Thursday, January 23, 2025

The Torah On Prostitution

Rahab, a prostitute from the book of Joshua, is called an example of commitment to God in Hebrews 11:31 because she hid Israelite spies.  From this passage, one would not be able to tell if prostitution, the process of having sex in exchange for money, is sinful.  Rahab is said to have been a prostitute, and she is commended as righteous.  To find what the Bible foundationally says about the morality of prostitution, one would have to go to Mosaic Law, the only place in the entire Bible where a great many things are addressed.  Yes, prostitution is mentioned elsewhere, but sometimes either in narratives or in figurative language, not in the direct moral commands of Yahweh as described in the Torah.  This is where one would have to go to find the core details of what is said about the issue beyond things such as that a given person practiced this profession.

Making someone a prostitute, first of all, is evil (Leviticus 19:29).  As with rape (Deuteronomy 22:25-27) in cases where mutual consent would make a sexual act adultery or some other capital sexual sin, forced prostitution, like forced labor on the Sabbath, would be a sin only for the perpetrator, not for the victim whatsoever.  No one forced into sexual activity is ever guilty whenever they are made to do anything at all, not even for a career of sex work (though not all sex work in the broadest sense is actually sinful, something I have somewhat touched upon before and will do again).  Leviticus 19:29's wording of not making one's daughter a prostitute would by necessity not be dependent on the age of one's child, in the sense of whether they are literally a child by age or only in the sense of one's offspring, nor would it be something that is truly about not treating one's children as opposed to everyone, and that means this treatment is no less abominable for sons or men.

The same right to not be made into a prostitute would be possessed by boys and men, for they too share God's image (Genesis 1:26-27, 5:1-2) and can be prostitutes as well, though asinine gender stereotypes present men as sex-obsessed (rather than some men due to personality or upbringing/broader cultural conditioning they succumbed to) enough to pay for sex with women and as physically unattractive enough that women would supposedly never naturally seek out men for sexual activities due to finding their bodies sexually alluring, whether payment is involved or not.  All of this is nonsense.  The Bible itself even acknowledges male prostitutes along with female ones later in Deuteronomy 23:17-18, to be addressed soon.  The sexism inherent in assuming that a prostitute must be a woman because the profession is supposedly tied to a woman's non-existent stereotypical "nature" and that regards men as simultaneously hypersexual and unattractive is logically false independent of any moral realities.

This verse alone does not condemn prostitution as a whole, only forced prostitution, which would be a sin of the one who forced another into the position and not a sin of any violated man or women.  As for Deuteronomy 23:17-18, it focuses at first specifically on shrine prostitutes, or prostitutes who perform their role in association with religious rites or worship, but the second verse already brings clarity to how Yahweh despises the earnings of a prostitute altogether (it does mention the earnings of both genders, not that it would need to for one to be sinful by logical equivalence to the other).  By verse 18, it is not speaking of simply shrine prostitution being immoral.  The passage says that bringing the earnings of any prostitute in to God's house to pay a vow.  If the earnings of a prostitute are despised by God, as the verse states, then the activity of prostitution itself that generates the income would have to be immoral, not merely the bringing of the payments to some formal place of worship of Yahweh.

Separate from this, other verses in Leviticus teach that voluntary prostitution defiles the participant, something that could not be the case if a given deed is not morally wrong, at least in the context of the worldview espoused by the Bible.  In both Leviticus 21:7 and 9, someone who becomes a prostitute of their own volition is said to have defiled themself.  A priest's daughter who becomes a prostitute is even to be executed by burning (21:9).  Due to logical necessity (a thing that is evil and can be done by people of either gender must be evil for both) and the wording of Deuteronomy 23:17-18, not that the latter is necessary to realize this, the Biblical morality of voluntary prostitution is not different for men than for women, so a priest's son would deserve the same fate.  Yes, prostitution in all of its manifestations is Biblically sinful, though it is specifically prostitution by a priest's children that is said to merit capital punishment.  Unless someone commits adultery, incest, homosexual intercourse, or some other separate sexual sin as part of their prostitution, a prostitute does not necessarily deserve to be killed despite their sin making them deserve eventual biological death, the first death, and the literal second death in hell (Matthew 10:28, Revelation 20:15) as would all wrongdoers (Romans 6:23).

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