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Text Sermons : Greek Word Studies : Abomination (e.g., of desolation) (946) bdelugma

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BDELUGMA = ABOMINATION

In Leviticus 20 the Lxx translates toebah with bdelugma (946) (derived from bdelusso [see word study] = emit foul odor, turn away from something or someone on account of the "stench". A loathing or disgust, abhor in turn derived from bdeo = to stink; see word study on related - bdekluktos) which describes something foul, that which is extremely hated, disgusted, detested or abhorred. The first NT use of bdelugma is in Mt 24:15 which is fitting as it describes the "Abomination (bdelugma) of desolation" (the Antichrist) (cp Mk 13:14). The other 4 uses of bdelugma are - Lk 16:15, Rev 17:4, 5, Rev 21:27.

Bdelugma is used 100x in the Septuagint! - Ge 43:32; 46:34; Ex 8:26; Lev 5:2; 7:21; 11:10, 12, 13, 20, 23, 41, 42; 18:22, 26, 27, 29; 20:13; Deut 7:25f; 12:31; 13:14; 14:3; 17:1, 4; 18:9, 12; 20:18; 22:5; 23:18; 24:4; 25:16; 27:15; 29:17; 32:16; 1 Kgs 11:5, 33; 14:24; 21:26; 2 Kgs 16:3; 17:32; 21:2, 11; 23:13; 2 Chr 15:8; 28:3; 33:2; 34:33; 36:14; Ps 88:8; Pr 11:1, 20; 12:22; 15:8f, 26; 16:12; 20:23; 21:27; 27:20; 29:27; Isa 1:13; 2:8, 20; 17:8; 41:24; 44:19; 66:3, 17; Jer 2:7; 4:1; 7:10, 30; 11:15; 13:27; 16:18; 32:35; 44:22; Ezek 5:9, 11; 6:9, 11; 7:3f, 8f, 20; 8:10; 11:18, 21; 20:7f, 30; 33:29; 36:31; Dan 9:25; 11:31; 12:11; Zech 9:7; Mal 2:11.

There are 14 uses of bdelugma in Leviticus - Lev 5:2; Lev 7:21; 11:10, 12, 13, 20, 23, 41, 42; 18:22, 26, 27, 29; 20:13 - Translated in NAS - Detestable (Lev 7:21, 11:10, 20, 23, 41-42, 20:13), Abhorrent (Lev 11:11-13), Abomination (Lev 18:22, 26, 27, 29)

Vine sees three major uses for toebah..

(1) Something or someone as essentially unique in the sense of being “dangerous,” “sinister,” and “repulsive” to another individual. (Ge 43:32) for to the Egyptians, eating bread with foreigners was repulsive because of their cultural or social differences (cf. Ge 46:34; Ps. 88:8). Another clear illustration of this essential clash of disposition appears in Prov. 29:27: “An unjust man is an abomination to the just: and he that is upright in the way is abomination to the wicked.” When used with reference to God, this nuance of the word describes people, things, acts, relationships, and characteristics that are “detestable” to Him because they are contrary to His nature. Things related to death and idolatry are loathsome to God (Deut. 14:3). People with habits loathsome to God are themselves detestable to Him (Dt. 22:5).

(2) Describes pagan practices and objects (Dt. 7:25-26). In other contexts, toebah describes the repeated failures to observe divine regulations (Ezek. 5:7, 9). Toebah may represent the pagan cultic practices themselves, as in Dt. 12:31, or the people who perpetrate such practices (Dt. 18:12). If Israelites are guilty of such idolatry, however, their fate will be worse than exile: death by stoning (Dt. 17:2-5).

(3) In the sphere of jurisprudence and of family or tribal relationships. Certain acts or characteristics are destructive of societal and familial harmony; both such things and the people who do them are described by toebah (Pr. 6:16-19). God says, “The scorner is an abomination to men” (Pr. 24:9) because he spreads his bitterness among God’s people, disrupting unity and harmony.

Kenneth Boa and R. Bowman. ..

In Leviticus 20:13 homosexual acts are said to be punishable by death. The argument that homosexuality is immoral and forbidden by God is not based on the premise that Leviticus imposes the death penalty for such acts. Rather, Leviticus shows that homosexuality is immoral because it is ranged with a variety of other sexual sins that are indisputably moral offenses (Lev. 18:6–23; 20:10–21). The death penalty shows how severely this particular act was judged under the Mosaic Law, and does not necessarily translate into a prescription for how the act should be viewed in the criminal codes of modern, non-Israelite nations.

On the other hand, the Mosaic Law did not impose death penalties for trivial offenses. Mel White’s argument is typical. Leviticus, he says, imposes the death penalty “for a variety of other sins as well” as homosexuality. “Imagine killing a child for cursing her parents or putting someone to death for working on Sunday or executing a neighbor for using God’s name in vain.” But White has misconstrued all three of the Levitical laws to which he is referring here. Let’s take them one at a time.

Leviticus 20:9 states that “everyone who curses his father or his mother shall surely be put to death.” Since this statute follows immediately upon statutes condemning child sacrifice (Lev 20:1–5) and occultism (Lev 20:6), it is clear that the offense is a serious one. All three of the offenses involve attempts to wield destructive power from spiritual forces that in fact are evil and demonic. The offense in Lev 20:9 is that of calling upon some deity to bring a curse on one’s parents. It is not merely using words like “damn” in reference to one’s parents (though that is also wrong).

Leviticus 23:30 is said by White to call for the death penalty for “one who works on the Sabbath.” On this supposition he suggests that a modern-day literal application would be to execute anyone working on Sunday. But his reading of the text is either careless or a deliberate misrepresentation, since it has nothing to do with the weekly Sabbath. The death penalty in this passage is imposed on any Israelite who works on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), the most solemn holy day of the Israelite calendar (vv. 26–29). Since there is nothing in Christianity or the general modern culture outside Judaism corresponding to the Day of Atonement, there is no reason to expect that this capital offense in Old Testament religion would apply today.

The third death penalty which White misconstrues is the one associated with blaspheming God’s name (Lev. 24:16). White trivializes the offense by describing it as “using God’s name in vain.” In fact the offense was that someone spoke a curse against God (vv. 10–15). Again, cursing in biblical thought is not merely careless language using God’s name, but invoking a deity or spiritual power to bring evil upon someone. To curse the Lord God, then, is to declare spiritual warfare against the true God, the God of Israel. Since Israel’s national existence was the direct result of God’s miraculous intervention on their behalf, and their nation was constituted legally as a people sworn by a covenant oath to worship and honor the Lord as their God, it is perfectly understandable that the Law would impose the maximum penalty on someone who openly cursed God. Such an act is akin to treason, and in fact more serious than treason, since the government that is betrayed is the kingdom of God.

Again, the few death penalties in the Mosaic Law for offenses relating to the Israelite religious system rather than directly moral offenses do not apply directly to modern non-Israelite nations. But it does not follow that the acts that were punishable by death are not still sins. Christians do not have a Day of Atonement, but the other two offenses are still possible today. Anyone who called upon a false god or occult power to bring harm upon their parents, or who cursed God himself, would surely have to be regarded as having sinned grievously. Even if we decided that none of the capital offenses in Leviticus should be punished by death today, that wouldn’t change the fact that they were and are still wrong—they are still sins. White himself slips and admits this when he says that “the death penalty was also demanded for a variety of other sins as well.” And indeed all of the capital offenses White cites are all sins: cursing one’s parents, adultery, incest, bestiality, occultism, prostitution, cursing God, and sexually violating a woman (even during her period, when she cannot become pregnant) are all surely sins (Lev. 20:9–18, 27; 21:9; 23:30; 24:16). Roughly the same list is produced by Spong, who also fails to notice that even in his radically liberal ethic most of these acts are viewed as immoral. It is therefore purely arbitrary to exclude homosexual acts, which are included in the same section of Leviticus as acts identified as “abominations” to God and as punishable in Israel by death (18:22; 20:13), from the category of sins.

Further confusing the matter, White argues that the laws in this section of Leviticus have no moral force because “even conservative Christian scholars seem to agree that the warnings were not about ethical or moral issues so much as they were a ‘Holiness Code’ describing acts that caused a Jewish man to be unclean and therefore unable to enter the courtyard of the temple for worship.” The confusion is obvious: how can Leviticus impose the death penalty for offenses that merely cause Jewish men to become ritually unclean? If a man is put to death, surely the question of whether he can “enter the courtyard of the temple for worship” is moot!

What White is confusing here are those elements of the “Holiness Code” (a term scholars do often use for this portion of Leviticus) that have to do with ritual purity and those that have to do with moral purity. It should be obvious that such commands as “Do not have sexual relations with an animal” (18:23) and “Do not defraud your neighbor or rob him” (19:13) are moral in their intent and force. The majority of the commands and statutes in Leviticus 18–20 clearly fall into this category. Most of the exceptions fall in one passage (19:19–37), where moral and ritual laws are mixed in order to make the point that Israel was expected to abide by all of the laws regardless of what kind they were. Both of the texts forbidding homosexuality are part of extended passages dealing unambiguously with issues of sexual morality (18:6–23; 20:10–21).

A couple of other objections to reading the Levitical texts as condemning all same-sex unions should be considered. It is sometimes argued that the texts do not condemn all such relations since nothing is said in Leviticus (or anywhere else in the Old Testament) about same-sex unions between two women. The premise is correct, but the argument ignores the form and perspective of Leviticus 18. All of the prohibitions are directed to adult men because the family heads in Israelite society were indisputably the men and therefore the primary responsibility for making certain these laws were obeyed was assigned to the men. Thus Leviticus commands the Israelite man not to have sexual relations with his mother (v. 7), stepmother (v. 8), sister or half-sister (v. 9), granddaughter (v. 10), stepsister (v. 11), aunt (vv. 12–13), uncle’s wife (v. 14), daughter-in-law (v. 15), or sister-in-law (v. 16); he is also forbidden to marry or have sexual relations with a woman and her daughter or her granddaughter (v. 17), or to marry or have sexual relations with a woman and her sister (v. 18). Finally, he is forbidden to have sexual relations with a woman during her period (v. 19), to commit adultery with his neighbor’s wife (v. 20), to allow any of his children to be sacrificed to Molech (v. 21), to have sexual relations with a man (v. 22), or to have sexual relations with an animal (v. 23). Only the last prohibition, regarding bestiality, explicitly adds a statement specifying that women are also prohibited from that act (v. 23). It is clear that the Israelites were to see these prohibitions as paradigms, not as an exhaustive list; what was forbidden to the men was also by implication forbidden to the women.

We conclude that there is no way around the clear prohibitions of Leviticus against homosexual acts. The traditional Jewish and Christian understanding, that these verses forbid certain kinds of sexual acts irrespective of how people feel who engage in them, seems to be the only legitimate interpretation. (An unchanging faith in a changing world: understanding and responding to critical issues that Christians face today)

In his article in Themelios (Vol 21) J. Glen Taylor has these comments on Leviticus 18:22 and Lev 20:13

As Wenham notes, because Leviticus 18:22 uses the very general term zǎkǎr, ‘male’, the passage clearly prohibits every kind of male—male intercourse (were the word na’ar, ‘youth’, used instead, presumably only pederasty would be condemned). These homosexual relations are further described by the very strong word tô’ebâ, ‘abomination’. In Leviticus 20:13 the penalty for offenders is death, putting the offence on a par with adultery (Lev 20:10) or the worst cases of incest (20:11, 12). Moreover, three factors make it clear that the sexual relationship here condemned involved mutual consent between two males: (1) both parties are punished; (2) the verb used is simply ‘lie’ (as opposed to, say, ‘seize and lie’ which would imply rape); and (3) the further comment is made, ‘their blood be upon their own heads’, which suggests an awareness of the action and its consequences.17 Thus, unlike Egypt where only pederasty was condemned or Mesopotamia where apparently only forcible homosexual relations were forbidden, OT law appears to forbid all forms of homosexual relations. Wenham’s explanation is probably correct that ‘it therefore seems most likely that Israel’s repudiation of homosexual intercourse arises out of its doctrine of creation’.19

Some scholars cast these passages from Leviticus in a very different light, however. For example, it is sometimes maintained that the context for the homosexuality referred to in Leviticus is cultic prostitution within a pagan Canaanite shrine and that the biblical writer is thus concerned more with idolatry than with homosexuality. In support of this view it is sometimes claimed that the term to’ebâ, ‘abomination’, is a highly specific word that points toward a religious concern for cultic purity in relation to the other nations and their gods. What is in view, so the argument goes, is cultic prostitution in which the participants attempt to procure fertility and fecundity by sympathetic magic through ritual sex acts, as is thought to have taken place in Canaanite culture. In short, the problem is not homosexual relations but their pagan, often idolatrous context(s).22 Which of these perspectives is correct?
The weight of evidence at present seems clearly to favour the former construal. Recent OT scholarship questions seriously the extent to which the traditional model for understanding cultic prostitution was in evidence at all either in Canaan or in Israel. Moreover, it is clear from the use of the term ‘abomination’ elsewhere in the Bible and in other literature that an abomination could refer generally to various things abhorrent to God and that it could even refer to practices of the Gentiles, in which case the word cannot be limited to a specific concern within Hebrew religion for purity in relation to other nations.24 Thus, given the uncertainties concerning this narrower understanding of the context and the clear generality of the condemnation of men lying with men, the view of Wenham that all forms of homosexual relations are condemned seems preferable.

A problem still possibly remains with these passages, namely their applicability to a setting in the NT and beyond to our own day. For example, on what grounds should the law concerning homosexuality be upheld and the law concerning intercourse with a woman during menstruation, mentioned in the same context, be dismissed? Though alien to the OT itself and difficult to sustain, the theological distinction between moral laws which are binding and ceremonial, ritual, and civil laws which are not, has long been upheld in Christian tradition (note for example Article 7 of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion). The problem in the present case is nonetheless mitigated significantly by the fact that the OT attitude to homosexuality is picked up and carried into the NT, which clearly has binding authority for Christians.27 Certainly, early Christian writers considered the levitical laws concerning homosexual intercourse to be relevant to the issue of sexual behaviour in their own day, a point denied by Boswell but convincingly reaffirmed by Wright. (The Bible and Homosexuality by J. Glen Taylor)

Leviticus 20:14 'If there is a man who marries a woman and her mother, it is immorality; both he and they shall be burned with fire, so that there will be no immorality in your midst.





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