The Secret History of Leviticus

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Yeah, I would approach anything the NYT says about religion with extreme caution.
 
Honestly? Trying too hard to make very large leaps of interpretation which, conveniently, probably can’t be falsified even if they are unreasonable jumps.

Even if these are glosses, it doesn’t make the author’s conclusions about what was permitted correct, but could merely have been clarifications on what was understood.

And even if the text and cultural practice did change, which I’m not convinced it did, it doesn’t mean the scriptural development and what we’ve received today is incorrect. Christian’s don’t deny that God “raised the bar” in his expectations of how society should conduct itself. We see polygamy in the Bible, it doesn’t mean polygamy is acceptable today, and so on.

These types of articles can be curious, but again, it just seems a tremendous leap and wishful thinking which will be regurgitated everywhere now even if there’s little actual support.
 
This is precisely what some rabbis (generally not Orthodox ones) have been grappling with for some time but WITHOUT the notion of a revisionist text since admitting the latter would negate the giving of the Law in one piece as an inspired holy book. And, once again, this is why a knowledge and understanding of the codified Oral Law is equally as important to Judaism as that of the Written Law. The conclusion of many of these rabbinical scholars is that male homosexual intercourse with family is NOT the same as male homosexual intercourse with strangers, the former prohibited while the latter permitted. Note too that the leap to FEMALE homosexual intercourse with either family or strangers is still neither explicitly specified nor implied in a revisionist theory.
 
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By extension, in Judaism, if not Christianity, this revisionist account might be a valid consideration to permit homosexual marriage, being that love and companionship take precedence over procreation, important as the latter is.
 
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Irrelevant to the Church, yes, but not to Jewish thinking.
 
Furthermore, the Church decided and dogmatically decreed sacred scripture hundreds of years ago. The thoughts of some Rabbi’s are irrelevant.
I agree that what Rabbinical scholars say or what certain schools of Judaism decide on the moral teaching of scripture in the Christian era have little to no import for the Church. However, meltzerboy wasn’t implying that it should matter for us, merely offering a Jewish take on the article, which is of course fine. Your post comes across rather harsh, considering.
 
Just want you to know that I appreciate the information and perspective you bring to the forum.
 
Irrelevant? Then why did Christ (a Jew) continue to attend synagogue and practice Judaism?
 
That is very insightful and adds greatly to the discussion.
A more accurate word than “desperation” for the article might be “childish”, which sums up various movement’s attempts to reconcile their faith with post-Sexual Revolution popularity. Desperation is still good though.

The movement is a childish attempt to feel accepted in a world that would deem them uncool. A curiously convenient “discovery” exactly paralleling a point in time when much of mainstream society has conceded (and will concede further) on issues of sexual ethics.
 
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The author makes an assumptions that seem crucial to his argument, namely that Leviticus 18:22 (and 20:13) is a later addition. He doesn’t argue it; he just says that scholars think it’s the case. Why do they think so? I think he has to argue this, given that he spends much time arguing that the passages where uncovering a man’s nakedness meaning having sex with is his wife had themselves been edited to mean this rather than gay sex. He sees this connotations as resulting from glosses that elaborate on the phase, but did not originally mean such things, right? On what grounds does he say this? He uses the fact that these are the only two passages where the male’s nakedness is uncovered. But I’m not sure this works well. Having sex with one’s wife in these contexts would also be seen as a humiliation of the husband, and in particular an affront to his authority, particularly since your father or your brother is of the same or greater authority than you. There are plenty of instances where this happens (Think Reuben, Absolom, Adonijah), and all the other anti-incest passages do not refer to the marital status of the woman, except for one: incest with the daughter-in-law, but this is argued against as a dishonor to the son (the difference being that a son is under your authority, so the phrase is not used).

There is another passage in a different book where uncovering nakedness is used, and that is in Genesis, with Ham and Noah. I know that there seems to be no consensus on what Ham actually did when he “uncovered Noah’s nakedness”, even among ancient exegetes, but one of the more compelling, imho, was the maternal rape argument, since it makes sense of Canaan’s curse afterwards if Canaan was the child of incest between Ham and his mother. Assuming this is the correct interpretation, scholars might respond to this by arguing that this passage is also “late” (I honestly don’t know much about redactionistic chronology). However, the argument uses the Levitical “glosses” in support of it.
 
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