Gays, Christians clash at Adelaide protest rally

[Darth Hoth]

Much of what is mentioned in truth "outlaws" gay sex, just male on male action. The concept of 'Homosexuality' was totally unknown to the Jews back when Leviticus was first wrote up.

A good deconstruction of how Leviticus is used out of context can be found HERE

That guy takes it completely out of thin air that the prohibitions were against pagan cult sex. Leviticus nowhere mentions any such context.

Further, he is wrong that the Hebrew word for abomination (to'ebah) refers only to ritual impurity. Elsewhere it speaks of such things as defrauding your neighbour (Deuteronomy 25:13-16; he himself also mentions this in his article) and human sacrifice (Deuteronomy 12:31). The ancient Hebrews certainly considered these "moral" infractions. The primitive verb root behind the noun (ta'ab) means precisely "hate," "abhor," "be disgusted with."

So when the Hebrew mention something that is "abomination (to'ebah) to the LORD thy God," it means in so many words, "something that God hates, and/or finds disgusting." Insofar as the protesters follow the Bible, they are actually quite correct; the Old Testament God does appear to hate homosexual intercourse as far as his own word is any good for determining such. Their error would be in whether modern people should find it interesting what their Bronze Age book records as God's Word.

(A liberal Christian might also throw in the "hate the sin, not the sinner" distinction; it is the homosexuality as such that is hated, not the homosexual person. Though I personally doubt the Hebrews themselves would have cared for that distinction, but whatever.)

Also, that the Bible only mentions a man and a man is hardly surprising, given the male-chauvinistic bias of the time; such ideas as "inclusive language" were utterly foreign to them. When it speaks of murder, theft and other such non-victimles crimes, it also always speaks of "the man who does this". Yet I have a hard time seeing it that the Hebrews would think it no crime if a woman committed theft and murder. So, logically one should probably say the same for male homosexuality and lesbianism

[Darth Hoth]

Emphasis mine. First, what we have to remember is that greek has a LOT of words for effeminate, each of them with different connotations. The word used in the writings of Paul is malokois which if I am translating correctly is a man who is soft, or delicate. So, men who are not manly enough. Considering the fact that greeks considered ONLY sleeping with men to be as many as you can get, I am pretty sure that using this word to mean gay=sin is a bad idea.

The classical understanding of the word (malakos, plural malakoi) as it fits the context is that it refers to a "passive" homosexual, who, as far as the Greeks were concerned, was the ultimate in unmasculine effeminacy. Whereas arsenokoites (below) refers to the "active" partner.

The word as such, as you note, means only effeminate, literally "soft, weak". However, in the time of Paul it appears to have already had connotations of passive homosexual activity. (ref: the "BAGD" Biblical Greek dictionary)

The word used for those who "abuse themselves with mankind" is arsenokoitai, which has never... EVER existed in greek until paul wrote it. Now, it could be a compound of Arsen (man) and koit(to encamp, basically). Given that I dont know the language all that well and am working with lexicons, if someone here knows how ancient greek compounds are made, that would be great... but the best I can think of is male camp followers. Hookers.

Arsenokoites (plural, arsenokoitai) does indeed appear to be a Pauline neologism. From what I gather, it was most probably based on the ancient Greek (Septuagint, or "LXX") translation of Leviticus 20:13, which goes like this:

"hos an koimethe meta arsenos koiten gynaikos"

From the Greek version, it reads, not-quite-literally, "lies with a male the bed of a woman." Arsenos means "male," koite, "bed". The latter word is also used figuratively to refer to cohabitation or intercourse; "sharing a bed," if you will. (The Letter to the Hebrews speaks of "the marriage bed," for example.) Given the extreme similarity between the Leviticus expression in Greek and Paul's neologism, I would take the meaning to be identical.

Arsenokoites as such, then, literally means "male bed," or perhaps "male-bedder;" it is translated in this sense in the early Bible translations. (For example, Jerome's Latin Vulgate, masculorum concubitores, literally "liers-together with men.") Similar compounds in ancient Greek would include examples such as doulokoites ("slave-bedder," a man who sleeps with slaves, from doulos and koite) and metrokoites ("mother-bedder," a man who sleeps with his mother, meter and koite).

The sense of arsenokoites would thus be an "active" homosexual, in contrast with the "passive" of malakos.

The reason Paul chose to coin a new word might have been that he wanted to paint the concept as entirely negative, whereas - again, as you noted - other, earlier words might have positive connotations of masculinity or virility. Although this is pure conjecture by modern scholarship; we can of course have no idea what his precise thoughts were. However, the meaning of the word as such looks quite clear, to me, at least.

"If two men engage in homosexual sex while on a woman's bed, both have committed an abomination. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads."

Yeah...

Granted, I have NO command of hebrew, and that comes from a gay christian group, but it is more in line with what my orthodox jewish friends (who speak hebrew) tell me, so I will go with that.

My own Hebrew is school-book at best, but as good as I can determine, it says something very like that: "If two men lie together a woman's bed," or the like. This is the expression the Septuagint translated as koiten gynaikos, "a woman's bed." The Hebrew word for bed (mishkab) does, however, frequently also refer to the "act of lying" (as in "lie down," often for sexual purposes). When Jacob's son Reuben slept with his father's concubine in Genesis, for example, it is spoken of with the same word (Gen 49:4).

So, it would seem to me that the old King James translation, "the lyings of a woman," is not necessarily incorrect here, and makes good sense in context.