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Leviticus 15-18



Leviticus 12 dealt with specifically female issues of purity, now Leviticus 15 deals primarily with male issues of purity after a “discharge”.  Two thoughts come to mind after reading this chapter:
  1. I am glad we do not have to follow all of these laws anymore.
  2. Whoever wrote some of these laws must have had obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Lawrence Boadt offers a helpful summary of Leviticus 16….
The taboos in chapters 11-15 are followed by the liturgy for the day of atonement in chapter 16. This rite is the climax of the first part of Leviticus. It is reserved to the high priest to place all the sins of Israel on the head of a goat once a year and drive the goat into the desert to die. It symbolizes God’s forgiving nature which always wipes the slate clean for his people. This is the origin of the idea of a “scapegoat.”[1]
Boadt also gives a helpful summary of the section of Leviticus that begins with chapter 17….
The last part of Leviticus consists of a special body of laws that are called together the “holiness code.” It gets this name from the stress it places on God as holy, and the need for the levites to imitate God’s holiness, and to keep themselves separate from merely profane behavior unworthy of their special calling. It includes rules on sex, marriage, touching blood, violating moral commandments, and upholding justice, and above all on the keeping of feast days and celebrations for Yahweh. It is one of the most advanced expressions of Israel’s special relationship to its God.[2]
Out of all the laws in the holiness code the one that is probably most deserving of special attention and comment in our day is in Leviticus 18:22. Here is Richard Elliott Friedman’s take on it….
Why is male homosexuality explicitly forbidden in the Torah but not female? Some would surmise that it is because women are controlled in a patriarchal Israelite society; and so a woman would simply have no choice but to marry a man. But this is not an adequate explanation, because there would still be opportunities for female homosexual liaisons. Some would say that the concern is the seed, which is understood to come from the male, and therefore is “wasted” in another male. But the text calls homosexuality “an offensive thing” (in older translations: “an abomination”), which certainly sounds like an abhorrence of the act, and not just a concern with the practical matter of reproduction. The reason may rather be because the Torah comes from a world in which there is polygamy. A man can have sex with his two wives simultaneously. That this is understood to be permissible is implied by the fact that the law in v. 18 above forbids it only with sisters…Or, even if the above case means marriage and not simultaneous sex, then simultaneous sex still is not forbidden anywhere in the Torah. If simultaneous sex with one’s two (or more) wives is practiced, it would be difficult to allow this while forbidding female homosexuality. (At minimum, it could require a number of laws specifying what sort of contact is permissible and under what circumstances.)
In the present state of knowledge concerning homosexuality, it is difficult to justify its prohibition in the Torah. All of the movements in Judaism (and other religions) are currently contending with this issue. Its resolution ultimately must lie in the law of Deuteronomy that states that, for difficult matters of the law, people must turn to the authorities of their age, to those who are competent to judge, and those judges must decide (Deut 17:8-9).
In my own view, the present understanding of the nature of homosexuality indicates that it is not an “offensive thing” (also translated “abomination”) as described in this verse. The Hebrew term for “offensive thing” (to ebah) is understood to be a relative term, which varies according to human perceptions. For example, in Genesis, Joseph tells his brothers that “any shepherd is an offensive thing to Egypt” (46:34); but, obviously, it is not an offensive thing to the Israelites. In light of the evidence at present, homosexuality cannot be said to be unnatural, nor is it an illness. Its prohibition in this verse explicitly applies only so long as it is properly perceived to be offensive, and therefore the current state of evidence suggests that the period in which this commandment was binding has come to an end.[3]
It is interesting to me that the verses about the scapegoat, and this law about homosexual practice, appear so close together in the Hebrew Scriptures. I say this is intriguing because, coincidentally, gays have been made into the scapegoat quite often in recent history. For example, there is a August 2013 headline in The New Statesman that reads: "Putin's 'war on gays' is a desperate search for scapegoats". In other words, some people find it convenient to blame gays for many things that are wrong in society or in the world today. Maybe it's time we started looking into our own hearts. Perhaps it is also time that we remember the ritual of the scapegoat is all about forgiveness and compassion.


[1] Boadt, Reading the Old Testament, 189
[2] Ibid, 189-190
[3] Friedman, Commentary on the Torah, 377-378

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