First
of all, the people who insist that the Bible condemns homosexuality put forward
their argument based on two things. First, Leviticus, a book written by a group
of anonymous Jewish priests in the centuries following the Bablyonian invasion
of Israel, more than 2000 years ago. I will point out the obvious fact that no
anonymous document written by an unknown committee can be claimed as divine
revelation: nobody can demonstrate with any certainty where this material came
from. So it wasn’t God who disliked the gays: it was this gaggle of priests who
thought that gays were icky.
Second, the disciple Paul. Paul himself felt that gays were “wicked” and should be punished, but not long before he wrote that, before he converted, he felt that Christians were wicked and should be punished. So Paul is also a very slender reed to hang an argument onto, particularly since Paul is the same person who decreed that members of the Christian church didn’t need to follow Torah law, which we will address later in this article: in other words, opponents of gay marriage are basing their fight on Leviticus and on the guy who rejected Leviticus.
Incidentally, why are
evangelicals so bent out of shape about lesbians, when the ban on homosexuality
in Leviticus doesn’t mention them at all? It’s aimed at men only.
Second, the disciple Paul. Paul himself felt that gays were “wicked” and should be punished, but not long before he wrote that, before he converted, he felt that Christians were wicked and should be punished. So Paul is also a very slender reed to hang an argument onto, particularly since Paul is the same person who decreed that members of the Christian church didn’t need to follow Torah law, which we will address later in this article: in other words, opponents of gay marriage are basing their fight on Leviticus and on the guy who rejected Leviticus.
They
refer to Bible passages which they claim to be condemnations of homosexuality,
but which don’t really say what they’re claiming, or are in dispute: the story
of Sodom, and passages from Matthew, Acts, Romans and Corinthians. Meanwhile –
more cherry-picking -- evangelicals
neatly ignore the story of Ruth and Naomi, and the story of David and Jonathan,
the love that surpasses the love of women.
This whole story begins with the first five books of the Bible, the Torah, given to us by God, Moses, his brother Aaron, or Moses’ scribe, or some other anonymous early sources, depending on what you believe. Whoever wrote the Torah had a critical goal: to build a nation that was totally pure, undefiled by any faith other than Judaism. And they were willing to go to appalling lengths to get it. As early as Exodus, God decided that if the Israelites shared their country with any non-Jews – gentiles – they would be contaminated, and tempted into worshipping other gods. So he told the Jews to take the Holy Land by force and kill everyone there, and he would help them do it. In other words, genocide, ethnic cleansing. Apparently the Israelite march from Egypt to the Holy Land showed God the need for this: along the way the Jews met Moab women and worshipped Moabite gods; God was forced to kill 24,000 people to show them the error of their ways.
God made two exceptions to the slaughter: if the Jewish soldiers found virgins while they were slaughtering the locals, they could keep the young girls for themselves (Numbers 31), and if a far-off city at the edge of the Holy Land surrendered, the locals could be enslaved instead of killed. So presumably rape and slavery were considered merciful, because those folks weren’t killed outright.
Through Deuteronomy and into the book of Joshua (and later under King David), the Israelites allegedly marched to the promised land, and killed, and killed, and killed. All to ensure that God’s laws were kept perfectly, and that no other Gods were even heard of, since the faithful of all the other religions had been murdered. Historically, however, it never happened: it was a fable invented by the Jewish priests to show that keeping God’s people and his laws pure was so important, that it even justified genocide. The Jewish writers preferred that future generations see the Jews as mass murderers, rather than as people who tolerated what Hitler would call “racial pollution”. Ironic. The authors, either priests or scribes working on behalf of the priests, wanted to stress the critical importance of keeping the Jews away from any exposure to non-Torah gods or ideas.
This in fact is a key tenet of monotheism: keeping the believers away from all other religions. Throughout the Old Testament, the men of God warned the Jews: don’t even ask about other gods, and kill anyone who does – destroy their whole town if that’s what it takes. The warnings about false prophets peddling unauthorized beliefs, even under the guise of regular priesthood, were incessant. The priests warned about witches, about atheists, about idols. Saint Stephen said the Jewish priests went too far, even persecuting genuine prophets. Stephen’s Christian colleagues initially tolerated other Christian preachers, under the doctrine that anyone who wasn’t against them was for them, but later they too began warning about fake preachers pretending to be Christians: not only did they want monotheism, they wanted to manage the quality control of the product.
Back to the Old Testament, where the Israelites were “liberating” their land. As the Jews murdered and took over territory, they dutifully repeated the orders of God’s priests: don’t mix in with any other ethnic groups or their gods, kill anyone who doesn’t want Jehovah, don’t ever let gentiles into Jerusalem. But the agenda of the Jews didn’t coincide perfectly with Jehovah’s: although they were perfectly happy to invade Palestine, kill the locals and steal everything that wasn’t nailed down, they showed little interest in maintain religious purity. They didn’t even bother to drive out all of the indigenous Canaanites, which is where the trouble began.
The Jews, from the common man right up to the kings, began intermarrying with other ethnic groups, worshipping other gods, making idols, all in violation of Torah law. It was an endless cycle: a good king would clean out the temple and destroy all the idols, and then an evil king would come along, often marry a foreigner with foreign gods, and put the idols back. King Solomon himself married pagan women (with a harem of a thousand women he had to branch out); this helped contribute to the division of the kingdom, whereupon the kings of both the northern realm and the southern kingdom went pagan throughout their terrible 200-year tenure.
So the laws of God, written in the Torah, were never seriously kept by anybody, right from the beginning. One king built a temple for Baal. In Chronicles they simply rescheduled Passover because the temple wasn’t ready: imagine the fuss today if someone tried to reschedule Christmas! The holiday of Tu Bishvat was established in violation of the original interpretation of Torah law. Even Jehovah himself stretched his own rule on idolatry by giving instruction (in Ezekiel 5) for a process that sounds an awful lot like a voodoo curse, when he wasn’t violating thou-shalt-not-kill a few million times.
The Jews handled Torah law with a carelessness that bordered on contempt. In Samuel they brought the Ark of the Covenant right onto a battlefield, just for good luck: they lost both the battle and the ark. Apparently the victorious Philistines were more careful with the Ark than the Jews had ever been. Later there were attempts to hide the Ark, and apparently the Jews just lost track of it somehow. Much later, King Josiah’s servants were bumbling around in a storeroom and found copies of the original Torah texts: they were tremendously excited, and worried that they hadn’t been following the rules written therein for quite some time.
Jews have never really been fanatic about adhering
word-for-word to the Torah, and it was their book in the first place, before
the Christians grabbed onto it.
Not only have the Jews never been serious about interpreting all of the Bible literally – they have never even agreed on what the Bible means. For 2000 years their greatest religious minds have been arguing about what it all means, and writing commentaries about it. That’s how we ended up with the Talmud.
