Reply to An interesting revelation: Homosexuality references in the Bible are recent and modern

Forum Index » Religion

Reply to "An interesting revelation: Homosexuality references in the Bible are recent and modern"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]when you say "modern construct," how are you defining "modern."   Sodomy came to mean as early as the 13th century what it means now, unnatural sexual acts including homosexual acts.  It doesn't mean lack of hospitality or failure to be nice to the poor.[/quote]

[b]it could mean rape and not include homosexual acts[/b][/quote]

Well, o.k., but the New International Version clearly says send out the men "so we can have sex with them." If you want to interpret that as rape, fine. It seems clear to me the gravamen of the offense is men having sex with men.

BTW, you can look the NIV up in Wikipedia and see it was written by scholars to translate the best existing manuscripts into English as those words are commonly understood today.  I understand much in the the Bible is unpalatable to us today in light of our modern sensibilities, but why not just leave it at that instead of trying to pretend the words mean something different than what they clearly say?  [/quote]

1. You are conflating two different lines.  The line about what was done to lots guests, clearly means sex/rape.  Whether THAT sin is the sex itself, the rape, or the inhospitality to guests the hebrew text itself does not say.  What I was referring to was the earlier line where G-d warned Lot of the sinfulness of Sodom BEFORE the incident with the guests.  The plain sense of the Hebrew is entirely vague as to what the sin is, but by a clever play on words the ancient rabbis read the sin as being violence committed against a maiden who helped the poor.

2  The NIV is a Christian translation, and almost certainly reflects long Christian traditions.  Not the midrash I have quoted. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics