“the Bible says homosexuality is a sin” well the Bible also has a lot of sexism, rape, incest, violence and a lot of contradictory messages in general because it was written by people and people have agendas
I don’t really think that God even has the time to care about if people are gay like if he’s got a whole world to run there are more important things anyway
And if God is love, he’s not just loving me if I am what he wants; he’s loving me as the person he made me to be, which is a queer person
You can’t say “I love you, and I made you gay but I’m sending you to hell you awful sinner” my dude that doesn’t make sense it’s not like hell has a low population is it
The god I believe in loves queer people because that’s how he made us
the bible doesn’t condemn homosexuality anyway. It’s content taken out of context and misinterpreted over hundreds of years of translations, re-translations, and mis-translations.
Hell, in Kenneth Davis’s Don’t Know Much About The Bible, there’s a passage that absolutely blows my mind and proves just how much we can misinterpret with simple translation mistakes:
“In researching the world’s oldest city, for instance, I learned that Joshua’s Jericho is one of the oldest human settlements. It also lies on a major earthquake zone. Could that simple fact of geology have had anything to do with those famous walls tumbling down? Then I discovered that Moses and the tribes of Israel never crossed the Red Sea but escaped from Pharaoh and his chariots across the Sea of Reeds, an uncertain designation which might be one of several Egyptian lakes or a marshy section of the Nile Delta. This mistranslation crept into the Greek Septuagint version and was uncovered by modern scholars with access to old Hebrew manuscripts.”
The bible is one long-ass game of telephone, whispered around the world in dozens if not hundreds of languages, for thousands of years. I have a hard time knowing what my grandpa is talking about, when he starts going on about the technology or practices of his youth, and that was only about 80 years ago, in the same country and in the same language as me. So why every Joe on the streets thinks they can take one or two verses, completely out of context and probably mis-translated several times to boot, and use it to spout propaganda and hatred for an entire group of people will forever be beyond me.
You’re all valid, and frankly, if there is a ‘loving God,’ then that God will be happy to see you happy. Seriously.
I needed that. Thank you.
The Bible wasn’t faxed down from the sky, people, it’s been compiled and formulated for hundreds of years until it became what it is today. And yes, misinterpreted by whoever with whatever agenda-of-the-day.
And hypocrites always stick to the word and not the spirit of any religion: to love, to help, to respect, to protect, and to strive to make the world a better place.
Yup, Jesus never said ANYTHING against LGBT people. All he said was don’t be greedy, don’t be lustful and don’t be wrathful. The fact that LGBTphobes took those instructions out of context to justify their LGBTphobia is pretty telling!
Hey, your friendly neighborhood Jew here!
You guys know that verse in Leviticus that homophobes like to trot out? Well, I’m here to tell you:
They don’t read Hebrew and they don’t know shit.
And now here’s something you probably won’t hear from any of those Fine Christian Folks ™ anytime soon, either:
We do read Hebrew and we still don’t know shit.
Here’s the thing. The most “accurate” word-for-word translation of that verse would say “a man shall not lie with another man; it is forbidden.”
Here’s the issue.
The grammar surrounding “men” in that sentence isn’t correct, and the word I’ve translated as “forbidden” is “toevah,” a word so fucking old we literally don’t know what it meant anymore.
The strange sentence construction suggests that “lie with another man” uses a feminine construction you wouldn’t normally find in a sentence that’s entirely about men, and while “toevah” means “forbidden,” it’s not actually clear what is forbidden. Here’s an incomplete list of possibilities:
Pederasty (adult male/adolescent male sex) is full-stop forbidden, a man sleeping with a male prostitute is full-stop forbidden, a man sleeping with a man as part of any kind of sex magic or fertility ritual is forbidden.
And my rabbi’s personal interpretation, based on the sentence construction: a man shouldn’t sleep with another man in a woman’s bed. (So basically: don’t cheat on your wife with a dude, which is probably treated separately from “don’t commit adultery” because adultery would come with the risk of an illegitimate child.)
You’ll notice none of these involve “ew, you disgusting gays.”
Unless you accept a word-for-word literal translation with zero consideration for the social mores and other tribes surrounding Israel contemporary with the writing of Torah, nothing about this commandment has anything to do with our modern understanding of queer people having committed relationships. Once you start taking the rituals and practices of Israel’s contemporaries into account, it suddenly becomes clear why these prohibitions would have been put into place (sex magic was common in the cult of Ba’al, for example, while pederasty was practically a requirement in Greece).
If you’re just a person out there loving other people of the same gender as you? The Torah says nothing against you. But do you know what our literary tradition does say?
It puts you in the company of Naomi and Ruth.
Ruth is considered the first convert, and her vow to her mother-in-law Naomi (after Ruth’s husband’s death) forms the basis of our modern marriage vows. “Where you go, I shall go, and where you lodge, I shall lodge; your people shall be my people, and your G-d my G-d; and where you die I shall die, and there shall I be buried.” Ruth remarries as prescribed by law at the time, but even when a child is born of that new union, nobody calls it “Ruth’s and Boaz’s child”–they all say a child has been born to Ruth and Naomi.
You are in the company of a woman whose name we invoke in our prayers and whose life we celebrate. I wear her words around my shoulders on my tallit, my sacred prayer shawl. Since we consider that everything in the Tanakh is intended for learning and study, what might we take from this story, but that a queer person can be virtuous and beloved of G-d?
Tag: lgbt
Trialogo series By Gonzalo Orquin will finally be shown in New York after the Vatican threatened to sue the artist at the showing in Rome
If its okay, would you be able to write something about being queer and hope? We’ve got the government backing a thing in Australia that will see an entire nation vote on whether marriage equality should be legal. There’s going to be equal funding for the “no” side, it’ll hurt a lot of young queers and its not even binding at the end. Its just so overwhelming.
i dreamed last night of jesus.
he was a protester with top surgery
scars on his bare chest, with a mouth painted wedding ring gold, with a heart
so unmistakably bright you knew
he was the one who sang the stars
into burning. he stood at the front
lines. he had scabbed knuckles. i asked
him to kiss me right there in front
of the thunderstorm & he did, nice
& slow, like we had nothing but
forevers. in some life i believe we do.but who are we here when the reckoning
tries to stumble its way forward?
women with river shale knees,
men with pink lemonade shoulders,
people who smile at their lovers,
hold their children, construct bronze
monuments to those we lost
when the past reckonings arrived.
& look how our history shines
in the light anyway. & look how we
teach ourselves to dance & write
poetry & leave everywhere we go the rose
petal sheen of kindness.see that thunderstorm, its smile
full of bruise colored snake teeth?
you are of the holy wholly beautiful gay
blood. keep marching.
Gender Diversity in Torah:
(I typed a paper on this but it was very long so here’s a condensed version. I used Artscroll for the Hebrew bits)
Despite the binary nature of the Hebrew language, biblical scribes found ways of demonstrating the gender variance and diversity of gender that exists in the lines of biblical texts. Post-biblical commentators created gender domains based on what they read in the text including androgynos, tumtum, aylonit and the saris. While these categories are largely based off of genitalia, many of these designations can help scholars understand how they correspond to modern-day understandings of gender.
- Rebecca- Rebecca is called “נער” (hereby transliterated “na’ar”), a word that refers to a young man. Biblical authors forewent the feminine form (נערה, or “na’ar’ah”), meaning young woman, in favor of referring to Rebecca as a young man. In many versions of the text, next to each occurrence of the word “na’ar” is a note in parenthesis, ״כתיב נערה״. This “kere u’ketiv”, or note of substitution, was edited into the text by the Masoretes to fix the “error” (Brodie). However, this supposed “error” occurs not once, but five times- all referring to Rebecca (Genesis 24:14,16,28,55,57), making it unlikely that it was a mistake at all. In fact, in Genesis 24:44, Abraham’s servant recounts the advice his master gave him, that whoever offers him water for his camels, “[הוא] shall be the woman whom G-d has designated for my master’s son.” The word for “he” (הוא) is used, rather than “she” (היא). Rebecca is referred to in the feminine case in all other instances. This mixing of genders may have been a purposeful attempt by the biblical authors to convey Rebecca’s gender variance.
- Dinah- Dinah is similarly referred to as a young man, “na’ar” three times (and is never referred to as “na’ar’ah”) in her (only) reference in the Torah, in Genesis 34.
- HaAdam (aka Adam and Eve)- Genesis 1:27 includes another interesting phrasing when it comes to gender. It reads, “G-d created the adam in G-d’s image; in the image of G-d [G-d] created him— male and female [G-d] created them” (Kukla and Zellman), The earth-creature (or Adam) is referred to first in the singular, and then in the plural- emphasizing that Adam was created as both male and female in one singular being. This did not go unnoticed by early rabbinic commentators, such as Rabbi Jeremiah ben Elazar, “When the Holy One, blessed be the One, created the first adam, [G-d] created him [an] “androgynos,” (both male and female). Adam and Eve are later cleaved in two. Some argue that Genesis 2’s account of the creation of Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs to form Eve contradicts this. It would seem from reading this passage reading the word “tzelah” as “rib” that Eve was formed from a small piece of Adam, and that the Adam creature was created primarily masculine. But the word, which is frequently translated as rib, “tzelah”, is more accurately translated “side,” as it is when referencing the sides of the tabernacle (Exodus 26:20). The creation of Eve was more like a separation of two halves, not the forming of Eve out of a small piece of Adam. This separation is emphasized again in Genesis 3:20, when Adam says “The man called his wife’s name Eve, because [הוא] had become the mother of all the living”. He uses the masculine form of the third person singular pronoun, rather than the feminine “היא”. This choice of words may have been to further emphasize the fact that Eve was a part of the original adam creature that had been referred to in the masculine sense. Adam and Eve’s androgynous nature might be most similar today to intersexuality, which often includes individuals that have features of both male- and female- assigned individuals.
- Joseph- Joseph has very feminine attributes. In Genesis 39:6, Joseph is described in a phrase used only one other time, to describe his mother; “יפה תואר ויפה מראה” or “of goodly description and goodly appearance”. Although ״תואר״ is sometimes used to refer to male beauty, “מראה” is only ever used to apply to women in the Torah (Lowin, 123). Joseph is also referred to as a “na’ar,” or young man, at age seventeen, far past the point at which he should be considered a youth. This may be an attempt to further feminize Joseph. Rabbinic commentators suggested that Joseph “behaved like a boy, penciling his eyes, curling his hair, and lifting his heel” (Hope-Lefkowitz, 89). Joseph certainly becomes more feminine in appearance after joining Egyptian society, dressing in rings, fine linens, and necklaces (Gen. 41:42). He is so unrecognizable by the time his brothers return to see him in Egypt that his brothers are confused when he reveals himself to them in Genesis 45:3. It is very likely that Joseph was dressed according to Egyptian cultural norms befitting his status, including a clean-shaven face, heavy jewelry, and dark kohl facial makeup.
- Sarah and Abraham- Sarah’s name changes in Genesis 17 from the masculine “Sarai” meaning “my prince” to the more feminine “Sarah,” or “princess.” This name change occurs with G-d’s promise that Sarah will no longer be barren. As Rabbi Nachman points out through his commentary on the Talmud, Genesis 11:30 is not simply emphasizing Sarai’s bareness by stating it twice with, “And Sarai was barren, she had no child”. He theorizes that this double-bareness was intended to mean that “she did not even have a womb”. Other early rabbinic commentators theorized that this barrenness of Abraham and Sarah was because they were both tumtum (they had indeterminate genitals). Rabbi Ammi interprets the parallelism in Isaiah 51:1, “Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and at the hollow of the pit from which you were dug; look to Abraham your forefather and Sarah who bore you”, to mean that Abraham and Sarah had indeterminate genitals before divine intervention. Abraham’s genitals were further shaped or “hewn” through divine intervention, while Sarah’s genitals were “dug” out, and a womb was formed. In the same encounter that G-d promises he will make Sarah able to bear children, he also tells Abraham that “Sarai” will become “Sarah.” Not only is her name changed from masculine to feminine, but the “י” (with a gematria value of 10) is “halved” into two “הs” (each with a gematria value of 5). The masculine essence of Sarai’s genitals that made her an aylonit or tumtum was hewn out and given to Abram, forming Abraham and Sarah. In modern terms, Sarah might have been considered a trans woman.
- G-d themselves- Judaism has traditionally held the idea that G-d is gender-neutral, stemming from the Genesis 1:26 statement by G-d, “Let us make Man in Our image, after Our likeness,” followed by the Genesis 1:27, “male and female he created Them,”. By creating a male-and-female creature in Their Own likeness, G-d identifies Themselves as something both masculine and feminine in nature. This plays into kabbalist mythology, where G-d is interpreted as having many faces, one of his many natures being the feminine Shekinah. In a language where the masculine takes precedence over the feminine, it is difficult to see this gender-variant nature of G-d. However, numerous times, metaphors are drawn comparing G-d to a comforting mother. In Deuteronomy 32:18, G-d is referenced as “the one who gave you birth” In Isaiah, G-d labors like a woman (Isaiah 42:14), remembers the children of Israel whom G-d “nursed” (Isaiah 49:15), and comforts her child- “Like a man whose mother consoled him, so will I console you, and in Jerusalem will you be consoled” (Artscroll, Isaiah 66:13). This gender variant nature of G-d reflects the true diversity of gender in the human expression.
Possible Biblical view of gender
Okay so I was reading Genesis 1-3 today trying to study what the Bible says about Gender and I found something interesting. In Gen. 1 God makes Man (Gender neutral/mortal) and makes them (they/them) male and female. But only in Chpt. 2 does God make the first female. So did God make Adam’s soul both male and female? To go even further, does this mean all our souls are either both genders or have no genders? If this is true then it would completely explain people having different genders, because they would be feeling the gender of their soul rather than their biological one.
This could mean that while we have gender roles set up on us from the fall that are biology specific, we are still different genders in our soul.
What do you think? Am I reading too much into it or missing something?
Submitted by @adopeydreamer
I think that’s definitely a possibility! The website Hope Remains goes into that, too, saying that both Adam and Eve were gender neutral while inside the Garden because it was only outside that they needed a physical reproductive system/to be biologically different. So I think there’s definitely something to that!
–Admin Emily
It’s basically Gen 1-3 and more specifically Gen 1:27 that brought me to the realisation that I’m genderqueer. It was the earth shattering realisation that “male *and* female he created them” (Gen 1:27) could be read that humanity as a whole was created a mixture of male and female and that the infinite variety that God loves was in that. I realised that God could love me with a gender identity that lay outside the binary, in fact that it’s possible that this was part of God’s original plan for humanity.
You *can* even go one step further and suggest that the whole Gen 2-3 Fall Narrative actually explains that gender is a result of or the cause of sin. It is only after the fall that gender becomes concrete.Oooh I love where this is going! but I’m going to throw the original Hebrew text into the conversation to help clarify and enrich it.
Then, as the second half of this post, I want to add a little more about how I interpret gender in Genesis 2 – so if you want to skip the linguistics, read the summary paragraph below and then skip to the paragraph that begins “As a sort of summary” near the end in bold. You could also skim while focusing on the parts in bold if you don’t have time to read the whole post.
As a summary of what the Hebrew will reveal: those verses in Genesis 1 are not talking about Adam alone – they’re about the whole of humanity, or all of the first humans. Genesis 1 and 2 are actually two separate stories – offering us two versions of Creation. Genesis 1 is a broader picture of how God made all of Creation, and so the making of humanity in this version is just a short overview. Genesis 2 “rewinds” in order to narrow the scope and focus on the making of humans, and so we get more details to the story. (For more on the differences between chapters 1 and 2, see this webpage.)
Thus, when Genesis 1 talks about God creating “man” in God’s own image (and the following paragraphs are going to critique that translation “man”), it’s talking not just about Adam but about all of the first of humanity – or, to relate it to Genesis 2, to Adam and Eve.Some of this discussion is going to get a little linguistic-y and grammatical, so if there’s a part you don’t understand, don’t freak out! I’ve done my best to be as clear as possible, but feel free to ask questions, or to simply shrug and move past particularly confusing sentences; even without some of the details, you should get the big picture.
Let’s dive in.
I recommend pulling up this webpage, which is an interlinear version of Genesis 1, to look at while reading this info on the Hebrew. The main verses relevant to this discussion are Genesis 1:26-28, so scroll the page down to there.
An interlinear text lines up the original Hebrew with a (very literal, basic) English translation, word for word. Note that you have to read the English lines from right to left, as that’s the order Hebrew goes in! It also follows the Hebrew word order, so you have to sort of flip flop some of the English for it to make sense.I am going to go verse by verse, pointing out the words that are important to the conversation and that may not always be translated clearly from the Hebrew into English.
Verse 26: “And God said, let us make adam in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air…(etc.)”
- First off, let me clarify the Hebrew word adam before translating it into English. Here, it is not talking about the first man whose story is told in Genesis 2 whose name is Adam – while this word can indeed be a name, it is more often used as a common noun in Hebrew for humans in general. (On a complete tangent, if you’re curious, here’s a post I wrote months ago that discusses the differences between the word adam and the word ish, which is the word for “man” specifically.)
- adam – as OP notes, the word used here is indeed gender neutral in the original Hebrew, despite often being translated into English as “man.” Clines’ dictionary defines adam as being able to be a collective noun (basically, a noun that “looks” singular but represents a plural group, such as the word “class,” which is a singular word representing a group of students) or a singular noun. Here is its definition of this word:
– “1. humanity, human beings, people, persons in general (without regard to sex); human race as a whole.”
– “2. individual, human being, person, whether a particular person or a typical human.”
So here in verse 26, when God makes adam in God’s image, is adam one human being (no gender specified) or humanity as a whole? I would say the second option – this verse is saying that God makes the whole human race in God’s image.- “…let them have dominion…” – this phrase is in the Hebrew one word, a verb – one that has a plural ending on it. This is not being used as a singular indefinite pronoun the way “they/them” can be used in English, because that cannot be done with this Hebrew construction – it is indeed referring to multiple people. So, combined with adam, we can surmise that “let them have dominion” means “let all human beings have dominion.”
Verse 27: “And God created the human race in his own image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”
- Here is where stuff gets good.
- You will notice that in my above English translation, them occurs twice – but in the actual Hebrew, there are two different pronouns being used.
- “in the image of God he created them” – here the pronoun is in the masculine singular, and is usually translated “him” or “it,” as it is used to refer to male individuals as well as nouns that are masculine (Hebrew has gendered nouns the way, say, Spanish does). In this verse, the masculine singular is referring to “the human race,” as adam as a noun is technically masculine (the “default” gender of Hebrew), even though it refers to people in a gender non-specific way, if that makes sense. So in some translations you’ll see it translated “he created him” to be true to the singular-ness of the Hebrew pronoun – but that causes confusion, making the reader think the verse is about one man, rather than the human race.
- “male and female he created them” – here the pronoun is indeed the masculine (or default; it can encompass individuals of any gender) plural. Like the phrase “let them have dominion” in verse 26, this use of the plural pronoun clarifies that the adam God is making in God’s image is indeed plural – not just one human but humanity.
- “male and female he created them” – oh no, you might be thinking, if this passage is thus about all humanity and not just Adam, does that mean that God makes all humanity male and female – i.e., with no possibility of humans being non-binary genders? Indeed, this verse is all too often used against nonbinary folks (and trans folks in general) in this way. But fear not.
- People have written about how this and is “not a binary and” – just as God creating the heavens and the earth encompasses all that is in them, so God creating humans male and female encompasses the rest of the gender spectrum – see this short post, as well as this video by Austen Hartke for a more in-depth look at this idea (starting around 2 minutes in). As Austen explains in the vid, things in nature are not so easily categorized into the binary “and”s of Genesis 1 – “if day and night were so equally separated, we wouldn’t have dawn or dusk.”
Verse 28: “And God blessed them and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air…”
- Not much new to note for this verse except to confirm that all of uses of them here are indeed plural, speaking to multiple beings; and that the command forms here are also plural – God is making the commands not to one person but multiple. This is cool to note when it comes to equality of genders – not only men receive God’s blessing, and not only men are told to “have dominion” – the first humans together are told this. (The verbs and pronouns in verse 29 are also all plural.)
So that ends the discussion of the Hebrew for Genesis 1:26-28. But even with all of that information, I’m intrigued by some of your points, @adopeydreamer and @gqsnail! Even though Genesis 1 is discussing the creation of all the human race (or, if you prefer, of both Adam and Eve, the first two humans), I think you could indeed interpret that line “male and female he created them” as stating that each individual human is “male and female” – that we each are created with the potential to be male, or female, or both, or something that fits elsewhere on the spectrum signified by that conjunction and. That’s pretty rad, and I’ll bring it up again a little later on.
Beyond that, I definitely recommend, as gqsnail does, checking out what hoperemains has to say about Adam and Eve. There are some things the webpage says that I’m not sure I agree with fully, but it’s a wonderful start at considering these first humans and gender and sexuality. It also clarifies some stuff about how Genesis 1 is an overview while Genesis 2 is more specific, and explains Hebrew nouns a bit, so if you found what I wrote confusing, see if the link helps you make better sense of it.
That leads, finally, to what I want to contribute to the conversation – not about Genesis 1′s version of creation, but the different version offered in Genesis 2:
Hoperemains points out that while adam – the basic, non-gender-specific word for “human” (which is often inaccurately translated as “man” in English Bibles) – is what God forms out of the dust in verse 7 of the Genesis 2 story, this adam actually uses a different word for himself – ish, the gender-specific word for man, i.e. a male person.
In other words, God created a human being without specifying a gender for that human being – it is this adam who chooses to label himself ish, to identify as a man. He first does this in 2:23, after calling the human formed from his rib ishah, the word for woman.
The fact that the man is the one who labels the woman leaves me feeling conflicted – it would be much “better” if she were able to choose for herself what she was instead of the man choosing for her (he also picks out her name, Eve, in 3:20); but if one studies the way social binaries are constructed, it is true that the dominant member of the binary tends to be the one that imposes the “lesser” label onto the oppressed member of the binary, so…from a sociological view, this makes sense. (It’s also a matter of recognizing that I’m likely reading way too much into it – I prefer interpreting scripture while keeping its very human, patriarchy-influenced authors in mind.) But anyway, I thought I’d throw this out here as kind of cool – that the first human chooses their gender.
As a sort of summary of all of this; If we want to read Genesis 1 and 2 together, we might read it thus:
- In Genesis 1:27, God creates the human race male and female – we can read this as each human being thus being created with an innate capacity to be male, female, and/or somewhere on the spectrum hidden in that word and, as formerly discussed. Even so, the text continues to use the neutral adam in 1:28 through the majority of chapter 2 – God does not label any individual adam as an ish or an ishah, a man or a woman.
- In Genesis 2, which “rewinds” and offers a more detailed account of humanity’s creation, God forms the non-gender-specific adam out of clay and spirit and then forms a “helpmate” (an interesting, also non-gender-specific word discussed more in the above hoperemains link) from that adam’s rib. Only at that point do gender specific terms enter the story – not from God, but from the adam, who identifies himself as ish, a man, and labels his helpmate ishah, a woman.
With these two chapters together, we have space to view gender as something God created, or as a social construct, or as a mix of the two. From Genesis 1, we see God making humans with gender (or at least sex) specified for the spectrum of humanity but without specifying a gender for any one human. From Genesis 2, we see God making humans with no genders (or sexes) specified, and the adam choosing to identify himself with a specific gender.
Why does this matter? Because it honors both those who hold their gender as something important to them and their faith, as well as those who don’t identify with any gender or who have struggled with being gendered in certain ways against their will. We can honor gender as something God created a potential for in each human being, while also honoring the agency each human has to choose their own gender.
We also see in Genesis 2 the act of Adam gendering Eve, rather than Eve choosing to identify as a woman for herself. This is something we certainly see reflected in the history of the gender binary, with very harmful consequences over the ages.
So rather than gendering one another, let us offer to each individual person the agency God created us with – to choose for ourselves how we want to identify, to feel out for ourselves which gender (or genders, or no gender at all) speaks to us from within the common human roots inside ourselves.
Thanks to @adopeydreamer, @lgbt-christian-safe-haven, and @gqsnail for starting this conversation! Sorry I wrote so long haha, but you’ve gotten me to look deeper into these first chapters of Genesis and I’m excited about that. I’d love to hear anyone else’s responses!
This is very thought provoking and much appreciated! Thanks for that research as well!
bennu rising 