Reclaiming Library · Entry 03 in the reading path. New here? Begin at Start Here.
Two verses in Leviticus — 18:22 and 20:13 — have been made to carry more condemnation per syllable than any other lines in scripture. They have been read at funerals of people they helped kill. So this entry does what the tradition of quoting them rarely does: it reads them, whole, in their own world.
What the text actually is
Leviticus 18–20 is the Holiness Code — a body of ritual and boundary law addressed to Iron Age Israel, defining the community against the temple practices of surrounding nations. The same code prohibits eating shellfish (11:10–12), wearing mixed-fiber garments (19:19), trimming beard edges (19:27), and sowing two seeds in one field (19:19). Christians who quote 18:22 while wearing poly-cotton blends after a shrimp dinner have already conceded, in practice, that the Holiness Code is not straightforwardly binding — the question is why one verse alone survived the concession.
The Hebrew itself is stranger than the English lets on. The phrase mishkevei ishah — “the lyings of a woman” — is rare and grammatically odd, and a substantial scholarly literature (Saul Olyan’s 1994 study in the Journal of the History of Sexuality; Jacob Milgrom’s Anchor Bible commentary on Leviticus 17–22) reads the prohibition as addressing specific acts in specific cultic and household-property contexts — not describing, let alone anticipating, mutual covenanted love between people of equal standing. Milgrom, the twentieth century’s preeminent Leviticus scholar and no radical, concluded the law’s scope was far narrower than its modern deployment.
What the text cannot be made to mean
It cannot address sexual orientation, a framework that would not exist for another two and a half millennia. It cannot address trans existence at all — the verse has nothing whatever to say about gender identity, and quoting it at trans people is not even wrong; it is a category error performed with a straight face. And it cannot be lifted out of a code its quoters do not keep: hermeneutical honesty is a package deal.
You shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.
Leviticus 19:18 — the same Holiness Code, eleven verses from the beard laws
The command the Holiness Code itself elevates — the one Jesus called half the hinge of the entire law (Matthew 22:39) — sits in the same document. A reading of Leviticus that weaponizes 18:22 and mutes 19:18 is not conservative. It is selective, and the selection principle is the prejudice it claims to justify.
What honest reading costs, and buys
Honest reading costs the verdict. It does not cost the scriptures — it returns them. The Holiness Code remains what it always was: a fierce, strange, historically situated document about a people defining themselves against exploitation. Read that way, it indicts temple abuse and boundary violation. It has nothing to say against your marriage, your name, or your body — and it never did.
Sources for checking this work: Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 17–22 (Anchor Bible, 2000); Saul M. Olyan, “And with a Male You Shall Not Lie the Lying Down of a Woman,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5.2 (1994); Phyllis Bird, “The Bible in Christian Ethical Deliberation Concerning Homosexuality” (1997); K. Renato Lings, Love Lost in Translation (2013). Disagreement is welcome when it engages the citations.
Next in the path: Entry 04 — Romans 1. If this reading reopened more than it settled, Care and the Faith Deconstruction group are open doors.
