“No woman of Israel is to engage in ritual prostitution, and no man of Israel is to engage in ritual homosexual prostitution.“-Deuteronomy 23:18
Alrighty, Deuteronomy 23:18 is going to require some explaining because the Biblical reality is so separate from what we know today.
Depending on your Bible translation, the topic of this verse is translated differently.
The Complete Jewish Bible uses the term “ritual prostitution” which I think is quite accurate.
The King James version says “There shall be no whore of the daughters of Israel, nor a sodomite of the sons of Israel”. which I think completely misses the point.
And the NIV version says “No Israelite man or woman is to become a shrine prostitute“ which like the Complete Jewish Bible captures the correct nuance I would say.
The law being established here is that any money a male or female prostitute earns for their services is NEVER to be offered up to the Lord as a vow payment, sacrifice or a tithe.
Why?
Because again this is another example of an illicit mixture.
Doing such a thing is abhorrent to the Lord our God and He cannot accept money that resulted from a practice that came from an authorized union.
Fruit from an illegal union is tainted and not acceptable.
Now…we’ve talked about this before but the Bible makes a sharp distinction between common prostitution and cultic prostitution.
Depending on your English Bible, one of the reasons the terms “temple prostitute” or “cultic prostitute” are used is because the Hebrew word being used here is KEDESHAH.
Now here’s the thing.
KEDESHAH does NOT actually mean “prostitute”.
What it really means is a “holy woman” or a “priestess”.
Quite mind-blowing, isn’t it?
In gentile cultures, the word originally had a positive meaning!
I’m not even kidding.
However, in the Hebrew culture, this word took on a very derogatory meaning primarily for two reasons.
FIRST, in the Levitical priesthood, ONLY males could become priests.
SECOND, by definition the pagan “holy woman” or “priestess” was worshipping a false god or goddess.
Therefore, over time the word KEDESHAH eventually transformed into a Hebrew idiom for “prostitute” or biblically speaking, one who engages in unauthorized or forbidden unions for pay.
We have access to plenty of ancient pictographs depicting the sexual worship practices that went on in the pagan religions.
The most typical ones are that of a goddess having sex with a god to create a new god (their son or daughter).
At the cultic temples, female priests would have sex with male priests to reenact the mating that supposedly happened between the gods in the spirit world.
What’s even more disgusting is that sometimes male priests would would dress up as females and perform the same sexual ritual with another male priest (who assumed the male role).
This is where we get the idiom “wages of a dog” which was used to refer to a homosexual male shrine prostitute.
We’ll continue this discussion the next time we meet.
1st corinthinians says dont join your body with a prostitute…..is that kedesh? A cultic prostitute or an ordinary prostitute?
Cultic.