Laws About Sex and Everything Else

Last updated on: July 1, 2016 at 8:32 pm by Nancy Rockwell

Laws About Sex and Everything Else 2016-07-01T20:32:50-04:00 Nancy Rockwell

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Law.

In the Bible law exists in Covenant and Codes. These originated in different times and places, for different reasons. They exist to define and to redefine the People of God.

The Great Law, the Ten Commandments, is also the holiest of laws, the oldest definition of People of God. It appears twice, in Exodus 20: 2-17 and in Deuteronomy 5.

Other law collections vary in age and era. The earliest are the Laws of the Covenant in Exodus 20: 22- 23:19, and the Deuteronomic Laws in Deuteronomy 12-26. In none of these is there any mention of homosexuality acts. In all of them, adultery is forbidden.

And then there is a set of laws known as the Holiness Code, in Leviticus 18 and 20. These codes emerged in the post-exilic period, after the people had lived in Babylon, when they had returned to Israel andthe priests were wanting to purge all Babylonian ways from the people. These laws exist to separate “us” from “them”.

In both of these Levitical Holiness Codes, homosexual acts are forbidden. But in none of the other codes. Adultery is forbidden in all the codes, and in the Commandments.

And here are the questions we have to answer. Since the Holiness Codes equate homosexual acts, adultery, and merely touching a menstruating woman, why don’t we?

Why is adultery forgiveable, even laudatory as Tammy Wynette sings it, and homosexual acts are not? Why is menstruation no longer as taboo now, as then, when women had to retire to a special enclosed place and stay there until a ritual examination pronounced them clean again?

And why, when adultery is forbidden in all four sets of laws, and homosexual acts are forbidden only in one set, are homosexual acts more taboo than adultery, in the sight of many Christians? May we pick and choose among the laws, but not revise them?

Both Levitical sets of laws forbid nakedness and sex between a long list of relations, between men and their mothers, sisters, sisters-in-law, and many more besides, and between men and other men, and between men and animals. But here is a distinction: sex between men is forbidden but not sex between women. Yet, in the very next verse, sex between men and animals, and between women and animals, is forbidden. Clearly, the priests understood the importance of naming women to apply a law to them, and they did not name sex between women as forbidden. Is this fair?

If we, in our time and culture, cannot understand why a couple who have had sex while the woman was menstruating, should be completely cut off from society, why do we presume we can understand what homosexual acts meant in the era these laws were written?

Also, the punishment, in Leviticus 20, for all these violations, is death. Death is still visited upon homosexuals in the US, by those who consider themselves holy, and some Christians vocally support this, or at least deem it worth considering. But we do not abide the killing of adulterers, and we do not abide the killing of those men who have touched menstruating women. Do we have the right to pick and choose?

Laws can change. In Israel, as anywhere, law, except for the Ten Commandments, is living and mutable. And even the Ten Commandments are continually being studied for deeper wisdom and understanding, for new insight into the nature of God and the People of God.

Consider law in the US. The most important law defining Americans, is the Constitution. After it, and subject to judgment by it, are State Laws, County Laws, and City or Town Laws, in order of importance. It is in this bottom layer that laws about sex and marriage have resided, until 2015.

Since colonial days marriage laws in most states banned whites and blacks from marrying. One by one, over about 70 years, those bans were overturned through appeals to higher courts, State and Federal. Also in those years, interracial couples could elope by leaving Mississippi or Alabama, and traveling to say,Virgina, Maryland, or New York, anywhere the laws were more liberal. Homosexual acts were also against the law in all states, and state by state, those laws were struck down, on appeal, beginning in the last century, after medical discoveries that homosexuality was a psychological disposition, not a perversion.

As that wisdom spread, same-sex marriage laws began to be enacted. Gay couples would get married in Vermont, say, and go home to South Carolina, where their marriage was not legal. Last summer, the Supreme Court declared that no state law was as important as the Constitution’s guarantee of equal treatment and equal personal dignity before the law.

The three sets of Priestly Codes, so called because they were compiled in lists by Israel’s priests in different historical periods, were inserted into the speeches of Moses by the priests to lend them importance. At the time they were inserted, everyone understood that the need for more laws had arisen. And could arise again, as the three Codes, written at different times, show. So biblical law is mutable, and can respond to changes in culture and wisdom, as can American law.

If we reach into the Laws of the Covenant and the Deuteronomic Laws, we find things that, in our time, are ridiculous to us: that slaves can be taken but only from neighboring nations (can we then own Canadians?); that a man may sell his daughter into slavery; that a neighbor working on the Sabbath should be killed; also to be killed, any man who gets his hair cut; that if you lend money to the poor, you may not charge interest (Bernie Sanders, are you there?).

What changes, over time, is who “we” understand ourselves to be, and who we understand “them” to be. And on that, and not in the forbidding of any particular sexual act, hangs all the law, and the gospel.
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Image: from Opsis, Georgetown.edu

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