The final two passages in the Jewish Scriptures 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.
We first must realize that there are many prohibitions given by Leviticus that are simply no longer taken as good advice, let alone divine law. For instance, the interceding chapter (19) gives a strange order in verse 27: “You shall not round off the hair on you temples or mar the edges of your beard.” And of course, your choice of facial hair is morally irrelevant. On the other hand, Leviticus gives certain prohibitions against murder. The problem, then, is whether the condemnations of homosexuality should be considered irrelevant today, like the facial hair requirement, or as still relevant, as the laws about murder. We can focus the issue with this question: why do we keep some prohibitions but not others?
There are three motivations for the laws in Leviticus: a law is either for the sake of cleanliness, religious symbolism, or morality. This gives us a strong justification for why we would keep some prohibitions and disregard others – 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). The first law is for the sake of morality, but the latter is clearly for the sake of cleanliness. Any law that concerns keeping clean, such as the famous prohibitions of mold growth, or about how to be a good Jew at the time, such as the facial hair requirements, we freely discard because we are much better at keeping clean than the Israelites were, who were at the time deprived of science.
So the question is whether 18:22 and 20:13 are for the sake of morality or for the sake of cleanliness. There are two good reasons for us to think that these condemnations are for the sake of cleanliness: 1) we know that that this particular act is indeed an act with the potential to spread disease, and 2) there are no prohibitions on other forms of male homosexual behavior or female same-sex behavior. It seems as though those activities would have been condemned as well if this were to be read as a moral condemnation. And Moses does in fact address female sexual relations elsewhere. 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, and no forms of female same-sex activity. The asymmetry could very well be because the prohibition of ‘lying with a man as with a women’ is for the sake of cleanliness; it is not a moral law. As such, it is no longer relevant.
