Joanna Töyräänvuori. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament. Volume 45, Issue 2. September 2020.
Introduction
Chapters 17-26 of the book of Leviticus comprise what is commonly called the Holiness Code (H). The name comes from frequent references made to holiness (קדש) in the chapters which seem to form a distinct unit of text that differs in style from the rest of Leviticus. As for its content, the Holiness Code is concerned with the purity and pollution of the Promised Land and maintaining the holiness of God’s chosen people, Israel. In modern discourses on homosexuality and marriage equality in countries where Christianity is or has been the majority religion, references are frequently made to two verses in particular from Leviticus, 18.22 and 20.13, which are widely interpreted as containing a condemnation of and even a demand for punishment for homosexual practices. Discussing the verses divorced from their context as a part for the Holiness Code may give rise to misinterpretations.
According to the so-called Documentary Hypothesis, the Holiness Code is a part of the Priestly source (P) and may comprise an originally older unit or a later addition to P. H has the trappings of a casuistic legal code, and many of its statutes are found in doublets, the first instance of which describes the infraction (18.22) and the second its punishment (20.13), with the text of the infraction often repeated in a slightly altered form.
Regardless of the textual history of the Holiness Code, its statutes present an ongoing dilemma, as they are referenced in discussions of modern-day legislation regarding homosexuality and marriage equality. The two verses, 18.22 and 20.13, are often interpreted as referring to homosexual sex acts—particularly the anal penetration of one man by another—and seen as forbidding this behaviour without considering the larger context of the Holiness Code. The two statutes are also seen as carrying greater weight than the rest of the statutes, the upholding of which is often left to the discretion of the individual or which are legislated against in civil law codes without biblical justification, especially outside the context of Orthodox Judaism.
As modern commentators are keen to point out, homosexuality, as we understand it today, did not exist in the ancient world, and hence the statutes cannot have referred to an equal, loving, and sensual relationship between two adult males. The statutes are also frequently interpreted as referring to a power imbalance, with liberal scholars insisting that the statutes only forbid participation in the passive role of a homosexual sex act, or that it forbids a forcible sex act performed by a male on another male—that is, rape. To this end, there is ample evidence of socially accepted forms of same-sex relationships in the ancient world from the fourth millennium BCE onward. The problem with interpretations of the statute, whether understood as being for or against homosexuality, is that they at once ignore the immediate context of the verses and apply outside knowledge of ancient cultural practices to supplement their chosen readings of the text.
The Text of Leviticus 18.22 and 20.13 and a Comparison of Translations
Before discussing how Lev. 18.22 and 20.13 ought to be interpreted in their historical context, I first examine how the verses have traditionally been translated. The following comparison of different official translations into English illustrates the elaborative strategy for translating Lev. 18.22, especially, as indicated in bold, the tendency to expand on the Hebrew phrase משכבי אשה:
- Tyndale: Thou shalt not lye with mankynde as with womankynde, for that is abominacion.
- Wycliffe: Thou shalt not be mixed together with a man, like in fleshly coupling with a woman, for it is an abomination.
- KJV: Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.
- RSV: You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.
- NIV: Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable.
- NKJV: You shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination.
Rather than being a literal translation of the Hebrew, all of these translations provide an elaboration of the text. This is unnecessary, as there is nothing in the Hebrew verse that is not understood or translatable into English.
ואת־זכר לא תשכב משכבי אשה תועבה הוא
And with a male you will not lie down the bed(ding)s of a woman; it is an abomination.
Most scholars agree on this being the literal translation of the Hebrew text. There is also no doubt that ‘lying down’ (שכב) is meant euphemistically in the verse, as a reference to sexual relations, although when so interpreted the verb is usually paired with the preposition עם, ‘to lie down with’, with the male nearly always being the subject of the verb. However, עם can be replaced with את with no alteration to the meaning of the verb, as is the case in this verse.
The Hebrew text of Lev. 20.13 has further been translated as follows:
- Tyndale: Yf a man lye with the mankynde after the maner as with womankynd, they haue both comitted an abhominacion and shall dye for it. Their bloude be apon their heed.
- Wycliffe: If a man sleepeth with a man, like in fleshly coupling with a woman, they both have done an unlawful thing, and they both shall be put to death; their blood be on them.
- KJV: If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.
- RSV: 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.
- NIV: If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.
- NKJV: If a man lies with a male as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them.
As with the former verse, a literal translation of the verse does not pose any problems to its comprehension, at least in so far as its lexical meaning:
ואיש אשר ישכב את־זכר משכבי אשה תועבה עשו שניהם מות יומתו דמיהם בם
And a man which lies down with a male the bed(ding)s of a woman, the two of them have made an abomination. Dying, they will be put to death. Their blood is upon them.
Regarding the syntax of the verse, it is not entirely clear whether שניהם, the numeral two affixed with the plural masculine personal suffix, is the additional subject of the verb עשו (‘they made’, qal perf. 3rd pl. comm.) or the verb יומתו (‘they are caused to die’, hof. impf. 3rd pl. masc.), given that the word order in Hebrew can be altered based on the importance of the part of speech. Ordinarily, however, the verbal form takes precedence, so it is not incorrect to interpret תועבה עשו שניהם as forming one clause and מות יומתו as forming another clause. Some translations, however, affix the numeral to the latter clause as an additional subject. All grammatical forms in the verse are masculine, but it should be noted that when feminine and masculine words form a compound subject in Hebrew, the compound is always realized as masculine regardless of how many feminine elements are present.
The crucial phrase for the understanding of these verses is ‘the bed(ding)s of a woman’, and, while the words are do not comprise a hapax legomenon (indeed, both words are well understood and separately occur frequently), the phrase as a whole is not found elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. Understanding the idiom is thus crucial for any interpretation of the verse and deserves closer examination.
The Beddings of a Woman
Much of the difficulty in translating and especially interpreting the two verses in Leviticus relates to the idiom משכבי אשה. Literally translated as ‘the layings of a woman’ or ‘bedding of a woman’, in the context of the verse most translations opt not to attempt to render the idiom but instead interpret it as referring to sexual relations between two males that happen in the fashion of that between a man and a woman, meaning that one of the sexual partners would take up the receptive role of a woman in the sex act.
Traditionally, the phrase has been connected to a similar phrase in Numbers 31.17-31.18 and Judg. 21.11-12, the beddings of a male: משכב זכר. Much has been made of the phrase containing the word זכר, traditionally interpreted as referring to the male sex instead of the gender role of a man, whereas the verses in Leviticus use אשה, referring to the gender role of a woman or to the social role of a married woman in particular. This disparity between the words has caused some to eschew using the verses in Numbers to interpret the verses in Leviticus, as אשה is seen as complementary to איש and זכר is seen as complementary to נקבה, female. This coupling of the words has its roots in the creation stories of Genesis, the first creation story referring to male and female in Genesis 1.27 and the second referring to man and woman in Genesis 2.23-24.
The interpretation of the words as referring to sex and gender roles may be too modern. Both words, זכר and איש, refer to men and may have been adopted into Hebrew from different cultural milieux. The former is likely a cognate of the Akkadian zikru, which has the meaning of ‘image, counterpart; replica’ and fits well with the narrative of the creation story. The interpretation of the word as referring to the male sex has probably been inspired by its pivotal use in the Genesis story. In Akkadian, the word does not denote the male sex but refers instead to the reputation of a man. Alternatively, the word may have derived from zikaru, which refers to the male organ, itself an akkadization of the Sumerian verb ᴢɪɢ, ‘to rise’. Regardless of its precise etymology, the word seems to be a cultural loan word, although not necessarily unique to biblical Hebrew.
The word איש, on the other hand, seems to be of North West Semitic derivation, likely formed as a contraction of אנוש, the collective for ‘men’, and hence more specifically refers to an individual’s participation in this collective—that is, a citizen, or, more specifically, a member of a socio-ethnoreligious community. While there are likely nuances to the use of the words in the texts of the Hebrew Bible that escape the modern interpreter, the male sex role is nevertheless within the sphere of meaning of both words.
In the context of the Holiness Code, זכר might be interpreted as referring to ‘any man’, as opposed to איש, which is clearly the subject of the statutes. While איש can be interpreted as the free, adult, autonomous member of the social-religious collective of Israel, referring to any and all men who hold responsibility for upholding the statutes of the Holiness Code, זכר instead refers to anyone of the male sex, whether freeman, servant, slave, adolescent, sojourner, kith or kin, including nephews, uncles, cousins, brothers, and fathers, who may or may not be subject to the same statutes as the איש. The זכר may also be an איש, but is not necessarily an איש, and therefore may not have the same responsibilities as the איש in upholding the statutes of the Holiness Code.
It is due to this apparent disparity between זכר and אשה that the verses in Num. are generally seen as unhelpful with regard to the interpretation of the verses in Lev. The Num. verses are seen as more unambiguous in their meaning, but this may be due to their carrying less of the burden of tradition. Num. 31.17-18 can be translated as:
ועתה הרגו כל־זכר בטף וכל־אשה ידעת איש למשכב זכר הרגו
וכל הטף בנשים אשר לא־ידעו משכב זכר החיו לכם
And now kill every male among the children, and kill every woman that has known a man at the bed of a male.
And every child among women that has not known the bed of a male, let them live for yourselves.
The syntax of verse 17 is more difficult than that of 18 due to the presence of the preposition ל in the former. The meaning of both verses, nevertheless, is clear: all male children are to be slain, as well as those women that have engaged in sexual congress with a man. The virginal female children untouched by man, on the other hand, are to be allowed to live. In these verses, then, to know the bed of a man means to have sex with a man. In the Levitical verse, attempts are made to translate the phrase differently in spite of the clarity of meaning in the context of Num. The difference between the verses is the use of beds in plural in Lev., the presence of the preposition ל in one of the instances in Num., and that Num. refers to זכר, whereas Lev. refers to אשה as the genitival (st. abs.) owner of the bed. These differences do not seem significant enough to translate the verses completely differently.
The text of Judg. 21.11-12 can further be translated as follows:
וזה הדבר אשר תעשו כל־זכר וכל־אשה ידעת משכב־זכר תחרימו
וימצאו מיושבי יביש גלעד ארבע מאות נערה בתולה אשר לא־ידעה איש למשכב זכר ויביאו אותם אל־המחנה שלה אשר
בארץ כנען
And this (is) the thing that you will do: every male and every woman knowing the bed of a male you will destroy.
And they found among the dwellers of Jabesh-Gilead four hundred young girls, maidens that had not known a man at the bed of a male. And they brought them to the camp of Shiloh which is in the land of Canaan.
Similarly to the verses in Num., the ‘bed of a male’ is featured twice, once as a simple genitive construct and again with the preposition ל. The translation of the first verse is unambiguous, as משכב־זכר clearly refers to a woman having sexual relations with a man. The major difference between the verses of Num. and Judg. and the Levitical verses is the use of the verb. The former two use the verb ידע, ‘to know’ the bed of a man, whereas the Levitical verses use שכב, ‘to lie down, to sleep’. Both verbs are well-established euphemisms for sexual intercourse, so the use of different verbs changes little about the idiom itself.
If the statute in Leviticus, then, forbids sexual relations of a man ‘with a male’ or, indeed, ‘with any man’, what type of sexual relations are indicated? As stated previously, the word order in Hebrew sentences usually begins with a verb, unless something deemed more important takes precedence and is thus fronted, or moved toward the beginning of the sentence. In Lev. 18.22, the new topic that is introduced and which carries the weight of the sentence is זכר. The main body of the sentence is לא תשכב משכבי אשה, comprising a negation, a predicate verb in the masculine imperfect, and an object in the form of a genitival construct, where the latter word in the absolute state functions as the owner of the former in the plural construct state. A first-year student of Hebrew would be able to translate the sentence as ‘you will not lay the beds of a woman’, which in the light of the Num. verses ought to be interpreted as ‘you will not have sex with a woman’ or ‘women’, given the use of beds in plural in the Levitical phrase.
The addition of את־זכר should not alter this interpretation of the sentence, and, indeed, were it moved further down the sentence, as in לא תשכב משכבי אשה את־זכר, the sentence could easily be translated as ‘you will not lay the beds of a woman with a man’, meaning ‘you will not have sex with a woman or women in conjunction with any man’. The moving of the prepositional expression should not affect the translation of the sentence, yet it seems to clarify the syntax of the verse tremendously. It is grammatically possible that the statute forbids a sexual practice in which two men share a single woman between them at the same time, a so-called ménage à trois.
Verse 20.13 can be similarly illustrated but poses a further problem: if two men are implicated in the bedding of one woman, which two are to be put to death? Again, the main body of the sentence is איש אשר ישכב משכבי אשה, the man who lays the beds of a woman. Here, the man and the woman have parity, and there is no difficulty in either translating or interpreting the sentence: a man has sex with a woman or women. Adding the prepositional phrase at the end of the sentence illustrates the syntax: איש אשר ישכב משכבי אשה את־זכר; the man who lays the beds of a woman with a male—that is, the man who has sex with a woman or women in conjunction with any man. Moving the prepositional phrase to the end of the sentence again clarifies the rest of the verse without changing anything grammatically:
| ואיש אשר ישכב משכבי אשה את־זכר תועבה עשו שניהם מות יומתו דמיהם בם |
And a man who lays the beds of a woman with a male, the two of them have made an abomination. Dying, they will be put to death. Their blood is upon them. |
With the exception of the affixed word ‘the two of them’, all verbal forms are plural and, while masculine, may include a feminine subject. If being put to death and their blood being upon them would refer to all three (or more) parties, why would only the two men be implicated in the creation of the abomination? The motivation for this ban might be due to an ancient understanding of biology in which it was the semen of a man, his seed, which gave life and the body of a mother that merely gestated this being created out of the man’s seed. One need only look at embryogenesis in the works of Aristotle to see that ancient ideas of how babies are made differed starkly from a modern scientific understanding, and the role of a man as the child’s progenitor was more pronounced.
While the ideas of embryogenesis may not have been identical between the author(s) of the Holiness Code and Hellenistic philosophers, it still proves that, in the first millennium BCE, it was generally accepted that children issued from semen and were gestated by mothers, not from the joining of a sperm with an ovum. This is why the idea of the mixing of the seed of two men inside the womb of a woman would have been abominable to ancient man—far more abominable than sex acts performed between adult males that likely were common at least in military camps and otherwise sequestered groups of men. It is noteworthy that the very next prohibition in Lev. 20.14 forbids the sexual congress of one man with two women: a mother and a daughter. Thematically it is an inversion of verse 13 (two men with one woman), even though the result of such a union would be different: a child that is both daughter and granddaughter to one woman and sister and daughter to the other. In this case, the verse advocates killing by fire of all involved parties. Therefore, the sexual act in question refers, along with the other statutes regarding illicit sexual practices, to acts that risk ritually polluting the Promised Land, meaning that they run the danger of creating offspring of questionable paternity. Ergo, the statutes cannot refer to homosexual sex acts.
The Holiness Code and Illicit Offspring
Leviticus 15.2-13, while not a part of the Holiness Code, describes the pollution of a man via his own seminal fluid. This seems to have been one of the major concerns for the author(s) of the text and is what causes the ritual pollution of the land. The second verse states that a man is unclean due to the semen running from his own flesh, and v. 15 stipulates that a man who has experienced a seminal emission is impure until the evening has come and he has washed himself with water. A woman with whom a man is in sexual contact would become likewise impure. The semen of an adult male that is the subject of the statutes presents a problem, and much of the legislation in Leviticus is concerned with the proper repositories for this semen and those that are strictly and expressly forbidden. The theme of the pollution of the seed in the context of mixed marriages is discussed in the Hebrew Bible in Ezra 9.1-10.44. This text actually makes mention of abominations in the same context in verses 9.1, 11, and 14. In the last verse, the problem is explicitly mentioned: Israelites intermarrying בעמי התעבות, ‘with the peoples of the abominations’. In v. 11, the abominations are paralleled with the impurities (טמאתם) of the people, the text suggesting that coupling with ‘The Canaanite, the Hittite, the Perizzite, the Jebusite, the Ammonite, and Moabite, the Egyptian and the Amorite’ would make the Israelites likewise impure. Abomination thus seems to be equal to the pollution of the land. Note that the word תועבה, ‘abomination’, is explicitly used to designate physically deformed (blemished) animals in Deut. 17.1.
The Holiness Code legislates regarding sexual acts, categorizing certain acts as illicit. The implication is that all acts not legislated against are legal by omission—or at least not a cause for the pollution of the land. The rationale for many of the prohibitions listed seems to be rooted in the incest taboo. While there is a natural aversion present in humans toward sexual congress with close relatives (the so-called Westermarck effect, reverse sexual imprinting in close domestic proximity), it is also clear that, in some members of society, this aversion is either weak or entirely lacking. The coupling of close relatives has a known tendency to result in genetic anomalies. While we cannot be certain that the process behind the production of these anomalies was understood in ancient societies, the frequency with which anomalies appeared may have, in addition to the natural aversion to such unions, contributed to social prohibitions of the coupling of close relatives. While there are examples of incest (19.30-38) and even divinely sanctioned incest (Gen. 10.12) in the Hebrew Bible, the legislation of the Holiness Code seems to exist to clarify to members of the socio-ethnoreligious community of Israel which couplings are permitted and which couplings prohibited. At least part of the motivation for these prohibitions may have been to stop the birth of children who would have been born with physical defects resulting from incestuous couplings.
While the mechanism which led to this type of defective offspring might not have been known to the ancient legislators, the motivation for the prohibitions may not have been to avoid such defects in the first place. The common denominator in many of the prohibitions in the Holiness Code is that the children that would result from the couplings would have unclear social roles. According to the Hebrew Bible, membership in the socio-ethnoreligious community of Israel is received through matrilineal succession, but in a patriarchal society the paternity of children was carefully controlled. The matrilineality of Israel made controlling the sexual congress of members of the society more crucial, as, biologically, the motherhood of an organism is certain at the moment of parturition, whereas the paternity of a human child can be subject to doubt.
In the cases of incest, both the matrilineal and patrimonial line of succession become confused. If a man fathers a child with his mother, the offspring of the union would be both child and sibling to the father. If a man fathers a child with his daughter, the offspring of the union would be both child and sibling to the mother. If a man fathers a child with his sister, the offspring would be both child and nibling (niece/nephew) to the father. If a man fathers a child with his son’s daughter, the offspring would be both child and grandchild to the man. All of the categories enumerated in the Holiness Code would result in this kind of confused paternity regarding the fruit of the couplings.
It is my suggestion, therefore, that both the prohibition of two men bedding one woman and the coupling of a man or a woman with an animal are grouped together with these prohibitions of incest, because the underlying rationale is the same: the statutes aim to prevent the creation of illicit and potentially abominable offspring. The creation of such offspring would be considered as disruptive to the social order, but ultimately it is questions of inheritance that the statutes aim to resolve. In a patriarchal, patrimonial society, the inheritance of birthright and family fortune is a major concern for the entire society, and it is the system of male primogeniture that these prohibitions attempt to secure. Iron Age Levantine societies most likely viewed paternity differently from modern conceptions. Writing on the conception of double paternity among the natives of Lowland South America, Beckerman and Valentine describe how
Inhabitants of the modern Western world are well aware that each child has one biological father and one only. We know that, in sexually reproducing organisms, only one sperm fertilizes the egg, and we know this rule holds for people as well as penguins. The doctrine of single paternity, as a folk belief, goes so far back in Western history and is so extended through our social and legal institutions that it is difficult for us to imagine that anyone could entertain any other view of biological paternity . . . Before the end of the nineteenth century, although Western law and custom assumed that each child had a single biological father, that premise was simply a folk belief, resting on other folk beliefs about how babies are made and what the mother and the father contribute—beliefs that seem quaint to us now . . . This happy coincidence of folk doctrine and biological reality within our own intellectual tradition has not been without its unfortunate consequences. It has made it easy for us to presume that our folk beliefs concerning fertilization, conception, and fetal development must be everyone’s folk beliefs, inevitable and universal.
It is telling that the statutes following the prohibition of two men performing sexual acts with one woman, Lev. 18.23 and 20.15-16, are the prohibitions on bestiality, which prohibit both men and women from performing sexual acts with animals. Both occurrences may have occasioned fears of bestial offspring to the effect of centaurs, minotaurs, satyrs, or fauns. Such half-human hybrid creatures are also known from the folklore of the ancient Near East, like the Mesopotamian kusarikku (bull man) and girtablullû (scorpion man). These statutes stipulate that both the man or the woman and the animal are to be put to death for the infraction, in both cases slaying both the subject of the statute and the host possibly carrying the offspring of the illicit union. It is also telling that sex acts such as anal sex between a man and a woman and necrophilia, while they almost certainly would have been viewed as abhorrent by the author(s) of the Holiness Code, are not forbidden in the statutes, as they do not run the risk of creating offspring. The absence of such statutes also suggests that it was not the spilling of seed outside a woman’s womb that was the main issue of the Holiness Code, but the pollution of the Promised Land via undesired progeny.
The question, then, is what the land considers defilement. What is the common denominator in all of the statutes concerning illicit sexual relations in the Holiness Code? The text contains only five statutes that do not pertain to incestuous sexual acts between different combinations of relatives: 1) the prohibition of sex during a woman’s menses, 2) the prohibition of sex with the wife of another man, 3) the prohibition of passing one’s seed to Molech, 4) the statute discussed in this article, and 5) bestiality. These statutes are a divergence from the first part of the Code, and many discuss the prohibitions as a unit of their own. I suggest that these statutes are not so different from the rest of those in the Code and that their core purpose is to prohibit the creation of offspring that would disrupt the social order through confusion. Each of the statutes could be explored in an article of their own, but a cursory explanation is offered here.
The most obvious of such disruptions of social order is the statute forbidding the bedding of another man’s wife. Bastards are a known disruption of patrilineal inheritance. As for the second, there appears to have been no link between menstruation and procreation in the minds of ancient authors. There were different explanations for what caused women to have menses, and studies show that women had less frequent menstruation in general in the ancient world, but one common theme is the idea that the menses made a woman unclean. In the ancient world, there seems to have been a widespread belief that the cycle of women was connected to the lunar cycle (from which menses take their name) and the temperature shifts attributed therein, rather than to a reproductive cycle. It would be logical to infer, then, that any offspring produced from a union with a menstruating woman would likewise be unclean and therefore pollute the land, especially given that the death penalty is prescribed for the act. Perhaps the resulting bestial offspring were imagined to crave the taste of human blood, akin to creatures in folk stories and beliefs. There is a clear taboo concerning blood in the Hebrew Bible, and the consumption of the blood of animals is expressly forbidden in Gen. 9.4.
The most difficult verse is that forbidding the passing of one’s seed to Molech (ומזרעך לא-תתן להעביר למלך), and attempts to interpret it have ranged from idol worship to child sacrifice. But it must be recognized that the man’s seed, his semen, explicitly features in the statute. There is something for which a man must not give his seed, and an inference could be made that this passing of seed would result in offspring monstrous to the ancient conception. Perhaps Molech represented a lesser divinity resulting in demigods for offspring or a dead ancestral spirit resulting from the mixing of the categories of the living with the dead. Whatever is meant by the passing of the seed to Molech, it is cause for the harshest punishment in the Holiness Code. While the interpretation of verse 18.21 may escape modern readers, a case can still be made for why all of the statutes in chapter 18 ought to be interpreted in light of sexual acts forbidden in order to avoid unwelcome progeny.
The contents of the verses about the implied result of the illicit unions can be illustrated by the following chart:
The motivation for the prohibitions may have been to prevent genetic anomalies resulting from incestuous or otherwise anomalous couplings, and the reason for the statutes may have been in securing the patrimonial social system, but the rationale of the author(s) is to be found instead in the prevention of the ritual pollution of the Promised Land.
Mary Douglas and Ritual Pollution
The express purpose of the Holiness Code is not to forbid acts that are untoward, reprehensible, sinful, morally compromised, disgusting, disgraceful, condemnable, or otherwise objectionable, even if many of the acts listed in its statutes may be all of these things. Rather, the Holiness Code is concerned with the purity and pollution of the Promised Land. In the parenetic introduction of the text, Yahweh forbids the practices of Egypt and of Canaan from his people (18.3), because these practices defiled the peoples that Yahweh promises to drive out of the land (18.24) before Israel. Yahweh warns that if Israel commits the acts of defilement listed in the Holiness Code, it too shall be vomited out by the land, as it had vomited out its former inhabitants. In light of this proclamation, it could be argued that what makes the land polluted are its people, hence making the control of its future population a major concern for religious legislation.
It seems as though the spilling of the seed did not become a concern for Judaism until the time of the Rabbinic writings. According to Satlow, concerns about the types of sex that do not lead to procreation are only a product of the latest redactional layer of the Babylonian Talmud. The story of Onan in Gen. 38 is often referenced in connection with the pollution of seminal fluid, Onan opting to let his seed fall to the ground instead of impregnating the widow of his slain brother in a so-called Levirate marriage. According to Frymer-Kensky, the motivation for this story was the securing of inheritance, and the economic repercussions of fathering a child for the widow of one’s brother would have meant that Onan would have forgone his own father’s inheritance in favour of the child. According to Frymer-Kensky, it was the influence of Hellenism that led to the stories of Er and Onan being interpreted as referring to a refusal to have sex and the practice of coitus interruptus respectively, instead of native concerns about patrimonial succession.
The anthropologist Mary Douglas theorized in her seminal work Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966) that the fluids issuing from the human body are marginal because their source is in the orifices that are located in the liminal spaces of the human body. The fears, beliefs, and limitations connected to the purity and impurity of the physical body reflect the boundaries of a society and are connected to social pollution. The body, then, is a microcosm of the entire society. These themes have been revisited recently by Duschinsky, Schnall, and Weiss (eds.) in Purity and Danger Now: New Perspectives (2016). According to Douglas, the legal texts of the Hebrew Bible are concerned with purity and pollution, and it is the mixing of these categories that makes things impure. The simple mixing of different spheres like the sacred with the profane can lead to catastrophe for the entire society.
In his commentary on Leviticus, Gerstenberger likewise writes that the text forbids the mixing of objects and essences of different natures arbitrarily, because they each possess a certain autonomy and inviolable power. According to him, mixing would destroy the uniqueness of each part, threaten their existence, and would, in the ancient conception, violate the attendant demons or deities, resulting in a dangerous conflict between the entities that would be perilous to anyone who caused such confusion in one’s community. Categories that explicitly should not be mixed in the text of Leviticus (19.19) are two different animals in breeding, two different kinds of seed in planting, and two different types of fabric in the same article of clothing. This idea of mixing is extended to sexual relationships, as the verse immediately following (19.20) concerns the bedding of a woman that is the servant of another man in the manner of שכבת־זרע—literally, ‘lying of seed’, indicating copulation. The types of offspring that would be produced from the illicit unions enumerated in the Holiness Code would likewise all fall under this theme of mixing categories that ought not to be mixed (כלאים), and hence the acts producing them would be considered polluting.
We cannot be certain that the authors knew that only the semen of one man (or, more accurately, one human sperm cell) would have been capable of fertilizing the ovum of the woman. Two men bedding one woman simultaneously might run the risk of not knowing who the father of the ensuing offspring would have been until the invention of DNA testing or the child, by happenstance, exhibited prominent traits that would have allowed for association with one of the potential fathers. The ancient compiler of the law code, however, may have imagined that it would have been possible for the mixing of the semen of two men inside the womb of a woman to have resulted in the birth of a hybrid offspring that would have been fathered by both men simultaneously and that could spring out of the womb with four arms and two heads upon its shoulders—that is, an abomination. Fears regarding abominable offspring resulting from illicit unions are an explicit concern in the apocryphal text 1 Enoch 6-16, in which the sons of God—named ‘the Watchers’—beget children with the women of the Earth. This text seems to draw on a brief mention of the unions of the daughters of man with the sons of God (Gen. 6.1-4), in which the results of these unions are described only as heroes (הגברים) and men of reknown (אנשי השם). In 1 Enoch 15.4, the Watchers are told that they have defiled themselves with the blood of women, having sired children with the blood of flesh. The offspring of these unions is also described as evil. The implication of the text is that both the act and the result of the coupling are characterized by impurity. The book of Enoch is dated to the third century BCE and demonstrates that the illicitness of the offspring of mixed couplings was a concern for the authors at this time.
While rare, genetic defects that result in such anomalous births do occur in nature and must have occurred in nature before the modern era; in the ancient conception, the best explanation for such extra limbs and appendages might well have been a forbidden double siring—that is, a mixed seminal fluid resulting in one pregnancy. Dicephalic or tetrabrachial children are sporadically born to humans, but birth defects also regularly occur in farm animals and likely would have been witnessed by the author(s) of the statutes. The ancient man likely had no knowledge about births resulting from monozygotic twin embryos, and may have attributed the phenomenon to double paternity. The mixing of seed also runs the real risk of superfecundation by two different men, the result being twin embryos of double paternity. The incidence of bipaternal or heteropaternal superfecundity is increased with the rate of infidelity in a society. In a matrilineal, patrimonial society, twins of two different fathers would have posed problems for social cohesion, especially if the children outwardly resembled their respective fathers.
Such an interpretation of these anomalous births is obviously mistaken, and it is reprehensible to refer to any child as an abomination. Birth defects do not make children abominable, but it is easy to imagine a rural Iron Age society having believed they did. Within the context of the Holiness Code, concerned with the purity and pollution of the land, a statute forbidding the possibility of the creation of such offspring seems like a much more pressing concern than policing the sexual practices of two adult males that cause only the mere minimum of ritual pollution described in Leviticus. There is nothing else in Leviticus, nor indeed in the rest of the Hebrew Bible, which suggests that the voluntary homosexual sex acts of two adult males would have been punishable by death, nor indeed why they ought to have been. The concept of double paternity, however, is not unknown in ancient texts. While most of the evidence we have for the conception of double paternity concerns either the divine or the semi-divine paternity of an individual, the idea of a child being fathered by two males does not only exist in ancient conception, it was clearly used in attempts to solve difficult ontological problems.
It is also possible that the text references and prohibits the practice of polyandry, or the marriage of one woman to two or more men. I have not, however, advanced this line of argumentation for two reasons: first, to argue that the text concerns the practice of polyandry is to employ a similar elaborative strategy to the text that has been done in the past but only with an alternative agenda. Second, ultimately the objection to polyandry—of which there are no examples in the Hebrew Bible and which therefore was either not a valid concern in the patriarchal society in which it was written or was so obviously alien to the community that it did not require legislation—ultimately comes down to the same issue. A woman in a patriarchal society cannot marry two men due to the doubt it casts on the paternity of her child and to the inheritance of paternal property. While a ban on polyandry might make a more palatable argument for the modern reader, it also fails to account for the literal making of the abomination mentioned in the statute. Furthermore, sexual contact with another man’s wife is already expressly forbidden in Lev. 20.10. What is clear from the context, however, is that sex acts in and of themselves were not the main concern for the authors.
While few legal codices from the surrounding ancient Near East have survived, the major corpora in Old Babylonian (Codex Hammurapi) and Hittite laws are silent on the topic of sex acts performed between two adult males. It is noteworthy that the Hittite laws prescribe the death penalty for both incest and bestiality but at the same time remain silent on the topic of sex acts between males. According to Hoffner, there seems thus to have been no laws against sex acts performed between adult males among the Hittites. While the Hittite law codes antedate the Holiness Code, the author(s) of Leviticus seem at least to have intended for the statutes to read as though they were authentic Late Bronze Age laws contemporary to the Hittite laws, hence attributing them to Moses. G. J. Wenham writes that
Seen in their Near Eastern context the originality of the Old Testament laws on homosexuality is very striking. Whereas the rest of the ancient orient saw homosexual acts as quite acceptable provided they were not incestuous or forcible, the Old Testament bans them all even where both parties freely consented. How can we explain this innovation? To ascribe this to Israelite reaction against the customs of their neighbours is too simple, for such an explanation in fact explains nothing.
The only surviving ancient law code to condemn homosexual sex acts is the Middle Assyrian law, but the law code punishes specifically sex acts between soldiers and male rape (MAL 20), prescribing the punishment of castration for the perpetrator, not death. False accusations of sex between men are also harshly punished by beating (50 blows), fining (a talent of lead and one month’s hard labour for the king), and branding (MAL 19). The Middle Assyrian laws are considered to be some of the strictest ancient law codes to have survived.
From the point of view of later tradition history, it is clear that the statutes were subsequently interpreted as condemning sex acts between men at some point. However, purely on the basis of the textual evidence, it does not seem as though the texts were interpreted in the context of homosexual sex acts until the Hellenistic era. The first textual evidence comes from the Jewish historian Philo, who discusses homosexuality in tandem with bestiality in De specialibus legibus 3.37-42 and similarly by Josephus in Contra Apionem 2.25. Prior to this, according to W. Loader, who wrote the definitive book on sexuality in the Qumran documents, there is only one clear reference to homosexuality in the Qumran texts written in the first centuries BCE, in the Damascus Document (4Q270 2 ii.16-17), which seems to be a partially surviving rewriting of the statute of Leviticus. The text of 4Q270 2 ii.15-17 reads as follows:
[או אשר ישכב עם]
[אשה הרה מקיץ דם [או יקדב א]ל בת [אחיו או אשר ישכב עם זכר
vac משכבי אשה
[Or who lies with]
a pregnant woman, stirring blood, [or approaches his brother’s] daughter, [or who lies with a male]
the bed(ding)s of a woman.
While the text adds the category of prohibition of sexual intercourse with a pregnant woman that is not mentioned in the Holiness Code, the taboo acts are similar to those of Leviticus: the creation of offspring that is either unclean (blood), mixing things that should not be mixed (the seed of a man with the seed of his brother), or creating illegitimate offspring (confusing or intercepting the lineage of another man). Again, the list is not concerned with the prohibition of sex acts as such, and therefore it would make the most sense for the final prohibition to also concern the creation of problematic offspring in line with the other prohibitions. The stark difference between the near silence on sex acts between men in the Qumran texts and the explicit condemnation of them in the historical texts of the first century suggests that the reinterpretation of the texts took place in response to the cultural imperialism of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid overlordship, which ultimately resulted in the Maccabean revolt in 167 BCE.
A comparison of other ancient law codes with the statutes of the Holiness Code, or their later reception history, as such do not, of course, prove one way or the other how the socio-ethnoreligious community that produced the texts viewed sex acts between two consenting adult males. Indeed, the Holiness Code itself purports to set apart the community instructed by its statutes from all peoples deemed unworthy to inhabit the Promised Land. The statutes of the Holiness Code are meant to prevent the pollution of the land through acts that the text itself claims were practiced among its previous inhabitants. The silence of the other ancient law codes therefore is not an argument to end all arguments, even if they do contextualize the statutes of the Holiness Code in their wider cultural framework. The focus of this article is not on whether the socio-ethnoreligious community of Israel was exceptional or not, but on the common theme in all the statutes of the Holiness Code and whether an interpretation of the statute as forbidding two males bedding one woman makes more sense in the context than homosexual sex acts.
Conclusions: Reinterpretation of the Verses in a Hellenistic Context and Why It Matters
The verses of Leviticus 18.22 and 20.13 are some of the most frequently quoted biblical verses in the modern era. It is difficult to find anyone that has followed the discourse on marriage equality in the past twenty years that has not come across these verses, whether their inclination is for or against homosexuality in general or marriage equality in particular. While no modern nation bases its contemporary legal code on biblical law, biblical texts are not unimportant in discussing new legislation in European and North American contexts.
While the translation of the verses is not difficult, their interpretation is less clear. Literal translations forbid a man laying with a male (in) ‘the beds of a woman’, but this phrase, found in both the Levitical verses, is not found anywhere else in the Hebrew Bible. A parallel phrase, ‘the bed of a male’, features in the book of Numbers and in Judges, indicating sexual contact between a man and a woman, with the woman being the subject of the verses. The Levitical phrases are not translated similarly, but instead most translations choose to elaborate on the text based on preconceived notions of what the text ought to contain. However, there is no reason to translate the Levitical phrase differently from other parallel verses; indeed, sexual contact between a man and a woman is likewise indicated by the Levitical phrases—not with one man but two. The rationale for a statute forbidding the mixing of the seminal fluids of two men is to be found in the potential creation of abominable offspring, something that seems to have been a major concern for the author(s) of the Holiness Code.
It is unfortunate that some scholars seem to take their own homophobia as the starting point for their inquiry into ancient religious texts, universalizing this bias to apply not only to the statutes of the Holiness Code but seemingly to the disposition of the Lord, the God of Israel, himself. It is undeniable that the interpretation of the verses of Leviticus 18.22 and 20.13 in the context of sexual acts performed by two male persons has affected the opinions of myriad adherents of the texts in later history, but this does not mean that it was the original intention of the verses in the Holiness Code. The purpose of the laws was not to legislate against what people found abhorrent or disgusting, but to uphold the order and cohesion of society. Acts that run the risk of creating new members to a society whose status is unclear from the moment of their conception are more dangerous to social order than what two autonomous subjects do consensually with their own bodies, especially given that the book of Leviticus contains instructions on cleaning the body from contact with seminal emissions.
Homosexuality was not viewed as a punishable offense in the Middle East until it was criminalized by the British penal code of 1885, similar laws being introduced in French-controlled areas at the same time. In fairness, the verses have been interpreted in the context of homosexuality at least since the time of Philo and Josephus. Both Jewish philosophers lived in a Hellenized world and, in their writings, combated the influence of Hellenistic practices, so their condemnation of homosexuality or interpretation of the law as forbidding homosexual sex acts does not yet prove that this was the intention of the author(s) of Leviticus. The perspective of the modern reader is irrevocably altered from that of the writers by the empires that, one after the other, conquered the land where the Holiness Code had been composed, the conquered both resisting and adapting to hegemonic ideas. What we can infer from the textual evidence is that, at least during the first century CE, the Levitical verses were interpreted as referring to sexual acts performed by two men, even if their reference was not to homosexuality as it is currently understood. Notwithstanding, this fact neither solves nor confirms the traditional reading of the verses.
Sex and sexuality have long been a battleground for different ideologies. The interpretation of the Levitical statutes should not be a question of philology or even of morality, however, but of a desire to understand what the author(s) have indicated and wished to express in their own time and cultural context.
This article does not intend to claim that not prescribing the death penalty for homosexual sex acts in the Iron Age is a mark of a progressive society or that ancient ideas of embryogenesis were not regressive in the extreme. N. Wyatt has stated that, while we may be able to approximate ancient modes of thinking, we can never forget how we think. It is therefore crucial that a scholar of ancient texts insert as little as possible of his or her own preconceived notions and contexts into the interpretation of ancient texts, or at the very least be aware of his or her own biases concerning the interpretation of texts and how one’s readings may be impacted by them. In the case of the interpretation of Leviticus, there is a clear divide between how they thought and how we think in Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Levant. The original intent of the text was completely lost in the cultural reformation that followed, replaced by an anti-Hellenistic condemnation of sex between consenting adult men. Weighing the textual, historical, and cultural information in our possession, I therefore argue that traditional interpretations of the statutes in Leviticus 18.22 and 20.13 are sorely mistaken. The Holiness Code did not intend to police sexed adult bodies, but to maintain the purity of the Promised Land. The pollution of the land was prevented by avoiding abominable offspring, not by the summary slaughter of autonomous individuals in consensual sexual relationships.