Читать книгу For We Know in Part - Robert Henrikson - Страница 18

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In the time and place that the book of Leviticus was written, human life and survival were very precarious. Certain assets were extremely hard to acquire and difficult to hold on to. Probably the most precious commodity to an ancient nomadic family and to the nation to which it belonged was not water, food, or livestock, but something far more fragile and less plentiful: the male substance that begets life, semen. The ancients believed that human sperm was limited and should not be wasted (Christian Science Magazine, Homosexuality and the Bible, by Walter Wink, 1996, p.2). With that understanding and with a high infant mortality rate from disease, war, pestilence, and superstition, the prospect of having and maintaining an enduring male family line was truly perilous.

The danger of losing some of its sons was so inevitable that the national mentality forbade upon penalty of death the wasting of male semen. Because of the extremely high value placed on the duty to sire sons, any social interaction by a male that permitted his semen to go anywhere but into a womb would have been tantamount to treason of the most dire kind. It is only natural that a strict prohibition (religious or otherwise) against same-gender sexual conduct would be enacted by such a people in order to minimize the loss of non-propagating semen.

While this compulsion to preserve the national identity was still in existence when the book of Romans was written, it was another influence of Greek and Roman sexual permissiveness that more infuriated the conservative Jewish mind. In the forms of religious-cult temple prostitution by both male/female and male/male rituals, and of an institution called ‘pederasty’ (leaders mentoring young males for which sexual favors were expected), the society of N. T. times became too promiscuous for the Jewish and Christian faithful. It is no surprise that they would speak out against it in their writings. It was in this climate of perversion that persons born with or developing into a same-gender orientation would be pronouncing a death sentence upon themselves if they dared to declare their true natures.

In either the O. T. era of superstitious protectionism or in the N. T. era of reaction-ism, it was not safe for anyone to openly declare their same-gender love and affection. For some reason God had chosen to keep this reality obscure until a time in history when it would be less threatening for his people to announce their true identities.