Homosexuality in Deuteronomy and Kings
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The passage of Deuteronomy 23:17–18 reads (NIV):
(17) No Israelite man or woman is to become a shrine prostitute. (18) You must not bring the earnings of a female prostitute or of a male prostitute [Heb. lit.: “the hire of a female prostitute or the price of a dog”] into the house of the LORD your God to pay any vow, because the LORD your God detests them both.
As an appeal to terminology and history, the revisionist view fails to observe that in Deuteronomy 23:18 (which enlarges on v. 17) the terms become zōnāh (“female prostitute”) and keleb (“dog”; LXX kyōn; see pp. 125, 227–28). Is it not possible that the author uses the last term because he assumed that men would be going to the male temple prostitute, and so form a homosexual situation?49 Does not verse 18 interpret verse 17?
Significant evidence in both Scripture and history points to the likelihood of male same-gender activity in cultic prostitution. For example, Leviticus 18:22 (cf. 20:13), prohibiting the lying of a male with another male, probably addresses the same practice as is condemned in Deuteronomy, although there the wording is more general in referring to sodomy.50 Is not Boswell being contradictory in his treatment of Leviticus and Deuteronomy? First, he admits that the descriptions of Leviticus clearly prohibit homosexuality, but because they occur in a cultic, ritual context they pertain only to Israel and are irrelevant today. Then he denies that homosexuality is present in Deuteronomy because there is no reason to believe that temple or cultic prostitution may be of the same sex. By a better line of argumentation, Leviticus furnishes evidence of same-gender sexual behavior elsewhere, including temple prostitution.51
In addition, the Greek version of Aquila rendered qādēš in Deuteronomy 23:17 and elsewhere as endiellagmenoi (“changed” of sex).52 Likewise, the regulation prohibiting the wearing of garments of the opposite gender (22:5) is not a mere rule of conventional propriety, according to S. R. Driver in his critical commentary of Deuteronomy. This rule, he argues, was “directed against the simulated changes of sex which occurred in Canaanite and Syrian heathenism, to the grave moral deterioration of those who adopted them.”53 Driver cites ancient religious rites incorporating sodomy. In worship of a bearded Venus, considered to be of both sexes, men dressed as women, and women dressed as men. Galli, or eunuch-priests of Cybele, the mother of the gods, paraded throughout Syria, Asia Minor, and other places attired as women and solicited people to unholy rites. Finally, Eusebius recounts how Constantine put down a temple of Aphrodite at Aphaka in Coele-Syria because of the character of its rites. He described the priests as “certain men who are women, not men, denying the dignity of nature.”54
The Greeks called the qādēš a kinaidos, receiving his name “from the dog-like manner in which the male qādēš debased himself.”55 Even the lexicons define the term dog as “a male cult prostitute (pederast).”56 Finally, Origen and Aquila used endiellagmenoi (“changed ones”) in translating 1 Kings 22:47 (there is no LXX text), which the KJV renders as “sodomite” (22:46; as also in 14:24; 15:12; 2 Kings 23:7).
The evidence from history is not so lacking that inferences are “moot” (as Boswell characterizes them). In his discussion of prostitution, Edwin Yamauchi shows evidence of male sacred prostitutes in ancient Babylon, “whose manhood Ishtar had changed into womanhood.” The Ugaritic texts list the qdsm, and there were “temple boys” at Carthage.57
Nissinen devotes an entire chapter to sexual practices among males in the ancient world. He finds references from ancient Egypt, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Middle Assyrian laws, and omen texts. Various Mesopotamian sources, from Sumerian times down to the Neo-Assyrian Period, refer to devotees to the gods known as assinnu, kurgarru, and kuluʾu, who were men who had been changed into women. Later documents from Syria, Asia Minor, and Rome speak of similarly emasculated priests called galli. The early church fathers (e.g., Lucian) condemned galli as “holy” (hieroi) or dedicated devotees to the goddesses Atargatis, Cybele, and Attis. As male prostitutes, such priests often serviced males in a religious or cultic context at the temples. Even a Mesopotamian astrological text refers to “love of a man for a man.”58 The similarity to what Deuteronomy 23:17–18 condemns, and to the worship Josiah expelled from Judah in his reforms, is clear.
Similarly, Donald Wold writes extensively about the sources of the ancient Near East, including Middle Assyrian laws and Mesopotamian, Hittite, Egyptian, and Ugaritic (Canaanite) texts. He doubts that devotees to gods in these societies were homosexuals but concludes that homosexuality is found in mythological texts about the gods and in magical omen texts. It is unknown, on the basis of current knowledge, how widespread homosexuality was among the common people, who were chiefly concerned with preservation and reproduction. But “cultic prostitution probably was known throughout the region.” We just aren’t sure of the form.59 Satinover points out that such ritualized sexual gratification was a true compulsion that the Bible condemns “as a quintessential act of idolatry.”60
That male prostitutes would service male worshipers is almost a necessary inference. In the patriarchal society of the East, women had no religious rights, or certainly far fewer rights than men. Predominantly, men would be the priests and men would go to the holy place to worship or prostitute themselves.
In 1 Kings 14:24, the text reads, “And there were also male cult prostitutes in the land. They did according to all the abominations of the nations which the LORD dispossessed before the sons of Israel.” Is not the second half of this verse reflective of the warning of Leviticus 18:24 (“Do not defile yourselves by any of these things; for by all these the nations which I am casting out before you have become defiled”) and verse 27 (“for the men of the land who have been before you have done all these abominations, and the land has become defiled” [emphasis added])? Could not the author of Kings be consciously reflecting the prohibitions of Leviticus? Note especially that abominations derives from the same term in 1 Kings 14:24 and Leviticus 18:22, 26, 27, 29, 30; 20:13 (toʿeba; LXX bdelygma). Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 explicitly describe homosexuality. It seems plausible that “male cult prostitute” must at least be inclusive enough to allow the idea of sodomite, so that the KJV is not incorrect. These passages are not “simply mistranslations of a Hebrew word for temple prostitute,” as Boswell and others maintain.61 The same is true regarding the contexts of the other passages (1 Kings 15:12; 22:46; 2 Kings 23:7).
Asa (1 Kings 15:12) and Jehoshaphat (22:46) put down the male cult prostitution that had flourished under Rehoboam (1 Kings 14:24). During the declining years of Judah, only Josiah (2 Kings 23:7) put down the practice.62 From the time of Asa and Jehoshaphat until Josiah it would be natural to condemn the existence of such prostitution, as Hosea (4:14) does during the reigns of Uzziah and Hezekiah. Apparently, male cult prostitution epitomizes the worst of apostasy. By his actions, Josiah may have directly challenged a curse of the goddess Ishtar.63
All of these references from Scripture and history make it quite plausible that in Deuteronomy 23:17 the sense of qādēš is “homosexual,” and the KJV is correct after all. The NASB tends to sustain this view when in the margin at 23:18 it defines dog as “male prostitute, sodomite.” The New International Version, New English Bible, and New Revised Standard Version use “male prostitute” in the text; the RSV reads “sodomite” in the margin. Boswell may complain that the LXX had difficulty in translating qādēš consistently, employing six different terms, but it is equally plausible that there is some definite reason for the choice of terms (as the use of endiellagmenou in 1 Kings 22:47 by Aquila and Origen demonstrates).64 All of them connote or denote sexual vices, often in a religious context. Boswell simply has no basis to say that none of these terms used by the LXX “would have suggested homosexuality to the theologians of the early church.”65 Although he claims that “almost no theologians invoked these passages as condemnations of homosexual behavior,” he does admit in a footnote that there were some, including Clement of Alexandria.66 It appears that Clement had some basis to find sodomy in Deuteronomy 23:18. In chapter 3 (pp. 125–33), these passages will be discussed as they are translated in the LXX.
De Young, J. B. (2000). Homosexuality: Contemporary Claims Examined in Light of the Bible and Other Ancient Literature and Law (pp. 40–43). Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications.
