The Jewish and Christian scriptures say nothing whatsoever about homosexuality.
Homosexuality and heterosexuality are modern concepts coined in German psychiatric
practice in 1870. The 1909 Merriam-Webster's New International Dictionary defined
homosexuality as a medical term, "morbid sexual passion for one of the same sex"
while the 1923 edition defined heterosexuality as the "morbid passion for one of the
opposite sex." (Katz:93) It was only in the 1934 Webster's dictionary that heterosexuality
was changed to mean "manifestation of sexual passion for one of the opposite
sex."(Katz:93)

Despite claims by religious extremists, there are no biblical words that can be translated
by homosexual because the concept of sexual orientation is totally absent in the
ancient Mediterranean world. The Bible neither speaks about sexual orientation nor
about sexual identity. It neither speaks about the modern subjectivities of heterosexuality,
homosexuality, bisexuality, and Tran sexuality. These identities are absent from the
biblical worldview. Neither did the apostle Peter think of himself as heterosexual, nor did
Paul view himself as homosexual because such concepts were alien to their thinking.

Fundamentalist and literalist Christians claim to take the Bible as the literal word of
God. This position is illogical. The original books of the Bible were primarily written in
Hebrew and Greek, and the Bible was subsequently translated into many languages.
Anyone studying foreign or ancient languages knows that translation is already an interpretation.
Fundamentalists claim that the King James Version of the Bible is the literal
word of God. This amounts to saying that an English interpretation of the original biblical
texts written in Hebrew, some Aramaic, and Greek is the literal word of God. There
is an inherent contradiction in such a statement because it elevates the English interpretation
of the original text to the literal word of God. This is not to say that a person
cannot encounter the word of God in the Bible, for the Word is larger than the words
within the scriptures.

There are seven texts used or rather misused as texts of terror, as weapons against
translesbigay people: Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, Genesis 19 and Judges 19, 1
Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10, and Romans 1. The Bible has been used as a
weapon to justify slavery, gender oppression, anti-Semitism, colonial domination of
developing nations, environmental exploitation, and sexual orientation oppression. The
Bible was not produced for violence but to be a word of grace; this should be obvious
but is seldom practiced by those filled with homo-hatred. The issue behind the biblical
texts traditionally applied to homosexuality does not concern same-sex behaviors but
deal with violence and gender transgression.

Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13
Many religiously conservative Jews and Christians take the verses in Leviticus 18:22
and 20:13 as a blanket condemnation of all homosexual practices. Leviticus 18:22 and
20:13 speak of a man who "lies the lying down of a woman." What do these verses
really prohibit? Lying down is a euphemism for a sexual act, and the meaning of "the
lying down of a woman" (miskab issah) is not obvious to a modern reader. In our own
culture, we speak of going to bed with someone, but our phrase is ambiguous. It tells
us nothing of what happened in bed. Does it denote oral, vaginal, or anal sex? It can
include all of the above or none of the above. The most persuasive arguments is that it
refers to male-to-male anal intercourse. Saul Olyan, a biblical scholar at Brown
University, deciphers the meaning of "the lying down of a woman" in parallel uses of the
idiom "the lying down of a male " (miskab zakar) within the Hebrew Bible. He concludes
that the phrase "the lying down of a male" must mean male vaginal penetration. Olyan
speculates that "the lying down of a woman" means "something like the act or condition
of a woman's being penetrated, or more simply, vaginal receptivity, the opposite of
vaginal penetration."(Olyan:1994:185) In sexual intercourse, a woman experiences
male penetration and offers her male partner vaginal receptivity. Olyan concludes," the
male-male sex laws of the Holiness Source appear to be circumscribed in their meaning;
they seem to refer specifically to intercourse and suggest that anal penetration was
seen as analogous to vaginal penetration on some level, since the "lying down of a
woman" seems to mean vaginal receptivity."(Olyan:1994:185-6) Other interpreters such
as Thomas Thurston and Daniel Boyarin also concur that the issue is anal intercourse.
(Thurston:1990 & Boyarin:1995) The verses in Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 do
not prohibit male oral sex, masturbation, or intercrural sex (intercourse in which a
male's genitals rubs between the thighs of his partner). They are totally silent about the
range of female- to-female sexuality. Nor do they prohibit a bisexual male engaging in
group sex as long as he does not penetrate another man or be penetrated by another.
Here the Leviticus text objects to a male who becomes a substitute for a female. It
calls a man functioning as a woman an abomination (to'eba), what Saul Olyan has rendered
as "the violation of a socially constructed boundary" or perhaps a taboo.
Abomination occurs six times in chapters 18 and 20 of the Holiness Code, and
nowhere else in Leviticus. Abomination refers to ritual impurity. Therefore, not all maleto-
male sexual acts are proscribed by 18:22, only anal intercourse is condemned. For
Olyan, the misuse of male semen, not the act of anal intercourse, generates the ban in
Leviticus.

If the holiness code is so bound to the holy land of Israel, then the foremost scholar on
Leviticus Rabbi Jacob Milgrom advances the notion that Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 are
not applicable to female homoeroticism nor to gentile homoeroticism. It applies only to
Jewish homoeroticism within the land of Israel. Jacob Milgrom concludes, "The ban on
homosexuality is limited to male Jews and inhabitants of the holy land. The basis for
the ban...is the need for procreation which opposes, in biblical times, the wasting of
seed." (Milgrom:1993:48)

Sodom and Gomorrah and Judges 19: Male Rape
Genesis 19 shares a history of narrative development with its parallel story in Judges
19. However, there is no clear scholarly consensus on the dependence of one story on
another or a core narrative tradition that branches into narrative traditions. Gender
codes of honor and shame, sexual property are equally operative in both stories.

The centuries-long Christian tradition that relates this text to same-sex practices has
given us the term "sodomy," coined in medieval Christianity. (Jordan:1996) It is the
story most frequently cited by homophobic Christians for their hatred of gays/lesbians.
Sodom has become the image of human depravity and moral decay, but the story in
Genesis 19 has nothing to do with same-sex sexuality but male rape.

The story of the destruction of Sodom-Gomorrah has been incorporated into the
Abraham saga. Chapters 18-19 form a literary unit that many fundamentalist and evangelical
interpreters fail to analyze as a whole. When chapter 19 is read with chapter 18,
the inhospitality of Sodom is contrasted with the rural social code of hospitality.
Hospitality is part of the cultural code and editor's theological motif operative in
Genesis 18-19. It is introduced in chapter 18 when Abraham welcomes and entertains
the messengers from God. In a similar fashion, Lot welcomes the messengers in
Sodom. The editor contrasts the rural, pastoral welcoming of strangers with the urban
hostility to them. The messengers are foreigners within the city, and the men of Sodom
surround the house and insist that "we might know them (yadha)." The Hebrew word to
"know" (yadha) is occasionally used as a euphemism for sexual intercourse, and here
in this chapter and Judges 19, yadha needs to be translated and contextualized in the
sexual codes of the penetrator and the penetrated in ancient world. A more apt colloquial
translation would be to "womanize, make into a woman." It has the context to "pene-
trate a male like a woman" or anal intercourse. Ancient near eastern societies subjected
their conquered, enemies, strangers, and trespassers to phallic anal penetration to
indicate their subordinate status.

Lot's offer of his daughters to the mob is shocking to readers. He owns his daughters;
they are his sexual property for his disposition. He was willing to let his daughters suffer
gang rape than to allow the messengers to suffer such collective violence, gender
denigration, and humiliation. Few homophobic interpreters ever raise an outcry at the
nonconsensual offer of Lot's daughters to the mob but focus their attention on the
rejection of the daughters to indicate that homosexuality is the center of the incident.
The mob has rejected women for the male messengers as gay men have rejected heterosexuality
for other men. Yet Lot's offer dispels any identification with what modern
society designates as homosexuality. The crowd is out to inflict the collective violence of
rape and thus remove the threat of the strangers. The crowd is no more representative
of homosexuality than a local urban street gang who attacks and rapes a stranger coming
into their territory.

But hospitality interpreters such John Boswell (1980) and John McNeill (1993) bracket
out some vital interpretative elements: phallic violence, patriarchal gender codes of