Over the past decade, I have been involved in a study of the so-called anti-homosexual texts of Leviticus in the original Hebrew versions extant, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and (with the aid of a Catholic Priest and a Biblical Languages student at Emory University) the Greek and Latin texts.
This study has involved reviewing Talmudic texts and other materials of a collateral nature to the subject matter being studied; anthropology, archaeology, philology, and etymology, to name but a few.
As a result of my research, I am convinced of two things:
1. THE ORIGINAL HEBREW TEXTS HAD ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH HOMOSEXUALITY, either for or against; but with the SUBSTITUTION, and utilization, of the body of one man by another (heterosexual) man for the PREFERRED body of a woman, usually in the context of religious rituals as practiced by the fertility cults of the Egyptian, Babylonian and Canaanite religions.
2. The texts of Leviticus (and Deuteronomy) were at a MUCH later date (about 1500 years later), utilized by the teachers and Rabbis of the Jewish religious tradition to condemn homosexuality. This happened in the 4th to 6th centuries under THREAT from the Christian governmental and ecclesiastical authorities. The Church needed to have the Jewish interpretation of the texts be in accordance with their own commentaries and teachings on homosexuality and sexual perversion.
The Byzantine Christian Church’s position concerning sexual activity, was to view it as sinful. Women were viewed as conduits of sexual impurity through menstruation, and religious impurity through the practice of witchcraft (folk healing practices) and devil worship. Homosexual men were viewed as women in male bodies, and thus perceived by the Church as equal to women in inherent impurity and the capability of being susceptible to demonic practices and worship.
As the Hebrew Bible was viewed as the FOUNDATION for the beliefs and teachings of Christianity, the Church needed that the texts in the Hebrew Bible be understood as having the Rabbis and teachers of the Jewish tradition also condemning homosexuality. Because of this need, we find, in the 5th century, the Church burning Jewish commentaries on the Hebrew Bible, as the commentators positions, written in the margins of their Hebrew Bibles did not accord with the anti-sexual, anti-feminist, anti-homosexual position of the Church.
The Hebrew Bible has God commanding the androgynous Adam to be sexual, replace him/herself, and fill the earth (see Genesis 1: 28). If God commands sex, then how can it be viewed as a “necessary evil?”
In the second chapter, God takes the female Adam from the side of the androgynous Adam AFTER God has realized that “it is not good for a human to be alone.” After the separation of the female Adam from the male Adam, the male Adam says; “This one shall AGAIN be bone from my bone, and flesh from my flesh. She shall be called EESHAH (A Creature of Passion) because she was taken from the Passion Place (Eysh-Fire). A passionate being (masculine side) shall therefore leave his father and his mother and be united with his other passionate being (his feminine side), and they shall be one being (Genesis 2: 23-24). To the Hebrew mind, God is COMMANDING that humans be paired together in marriage.
Within the Hebrew Torah readings of Achare Mot (Leviticus 16: 1-18: 30) and Kedosheem (Leviticus 19: 1-20: 27) are found the verses that have been utilized for the past sixteen hundred years, by Jewish and Christian fundamentalist teachers to wrongly persecute a small portion of the human population.
These specific texts are: Leviticus 18: 22; which states: “V’et zachar lo tishkav mishkevey eeshah toeyvah hee.” "Do not lie (sexually) with a male as you would with a woman, since this is an abomination."
And, Leviticus 20: 13, which states: "V'eesh asher yishkav et-zakhar mishkevey eeshah toeyvah. Asu shenayhem mot yumatu dameyhem bam." If a man has sexual intercourse with a man in the same manner as with a woman, they have both committed a disgusting perversion. They shall die by being stoned to death."
It is a full one thousand years AFTER these verses were written in Leviticus, also called Torat Kohanim (Instructions for the Priests), during a period of historical time when Jews were in contact with a European based, Greek thinking culture that had an openly promiscuous sexual modality, that the very first Talmudic references to PUBLIC DISPLAYS of homosexual like activity as a perversion of JEWISH religious practice are recorded. According to Rabbi Jacob Milgrom, the translator and commentator of the prestigious Anchor Bible Series Translation of the Book of Leviticus, and the Jewish Publication Society Commentary on the Book of Numbers, these texts are referring to non–Israelite RELIGIOUS sexual and sexual abuse practices that Israelites were not to imitate in the Land of Israel. PLEASE READ ON TO THE NEXT PAGE !!!!
