Snipped from the message board of Sodom & Gomorrah is this biblical verse supporting their viewpoint against gays: Romans 9:13! “As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I HATED!”
This made me curious. Is there some consideration that Esau was gay?
Esau has descendants mentioned in the Bible, so he may have just been adventurous.
I thought he was just hairy and had problems with delayed gratification.
Disclaimer: IANA Bible scholar.
The context of the original quote, Malachi 1, is a prophecy against the Children of Israel, in which “Esau” means “the Edomites”, who were his descendents.
If you read the whole thing, apparently the Israelites were bringing the castoffs of their flocks as sacrifices, thus incurring the Lord’s wrath, and presumably the Edomites were doing the same thing, thus incurring the Lord’s wrath, too.
There’s a nifty breakdown of the Edomites here, in which it’s noted that the Bible says they were “strong and cruel, vindictive, idolatrous, superstitious, and the implacable enemies of Israel”.
There are lots of reasons why people in the Bible incur the Lord’s wrath, and “Being gay” actually ranks pretty low on the list, no matter what the folks with an anti-gay agenda wanna think. I’d say that a people who were idolatrous enemies of Israel would get a red “hate” button from Yahweh pretty quick. Thus, “Esau have I hated.” Nothing to do with his sexual preferences.
Without seeing the post/board in question, I can only guess that this is meant as a response to the argument, “God is love. He doesn’t hate gays. He doesn’t hate anyone.”, by giving an example of God hating in the bible.
What would Esau have to do with Sodom and Gomorrah, which were destroyed in the time of Abraham and Lot, long before the birth of Jacob and Esau?
This sounds more like a condemnation of evolution than of homosexuality.
The whole idea of a sacrifice is that it represents a hardship for the guy making the sacrifice. If you give up meat for Lent, even though you love hamburgers and steak and whatnot, then that’s a sacrifice. If you give up meat for Lent, but you’re a vegetarian who doesn’t eat meat anyway, then you’re not sacrificing anything.
Similarly, sacrificing a castoff animal is cheating, because the animal meant nothing to you. Basically, they were sacrificing garbage. To be a proper sacrifice, the animal would have to be one that could have been valuable.
Esau took several wives (although what exactly their names, ethnicities and paternities were has some confusion from verse to verse) and had many children, so no. It would be more logical to assume that Jacob, who stayed in the tents with the women, was, but two wives and two concubines would seem to imply otherwise.
Never look for logic when dealing with the Phelps and other whacked out Fundie hatemongers.
Nothing in Jewish traditional literature ever suggested that Esau was homosexual. He was (at least) a murderer, a thief, and an idolater, but not, as far as anything mentions, gay.
thats all right - just as long as hes not gay.
But seriously, any idea where edom is actually situated. Was it a part of the northern isreal kingdom?
scm1001:
According to the maps in my Living Torah, Edom was south and east of the Dead Sea, parallel to the Negev Desert. Wikipedia has a map that illustrates this.
Much of what’s now Jordan and bits and pieces of Israel. Herod the Great, who was an Edomite (his family was forcibly converted to Judaism during a war a generation before his birth), was the grandson of the king of Petra (the city of carved stone cliffs most famously used in Indiana Jones/Last Crusade, which was an Edomite city-state.
To get there, you take a left turn just before you get to Jerusalem headin’ south, and you go a ways and make you a right, and when you see the Co’Cola sign in Arabic you gone about a mile too far.