Free Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire by Eric Berkowitz

Hebrew husbands, on the other hand, faced no such risks. Even if their adultery accusations were proven wrong, the men were considered innocent of any wrongdoing. Thus they were permitted to have their wives poisoned time and again on nothing more than a jealous hunch. 16

TREMBLING BEFORE GOD: HOMOSEXUALITY AMONG THE HEBREWS
     
    With the exception of requiring husbands to be faithful to their wives—at least in theory—the Hebrews treated adultery much as their neighbors did. They struck out on their own, however, in designating a new sexual “abomination” where there had been no precedent: The Bible made anal sex between men a crime of the worst order, for which death by stoning became the only option. “Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable,” commands Leviticus. “Their blood will be on their own heads.” Men had been “lying together” since the beginning of civilization, of course. This was the first time they risked their lives by doing so.
    The Code of Hammurabi, which ordered society in most of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley for more than a thousand years, has nothing to say about homosexuality. The laws of Eshunna and Egypt are also silent on the subject. The Hittites forbade father-son relations, but that was part of a general rule against incest. The Assyrians thought it shameful for a man to repeatedly offer himself to other men, and also prohibited men from raping males of the same social class, but all other male-male sexual relations were ignored. The Hebrews, by contrast, made no distinctions and left no exceptions. Sexual intercourse between men was out, regardless of who was doing it and how it was done. The Jewish God hated it so much he wrecked the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to prove it.
    But before that story (and here’s the punchline: It’s not true), it is worth looking briefly at why the Hebrews would have adopted such a position. As we saw earlier, the ancient Jews were consumed with a sense of physical vulnerability, which they translated into spiritual terms. By drawing rigid sexual boundaries, the Jews were trying to bulk up the body politic. Men having sex with men blurred the lines by putting males in the “receptive” role of females in sex acts that, like bestiality, produced no children. Sexual pleasure was never forbidden among the Hebrews so long as it occurred while husbands and wives were producing more Hebrews. When they sought erotic pleasure for its own sake, or when they had sex that resulted in illegitimate children (as in cases of adultery or incest), the nation of Israel as a whole was weakened. 17 God threatened to destroy the Jews: If they enfeebled themselves from within, they would be destroyed from without.
    In this context, biblical antihomosexual laws were also instruments of foreign policy. Male-male sex was forbidden (the scriptures ignore lesbian relations) precisely because the Jews’ neighbors permitted it. Just as sex with animals was common in the region, so was a benign attitude toward same-gender sex. As it was the mission of the Jews, based on the commandment of their God, to “not do as they do” in other, non-Jewish societies, homosexual sex was just one of a litany of “filthy foreign” practices the Jews defined themselves by rejecting. 18 If the Hebrews’ enemies permitted homosexuality, it was inevitable that Jewish law would forbid it.
    The book of Leviticus was supposed to come to Moses directly from the mouth of God, so its threats of destruction for homosexual sex were taken, so to speak, as gospel. But a simple law is rarely enough in itself to change people’s behavior. The point needed to be driven home with a gruesome example of God making good on his threat. Oddly, the Bible provides no such illustrations. In a book crammed with anecdotes, allegories, and repetitions, the subject of homosexuality is addressed just twice, and in the comparatively dry language cited above. To fill the gap, some later