One of the recent reviews of "The Bible Now" that was favorable on the whole criticized us on one point in our chapter on homosexuality. The reviewer said that we were liberals, with a liberal agenda, and that we had twisted the clear meaning of the biblical law to fulfill that agenda.
Others have criticized us at times in our careers for being conservative.
As we said in the first of these posts and in the book, we are scholars, not politicians. Our job isn't to score points for a side, push an agenda or to re-size the Bible to fit our personal views. So far as we know, all the other reviews and endorsements we have received thus far have gotten that point. That doesn't make this one claim in this one review wrong. We don't determine the truth by majority vote. Nor have we ever written a response to a review. So what are we supposed to do when someone criticizes both our scholarship and our integrity in one shot? We do what scholars are supposed to do. We go back to the evidence. So here's the text and a summary of the evidence:
"You shall not lay a male the layings of a woman; it is a to'ebah" (offensive thing)
(Leviticus 18:22).
"And a man who will lay a male the layings of a woman: the two of them have done a to'ebah (offensive thing). They shall be put to death. Their blood is on them"
(Leviticus 20:13).
We just want to remind you first that this is just one point in a larger treatment of a very controversial subject, and there's much more to the chapter. There are several points here that call for treatment: Why does the text prohibit only male homosexual acts and not female? Which acts does it forbid: only penetrative intercourse, or all acts? These are in that chapter, and they're important, but they're not the subject of this post.
The point on which we were thought to be "twisting" came up later in our discussion. We acknowledged that many people have recognized that these two texts pretty clearly do prohibit at least some kinds of male-male sex, but they have asked whether there is any legitimate "way out," anything in the text that might provide for some change in the law. For example, one of our students once pointed out that it is, after all, impossible to lie with a man in the way one does with a woman -- namely, vaginal sex -- so no one can violate this commandment! That's a clever, even fascinating idea, but why then would the commandment exist if it prohibits something that is impossible anyway? And besides, the plural phrase "a woman's layings" (miskebê 'issah) implies that many acts, not just vaginal sex, are included here.
Similarly, a daughter of one of the authors of this book pointed out that a homosexual man may not mind a commandment that tells him that he can't lie with men the way he lies with women because he does not lie with women! This, too, is not a compelling argument, (though it's clever). We considered other such arguments as well but found all of them inadequate. For left or right, liberal or conservative, gay or straight, we don't think that we can define our way out of the question by looking for such loopholes in the law. The law really means what pretty much everyone has taken it to mean for centuries. Whatever view one takes, one must address the law fairly in terms of what it says.
So we sought to contribute another perspective that we believe can be helpful on this subject. The text identifies male homosexual acts by the technical term to'ebah, translated in English here as "an offensive thing" or in older translations as "an abomination." This is important because most things that are forbidden in biblical law are not identified with this word. In both of the contexts in Leviticus (chapters 18 and 20), male homosexuality is the only act to be called this. (Other acts are included broadly in a line at the end of chapter 18.) So this term, which is an important one in the Bible in general, is particularly important with regard to the law about male homosexual acts.
The question is: Is this term to'ebah an absolute, meaning that an act that is a to'ebah is wrong in itself and can never be otherwise? Or is the term relative -- meaning that something that is a to'ebah to one person may not be offensive to another, or something that is a to'ebah in one culture may not be offensive in another, or something that is a to'ebah in one generation or time period may not be offensive in another -- in which case the law may change as people's perceptions change?
