The Sins of Scripture (13 page)

T
his is the Word of the Lord?

The book of Leviticus was composed during the Babylonian Exile in the latter years of the sixth century BCE primarily by a group of Jewish religious leaders who came to be known as “the priestly writers.” It was a survival document, calling and shaping the Jewish people into a dedication strong enough to continue their existence as a people who were not only separated from their homeland, but who would probably never see Judah again. Leviticus cultivated the sense of Jewish separation from everyone else that was deemed to be necessary for the maintenance of the Jewish national identity during that exile.

In the heart of the book of Leviticus is a section now known as “the holiness code.” It was written to assist the captive Jews to achieve their objective of keeping themselves apart from the people among whom they were forced to live. Such separation was the key to their survival in history. It was incumbent upon the Jews as exiles to define themselves as both holy and different. They did this in several ways.

First, they established the seventh day of each week as the Sabbath and commanded that it be observed not only with a refusal to work, but also with attendance in the synagogue. To make this tradition the very hallmark of Judaism, these exiles created the six-day creation story with which the Bible now opens, contending that God validated this Sabbath tradition at the beginning of time by resting from the divine labors on the seventh day of creation. God then blessed the seventh day, enjoining it on the Jewish people forever after as a means of proclaiming themselves to be both holy and different.

Second, the exiled Jews adopted the kosher dietary laws also found in Leviticus. If a religious system imposes a strict diet on its constituents, adherents of that system are not likely to eat outside the faith community. Since people eating together is the primary way relationships normally grow, having to eat kosher food prepared in a kosher kitchen went a long way toward creating separation and encouraging the call to holiness at every meal.

Third, the captive Jews elevated circumcision to be the very mark of Judaism. This revived practice, which had fallen into general disuse, had the effect of putting the mark of their religion and tribal identity on the body of Jewish males, creating a separation that could never be denied.

Serving a similar motive, the holiness code of the book of Leviticus was designed to show that the Jews were different and thus meant to be set apart from the Babylonians among whom they were now forced to live as conquered people in exile. The priestly writers were surely aware of a variety of sexual practices among their captors and decided to define themselves in terms of a strict moral code that reflected their sixth-century BCE sense of values based upon their knowledge and the popular prejudices of their day. The defining passages about homosexuality quoted at the beginning of this chapter are taken from this section of Leviticus. They are clearly homophobic, but they also served the cultic need to articulate the attitude of the religious leaders at that time and to call the Jewish people into a life of identifiable boundaries that set them apart from the non-Jewish Babylonians.

In time Leviticus took its place among the first five books of the Bible as the very heart of Jewish life. “The Torah,” as these five books were called, was identified as the work of Moses, the “father” and founder of Judaism. In time the Torah was supplemented by the writings of the early and late prophets and other material to form the Hebrew Bible. Later Christians added what they called the New Testament to these Hebrew scriptures to create the Christian Bible. Finally, that Bible began to be called the “Word of God.” In this moment the prejudices of the ages ultimately found expression in these books and thus began their role in legitimating the dehumanization process of those who by these ancient definitions were outside the bounds of holiness as the Jews then defined them.

Like all other people, the writers of these sacred scriptures could escape neither their limitations in knowledge nor their place in history. Because of the advance in scientific learning, however, the attitudes, prejudices and ignorances of the past tend to die out as new ideas challenge old practices. This very normal and constant process is much more difficult to accomplish, however, if a cultural assumption is made along the way that the words in this particular book cannot be wrong because God is their author. So the limitations and the uninformed ignorance of ancient biblical authors have been quoted to perpetuate, throughout the history of those who call these writings sacred, the prejudices of antiquity. It is an interesting but closed circle, and the pain that has arisen from these attitudes is both measurable and palpable.

The first line of defense used by those who want to condemn homosexuality appears now to be the Bible. It is evident in Western society today that the major negativity against gay and lesbian people emanates from conservative Christian churches, both Catholic and Protestant.

A Canadian Anglican priest, the Very Reverend Peter Moore, now working as the dean of an evangelical seminary in the United States, has written, “There is nothing more certain than that the Bible condemns homosexuality. If the homosexuals win this battle, then the Bible will have no moral authority in any area of life.” He then continues with a long and convoluted argument in typical evangelical style. His argument hinges on some version of the old and discredited biblical argument that “God wrote it; I believe it; that does it.” It does not work. The argument from scripture about homosexuals is frail, fragile and pitiful. Perhaps those who offer it realize this, and that accounts for the hysterical quality of their rhetoric.
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“Have you not read Leviticus?” That was a regular refrain in letters written to me by Bible quoters when this debate on homosexuality was raging in my church some years ago. By Leviticus they could have meant only the texts from Leviticus 18 and Leviticus 20 with which I opened this chapter. I doubt if they were referring to the injunction in Leviticus that warns, “You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard” (19:27). I do not believe that much heed is paid today to the Leviticus prohibition against letting “your animals breed with another kind” (19:19, NRSV). Scientists have done amazing things in the field of animal husbandry to improve the herds of livestock.

The fact is that almost the only thing the Bible quoters know about the book of Leviticus is contained in these verses, one of which declares homosexual activity of a man with a man to be a prohibited abomination (18:22) and the other which prescribes the death penalty for those who violate this rule (20:13). It is interesting to note that Leviticus says nothing about lesbian relationships. Perhaps the author of Leviticus did not know there was such a thing.

I found the Leviticus 20 text emblazoned on a placard that was carried by a counterdemonstrator in the New York Gay Pride Parade some years ago. His sign proclaimed, “God said fags should die (Leviticus 20).” A version of that same text was carried by an anti-homosexual fundamentalist group from Topeka, Kansas, as they demonstrated at the funeral of Matthew Shepard, a young, gay university student who was beaten into unconsciousness and left to die on a fence post in subfreezing weather in Wyoming a few years ago.

It was also the implication behind the actions of the parents of a gay man whose story, related to me by an institutional Methodist chaplain, was one of the most poignant I have ever heard. This young man grew up in a family where the father and mother both expressed vehement negativity about homosexuality. Both parents were frequently heard to say that they would rather see their son dead than to know he was gay. So their son, knowing himself to be homosexual, hid deeper and deeper in his closet of security. When the time came for him to enter a university, he chose an academic setting on the other side of the country. University activities crowded his summers and holidays so that he was able to return home for only brief visits. When he graduated, he took a position near his university. Contact with his family was minimal. He drifted into the gay ghetto and ultimately contracted AIDS. When it was finally diagnosed, he faced the fact that he would not live much longer.

His deepest hope was to reconcile himself with his parents before he died. The relationship was so estranged, however, that he did not know how to do it. That was when he sought the counsel of this Methodist chaplain. After some conversation they decided together that the best way to approach this young man’s parents was through a letter that would tell them that he was gay and dying with AIDS and would convey his dying wish to visit them and seek reconciliation. The letter was carefully crafted, addressed and mailed. About ten days later, a reply was received. The young man did not want to open this letter alone, so back to the Methodist chaplain he went. When the envelope was opened they discovered that it contained a blank piece of paper that when unfolded revealed the torn pieces of a printed document. It was the remains of this young man’s birth certificate. The Leviticus theme of “God says fags should die” had been lived out yet again. It is surely a terrible and terrifying text.

We are living in a time when a new consciousness is arising in which there is a growing recognition that for homosexual people their only “sin” seems to be that they were born with a sexual orientation different from that of the majority. Yet we now know that orientation to be perfectly normal. It is like other minority positions within the human family: left-handedness, red hair. Minority positions, when not understood, tend to frighten people, and in their fear people strike out to protect themselves by rejecting and sometimes killing the different ones. That is understandable; we know why it happens. But it is evil nonetheless, and when it is validated with appeals to God and “God’s Word,” its evil reaches demonic levels. That is where this debate now lies inside the religious institutions of the Western world. The entrenched fear is that if something the Bible calls an abomination becomes acceptable, then that which makes religious people different will disappear and the defining “Word of God” in the Bible will collapse, leaving believers unsure about who they are. The battle rages and ultimately the Bible quoters will lose. When they do, their religion will either change or it will die.

Overwhelming scientific and medical knowledge exists today pointing to an inescapable conclusion. Sexual orientation is not a moral choice. It is something to which people awaken. It is therefore not morally culpable. The texts in Leviticus 18 and 20 are simply wrong. They are morally incompetent because they are based on ignorance. They should be viewed, as should so much else in Leviticus and the rest of the Torah, as stages in human development that we have outgrown, that we have been educated beyond and have therefore abandoned. To quote these texts to justify our prejudices and even our violence destroys the very essence of what Christians say they believe about God. The God who is love, the God who is heard through the words of Jesus promising life more abundantly, the description of the way others will recognize our desire to follow Jesus “by our love,” all are violated if the texts of Leviticus 18 and 20 are given legitimacy. The time has come for all Christians to decide whether a person can follow Christ and still maintain his or her homophobic prejudices. I do not believe that is possible. Deep down all of us know this to be true. The decision is not both/and; it is either/or. We can either follow Christ or maintain our prejudices. There can be no compromise. The contending positions are mutually exclusive. There must be no wavering. Leviticus 18 and 20 cannot be allowed to remain in the lexicon of Christian behavior.

It is also no longer a morally defensible argument for hierarchical figures to protect the destructive homophobia of some leaders and church members in order “to preserve the unity of the church.” A church unified in prejudice cannot possibly be the Body of Christ. Can anyone imagine a church preserving its unity by tolerating slavery in its midst? Is there any difference between that situation and tolerating homophobia? Any prejudice based upon who a person is, his or her very being as a child of God, cannot be a part of the church’s life. Quoting Leviticus to justify our prejudices is no longer an option.

“Those Leviticus verses do not stand alone in the Bible,” my critics will say. “They are but a small part of the biblical condemnation of homosexuality!” Fair enough, so next I will turn to Genesis 19, the chapter that has given us the words “sodomy” and “sodomite,” as our examination of the biblical texts regarding homosexuality continues.

A
sodomite! That at one time meant simply a citizen of the city of Sodom. Today, “sodomite” has come to mean one who performs sexual acts on a person of the same sex, and the word “sodomy” is used to describe that activity. It also sometimes means both anal sex and the act of a sexual encounter with a subhuman creature. That is quite a journey for two words to take, as I shall seek to demonstrate by examining this biblical reference to homosexuality. It is a text that has been used, throughout the centuries, to justify human hostility toward those who either are or are thought to be homosexuals. I find it of signal interest to note that even though the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is regularly quoted in the debate about the church’s full acceptance of homosexual people, this narrative itself is seldom, if ever, read in its entirety. That is the first fact I want to raise to consciousness, because it indicates once again that we are dealing with irrational prejudice and not reasoned argument.

I start, therefore, by relating the whole story of the city of Sodom. It begins in Genesis 18:1 and concludes in Genesis 19:38. That means it absorbs two entire chapters in the Torah.

The story opens by the oaks of Mamre with Abraham sitting at the door of his tent in the heat of the day. He lifts up his eyes and sees three men approaching. One is said in the text to be the Lord; the other two are later identified as angels. Abraham, in the custom of the Middle East, goes out to greet these visitors and to offer them the hospitality of his home. In a ritualistic fashion he offers to have their feet washed, to share his shade underneath the tree and to provide them with a “morsel of bread” (KJV) so that, refreshed, they can pass on.

It is not just a morsel, however, that Abraham prepares, but a full banquet of meal cakes, a roasted lamb, curds and milk. Sarah, Abraham’s wife, helps in the preparation of this meal, but she does not eat with them, for after all she is merely a woman.

At dinner these visitors, who obviously have access to divine knowledge, discuss with Abraham the fact that Sarah, his wife, is to have a baby. This child will enable God’s promise to Abraham to be fulfilled, that through his “seed” all the nations of the earth will be blessed. There is, however, a problem that seems insurmountable: Sarah is well advanced in years—or, as the King James text so delicately puts it, “it [had] ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women.” When she hears this plan Sarah, who is hiding behind the tent door where she hopes, in vain it now appears, to catch up on the dinner gossip without being discovered, laughs out loud. She then utters words that later Victorians would never have used or even understood. “After I have grown old,…shall I have pleasure?” The Lord hears this, however, and rebukes Sarah for thinking that anything is impossible with God. Embarrassed, she denies laughing, but the Lord says, “Oh yes, you did laugh.”

Only then does the conversation turn to the city of Sodom. The Lord decides to share with Abraham, who is to be the father of a great and mighty nation, the divine plan for that city. Since God has chosen Abraham, then Abraham must be informed of God’s plans! A report has come to the Lord suggesting that the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are very sinful. The Lord has decided to check out this report by sending his own emissaries to these places to seek verification. This is not the picture of an all-knowing deity; God needs a firsthand, eyewitness account. The divine plan, as outlined to Abraham, is this: the Lord’s two angelic companions are to be dispatched to Sodom, while the Lord will remain with Abraham. During the absence of these two companions, the Lord will fill Abraham in on the details for destroying the entire city, should the reports by the messengers justify such a response.

Abraham then engages the Lord in a bargaining or haggling session similar to those that regularly took place in the marketplaces of that region, when the seller sought to gain for his goods a price twice their value and the buyer sought to pay for them half of what they were worth. As in the market, before the final price is agreed to a vigorous debate takes place.

“Wilt thou,” asks Abraham of the Lord, “also destroy the righteous with the wicked?” (KJV). That seems a rather ungodlike thing to do, as Abraham will try to convince the Lord. Abraham is also concerned, we soon learn, about his nephew Lot and his family, who are residents in the city of Sodom. “Peradventure,” Abraham says as the bargaining begins, “there be fifty righteous [people] within the city: wilt thou also destroy and not spare the place for the fifty righteous that are therein?” (KJV). That would not be fair, argues Abraham, reminding God of the divine character: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (KJV).

God agrees with Abraham’s initial parry and so, recognizing weakness in his bargaining partner, Abraham presses his advantage. He first reminds God of God’s greatness and of his own status as dust and ashes. It sounds much like the self-denigration that takes place on the first tee of a golf course before the bets are placed. Suppose you don’t quite get to fifty, says Abraham. Say you fall short by five, will the shortfall of just five righteous people trigger the destruct button? God responds positively that the city will be spared if forty-five righteous people can be discovered there. Abraham continues the debate, reminding God that he knows full well how impertinent it is to confront the Holy One, but Abraham, nonetheless, presses the bargaining process down to forty righteous people, then thirty, then twenty and finally ten. At this point the Lord promises not to destroy the city of Sodom for the sake of ten righteous people. Then the Lord departs and Abraham returns to his tent. The storyline shifts to the Lord’s two angelic companions as they enter the city of Sodom just as dusk is descending.

There were no hotels or motels in the ancient world. Travel was hard and dangerous, so travelers were few. The operative code governing the rights of strangers in that region was straightforward and clear. Visitors to a city had no rights and no protection unless hospitality was offered and accorded to them by one who was a citizen of the city. If that hospitality was not offered, then the strangers became fair game for abuse, which usually took the form of ribald play in which the manhood (no women would ever have been travelers unless whole families were forced into migration) of the strangers was compromised. This meant forcing the unprotected visitor to play the role of a woman in a sexually abusive act. This kind of episode constituted an evening of entertainment for the male citizens of the city, breaking the monotony of their normal existence.

So when the men of Sodom see these two strangers appear near sundown, with little chance at that late hour of hospitality being offered, their hopes begin to rise in anticipation of a night of debauchery.

However, Abraham’s nephew Lot at the very last moment takes these strangers into his home and thus thwarts the plans of his fellow citizens. Enraged at this lost opportunity, the men of Sodom, including, says this text, “young and old, all the people to the last man,” surround Lot’s house, demanding that these two visitors be surrendered to them for sexual sport. For Lot to do such a thing would be to violate not only his word, but also the hospitality code of the region, a code that was for travelers in that day the difference between life and death. Once the protection of a home had been offered, the honor of the whole household was at stake if this protection was compromised.

Lot refuses their demands, but the rage of the crowd is not lessened. Lot, after rebuking his fellow citizens by urging them not to act so wickedly, then makes a counteroffer. I will give you instead, he says, my two virgin daughters, and you may “do to them as you please.” The implication here is that these two daughters, both of whom appear to be betrothed to young men who are part of the mob, are to be gang-raped for the evening’s entertainment. That is exactly what happens in a similar story told in the book of Judges that follows the Sodom story very closely (see Judg. 19).

There is no indication in this biblical narrative that Lot’s daughters are consulted about this offer, since they are, after all, only women and thus have no rights. Women were viewed in that period of time as the property of their father, who could do with them whatever he desired until they became the property of another man willing to pay the bride price to the father. At that point women simply became the property of their husbands. This is what the Bible overtly says.

The men of Sodom seem dissatisfied by Lot’s offer of his daughters and begin to be violent, forcing their way into Lot’s home. The two angelic visitors, using supernatural power, come to Lot’s rescue, striking the men of the city with blindness. These angelic visitors then order Lot and his family to leave the city. Ten righteous people have not been discovered in the city of Sodom, so the Lord is primed to destroy it. Lot, his wife and his daughters are the only righteous people to be identified and now, in a divine act of mercy, these four people are to be allowed to escape. An offer of safety is also made to their potential husbands, who are invited to accompany them in their flight, but they decline the offer. Perhaps they are still recovering from their blindness. Lot and his family now flee the city and the divine destruction begins: fire and brimstone rain down and Sodom and all its citizens are destroyed.

Lot first plans to enter the city of Zoar, where he and his family will have the status of strangers. After second thoughts, however, knowing well what can happen to unprotected strangers in a foreign city, he opts not to run that risk and heads instead for the mountains. His wife, the story says, then makes the fatal mistake of looking back, as all of them have been warned not to do, and she is turned, immediately and magically, into a pillar of salt. At last only Lot and his two daughters are spared. This man who has offered his virgin daughters for gang rape is nonetheless judged by God to be righteous and worthy of deliverance!

The story does not end there. The “righteousness” of this group of three is destined to be compromised yet again. As the story continues, these two daughters slowly realize that they will never marry and bear children “after the manner of all the world,” as the text says. Their purpose in life as women, according to the biblical definition, is therefore destined never to be fulfilled. They are now without either clan or tribe, which is where husbands would normally be found for them in that world. Their father is thus the only man available, so they conspire to get him drunk. They ply him with wine and then, while he is in a drunken stupor, turn him into their sexual partner and lover, with the older daughter lying with him on the first night and the younger daughter on the second night. Both daughters accomplish their purpose, even on these one-night stands, and become pregnant by their father. These incestuous acts bring into life two sons: Moab, who was said to have been the father of the Moabites, and Ammon, who was said to have been the father of the Ammonites. It is on this note that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah finally comes to an end.

This ancient biblical narrative features a view of God so primitive that this God does not know what is going on in the world and has to send divine emissaries to bring back firsthand intelligence. Yet this ancient story has been used to demonstrate God’s negativity toward homosexual persons. This story that portrays all of the men of Sodom as eager to gang-rape two heavenly visitors, who have no rights in that city unless a citizen offers hospitality and protection, has been used to condemn faithful and loving homosexual relationships. This biblical narrative is one in which a father, in order to protect the Middle Eastern code of hospitality, can offer his virgin daughters to be gang-raped and still be regarded by both God and the author of this story as righteous and deserving of divine protection. Finally, a narrative that depicts scheming daughters, a drunken father and dual acts of incest has been turned by the prejudices of later interpreters into an anti-homosexual biblical text that feeds the basest side of our humanity. How is all of that possible unless prejudice overwhelms rationality and moral judgment?

Of course gang rape is wrong whether its style is homosexual or heterosexual. Of course the plot to commit incest is wrong. But what does that have to do with the hopes and aspirations of two women or two men in the twenty-first century who love each other, and who want to live for and with each other in a partnership of intimacy and faithfulness and with the blessing of God? How inappropriate can prejudice, wrapped in the authoritative blanket of scripture, become? On the basis of this narrative, the fear of something that seems odd and strange to heterosexuals has been combined with a perceived threat to their heterosexual identity posed by the presence of the reality of homosexuality in our world, to produce a bitter, hostile, destructive response that has victimized gay and lesbian people throughout the ages. This biblical story has been used for centuries to justify murders, oppression and gay persecution. People whose only crime—or “sin,” if you prefer—is that they were born with a sexual orientation different from that of the majority have been victimized because of that difference. That victimization has been justified by appeals to ancient biblical texts like this one about the city of Sodom. That is so blatantly evil, so overtly ignorant and so violently prejudiced that it should be worthy of nothing but condemnation. If this is what traditionalists mean when they use the phrase “clear teaching of scripture,” then let it be said that this use of the Bible has no place in our world unless ignorance is to be called knowledge and evil is to be called virtuous!

The Bible supports the prejudice of homophobia only by having its message twisted with a strange literalization, coupled with the ability to read ancient tribal history and practice as if it could be made holy by calling it the “Word of God.” If that is what biblical morality is, I want none of it. For that reason I, for one, will no longer tolerate or respect anyone who quotes the Sodom story to justify this violent prejudice. This ancient and destructive text, now exposed, must never again be used in my hearing in the service of oppression.