A Queer Theological Reading of Leviticus 18:22: “Do Not Lie With A Man As With A Woman”

You shall not lie with a man as with a woman. It is an abomination (Lev. 18:22).

If a man lies with a man as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death. Their blood is upon them (Lev. 20:13).

Leviticus 18:22 is a short verse around which this article is built. In the Bible, it is echoed almost verbatim by Leviticus 20:13. The second passage repeats the original wording and adds a prescription of capital punishment.

Within the corpus of the Old Testament, both verses occupy a distinctive, almost isolated place: elsewhere there are no direct correspondences to them, and they are not quoted again.

The phrase, “You shall not lie with a man as with a woman. It is an abomination,” is traditionally understood as a prohibition of male same-sex intercourse. When read this way, it is treated as an unequivocal statement about God’s attitude toward such practices and is cited as grounds for forbidding same-sex relationships.

In this article, we will examine contemporary biblical scholarship, including the work of queer theologians, who propose a different interpretation. According to these approaches, the text is not prohibiting same-sex relationships in general, but rather male incest within the same household. This conclusion is supported by a detailed philological analysis of the ancient Hebrew original.

Whom Leviticus Is Addressed To

“Leviticus” is the title of one of the books of the Bible; it may be understood as “the book about the Levites.”

The Levites were one of the tribes of Israel from which temple ministers were drawn. Yet the status of chief priests did not belong to all Levites, but to the kohanim — the descendants of Aaron: only they had the right to offer sacrifices.

The book was intended primarily for priests, since it contained instructions for the sacrificial order, rules of ritual purity, and regulations defining what was permitted and what was forbidden in worship.

From this, one might conclude that the prohibition in Lev. 18:22 does not apply to people today, since we do not belong to the priesthood of ancient Israel. But this argument is weak, because familiarity with this book was enjoined upon the whole people of Israel: it codified norms of conduct, distinguishing the allowable from the prohibited.

In the Christian tradition, it is commonly held that after the coming of Jesus Christ, Levitical cultic prescriptions lost their binding force. Animal sacrifices, dietary restrictions — for example, the prohibition of pork or seafood — as well as ritual purifications were tied to the temple cult of ancient Israel and are no longer regarded as requiring literal observance.

In debates, reference is also made, for instance, to Leviticus 25, which contains provisions that permit slavery. This fact is used as an argument against applying Leviticus 18:22 in the present: if some of the book’s injunctions, including the acceptance of slavery, are not considered obligatory, then other prohibitions may likewise be seen as historically conditioned.

At the same time, the book’s moral injunctions — such as the prohibitions of murder and theft and the commandment “love your neighbor as yourself” — are usually acknowledged in Christianity as retaining their force. In Judaism, however, “Leviticus” continues to be received as part of the living Law in its entirety.

Traditional Interpretation: A Ban On “Sodomy”

In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, Leviticus 18:22 is treated as an unconditional prohibition of “sodomy” and related practices. Aleksandr Lopukhin, for example, wrote: “The prohibition of the most loathsome forms of carnal sin — sodomy… is accompanied by an indication that they existed among the Canaanites, who will be repaid for this according to justice.”

Catholic theology takes a similar position. In papal documents, this prohibition is classified among the moral provisions of the Law, understood to remain binding even after the coming of Jesus Christ.

In Protestant circles, no single approach has prevailed. Assessments vary. Contemporary apologists, including LGBT Christians, more often focus not on whether the text contains a prohibition, but on its character: whether it belongs to ritual regulations that, in Christian understanding, lost their obligatory force after Christ, or whether it is a moral norm that continues to apply.

Queer Theological And Related Readings

In contemporary scholarship associated with queer theology, several interpretations of Leviticus 18:22 have been proposed. Among them, three approaches stand out, differing in method and argumentation.

The theologian and professor Daniel A. Helminiak interprets the verse primarily within its historical and religious context. He links the prohibition to the task of distinguishing Israel from the “foreign” cultic practices of neighboring peoples and to prevailing notions of ritual purity.

In The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, the grammar of the formula is analyzed, and the possibility of a narrower scope for the prohibition is discussed. The commentary cites a theory advanced by Rabbi Jacob Milgrom, according to which the text may address the specific case of incest.

The most elaborate philological analysis is offered by Renato Lings. He examines in detail the verse’s vocabulary and grammatical construction and concludes that Leviticus 18:22 should be understood as a prohibition of male incest rather than a universal condemnation of same-sex relationships.

Each of these three approaches will be considered in detail below.

Helminiak’s Reading: The Ban As Part Of Israel’s Separation From Neighboring Cults

First, Daniel A. Helminiak’s interpretation proceeds from the premise that the injunction in Leviticus is addressed to men and does not extend to female same-sex relations. Second, he connects the prohibition not to a moral evaluation of sexual behavior as such, but to the task of religious boundary-making: in Leviticus, male participation in same-sex acts functions as a sign of assimilation to “pagans” and of self-identification with non-Jews — that is, it is treated as a form of religious apostasy and a breach of covenant loyalty through involvement in “foreign” cultic practices.

This reading draws support from the placement of the prohibition within the so-called Holiness Code, whose purpose is to keep Israel “holy,” that is, set apart from neighboring peoples. At the beginning of chapter 18, the basic directive is stated: do not act as they do in Egypt and Canaan, and do not follow their statutes. What follows is a list of practices associated with Canaanite religion and labeled “abominations”: fertility motifs, sex during menstruation, and the sacrifice of children to Molech. Against this backdrop, the ban on male same-sex acts appears within the same series as yet another marker of what is “foreign” and ritually unacceptable.

Helminiak illustrates the logic by analogy: a modern believer might be repelled by a “satanic ritual” with sexual elements not because of sex per se, but because worship is being directed to the “wrong” object; similarly, on this view, Leviticus primarily condemns religious infidelity rather than sexual practice as a universal ethical category.

From this follows his “mismatch of conditions” thesis: in most contemporary contexts, sex is not part of a religious rite, and therefore the rationale of the ancient prohibition does not coincide with the terrain of modern debates about homosexuality. Citing Leviticus as a direct answer to the question “ethical or unethical?” amounts to a shift of topic, because the text is addressing communal boundaries and covenant fidelity, not constructing a universal moral theory of sexual acts.

A separate strand of Helminiak’s argument concerns the word commonly rendered “abomination.” In translation it sounds like a moral verdict, yet in its ancient Hebrew setting it is tied to the ritual system of clean and unclean. In Lev. 20:25–26, what is “abominable” stands alongside prohibitions against “defiling” oneself with unclean animals and birds; within this logic, “abomination” functions as a type of “uncleanness” and as a violation of ritual purity rules. The same principle is visible in dietary restrictions, bans on “mixing” (seeds, fabrics), and temporary states of impurity associated with menstruation, emission of semen, contact with death, and childbirth.

The internal logic of these prohibitions is difficult to reconstruct, and a “sanitary” explanation, Helminiak argues, does not work: it fails to clarify bans on mixing textiles and fits poorly with descriptions of skin diseases. In Lev. 13:13, purity is correlated not with contagion but with the integrity of a condition, since the person who is wholly afflicted is declared clean.

Accordingly, the categories of “clean” and “unclean” are interpreted as a ritual system rather than a moral ethic. Contemporary cultures also rely on notions of what is “dirty” or “improper,” but these are more often social taboos and learned reactions of disgust — and disgust is not identical with moral wrongness: what seems “dirty” may simply be unfamiliar, and over time such prohibitions can come to be experienced as “eternal” and even “divine,” though they originated as norms of a particular milieu.

On Helminiak’s reading, then, labeling male same-sex acts an “abomination” means assigning them to the sphere of ritual impurity and “foreignness,” not asserting that they are “evil by nature.” Moreover, in the Hebrew text “abomination” renders the word tōʿēbâ, which can be understood as “impurity,” “defilement,” or “taboo,” in contrast to zimmâ, which denotes evil as such. Thus in Lev. 18:22 the act is marked as a taboo and a ritual transgression, not as an ethical sin.

In support of this reading, Helminiak appeals to the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Scriptures for Greek-speaking Jews. In Lev. 18:22, tōʿēbâ is translated with βδέλυγμα (bdélygma), a term that likewise belongs to the sphere of ritual impurity. The translators could, however, have used ἀνομία (anomía), “lawlessness,” a word that in biblical Greek appears where violence or manifest injustice is at issue. The choice of βδέλυγμα is therefore taken as an additional argument for a ritual construal, suggesting that in pre-Christian Judaism the prohibition could be heard not as “this is evil by nature,” but as “this is unclean and associated with foreign cults.”

Helminiak concludes that Lev. 18:22 forbids male same-sex acts because of their cultural and religious implications within a specific historical setting, and does not articulate a universal sexual ethic. For that reason, deploying the verse as a direct proof-text in modern Christian moral debate about same-sex intercourse is, on this view, methodologically unsound, since the questions and contexts are not comparable.

Yet even if one accepts this historical-religious interpretation, other questions remain — questions the LGBT community directs to Lev. 18:22. For example: how can Leviticus be related to Jesus and the New Testament without falling into selective quotation?

What The Expositor’s Bible Commentary Says

The Expositor’s Bible Commentary (EBC) is a major English-language, multi-volume series of commentaries on the books of the Old and New Testaments. In its discussion of the prohibition in Leviticus, the EBC authors attend closely to the vocabulary and the context of chapter 18.

EBC notes that the word commonly translated “abomination” appears six times in Leviticus, with four of those occurrences concentrated at the end of chapter 18. This section describes practices characterized as “Canaanite” and as “defiling the land.” Against that backdrop, the commentators consider it likely that male same-sex acts, in this context, were perceived as an element of an alien cult.

The commentary also addresses the broader Ancient Near Eastern background. In EBC’s assessment, homosexuality was seldom prohibited outright by law in the ancient Near East, except in cases involving coercion or violence. The Middle Assyrian Laws are mentioned as an exception. In other regions, insofar as the evidence allows one to judge, the practice could be tolerated and sometimes even assumed a cultic status.

EBC also offers a separate discussion of the position of Jacob Milgrom, a Jewish biblical scholar and rabbi who specialized in Leviticus and the cultic laws of the Torah. Milgrom draws attention to grammatical details in the wording: the term for “male” appears in the singular, whereas the phrase rendered “as with a woman” — literally “the lyings of a woman” in the Hebrew — appears in the plural.

He also stresses the uniqueness of the disputed formula commonly translated “to lie as with a woman”: in that precise form, it occurs only here. At the same time, the construction “to lie with/like …” has parallels and appears five times in the Hebrew Bible. In four of those instances, the reference is to the bed as a place, and the construction does not necessarily denote a sexual act.

On this basis, Milgrom proposes reading the expression as an indication of “bed” or “bedding,” that is, as a reference to a particular situation and setting rather than a direct description of an act. This yields a narrower conclusion: here, Milgrom argues, the text prohibits specifically homosexual incest among Israelites in the land of Israel.

K. Renato Lings’s Arguments: Reading The Ancient Hebrew Text And The Problems Of Translation

Renato Lings, a contemporary theologian, translator, and interpreter of biblical texts, argues in his scholarship that Lev. 18:22 and Lev. 20:13 do not prohibit all same-sex relationships, but rather incestuous ones. This approach rests on the claim that the vocabulary in these verses is so archaic that, despite their apparent simplicity, they scarcely allow an unambiguous translation and therefore require an extended philological analysis.

Lings draws attention to the choice of the term for “male” in Lev. 18:22. At first glance, one might assume that the original uses the ordinary Hebrew word for “man,” ’īš; however, the text employs the rarer noun zākhār, whose basic sense is commonly described as “male” or “male creature.” The term can be applied both to humans and to animals; in the creation account (Gen. 1:27) it appears alongside its female counterpart neqēvâ, rendered as “female” or “female creature.” For Lings, the substitution of ’īš with zākhār is significant, because, in his view, it shifts the nuance of the statement and may therefore affect its interpretation.

In the Masoretic tradition, the base text of Lev. 18:22 is transmitted as two short clauses:

w’eth-zākhār lō’ tiškav miškevē ’iššâ

Lings parses the expression piece by piece. The particle w- functions roughly like the conjunction “and.” The sequence ’eth-zākhār consists of the marker ’eth and the noun zākhār in the sense “male” or “male creature.” The particle lō’ expresses negation, “not.” The form tiškav is rendered as “you shall lie” or “you will lie.” In a strict word-for-word translation, the opening yields something like “And with a male you shall not lie,” and up to this point the syntax appears relatively straightforward.

What Exactly Does “As With A Woman” Mean?

According to Lings, the central interpretive difficulty in Lev. 18:22 is concentrated in the second half of the verse, the phrase miškevē ’iššâ. It can be rendered as “the lyings of a woman,” “a woman’s bed,” or “a woman’s lying,” and it is precisely this construction that makes the sentence syntactically opaque.

Traditional translations typically expand it into a form intelligible to modern readers — “do not lie [with a man] as with a woman.” Lings regards this as an interpretive choice, because the Hebrew phrase is shorter and structured differently.

A grammatical analysis brings out two features that, in his view, alter the picture.

The first concerns the absence of a comparative particle. The text lacks the expected prefix kě- meaning “as” or “like.” Between tiškav (“you shall lie” / “you will lie”) and miškevē there is no grammatical marker of comparison, so the second element is difficult to read as “as with a woman.” Taken literally, miškevē appears as the direct object of “lie,” which produces an oddity: as though “lyings” were the object of an action that one cannot, strictly speaking, “lie.”

The second feature is that the object marker ’eth is not repeated in the second half. It appears at the beginning with zākhār (“male”), but it does not reappear before ’iššâ (“woman”). To make the sentence idiomatic in modern languages, translations typically supply a second “with” and, alongside it, introduce “as,” thereby filling semantic gaps that remain in the Hebrew.

For Lings, the morphology of miškevē is also important. It is a noun formed from the verb šākhav, which can mean “to lie down” and “to have sexual relations.” With ’iššâ it stands in the construct state, yielding a linkage like “a woman’s lyings” or “female beds,” rather than a comparative construction (“as with a woman”) or a simple prepositional one (“with a woman”).

For that reason, Lings argues, the familiar translation “you shall not lie with a man as with a woman” does not reflect the structure of the Hebrew well. A more literal rendering would come out as “and with a male you shall not lie the lyings of a woman,” or, even more directly, “and with a male you shall not lie female beds.”

The expression miškevē ’iššâ (“female beds/lyings”) has no clear parallels elsewhere in the Bible, which calls for caution in interpretation. An additional difficulty, Lings notes, is the plural form miškevē. The singular miškav (“bed”) occurs much more often, whereas the plural yields something like “acts of lying” or “beds,” and is further marked by the way it is grammatically bound to ’iššâ through the ending -ē, forming an unusual construct chain.

Lings suggests looking for clues elsewhere in Scripture. In Num. 31:18 there is the expression miškav zākhār referring to women who had not known “the lying of a male.” Against the backdrop of strict norms concerning sexuality outside marriage, this formula can be read as describing girls who had not entered sexual relations in a legitimate marital framework — that is, an expression tied to the theme of licit sexuality.

The only example outside Leviticus of the plural miškevē that Lings highlights is Gen. 49:4, where Jacob rebukes Reuben for his relations with Bilhah, an episode narrated in Gen. 35:22. In that text, two different words appear side by side: the physical “bed” or “couch” is named with the singular yātsūaʿ, while “beds/lyings” are expressed precisely with the plural miškevē. This suggests that the two forms are not fully interchangeable. One possible construal Lings considers is that yātsūaʿ denotes the place of the act, while the plural miškevē underscores the problematic status of the relationship. Many translations, he observes, simplify the construction by treating miškevē as a straightforward equivalent of miškav, thereby erasing the philological distinction.

The story of Reuben and Bilhah clarifies why such an emphasis might matter. Reuben was Jacob’s firstborn son by Leah, one of the twelve sons. Bilhah (also spelled Billa or Vallah in some traditions) was Jacob’s handmaid. In modern, everyday terms their liaison may not look like incest; yet under ancient norms it fell within incest taboos as “sexual relations with one’s father’s woman.” In ancient Israelite logic this could be expressed as though Reuben had “uncovered his father’s nakedness” through his father’s woman.

From this Lings draws a further conclusion: many translations of Lev. 18:22 and Gen. 49:4 avoid the rare and difficult plural miškevē and, in effect, move away from the principle of lectio difficilior, according to which the more difficult reading is to be preferred. On this view, the meaning may lie precisely in the grammatical “difficulty” that translation tends to smooth away.

Lings’s Hypothesis About A Ban On Same-Sex Incest

The only non-Levitical occurrence of the form miškevē appears in the context of Reuben’s forbidden liaison, where his relations with Bilhah are classified as incest and correlated with the relevant prohibitions in Leviticus. Against this backdrop, miškevē takes on the force of a marker that may link the Levitical ban to the theme of intra-familial sexual taboos.

Throughout Lev. 18, the emphasis falls on prohibitions within the kin group, and therefore within the chapter ’iššâ may provisionally be understood as “a woman of the family.” The chapter lists a range of forbidden sexual relations, including marriage to two sisters, sex during menstruation, infidelity, and bestiality.

For understanding the expression miškevē ’iššâ, the composition of the text is crucial. The main unit in Lev. 18:6–17 describes incest through the formula lěgalōth ’erwâ, “to uncover nakedness,” and introduces a general ban on sexual relations with close kin (18:6). Since miškevē ’iššâ is positioned adjacent to this block, the connection to incest, on this line of reasoning, cannot simply be ruled out.

Further arguments are drawn from comparison with Lev. 20. That chapter largely parallels Lev. 18, but it is organized differently: each transgression is paired with a punishment, and the sequence of topics shifts sharply. The prohibition concerning giving one’s “seed” to Molech, which in 18:21 reads as a discrete episode, becomes the leading theme in Lev. 20 (20:2–5). Such regrouping encourages a different angle on the same prohibitions and may sharpen the sense of miškevē ’iššâ.

In Lev. 20, an important detail is the immediate context of 20:13. The two verses directly preceding it, 20:11–12, are explicitly about incest and prescribe the death penalty for incestuous acts. In 20:13 the same penalty is assigned to men involved in miškevē ’iššâ. Then, after a brief block of sanctions for other offenses, the theme of incest returns in 20:17 and 20:19–21.

Within this compositional setting, a cautious inference becomes possible: certainty is not attainable, but the structure of Lev. 20 lends support to the hypothesis that miškevē ’iššâ is connected with the language by which the book describes incestuous relations.

If one accepts these considerations, Lev. 18:22 can be read as specifying that the general prohibition of incest applies “in every direction.” By the time 18:22 appears, most combinations have already been listed and forbidden, and miškevē ’iššâ may function as a generalizing phrase: relations with a close male relative are as forbidden as the incestuous relations with female relatives enumerated earlier.

This reading is further aided by the plural miškevē. It can be interpreted as an allusion to the full set of “female” relationships described in Lev. 18. On that understanding, sexual acts recede into the background, and the chapter is received as a catalogue of “wrong kinds of relationships” that Israelites are to avoid. Bestiality fits the same logic as choosing the “wrong partner,” while the Molech prohibition fits as choosing the “wrong recipient” or the wrong procedure in the offering of one’s “seed.”

If this interpretation is correct, it can be partially compared with norms in other legal traditions of the ancient Near East. In particular, §189 of the Hittite laws prescribes punishment for the coerced sexual violation of a man’s mother, daughter, or son.

Summary Of Lings’s Argument And Its Limits

If one accepts that miškevē ’iššâ is connected with incest, a practical question arises: can this construction be rendered in clear contemporary language without distorting its meaning? Two working formulations have been proposed:

(a) “You must not lie with close relatives, whether male or female.”

(b) “With a male relative you must not enter into sexual relations that are forbidden with female relatives.”

There remains, however, one further problem — one that traditional interpretations have largely sidestepped.

The usual rendering “as with a woman” sounds neutral and implies that “lying with a woman” is generally permissible. But this sits poorly with the context of Lev. 18, where nearby prohibitions concern heterosexual incest and other sexual offenses committed precisely with women. In chapters 18 and 20, references to a woman almost always occur within a prohibitive formula. The plural miškevē may point not to a single “model” of behavior, but to a set of unlawful configurations — in other words, to the various forms of heterosexual incest listed above. Put differently, the standard “as with a woman” does not match the overall cadence of warning and prohibition that sets the rhythm of both chapters.

Lev. 18:22 ends with the words tōʿēbâ hî’ — “it is an abomination.” It is sometimes claimed that, because the term “abomination” is used, male same-sex relations are here judged more harshly than other transgressions. Yet the text itself provides little basis for such a hierarchy.

Chapter 18 as a whole draws a boundary of purity around the family circle in order to exclude incest and other degrading, destructive acts, and tōʿēbâ in 18:22 merely marks the deed alongside other strong designations. In 18:17 the term zimmâ (“depravity,” “lewdness”) appears; in 18:23, tēvel (“illicit mixture,” “confusion”). Moreover, in 18:26 all the prohibitions of the chapter are summed up with the plural tōʿēbōth (“abominations”), and in the concluding verses (18:26–27, 29–30) this vocabulary functions as a general verdict over the entire list.

Accordingly, in this context tōʿēbâ appears as a broad, recurring category by which the legislator designates the unlawful character of the whole set of actions in Lev. 18. There is therefore no reason to assign the word a special “degree of repulsiveness” for one item more than for the others: it functions as a general label for conduct that leads Israelite men and women away from the path set by YHWH.

***

Renato Lings’s interpretation allows Lev. 18:22 to be read as a verse inserted into the text with a specific function. If the primary aim of the surrounding verses in Lev. 18 and Lev. 20 is to prohibit incestuous heterosexual practices, then Lev. 18:22 may have been added so that homosexual incest would also be included in the catalogue. On this reading, the verse appears as a coherent element within a series of prohibitive formulas directed against transgressive sexual practices: incest is forbidden with any close relative, regardless of sex.

Taken together, the arguments of Lings, Helminiak, and other scholars give reason not to treat homophobic interpretations of Lev. 18:22 as self-evident. At the same time, other passages in the biblical corpus are also read as prohibiting same-sex relations, including texts in the New Testament. They will be examined in separate articles.

References and Sources

• Лопухин А. П. Толковая библия. [Lopukhin, A. P. - The Explanatory Bible.]
• Longman Temper III, Garland David E. The Expositor’s Bible Commentary: 1 Genesis–Leviticus. 2008.
• Lings K. Renato. The «Lyings» of a Woman: Male-Male Incest in Leviticus 18.22?. 2009.
• Daniel A. Helminiak. What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality. 1994.