The Bible forbids gay sex. But an earlier version of the text permitted it.
— Read on www.nytimes.com/2018/07/21/opinion/sunday/bible-prohibit-gay-sex.html
I read Leviticus 18 as a list. To me, the section which contains the famous prohibition consists of 3 pieces. I’m reading the prohibition against sex between men as the second of 3 related parts because the 1st and 3rd share a strong similarity, which is that the 1st refers to a Canaanite ritual practice and the 3rd appears to also refer to a Canaanite ritual practice. Put them together and it reads: don’t sacrifice your children to God, don’t engage in ritual homosexual sex as an offering to God, and don’t have sex with animals as an offering to God. These three connect forms of offering: God doesn’t want you to kill your children, have ritual homosexual sex or ritual sex with beasts. It doesn’t strictly say you can’t kill your children, but I think the idea is that you wouldn’t otherwise kill your child except as a sacrifice, assuming the child is healthy. This opens some dark doorways that lead to the expectation that children might be killed because they weren’t healthy, which I expect was normal then, so the concept is limited to those you wouldn’t otherwise kill, which fits with the concept of Cain and Abel and the quality of your sacrifice, with the implication that Cain offered God less than the best, less than a healthy lamb. It doesn’t say you can’t have homosexual sex or sex with animals unless you extend the prohibition in the same way you’ve extended ‘no child sacrifice’ to ‘no child killing’ – which again highlights the anti-Godly nature of ‘honor killing’. To me, the point of ‘no sex with’ as an offering is fascinating: it’s the male expression of God as the provider of the seeds of life – that fertilize an egg and any number of eggs in a woman and in a number of women – so the concept of that as an offering would be that man asserts sexual dominion over man and over beast as a devotional act. This contrasts with the relationship of man and woman in Judaism, in which neither has dominion but instead each has obligations to the other, and the fulfillment of those obligations is a devotional act. It’s interesting then that sex between man and woman or woman and woman is not excluded as a devotional act. That may be because it was common in so many ancient societies. It may also be because sexuality was eventually channeled into the ‘covenant’ of marriage and the like.
Why ban these devotional acts? Look back at the easy one: no child sacrifice. It only matters because God says ‘me no like, so don’t do’, and that occurs only because God is saying ‘don’t act like me, don’t pretend that you’re in my place as taker of life, as spreader of life, as maker of the animals, and so on.’ Why? Because God is becoming more abstracted from the literal, so instead of taking life because God takes life and so on, we should recognize that we aren’t going to be like God that way, that we can’t be like God doing that. To me, the act of homosexuality is not the same as offering that act as a ritual before God. That is why I pointed out the prohibition isn’t against child killing but ritual child killing: it’s the performance of acts before God as the audience for those acts. I can imagine the people of that time thinking it was perfectly normal to leave malformed babies out to die – or killing them in some way – but they had begun to differentiate between what they were and what God is so that imitation of God’s ways changes. Hidden in there is what I think is a deeper meaning: these are imitations of God’s ways, which makes sense when you realize that of course God has sex with beasts and sex with men because God infuses our thoughts and flows through us into new life. God’s ways are not the ways of people, nor are the ways of people the ways of beasts. These bans are ways of marking a growth in awareness.
But if imitation of God doesn’t make us holy, then what the heck are we doing? We try to offer the best, most heartfelt prayers, but does God pray? If God prays to us, it’s that we do better and that, apparently, does not include getting better at sacrifices that are enactments of God’s own behavior as life force and life taker. You can understand child sacrifice: here is this precious gift, a healthy child, which I now give to you, God, in fire. It is: I assert your dominion by asserting the power of death you have over this life through my hand. You see the same thing in ritual sex: you assert dominion over beasts and over men in a literalized fashion. It is that form of submission which is being prohibited.
jomi: playing with perception 