Thomas Kazen ”Dirt, Shame, Status: Same-Sex Sexuality in the Bible” pt. 1

[00:00:00] Oh, when did we lose our way?

[00:00:37] This week's guest is Dr. Thomas Kazen. Thomas is professor and chair of biblical studies at Stockholm School of Theology, University College Stockholm.

[00:00:46] He has authored numerous books and articles in English and Swedish, including Moral Infringement and Repair in Antiquity, and Impurity and Purification in Early Judaism and the Jesus Tradition.

[00:00:56] Today, he's here to talk about his brand new book, Dirt, Shame, Status, Perspectives on Same-Sex Sexuality in the Bible in the Ancient World.

[00:01:04] Although we've covered the topic of same-sex relationships on prior episodes from different angles,

[00:01:09] this is the first time we've really had someone on to dig deep into the handful of scriptural references

[00:01:14] and looked at the context of the times in which they were written to try to understand how this topic might have been viewed in ancient times.

[00:01:22] Word of warning, there are times in this interview where we discuss ancient practices that would be clearly considered sexual assault in modern times,

[00:01:30] and there is some language that could be considered offensive to some.

[00:01:33] But it's a really important conversation if we want to understand how this topic was viewed back in the time these Bible passages were written

[00:01:40] and what these few references might have been referring to at the time.

[00:01:44] So without further ado, here's Thomas freaking Kazen.

[00:01:59] All right. Welcome to the Deconstructionist Podcast.

[00:02:02] Very excited this week to have Thomas Kazen on.

[00:02:04] Thank you so much for spending some of your day with me.

[00:02:07] Thank you. Nice to be here.

[00:02:09] Absolutely. So tell people a little bit about yourself before we get into the subject matter.

[00:02:14] And ultimately, how did you become interested in this subject matter enough to write a book about it?

[00:02:19] Yeah. Well, I'm a Swedish biblical scholar.

[00:02:25] I worked in the academy for more than 20 years.

[00:02:29] And before I did my dissertation, did my doctoral studies, I worked as a minister in a local church.

[00:02:40] So the issue of same-sex relationships has, of course, been a hot issue in many churches for decades.

[00:02:52] And in some churches, it is no longer an issue at all.

[00:02:59] But it's something that people are through and done with, and it's completely self-evident.

[00:03:08] It's completely natural that people with different kinds of relationships are part of the church and are fully accepted.

[00:03:22] And there's just simply no discussion about it.

[00:03:24] And, of course, in other parts of the church, it's very different, the very opposite.

[00:03:30] Now, back then, before I started my PhD studies, I became engaged in this question because I was so…

[00:03:47] I got upset by the way in which people treated biblical texts as evidence for this and that, without taking any consideration, without considering at all the historical context,

[00:04:05] and just pulling out Bible texts and pushing them into today's world without much thought, actually.

[00:04:24] So I started to write something on this, which was more aimed at my own denominational context.

[00:04:37] But I never did a proper book on it.

[00:04:41] And then I became a scholar and a researcher.

[00:04:44] And one day I saw an announcement of a stipend for doing research on…

[00:04:57] which related to same-sex issues.

[00:04:59] And I thought, well, maybe I should apply and try to do a study on this.

[00:05:05] So I did.

[00:05:05] And I wrote this book, Dirt Shame Status, in Swedish first, and it was published in 2018.

[00:05:13] And then I later decided to translate it into English.

[00:05:20] Yeah, you're absolutely right.

[00:05:22] It's definitely a topic that has come to the forefront in a lot of denominations within the last, I would say, five years or so.

[00:05:30] And caused division amongst a lot of denominations.

[00:05:33] I know my own background is Lutheran, and they sort of had a split when they decided to become…

[00:05:39] at least the ELCA branch decided to become fully affirming.

[00:05:43] But to even begin to talk about this topic, you talk about in your book, in the preface, the approach to the topic of same-sex relationships in the Bible.

[00:05:52] You really have to consider three ancient paradigms.

[00:05:55] Notions of ritual purity and impurity.

[00:05:58] Second being social power structures with clear patterns of superiority and subordination.

[00:06:03] And the third being the ancient game of honor and shame.

[00:06:08] So kind of starting off with the first one, notions of ritual purity and impurity.

[00:06:12] Talk a little bit about that because I think, especially when we're talking about this topic in particular,

[00:06:19] your book is absolutely spot on in the respect that context is really important here.

[00:06:24] And we have to understand what the ancient peoples, how they would have understood this subject to begin with.

[00:06:30] Yeah, yeah.

[00:06:32] And purity and impurity is an old topic of mine.

[00:06:35] And that's…

[00:06:35] I wrote my dissertation back then about purity laws.

[00:06:43] And I never get rid of this topic because it pops up all the time.

[00:06:48] So through the years, I've had to interact with various discussions on ritual purity.

[00:06:53] But ritual purity is one thing.

[00:07:00] The thing is that purity language, purity jargon is being used in the ancient world, in the Bible and still today in many different ways.

[00:07:13] Because it's very evocative.

[00:07:17] It kind of pulls out for…

[00:07:22] Yeah, it pulls out people's feelings, people's emotions.

[00:07:28] So when you speak about something as dirty, because that's what purity is at the bottom line of purity is.

[00:07:40] Right.

[00:07:41] Ritual purity is a very special thing, but by naming various things, various behaviours, various people, impure, you evoke feelings of aversion, disgust, distance.

[00:08:11] And this means that purity language can be used in a political sense, so to speak.

[00:08:22] Used for evaluating, for downgrading, for abusing people.

[00:08:34] And in the book of Leviticus, in the so-called holiness code, this is where we have the two very similar texts on male-male relationships.

[00:08:53] Right.

[00:08:56] And in this, these acts are said to be disgusting.

[00:09:05] And the word that's being used, the Hebrew word toiva, it's a disgust word which the holiness code uses quite frequently for various impure states or both ritual and so-called moral impurities.

[00:09:23] So it's not that sex between males is explicitly outright called impure, but those acts are called disgusting.

[00:09:40] And they are within a context of various behaviours, various acts that are said to defile people.

[00:09:57] So this is just one thing on a large list of things that are said to defile people.

[00:10:07] So impurity and disgust are kind of coupled together in this context.

[00:10:16] And, of course, you can look at this in two ways.

[00:10:25] You can think that people were regarding these sexual acts as disgusting and therefore they also thought of them as impure.

[00:10:36] But you can also turn it around and say that by naming these things disgusting and pairing them with other behaviours and other things that were obviously in that context regarded as impure.

[00:11:01] You can't be used by association.

[00:11:05] You influence the values of people in this way.

[00:11:11] So the other thing I want to acknowledge that you point out at the beginning of the book also is that the current modern understanding of what we refer to as homosexuality is a relatively new concept that did not exist at the time that many of these texts were written.

[00:11:25] So talk about that a little bit as well.

[00:11:27] I think that's important to point out.

[00:11:28] Yes.

[00:11:31] Well, the term homosexuality, I mean, was coined in Germany in 1868.

[00:11:42] That's the first known occurrence of this word.

[00:11:45] And towards the end of the 19th century, we find it being used in English as well.

[00:11:51] And with the advent of this term or this concept, we also get heterosexuality as the kind of opposite.

[00:12:10] When we look at the ancient world, of course, there was a certain awareness that there were people who preferred people of their own sex.

[00:12:24] But in general, sex was understood very much as a hierarchical act.

[00:12:39] And if we simplify a little, but only a little, we could say that sex was understood as penetration.

[00:13:01] So a superior person penetrates an inferior person.

[00:13:07] That is, a free male in the ancient world could exercise his sexualities, sexual drives towards women or slaves of either sex.

[00:13:33] Or a person with a person who penetrated a person who penetrated a person with low status.

[00:13:42] That was not as serious as the opposite, which was almost unthinkable.

[00:13:49] So that's why a free male who penetrated another free male was kind of degrading him.

[00:14:00] While it wasn't degrading to penetrate a woman because she was considered subordinate to begin with.

[00:14:09] Of course, it was a crime to penetrate another man's woman because she was under his authority.

[00:14:17] Now, this whole hierarchical understanding of sex, it's very important to understand it in order to understand what the ancients talk about.

[00:14:30] Now, we should be careful to think that we are so very different.

[00:14:35] Because if we scratch the surface of our own cultures, we see that we basically, very often, we basically have the same kind of core understanding, which explains a lot of abuses and misuses of relationships today.

[00:14:59] But, of course, if you think of sex mainly in hierarchical terms, the distinction between hetero and homo doesn't come to mind immediately or necessarily.

[00:15:23] And the way we often think today has to do with...

[00:15:37] I'm sorry, Reiton, you have to cut...

[00:15:40] We'll have to cut out this pause because it's just that my English fails me sometimes.

[00:15:46] Sometimes I revert to Swedish in my brain.

[00:15:49] That's okay.

[00:15:50] Yeah.

[00:15:55] Orientation.

[00:15:56] Yeah.

[00:15:56] The way we think...

[00:15:57] Okay, three, two, one.

[00:15:58] The way we think today is often in terms of orientation, sexual orientation.

[00:16:06] So some people we think are biologically disposed towards a certain type of sexual preference.

[00:16:19] And now that's not what everyone thinks, but others would rather emphasize preference as a choice.

[00:16:34] And this, of course, has to do with how we balance the concept of cultural construction against concepts of biology and not least evolutionary biology.

[00:16:50] Right?

[00:16:52] Well, I belong to those who think that everything is both dependent on evolutionary biology and cultural construct at the same time.

[00:17:03] And those factors are intertwined all the time, but they're both there.

[00:17:13] So for us, when we think that way, sexual preference is at least to considerable extent a matter of orientation.

[00:17:30] But it is also a cultural construct.

[00:17:35] Now, the ancients thought differently about this.

[00:17:43] Not completely differently, but differently enough for us to have problems in understanding them.

[00:17:52] Yeah.

[00:17:53] And you talk about in the book, the two main cultures that would have had, you know, a major influence on many of the authors behind, you know, the so-called clobber verses.

[00:18:05] You know, we talk about like Paul's letters and things like that would have been sort of the Hellenistic Greek influence and then the Roman influence.

[00:18:15] And within, so talk about a little bit though, about, you know, the Hellenistic influence in terms of what impact that would have had on the authors and in what ways that would help us understand maybe perhaps what they meant if it's not, you know, necessarily our current contemporary understanding.

[00:18:37] Well, if we go back to ancient Greece, this is a very agonistic culture.

[00:18:47] It was a competitive culture.

[00:18:51] And honour, honour was considered so important.

[00:18:59] Every free male had to guard his honour and compete with other free males.

[00:19:05] It was kind of limited goods honour.

[00:19:08] So, so, so, so you, you scored honour points in various ways.

[00:19:23] And within this hierarchical and honour shame framework, well, sex was part of this framework, of course.

[00:19:35] So, so your honour could be increased, but it could also be, be compromised.

[00:19:50] At the same time, at least in, in ancient Athens and in many other places too.

[00:19:57] But we, we have most of the, of the surviving evidence from Athens.

[00:20:06] There evolved this practice of pederasty, or how do you say it in English? Pederasty.

[00:20:14] Yeah.

[00:20:16] It's, and we easily confuse this with, with pedophily, pedophilia, pedophilia, sorry.

[00:20:31] That's the English word.

[00:20:34] And, but even for the Greeks, sex with underage children, that, for them, that meant children under the age of 12 was unacceptable.

[00:20:48] That was hubris.

[00:20:50] That was hubris.

[00:20:55] But a practice evolved, which made it possible for, for males, for free males to, to enter into relationships with young boys between the, usually between the age of 12 and, and 17.

[00:21:15] And, and some of these elite men were, they were scouting the gymnasia and the, the wrestling arenas.

[00:21:25] And, and, and, and, and gave them gifts and, and so on.

[00:21:44] And they, they, boys became their lovers.

[00:21:51] And this was, the Greeks themselves called this a complicated practice.

[00:22:00] And, and it, it, it was complicated also within the hierarchical honor shame framework that they, that they lived within.

[00:22:12] It was complicated because these boys were, they were free boys, free men when they grew up.

[00:22:19] I mean, they, they were free, free born boys.

[00:22:22] And it was not really suitable to treat them in, in any way.

[00:22:30] So this was, this practice was kind of guarded and, and, and circumscribed with, with, you know, a lot of more or less apologetic explanations about the pedagogical advantages of, of this.

[00:22:51] And, and, and, and, and, and, and Plato writes a lot of, a lot about this.

[00:23:12] But it, but it, when you, when you read what is written about, about this practice, you realize that, that, okay, there was an ideal that tried to keep this within certain limits for the sake of your decorum.

[00:23:27] And according to theory, but in reality, this was not really the case always.

[00:23:38] And there are lots of discussions that are these court cases.

[00:23:42] You know, we have orators who are, who are defending, defending people who are accused of continuing being lovers in adult age, et cetera.

[00:23:54] So, so this was indeed a complicated practice.

[00:24:00] And there is a lot of scholarly discussion about how, how did it originate?

[00:24:06] Anything from, you know, ritual, ritual insemination, rites of passages for young boys becoming warriors.

[00:24:18] Well, we have Sparta, of course.

[00:24:22] And we have the Holy Band of Thieves.

[00:24:25] Warrior societies where adult warriors then were paired with, with younger boys who were trained by them and at the same time functioned as their lovers.

[00:24:42] The interesting thing in all this is that the result is always an asymmetry.

[00:24:49] These sexual, same-sex sexual relationships are always asymmetrical.

[00:24:56] Today, we, we assume consenting adults.

[00:25:01] We assume, we assume that proper sex is to have sex with someone and it's going to be equal somehow.

[00:25:13] And when a sexual relationship is unequal, when there is a power relationship, we are suspicious about it.

[00:25:20] And we, we, we, we start to think that this is, this may be a matter of, of, you know, power exploitation of, because of power relationships.

[00:25:35] Or it's, we, that's not our ideal.

[00:25:43] Well, precisely what is our ideal, free independent people at the same level is, who choose each other.

[00:26:00] That was what caused problems in antiquity.

[00:26:03] And, and, and, and this is maybe startling for us, but, when we put it this way, we understand that there is kind of gap between our understanding and the ancient world, which makes it impossible to just take all these texts as, at face value and, and, and use them for some kind of moral guidance today.

[00:26:27] Because there is a basic difference, basic discrepancy between how we think and how they thought in antiquity.

[00:26:40] Yeah.

[00:26:40] And one of the things that really came through in your book was the fact that we're talking about two very different things in the sense that in the ancient world, it very much was about that sort of patriarchal power structure.

[00:26:56] And the fact that it was largely based around men and men in positions of power, specifically free men versus non-free men and men in power over women.

[00:27:09] And so that seems, you know, that, that has to be a large factor in this conversation when we're talking about same-sex relationships in history.

[00:27:18] And that's not something, as you point out at the end of the book, you know, when we talk about homosexuality or same-sex relationships now, we're talking about it from the perspective of, of sort of a democratic, you know, system where there is equality.

[00:27:36] And so you have to kind of factor that in when you're having these types of conversations.

[00:27:39] Yes.

[00:27:41] Yes.

[00:27:42] Yes.

[00:27:42] And the paradox is that we often, we often think of our values, our democratic values, our values of equality today.

[00:27:53] We often think of them as being grounded in, rooted in, going back to, to, you know, to ancient, ancient Judaism and to, to ancient Greece, to Athens.

[00:28:11] And in a sense, that's, that, that, that's true because there, there are, there are aspects of Greek philosophy and culture.

[00:28:21] And there are aspects of the, of, of, of, of the, of the Jewish tradition out of which Christianity grows that have shaped the Western world and, and, and, and European, European thought.

[00:28:42] And, and, but I mean, it's a process of 2000 years before we reach, we reach our democratic world.

[00:28:52] And if we think about it, democracies in, in, in the way we understand it is very young and today very threatened indeed.

[00:29:00] Uh, and, uh, the, um, the, the, the understanding of same-sex sexuality, which many of us take for granted today, uh, is only few, has only been in general accepted for a few decades and still not in many quarters.

[00:29:25] Yeah. And so talk about, kind of to take it back to, to, to, to Paul, because I think a lot of, um, modern Christians, and you talk about this in the book as well, like Western, specific to Western Christianity, sort of defer back to, again, the, the clobber passages.

[00:29:42] And I think, you know, depending on who you're talking to, you could argue there's five, maybe six verses within, uh, the Bible that, that may or may not refer to same-sex, uh, scenarios.

[00:29:55] And, um, the, the ones that seem to be a little bit more clear and less ambiguous, uh, would be, you know, obviously some of the letters, um, from Paul.

[00:30:05] Uh, and, and so talk about, you know, how Paul might've used sexuality based on what we understand of the time.

[00:30:11] So like the influences, like we talked about it, the Hellenistic and Roman culture and his contemporaries, because we can learn something from Paul's contemporaries at the time in the ways in which they, uh, sort of spoke about it in terms of what is natural.

[00:30:25] That is, um, cultural normative and moral.

[00:30:29] Yeah.

[00:30:30] Yeah.

[00:30:30] Um, well, first.

[00:30:37] Paul, Paul, Paul's default understanding of same-sex relationships is negative.

[00:30:47] It's, it's no idea for us to, to try to, to tweak our interpretation of Paul to, to say that he's, he's positive or that he talks about something else.

[00:31:00] He talks about something else.

[00:31:01] Of course, of course, all people in antiquity, when they speak about these issues, they, they don't talk exactly of what we're, what we're thinking of today.

[00:31:12] Um, but Paul has, Paul has, Paul is a Jew and in his Jewish heritage, which I think was influenced a lot, uh, far back by, by, by Zoroastrian, uh, ideas, negative, uh, negative sentiments, uh, towards same-sex relationships.

[00:31:36] Um, this is just something, one of, one of many, uh, behaviors that he thinks, uh, result from, uh, from idolatry.

[00:31:58] And this is an idea that he has learned from and borrowed from, from the wisdom of Solomon, the book, uh, uh, that writing, which is in the, uh, which is in the Old Testament, in the, in the part that some denominations call the Apocrypha.

[00:32:16] Um, and, uh, and, and he's in, in, in, in, in the letter to the Romans, Paul is basically, uh, summarizing the argument of, of the wisdom of, of Solomon, uh, that because people, uh, because people have forgotten God and worshiped idols, uh, they engage in all sorts of, uh, immoral behaviors.

[00:32:45] And then he, he, he's not, his aim is not to, to, to, to punch at same-sex relationships, especially.

[00:32:56] It's just one of the many things he lists in, in the first chapter of Romans.

[00:33:01] Um, and things it's, uh, thinking that it results from, uh, from idolatry.

[00:33:10] Uh, but it's, it's, it's very interesting to, to, to, to, uh, to analyze this particular passage and see what he's really saying.

[00:33:20] If we, uh, if, if we look at it carefully, uh, he's saying, uh, he's saying that the women, um, let, let me find it here.

[00:33:35] Yeah. Uh, he said that the, the, the females exchange the natural use for that, which is against nature.

[00:33:46] Uh, this is symptomatic.

[00:33:48] Doesn't, it doesn't talk about same-sex, uh, acts between, uh, women explicitly.

[00:33:56] He may, he may imply this, but it's, it is possible to, to, uh, interpret it in a, in a different way that women were behaving outside of their proper subordinate roles.

[00:34:12] Um, and this is, this is typical of antiquity because, uh, sex between women wasn't understood as problematic as sex between males.

[00:34:28] Why?

[00:34:28] Well, because they were not supposed to be able to penetrate each other and sex is penetration.

[00:34:33] So, and, and they are subordinate, both of them to begin with.

[00:34:37] So, no one loses honor in that sense, only that they're regarded as, as, as, uh, uh, leisurely and, uh, uh, uh, lacking, uh, lacking character or restraint.

[00:34:57] Right.

[00:34:57] Um, so be that as it may, he then continues to, to say that, uh, the males practice shamefulness with males and received in themselves the necessary payment for their error.

[00:35:13] And this is a very interesting thing, uh, very interesting expression.

[00:35:19] Uh, they, they, they abandoned their natural use of females and were inflamed with a yearning for each other.

[00:35:32] Uh, so it's definitely sex between males here.

[00:35:39] Uh, and what does he mean with, with this phrase that they practice shame, uh, they received in themselves the necessary payment for their error?

[00:35:51] Uh, well, it's a very interesting thing.

[00:35:52] It's some kind of payback they receive.

[00:35:55] And in the Greek and Roman world, comedians, they were, uh, they were laughing and making jokes about, about the elites, uh, who, uh, who practiced, uh, sex with other males and allowed themselves to be penetrated.

[00:36:17] They were making jokes about them.

[00:36:19] They were making jokes about them.

[00:36:20] They're broad, you know, becoming broad arsed.

[00:36:23] And, and, um, you've got this, this joke about the, um, the Greek soldiers at, at the siege of Troy.

[00:36:32] They had no, uh, they had no, had no women available there.

[00:36:37] So they returned, they returned back to Greece with arses as wide as the gates of the city that they, they, uh, conquered.

[00:36:46] So we have these very rude, very crude, uh, jokes, uh, which are really part of castigating the elites.

[00:36:58] Yes.

[00:36:58] But, uh, some researchers think that Paul is actually, uh, he's actually, uh, implying this kind of, of idea or, or interpretation here.

[00:37:18] It, it, it's not 100% sure, but, um, the, the thing that is clear from this text is that Paul is just rehearsing the general understanding of sex and antiquity.

[00:37:39] Sex is penetration by, by, uh, superior males of subordinates.

[00:37:50] And, uh, when a free male penetrates another free male, the, the social order is upset.

[00:38:05] There is kind of breach of, of the hierarchical order.

[00:38:10] And this is simply in their mind, uh, unacceptable.

[00:38:16] And Paul is no different in that regard than really anyone else in antiquity.

[00:38:23] But with his Jewish background, he would not have accepted, uh, he would not have accepted sexual relationships, uh, irregular sexual relationships of any kind, I think.

[00:38:41] Uh, which most males engaged in, in antiquity.

[00:38:50] Uh, so in that regard, we could say that he was stricter.

[00:38:55] Um, many Greeks and Romans would have agreed with him when it came to the issue of, you know, free adult males.

[00:39:05] Uh, but, uh,

[00:39:09] Uh, but there would have been lots of other ways, uh, for them to exercise their sexuality against both men and women.

[00:39:21] I sometimes say that, you know, we talk about sex with, to have sex with someone.

[00:39:27] And if we exaggerate a bit, we could say that in the ancient world, you had sex against, or at least towards someone.

[00:39:36] But not with.

[00:39:37] Does she care that I doubt?

[00:40:05] Does she care?

[00:40:08] Something tell.

[00:40:45] Has a face.

[00:40:46] His face must look like yours.

[00:41:00] Did God.

[00:41:16] Looks like a.

[00:42:10] Has a face.

[00:42:12] Her face must look like yours.

[00:42:26] Like a Tina.

[00:42:29] An Ahmed or Mildred.

[00:42:31] Russ and his husband.

[00:42:34] Gus and their children.

[00:42:37] Face like a Kim.

[00:42:39] Ted or Tyron.