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6 Golden Do’s and Don’ts
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6 Golden Do’s and Don’ts Leviticus 19:1-17 from a Human-Rights-Based Approach (HRBA) Carole R. Fontaine Preface: Tortured Textualities In a recent seminary course where we discussed the ethical values of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur’an, students compared the guiding ethical principles of these scriptures to the principles and values coded in the United Nations Declaration of Universal Human Rights (UNDUHR),1 the foundational document for the international laws governing human rights. Students were quite dismayed to discover that we would indeed be considering legal texts from the Hebrew Bible, and that the Ten Commandments, so popular in United States’ religious discourse on values and legal foundations, might not be the be-all and end-all legacy for human rights that they had been taught to expect by their church affiliations and seminary training. They saw very little support of the intrinsic worth and dignity of gay and lesbian persons in any of the documents we were studying. This was a matter of considerable concern, and that was even before we began to consider the situation with respect to legal warrants for protecting human rights found in the church fathers, or rabbis of classical Judaism, much less in the Qur’an, or shari’a law derived from various interpretations of the Qur’an, all sources developed in a patriarchal context and in opposition to more dominant cultures. In our local setting, it was important to the students to affirm all religious points of view as equally valid; but when they came to their key issue, sexual orientation, they were completely at a loss to discover that religions of antiquity did not affirm that to which they so firmly adhered or the issues to which their diverse ministries would be directed. (The issue of gender had been 97 labeled by this class as clearly heterosexist, and hence invalid, so they were not especially troubled by the treatment of straight women in our texts, nor did those who were not African American detect any particular issues of race and ethnicity as a difficulty in the Scriptures surveyed.) Most of the students embraced a liberal philosophy, which caused them to assess the rabbinic writers of the Sayings of the Fathers as a wee bit narrow in their focus on only one community—their own—to the exclusion of universal concerns in evidence in the New Testament transformation of Judaism.2 In the absence of explicit focus on students’ personal issues in what we read, only a couple of diehard Jesusloving conservatives wanted to argue that biblical laws or ethics had much use in today’s world. Hearing my discussion of ethics in Q and their reformulation in the books of Matthew and Luke in the Sermon on the Mount (Horsley 2008), one of my Jesus people asked plaintively which text I would take if I could only take one to found a new civilization on a desert island somewhere: the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Qur’an, the US Constitution, or the UNDUHR. I answered firmly that if only one text were available to me, it would have to be the UNDUHR, despite the well-known critiques of its focus on individual rights and the neglect of reasonable and legitimate group values, among other things. But I also noted at the same time that although the three Scriptures in question were held captive by the cultures of their time (especially in regard to slave ownership, patriarchal views of women and children, xenophobic attitudes toward the other, hierarchical and stratified views of social organization in economics, and purity fetishes), I retained a soft spot for each Scripture, despite many difficulties. The Sermon on the Mount, I told them, presented a radical protest against Roman occupation, and it could never have existed without Leviticus 19, its partial Vorlage. Further, the Qur’an did the best job inscribing intrinsic human worth and dignity for slaves, and better encoded the equality of the sexes in rationality and responsibility, so ought not to be dismissed out of hand. The U.S. Constitution outlines a republic, not a true democracy and even with the Bill of Rights is primarily concerned with how creditors might receive payment across sovereign state lines. The students were deeply horrified by my praise of Leviticus, and the class as a whole never recovered from my statement in favor of partial affirmation of scriptural texts. (Perhaps my subject status as a middle-class, white...