While committed couples now have June weddings in California that they have dreamed about for years, it’s again time to ask why some people justify homophobia because of a desire to be good Christians. What is the Biblical source of this misunderstanding?
For the second time this year, I offer Rabbi Gershon’s response to those who fear that homosexuality is a sin according to the Bible. From his website (see under “Pumbedissa”):
(M)ost Jews today know their scriptures mainly through the out-of-context renditions by the Church or as innocently misrepresented to them by well-meaning Christians…
The Jewish scriptural prohibition against homosexuality appears in the context of laws concerning cultic rites performed by seven specific nations whose religious worship rites we were instructed not to emulate in our own worship (Leviticus 18:3 and 22; 20:13 and 23; Deuteronomy 23:18). Therefore the wording is: “to lay with a man as with a woman,” something a true homosexual man does not do.
The prohibition is against a horny heterosexual man using another man for sex, which ritually occurred in ancient religious worship among some of those seven nations our ancestors were warned against emulating. To translate that prohibition, therefore, as applying to any homosexual relationship context is to translate it in such a way that it leaves the realm of any divine ordination and enters instead the realm of subjective mortal homophobia.
The ancient rabbis must have had some sense of this problem when they ruled 2100 years ago that any homosexual sex short of anal intercourse was NOT included in the biblical prohibition (Babylonian Talmud, Yevamot 54a-56a; Sotah 26b; Nidah 13a; see Maimonides’ Perush L’Mishnayot on Sanhedrin 54a). Why did they bother to offer that qualification if it was so clear to them that homosexuality was forbidden?
Also, lesbianism, according to Jewish law, was never prohibited. And though a single third century rabbi attempted to legislate against it, he was overruled by the majority of the sages (Babylonian Talmud, Yevamot 76a). Writing about lesbianism, Maimonides rules: “It is neither a biblical nor a rabbinic prohibition” (Perush L’Mishnayot on Sanhedrin 54a).
