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this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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I think the element of power plays into too - like how in Ancient Rome it was totally okay for a man to have sex with other men, as long as the higher status man was on top. They don’t view sex as an act between equals, they view it as an expression of power.
Leviticus’s condemnations of gay sex are rooted in that - it was common in Bronze Age warfare to rape enemy combatants as a way of humiliating and demasculinizing them.
Leviticus tells you to kill both involved and mentions nothing about war in either instance. It was specifically to go against consensual sex between males. Don't apologize for the text, if the author had intended it to be stopping war rape it would have said that. The author was fine with war rape which is why it specifically tells the reader to take the girls you find in battle.
There is no god and the Bible is shit. Time to move on.
Not apologia - I have no investment in the beliefs of folks in a specific area from 1000-500 BCE, I just find them fascinating to study for obvious reasons. But Leviticus is a document written in a specific historical context - relationships are entirely man/property. Consenting to sex is not really a thing. Treating a man like a woman is defiling him, he is also now a thing defiled he must be destroyed to purify the community.
I also doubt that enforcement was even happening at the time the texts were written.
Like, the question of “what happens if a woman reaches out to break up a fight between two men, and she accidentally grabs some dudes ‘nads” is discussed at length. They are responding to specific concerns at a historical period which has very little in common with our own. The idea that “sex is supposed to be with someone you love and consider your equal” was as alien to them as it was to my ex 🗿
We also shouldn’t assume that the Bible is univocal - there are so many different authors/rewriters/compilers with different agendas writing in different time periods. This is why I brought up Leviticus and not Paul’s (and not-Paul’s) shit, because I don’t know enough Greek to argue about arsenokoitai lol.
Yeah I also heard that same episode of Data Over Dogma. Dan didn't mention that Leviticus also tells you not to kill a girl that was raped and can force the rapist to marry her. Which means that so called defilement didn't mean you killed everyone involved. Breaking his whole argument.
Maybe reword it a bit. He claims that the act of being penetration outside of marriage meant you were defiled which meant you were to be killed. And he points out that they did that to the animal and to the adulteress. The problem with that argument is they did not do it for the rape victim and in fact Leviticus specifically says not to. The argument doesn't work and the contradiction is easy to spot.
Additionally no where do we even see a hint of a concept of gay marriage in the Bible. If the defilement argument held any water a marriage would fix it. No where do we even see a nod to the idea that can use boys for a certain purpose which yeah they were used for. If the defilement argument worked we should have seen it called out.
The simplest explaination is plain reading and the plain reading is if a MAN (not a boy an adult man) has sex with a MAN (not a boy an adult man) they are BOTH to be put to death.
I don't subscribe in any way shape or form that the Bible is univocal. I am not even convinced that Mark alone had less than 4 authors. But on this one topic the Bible is consistent on.
Side-note I do think Paul literally did say that. He might not have written that letter but I think he did utter it. The man didn't even approve of hetro sex within marriage no way he was cool with gay guys.
Don't follow the Bible, don't apologize for the Bible, don't downplay what it says by contextualizing. It is a vile disgusting book and very blunt.
Deuteronomy discusses the rape of women. It is not covered in Leviticus. Deuteronomy outlines several situations for what to be done when a women is sexually assaulted. A women who is pledged to someone but is raped is killed if she doesn’t not resist/“cry out,” because of the ancient world’s non-understanding of sexual coercion. If she resists it becomes a property crime. If she is unmarried she becomes property of the rapist.
A “plain reading” of a text that was written in a different language millennia ago which has gone through multiple translations is silly. The fact that there are multiple translations is in itself an indication that there’s ridiculous complexity in just rendering the text in English. Usually, when someone reads translations of primary texts, the book they’re published in is at least 50% context.
I like Dan McClellan’s work bringing scholarship to a mass entertainment platform, but I’ve only seen a few of his TikTok’s. I prefer getting my information from JSTOR. I don’t think that I’m “downplaying” the Bible by providing a context.
I’m curious which letters of Paul you would claim are authentic, and on what you would base your reconstruction of Paul’s ideas. (I’m enjoying Bart Ehrman’s Forgery and Counterforgery at the moment, I’d be happy to discuss what Paul did and didn’t write). Saying Paul didn’t approve of heterosexual sex within marriage is a very strange reading of the text - the verses you are referring to are saying that it is pointless to marry (the world is going to end very soon) unless you are just too horny to resist it. Many of Paul’s letters are known forgeries, with distinct theology.
Sorry but I subscribe to the idea that the two books were of the same authors and were divided up later, like Samuel.
I don't need a translation to read it in the original. I made the effort to learn the biblical languages and yes I can tell you 100% with zero doubt that the words used refer to an adult male and another adult male. The whole plural tense thing means nothing. Old Hebrew had a word for boy and the authors choose not to use. There is a reason why no one fluent in Hebrew makes that argument and instead tries to use the context argument, like Dan did. There is no context that makes it not horrific. The text requires you to murder men who had consensual gay sex. The very word used in that passage is used only to describe ADULTS with a cock in every other single instance in the OT. From Adam onward.
I think the popular core list of 7 letters are authentic but that doesn't mean the 6 forgeries have nothing Paul said.
Do you have any academic sources that posit Leviticus and Deuteronomy were written by the same authors? That’s a unique claim, they have clearly different priorities and values. The only folks I’ve heard claim they were authored by the same people are those that believe they were all written by Moses, which is certainly not the academic viewpoint.
I have not mentioned “boys” at all. I think you are projecting other arguments you’ve heard on to me, and not addressing my claim. I am claiming that in the context of the Bronze Age Middle East, the concept of consensual gay sex between adult men was not something that would be on the mind of the priestly folks tasked with compiling ritual law. The situation that they would have actually encountered or heard of would be assault.
The forged letters definitely have elements of what Paul said - if I wanted to forge a new Harry Potter book plagiarizing and rewriting some of the old books would be a good strategy. They also have changes that were clearly used to advocate theological positions that Paul would have opposed - most of the interesting stuff is related to soteriology though.
I don't know you were a mind reader with access to a time machine. Now, what does the text say? In literal Hebrew.
I am not studied enough in Hebrew to go into arguments concerning מִשְׁכְּבֵי אִשָּׁה, but considering it is a phrase that does not show up elsewhere in the Bible or contemporary Hebrew texts, I think reading it as unambiguously referring to consensual sex between men is the mind reading. Just like ἀρσενοκοίτης, we are trying to parse words with complicated meanings seated in a very specific cultural context.
אִשָּׁה means women, adult female. מִשְׁכְּבֵי means fucking. Both words are everywhere in that same chapter. Also if you want to be fully pedantic you don't even need the accent marks for both. Why didn't you include the entire sentence?
Here https://www.chabad.org/library/bible_cdo/aid/9921/jewish/Chapter-20.htm
The only word you can argue with is זָכָר֙ which means male not just adult male. This is not a limiting term this is a broad term, this means eunchs and this means guys from other tribes, or spirits in the form of human males. There was a word for boy (יֶלֶד) which is not used, a word for slave (עֶבֶד) also not used, and a word for male angels also not used. The authors deliberately choose a word that would cover all human form males and combined with the rules against punish of a rape victim would result in only consensual gay male sex being banned.
Hebrew really isn't that hard. 25 letters, about 100 roots, heavy dependence on prefixes and suffixes. It took a fair amount of self-study before I got to the point where I could get through the Book of Job word for word. If a person as bad as languages as me can do it I am sure you can.
The hard part is when you get to a word that is used like once and you see these really long debates online about what it means, but for these basic words like male, sex, boy, and slave they are all over.