Jay Michaelson's article in Religious Dispatches "Why Rick Santorum Can’t Just Say: God Doesn’t Want You To Be Gay," makes a fascinating argument about the translation in the famous condemnation in Leviticus of male gay sex. Taboo Among his credentials is that he is a Hebrew scholar so it seems plausible to take his theory seriously. The argument covers other passages in the Bible but still boils down to his claim that "abomination" is a mis-translation of the Hebrew word "toevah" which, after some machinations, he decides is better translated as "taboo."Abomination?
Michaelson seems to believe this is some sort of revolutionary improvement in the Bible's view of the sexuality part of being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered. An 'abomination' gets a dictionary rendition of 'something that causes disgust or abhorrence' while 'taboo' according to Webster's is (1)forbidden to profane use or contact because of what are held to be dangerous supernatural powers, (2) banned on grounds of morality or taste.
Abomination at least in modern usage comes down to something gross, while Taboo is forbidden or banned on grounds its profane or an immoral status. At least with respect to the proscription in Leviticus, it seems to me that matters have not been made tremendously more lenient, but in fact are if anything worse. To get things to come out slightly better, Michaelson defines Abomination as "conjur[ing] up images of things which should not exist on the face of the earth: three-legged babies, oceans choked with oil, or Cheez-Whiz" -- Leading some religious people to regard "Homosexuality [as] unnatural, a perversion, a disease, an abomination." On then other hand in the Hebrew Bible the word "toevah" he says is used only in the context of practices and attributes occurring in foreign tribes or civilizations and thus, on that account, forbidden to the Jews. The Israelites are warned in Deuteronomy 18:9-12 "not to learn the toevot (plural of toevah) of those nations." They are warned about stuff like magicians, forture tellers, charmers, and witches.
Michaelson writes "Deut. 12:31, 13:14, 17:4, 27:15, and 32:16 further identify idolatry, child sacrifice, witchcraft, and other “foreign” practices as toevah, and Deut. 20:18 says that avoiding toevah justifies the genocide of the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanaites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites. So, toevah is serious, but it is serious as a particular class of cultic offense: a transgression of national boundary. It is certainly not “abomination.” Nationalism
Okay. Let's review. Toevah can justify genocide, but don't worry it's about nationalism, so queers can relax because unlike child sacrifice, genocide, and witchcraft, toevah doesn't call queer sex anything as crummy as an "abomination."
Deuteronomy it appears assumes the existence of charmers, fortune tellers, witches -- that is people with magic powers however limited in scope. The problem is that charmers and witches cannot do any magic, and fortune tellers don't exist because no one has knowledge of the future. The matter of justifying waring against and either exterminating or enslaving Hittites, Amorites, Canaanaites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites is slightly problematic. A god who commanded or tolerated such wars and exterminations would be evil and if they-he-it-she existed would be unworthy of worship much less obedience. How "toevah" can be so mild a notion, a mere social taboo, whilst when it comes to foreigners warrants genocide, slavery, and rape is a good example of why theology can so often be clever when hardly ever making any sense.
Maybe I'll learn more as I keep plodding through the Bible, but so far the inescapable conclusion is that it condemns something for which there is nothing wrong. It does condemn; and there's is nothing wrong with being LGBTQ. It cannot be squared, accommodated, fudged, finessed, lavenderwashed. It claims all sorts of nonsense. It is a reservoir of increasingly false empirical claims, and nonsensical moral/ethical claims. From the point of its plausibility and authority, it simply cannot make a difference whether "toevah" means abomination, taboo, or Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
Oh please, Mr. Currie, like me YOU sometimes use TOO MANY WORDS. Here's how I would have written this piece about the Bible, which retains its popularity solely (OK, not SOLELY), because it can be used to support ANY idea or philosophy:
ReplyDeleteAccording to the Bible, it is an abomination to touch the skin of a dead pig. American Football is a sin equivalent to Homosexuality.
The End.
Scott