The Bible Guy is off on vacation with his lovely wife, and will return in three weeks.  God bless you all, and keep reading your Bible!

In our ordinary, day-to-day reading, we realize that different texts must be read in different ways.  It would never occur to us to read the phone book the way that we would read a novel (“Hmmm–lots of characters, but no plot. . .”).  Similarly, we are (at least, generally) aware that while novels sometimes may contain facts, they are not factual: neither Sherlock Holmes nor Atticus Finch is a real person.

But when we turn to the books of the Bible, we sometimes forget this common-sense principle, and insist that each passage of Scripture must be read in the same way as every other passage, “flattening” the Bible as though it were all of a piece.  Slogans such as “God said it. I believe it. That settles it” not only treat the Bible as if it were flat, but also insist that this is the only faithful way to read the Bible. If the Bible is God’s word, after all, then it must be true, and if the Bible is true, then that must mean that every word of it is true in the same way: factual, accurate, applicable, and authoritative.

We will talk about biblical authority next time.  But for now, this flattening approach ignores a fundamental feature of the Bible, evident to the most casual reader: the Bible is not a book, but a library of books, written in different times, places, and languages.  The Hebrew Bible contains a good deal of poetry: indeed, the books of Psalms and the Song of Songs (sometimes called the Song of Solomon) are entirely poetic.  The Greek New Testament is dominated by letters, such as Romans or 1 Thessalonians.  Some books are narratives, with characters and dialogue and plot–such as Ruth or Jonah on the left-hand side of the Bible, or Acts on the right.  Most Old Testament prophetic books, such as Amos or Jeremiah, are collections of speeches; similarly, in the New Testament, Hebrews is a sermon.  The first five books of the Bible are commonly called “law,” although only Leviticus and Deuteronomy consist mostly of laws; Genesis is entirely narrative, and Exodus is mostly so.  The first four books of uniquely Christian Scripture are all called “gospels,” from the Old English godspel, or “good news”–although only Mark explicitly bears that title (Mark 1:1).  No wonder we call this book “the Bible,” a word which comes from the Greek ta biblia, meaning “the books!”

Not only do different books call for different readings, but within each biblical book, we find a variety of styles and techniques, calling for different approaches.  For example, Jesus was a master storyteller.  In the New Testament, the word “parable” (Greek parabole) occurs fifty times, all but twice (Heb 9:9; 11:19) in the first three books: Matthew, Mark, and Luke.  Indeed, Mark and Matthew go so far as to say that Jesus never taught without a parable (Mark 4:34; Matt 13:34).  The Septuagint (the Greek translation of Jewish Scripture) uses parabole for the Hebrew word mashal.  In the Hebrew Bible, a mashal is a saying requiring interpretation: generally speaking, a riddle,  a proverb (the Hebrew name for the book of Proverbs is Meshalim), or a metaphor.

Put simply, parables are meant to be read not literally, but figuratively (as the two uses of parabole in the book of Hebrews indicate).  For example, Jesus’ parable of the weeds growing among the wheat (Matt 13:24-30) doesn’t describe good farming practices–although when I was growing up, I tried persuading my Dad that weeding our garden wasn’t biblical!  Instead, it is a story about the kingdom of God.

Usually, we understand this distinction without difficulty.  When Jesus says, “How often I wanted to gather your people together, just as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. But you didn’t want that” (Matt 23:27), no one thinks that Jesus has wings, or that the inhabitants of Jerusalem were chickens!  We know how figurative language works.

 Yet Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-30) is sometimes read, not as a story told to illustrate a point about wealth and responsibility, but as a proof of the existence of hell–indeed, as a detailed geography of the afterlife, detailing where “the bosom of Abraham” and hell are located relative to one another, with a “great gulf” between them, across which people in hell can see into heaven, and vice versa.   That Jesus says nothing about that topic either before or after this story in Luke should remind us that this is after all a parable, not a cosmic travelogue.

Reading the Bible rightly, then, requires us to ask of any passage, where does this come from?  What sort of text is this?  What standards of interpretation do I need to apply if I am to understand its message?

Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 are often cited by Christians opposed to same-sex marriage.  In the CEB, the first passage reads, “You must not have sexual intercourse with a man as you would with a woman; it is a detestable practice (Hebrew to’ebah).”  The second goes further: “If a man has sexual intercourse with a man as he would with a woman, the two of them have done something detestable (Hebrew to’ebah). They must be executed; their blood is on their own heads.”  How ought these passages be read and applied?

I have written about these verses in greater detail  before.  Put briefly, they come from a section of Leviticus called the Holiness Code (Lev 17—26), which “democratizes” the idea of holiness: not only are the priests and the sacred objects pertaining to worship set apart as belonging to God, but all of Israel is God’s, and so is called to a higher standard of commitment, service, and ritual purity: “You must be holy, because I, the LORD your God, am holy” (Lev 19:2).

In these chapters, more stringent standards of ritual purity are upheld than is the case elsewhere, even within the book of Leviticus!  For example, Leviticus 15:24 states that a man who has sex with a woman during her menstrual period (during which she is ritually unclean: see Lev 15:19–23) shares in her impurity—like her, “he will be unclean for seven days.”  Lev 18:19 and 20:18 go far beyond this, however.  In the radical view of ritual purity the Holiness Code upholds, sexual contact with a menstruating woman is to’ebah: an abomination to be punished by exile from the community (Lev 18:29; 20:18).

Ritual purity and impurity–the “clean” and the “unclean”–are strange concepts to many of us.  Put simply, these rules have to do with customs that you follow in order to be a fully integrated member of your tribe: the food that you eat, the clothes that you wear, the way that you plant your crops. Violating these customs alienates you from your tribe: but even more, in ancient Israel, such violations were regarded as pollutions that stained not only the offender, but anyone else who came into contact with him or her.  In fact, the Holiness Code declares that the land itself was defiled by such actions, and so would repel their perpetrators:

You must not do any of these detestable things, neither citizen nor immigrant who lives with you (because the people who had the land before you did all of these detestable things and the land became unclean), so that the land does not vomit you out because you have made it unclean, just as it vomited out the nations that were before you (Lev 18:26-28).

Some such customs deal with actions any culture would condemn, such as as incest (18:6-18), child sacrifice (18:21), and bestiality (18:23).  But ritual purity doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with morality.

Horses, for example, were ritually unclean: since, unlike cows, sheep, and goats, they have solid rather than divided hooves and do not chew the cud (see Lev 11:3), they couldn’t be eaten or offered as sacrifices.  But this doesn’t mean that ancient Israelites thought that horses were evil:  in fact they were important, particularly for the military, and praised for their strength and beauty (see Job 39:19-25).

The point is that, if indeed Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 have to do with ritual purity (as their context suggests; see Lev 18:26-28), then we should not read them as though they were moral proscriptions.  Concerning ritual purity, Jesus taught: “Listen and understand. It’s not what goes into the mouth that contaminates a person in God’s sight. It’s what comes out of the mouth that contaminates the person” (Matt 15:10-11).  When pressed for an explanation, he said:

Don’t you understand yet?  Don’t you know that everything that goes into the mouth enters the stomach and goes out into the sewer?  But what goes out of the mouth comes from the heart. And that’s what contaminates a person in God’s sight. Out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adultery, sexual sins, thefts, false testimonies, and insults.  These contaminate a person in God’s sight. But eating without washing hands doesn’t contaminate in God’s sight (Matt 15:16-20).

Christians need not read every verse of Leviticus as a commandment–nor indeed do we.  Few if any Christian readers regard sex with a menstruating woman as a sin.  Further, even among those who would insist upon applying Lev 18:22 directly to our contemporary context, few would call for the death penalty for gay men (Lev 20:13), let alone for children who curse their parents (Lev 20:9) or for mediums and diviners (Lev 20:27).  In short, despite protests to the contrary, none of us really apply the same standard of authority or interpretation to every passage of Scripture.  All of us realize that the Bible is not flat–and an honest reading of Scripture must begin with that acknowledgement.

Because the Bible is not flat, reading Scripture responsibly and honestly requires taking the Bible seriously–not literally.  The Bible requires committed, prayerful reflection and careful study.  This is particularly the case for those books, like Leviticus, that presume a worldview and way of life very different from ours.

But this certainly doesn’t mean that Christians should avoid those harder books!  Leviticus, including the Holiness Code, is Scripture–word of God for people of God.  We need to hear, and heed, its summons to lives of personal holiness.

Holiness, after all, means more than ritual purity. The Holiness Code also states, “You must not take revenge nor hold a grudge against any of your people; instead, you must love your neighbor as yourself; I am the LORD” (Lev 19:18).  Jesus called this passage one of the two commandments on which “[a]ll the Law and the Prophets depend” (see Matt 22:34-40).  For John Wesley, holiness, or Christian perfection, meant

. . . loving God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength.  This implies, that no wrong temper, none contrary to love, remains in the soul; and that all the thoughts, words, and actions, are governed by pure love (John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection [Orlando: Relevant Media, 2006; orig. 1777]; p. 49).

May our reading of the Bible lead us into lives of love, following the God who comes to meet us in these pages.

AFTERWORD:

Several of you reported problems with the subscription link on this page.  Our seminary’s intrepid webmaster David Keys wrote, “To make this a more generic feed to read, I converted the link to a feedburner link. This is a Google service which should make subscribing more universally easy to everyone.

. . . The users that are using the original rss feed https://steventuell.net/?feed=rss2 will continue to do so. It is still active.”

Let me know how this works!

On Sunday, it will be my honor to participate in the memorial service for Dr. Loretto R. Auvil, mother of my old and dear friend Walt, and a leading citizen and philanthropist in Parkersburg, WV where I was raised–may light perpetual shine upon her.  As is traditional in services of death and resurrection, we will share together the ancient, powerful, comforting words of the Twenty-Third Psalm.

One reason we find this passage so comforting is that it is so familiar.  Typically, I find that as soon as I start this Psalm, others join in–many people, even folk who have long been estranged from the church, have this psalm by heart.  Like John 3:16 or 1 Corinthians 13, Psalm 23 has become woven into our culture.  Surely, such a familiar passage must be throughly understood–how could it possibly hold any surprises?

My Hebrew class was reading Psalm 23, identifying words and parsing verbs as we went, when we came upon weshabti in the middle of verse 6.  My students were puzzled by this word–and to my astonishment and chagrin, so was I!  I had always read right over it, but when I looked again at the verse, and at this word, I found that it did not say what I had always assumed that it said.  Usually, weshabti is read as though it were a form of yashab (“dwell”)–so, “I shall dwell.”  That is what the Aramaic  Targum of this psalm has, what the Greek translators of the Septuagint assumed (for more on these ancient versions of Scripture, see my blog “Which Bible?”), and the way that pretty much every English translation of the psalm of which I am aware reads.

But, if weshabti comes from yashab, it is a very irregular form of that verb!  What it actually looks like is a form of the verb shub (“return”), in which case the verse should read, “I will return to the LORD’s house”–as the footnotes on this verse in the English Standard Version and the Common English Bible alike observe.  The point of the verse would then be the psalmist’s promise to keep coming back to God’s temple as long as he lives–to return on pilgrimage, as often as possible.  Psalm 23:6 may not be so much about rest at life’s end as it is about a lifelong commitment to worship the LORD.

The Bible does this to me all the time.  Again and again, a “familiar” text that I had thought that I had pegged will suddenly leap off the page, grab me by the collar, and show me something I have never see before.  The writer of Hebrews puts it very well:

God’s word is living, active, and sharper than any two-edged sword. It penetrates to the point that it separates the soul from the spirit and the joints from the marrow. It’s able to judge the heart’s thoughts and intentions (Heb 4:12).

One of my favorite sayings comes from nineteenth- century American humorist Josh Billings (the stage name of Henry Wheeler Shaw): “It ain’t ignorance causes so much trouble; it’s folks knowing so much that ain’t so.”  This is especially true of Scripture.  Because the Bible is so familiar, so deeply ingrained in Western culture, and so often cited as an authority, we sometimes assume that we know what it says, when in fact we may not.

For example, in a 2001 study by the Barna Group, 75% of Americans surveyed agreed with the statement, “The Bible teaches that God helps those who help themselves.”  Of course, that chestnut is not found in the Bible at all. The saying “God helps those who help themselves” comes from seventeenth-century English political theorist Algernon Sydney (Discourses Concerning Government, Chapter 2, section 23), though it was popularized by Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard’s Almanack, 1736). I sneaked that one into the Bible content exam at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary once, and while I am pleased (and relieved!) to report that most of our students knew that “God helps those who help themselves” was not in the Bible, a disturbing minority was certain that it was in there somewhere, perhaps in James or Proverbs!

Even those of us who have long loved and studied Scripture continually find that the Spirit has something new to show us.  The first step in reading the Bible, then, is actually to read the Bible, in big chunks–not assuming that we already know what it says, but to look again, humbly seeking to discern Scripture’s intent.

One thing we may think that we know about the Bible is that the fiery destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19:1-28 proves God’s anger over the sin of homosexuality.  This may seem obvious:  after all, the men of the city crowd around Lot’s house, demanding “Where are the men who arrived tonight? Bring them out to us so that we may have sex with them” (Gen 19:5).  Indeed, this is where the word “sodomy” comes from.

But, look again.  The Bible itself does not refer to Sodom in this way.   When “Sodom” is mentioned in the Bible (in Old and New Testaments combined, in 48 verses), it is often used metaphorically, as an example of total destruction brought by divine wrath (for example, Deut 29:23; Matt 11:24//Lk 10:12), with nothing said about the reason for Sodom’s destruction.  Even in the account of Sodom and Gomorrah’s destruction in Genesis 18:16–19:28, the reason given for the LORD’s judgment on the cities is not sexual sin:

Then the Lord said, “The cries of injustice from Sodom and Gomorrah are countless, and their sin is very serious!  I will go down now to examine the cries of injustice that have reached me. Have they really done all this? If not, I want to know” (Gen 18:20-21).

The Hebrew word rendered “cries of injustice” in the CEB is za’aqah (sometimes spelled tsa’aqah)– typically used for the cry of the oppressed for help (for example, Exod 22:21-24). Indeed, the gang rape attempted by the men of Sodom does not represent anyone’s idea of consensual intimacy!   This passage is about power and control through rape: the sexual humiliation of the stranger.

So too, in Ezekiel 16:49-50, we read:

This is the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were proud, had plenty to eat, and enjoyed peace and prosperity; but she didn’t help the poor and the needy.  They became haughty and did detestable things in front of me, and I turned away from them as soon as I saw it.

Since the word rendered “detestable thing” here (Hebrew to’ebah) in used in Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13  for male homosexuality (for more on those passages, see my earlier blog; we will discuss these verses and others next time), some have proposed that that is its meaning in Ezek 16:50 as well.  However, in Ezekiel, where the term to’ebah appears 43 times, it nearly always refers to idolatry (for example, Ezek 6:9; for the concern for idolatry in Ezek 16, see 16:16-21).  For Ezekiel, injustice to the poor and false worship together led to Sodom’s destruction.

The exception that proves the rule–the only passage in Scripture that relates the sin of Sodom to a sexual act–is Jude 6-7:

I remind you too of the angels who didn’t keep their position of authority but deserted their own home. The Lord has kept them in eternal chains in the underworld until the judgment of the great day.  In the same way, Sodom and Gomorrah and neighboring towns practiced immoral sexual relations and pursued other sexual urges. By undergoing the punishment of eternal fire, they serve as a warning.

Jude’s reference to “the angels who didn’t keep their position of authority but deserted their own home,” imprisoned “in eternal chains in the underworld,” alludes to a third-century BC Jewish apocalypse, “The Book of the Watchers,” preserved in 1 Enoch.  The Watchers were angels, charged with caring for humanity, who instead gave humans forbidden knowledge, and had sex with human women.  Out of these unions the Nephilim (Hebrew for “fallen ones”) were born: giants, monsters, and heroes of ancient times (see Gen 6:1-4).  For their crimes, the Watchers were imprisoned until the final judgment (1 Enoch 10:4-14).

Jude says that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed for acting “in the same way” as those angels–that is, for doing what the Watchers did.  The CEB translates the Greek opiso sarkos heteras as “other sexual urges” (the NIV has “perversion”), but a more literal rendering would be “going after other [or “strange”] flesh” (see the KJV). The explicit comparison with the story of the Watchers makes plain what is meant by this odd expression.  The men of Sodom lusted after angels, just as the angelic Watchers lusted after human women (for Jude’s concern about showing spiritual beings proper respect, see Jude 8-10).

I invite you to chase these passages yourself, and do your own study of them.  But I honestly see no relevance of the Sodom texts to our contemporary conversation about LGBTQ women and men.

Distinguished Hebrew Bible scholar and preacher Ellen F. Davis writes,

I suppose every one of us would like to be an astonishing preacher–unlikely though that seems on a week-to-week basis.  But the plain fact is that no preacher can ever be astonishing (in a positive sense!) unless she has first been astonished.  And the only regular and fully reliable source of astonishment for the Christian preacher is the Scripture itself (Wondrous Depth: Preaching the Old Testament [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005], 2).

This is true, sisters and brothers, not just for preachers, but for all of us! God give us open ears, open hearts, and wide open eyes, so that we will not settle for what we already “know” that the Bible says, but will be willing, always, to look again–and to wait, confidently and eagerly, for God’s living Word to astonish us!