<p>Leviticus is the perfect example.</p>
<p>If you read without context, it says no sex between men; it’s silent about sex between women. That’s one way to read and heaven knows I see a lot of that but it’s not the normal way we read because we normally see things in context.</p>
<p>The context is this prohibition is the middle of 3. The other two are specifically Canaanite worship rituals: child sacrifice and sex with animals. Hard to believe but we absolutely know that child sacrifice was real in that part of the world. We even have large scale evidence of child sacrifice across social levels in Carthage, which puts new light on the Roman disgust for Carthage.</p>
<p>In context, the prohibition of male-male sex is just as easily interpreted as “no sex between men as part of the worship of God”. That says nothing about consensual sex. This interpretation follows along not only with the trend of Israelite rejection of Canaanite worship practices but also with the story of Sodom. Remember that? They come to the city and the men of the town try to rape new comers. That isn’t consensual male-male sex but rape. Note that there never really appears anywhere a prohibition against raping women. </p>
<p>And the story of Sodom follows from the conception of creation. I can’t remember the verse but it says “the sons of God knew the daughters of the earth” or something like that. The imagery is pretty basic: a man can have children with many women and thus can bring forth life like God does from many sources. This is represented generally in the long lists of who begat whom because each named male is the bringer forth of life in that generation. (Yes, this is ridiculously sexist. Men wrote this.)</p>
<p>So if you grow up in a tradition which takes the Leviticus prohibition out of context and which applies cultural hatreds, then you believe God wants this result. If you have a brain to think about it, maybe you decide the meaning is different. </p>
<p>I note as well that John Boswell and others have located much of the animus against homosexuality to the Church’s efforts to reform its own priesthood in the Middle Ages. So in essence, we hear today the echoes of the Church trying to stamp out what it now hides.</p>
<p>Some Biblical text is more ambiguous than we want to believe and some is more bluntly misinterpreted. An example of the latter is the prohibition against adultery is nearly always interpreted wrongly if you know history. It meant sex with a married woman, not sex outside of marriage. Sex with a married woman could result in a child not of the husband and that could mix up inheritance rights and could cause violence. They were addressing the “who’s the daddy” problem. </p>
<p>The Bible has some blunt references to sex outside marriage as not only being ok but as good. The most famous may be Tamar. She dresses as a prostitute and has sex with Judah (I think). He’s married. He isn’t living up to his obligations after the death of her husband. Neither is castigated. So if you read the Bible with the literalness that so many want, married men can have sex with unmarried women and it isn’t adultery.</p>