Jay Michaelson over at Religion Dispatches Magazine has written a post whose primary purpose is to suggest that homosexuality was a cultural toboo to Israel, but should be acceptable to our own Christian faith. Michaelson writes:
Homosexuality is abomination. The Christian Right says so all the time, and non-religious LGBT activists say it too, to relegate religion to humanity’s dustheap. After all, isn’t that what it says in the Bible?
No—and progressive religionists should not use the word. It’s a mistranslation and a misconception, doing harm to LGBT people and religious people alike.
After his brief survey of how the Hebrew is used in a few select passages (no footnotes or authoritative sources are cited) Michaelson concludes:
Personally, I like “taboo” as a replacement. It conveys the culturally relative nature of toevah, has some connotation of foreignness, and rightly aligns the taboo against homosexuality with taboos against, for example, eating unkosher food. It also has a vaguely archaic feel, which it should. Admittedly, “taboo” began as tabu, and specifically refers to a particular concept in Pacific indigenous religion; it is a bit inexact to import it to Judaism and Christianity. Yet the word has, by now, entered the common parlance, and in that general sense, it matches toevah fairly well. (Alternatively, we could stick with the Hebrew term, the foreignness of which heightens the foreignness of the biblical concerns about homosexuality.) One thing remains clear, though: what’s really abominable here is the word “abomination” itself.
The substance of Michaelson’s argument is this:
The term toevah (and its plural, toevot) occurs 103 times in the Hebrew Bible, and almost always has the connotation of a non-Israelite cultic practice. In the Torah, the primary toevah is avodah zara, foreign forms of worship, and most other toevot flow from it. The Israelites are instructed not to commit toevah because other nations do so. Deuteronomy 18:9-12 makes this quite clear:
When you come into the land that YHVH your God gives you, do not learn to do the toevot of those nations. Do not find among you one who passes his son or daughter through the fire; or a magician; or a fortune teller, charmer, or witch… because all who do these things are toevah to YHVH and because of these toevot YHVH your God is driving them out before you.
Elsewhere, Deuteronomy 7:25-26 commands:
[Y]ou shall burn the statues of their gods in fire. Do not desire the silver and gold on them and take it onto yourself, else you be snared by it, for it is a toevah to YHVH your God. And you shall not bring toevah to your home
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.”
The blog invited comment, so I wrote the following:
Hi, I have a question. The way I read your article, you are suggesting that homosexuality was nothing more than a cultural taboo. In our time, we should no longer consider it taboo any more than the food restrictions on Israel. Am I reading you right?
If that is the case, my question centers around this list you produced of verses that use the term you translate as “taboo”.
“Deut. 12:31, 13:14, 17:4, 27:15, and 32:16 further identify idolatry, child sacrifice, witchcraft, and other “foreign” practices as toevah”
So do you also accept child sacrifice as a culturally acceptable practice for Christians since it is merely “taboo” and not an abomination?
Thanks
PS
This is my first time on your blog, so if I am missing some key context to your post, please let me know. Thanks.
More than a week has passed and neither RD Magazine nor Michaelson has chosen to post my question or respond to it. Despite Michaelson’s stated credentials (he claims to be completing his Ph.D. in Jewish Thought at Hebrew University) he has made many substantive errors and critical omissions in his analysis. I will address these in a future post, but for now I am interested in some input. Please read his entire post and tell me…
- What is your overall impression of his article?
- Do you find his arguements about the “mistranslation” of “abomination” persuasive? Why or why not?
Post your comments here or if you are too shy, you can always email me.
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