Brennan Breed, “Bringing the Case before the LORD III. GENDER IDENTIFICATION

III. GENDER IDENTIFICATION

Second, sexuality contains the distinct issue of―gender identification‖—that is, what genders exist and how one identifies as one of them. One might imagine that this is relatively simple there are simply men and women but many cultures have a space for individuals of indeterminate gender, or sometimes for a third gender that is different from men and women.

 In the ancient Near East, we know that there were then, as there are today, hermpahrodites, or people of indefinite biological gender. 

As Matthew 19:12 tells us, some of these people were born this way, while others were made this way. In the ancient world the category of eunuchs usually men who had been castrated or whose genitals were otherwise missing or damaged were understood to be distinct from men in important ways. 

For example, eunuchs could work with women, even supervise women, in ways that men could not, such as Hegai and Saashgaz in the book of Esther, who supervised the concubines (Esther 2:3, 14, 15). There was, quite interestingly, a struggle in ancient Israel over the cultural and religious status of such persons. Whereas Leviticus 21:20 and Deuteronomy 23:1 prohibit people of indeterminate gender from joining the assembly of YHWH, Isaiah 56:3-5 proclaims that YHWH invites these people into the temple and will give to them, if they are faithful, an everlasting name. 

Thus, in the Bible as in the modern world, there are individuals and texts such as the prophet of Isaiah 56 who demand that typical assumptions of binary gender relations change in order to accommodate people who do not fit cleanly into those categories. 

If we want to discuss biblical teachings on gender identification, we must consider the eunuch and those who are displaced by current cultural boundaries of gender.