with a male you shall not lie
as one lies with a woman. The explicitness of this law—the Hebrew for “as
one lies” is the plural construct noun mishkevei, “bedding,” used
exclusively for sexual intercourse—suggests that it is a ban on anal
intercourse and intercrural intercourse (the latter often practiced by the
Greeks). Other forms of homosexual activity do not seem of urgent concern. The
evident rationale for the prohibition is the wasting of seed in what the law
appears to envisage as a kind of grotesque parody of heterosexual intercourse.
(Lesbianism, which surely must have been known in the ancient Near East, is
nowhere mentioned, perhaps because no wasting of seed is involved, although the
reason for the omission remains unclear.) There is scant textual evidence to
support the apologetic claim of some recent interpreters that the ban on
homosexual congress is limited to the preceding list of incestuous unions.
One may apply here the proposal of Mary Douglas that this is a culture that
likes to keep lines of categorical distinction clear: no human-beast couplings
are allowed (in contrast to the imaginative freedom on this topic of Greek
myth), and any simulation of procreative heterosexual intercourse by the
insertion of the male member in an orifice or fleshy crevice of another male is
abhorrent. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 2019], 1:429, emphasis in bold added)
