there. And I was like, awesome. So I got to introduce my kids to a show that I grew up just loving. So I don’t know about you. You reminded me of that. The buckling up. Well, buckling up, but dun, dun, duns also.

Oh, yes, exactly. All the things.

Yeah, all the things.

And don’t call me Shirley.

Yeah, that’s the… My daughter loved that. All right, go ahead.

Good Lord. We are just on top of each other today.

Yeah, it is. It’s a mess.

So let’s… Let’s start with… I think we need to start with sort of a basis. Yeah. Ground us in what we’re talking about in terms of sexuality, in terms of, you know, biblical times. Help us out with that.

Well, I want to start with trying to explain that anciently they thought and talked about sexuality and organized their society around sexuality very, very differently from the way that we do today. And so when in our public discourse and discussions with other people, in the ways that we think about sexuality, science and our culture and media and a bunch of other things have kind of created the structures that we use to kind of give flesh to the skeleton of what sexuality is, what human sexuality is, including homosexuality. And anciently, they did it in a very different way.did it in a very different way. And when we look at the biblical text and we superimpose those frameworks, those interpretive lenses, if you will, that we use today, if we superimpose them on the biblical text, we are going to distort what those authors were trying to do with their text.

We are going to misunderstand how they thought and talked about sexuality. And so I want to provide a couple of insights from the broader study of sexuality in the ancient world to help us kind of reorient our thinking. And one of the main things that I think we need to understand is that we try to think of sexuality today, sexual relationships as reciprocal, as equal partnerships, as two people doing something together. And this is…

I mean, ideally, that’s…

Ideally, yes. Aspirationally, that’s what we would like everyone to… how we would like people to talk and think about sexuality. And it was much less so anciently. In the ancient world, there was a social hierarchy of domination. And one of… And I’m… I’m still trying to find the right terminology for this, but I refer to a social hierarchy of domination and penetration. Although I’m going to use, when I refer to this later on to be a little more… A little more discreet. I’m going to talk about active slash insertive roles versus passive slash receptive roles. But anyway, sexuality was not something that two people did together. It was something that one person did to another person, someone lower down on that social hierarchy of domination and penetration. On that social hierarchy of domination and penetration.

The roles, the social roles, sexual, sat a lot closer to the surface and were a lot more… Were a lot more normative. They were a lot more important to how people function socially. And so men, particularly freeborn citizen men in most societies in the first millennium BCE, were at the very top of this social hierarchy of domination and penetration. And there was… And then you had grades below that. You had men who may not be freeborn; slaves were below that. Women were below that. Children were below that. There were a lot of different ways this hierarchy could be structured. But across ancient Southwest Asia, the cultures that we are going to be talking about, freeborn citizen men were at the very top of that social hierarchy. And for a freeborn citizen man to take a… a role that might be considered submissive or subordinate within a sexual relationship was considered to violate that hierarchy, which was problematic.

And this is manifested in a lot of different ways. And I think one of the most interesting ways that is something… when we think about sexual propriety today, we don’t really get too upset about this. But anciently, if a man was on the bottom during intercourse with his wife, that was considered inappropriate. And we have ancient Mesopotamian texts that talk about how that renders a man ritually impure for a month. And we have a Talmudic text that actually says that that will give a man diarrhea. So…

And so that… This is how…

Didn’t see that coming, to be perfectly honest.

But there’s a… There’s a guy named David Hayward who does a… I think he calls himself… He does a cartoon. I think it’s a Nakedpastor cartoon. They’re pretty basic drawings, but he did… He did one where it was a woman was… Was on top of… They’re in bed. You know, they got the blankets covering them.54.790] Dan McClellan: But I think the man stops her and says, wait a minute. Is woman on top biblical? And it’s a. And it’s a joke. But I responded to. When he tweeted this out, I was like, probably not.

Because of this.

Disturbingly, no.

Yeah. This social hierarchy meant that for a man to take a submissive, even just sexual position in a. A socially acceptable act of sexual intercourse was considered problematic.

Well, it’s a darn good thing that many thousands of years later, we have evolved so that nobody has these kinds of thoughts. I can’t believe I. I honestly can’t believe how much I encounter this kind of thinking still today. Like, yeah, we still see it in a lot of, you know, this alpha male, you know, dominating, blah, blah, blah. Hear it a lot, interestingly, from people calling themselves incels. So, like, you know, if. If. If you’re saying you’re involuntarily celibate and. And yet you have big feelings about who’s supposed to be on top and who’s supposed to be dominating and who’s supposed to be, you know, important, maybe you maybe find a link there.

Is all I’m saying. Well, and. And I think it’s. It’s interesting. It. It’s because the people who are the most concerned about it are the people who are also most adamant that there is something essential about gender roles. Right. When it’s like you. All you ever talk about is the performativity of gender roles.

And so you are acknowledging that gender is something that you do, not something that you are. Right. Which, yeah, the. And, and just the obliviousness of folks who, who try to. Try to have their cake and eat it too, regarding that is just.

Yeah, just, just the concept of saying, oh, you guys are all beta males, I’m an alpha male, and all these other guys are beta male. Well, if there’s that many beta males, then that’s part of masculinity. That’s part of maleness, isn’t it? Question mark.

Yeah. Are you going to compartmentalize it up? Is there, are there grades of masculinity? If so, then it’s not that binary. Right, exactly.

But this idea that this, this notion of a social hierarchy of domination and of penetration, it is still active today, but we see it back in the end of the second millennium BCE, the beginning of the first millennium BCE, in Mesopotamia, we see it in Talmudic literature.

A thousand years later, we see it in the Alphabet of Ben Sira, which is a medieval text written somewhere between probably the year 700 and 1000. Excuse me, CE. And this text, this tells the story of where Lilith came from. And according to this text, Lilith was Adam’s first wife in the Garden of Eden. And she didn’t want to be on the bottom, she wanted to be on the top. This is all the text says. She refused to be on the bottom. She said, I wanted to be on top. And Adam said, it’s not in your nature to be on top. And she gets upset and storms out of the Garden of Eden.

And then she says, I’ll tell you what’s in my nature. Thank you very much.

Yeah. And. And she leaves. And then God sends these three angels after her to try to convince her to come back to the Garden of Eden.n McClellan: And she’s like, I’m not doing it. And I’m going to. I’m going to go be this succubus that’s going to. I’m going to afflict newborn babies and I’m going to give men wet dreams and things like this. And I’m gonna. The only way that babies will be protected from me is if they’re wearing an amulet with the names of these three angels on them. And this is. This is likely a very complex aetiology for why people were using amulets on their babies to try to protect them from evil spirits. Lilith, the first wife of Adam, is one of the main ones of these evil.

We may have to talk about Lilith at some point.

Oh yeah, we’ll definitely need to talk about Lilith. Lilith. Excuse me. But you can, you can see that this is socially salient. This is something that people are aware of and something that is important within literature, within society for thousands of years.

And so this is what’s governing what people think of as appropriate and inappropriate sexual acts is this hierarchy of domination and penetration. And there are a lot of other aspects of it. You know, when it comes to incest and other things like that, there are boundaries around that as well. But when it comes to why in the first millennium BCE they’re not happy about this idea of male same-sex intercourse, that’s the primary driver of rationalizing why it’s wrong. I want to take a step back for a second though and say that the primary driver is an intuitive one. It’s this just kind of subconscious intuitive aversion to the idea of male same-sex intercourse on the part of those who are not oriented in that direction. And so that’s going to bubble to the surface socially as that kind of ickiness.

This is weird. We don’t like this. And then you have to come up with a reason why. You have to explain why it’s wrong, it’s bad. And the explanation that is most central to most of the rationalizations is this idea of this hierarchy of domination and penetration.

Yeah. It does feel like there is a. I mean when that power differential is. Has any kind. When there’s anything that sort of causes someone to question it or causes someone to flip it on, you know, when it’s flipped on its head in any way, it seems like that’s when people start to really freak out.

And so when they, you know, when it makes sense to me that when somebody encountered an act that seemed to be non-normative in terms of the power differential, even if it’s just something as intimate as two people having sex in the way that they want to have sex, I can see how that would kind of upset some folks.

Yeah. And I want to add that I think I would say that the size of the society involved has something to do with how acceptable versus unacceptable these things are because a larger society is going to be stronger socially but you’re going to have a lot more interactions between people who live very, very different lives. The smaller the society, the more homogeneous things are. And so the more shocking something that is non-normative is going to be to that society. Whereas a larger society like the empires of Egypt and of Mesopotamia and places like that, you’re just exposed to a lot more difference and a lot more pluriformity, a lot more diversity. And so things that would shock small towns are not going to be as shocking. And so there tends to be more tolerance because people have more experiences with these things and they’re not new, they’re not different and they’re not as icky.

And. And so when we look in the legislation of the rest of ancient Southwest Asia, we really don’t see any concerns with.y don’t see any concerns with. There’s no legislation that is prohibiting same sex intercourse.

Interesting.

The closest you get is a Middle Assyrian law that it’s a little difficult to interpret. But what it seems to be saying is if a freeborn citizen man, and we’re not sure if this is coerced, if it’s forced or if it’s consensual, engages in an act of same sex intercourse with another freeborn citizen man, they have victimized the other freeborn citizen man. And when it talks about engaging in the act, what it means is that the original, the first freeborn citizen man taking the active insertive role and victimizing the man who was taking the receptive slash insertive or sorry, passive slash receptive role, it was understood as more natural for someone to seek out another body to penetrate.

It was considered more unnatural for someone to a man to seek out someone else to take the insertive role with them. And so there were, there were different values associated with each role. And I think that’s, that’s also important to keep in mind that these two different roles, the active slash insertive role and then the passive slash receptive role, they had different explanations for each of these and the two were kept very separate. They were compartmentalized. Okay, so it wasn’t, they didn’t have anything remotely like our modern concept of a homosexual orientation or sexual orientation in general. That’s something that we’ve developed, our understanding of it today, has developed since the 19th century. They absolutely had people we would describe today as having a homosexual orientation or a bisexual orientation or other kinds of orientations. But when they, when they thought and talked about those, those people, they described what they were doing in very different ways.

And they, they reasoned about their motivations in ways. And so the one who sought out other men to penetrate. That was considered a little more understandable and a little more normative. Whereas the one who sought out the receptive, passive role, that was considered an aberrancy. I don’t even know if that’s a word. Aberrant. That was considered more of a pathology. And so those people were considered to be victims and to be victimized. And it was. It was. They would never think of someone seeking that out. They would only think of somebody else victimizing them in that way.

It is interesting how a little imagination some people had about what people might want.

Yeah, yeah. Well, everybody bases their understanding of what everybody else wants on assumptions that everybody wants the same things right as them.

So they needed an Internet is what they needed. They’d learn real quick what people want.

Yeah. And I just want to point to a handful of books because that people can go look at if they want to research this more for themselves. Because I’m kind of distilling this down to my understanding of what is ultimately a complex field. And so some really good books. Ruby Blondell and Kirk Ormond edited a book called Ancient Sex: New Essays from 2015. That is. Is a good one. Bernadette Brooten’s 1996 book Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism is an excellent book. Lewis Crompton from 2003, Homosexuality and Civilization is a good book. A really good book is Benjamin Dunning’s book, The Oxford Handbook of New Testament, Gender, and Sexuality. That’s a really good one. Judith Hallett and Marilyn Skinner’s 1997 book Roman Sexualities for the.

The Roman World. And then Thomas Hubbard in 2014 published a book called A Companion to Greek and Roman Sexualities.ellan: That’s really good. So just for general kind of background about ancient sexuality, those are some, some good texts. Another one, wonderful. Mark Masterson from 2015, Sex in Antiquity: Exploring Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient World.

All right, so with.

So that’s a background, that’s a foundation. Let’s. Yeah, we can move on.

We’ve. We’ve got to dive into this, into the Bible here. We gotta. We gotta get biblical with this thing. So without. With all of that as the sort of the background of what’s going on, let’s get into what the. What people say about the Bible and what. What the Bible says itself. So, yeah, a lot of people, a matter of fact, it’s very interesting. Just this morning, a friend of mine posted a thing on Facebook where she was talking about how she reached out to her parents’ new church to ask about their views on the LGBTQ people in. In. Because, you know, she’s. She’s queer and wanted to know what her mom’s new church was going to say about people like her. And they wrote back and said we follow the Bible exactly and therefore we are against gay people.

That’s the thrust of it. So when they, when they talk about following the Bible exactly or whatever, you know, you and I have discussed plenty of times that there’s. The Bible doesn’t say one thing about almost anything.

Right. The.

But there are a lot. There are some very, very prominent verses that, that lots of Christians use to justify or, or to. The word justify isn’t what I want to say here that support their idea that it is not legitimate. Okay.

So, you know, we’ll. We can start with Genesis just in Genesis 2 at the very end of the chapter, this is, you know, the second account of the, of the creation. And you know, Adam has just. God has just created Eve for Adam. Adam has said she is flesh of my flesh. This is great. And it says in verse 24, therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife and they become. They become one flesh. Which seems to indicate that this is. Making. That it is. That’s. That’s what you’re supposed to do. Not that. Not that either Adam or Eve had a father and mother to leave. But. But it does seem to be a sort of prescription.

It’s. It’s used that way quite frequently. And. And I think that goes back to the early centuries after the New Testament, at least I don’t think we see this passage being used prescriptively regarding marriage during the New Testament. But today we see it used all the time as this prescribes what marriage is. It is between one man and one woman. And that’s how it’s used. However, there’s nothing prescriptive about the text. It is a thoroughly descriptive text and specifically one that’s functioning as an etiology. It’s not. And you can already tell that it’s looking backwards. It’s talking about a man who doesn’t have a father and a woman who doesn’t have a father or a mother. It’s talking about the two of them. And then it basically says and this is why we do this now.this is why we do this now.

Right.

And so it’s just describing the origins of that. It’s. In a sense, this is kind of an Aesop’s tale of why it is that a man will leave his parents’ household and a woman will leave her parents’ household and they will create their own household. And this is, this is an etiology for independent kinship units. Why a man will go off and start his own household. And the explanation is basically, since woman was taken out of man and they originate in a single body, then it’s natural for the two of them to come together and form a single body and independent kinship unit, an independent household. However, this text is also being written in a time period when polygamy was perfectly normative, where men who had the money, the resources, were not prohibited or frowned upon in any way, shape, or form whatsoever from taking additional wives.

I’m always baffled by people saying, you know, I believe in biblical marriage, one man, one woman.

It’s just like, have you read anything in the Bible? Because there’s, you remember Solomon? That’s, that’s not a one man, one woman situation.

Yeah. And so when you take this text prescriptively and say therefore it means one man, one woman, it’s like, well, this text was in circulation and was authoritative for several centuries while it was frequently one man and multiple women. And they had their independent relationships with the man and one of their given wives. But a man could be married to multiple different women. And in the Bible, the Bible even describes God as arranging some of these marriages. God tells David, I have given you your master’s wives, and this is a divine endorsement of polygamy. And so to read this prescriptively is a renegotiation of the text and one that is intended to rationalize, legitimize, authorize a post-biblical worldview, whatever that may be, whether that’s the early Christians trying to rationalize why they didn’t like polygamy anymore, or whether that’s someone today trying to explain why they don’t think that two men or two women ought to be able to marry each other.

Right.

So that’s.

Well, all right, so that’s not prescriptive. But then we get to Genesis 19 , which we’ve already talked about. This is Sodom and Gomorrah. They get destroyed. And the order of events could very easily lead one to believe that the reason that it is destroyed, that these cities are destroyed, is that everything was so debauched in these cities that men were like… The one thing we hear about in the story specifically is angels come into the city and a mob gathers to want to rape them.

Presumably men wanting to rape these men.

And so that seems pretty solid. Like it seems if you draw the lines, it feels like what that story is about is men wanting to rape other men and God destroys the city.

It’s the fact that the threatened sexual assault is between two agents of the same sex is kind of incidental. Well, it’s not totally incidental. If the main characters were women and they went into the city and all the men gathered around and said, bring out the two women because, you know, we want to know them, we’re going to sexually assault them, would you then say, well, turns out heterosexuality is obviously the problem in this story? No, you wouldn’t say that. So it doesn’t, it doesn’t make sense to say, well, because they’re men and they’re wanting to sexually assault other men, the problem is the fact that they’re both men. No, the problem is the threatened sexual assault. And the reason it is significant in the story is because in the Bible you wouldn’t really have a story where the angels are women or where women are the main character, because most of the time, there are some rare exceptions, but they don’t have to do with this kind of scenario.do with, with this kind of scenario.

Most of the time. Women are kind of NPCs in the Bible. They are not full autonomous persons. They are not fully autonomous agents unto themselves in the Bible, and certainly not in sexual situations either. They are the passive agent. They are the one who has acted upon in a sexual encounter. And so we’re very lucky to even

Get a name in the Bible.

Yeah, if they are named, they are. They’re certainly in the minority. And so one of the rhetorical points, one of the ways that they’re showing the depravity of Sodom is to show that the men of the city are going to forcefully overturn that social hierarchy of domination and penetration and basically force the male angels into a submission, submissive, subordinate sexual act. And basically that, that’s a way to shame, to dominate, and to disgrace these men who are, according to the narrative, who are angels. And so it’s not just a threat of sexual assault. It’s also a threat of violating their status, their station as men to say, we are going to, you know, overturn that, that hierarchy. And, and you see the same kind of threats today when, when men are emasculated or feminized in rhetoric today, it’s doing the same kind of thing if, and there are a bunch of different ways that, that men today try to feminize or emasculate other men to try to assert their dominance over them.

And so it’s, it’s the same kind of thing. And as we discussed in the previous, when we discussed this in a previous episode, we have a very similar story in Judges 19 where again, the, the problem there is not, oh, this is men wanting to have sex with men. The problem is this is men sexually assaulting and this is men using the threat of sexual assault as a means of shaming, of disgracing, of emasculating, of overturning that hierarchy of domination and penetration. So the problem here is not the fact that this is men who want to have sex with other men. In fact, in the Judges 19 story, they end up sexually assaulting the man’s concubine, the woman. And that’s still cause for concern for that man. He’s pretty callous and heartless in the morning, stepping over the, the dying concubine and telling her to get up because they’re in a hurry, before finally cutting her up into 12 pieces and sending these pieces to the 12 tribes of Israel.

Not to say, hey, these men tried to have sex with another man, but to say, look what they did to, to my concubine; they sexually assaulted ultimately what is my property. And so that’s still a very, very bad thing within that story. So when you try to reduce it to a threat of same-sex intercourse, you’re misreading the story, you’re misunderstanding it because it’s far more than that. It’s about social status, it’s about social position, it’s about the use of the threat of sexual assault.

All right, all right, that’s. I, I hear you on that point, but now it’s time to get into some laws. We’re going to Leviticus, we’re going to lay down some real laws here. And, and it feels pretty definitive. So I’m, I’m eager to hear what you have to say about it because Leviticus 18 , verse 22 says, you shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination.

And Leviticus 20:13 says something similar. It says, 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 guilt is upon them. Yeah, that’s pretty hardcore.

It’s, it’s pretty harsh. It is, it is a part of these, these two chapters that discuss basically laws regarding sexual relationships. And there’s a lot to the context that, that we need to talk about here. The first thing I want to say, however, is that there are some folks who make the argument that this is a reference to, that the word zachar at the beginning means that “with a male you shall not lie.”." There’s an argument that zakhar refers to young men, to boys, to youth. And there’s not really anything that supports this argument. I think that is a conclusion in search of an argument. Zakhar just means male generically. And unless it is qualified in some way, the most stereotypical male within this society and within the text that use this word is an adult citizen male.

So, man on man. So this is not a reference to pedophilia. This is a reference to male same-sex intercourse. Now there are other folks who want to draw from the context, which some of the context has to do with acts that can be argued to be cultic in their nature, in their context. And so some people want to try to take that reading and impose that context onto these passages and say, well, we need to understand this in the context of cultic acts. Therefore this is prohibiting cultic sex between two men. So maybe this is about cultic prostitution or something like that. That is also an argument that I don’t think has much support. I don’t think the scholarship is in support of that argument. So these two passages, Leviticus 18:22 and Leviticus 20:13 , I think are very clearly prohibiting male same-sex intercourse, just generic male same-sex intercourse.

Now they understood it much differently back then. As I stated, this is… Sex is something that one agent does to another. And so they probably didn’t think about this as something that was mutual, something that was consensual on the part of both parties. And so in Leviticus 18:22 , the prohibition is on the one who is taking the active slash insertive role. So what it is saying is, hey you, don’t you go and have sex with another man as if he were a woman. In other words, don’t take the active slash insertive role. So Leviticus 18:22 is, if we’re going to try to draw clear lines about what this is prohibiting. Precisely. Leviticus 18:22 seems to be prohibiting taking the active role, the insertive role in an act of male same-sex intercourse, which is pretty limited when we think about all potential kinds of same-sex intercourse; that is a pretty limited subsection of that.

Now Leviticus 20 , verse 13 expands it and seems to identify the passive slash receptive role as culpable as well. There’s an argument to make that Leviticus 20 is copying Leviticus 18 , but then adding condemnation of the other partner to this. Because there are a handful of passages in Leviticus 20 where it starts off in the singular and then you awkwardly have this pivot to the plural, and in Leviticus 20 , verse 13—or not chapter 13, excuse me. And verse 13 is one of these examples where it starts off in the singular and then the grammar suddenly is in the plural. And this is not standard in Hebrew. This is not how we usually do things. And so a lot of scholars think that Leviticus 18 is probably the original prohibition. And then somebody repeated these and said, no, we also need to impose the death penalty upon the other partner in this act.

So some of the women who are mentioned who are having, you know, the Leviticus 18 says, hey, men don’t sleep with a person who is a woman who is X, Y or Z. Leviticus 20 then says, hey, men don’t sleep with a woman who is X, Y or Z. And also the woman is killed as well. And so we seem to have a later alteration of the standard here.

Whoever wrote Leviticus 20 was a grump.

Well, what they seem to be doing is both of these chapters seem to be concerned with maintaining the purity of the land. Because these actions anciently were thought to have kind of created a metaphysical contamination that went on to the land and literally defiled, rendered impure, and contaminated the land.aminated the land. And the threat you see in Leviticus 18 and Leviticus 20 is that you’re going to defile the land and the land is going to kick you out, you’re going to be expelled from the land if you defile it too much. So when we go back to kind of intuitive concepts of morality and right and wrong, we all have kind of an inbuilt system of contamination, an understanding of what contaminates and what doesn’t. And we’re very sensitive to things that we intuitively feel like are contaminating. And this is one of the reasons most people don’t have a problem smelling their own gas.

But as soon as they smell somebody else’s, it’s because we have this intuitive sense that this is getting into my body and this is going to contaminate me in some way, shape, or form. We all have a sense of, “Oh no, contamination.” And so this is kind of rationalized. These moral-social indiscretions, the ways we’re violating these compartments that have been set up for our social existence, are being framed as something that creates a metaphysical contamination that’s going to spill onto the land and the land is going to kick us out. And so, like the idea of men not wearing women’s clothes, women not wearing men’s clothes, the idea of mixing fabrics—these are all violations of socially conventionalized compartments and boundaries, everything in its place. And if you spill over the boundary into the other compartment, oh no, that’s a problem that creates this kind of metaphysical concept of contamination.

And therefore that’s prohibited. So mixing fabrics: prohibited. Men wearing women’s clothes: prohibited. Eating the wrong kinds of food. They somehow came up with compartments for different types of foods. These were okay, these other ones were not. But it’s all based on this idea that if we’re violating boundaries, that produces this contamination. And so Leviticus 18 seems to be saying, “Hey man, don’t do that. That creates this contamination.” That creates this contamination. And then Leviticus 20 is saying the other person is also creating the contamination. And so they also need to go. And that is how we purge the land of that contamination. And so these two passages are condemning male same-sex intercourse. One specifically the active/insertive role. The other is saying, “Now we’re going to expand it to the other role as well.” But it’s still only male same-sex intercourse. And conspicuously, the Hebrew Bible nowhere says a single thing whatsoever about female same-sex intercourse.

And if they extended this idea to females, they would have said something because the very next verse in chapter 18 and chapter 20 talk about bestiality. And there it explicitly says, “Guys, don’t do this.” Oh yeah. Also, women are also prohibited from doing this.

And so two things I want to note there. If the problem were just same-sex intercourse across the board, “this is all wrong” and all for the same reason, women would have been included there. But they were not. Conspicuously, they would have been.

Yeah. If you’ve read Leviticus, you know it’s thorough. Yeah, they cover a lot of stuff. Stuff that you wouldn’t think you’d need laws for. Yeah, they cover a lot of stuff. So it would be weird for them to skip it.

Which means lesbians, you’re totally good.

And there is a stream of Jewish thought that has no issue with female same-sex intercourse.

Interesting. Dan Beecher: Yeah.

The other thing to note about the, the next passage that talks about bestiality is that the only passage in these two chapters that prohibits women, or that prohibits the sexual partner that a woman can have, is the only passage that refers to a sexual partner that could possibly be below her on that hierarchy of domination and penetration. And that’s because that sexual partner is an animal.

In other words, we can tell that we’re referring to people higher up on the, on the hierarchy. Don’t do this to someone else somewhere on that hierarchy, because that’s wrong. And the only time that the agency of a woman is even considered is when it’s about somebody lower on that, on that hierarchy. Because they are not the active agent in any other kind of sexual encounter. They are the passive. They are the one having it done to them, except when the other entity is an animal.

So clearly that hierarchy is in play here. Yes.

Oh, all right. You know what I think we should do is take a bit of a moment to cleanse our palates and then we’ll dive into the New Testament and see if we can make some sense out of that.

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Thank you.

All right, so we’ve covered the Old Testament, we’ve covered Levitical law, but let’s get into the New Testament. Let’s talk about what Jesus’s people had to say.

About all of this stuff.

I think to start, however, we need to talk about the, the sociocultural foundation of what’s going on in the New Testament. What are they building on? And I think the argument is strong that they’re building on a foundation of Greco-Roman period Jewish conventions, and particularly in Paul. Paul is really the only one who’s addressing same-sex intercourse in the New Testament. And then the, the person who is pretending to be Paul who wrote First Timothy. And, and that’s an issue.

We’ll have to get into that.

We’re going to have to do a whole… Yeah. …segment on, on that in and of itself. But Paul seems to be writing from a perspective that is informed not only by Greco-Roman period Judaism, but also by some of the philosophical traditions that were in circulation at the time. Now Paul is not a textbook Stoic or a textbook Platonist, but Paul is clearly influenced by some of the streams of Stoic, Platonist, and probably Pythagorean ideas that were in circulation. And so there were people who borrowed a little bit from here, a little bit from there and kind of created their own philosophical mashup. And, and I think Paul, there’s a good case to make that Paul is…

One of them. Interesting.

And when we look at Greco-Roman period Judaism, some of the most representative texts are, one, Philo of Alexandria, who talks a lot about philosophy and talks a lot about sexuality. Now in the, in the Hebrew Bible, we saw that there was a concern for male same-sex intercourse. Female same-sex intercourse was conspicuously absent in the Greco-Roman world.:28.840] Dan McClellan: there was a place for same-sex intercourse, but it was primarily for male same-sex intercourse. Female same-sex intercourse was something that didn’t really fit comfortably into their rationalization of male same-sex intercourse. I think the easiest way to understand what was going on was men who are at the top of this hierarchy of domination and penetration were basically walking around, they were walking, talking hammers, looking for nails. And those nails could take a lot of different forms. And so basically you had the ideal of a penetrable body and then you had other kinds of bodies that had different degrees of proximity to that ideal penetrable body.

And so young men, prepubescent, were considered to be kind of close to that ideal penetrable body. And so within the broader Greco-Roman world, it was considered perfectly understandable and perfectly acceptable for men to have young boys as lovers. Now frequently these would be, they were from lower social classes or they were slaves because it was considered inappropriate to engage in that kind of relationship with someone of equal social status. Again social hierarchy of domination and penetration. And so there was a carve-out for that. It was understandable that a man would want to penetrate a body that was close to that ideal. And there was, there were relationships that were considered inappropriate. Female same-sex intercourse didn’t really fit into that very well because nobody was really doing the penetrating there.

And so they didn’t know where it fell on that hierarchy. And so you had female same-sex intercourse was, there were aspects, parts of the society that considered it more acceptable, but for the most part it was considered more of a pathology, as would a man who sought out the passive-receptive role in an act of male same-sex intercourse. So again, we have compartmentalized roles that are understood in very different ways and that had different degrees of acceptability within society. Now, on the Jewish side of things, they were very conservative and so they didn’t like same-sex intercourse at all. And Philo rationalizes it as a problem because it interrupts, it obstructs procreation. And that’s the primary purpose of sex. And so if you’re not having procreative sex, it is inappropriate.

There’s some parity that is achieved between men and women in the sense that female same-sex intercourse is now condemned to the same degree that male same-sex intercourse is condemned. But the rationalizations are entirely different.

Sorry, help me out with. Who is this Philo of?

Oh, Philo of Alexandria is a Jewish philosopher who’s writing at the end of the first century BCE and at the beginning of the first century CE. Actually, I think probably mostly at the beginning of the first century CE. And I want to say he dies around the same time period as Paul. And he wrote tons and tons of texts, primarily commentaries on the scriptures from the Hebrew Bible. And so Philo is one of our most important kind of windows into Greco-Roman period Judaism because he’s doing a lot of commenting and he was also a diplomat. He was sent on missions to Rome to try to convince the emperor to lay off the people in Alexandria and Jerusalem and things like that. So, okay, there are tons and tons of works by Philo of Alexandria.

And if anybody is interested in looking this stuff up, there’s a scholar named William Loader who has published several texts on sexuality and Philo, Josephus and the Testaments, the New Testament, the Pseudepigrapha, done a lot of really, really good work on how all these writers in this period address sexuality. And so in the Greco-Roman period, Judaism was like, we don’t like anything except for sex that is being done for the purposes of procreation. And this is why they rationalize why sex during menstruation was considered inappropriate in the Hebrew Bible.. But they also extend it to sex during pregnancy and other kinds of sex that is done for any reason other than procreation. And you had different degrees of, of severity. Some people were like, absolutely no sex whatsoever unless the, the purpose is procreation.

And other people who are like, you know, sometimes it’s okay, but for the.

Most part, calm down, but for the.

Most part we want to keep it to sex for the purpose of procreation.

Man, they were killjoys back then.

And, and part of this was because of this idea that developed within some Greek philosophical thought that sexual desire was a problem. That sexual desire was one of the kind of baser passions that was symptomatic of our, you know, corrupt fleshly existence. And so particularly within Platonism, but also within Pythagoreanism and to some degree within Stoicism, you wanted to, you wanted to overcome the vicissitudes of the flesh and you wanted to have a more spiritual experience. And so there were schools of thought that liked the idea of celibacy because you were basically flatlining that sexual desire. You were not going to let that sexual desire bubble to the surface. You were going to keep it under wraps.

I feel like we’re transitioning to Paul.

We’re transitioning to the New Testament because we do have, in Matthew and in Luke we have this. I don’t know if you remember, but one of them asks about divorce. And Jesus, you know, basically gives this, this more strict rule. And, and they’re like, “Wow, it would be better not to get married.” And Jesus is like, “You know what?” And then says, “Funny you should say that.”

Says, “Not—” “This is a, this is a tough saying that not everyone can accept.” But then goes on to say there are men who are born eunuchs, there are men who are made eunuchs by others, and then there are men who make themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. So that’s Matthew 19 . And most scholars would say this probably isn’t talking about self-castration. It probably means there are men who are swearing off sex. They are adopting a life of celibacy for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. And Jesus is like, “I mean, you know, that’s hardcore.” Not everybody can accept that, but those who can, you know, gotta hand it to them. Basically saying celibacy is, is a higher ideal. And this is, and this is what Paul is saying as well. Paul was an unmarried man. And the majority of scholars would argue that Paul does not have a particularly high view of the value of sex.

Paul doesn’t have a high view of the value of sex. And he talks about sex as something that is problematic, that can get out of control, can be misdirected. Sexual desire can be misdirected very easily. And so in First Corinthians and in Thessalonians, we have this idea basically that it’s better to be celibate. But if you can’t hack celibacy, go ahead and get married. However, sex within marriage should be without passion because that’s for the dirty, dirty Gentiles. And it should be basically prophylactic. You only have enough sex to keep a lid on sexual desire. Not to say you must keep it at a level zero at all times, but to say whenever it starts bubbling up, you don’t want it to boil over. And so, you know, come over and do whatever you got to do to get the boil back down in the pot.

And, and so sex is really prophylactic within Paul’s sexual ethic, but he would prefer people just didn’t have it.

But, yeah, that’s, that’s just me.

Yeah. And a lot of translations will render this passage in First Thessalonians. I think it’s 4. 4, maybe verse 5 where it talks about how every man should possess his vessel in honor and holiness. And “not in” the Greek literally says “the passion of desire,” like the Gentiles who don’t know God. But a lot of translations will say “lustful desire” to make it sound like there’s desire that’s okay, and there’s desire that’s… …that’s lustful and inappropriate. But Paul is really saying no sexual desire. No, no “passion of desire.” So.

Well, let’s stick with Paul, but let’s get to Romans 1 , okay, where Paul in verses 26 and 27, Paul says this. For this reason God gave them over to dishonorable passions. Their females exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural. And in the same way also, the males giving up natural intercourse with females were consumed with their passionate desires for one another. Males committed shameless acts with males and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

What are we talking about?

Well, one note I want to make here is “natural intercourse” is an awful translation of the Greek because the Greek there refers to the utility, the usefulness of the women. So it says the men gave up the natural utility of their women and the women gave up their own natural utility. And what is the natural utility here? Well, Paul doesn’t really care about procreation because Paul thinks Jesus is coming back too soon for any of that to matter. And he commands all of his congregations: stay in the circumstances, the life circumstances you were in when God called you. In other words, if you don’t have kids, don’t get pregnant. So while Greco-Roman period Judaism was like, sex is only for procreation, Paul was like, not even for that. We don’t care about procreation. And so the natural usefulness of a woman is just as, basically, a sexual receptacle. And this is what “possess your vessel” means.

In Thessalonians, the vessel is the sexual receptacle, that is a man’s wife. And so the idea here is that men are giving up what a woman is good for in order to go engage in male same-sex intercourse. Women are giving up what they are themselves good for to go engage in same-sex intercourse. And Paul is basically adopting a pretty run-of-the-mill idea from Greco-Roman period Judaism that same-sex intercourse, whether it is male or female-female, is wrong because it is violating what the purpose of sex was, which was procreation. But Paul can’t really say that because Paul doesn’t care about procreation. So Paul is just saying this is nature. Nature says you’re not supposed to do this. And what that means is basically when you look at genitals, what does it seem like they’re there to do?

Therefore, that is natural. Therefore if you’re doing things unnatural, that is bad. Now another interesting thing to note about this is in Romans 1 , Paul is talking about how the Gentiles refuse to acknowledge God, who is manifest within creation. And so they have no excuse. God is testified to them by the natural world. And so they have refused to worship the Creator and instead are worshiping the created things. And it says that God gave them over to their passions. In other words, God puts a kind of a governor, a limit on these fleshly passions. And because they were not worshiping him, but were worshiping the created order, God said, all right, I’m taking the lids off and watch what happens. And so basically their sexual desire is boiling over, is being misdirected, everything’s going wrong to the degree that men are having sex with men, women are having sex with women.

It’s pandemonium everywhere you look. And so it’s interesting that Paul is not saying, hey, don’t do this. Paul is saying the Gentiles worship the wrong thing and look what happened to them. So it’s kind of using it as kind of an illustration rather than a direct condemnation.

Yeah, that feels a lot like a “please don’t throw me in the briar patch” moment to me.

But I think it’s interesting to note here that folks who try to transfer Paul’s sexual ethic from Romans 1 into today already are having to negotiate with Paul’s sexual ethic because Paul didn’t like sex at all. Paul was like, look, don’t do it. Only get married if you can’t hack celibacy and then just have enough sex to keep down the urges. And nobody today thinks about sex that way within Christianity, among those people who consider Paul’s writings authoritative. So they’ve already negotiated away the majority of Paul’s sexual ethic, but for some reason they take this as non-negotiable. Even though we can account for the conceptual, the philosophical origins of this concern. And it’s based on social hierarchies and conventions that simply don’t exist anymore.

All right, let’s look at some other scriptures here. 1 Corinthians 6 , verse 9. It says, do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. The sexually immoral, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, excuse me, men who engage in illicit sex. And then 10 goes on to say thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, swindlers, none of these will inherit the kingdom of God. So I mean we’ve got sexually immoral, which seems to be a catch-all phrase, and we’ve got male prostitutes and men who engage in illicit sex.

Yeah, so we’ve got two words here in Greek and they are… One of them is a little easier to understand than the other. One of them is malakoi or malakoi, according to the Erasmian pronunciation. And it basically, to be a little crude… This would be translated as “softies” and it’s a reference to somebody who is socially soft, which can refer to sexual kind of effeminate things. But here very certainly as a reference to men who take the passive or receptive role in an act of male same-sex intercourse. And then the next word is arsenokoitai or, according to the Erasmian pronunciation, arsenokoitai, which would be men-bedders. And this is a neologism. Paul invents this word and it seems to be taken from the Septuagint translation of Leviticus 18 and Leviticus 20 , where arsen is men and that arsenokoitai is basically men-bedders.

And this would refer to the one who takes the active or the insertive role in an act of male same-sex intercourse. So where Paul, as with Leviticus 20 , verse 13, is condemning both sides of this act of same-sex intercourse, he is still maintaining that compartmentalization that the malakoi are one group who are motivated by one thing, and then the arsenokoitai are an entirely separate group motivated by an entirely separate thing. And so these are… There is no versatile role in Paul’s conceptualization of human sexuality, which in my understanding, the majority of men who identify as homosexual today would identify as having a, preferring a versatile role rather than confining themselves to the insertive or the receptive role. And so now that we know about that, the understanding that Paul has of human sexuality is outdated, inaccurate and is based on this assumption that nature dictates the way it’s supposed to be.way it’s supposed to be.

And we know now that nature is a little less binary than Paul would have it and that this is not something that is a choice. This is not something that is fundamentally built on the nurture side of the nature-nurture divide, but is something that is driven primarily by nature. And so Paul’s rationalization for why he supports the kind of traditional Greco-Roman Jewish position on this is based on entirely outdated frameworks. And I know that First Timothy is the other one that talks about this as well and it only uses the word arsenokoitai. It does not use the other word. So we’re back to just referring to the insertive role. But there’s nothing different to address about that text. We’ve addressed this word already. So I think we can. And also First Timothy was not written by Paul. Again, something we can talk about in another segment.

But so I think we can consider First Timothy addressed as well.

Sure. And then finally there’s Jude who goes back to Sodom and Gomorrah and says, “Likewise Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which in the same manner as they indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural lust, serve as an example by undergoing punishment of eternal fire.”

So the unnatural lust there, that’s translating a Greek phrase. I believe it is sarkos heteras, which actually means “other flesh.” And while some people understand this to refer to unnatural sexual acts, the context here—the verse before, the verse after—makes clear that we’re talking about some kind of problematic relationship between humans and angels. And so what Jude 1:7 is condemning is humans wanting to have sex with angels.

Because that does sound unnatural.

It is. And this is other flesh like the sarkos heteras—hetera, heteron—it’s very definitely not talking about same-sex intercourse. But this is a debate that was going on at the time because we were having debates about Genesis 6 ; the Book of Enoch is talking about the angels, the fallen angels. And there were debates at the time about, wait a minute, one: can angels disobey God? Two: are angels sexually compatible with humans? And so when Jude was being written, there were people on all sides of this question saying, “No, angels aren’t sexually compatible. They can’t disobey. That must have been humans.” And obviously the author here is reading Genesis 19 as a reflection of one of these inappropriate attempts to try to bridge the unbridgeable sexual gap between humanity and the angelic world. And so this has absolutely nothing to do with same-sex intercourse.

This is a reference to humans desiring inappropriate sexual relationships with divine entities.

So the conclusion that we have to come to in all of this is that we don’t have to come to any specific conclusion. I think that, you know, there are definitely scriptures that have laws, specifically those Levitical laws against at least male homosexual acts. But in order to hold to those, in order to make the case that those are applicable to a modern society, it sounds to me like you have to get past a whole lot of other stuff.

Yeah, I would argue that, one, Leviticus is only about the land of Israel or the house of Israel. And so if you are not either Jewish or living within the land of Israel, Leviticus has no application to you anyway. And so if you’re wanting to leverage Leviticus, you’re already renegotiating the text. You’re already saying, “I want to use this text just because I want to use this text,” not because the text requires it of me.

And so many people point out, like Leviticus also prohibits the eating of shellfish, the wearing of mixed-fabric clothing—all of that sort of stuff is also condemned.also condemned. If you do those other things, you’re already rejecting Levitical law, right?

Yeah. So it is, it is transparently a renegotiation. And additionally with Paul, Paul is taking a very conservative stance. Paul is promoting a sexual ethic that has been overwhelmingly rejected by the modern world. Celibacy is not something that the majority of people who consider the Bible an authoritative text live. It’s something, there are some folks who do that. But overwhelmingly, Paul’s sexual ethic has already been negotiated away. The Bible is negotiable. There is nothing in here that cannot be negotiated away. And even if you try to lump it all together into one thing, say we’re going to take it all seriously, it is not univocal, it is not consistent, you’re going to find contradictory aspects of trying to do so. And so everybody is already negotiating with the text. Much of that negotiation is driven by structuring power and values and engaging in boundary maintenance to serve the interests of one’s social identities.

And when we negotiate away part of Paul, but then say, no, this other part of Paul is non-negotiable. We’re just doing that because it serves our interests. It makes the text meaningful or useful for us. And I would argue that we are well past the point when the lives of LGBTQ people are far more important than the deployment of these texts to engage in identity politics or boundary maintenance for the sake of your community. Very clearly, the lives of these people are more important than that. And they are under threat. They are being marginalized, they are being devalued. And there is untold abuse and harm and self-harm arising from the way people are trying to use these things to structure power that will be renegotiated away sometime in the future. I personally don’t have a doubt about that. I don’t know how far in the distant future that will be.

But the only thing that is stopping us from negotiating that final aspect of Paul’s sexual ethic away is the fact that it’s still useful for some people. And I think that is pretty sad.

All right, we’ll leave it at that. Thanks everyone for listening. If you’d like to become a patron of the show, you can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma. You can also contact us if you wish to; contact@dataoverdogmapod.com is the email address. Dan, thanks so much for this. This was a very enlightening episode.

Well, thank you. I’m, I’m sorry for going on a handful of rants there.

But to the important part, you come for the rant, you stay for the Bible stuff. Thanks everybody for tuning in. We will talk to you again next week.

Have a wonderful week, everybody.

Adam and Steve (what the Bible says about homosexuality)

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology