THE LEVITICAL PROHIBITION OF MALE HOMOSEXUAL ACTS

The prohibition of “lying with males” in Leviticus וַיִּקְרָא‎, the third book of the Jewish Torah and consequently of the Christian Old Testament, is the only unambiguous condemnation of male homosexual acts in them^[1] and the basis for the confirmed condemnation of them in the New Testament. It was also an obviously heavy influence on the prohibition of such acts in the Koran. Its importance in causing most of the misery ever or anywhere inflicted on those partaking of Greek love cannot therefore be exaggerated. Since no other people before around the 3^rd century AD^[2] is known to have punished them and Greek love was ubiquitous and sometimes admired amongst the best-known peoples of antiquity, there is not much reason to suppose that in most of the world anyone would ever have thought to inflict this misery were it not for Leviticus.

Leviticus was attributed by ancient Jewish and Christian tradition to the 15^th century BC Jewish lawgiver Moses, though it probably only reached its final surviving form in Hebrew in the 6^th or 5^th centuries BC. Most of it, including the passages presented here, consists of speeches “God” is claimed to have made to Moses on Mt. Sinai so that he could repeat them to the Israelites whom he had just led there. As such, it is part of God’s covenant with Israel and central to Jewish law and ritual.

Soon after the conversion of Gentiles to Christianity began, Jesus’s apostles found themselves obliged to decide the extent to which Jewish law applied to Christians who were not Jews. Did they need to be circumcised, for example? As recounted in The Acts of the Apostles, the apostles met in Jerusalem in about AD 49 to resolve this. They decided to tell the Gentiles they were not to be burdened with Jewish law except “that ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication: from which if ye keep yourselves, ye shall do well.” (XV 29) Effectively, they thus drew a distinction between moral laws which did apply to Gentiles, and ceremonial and civil laws which did not. Since The Acts of the Apostles is a canonical book of the New Testament, their decision was binding and incontestable for Christians, as were the epistles of the apostle Paul, three of which soon afterwards specified male homosexual acts as forbidden to Gentiles. 

As a result, when Christianity triumphed in the Roman Empire in the 4^th century AD, laws were introduced against male homosexual acts, beginning in 342, steadily increasing in scope, severity and enforcement, and culminating in the laws of Justinian issued in 533-59, a process described in detail in the article The Laws of the Christian Roman Emperors. Thereafter, men or boys caught in homosexual acts were often put to death. When Christianity spread beyond the Roman Empire, conversion was usually followed, sooner or later by similar laws, but even when they were not, the fact that a country had adopted Christianity as its state religion meant that homosexual acts were illegal and could be punished by ecclesiastical courts as violations of Leviticus XX 13, albeit not generally as harshly as by secular courts.

This remained the case throughout Christendom until sodomy was removed from French criminal law in 1791, apparently as one of a host of “imaginary” crimes, thus legalising Greek love in a former part of the Roman Empire for the first time since antiquity. Other Christian countries followed slowly and all male homosexual acts remain illegal in many countries, with Leviticus the ultimate inspiration for this.^[3] Whilst the purported rationale for vilifying Greek love had to change in many other countries where Christian belief declined in the 20^th century and the prohibition against sex between men was lifted, it is still demonstrable that the hatred of male homosexuality originally engendered by Leviticus has remained behind much of the enduring venom.^[4]

The translation of the two relevant verses is the “Authorised Version” by forty-seven scholars under English royal commission printed by Robert Barker in London in 1611.

Leviticus XVIII 22

Leviticus XVIII is in general about what was forbidden to the Israelites, making them holy and distinct from the Egyptians and Canaanites, between whose lands they were moving.

 

Leviticus XX 13 

Leviticus XX repeats much of Leviticus XVIII, but from a different perspective, that of how breaking God’s laws should be punished.

^[1] The early Christian fathers decided that the sin for which the city of Sodom had been destroyed, as described in Genesis XIX, was homosexual (hence the word sodomy), but no earlier writers said this. The only other allusions to Sodom in the Old Testament, Genesis XIII 13 and XVIII 20, Deuteronomy XXIX 22-7,  Ezekiel XVI 49-50, Isaiah I 10 and Jeremiah XXIII 14, speak of the Sodomites’ injustice, pride, oppression and unexplained abominations. Besides these, the story itself shows the Sodomites intending rape and gross violation of the ancient customs of hospitality. Very likely therefore, the idea that the Sodomites were wiped out for homosexual acts would never have arisen if it had not been the case that such acts were prohibited by Leviticus.

^[2] The date depends on the uncertain matters of when Zoroastrianism adopted its severe stance against pedication and when it became the state religion in Persia.

^[3] In Moslem countries where such acts are illegal, the culpability of Leviticus lies in its influence on the Koran. In some African countries with Christianity as the main religion where they are also illegal, this is because such laws were first introduced with Christianity by the European colonial powers, no such laws being known of before.

^[4] Hatred of Greek love in the extreme form now pervasive in much of the world originated in the USA in the 1970s and has remained at its most extreme there, with many more people imprisoned for it there than in the rest of the world put together. It has also been aggressive in exporting its view of Greek love. While it has long been socially unacceptable for Americans to express hostility to homosexuality per se, that their secret hatred of it endures and is a vital component of their abomination of Greek love is demonstrated by the much higher prison sentences given to men convicted of sex with boys versus those convicted of sex with girls, a difference particularly striking with respect to boys and girls of 14-17, so only just under the age of consent (Shawn M. Rolfe, Bruce Rind and Thomas K. Hubbard, “Bias in Sentencing Men for Sexual Offenses Against Minors: Male Victims Bring More Punitive Sentences Than Female Victims” in Behavioral Sciences & The Law, 2025, pp. 385-400).

^[5] “Mankinde” has been replaced by “males” as a much more accurate translation of זָכָר (zākhār). The word carries no implication of adulthood. The most celebrated translation of the Bible into German, that of Martin Luther in 1524, translated זָכָר as Knaben (boys) on the entirely reasonable pre-20th century assumption that boys would have been the normal object of male homosexual lust.

^[6] Similarly, “womankind” has been replaced by “females” as a much more accurate translation of אִשָּׁה (ʾishshāh). The word carries no implication of adulthood. More generally in understanding the Authorised Version’s translation, it may be observed that from an early 17^th century English perspective, there was no distinction in sexual morality between sex with those considered to have only just reached the age of fertility (12 with girls; 14 with boys) and fully mature adults. The point being made was gender, not age.
     It is the phrase “as with females” that places it beyond doubt that “lying with males” meant having sexual intercourse with them, but what kind of sexual intercourse? Often, Christian countries treated all overt homosexual acts as violating the prohibition, but sometimes, for example in England for a few centuries down to 1885, the only homosexual act considered a crime was pedication, presumably because it alone was seen as equivalent to vaginal intercourse, the kind of sex a male was expected to have with a female.

^[7] Exactly as with Leviticus XVIII 22 above, “mankind” has been replaced by “males” as a much more accurate translation of זָכָר (zākhār). The word carries no implication of adulthood. The most celebrated translation of the Bible into German, that of Martin Luther in 1524, translated זָכָר as Knaben (boys) on the entirely reasonable pre-20th century assumption that boys would have been the normal object of male homosexual lust.

^[8] Again exactly as with Leviticus XVIII 22 above, “a woman” has been replaced by “females” as a much more accurate translation of אִשָּׁה (ʾishshāh). The word carries no implication of adulthood. More generally in understanding the Authorised Version’s translation, it may be observed that from an early 17^th century English perspective, there was no distinction in sexual morality between sex with those considered to have only just reached the age of fertility (12 with girls; 14 with boys) and fully mature adults. The point being made was gender, not age.