All right, today we're jumping into a really interesting topic
by summarizing some arguments from the podcast series The
Queer Christian. We're going to be looking at 2
specific verses from the book of Leviticus in the Old Testament.
Now, these are often called clobber verses, and for a long,
long time they've been the foundation for condemning same
sex relationships. But this source we're exploring
offers a very different way to look at them.
So let's start by looking at the verses themselves.
OK, so first up we've got Leviticus chapter 18, verse 22.
It reads you shall not lie. With a male as with a woman, it
is an abomination. Pretty straightforward, right?
I mean, on the surface it seems like a very clear, direct
prohibition. This verse has been a
cornerstone for traditional views for century.
And it doesn't stop there. Just a couple chapters later in
chapter 20, the same idea is repeated, but this time it adds
a pretty severe consequence. Quote.
They shall be put to death. Whoa.
So when you just read these two verses by themselves in English,
they seem incredibly direct and damning.
And you can see why for a lot of people, that's pretty much the
end of the discussion, right? Case closed.
But the argument from our source material today asks a really
important question. What happens when we zoom out?
What's the bigger picture that these verses are actually a part
of? So let's do exactly that.
Let's pull back the lens a bit, because here's the thing, these
verses don't just exist in a vacuum.
They're art of a much larger ancient legal document called
the Holiness Code, which was written for a very specific
group of people in a very specific time in history.
And this is absolutely crucial to the whole argument.
These aren't 2 stand alone commandments just dropped from
the sky. Nope, they are just two little
entries in a long, super detailed list of rules that
covered almost every part of ancient Israelite life, from
what you could eat to what you could wear, to how you farmed.
And we're not talking about a handful of rules here.
The sheer scale is, well, it's massive.
We're talking about over 70 different laws.
This wasn't just a simple list of do's and don'ts, it was the
entire framework for their society.
And this is where it gets really fascinating because you start to
see what else is on this list. For example, Leviticus says you
can't eat shrimp or pork. You can't wear a shirt made of a
cotton Poly blend. You can't even trim your beard.
It also gives the death penalty for cursing at your parents or
for working on a Saturday. But at the same time it commands
that foreigners must be treated just like native born citizens.
It's a really complex mix. So all of this leads to a really
big question. And this is the core of the
source materials argument. If all these rules come from the
exact same holiness code, why are these two verses about same
sex acts treated like timeless universal moral laws while
almost all the others are just dismissed as being culturally
specific? And, you know, not for us today.
OK, check this out. It's a fantastic example.
The rule about men lying with men is in chapter 18.
Just one chapter later, we get the rule against trimming
beards. So why is 1 treated like this
unbreakable moral law for all time while the other is so
totally ignored that, let's be honest, many churches probably
prefer a nicely trimmed beard? Or how about this one, which is
even more stark? The very same chapter, chapter
20, that calls for the death penalty for men lying together
also calls for the death penalty for anyone who curses their
parents. And yet you would have a very
hard time finding anyone today who thinks that's a good idea.
This selective application is what the source calls cherry
picking. And you know, the inconsistency
gets even weirder. I mean, think about it.
Many people who hold up this verse as a timeless moral law
are only applying the first half of it, the part that condemns
the ACT. They totally ignore the
second-half that demands the death penalty.
That's a huge inconsistency inside a single sentence.
All right, so that's the whole consistency issue.
But there's another huge piece to this puzzle, the language
itself. The argument here, is that a
keyword, a really important word at the heart of these verses,
might not mean what we all think it means today.
And it all hinges on one single powerful word, abomination.
We hear that word and it sounds, well, it sounds really, really
bad, like a deep moral evil. But the question is, what did
the original Hebrew word taweba actually mean to the people who
first heard it? Well, according to our source,
this is where things get lost in translation.
Toeba, it turns out, was more of a technical term.
It didn't always mean something was inherently sinful or evil.
Often it just meant something was ritually or culturally
unclean. For the ancient Israelites, for
example, eating pork was a toeba.
Wearing that Poly cotton blend was a toeba.
The focus was all about maintaining the state of ritual
purity. So you might be asking why all
this focus on being ritually pure?
Well, the argument is that it was all about identity.
The Holiness Code was basically designed to make the nation of
Israel distinct, to set them apart from their Pagan neighbors
in Canaan. And these neighbors were known
for practices like temple prostitution, both heterosexual
and homosexual, which the Israelites were commanded to
stay far away from. And this all leads up to a major
theological turning point. The source we're looking at
cites Dr. Ralph Blair, a theologian who argues that this
entire system of ritual purity was essentially wiped away with
the new Covenant in the New Testament.
The argument is that both Jesus and the apostle Paul completely
rejected these kinds of ritual distinctions between what's
clean and unclean and instead focused on what's going on in a
person's heart. OK, so let's step back and look
at what we've got. When you put all these pieces on
the table, the huge and mostly ignored context of the Holiness
code, the really inconsistent way it's applied, and the
disputed translation of that keyword, the source argues that
the traditional interpretation starts to look like it's
standing on very shaky ground. So let's just layout the three
core arguments that are really chipping away at that
traditional view. First, the verses are yanked out
of their original legal and cultural context.
Second, their application is incredibly inconsistent when you
look at all the other laws in the exact same code.
And 3rd, the translation of that central word abomination is very
much up for debate. And this all leads to a really
powerful image the source uses to wrap this all up.
A House of Cards. With the context missing, the
consistency gone, and the translation challenged, the
entire argument built on Leviticus becomes, in this view,
a House of Cards. You pull out any one of those
pieces and the whole thing just collapses.
And that leaves us with this final, really thought provoking
question. What changes in our
understanding when we start to view ancient rules not as this
flat list of timeless commands for everybody, but as complex
ideas that were products of their own specific time and
their own specific place? That was a summary of arguments
from the podcast series The Queer Christian by Elton
Sherwin, which is available on most podcast services.