The book of Leviticus presents us with a paradox. On the one hand, Leviticus sits at the center of the Torah, literally the heart of the Hebrew Bible. Its text lays the foundation in detail for the ancient Hebrew and contemporary, observant Jewish way of life—from what food to eat and how to cook it, to the commandments and instructions for holy days and festivals. At the center of Leviticus is the Holiness Code, a moral compass and ethical guide for how to achieve holiness in one’s day-to-day activities. These chapters, 17 through 27, include crucial tenets such as a restatement of the Ten Commandments and the injunction to “love thy neighbor as thyself.”1 On the other hand, and in spite of the book’s centrality to the religion, Leviticus as a whole is all but neglected by scholars much less the laity. According to Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus was not in the school curriculum in Israel when he published his three volume treatise on the book in 2004, and “even in advanced schools of Torah studies, the yeshivot, Leviticus [was] not studied in its entirety, but only in a verse here, a verse there.”2 However, contemporary social issues, such as a raised consciousness about the food we eat, the increased visibility and acceptance of gay and lesbian members of society, and renewed concerns about a deteriorating social fabric, have moved scholars, writers, theologians and moralists—Christian as well as Jewish—to seek relevant new interpretations of specific Levitical texts. Recent interpretations of the text of verses 18:22 and 20:13, which prohibit certain homosexual activity, may serve as an aperture through which we can seek an understanding of the ways interpreters view the relevance of Leviticus today.
To that end, we will examine two different ways of approaching the interpretation of Leviticus. First we will analyze the views of anthropologist Mary Douglas and of writer and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva on how Leviticus functions as a logical whole. And second, by comparing the respective interpretations of Leviticus 18:22 by Rabbi Steven Greenberg and biblical scholar Jacob Milgrom, we will gain perspective on the consequences of relying on Leviticus as a set of foundational principles, as opposed to narrowly read rules.
My aim in this essay is to show that persuasive arguments like Kristeva’s and Douglas’s favor a logically coherent reading of Leviticus and effectively invalidate claims like Greenberg’s that promote the selective interpretative application of one of the chapter’s rules, such as the prohibition of homosexual behavior, outside the context of the whole. Furthermore, our examination will support the notion that the interpretation of a single Levitical injunction can be more successful when supported by arguments from principles derived from the text, like Milgrom’s, than by arguments like Greenberg’s that appeal to nuanced deconstruction of the text. In other words, and to put it bluntly in relation to the verses concerning homosexual behavior, observant Jews are not justified in declaring that the proscription against homosexual behavior is irrelevant while maintaining the validity of the rest of the laws. Likewise, non-Jews are not justified in turning to Leviticus for support of anti-homosexual positions if at the same time, they reject the applicability of the dietary laws, for example. Moreover, anyone seeking to determine the contemporary application of the Levitical rules about homosexuality, whether they favor a broad or a narrow interpretation of the rules, will have difficulty resorting solely to the precise definitions of the two thousand-year-old text. The book’s logical structure should more readily yield principles behind the rules, which would be useful in determining contemporary applications.
Identity through Separation and the Logic of Leviticus
Leviticus appears to us today as an archaic book of laws. Its byzantine structure and the apparent arbitrariness of its rules add to the confusion and serve to confirm its inapplicability to our modern world. Yet there is an audience that seeks a justification of certain social positions in the text of Leviticus, relying in part on the text’s status as moral or religious law. Positions against homosexuality, for instance, are commonly, though not universally, justified by reference to passages in Leviticus. Writers who analyze the text and structure of the book can shed light on the validity of these positions. Julia Kristeva’s analysis of the Levitical text in “Semiotics of Biblical Abomination,”3 and Mary Douglas’s textual analysis in “The Abominations of Leviticus,”4 both support the idea that the injunctions against homosexual conduct are dependent on their textual context. Who the law enjoins and the purposes of its statutes matter.
The text of Leviticus seems very clear: “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination” (18:22) and “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination” (20:13). Moreover, most all of chapter eighteen concerns itself with proscribing taboo sexual behavior, incest, adultery, bestiality and so forth. In what sense do
these passages constitute law? Are they arbitrary rules, or do they belong to a formal system that might shed light on our interpretation of them as law? Both Douglas and Kristeva reject the notion that Leviticus is an arbitrary collection of rules and argue that it conveys a formal system of laws grounded in the concept of holiness and its role in the unique relationship between the one God and his chosen nation of Israel.
For Douglas, holiness, while literally rooted in separation, is also illustrated by the idea of completeness.5 For instance, the complete, or perfect and unblemished, physical body, whether of a priest or of an animal worthy of sacrifice, is a prerequisite for participation in the holy rituals in the temple. Where impurity exists, for example in women following childbirth, or in lepers, Leviticus prescribes rituals for cleansing to regain the state of holiness. But Douglas is aware that the completeness, or wholeness, she articulates has emerged from the concept of separation embedded in the word “holiness.”6 In the cases of both women after childbirth and lepers, the purification process first involves a separation from others who are pure (Lev. 12:4-5, 13:46fƒ.). Moreover, categories of individuals must remain separate from unlike categories, as in the proscription of bestiality (Lev. 18:23), to avoid confusion of different classes of things. Douglas includes under this rubric the distinct categories of creation.7 Thus the natural order is
important and leads to the sexual prohibitions in chapter eighteen.
Julia Kristeva takes Douglas’s notion of separation further. She links Leviticus’s distinction between pure and impure to the ongoing battle waged by the Israelites against paganism and its influence. The pure-impure opposition in the law draws the individual into that conflict through a daily striving to be separate, not just to be separate from non-Hebrew pagans, but to individuate oneself as a subject of the law.8 For Kristeva, this “design of ‘separation’ and ‘individual integrity’” (quoting Mary Douglas) is the foundation for the logical coherence of the Levitical statutes.9 “The place and law of the One do not exist without a series of separations. . . . ”10 We can thus follow Kristeva’s train of thought. As a patriarchy struggling to survive in a region dominated by cultures in which women wielded more theological power, the ancient Hebrews protected their way of life—not only by means of war, but also by adhering to a paternalistic, monotheistic creation myth, or religion. The threat to their society was real. Intermingling with the other societies would risk a disruption of the patrilineality central to the Hebrew way of life. The paternal one God gives his law to his people, the Israelites. The law and its statutes in turn serve to reinforce the separation of the Israelites from the others, who are now pagans. The law
not only enforces separation from pagans in rituals of worship, it also instantiates separateness into daily activities and the life of the body. For Kristeva then, the text of Leviticus 18 has to do with creating a sexual identity that separates the Israelite from the pagan and maintains the patrilineage. Thus, Kristeva considers the homosexual behavior proscriptions a logical consequence of a formal system embodied in the whole of the Mosaic code based on differences.
In a sense, we have circled back to Douglas’s view that the law focuses on holiness belonging to God, but which men can find in their lives. We can see that a formal system of laws enforces God’s separation of the Israelites from other nations: “I am the LORD your God, which have separated you from other people. Ye shall therefore put difference between clean beasts and unclean . . . ” (Lev. 20:24-25). The separation of the Israelites from others is crucial to their identity as individuals belonging to the nation under the one God. So we have, “Ye shall be holy: for I the LORD your God am holy” (19:2). As Kristeva points out, this is different from God’s covenant with Noah for the whole of mankind. God makes his covenant with Moses “valid for a single nation, appl[ying] himself to making that system of differences both more rigorous and more precise.”11 By referring to the covenant at Sinai Kristeva helps answer our question, “In what sense do 18:22 and 20:13 constitute law?” These provisions, falling under the whole of the law, are covenantal in nature. They are part of what we would call a contract. God, on his part, promises to protect, secure, and deliver the Israelites. And on their part, the Israelites promise to obey His statutes.12
Kristeva and Douglas persuasively argue that the rules set forth in Leviticus are not arbitrary, that they are logically embedded in a formal statutory system, and that the logic of the system is dependent on its applicability to the children of Israel. That is, the statutes only have force, and are enforceable, for individuals who maintain their identity by belonging to the nation that has been separated from all others. Moreover, the punishment for one’s transgression is to be “cut off from his people.”13 The offender is to be separated from his special group, which is special just because it has been separated by God from other groups. Moreover, for Kristeva and Douglas, the purpose of these particular statutes is to partially define sexual relations with regard to their role in a logical series of separations.
The purpose of the statutes matters particularly for present day discussions because some of those who continue to use selected portions of Leviticus and the Mosaic code in Exodus to justify their personal beliefs extend their claims to what ought to be imposed by law (moral, religious or civil) on others. For the moment, we have the convincing arguments of Kristeva and Douglas that the validity of the whole of the Mosaic code hangs on the logical relationship of the individual statutes to one another, to the Israelites and ultimately to God, as Kristeva suggests. If they are correct, we could conclude that either the whole thing stands, or the whole thing falls.
Narrow vs. Broad Interpretation
Biblical scholar Jacob Milgrom analogizes the Torah to the U.S. Constitution, comparing the ways the Torah can be interpreted with the approaches judges take to interpreting the Constitution.14 As Americans, we know the Constitution is our founding legal document and the “supreme law of the land,” with which no other law must conflict. And yet different judges take different approaches to determining whether a particular law is constitutional or not. Some judges will construe the Constitution based on a literal and narrow definition of its text. Other judges will construe the law more broadly by deriving principles from the text, which can be applied to contemporary conditions. Milgrom’s analogy refers to those who read the Torah literally using the written text as the exclusive basis for interpretation, and to others who look for the Torah’s precise meaning while deducing the principles behind its laws and asking, “If the composers of the Torah were living today, how would they apply these principles to the issues of our day?”15
Rabbi Steven Greenberg interprets Leviticus 18:22 in a way that leads him to conclude the verse should be narrowly construed as a prohibition of a type of sexual domination.16 By comparing Greenberg’s narrow method of textual analysis to the broader approach to interpretation of Milgrom, I will show that Greenberg’s approach is more difficult than Milgrom’s to apply in modern circumstances. Moreover, Greenberg’s position is less consistent with the positions of Douglas and Kristeva on the coherence of the chapter and accounting for the context in which the verse appears.
Again, the text of Leviticus 18:22 reads, “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.” Greenberg interprets the text this way:
And a male you shall not bed (sexually penetrate) (engulfing one’s penis), as in the lyings of a woman: it is abhorrent.17
In other words, Greenberg says the prohibition is limited to acts of non-vaginal sexual penetration that engulfs one’s penis. The concept of engulfment is crucial to Greenberg’s later argument that the law is mainly concerned with the power of sexual penetration to humiliate one’s partner, due to the presumed greater power of the penetrator. Moreover, he signals the importance of the concept by the lengths to which he goes to argue for this interpretation.
Greenberg uses a tight bit of logic to arrive at “engulfing one’s penis” from the Hebrew phrase mishkeve ishah, a phrase that appears nowhere else in the Bible. His argument, with my bracketed numbers inserted to delineate its elements, is set forth here in full.
The phrase “the lying of a male” (mishkav zakhar) is found in the Book of Numbers. [1] Women who know the “lying of a male” are experienced in intercourse. [2] The “lying of a male” is apparently what a woman experiences in intercourse, [3] that is, the penetration of the vagina. [4] If this phrase is the reverse of our phrase in Leviticus, then we have found a possible meaning. [5] The “lyings of a woman” (mishkeve ishah) would mean what a man experiences in intercourse with a woman, [6] that is, the engulfment of the penis.18
Just how tight is his logic? Though we can accept premises [1] and [2], there is no reason to accept without further justification the implication in [3] that “what a woman experiences” equals “the penetration of the vagina.” I see no reason why other experiences a woman might have should not be considered. For instance, in the context in which mishkav zakhar appears in Numbers, Moses commands a general massacre of the Midianites, excluding only virgin females
(Num. 17-18). Since, in context, the “lying with a male” has to do with making a distinction between non-virgins and virgins, the female experience referenced in Numbers could be breaking of the hymen rather than penetration of the vagina. In that case, Greenberg’s conclusion [6] would be incorrect. Greenberg is drawing conclusions based on a very narrow reading of the Biblical text, augmented by appeals to rabbinic tradition. Of course there is nothing wrong with that, but the point here is that it compels him to rely on tenuous inferences in propositions [2] and [3].
I have focused on Greenberg’s claim that the Levitical ban has to do with engulfment of the penis because it leads to a crucial conclusion that, “the verse prohibits one, and only one, sexual practice between men, namely, anal intercourse. . . . ”19 If Greenberg’s reasoning is flawed, then other non-penetrative forms of homosexual activity, oral sex for example, may be prohibited, and his reliance on penetration for his argument that “the verse prohibits the kind of sex between men that is designed to effect the power and mastery of the penetrator”20 is invalid.
Milgrom’s own position is that homosexuality is prohibited by the Bible, but that the prohibition is severely limited. The prohibition should not be applied universally because it is only addressed to the people of Israel, compliance is a condition for residing in the Holy Land, and it only applies to men as lesbianism is not addressed.21 Milgrom speculates on the lesbian omission by proposing that, in his opinion, it is not addressed because “no genital fluids are lost.”22 Milgrom goes on to express his rationale for the sexual prohibitions in Leviticus as follows:
The common denominator of all the prohibitions [of chapter 18], I submit, is that they involve the emission of semen for the purpose of copulation, resulting in either incest and illicit progeny or, as in this case [of verse 22], lack of progeny (or its destruction in the case of Molek worship, v. 21). In a word, the theme . . . is procreation. Semen emission per se is not forbidden; it just defiles, but purificatory rites must follow. In certain cases of sexual congress, however, it is strictly forbidden, and severe consequences must follow.23
Milgrom justifies his interpretation by applying two principles. The first is that Leviticus applies only to Israelites as a consequence of their Sinaitic covenant with God, a position supported by Julia Kristeva’s observation that God made his covenant with Moses valid for a single nation.24 One could also obtain this conclusion by reference to the fact that the whole of the Mosaic code presupposes the Lord’s injunction to Moses, “Speak unto the children of Israel” (Lev. 1:2). The second principle is that sexual conduct is governed by the issues of legitimate procreation and wasting of seed, justifying the ban on homosexuality. In addition to textual context, like Kristeva and Douglas respectively, he gives close consideration to the text’s historical and anthropological context. For instance, he discusses the practices of the Canaanites, which are to be avoided at all costs, in relation to the final four sexual prohibitions of chapter 18.25
One meaningful lesson we can take from Greenberg is that one’s worldview is likely to affect one’s interpretation of ambiguity and omission in text. As a professed Orthodox Jew, Greenberg is confronted with how to approach the Biblical law in Leviticus. And as such, he is seeking a way for gay people to reconnect to God, Torah, and the Jewish people.”26 Nevertheless, I think Greenberg’s approach to his argument cuts against the grain of Douglas’s claim that any piecemeal approach to interpreting the injunctions of Leviticus is fruitless. And even though Greenberg considers the whole range of sources at his disposal—the Torah, the Talmud and other rabbinical writings—by the time he has finished, the text of the verse seems removed from
its context in the litany of sexual prohibitions in Leviticus 18. His ultimate rationale for 18:22, having to do with the prohibition of “sex for conquest,”27 has little, if any, demonstrable bearing on the other prohibitions of chapter 18. Douglas, and Kristeva for that matter, would demand a more coherent rationale, such as Milgrom’s. One of the problems here, I think, is that Greenberg, in arguing from his particular point of view, arrives at a rationale from the analysis of only one verse.
Conclusion
Milgrom’s analogy will be most useful if it can aid in our thinking about the relative merits of various interpretations of Leviticus. With specific regard to the issues raised in this essay, we could ask the following: Does an understanding of differing judicial philosophies color my skepticism of Greenberg’s argument? And in light of Kristeva’s and Douglas’s positions on the coherence of the Levitical text, can clarity about our own judicial philosophy lead to more informed judgments about contemporary interpretations of the Levitical proscriptions of homosexual behavior?
We can appreciate Greenberg’s thorough understanding of the milieu for his argument. He realizes he is pushing the envelope to forge new territory in Jewish thinking about homosexuality in relation to the Torah. But there is a conflict between his desired outcome and the approach he takes to interpretation. That is to say, he favors an outcome that considers Leviticus a living text, a text susceptible to a range of reasonable interpretations, and which accommodates changes in societal circumstances over time. His approach, however, is to make
an ultimate appeal to the narrow meaning of the written text. The principle he would like to espouse is so narrowly drawn, applying as it does only to Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, that it can hardly be called a principle. Milgrom, on the other hand, manages to restrict the application of the ban on homosexuality by appealing to larger principles.
Ultimately the texts of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 are best served by a broad, contextual approach to interpretation. For one thing, the text includes Hebrew terms that are found nowhere else in the Bible, increasing the risk that interpretations based on the precise definition of those terms will enter the realm of pure speculation. This accounts primarily for my skepticism regarding Greenberg’s position. On the other hand, Milgrom’s approach is compelling. He does not ignore the precise meaning of the text, but he informs his interpretive conclusions by also considering why the verse is there at all. This brings me full circle to the first section of this essay and my concurrence with the complementary positions held by Douglas and Kristeva that Leviticus constitutes a logically coherent set of rules. Since they are not arbitrary, and given the covenantal nature of their establishment, we cannot ignore the fact that the injunctions of Leviticus constitute valid law for some set of subjects. Furthermore, Milgrom has identified the narrowest possible set of subjects. This conclusion will not appeal to fundamentalist Christians. Nor will it satisfy Greenberg or his followers, for whose cause I have great sympathy. But it is an inevitable consequence of a religion theologically grounded in a written text that is taken to be the word of God and the final appeal on issues of morality.
NOTES
1 Leviticus, The Holy Bible (King James Version) for Kindle: The Old & New Testaments, Deuterocanonical Literature, Glossary & Suggested Reading List, illus., Gustave Dore (Mobi Spiritual, 2009), 19:18, Kindle. Further citations of this work are given in the text (Lev. 19:18).
2 Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus: A Book of Ritual and Ethics (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2004), 86.
3 Julia Kristeva, “Semiotics of Biblical Abomination,” in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1982), 90-112.
4 Mary Douglas, “The Abominations of Leviticus,” in Purity and Danger; an Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 41-57.
5 Ibid., 53.
6 Ibid., 51.
7 Ibid., 53.
8 Kristeva, “Biblical Abomination,” 94.
9 Ibid., 99.
10 Ibid., 94.
11 Ibid., 96-7.
12 See Milgrom, Leviticus, 14.
13 Lev. 18:29. This phrase precedes many verses throughout Leviticus.
14 Milgrom, Leviticus, 3-4.
15 Ibid., 4.
16 Steven Greenberg, Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition
(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin, 2004), pdf.
17 Ibid., 82.
18 Ibid., 80.
19 Ibid., 81.
20 Ibid., 206.
21 Milgrom, Leviticus, 196.
22 Ibid., 197, 208.
23 Ibid., 207.
24 See note 11.
25 Milgrom, Leviticus, 201.
26 Greenberg, Wrestling with God, 206.
27 Ibid.
AGLSP Confluence © 2015 AGLSP – Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs, All Rights Reserved.
