Bible Review

Thorkild Jacobsen, “The Graven Image,” in Ancient Israelite Religion, edited by P. Miller, P. Hanson and S. D. McBride (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1987), p. 18.

A. L. Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 184.

Henri Frankfort, Ancient Egyptian Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), p. 12.

See M. Margaliot, “Jeremiah 10:1–16: A Re-examination,” Vetus Testamentum, Vol. 30 (1980), pp. 295–308.

Philip J. King, Jeremiah: An Archaeological Companion (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993).

For this argument, see Countryman’s Dirt, Greed and Sex, esp. pp. 120–123.

Space limitations prevent citing the reasons it probably refers to pederasty. For details of the argument, see Robin Scroggs, The New Testament and Homosexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), esp. pp. 17–65 and 101–109. Scroggs’s book is the most helpful book-length study of homosexuality in the New Testament by a mainstream scholar. L. William Countryman’s study of sexual ethics in the Bible, Dirt, Greed and Sex (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988), is equally important, though it treats matters in addition to homosexuality.

The King James Version translates it as “abusers of themselves with mankind,” the New English Bible as “homosexual perversion” and the Revised Standard Version and New Revised Standard Version as “sodomites” and/or “male prostitutes.”