Ancient sexual laws: Text and intertext of the biblical Holiness Code and Hittite Law

Our "interpretive grid," laid over the sexual world of the ancients, obscures for us what was important to them and how their notions of sexuality cohered as a system. Interpreters from Philo Judaeus to the present have had difficulty accounting for the thematic continuity of all the sexual laws of Leviticus chapters 18--21. This study, making use of contemporary semantic theory, intertextuality, and Foucault's notions about the archaeology of ideas, builds a "thick description" of the sexual laws from the biblical Holiness Code [H] (Lev. 17--26) and the Hittite Laws [HL]. It reconstructs the sexual world views of each and locates specific prohibitions within their literary and cultural contexts. Contrastive comparison of the two world views highlights the distinctive elements in each. This is the first time that any systematic reconstruction and comparison of the two has been undertaken.; Close textual study of H and HL reveals a somewhat different map of regulated sexual behaviors than that drawn from our contemporary North American view. Categories that play little role in our modern and urban imagination---"blood sex," bestiality, and sex with numina---rank with incest and adultery. Lev. 18:23b yields the parade example of "unnatural" female sexuality---a woman with a beast. Both "codes" treat male homosexuality as a particular species under the genus of incest and do not otherwise address homosexual behaviors. H nuances its definition of adultery by parsing it along the lines of priestly- and slave-class. HL also divides its sexual rules along class lines. H includes child sacrifice to Molek, conjuring ghosts and familiar spirits, and spilling blood to satyrs, under the rubric of zenut or 'fornication'. In contrast, HL permits "sexual relations" with ghosts---perhaps in dreams---and allows that a goddess might entice one to adultery or help overcome one's impotence. Both HL and H share a nexus of interests, juxtaposing rules governing incest, bestiality, and ghost-relations. This reconstruction not only corrects prior analyses but also challenges the use of H's texts in current public debates.