Several biblical passages prohibit or condemn the sexual acts they describe. They do not use the modern category of sexual orientation or discuss same-sex marriage as it exists today. A fair answer must distinguish the ancient wording, its social setting, and the further question of how communities apply it now.
Leviticus 18:22 prohibits a male lying with a male as with a woman; 20:13 repeats the prohibition and assigns death to the participants. Neither verse explicitly limits the rule to prostitution or coercion. These commands belong to Israel’s holiness legislation, and Leviticus 18:24–30 also condemns the nations for the practices listed. The chapter includes incest, adultery, intercourse during menstruation, and other prohibitions. Sorting its commands into permanently moral and temporarily ceremonial categories is a later interpretive framework, not the chapter’s own labeling.
Genesis 19 concerns a threatened sexual assault on visitors. It should not be treated as a description of a loving partnership. Ezekiel 16:49–50 accuses Sodom of arrogance, abundance without care for the poor, and abominations; it does not identify Sodom’s entire wrongdoing with a modern identity. Leviticus contains no comparably explicit prohibition naming female same-sex acts. Recognizing that difference is not the same as proving the authors approved them.
Romans 1:26–27 describes women exchanging natural relations and men desiring one another within Paul’s account of idolatry and disordered desire. The reciprocal male desire makes a restriction solely to rape or pederasty difficult to establish. First Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10 contain disputed Greek terms, especially arsenokoitai, whose wording is associated with the Greek translation of Leviticus. Translation requires interpretation, but the historical prohibitive reading did not begin when an English Bible first used “homosexual.”
Prohibitive interpreters read these texts as excluding same-sex sexual relations generally. Affirming interpreters argue that their ancient assumptions about gender, nature, status, and desire should not determine the treatment of an equal, committed partnership. Some propose a narrower original prohibition; others acknowledge the wider prohibition and argue for a changed ethical application. Those are different arguments and should not be blended. No biblical passage explicitly blesses a same-sex sexual union, but that observation alone does not settle every question about contemporary interpretation.
Jesus’ appeal to male and female in Genesis occurs in a divorce debate (Matthew 19:3–9). It supplies a male-female marriage model, not a direct discussion of sexual orientation. Isaiah’s welcome of eunuchs is important evidence about belonging, but it expressly includes Sabbath and covenant fidelity (Isaiah 56:3–7); it is neither an explicit same-sex marriage endorsement nor an irrelevant passage.
Jewish as well as Christian interpreters disagree about contemporary application, though they do not share the same scriptural canon. The question is not only what Paul permits Christians, but what Leviticus says and why a community regards its ruling as binding, limited, or subject to ethical reconsideration. Describing an ancient death penalty is not endorsing it today. None of this licenses harassment or diminishes anyone’s dignity.
Read in context: Leviticus 18; Ezekiel 16; Romans 1–2; Isaiah 56.