Love Lost in Translation

CHAPTER 6. WITH A MALE Introduction In current debates on homoeroticism in the Bible, Lev. 18.22 is widely quoted. Within the Jewish tradition, this verse is believed to prohibit homoeroticism (Alpert 1989: 62), while scholars from a wide range of backgrounds argue that Lev. 18.22 and the parallel text in 20.13 are the only explicit references to so-called male homogenital acts in the Hebrew Bible (Heacock 2011: 89). However, the prominence assigned to Lev. 18.22 in theological debates in recent years contrasts with the absence of references to this verse in other parts of the Bible and the writings of the early Church. Given these contradictions, a careful textual analysis of the original Hebrew text is required. The literary genre of Leviticus is characterized by great complexity. Narratives, cultic rules and laws are interspersed in such a manner that narratives exemplify laws and laws follow narratives in an intricate pattern of reciprocity. Past, present and future are intermingled and explain each other in fruitful ways. It is a paradox that even though the book is often in the narrative mode, it is a narrative virtually without events (Douglas 2004: 128). The language presented by Leviticus is at all times sophisticated, polished and with poetic qualities as observed by Mary Douglas (p. 175): ‘Every verse in Leviticus is another expert cut; each new facet of the diamond reflects the same crystalline structure.’ The book of Leviticus poses huge challenges to translators (Lings 2009: 233). According to Adrian Schenker (2003: 162–3), however, the single precepts and their systematic order in Lev. 18 & 20 are ‘rationally transparent’. Encouraged by this argument, I plan to apply several tools, particularly semantics and literary analysis, in pursuit of a bona fide approach to Lev. 18.22. I anticipate that this, combined with examinations of twelve English versions of the Bible, will enable me to establish the ‘rational principle’ governing the role of this biblical verse in its context. Restricted Bisexuality Some renderings of Lev. 18.22 are expressed in so-called everyday language. A representative example is Eugene Peterson’s paraphrased version of the Bible called The Message (2002), in which Lev. 18.22 reads as follows: Don’t have sex with a man as one does with a woman. That is abhorrent. Perhaps the word ‘abhorrent’ cannot be described as ‘everyday language’, but everything else can. The phrase ‘don’t have sex’ sounds distinctly modern, i.e. late twentieth and early twenty-first century, which matches the stated aims of the translator and the date of publication (1993). Thus, at first sight, this text appears to be precise and ‘straightforward’. A closer inspection, however, leads to the discovery that it is fraught with ambiguities. To gauge some of the complexity of Lev. 18.22, it may be helpful to carry out an experiment. Imagine presenting these words cited from The Message to someone completely unfamiliar with the Bible, asking them how they interpret the text. Before venturing an answer, they are likely to request information about the context. For example, they may ask: ‘To whom is this prohibition addressed? To a man or a woman?’ The question is relevant because the English wording does not reveal whether the addressee is male or female or whether both genders are included. So, in this hypothetical scenario, the person confronted with this text for the first time might justify their need for clarification in the following ways: if the word ‘one’ refers to a female, the text seems to serve two possible purposes. It may conceivably address a lesbian woman who is allowed to have sex with another woman but not with a man. Viewed from another angle, the addressee might be a bisexual woman allowed to have sex with a man as well as with a woman. However, if she chooses a male partner, there is a limitation: she should not do the same things in bed with him as when sleeping with a woman. Conversely, if the addressee, referred to as ‘one’, is male, the hypothetical scenario might be visualized as follows: the addressee is (a) a bisexual man given permission to have sex with a woman but not with a man or (b) a bisexual man allowed to have sex with a woman and a man but facing restrictions when he wishes to have a male partner. Some readers may dismiss this imaginary test as too theoretical or light-hearted, and some may argue that the modern word ‘bisexual’ is anachronistic. However, the same argument might be levelled against Eugene Peterson’s phrase ‘don’t have sex’, which belongs to contemporary English. Viewed from this perspective, ‘don’t have sex’ and ‘bisexual’ are a good match as both belong to the realm of modernity. In reality, the reasoning behind the experiment carried out above is perfectly logical. Taken at face value, the English words of Lev. 18.22 according to The Message fall into three parts: (1) ‘Don’t have sex with a man’, (2) ‘as one does with a woman’, and (3) ‘that is abhorrent’. Leaving the word ‘abhorrent’ for later, at this stage I am going to concentrate on (1) and (2). The fundamental part of the prohibition seems to be ‘as one does with a woman’. Put differently, this part of the sentence is stated in positive terms, i.e. it is not negated; hence it implies that it is right and proper for everyone to have sex with a woman. This phrase is connected to the preceding imperative ‘don’t have sex with a man’ by means of the conjunction ‘as’, which in Standard English means ‘to the degree that’. In this manner a comparison is established along with a caveat. Given the positive ring of ‘as one does with a woman’ vis-à-vis the negative connotations of ‘don’t have sex with a man’, it might be argued that The Message is advocating limited bisexuality for women as well as for men and that, in both cases, sex with a woman is presented as the better, and more complete, option.