Leviticus Cont. - Christianity and Queer Communities
Part 4
Analyzing the Passages: The Glaring Omission in Leviticus
In our last post, we sat with a heavy text.
Leviticus 18:22 “And you shall not lie with a male as lying with a woman; that is a detestable thing.”
Leviticus 20:13 “As for the man who lies with a male as lying with a woman, they have committed a detestable thing; they shall surely be put to death—their blood is on them.”
We looked closely at Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, leaning into the tension of the original Hebrew language. We explored the distinct possibility that these ancient rules were actually addressing idolatrous temple prostitution, or perhaps the rape of otherwise heterosexual men.
For me, stepping back and realizing that these verses might not be talking about loving, covenanted same-sex relationships has been a profound theological awakening. It shifted how I see the text.
But my biggest shift happened when I ran into the most glaring problem of all.
These verses are entirely unconcerned with lesbianism.
The Missing Half of the Equation
If the primary topic of these passages is a blanket condemnation of homosexuality, why is the female half of the equation completely absent?
Some contend that lesbianism is obviously condemned by default when male-male sex is forbidden. But does the text itself actually support that assumption?
If women are simply presumed to be included in the rules for men, why are women explicitly singled out in the very next breath when it comes to bestiality?
Leviticus 18:23 “And [men] shall not give their seminal emission with any animal, becoming unclean with it; and a woman shall not position herself with an animal to copulate with it—that is a perversion.”
Leviticus 20:15-16 “As for a man who gives their seminal emission to an animal, he shall surely be put to death, and you must kill the animal. As for a woman who approaches any animal to copulate with it, you shall kill the woman and the animal; they shall surely be put to death—their blood is on them.”
If women are presumed in Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, why is it necessary to mention them in verses 23 and 16?
By deliberately writing a separate, specific section for women right next door, the Levitical author disproves the assumption that lesbianism is implicitly in view when speaking to male-male sexual relations.
With lesbianism missing from the text, we have to ask: What if there is something other than the modern concept of “homosexuality” at play here?
The Real Issue: A Patriarchal or Penetrative Hierarchy
To understand this, we have to use our historical imagination. Picture the ancient Near East. It was a fiercely patriarchal world—a culture that allocated the highest social position to men and treated women as property.
When we view the text through that ancient social structure, the evidence suggests these verses are not concerned with homosexuality as a relational issue. They are concerned with a strict, ancient, social hierarchy.
In that patriarchal world, the central issue wasn’t the gender of the people involved. It was who was penetrating whom.
The matter that explicitly connects male-male intercourse, male-animal intercourse, and female-animal intercourse is penetration. A man is not to be penetrated by another man, an animal is not to be penetrated by a man, and a woman is not to be penetrated by an animal.
A “penetrative hierarchy” reveals itself in the patriarchal law code:
The Degradation of the Man (by a Man): In this ancient context, the primary problem with male-male intercourse wasn’t the gender pairing itself. It was that one male was lowering himself to the perceived lesser status of a woman by being penetrated.
The Degradation of the Man (by a Beast): We are looking at a society so obsessed with protecting the elevated status of men that they would sacrifice women to a violent mob to preserve it. In that worldview, it would be unthinkable and deeply shameful for a man to lower himself to the level of a beast by copulating with an animal.
The Elevation of the Beast (by a Man): But there is a flip side to that coin. While men were held highest, women still held a place in society above the animals. So, the secondary issue with male bestiality is that a beast is improperly elevated to a woman’s place when it is penetrated by a man.
The Elevation of the Beast (by a Woman): This finally explains the female prohibition. If a woman joins with an animal, she degrades herself, yes. But in a fiercely patriarchal world, the greater offense—the ultimate social sacrilege—would be a woman daring to elevate a beast to a man’s position as her sexual penetrator.
As we saw in the horrific stories of Sodom and Gibeah, ancient cultures placed far less concern on women being degraded than they did on maintaining the man’s highest, unrivaled position in society.
This hierarchal concept harmonizes the passages perfectly. It explains the absence of lesbianism because, in their biological mechanics, a woman does not have the anatomy to “penetrate” another woman in the way this ancient hierarchy was concerned with.
The wording is specifically centered around penile penetration to maintain a social order that keeps men at the top, rather than dealing with same-sex romance.
Understanding Ancient “Laws”
There is another layer to this.
Adding to the difficulty of applying these Levitical passages to modern homosexuality is the way ancient laws actually functioned.
They did not function the way we envision legislation in the West today. We think of justice as conforming to written legislation. For the ancients, justice was conforming to traditions reflected in cultural paradigms. In fact, there is little to no evidence of written “laws” from ancient Mesopotamians in the sense of a modern justice system.
Through the discovery of ancient documents like the Code of Hammurabi, modern scholarship recognizes that ancient rule lists were really “wisdoms” that illuminated the values framing daily life. They were meant to create a people who understood their roles and places within the family and the town.
Generally, what we picture as strict “laws” of the ancient Near East are better understood as cultural mores meant to enforce social norms.
This means the ancient Hebrews came from a world of less-than-absolute laws. The instructions given at Mt. Sinai would have been understood as the paragon of wisdom for maintaining their specific societal structure. This explains why these texts sound more like the enforcement of a “patriarchal social hierarchy” than a timeless moral treatise on the act of homosexuality itself.
Even more, this explains why we don’t find records of the most horrendous Mosaic laws actually being enacted. They didn’t read them necessarily as literally as we do.
A Matter of Conscience
Just this brief consideration of the Levitical passages leave us with a stark, logical conclusion.
If we try to claim these laws must be used for a literal, modern condemnation of homosexuality, we arrive at a contradiction. A literal reading of these laws must admit that the laws do not literally care about lesbianism.
Not caring about half the matter makes no sense if the goal is to condemn the whole matter. (Otherwise, we are left with the absurd conclusion in these passages that the Bible literally forbids homosexual men, but lesbianism is perfectly permitted.)
It is illogical to presume the author rolls women up with the male-male prohibition when he explicitly separates them in the very next sentence. Therefore, according to the author’s own pattern of writing, I am forced to conclude that the modern concept of homosexuality is not under consideration here in Leviticus.
I have to be honest with you. In good conscience, I cannot address homosexuality using passages that ignore half the issue. Especially when those passages are deeply contextualized within an antiquated social hierarchy that permitted women to be treated as lesser beings—to the point of handing over one’s own daughters to be raped.
Sit with that reality for a moment. What does it look like to release our grip on these verses?
My study necessarily moves on: are there other passages that condemn homosexuality as a sin?
Those two passages are it for the Old Testament.
We will begin to look at the New Testament in the next post.