Bible Twister makes Leviticus say homosexuality is good
From the op-ed pages of the New York Times comes “ The Secret History of Leviticus ,” an improbable essay by Idan Dershowitz. A scholar of the Hebrew Bible and a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, Dershowitz has written for the Times a popular version of the academic argument he published recently in the journal Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel . The Book of Leviticus contains two prohibitions against homosexual acts, the first of which (18:22) states: “You shall not lie with a male as though lying with a woman; it is an abomination.” According to Dershowitz, “before Leviticus was composed, outright prohibitions against homosexual sex … were practically unheard-of in the ancient world.” But he proposes that “an earlier version of the laws in Leviticus 18 permitted sex between men,” albeit tacitly. Supposedly, the laws were revised by a later editor so as to include the prohibition, and to “obscure any implication that same-sex relations had once been permissible.” Dersho