"Consider this past Sunday’s edition of The New York Times. The most influential newspaper in the world, secular to its core and situated in the Gotham of secular New York, ran a opinion essay in its weekly “Review” section entitled “The Secret History of Leviticus.” Leviticus . . . in Sunday’s edition of The New York Times?
Just about every verse of Leviticus is offensive to the modern secular mind. Leviticus reveals a God who is both omnipotent and holy, a God who chooses Israel as his particular and personal covenant people, a God who drives out other nations in order to fulfill his promises to Israel, and a God who lays down commands about every dimension of human life, including human sexuality. Especially human sexuality.
As you might expect, sexuality was the issue at stake in the essay on Leviticus that appeared in Sunday’s edition of the Times.
Idan Dershowitz, identified as “a biblical scholar and junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows,” began by stating: “No text has had a greater influence on attitudes toward gay people than the biblical book of Leviticus, which prohibits sex between men.”
Indeed, Leviticus 18:22 is about as clear a prohibition of male homosexuality as can be imagined: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.”
An abomination is an object or act that God detests. It is the strongest word of divine judgment found in the Bible.
But Idan Dershowitz now argues–in The New York Times, no less–that the prohibition of men having sex with men is all based on the fact that a later editor (or redactor) changed the text of the Bible here. By the time Dershowitz has finished his argument, Leviticus 18:22 is explained away as being a deliberate effort by a redactor to change what had been permission for sex between men into a prohibition.
Dershowitz argues that Noah was never originally associated with the account of the flood, and that the original tragedy of divine judgment was drought and famine, later associated with Noah and changed into a flood. Get the pattern?" BCN
Just about every verse of Leviticus is offensive to the modern secular mind. Leviticus reveals a God who is both omnipotent and holy, a God who chooses Israel as his particular and personal covenant people, a God who drives out other nations in order to fulfill his promises to Israel, and a God who lays down commands about every dimension of human life, including human sexuality. Especially human sexuality.
As you might expect, sexuality was the issue at stake in the essay on Leviticus that appeared in Sunday’s edition of the Times.
Idan Dershowitz, identified as “a biblical scholar and junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows,” began by stating: “No text has had a greater influence on attitudes toward gay people than the biblical book of Leviticus, which prohibits sex between men.”
Indeed, Leviticus 18:22 is about as clear a prohibition of male homosexuality as can be imagined: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.”
An abomination is an object or act that God detests. It is the strongest word of divine judgment found in the Bible.
But Idan Dershowitz now argues–in The New York Times, no less–that the prohibition of men having sex with men is all based on the fact that a later editor (or redactor) changed the text of the Bible here. By the time Dershowitz has finished his argument, Leviticus 18:22 is explained away as being a deliberate effort by a redactor to change what had been permission for sex between men into a prohibition.
Dershowitz argues that Noah was never originally associated with the account of the flood, and that the original tragedy of divine judgment was drought and famine, later associated with Noah and changed into a flood. Get the pattern?" BCN