There were a few terms I kept running into during my reading of the Old Testament that I wanted to know more about. First up was Baal. Turns out there were a bunch of Baals, it was also a term for “father,” “lord,” or “master.” He was your typical fertility, crop, good weather god for the most part. Some people worked in human sacrifice, probably from the cult of Molech. How’s this for creepy, there was a huge bronze statue of Molech that was hollow. They would keep a fire burning in it, making the statue glow a dull red. People would place their first born son or daughter in its hands and through an ingenious mechanism, the hands would move up and drop the child into its mouth where the baby would drop inside and burn to death… The priests would dance around and cut themselves while this was going on and there would be musicians playing flutes, harps, and tambourines to drown out the screams. Can’t say as I’m sorry to see that cult fade away…
I made the mistake of looking up “temple prostitutes” on the web. I had seen this term a couple of times and didn’t really know what it meant. Well, it turns out that various cults used sex as part of their services. It was to call the divine power, bring good luck, etc. There were both male and female shrine prostitutes and there is little or no evidence that they had sex with the same sex. Well, this has caused considerable outrage among the more wacko, gays are evil incarnate crowd. Apparently, the term shrine or temple prostitute replaced “sodomite” that was used in the original King James version of the Bible. People are outraged that any reference that paints gays in a negative light be changed, accuracy be damned. Granted, I don’t have the background to argue this from first hand sources, but from what I can tell, the term shrine prostitute is a more accurate translation and it is MUCH more specific as to what is being disallowed. The anti-gay folks should just relax, there are still plenty of references of man on man sex as being forbidden and/or shown in a negative light. The whole incident with Lot and the angels in Sodom, God’s judgement on Sodom and Gomorra, there’s a part in Leviticus that explicitly states that sex between men is forbidden (or is anathema to the Lord or some other language like that). If there really was a plot to make homosexuality look “more acceptable” in the Bible, those last things would be the things getting revised, not a correction of sloppy translation of a vague term.
i really get a kick out of people getting all in a lather because a verse in a Bible is not how they learned it, inevitably from the King James version. They say you can’t alter the “word of God” and that it is blasphemy. How can people be so thick to miss the fact that they are reading a translation? And the texts that the translators are working from aren’t from anywhere near the time of those things happening. Especially when it comes to the Old Testament, who knows how many times those books were revised, edited, or just “neatened up” in order to clarify things. There is no way to know what was originally written. To me, this is a good thing. How can anyone, with a straight face, tell me that God’s will can be explicitly stated with something as clumsy as language, especially through so many translations. Anything, yes anything, that God “says” will be considerably simplified and yes, mangled when put into one of our languages. We can only receive or understand a small portion of “The Truth.” Get over it people…