More on GLBT in the Bible, Part 1

I had planned to extend this piece but my old concordance has no word eunuck and my Bible 2000 CD isn’t really searchable for words… I thought computors were made for such (not to mention fudamentalist CDs). So, not being very Bible-savvy, I’ll simply add a few observations.

Genesis 18-19 The word in Genesis 19:5 as I have said various times in different places is sungenåmetha autoîs, which means “say hello to them”. The aorist present gnåmen autois which some try to put here (in translations) is a different word altogether, which in the imperfect only e-gnå-, may be a euphemism for (“hetero-sexual”) intercourse, circumstances permitting (which they do in a total of 9 places; 8 in the OT (mainly in Genesis) and 1 in the NT (Matthew 1:25). The root gnå- occurs 934 times in the Bible – 9 egnå- out of 934 gnå- seems to me a total of less than 1%.

Hardly the Rule, but the exception - and it's never "homo-sexual". However, anti Modern "translators" insist on this distortion.

Leviticus 18:22 This is about Koitän gunaikòs; the Wife’s Bed, the only Bed there was in an Antique household. It’s debatable whether the one Bed belonged to the husband or the wife, but both slept in it. The Household itself slept on mats and cots on the floor, or on the roof (in Europe in attics well into the 20th century). What the verse says in the Greek LXX, the Septuagint (the first translation and as such the first interpretation); in fact the first complete Bible, from the Jewish congregation in Alexandria around 100 BC, is kaì metà ársenos ou koimethäsä koitän gunaikòs; “and with a man don’t put yourself in the Bed of a wife”. Quite simply. It’s occupied. 3 is one too many.

The Mazoretic text (c:a 900 AD) seems to be damaged here (there seems to be an im; in, missing), having lost the Bed (at least in translations). But it probably was there originally also in Hebrew.

In the West, the text remained as in the LXX for very long, i.e. in the Old Latin (North Africa, 2nd century onwards). It was only the ideological changes in the very reliable Old Latin translation around 1200 in Paris (the Scholastic Versio Vulgata, with a little help from the holes in the damaged Hebrew text ;=), which caused this to be the very different version we know today, centred on the Spilling of Semen (a Gnosticist Idea) and social discipline (Empire), by way of reading Koitän; the Bed, as a 2nd verb “sleep together sexually”, cf our medical Macaroni coitus ;=) and gunaikòs; (of the) Wife, as “womanly” - Oh! the Daughters of Eve…

Post 16th century Renaissance translators do the same trick with any passage where Koitän appears.

The French Bible de Jerusalem translation (1955) is the only one I’ve found, which retains the original Bed - all others go for the Macaroni.

Leviticus 20:13 the same (a parallel) re-written as secular law (If a man does, then…)

Romans 1:26-27 This gloss (to my mind probably added by Platonist Clement of Alexandria of Fables fame, around 180) expresses the Hellenist popular philosophical preoccupation with the ideal of a-pathía. All feelings páthä; passions, are a-timías; dis-honourable to the philosophically minded, especially if strong...

The passage as a whole (Romans 1:18-32) expresses Museioon’s Idea of a Fall of Humanity from an original (= Good ;=) Idea of a non personal Highest Being, to (cf Shinto of Japan) the base “gods” of Mount Olympus (humans, birds, four footers, and crocodiles, as in Romans 1:23 and Deuteronomium 5:8).

I very much question if such a mixis of Hellenist and Biblical was even possible in Paul’s time.