The final two passages which are sometimes used as arguments against homosexuality are from Leviticus 18:22 and Leviticus 20:13:
“You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination” (18:22)
“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” (20:13)
The oft-used phrase “homosexuality is an abomination” comes from these verses, and based on the wide usage of that phrase it is obvious that these verses have an immediate intuitive appeal to many. Those are indeed harsh words.
But we first must realize that there are many prohibitions given in Leviticus that we no longer consider relevant. For instance, the interceding chapter (19) gives a strange order in v. 27: “You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard”. And of course, your choice of facial hair has long since become regarded as morally irrelevant. So the question is, why do we keep some prohibitions but not others?
The usual answer that is given is that there are two motivations for the laws in Leviticus: a law is either for the sake of cleanliness (or religious symbolism), or for the sake of morality. This makes sense – we don’t sacrifice our children (20:4) because that is still morally wrong, but we don’t banish from our society two married people who have sex during the woman’s menstrual period (20:18). One law is for the sake of morality, but the latter is for the sake of cleanliness. Any law that is no longer relevant for keeping clean, such as the famous prohibitions of mold growth, we freely discard.
Many then assume that 18:22 and 20:13 are for the sake of morality rather than for the sake of cleanliness. But is this a good assumption? It indeed seems like it could be for the sake of cleanliness, for we know at least that the particular act mentioned there is a disease-spreading act. Furthermore, there are no prohibitions on other forms of male homosexual behavior. Why weren’t those prohibited? And why wasn’t same-sex female activity also condemned?
A possible answer to the last question is that the law didn’t really talk much about females anyway, so we should assume that the prohibition extends to them. But that is not true, and we see this from both passages. For instance, 20:15 prohibits males from bestiality, but then females get their own verse forbidding bestiality in 16. Moses thought that for whatever reason there had to be separate prohibitions for males and females in that case. But two verses before, he only condemns one form of male homosexuality. The asymmetry could very well be because the prohibition about ‘lying with a man as with a women’ is for the sake of cleanliness. Otherwise, we should expect to see a corresponding condemnation of female same-sex activity, since if it were for the sake of morality, the female version of the act should fall under the same condemnation. This is at least as compelling an interpretation as the one that thinks that it is a moral prohibition.
