What do L+ discourse and the Bible have to do with an old-fashioned card catalog from a library?

Actually, quite a bit. These catalogs were ways of categorizing. Information was sorted, boxed, and labeled.

Close study of the Old Testament reveals a passion for categorizing and labeling things. It starts with Genesis 1 when God creates by separating:

• God separates light from darkness (1:4).
• God separates waters above the dome (the “firmament”) from waters below (1:7).
• God causes dry land to appear from water (1:9).
• God separates day from night (1:14).
• God blesses the Sabbath and distinguishes it from the other days (2:3).

Creation by separation expresses an important OT belief and concern–the belief that things exist in distinct categories and the concern to keep distinct things separate. The flood (Gen. 6-8) is what happens when water doesn’t keep to its rightful place–when it transgresses its boundaries–and mixes with the earth. The result is chaos.

This concern for categories and separation is prominent in Leviticus, where priests are told:

You are to distinguish between the holy and the common and between the unclean and the clean.

Leviticus 10:10

For instance, the priests were to teach Israel to distinguish clean from unclean animals. For the OT, certain kinds of animals are unclean. It was important that Israel not confuse categories by eating something ritually unclean.

Why were certain animals ritually unclean? Because they represent a kind of mixing, a departure from the norm.

• For land animals, the norm is the cow. Clean animals are those that resemble a cow in two important respects–having an undivided hoof and chewing cud. Pigs, having a split hoof and not chewing cud, fail to resemble the normative cow and are thus unclean.
• For sea life, the norm is fish. Clean animals are those with scales and fins. Shrimp, lobster, and other crustaceans are unclean because they lack scales and fins. They don’t fit their category (sea creature).

How, you ask, does all this bear on what the OT has to say about same-sex sex? The answer is that the OT portrays homosexual acts an unlawful mixing that results in chaos.

You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.

Leviticus 18:22

As with animals, so with humans: There are fixed categories (male and female) and there are norms pertinent to those categories (such as heterosexual intercourse). Confusing the categories and departing from the norm are abominable. Same-sex sex represents such a confusion and such a departure. We find another example of gender confusion in Deuteronomy:

A woman shall not wear a man’s apparel, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment, for whoever does such things is abhorrent [literally, abominable] to the Lord your God (Dt. 22:5).

Deuteronomy 22:5

Deuteronomy is actually quite exercised about illicit mixing:

“You shall not sow your vineyard with two kinds of seed, or the whole yield will be forbidden, both the crop that you have sown and the yield of the vineyard itself” (Dt. 22:9).

“You shall not plow with an ox and a donkey yoked together” (Dt. 22:10).

 “You shall not wear clothes made of wool and linen woven together” (Dt. 22:11).

OK, I think I’ve proved my point: The OT (or at least the portions of it that we associate with priestly concerns) teaches that Israel must maintain a separation between things that should not be mixed–genders, partners in intercourse, material in clothing. Things exist in fixed, distinct categories, and those categories must not be confused or blended in any way.

Does this concern show up in the New Testament? Here’s a place where I think it does:

 Do not be mismatched with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and lawlessness have in common? Or what partnership is there between light and darkness? What agreement does Christ have with Beliar? Or what does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God, as God said,

“I will live in them and walk among them,
    and I will be their God,
    and they shall be my people.
¹⁷ Therefore come out from them,
    and be separate from them, says the Lord,
and touch nothing unclean….

2 Corinthians 6:14-17

However, there are also indication in the NT that point in a different direction. One suggestive passage is in Luke 8, where a woman suffering from a 12 yearlong menstrual period approaches Jesus for healing. Since menstruous women were ritually unclean and since unclean things were supposed to be kept physically separate from holy things, this was a tense situation; there was a danger that the holy Jesus would be profaned. Yet, unexpectedly, when the woman touches Jesus, he suffers no loss of holiness. On the contrary, the woman is physically healed and at the same time rendered ritually clean. (A former student of mine, Keegan Ossinski, wrote a wonderful essay on this episode.)

Another passage occurs when a foreign woman confronts Jesus with a request for healing. According to Matthew’s gospel, the preaching of the kingdom was for Israel only–the twelve disciples were specifically told not to go into Gentile areas or even Samaria (Mt. 10:5-6). Nonetheless, after some clever urging by the foreign woman, Jesus heals her daughter. This passage fits into the New Testament’s teaching that the gospel of the Kingdom is for everyone–a common sentiment today, but novel in the early decades of Christianity.

Another and equally dramatic passage occurs in Mark 7 when, in debate with the Pharisees about OT purity concerns, Jesus “declared all foods clean” (Mk. 7:19), destroying one fundamental way of categorizing things in the OT.

Well, if the distinction between clean and unclean food is nullified, does that nullification extend elsewhere? Such an extension appears in Acts 10 when Peter, a Jew, perceives that God welcomes non-Jews into the kingdom of God and confesses, “God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean” (Acts 10:28). Gentiles, in other words, were no longer to be considered ritually unclean merely because they were Gentiles.

There is a lot more to be said about categories, labeling, and separation in the Bible. There are also important philosophical and scientific considerations. However, I think it’s safe to say that, to the extent that the Bible’s teaching about same-sex sex rests on concerns about keeping things separate and on beliefs about fixed categories, it is worth revisiting that teaching in light of NT passages such as those that I’ve cited.

Image attribution

• Card catalog: Photo by Sanwal Deen on StockSnap
• Woman in trousers: CC
• Mixed seeds: Free to use CC0
• Cotton wool sweater: Free to use CC0
• Jesus healing the woman with the issue of blood: PD-Art
• Jesus heals the Syrophoenician woman: CC BY 4.0