Marry Like an Egyptian

Someone on Facebook mentioned, as part of an argument against same-sex marriage, a passage in Maimonides saying that the ancient Egyptians would marry a man to a man and a woman to a woman.

To me, this seemed to provide still more support for an argument in the precise opposite direction.

Maimonides was in fact drawing from the earlier Sifra, the famous commentary on Leviticus. The gist of the entire discussion in both sources is that same-sex relations between women were not viewed in those times in the negative way that most opponents of same-sex relations today view them.

But either way, the very statement that rejection of same-sex marriage in Israel was part of an attempt to distinguish Israel from its neighbors means that, from a Christian perspective, it ought perhaps to be placed in the same category as boiling a kid in its mother’s milk.