Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [67]
How does God feel about cross-dressing?
Milton Berle, Lucille Ball, New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the singer k.d. lang, and the notorious basketball player Dennis Rodman may all be in trouble. According to Deuteronomy 22: “A woman shall not wear a man’s apparel, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for whoever does such things is abhorrent to the Lord your God.”
That makes it pretty clear—God doesn’t go for cross-dressers.
This is one more example of a specific prohibition against a practice that was common in other ancient. Near Eastern societies. Many of the Torah’s prohibitions were aimed at a variety of acts, including idol worship, cultic prostitution, incest, homosexuality, even bestiality and infant sacrifice, that were acceptable in other neighboring cultures, including the Canaanites and the Egyptians. The cross-dressing prohibition was apparently aimed at keeping Israelites from taking part in Canaanite practices where worshipers simulated a sex change, perhaps as a fertility rite.
Canaanite religion centered on worship of Baal, a fertility god responsible for rain, obviously a significant figure in an agricultural community that bordered the desert. The rains came, according to Canaanite belief, when Baal had sex, with his semen falling in the form of life-giving rain. Instead of a simple “rain dance,” Canaanite priests imitated Baal by having sex, apparently coupling with men, women, and beasts. Many of the Mosaic Laws were specifically aimed at sexually charged Canaanite worship that must have held enormous appeal for many of the Children of Israel.
Apart from its disdain for the commingling of sex and God, the law code in Deuteronomy, like the laws elsewhere in the Torah, dealt very specifically with sexual relations, including marriage customs:
“Suppose a man marries a woman, but after going in to her, he dislikes her and makes up charges against her, slandering her by saying, ‘I married this woman but when I lay with her, I did not find evidence of her virginity.’ The father of the young woman shall then submit the evidence of the young woman’s virginity to the elders of the city at the gate…. Then they shall spread out the cloth before the elders of the town. The elders of the town shall take the man and punish him…. She shall remain his wife; he shall not be permitted to divorce her as long as she lives.
“If, however, this charge is true…then they shall bring the young woman out of the entrance of her father’s house and the men of her town shall stone her to death.” (Deut. 22:13-21)
BIBLICAL VOICES
Then Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is opposite Jericho, and the Lord showed him the whole land:… The Lord said to him, “This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, ‘I will give it to your descendants’; I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not cross over there.” Then Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab, at a valley in the land of Moab…but no one knows his burial place to this day. (Deut. 34:1-6)
OVER THE RIVER
JOSHUA
Joshua “fit” the battle of Jericho, Jericho,Jericho. Joshua “fit” the battle of Jericho, And the walls came tumblin’ down.
—African-American spiritual
And it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city. (Joshua 6:20 KJV)
* How did a prostitute help destroy Jericho?
* How did King David and Jesus descend from a pair of biblical prostitutes?
* If God sanctions “ethnic cleansing,” does that make it okay?
Back in the wicked days of disco, throngs of “beautiful people” stood on a line outside Studio 54, hoping, praying, and pleading to be let into New York’s notorious nightclub. Many of them were devastated when the all-powerful