“Neither shalt thou go up by steps unto mine altar, that thy nakedness be not discovered thereon.”
What does this mean, exactly? Is it that if the altar is elevated and you’re climbing up the stairs, the altar can see under your skirt and that’s bad?
Awww, heck** HazelNut**, just wear a GOP pantsuit to church. Problem solved! 
I think I’d rather risk being struck down by lightening than wear a pantsuit. :dubious:
The New Living Bible is a little clearer:
That’s verse 26 BTW.
Well, it’s good advice.
Heaven forbid …
Lewis Black says that any time a Christian has a question about something in the Old Testament, he should ask a Jew. The Old Testament is their book. It’s not the Christians’ book. It’s the Jews’ book.
So find a Jew and ask him. He will then take the time out of his JEW-Y JEW-Y day, and explain it to you.
…if, of course, the price is right. 
My interpretation would equate the original to:
If you come to my alter, do not hide yourself from me. In other words, come with your soul bared.
But If I’m starting a new religion in the world, I might not be able to afford a grand temple with a high alter. I might make it part of my teachings of humility. I am a humble god who doesn’t need lots of masonry sounds a lot better than I am a poor god who can’t afford stone.
I always heard that if you wanted to learn the OT, you should ask a Baptist, not a Jew. But I’m just a lowly old Methodist.
Remember, this is a culture that hadn’t invented pants or underwear.
So then - how *do *you approach the alter? Or is this saying that the alter shouldn’t be raised?
It’s 20:26, by the way.
I interpreted it metaphorically. Building an altar on steps is a way of glorifying yourself and/or your country, which is what the Egyptians were doing with pyramids to prove their wealth and power. In Exodus, they’d just learned how Pharoah was humbled due his pride and hard heart. Combine this with the recurring theme in both OT and NT of people who use religion for personal pride and gain, and I see it as a warning about mistaking wealth and earthly power for true spirituality… that if you do, your spiritual nakedness will be revealed in the same way that your physical nakedness might be.
If it was just a warning about literal nakedness, surely some Mormon-style holy underwear would have done the trick.
Actually, the priests in the Temple DID have a sort of underwear as part of their uniform.
Well yeah, but who do you think the Baptists ask?
The SDMB addendum is that all the “ask a Jew” questions tend to get posted on Friday night.
The fact is that the ancient Israelites DID wear pants, and the priests did in fact wear them during Temple service. Note Exodus 28:42, “Make linen undergarments as a covering for the body, reaching from the waist to the thigh.”
The verse at 20:22 is saying that even though the flesh of the private parts are not actually exposed during Temple service, one does not step in such a manner as would cause the privates to be more revealed, because one must conduct himself in a holy manner while approaching the altar. So access to the altar must be made by a ramp rather than by steps, in order to allow for a more modest gait…even though the modesty of the priests’s flesh wouldn’t really be compromised at the time.
Then don’t go commando in church.
Pants? That garment sounds to me more like a kind of underskirt, the equivalent of a ladies’ half-slip today. Do we have any textual/artifactual evidence to indicate that such linen undergarments were actually bifurcated, i.e., with a separate opening for each leg in the form of pants rather than skirts?
A skirt-like undergarment, of course, will still reveal the wearer’s private parts to anyone looking up their clothes from below.
Dunno if it says it outright in the text, but Jewish tradition has always depicted it as (more or less) long white boxers. For some reason, I can’t find a chart on Google.
Kimstu:
That’s a problem with the NIV translation. The actual Hebrew uses the word “Michnasayim” which actually means pants, not “undergarments” (though they were undergarments in a sense, as they were worn underneath all the other garments the priests wore during service. Additionally, the Hebrew says that the purpose of these are “L’Chasos B’sar Ervah” - to cover the flesh of the privates, which would necessitate pants - not merely (as in the NIV translation) “a covering for the body.”
The King James is definitely close to the spirit of the original Hebrew: “And thou shalt make them linen breeches to cover their nakedness; from the loins even unto the thighs they shall reach”.
Bottom line, Jewish understanding of this verse has always been pants.