When I juxtaposed geo’s fourteen translators with your original scribe-prophet which I did by calling you on your claim that the first writing was indeed the “word of God” while lesser and later translations were not to be taken literally as that word, what I was doing was posing the question, “Where did it go?”.
Because you are saying it went away, the word of God, somewhere between the original Leviticus and this one. Or it stayed behind with the original writing, while the words themselves went away. The words in the fact of the writing with that particular name on it were appropriated, dragged off to serve other, baser purpose.
So I read your subsequent post anticipating a reply to that question, but what I got was a rhetorical flourish with Edwardian filigree:
“I know that God speaks in Leviticus precisely because His voice is able to cut through the litter of irredeemably dead verbiage, and the even more irredeemably dead purposes that bigots would distort those dead words to serve.”
“I know God speaks in Leviticus because I hear God speaking in Leviticus, loud and clear. As opposed to the noise of those haters going around hating.”
The reason I juxtaposed the Guarani and the ancient Hebrew was also to ask a question. That being how is it any different when I claim to hear the word of God echoing from the jungle, as he speaks to the Guarani about life and right and wrong, and your symmetrical claim for the ancient Hebrew? Except that the Hebraic claim is foundational to the culture and civilization we both operate in, the one this conversation takes place in, and that claim to authenticity and proximity is revered and cultivated and until quite recently was extensively proselytized for by that culture we share, while the Guarani claim is anathema to it, the people themselves viewed as inferior and poor because of how they live and what they have (even when the way they live is like an electric car running on solar power, like a local garden, like recycling and all that stuff, and they’ve been living like that for thousands and thousands of years, successfully) and any claim to their proximity to God is persecuted, and attacked from all sides when it does appear. Not to mention the very landscape in which they have that proximity being itself attacked and degraded. Not to mention other people like that in the same boat all over the place.
Your reply to that question is that you don’t know because they haven’t written down anything about their relationship to a speaking God, that you can understand. And then you deliver this:
“…why even slaves and the homeless need to be allowed some humane treatment, some share of even the scant material goods of the time…”
The sickness is masked in that statement but it’s very plain. The elision, the assumption, the confirmation of the existence of slaves, the rightness of a world where slaves are allowed “some humane treatment”.
I’m not sure if my disgust for that sentiment is engendered more by its sickness or by its arrogance.
The arrogance here, for sure:
“Leviticus helps me remember that I was a slave once in Egypt.”
Any Egyptian reading that of course should assume that it’s not about him, or her. And that’s the thing I came in on.

I am hardly a defender of the Church. But even a blind pig will find the occasional acorn, and I don’t think that a sound practice, like reading a text written in a dead language only in the original, is refuted simply because a blind pig like the Church once endorsed it. Even less is the soundness of the idea called in question just because the Church eventually reverted to form on this point. I also cited Jewish practice in support of this idea. Not having a Church to burden them, their religious practice is often somewhat less unreliable.

As for my ability to translate passages in Leviticus, admittedly I only have two semesters of Hebrew. My degree is in Classical Languages, and, sadly, that discipline can be rather suspicious of the study of Hebrew, so two semesters is all I could manage to finagle from my academic advisors. But I know enough Hebrew, and have enough experience translating other dead languages, to be very confident that this text will simply not bear the homophobic meaning foisted on it.

It is not as difficult as you might think to achieve a high level of confidence in translating a passage in a dead language such as Hebrew, if your end is purely negative. You can never prove a negative empirically in an open universe, because, as in the classic example, just because no black swans have ever been observed in Europe does not mean that, should you discover a new continent such as Australia, you will not find black swans down there. But a dead language is not an open universe. Every text in the Hebrew of the time of Leviticus has already been examined, and none of them help us to understand this “lie not with a man in a womanly bed” thing, specifically the “womanly bed” part of it. We simply do not know what is intended by that phrase. We cannot and will never be able to confirm that homosexuality of any sort is intended, until and unless we discover some pot shard equivalent of the Village Voice personals of the day, and thus get some help on the language of the day, if any, as regards man-on-man hook-ups.

But what of those 14 scholars who say that “lying with a man in a womanly bed” definitely refers to man-on-man sex, some of whom surely must be more learned, have more academic credentials, than Glen Tomkins? (I say, “some of them”, because, as with sausage, if you like reading Bible translations, you probably don’t want to be in the kitchen when they’re being concocted, and, believe me, some of these translation decisions are informed by not much at all.)

Well, for one thing, in the Septuagint we have 70 scholars of Hebrew who all agreed that the passage means no such thing, who modestly agree with me that they do not know what it means, thus their refusal to say anything more definite, less literal, than “lie not with a man in a womanly bed”. Not only are they five times the number of your experts, but, if we are to believe the traditional account of how the Septuagint was produced, they all, unlike your 14 trimmers, arrived at this translation independently. Even if this account is a mere pious fable, the bottom line for me is the scholar or scholars wh0 produced the Septuagint lived in 200 BCE, and your panel all lived much, much later, several more deaths of Hebrew after 200 BCE. The whole reason for translating the Hebrew text into Greek in 200 BCE was precisely that Hebrew was dying, was not spoken any more by anyone in daily life. Many words, phrases and whole passages were already of unclear and disputed meaning. Bad as the situation was for translating then, it has been infinitely worse ever since. At least the scholars who made the Septuagint had access to other texts in the Hebrew of the time when Leviticus was written, since lost, and to the memory and tradition of a much more recently dead language. Not all of their conjectures when they reached for a definitive reading have held up to the more careful scrutiny of the Bible by modern scholarship for internal consistency, and so the Septuagint has a less than stellar reputation these days. But I know of no instances of caution rather than conjecture by the Septuagint translators, no passage such as this one, where they admit that they have no good conjecture of a specific meaning, where subsequent generations have proven the translation wrong.

But you don’t even have to appeal to any knowledge of the Septuagint to understand that this conjecture that “lie not with a man in a womanly bed” must refer to homosexuality, is a willful overtranslation. The connection between the literal phrase, “a womanly bed”, or transvestitism, and homosexuality, lies in a cultural stereotype peculiar to our tribe and age. The ancients did not connect homosexuality with effeminacy or cross-dressing, that’s our stereotype baggage, not theirs. Aristophanes is the locus classicus for both sex jokes and cross-dressing jokes. While I haven’t read every line of every play of Aristophanes, and so cannot be sure that this observation is truly definitve, I cannot recall any joke that comedian makes that implies that the ancients made any sort of connection between homosexuality and effeminacy or transvestitism. That a comedian of our tribe can’t do a cross-dressing routine without getting into gay jokes, while Aristophanes never makes this connection, despite jokes about homosexuality and cross-dressing forming the bulk of his oeuvre, is the best evidence possible that the ancients simply didn’t make this connection. That this connection is jumped to by every one of your 14 experts proves that, while they may have been quite learned, they were still all victims of their upbringing, unable to understand the concept that other peoples might have seen the world differently, and not have labored under the same stereotypes. If you can study ancient texts for a lifetime and not understand that, not have that rubbed in your face by every line you translate, you are indeed a fool, however learned a fool.

Not being a Guarani, or a recipient of their traditions, I cannot say anything about their contact or non-contact with God. But, if I am not mistaken, they did not have writing until contact with the West, and so did not have the means to hand down through the generations the word of God fixed by writing so that the text could not be altered to suit the times. Well, cannot be altered to suit the times unless you proceed as geo would have us, and simply find some bit of text that can be wrenched out of context and mistranslated to suit the emotional needs of the present-day mob. Whatever truth the Guarani bear stands mute for the rest of us. This is not the case for the Bible, which is available to us all, if we only take the time to study it properly.

Why would anyone think that Leviticus is the word of God? It is certainly true as you say that large parts of it died with the language, Hebrew, in which it was written. The bit that geo goes on about, about “lying not with man in a womanly bed” is pretty clearly gone beyond all recovery, as even the scholars in 200 BCE who produced the Septuagint found that the meaning of the phrase was already lost. Hebrew has died again a few times since then, so our ability to pin that phrase down is about nil. And this is hardly the only bit of Leviticus that is lost. The book goes on at length about “house leprosy”, a form of the disease that affects buildings. Good luck figuring out what “house leprosy” refers to. The only difference between it and more famous lost bits that the literalists like to harp on, like the “womanly bed” thing, is that none of them have figured out a way to use the house leprosy thing to persecute some hated minority, yet. But perhaps I speak too soon, and the next big thing will be to claim Scriptural authority for blaming the economic meltdown on poor people, via some creative distortion of house leprosy into sub-prime mortgages.

I know that God speaks in Leviticus precisely because His voice is able to cut through the litter of irredeemably dead verbiage, and the even more irredeemably dead purposes that bigots would distort those dead words to serve. This book was written in times so materially hard that the people it was originally written for would have looked upon conditions in our Great Depression as an inconceivably generous godsend. Yet even in our prosperity, we are too hard-fisted to observe the simple measures of generosity to our poor that Leviticus asks people, even the richest of whom we would consider abjectly poor, to extend to the truly inconceivably poor of their time. “Remember, you were slaves once in Egypt.”, the book keeps insisting, as an explanation for why even slaves and the homeless need to be allowed some humane treatment, some share of even the scant material goods of the time. My family owned slaves not so long ago. It’s how they managed to maintain a life-style that encouraged high standards of learning, and supported the family profession of medicine, which did not pay for itself in those days, but had to be supported somehow. They managed a way of life that, handed down through the generations, made me a doctor, but they didn’t manage to maintain even the standards for the humane treatment of slaves that Leviticus prescribed for 25 centuries ago. Leviticus helps me remember that I was a slave once in Egypt.

That fools and bigots find no use for Leviticus except to mine it for the odd passage that they can rip out of context to make themselves feel good about persecuting the poor and defenceless, should not define the book for you, or anyone. The use they put Leviticus to tells us nothing about the book, or God’s will, but only about them, and what they are.

But, Glen, how can the Church’s fear be “well-founded” if the Church itself is responsible for what you claim is the mistranslation in this case? After all, every Catholic and virtually all Protestant translations of the verse agree in reading it as a condemnation of homosexuality.

I am convinced that you will not be able to support any of the translations cited

Just curious: what convinced you? Do you read Hebrew at least as well as the translators of those fourteen versions I cited?

Overtranslation can’t be avoided when translating a dead language. It isn’t surprising that your fourteen translations, all by Anglophones (by definition) and done within a brief span of time far removed form the time the text was written, and during which homophobia predominated in their culture, would all overtranslate in the same homophobic direction. This happens a lot with dead languages, and the systematic distortions by no means arise only from homophobia. Any strong and widely shared prejudice will do to enforce agreement among men.

The Jews still insist on everyone learning Hebrew, so that they can take responsibility themselves for avoiding the overtranslation inherent in translating their sacred text. For many centuries, the Church would not allow translation of the Christian sacred text into vulgar languages because of the well-founded fear that such translations would be necessarily and unavoidably wrong, as in this case.

You can take the word of men adrift in Augustine’s river of custom, or you can believe God. You’re free to follow the wise examples cited above and look up the passage in the original. Take whatever time you need to study the language. If you do this, I am convinced that you will not be able to support any of the translations cited. If you refuse to do this, then you are ceding any right to dispute this question, at least insofar as the questions of homosexuality and homophobia are disposed of by the authority of the Bible, to the anonymous folks who made those fourteen translations, and you must let them defend their homophobic distortions of God’s word.