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kalikshama -> RE: Is the bible right about Homosex ? (10/3/2012 6:31:48 AM)
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http://www.stjohnsmcc.org/new/BibleAbuse/Leviticus.php
If translated word for word, Leviticus 18:22 is roughly ‘And with mankind you shall not lie beds (plural noun) a woman/wife (singular noun).’ This final two-noun phrase is unclear in the original Hebrew; it is shared with Leviticus 20:13 (yet sometimes translated differently in the two verses), and it doesn’t occur anywhere else in the Bible. Although ‘beds of a woman’ seems to be the consensus for its meaning, other prepositions and relationships are also possible.
...Alternatively, the verse could be interpreted to produce ‘And with a male you shall not lie [in the] beds of a woman,’ which is to say that if two men are going to have sex, they cannot do it in a bed belonging to a woman, i.e., which is reserved only for heterosexual intercourse.
Both this verse and the other from Leviticus (see below) appear in a holiness code that applied to Israel rather than to gentile Christians in an age of grace. Both occur in the clear context of opposition to the practices of the local fertility god Moloch; verse 21 sets the stage for this one by forbidding people from allowing their children to be burned in sacrifice to Moloch, verse 23 prohibits intercourse with animals (the idol of Moloch was in the form of a bull with a man’s head and shoulders, so this verse too may refer to idol worship). At the time, in order to get a conviction, Jewish law required four (male) witnesses, so whatever the action condemned in Leviticus was, it was likely a public event (there are no instances recorded in the Talmud of anyone being brought before the Sanhedrin and charged with homosexual activity). Worship of other gods provided a context where sex is very public, and there are 59 other places in the Bible where the worship of other gods is called an abomination (in the KJV). How could these two verses not apply to temple prostitution?
The probability that ritual prostitution is the context of these two verses is underlined by a later mistranslation of the Hebrew word qadesh, which appears in Deuteronomy (23:17), 1 Kings (14:24, 15:12 & 22:46), and 2 Kings (23:7). Literally the word means ’holy one’; it is clearly used in these verses to refer to a man that engages in ritual (pagan) temple prostitution in order to encourage the god(s) to make the earth and its creatures more fertile. By analogy many scholars interpret the verses in Leviticus as specifically referring only to sexual activities in a pagan temple ritual.
In the King James Version the word qadesh was translated for the first time as ‘sodomite,’ a word that at the time generically referred to any person who engaged in ‘unnatural’ sexual acts of any type. The New King James and 21st Century King James translations inaccurately retain the word ‘sodomite’ even though today it refers specifically only to males who engage in anal sex; most other Bibles more accurately translate it as cult, shrine, or temple prostitute.
The exact meaning of the original passage in Leviticus is therefore unclear. Translators face a choice between alternative prohibitions of:
- homosexual behavior by either sex
- sexual behavior between two men
- sexual behavior between a man and a married man (or perhaps three people, including at least one man and one woman)
- just anal sex between two men
- just pagan temple ritual sex (between two men?)
- sexual activity between two men in a woman’s bed
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