The Old Testament and Homosexuality

             After roughly four hundred years of slavery, God had delivered the Israelites from Egyptian rule.  God had sent Moses to demand that the Egyptian Pharaoh release the Israelites from captivity, and upon his refusal, God displayed his power before the Egyptians, showing that He alone is the one True God.

            The Israelites, now a free people, were wandering the desert in search of the Promised Land, which God had promised to Abraham in Genesis twelve.  In the midst of their search (Exodus 20), God came to meet with Moses, and delivered to him the Ten Commandments.  At this time God had done something new in humanity, He had provided them with the law.

            Following the advent of the Mosaic Law (the law given to Moses), the Israelites, now known as God’s chosen people, were commanded to build the Tabernacle, which would house the presence of God.  The Israelites were now to become “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”^[1]  The latter part of the book of Exodus provides the Israelite people with the Law, and with the instructions on the building of the Tabernacle.  By the end of the book of Exodus the Tabernacle has been constructed and the following book, Leviticus, continues giving Law commands on how the Israelites are to fulfill the commission of being a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

            It is in the book of Leviticus that we first encounter a command addressing homosexuality.[2]  The book of Leviticus is comprised of Laws on Sacrifice, Instructions for the Priests, Institution of the Priesthood, Uncleanness Treatment, and Prescriptions for Practical Holiness.  It is in the last section, Practical Holiness, where we find commandments about the basic principles of sexual behavior, and more specifically, the commandment regarding homosexuality.

            Leviticus 18:22 appears in a series of principles or commands regarding proper sexual conduct of God’s holy people.  “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.”^[3]  Leviticus 18:22, clearly shows that the Old Testament prohibits acts of homosexual sex for the Israelite nation.  As one author puts it: “The language is devastatingly untechnical, leaving no room for ambiguity.”[4]  The command is then repeated in Leviticus 20:13, but in the restatement, it attaches a penalty to the command: “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.”^[5]  The implications drawn from these two passages alone show that the Israelites certainly would have understood homosexual sexual acts to be condemned.

There are several things to consider when looking at this passage.  First we must look at the term “abomination”.  תּוֹעֵבָה (tôʿēbâ) abominable/abomination:

As with the verb, so also with the noun the abomination may be of a physical, ritual or ethical nature and may be abhorred by God or man… Homosexuality and other perversions are repugnant to God and fall under his judgment (Lev 18:22–30; 20:13). Idolatry (Deut 7:25), human sacrifice (Deut 12:31), eating ritually unclean animals (Deut 14:3–8), sacrificing defective animals (Deut 17:1), conducting one’s business dishonestly (Deut 25:13–16), practicing ritual prostitution (I Kgs 14:23f.), and similar acts of disobedience… were sure to bring God’s wrath on those who perpetrated them. Twelve times the book of Proverbs uses the phrase, “is an abomination to the Lord.” In Ps 88, a prayer for help written by a man close to death, the physically repulsive appearance of a tôʿēbâ is stressed; the man’s former friends avoid him because they consider him to be a thing of horror^[6]

            What is important to note about ‘abomination’ (tôʿēbâ) is that it is not reserved specifically for homosexual sexual acts.  The passage states that homosexuality (referring to the actual act of homosexual sex, not orientation) is repugnant (extremely distasteful or unacceptable) to God on the basis that it does not conform to the design God intended for mankind.  What the passage does not suggest is that homosexual sexual acts are worse than other sins, but rather, that they fit into the category of abomination, which extends to various other types of sin, including idolatry, which is often viewed as the basis for every kind of sin.

            Idolatry is putting something else before God.  For most of us in modern western culture, the idol tends to be our own desires.  Idolatry is something that is universal, as we saw in the description of the fall of mankind; idolatry led to the introduction of sin into the world and is at the heart of our sinful actions against God.  If this is the case, and if idolatry is an abomination, all of mankind stands with the same stain of guilt as those who are guilty of homosexual sexual acts, which also fit into the category of abomination.

            This is not to say that those who are guilty of committing a homosexual sexual act are acquitted from guilt, but rather, the concept that homosexual sin is somehow more abhorrent than any other sin is simply not Biblical.

            The basis of why homosexual sexual acts are condemned in the Levitical text has to do with the created order.  God, in creation, created man and woman in his image with the intended sexual acts to be within the confines of a heterosexual marriage union.  The Levitical laws surrounding homosexual sexual acts are not condemning one’s sexual orientation, but rather the actual sexual acts, on the basis that they do not conform to the intended natural order God created.  In other words, the reason homosexual acts were unacceptable, is because they went against the intended design of the designer.  As the designer of mankind, God has the right to determine which acts are deemed appropriate or inappropriate for mankind, as seen in the section on ‘Proper Response to the Gospel.’

            One might then ask why Christians no longer follow the latter portion of Leviticus 20:13, which states that those who are caught practicing homosexual acts should be put to death.  To properly understand this, we must first look to the cultural implications of the passage.  The Israelites were becoming a theocratic nation at the time when they received the Levitical Laws.  This meant that the laws were not only to govern moral conduct, but civil punishment for moral acts.  In our present context we are no longer part of a theocratic government, and are not bound to the responsibility of punishing someone guilty of committing homosexual sexual acts.  With the Old Covenant, the theocratic society was intended to be an ethnic national society, a holy nation, whereby the Israelites were required to cleanse from among themselves anyone who was considered impure or unholy.

            Under the new covenant in Jesus, we are no longer a theocratic, ethnic national society, but rather a holy people made of all ethnicities and nationalities.  The new covenant is not a theocracy and therefore we are not bound by the theocratic demands that were applicable in Leviticus, although the moral law (that we not break what is morally unacceptable to God) is tied to the character of God, not the civil requirements of the people, and is therefore still applicable.

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^[1] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. 2001 (Ex 19:6). Wheaton: Standard Bible Society.

[2] Although the first command regarding homosexuality is found in Leviticus, the first instance of homosexuality being condemned comes from the story in Genesis 19.

^[3] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. 2001 (Le 18:22). Wheaton: Standard Bible Society.

[4] Roy Gane, Leviticus, Numbers, The NIV Application Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2004), 321.

^[5] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. 2001 (Le 20:13). Wheaton: Standard Bible Society.

^[6] Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament. 1999 (R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer, Jr. & B. K. Waltke, Ed.) (electronic ed.) (977). Chicago: Moody Press.