This is the second in a short series of posts addressed to the common perception among Christians that the Bible stands squarely opposed to queer sex. Anyone who would argue differently, so this goes, has to do so in the face of the plain sense of the scriptures. To support same-sex marriage is to oppose the Bible. But is this true? In this post, I look at one set of such texts, the holiness texts based on Leviticus but found also in the New Testament (1 Corinthians 6 and 1 Timothy 1), discovering that these texts present the church with a challenge, but not the challenge that usually has been read into the texts. In the following post, I’ll turn to another set of texts, also cited against same-sex marriage, in which a powerful story offers another challenge to the church that we ignore at our peril.  

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We are losing the Bible, losing the Bible even among those who make the strongest claims for it. One of the saddest aspects of the current church debate about same-sex marriage is that the Bible has been lost on both sides of the debate. It has been lost for those who see in the Bible only condemnation and have therefore largely dismissed it. It has been lost equally among those who claim it, use it against others, but who, for all that, have not really engaged it. If I can do anything in this current moment of ecclesiastical disintegration, it would be to put the Bible back at the center of the discussion, not to clobber one side or the other but to grasp what the Bible has to show us.

Which brings me to Leviticus. Of all the books in the Christian Bible Leviticus may be the least loved. In rabbinic tradition, it was known as tôrat kōhănîm, “the manual of the priests” (on this and almost everything else about Leviticus, see the massive—2714 pages—commentary by Jacob Milgrom in the Anchor Bible series). Leviticus is filled with rules: laws, instructions, and rituals of various kinds. It often reads as if it were written by lawyers, which it was. None of this tends to recommend the book to contemporary Christians.

Leviticus comes in two books. The first half, chapters 1-16, is often called P for Priestly. The second half, roughly chapters 17-27 is called H, for Holiness Code. These collections of laws and rituals represent two schools of thought in ancient Israel with subtle differences of theology and approaches to the question of how Israel should live.

It’s hard to date the discussions internal to Leviticus exactly. For most scholars, both P and H come from the time of the Babylonian exile or even later. They look forward by looking back, asking not only what went wrong for Israel, but how a restored community should live. The laws say this is how things should have been, even if they were never quite like this. They are as much theological reflection as legal prescription. 

It’s the second collection that is important for our purposes here, the Holiness Code. Of the seven biblical texts said to stand against same-sex marriage, two are found in these chapters. What’s more, two of the three New Testament texts included in the seven, are derived directly from the Leviticus texts, which means that of the seven texts, four are in one way or another connected to Leviticus. But I’ll not begin with them, the texts about same-sex relations. To begin with them is to rip them out of context and to misread them. Better to begin with what’s going with the Holiness Code in general. 

The theme of the Holiness Code—this will come as no surprise—is, well, holiness. The core statement of the theme is found in chapter 19, which begins:

Yhwh spoke to Moses, saying, “Address the whole congregation of the Israelites. You shall say to them: ‘Holy you shall be for holy I am, YHWH, your God.

If you are a reader of the Old Testament, you will hear in this echoes of Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5-6. The echoes grow stronger in the next verses as it goes through several of the ten commandments, expanding and reflecting on them. At the end of the chapter, it circles back, this time directly quoting Exodus 20:2, “I am Yhwh your God who brought you out of Egypt” (19:36).

What’s being claimed by these echoes of Exodus and Deuteronomy is that these verses—and the chapters that surround them—are constitutive, covenantal, as are Exodus 19-20 and Deuteronomy 5-6. It’s as if the people are back at the mountain, receiving their instructions anew. The instructions center the people on the concept of holiness: “Be holy as I am holy.” 

Holiness in the scriptures is a kind of belonging, a chosenness, selected for divine purposes. The key text, repeated in the New Testament, is Exodus 19:5-6. In this passage, Yhwh is speaking:

So then, if you listen well to my voice and keep covenant, you will be my personal possession from among all the peoples—for all the [people of the] earth belong to me—and you will become for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” (See for the New Testament, 1 Peter 2:4-10, especially verse 9)

Holiness involves, in Milgrom’s phrasing, both “separation from” and “separation to.” “Separation from” is what distinguishes the qualities of the holy from what is not holy. It describes a kind of excellence. Or, kinds of excellence: moral excellence, excellence as a matter of community life, excellence in how that community life is expressed, and more. “Separation to,” often forgotten, is the purpose for which the people are separated out. They are separated to God, and to serve God means serving God’s mission of reconciling the world to God’s own self. This is what it means to be a “kingdom of priests.” As priests are to the people, lifting praise to God and prayers for the people, so the holy community is to the world, lifting praise to God and prayers for all God’s creation. 

In doing these things, Milgrom reminds us, “Holiness means imitation Dei—the life of godliness.” For the New Testament people of God, this takes on new shades of meaning: to live holy lives is to live in imitation of Christ. 

The point is that if we are to understand what is going on in Leviticus, we have to begin with holiness. The central question for these chapters is the nature of holy community: what does the holy community look like? How can the people of God—in this case, perhaps, the exilic community on the cusp of returning to the ancient land of Israel—best live as God’s holy possession?

The Holiness Code in Leviticus works out in detail what holy community should look like. It’s evidently the product of long and intense discussion, still marked by the the starts and stops of that kind of discussion. It includes, in contrast with the P section of Leviticus, the idea that eating meat requires presence at the sanctuary. All meat comes from God’s table and requires the grace of God, who must forgive killing the animal. It includes rules about mixing: kinds of seed, kinds of cloth, kinds of animals. It even includes a particular law about what happens when a man has sex with an enslaved woman who “belongs” to someone else and has not yet been freed (19:20-22). In this case, the man is not to be put to death (see in contrast, 20:10), but only obligated to sacrifice a sheep. And it includes, twice over, sets of rules about sexual contact. 

These two sets of rules frame chapter 19, the core chapter on holiness, in chapters 18 and 20. They appear to derive from the same list but worked out differently. The rules are written for the patriarch of a household or an extended community—written from the patriarch’s point of view, not that of others in the household. The term of art used in these texts is not “to approach [another person] to uncover their nakedness (18:6 and frequently). (The NIV, in one of those perverse attempts to make the Bible easier to understand, renders this idiom as “to have sexual relations with,” thereby losing much of what this is about.) 

One must imagine for these rules a large patriarchal household with mothers and fathers, uncles and aunts, married and unmarried children, and servants and slaves. In this household one is likely to brush up against others of the household in ways that are potentially compromising. Coming upon nakedness would have been a common experience. But the Leviticus text adds intention: “to approach” another “in order to uncover [their] nakedness.” It has in mind not only sexual relations, but the male gaze, what Jesus talks about in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:27-8). It has in mind the way that personal integrity can be compromised even when it doesn’t end in sex. Uncovering someone’s nakedness is a broad concept. 

In this way, these rules seem to come close to the concept of consent. Given the power of the patriarch (and other adult males), who can give consent and who cannot? But it’s not only consent that is at stake here; it’s community, family. Lying behind these rules is the potential for sexual acts of a certain kind to destroy community. 

Thus, the rules include not only not uncovering the nakedness of blood relatives, “Don’t uncover the nakedness of your mother,” for example, but rules about not uncovering the nakedness of married (non-blood) relatives, “Don’t uncover the nakedness of your father’s wife” (18:8), where the woman is not your mother. This rule presumably applies even if your father is dead. The same for your father’s brother’s wife (18:14). And your wife’s sister (18:18). These are not blood relations, but violating them would be highly disruptive of family and community. 

And the rules are deeply cultural, both for whom and what they include and don’t include. They don’t include, for example, enslaved people, except as I’ve already mentioned in that fraught and strange ruling about sex with a woman seemingly on the cusp of freedom in chapter 19. Apparently, sex with slaves was not worth ruling on. On the other hand, they do include not uncovering the nakedness of a woman with her period (18:19). Go figure.

It’s in this context, in working out these sorts of relationships, that both chapter 18 and 20 includes a rule about male-on-male sex: “Don’t lie with a male as if bedding a woman; it’s an abomination” (18:22). Chapter 20 adds a penalty clause (as it does in other instances): “A man who lies with a male as if bedding a woman commits an abomination; the two of them shall surely be put to death. Their blood will be on them” (20:13). 

There is much that could and perhaps should be said about these rules, including the clumsiness of the language, clumsier even in Hebrew than in English. It’s as if the H priests lacked the vocabulary to describe properly what the rule is about. This supports the argument that the writers of Leviticus did not have the concept of sexual orientation. And one ought to at least pause on the death penalty here, as in other instances in these rules, noting the long history of violence committed by religious people against LGBTQ (and other) people—violence that has not ended.

But the focus should not be on these rules in isolation, any of them. The focus should be on the Holiness Code as a whole, with all its various provisions, some for which we still agree, some for which we shake our heads in puzzlement (like not mixing two kinds of cloth), and some for which we strongly object (like the rules and lack of rules having to do with enslaved people). The proper procedure is not keeping one provision and jettisoning another. The focus should be on the question that underlies the Holiness Code: what should holy community look like? 

On the question, first, before the answer. If you don’t get the question right, you won’t get the answer right. With our eyes fixed firmly on the question, we can consider how the ancient community went about trying to answer it, given the culture and expectations of their time. And then, asking the same question and learning from how they answered it, we can attempt to give our own answer—an answer instructed not only by the way these ancient people answered it but by the way it’s answered elsewhere in the Bible, by what we have learned since about these matters, and about how our answers might change in the light of the coming and call of Christ.

The same pattern of biblical interpretation applies to the New Testament passages that quote Leviticus: 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10. They are asking the same questions as the priests who formulated the Holiness Code, now not in the context of the Babylonian empire by a people looking toward returning to the land, but in the context of the Roman empire and the mission to the gentiles. In the interest of not making this overlong—as perhaps it already is—I’ll not review those texts here, but you can work it out.

And, as I said above, these are not the only texts that should enter the conversation about holy community. There are many such in both Old and New Testaments, most of which make no mention of same sex relationships at all. Surely one of the most important of these is the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7, especially in this regard, chapter 5). Instead of holiness Jesus uses the word “righteousness”: “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven” (5:20), but it’s the same question: what should holy community look like? 

In answer to that question, you can’t simply map the Holiness Code on to our time. No one actually does this, not even those who want to stake their claim one the texts against gay sex. The provisions of the Holiness Code were written for that time and that culture. In their answer to the question of holy community, those who produced the Holiness Code fail to see things we see clearly, like the horrors of human slavery, and they see as important other things that we think don’t matter at all, like mixing kinds of cloth or sowing two different kinds of seed in the same field. The point is not the specific provisions but the way the ancient priests went about answering it. The point is to engage the question in conversation with these ancient communities and to answer it as best we can, realizing that we, like they, will not get it entirely right.

This is exactly what the CRC—at least before the disastrous synods of the 2020s—had been trying to do. Our way of doing the same thing is called “Safe Church.” The concern is the same: when is it wrong “to approach someone in order to uncover their nakedness?” In asking this we should take the Leviticus formulation seriously (as the NIV, for example, does not). The concern not just about sex but about exposing others to the sexual gaze, taking away their personal dignity, or robbing them of the integrity of their bodies in other ways. In this Leviticus goes ahead of us. In engaging their answers to the question of holy community, we can learn things for our communities. In these passages, the Spirit still speaks.

But not in the way that the Bible has often been taken to speak. Biblical interpretation is not ferreting out theological rules, choosing this one and discarding that one, but engaging in conversation with the text along with the church across the ages. It’s in the context of this conversation that we can ask about same-sex marriage. It will not do to suppose that the rules of the Leviticus community can somehow directly address our question. When the priests formulated the Holiness Code, same-sex marriage didn’t exist. No one had ever considered it. Supposing that the Holiness Code rules on same-sex marriage is like supposing that Genesis 1 rules on quantum theory. Our question is new but related to the old question. We are asking whether same-sex marriage fits in holy community. 

Here Milgrom’s distinction between “separation from” and “separation to” can help us. We should attend to the first kind of separation, asking ourselves how holiness requires us to live differently from the world around us. On this, we may differ, but we should be discussing it. I’ll have more to say about this in a future post. The question here is what is being outlawed by the rules against queer sex from past times. Was it the act itself? Somehow and for some reason, if you do this (heterosexual kinds of things) with your body you are in God’s will but if you do that (homosexual kinds of things) you are not in God’s will? Or is it not so much what you do with your body as the moral and social context in which you do it? And if that is the case, should not same-sex marriage be counted as marriage just as in the case of opposite-sex marriage?

All that I will return to in the next post, but we should also attend to holiness as “separation to.” Our holiness ought to serve the mission to which we are called. And that mission, as I have already said, is to be a priestly community, lifting praises to God and prayers for the world. Our mission is to mark the presence of God in Christ so that all the world can see what we see.

And for this last, it would seem to me that the church would do much better if instead of ruling LGBTQ+ people out, we ruled them in. We would be more Christlike church, holier, if we accepted LGBTQ+ people and accepted them not as some think they should be but as they actually are. Part of what should be distinctive about holy community is that it includes those whom others exclude. 

And if we read the Bible in this way—not as a set of ancient rules set in stone, but as a living conversation between communities trying to be God’s holy people in different times—we will find that the Bible comes alive. In our conversations, the Spirit will speak.

And not only here in Leviticus, but more eloquently and perhaps more incisively to our times, in a story, a story told twice in the Bible, once in Genesis 19 and again in Judges 19. It’s to that story and what it means that I will turn in the next post.

Stay tuned.

Clay