Homo­sex­u­al­i­ty in the Bible

The Bible endors­es homo­sex­u­al behav­iour and we shall pro­vide one such exam­ple which is exem­pli­fied in the sto­ry of the rela­tion­ship between Daniel and the prince of the eunuchs. The verse is :

​“Vayiten ha-Elo­him et-Daniyel leKHesed u’ler­aKHamim lifnei sar hasarisim” (Daniel 1:9)

[i.e., ​“Now God had brought Daniel into favor and ten­der love with the prince of the eunuchs” (KJV).]

The Hebrew words, which describe the rela­tion­ship between Daniel and the prince of the Eunuchs, are ​“KHesed” and ​“RaHamim”.

The first of these indeed means ​“good­ness, kind­ness, faith­ful­ness”. The word ​“RaHamim”, how­ev­er, derives from the Semit­ic root R‑H-M, which refers to a womb.See The Brown-Dri­ver-Brig­gs Hebrew and Eng­lish Lex­i­con (Hen­drick­son Pub­lish­ers, 2001), p. 933 ; c.f. Strong’s no 7356 The KJV’s ren­der­ing of ​“RaHamim” as ​“ten­der love” would there­fore entail and inde­spen­si­ble ele­ment of phys­i­cal love, or love which is man­i­fest­ed through phys­i­cal contact.

Now, look at our two char­ac­ters : The prince of the eunuchs is of course an eunuch. Daniel, in the opin­ion of the Jew­ish com­men­ta­tors, was also an eunuch.The state­ment, that Daniel was a eunuch, is quot­ed by Ori­gen with appro­ba­tion in his ​“Com­men­tary to Matthew”, Book xv, sec­tion 5 :

“For the chil­dren of the Hebrews say that Daniel and his three com­pan­ions Hana­ni­ah, Azari­ah, and Mishael were eunuchized in Baby­lon and thus was ful­filled what Isa­iah said to Hezeki­ah : ​“They will take from your seed and make of them eunuchs in the house of the king of Baby­lon” [Isa­iah 39:7]” Hence an affair between them involv­ing phys­i­cal love would cor­rect­ly be termed as a homo­sex­u­al affair (i.e., between an eunuch and anoth­er eunuch).

Of course there is no ​“twist­ing” done to the sense or mate­r­i­al of the verse, which are pre­sent­ed as they stand. Some may object that it is quite impos­si­ble for an eunuch to have any sex­u­al con­tact. I would like to high­light this argu­ment by point­ing out an even more ele­men­tary mat­ter : the depri­va­tion of the testes or exter­nal gen­i­tals in a man or boy does not result in the change of sex of the same to a woman or girl. Hence the ​“ten­der love” between Daniel and the prince of the eunuchs would nonethe­less remain a homo­sex­u­al affair.

Sec­ond­ly, the terms ​“eunuch” and ​“cas­tra­tion” are invari­ably spo­ken of male sub­jects ; the cor­rect cor­re­spond­ing term for females is ​“spay­ing”.

Third­ly, why should one enter­tain the pos­si­bil­i­ty that the eunuch (as in Daniel’s ​“prince of the eunuchs”), would have to be the active sex­u­al part­ner, when the com­mon sense assigns to him the pas­sive role ?

Fourth­ly, it is also abun­dant­ly clear that this is not the only homo­sex­u­al affair from the Bible. It is also believed that Jonathon and David too (accord­ing to the Bib­li­cal account) were more than just the ​“clos­est of friends”; they were pas­sion­ate homo­sex­u­al lovers.The inter­est­ed read­er can read a 170-page book on this very issue.

Hence from this brief expo­si­tion, it is incon­ceiv­able that the ​“word of God” would con­done such a hor­ri­ble and unnat­ur­al sex­u­al act, as the Bible obvi­ous­ly does.