Did Ancient Rabbis Discuss Same-Sex Marriage?

When we look at ancient Jewish discussions of same-sex relationships, we generally begin with Leviticus and its prohibition of sexual intercourse between men. But several rabbinic texts raise a related question that is often overlooked: did ancient rabbis also discuss men marrying men and women marrying women?

The answer is yes, although understanding what they meant requires some care. In one rabbinic interpretation of Leviticus, we find explicit references to a man marrying a man and a woman marrying a woman. Another passage, preserved in the Babylonian Talmud, refers to marriage contracts written for males. A third, found in Vayikra Rabbah, connects the writing of marriage documents for prohibited unions with the generation destroyed in Noah’s Flood.

These passages are not endorsements of same-sex marriage, nor do they establish that such marriages were widely practiced or legally recognized in antiquity. They do, however, show that some rabbis addressed more than sexual acts. Their discussions also extended to marriage arrangements and the formal recognition of relationships. How much further we can take that observation depends on the individual texts and, in one case, the manuscripts in which they survive.

The Flood Tradition and Its Variants

Vayikra Rabbah, a collection of rabbinic interpretations generally dated to the fifth century AD, contains an unusual explanation for the destruction of Noah’s generation. In chapter 23, while discussing Leviticus 18:3 and its warning against following the customs of Egypt and Canaan, a teaching attributed to Rav Huna in the name of Rabbi Yosei claims that the generation of the Flood was destroyed because its people began writing marriage documents for prohibited unions.

The difficulty is that the surviving manuscripts do not all agree about the participants in those unions. The first printed edition, along with certain London and Paris manuscripts, refers to documents written “for the male and for the female.” This has been understood as a reference to marriages between men and between women. Other manuscripts preserve a longer reading that also includes animals, while a parallel tradition in Genesis Rabbah refers to males and animals.

Which reading was original? That question cannot be settled simply by choosing the version that seems most relevant to modern discussions of same-sex marriage. The manuscript differences need to be taken seriously, particularly since the inclusion of animals changes the range of prohibited relationships being described.

There is still something we can establish. Across these versions, the rabbis used the writing of marriage documents as an example of the corruption they associated with Noah’s generation. The account is a moral interpretation of Genesis, written long after the events it supposedly describes. It tells us how rabbis understood and illustrated the wrongdoing of that generation, not what marriage practices actually existed before the Flood.

Sifra and the Customs of Egypt and Canaan

We find a more explicit discussion in Sifra, a collection of legal interpretations of Leviticus that preserves earlier tannaitic traditions. In its explanation of Leviticus 18:3, the text asks what it means for Israel to avoid the practices of Egypt and Canaan.

The instruction could hardly mean that Israelites were forbidden from doing everything the Egyptians and Canaanites did. People in those societies built houses and planted crops, after all. Sifra therefore distinguishes ordinary activities from the social customs it considers objectionable. Among the examples it identifies are a man marrying a man, a woman marrying a woman, a man marrying a woman and her daughter, and a woman being married to two men.

Notice where this discussion occurs. Sifra is interpreting Leviticus 18:3, with its broader warning about foreign customs, rather than Leviticus 18:22, which specifically prohibits male intercourse. The marriage arrangements appear alongside other relationships that the rabbis regarded as prohibited. The reference to women marrying women is especially revealing because Leviticus 18:22 does not address sexual relations between women.

This gives us evidence that at least some rabbinic interpreters understood the chapter’s prohibitions more broadly than the sexual act explicitly named in verse 22. They included forms of marriage and relationships that they associated with the customs of other societies.

We should be careful, however, about treating this as a straightforward description of Egyptian or Canaanite society. Sifra preserves tannaitic material, but the dating of individual traditions, the compilation of the work, and the manuscripts available to us are separate historical questions. Nor does the passage establish how common these arrangements were, or whether they enjoyed legal recognition in the societies being criticized. What we have is evidence of a rabbinic interpretation that attributed such practices to Egypt and Canaan.

Marriage Contracts in Chullin

The Babylonian Talmud provides another example. In Chullin 92b, Ulla describes commandments supposedly accepted by the descendants of Noah. Among the restraints they continued to observe, he says, was that they did not write ketubot for males.

A ketubah is a marriage document associated with marital obligations in Jewish practice. The reference therefore introduces a question beyond whether two men might engage in prohibited sexual conduct. It concerns the formal documentation of a relationship.

Unfortunately, Ulla does not elaborate. He gives no description of a ceremony, identifies no particular couple, and offers no surviving example of such a document. We might understand his statement to mean that people could engage in conduct the rabbis condemned while still refusing to give those relationships the formal recognition associated with marriage. That is a reasonable interpretation, but it remains an interpretation of a brief statement.

The passage also provides an interesting comparison with the Flood tradition in Vayikra Rabbah. There, writing marriage documents illustrates the corruption of an earlier generation. In Chullin, the refusal to write them represents a moral boundary that people had not crossed. We have no need to assume that one passage was directly dependent on the other. Both nevertheless use the recognition of a relationship through marriage documentation to make a moral argument.

Dating and Historical Context

There is another difficulty with these sources that deserves attention. Although Vayikra Rabbah is generally associated with the fifth century AD, some of the rabbis named in its traditions lived considerably earlier. Rav Huna is associated with the third century AD, while Ulla lived during the third and fourth centuries. Their teachings may preserve earlier material, but an attribution to a named rabbi does not automatically establish that every word in the surviving text originated during his lifetime.

This becomes relevant when we consider what the rabbis might have known about marriage practices in the wider Roman world.

The scholar Saul Lieberman suggested that rabbis in the Land of Israel may have been familiar with occasional marriage ceremonies between men in Roman society. He also proposed that the association with Noah’s generation reflected the rabbis’ awareness that such arrangements were not generally accepted among the Roman population.

Lieberman’s interpretation offers a possible historical setting for the passages, but the texts themselves do not establish precisely what practices the rabbis had encountered. They might reflect knowledge of occasional ceremonies, conventional accusations about the behavior of foreign peoples, or some combination of the two.

We also need to distinguish a ceremony performed by individuals from a marriage recognized under Roman law. Evidence that some people entered relationships they described or treated as marriages would not, by itself, demonstrate that Roman authorities recognized those unions as ordinary legal marriages. The rabbinic references cannot settle that question.

What the Texts Establish

So, did ancient rabbis discuss same-sex marriage? Yes. Sifra explicitly mentions men marrying men and women marrying women, while Chullin refers to the refusal to write marriage contracts for males. The tradition in Vayikra Rabbah adds another example of marriage documentation being used in rabbinic moral argument, although its manuscript variations prevent us from being certain about every relationship the original passage described.

None of these texts speaks approvingly of the arrangements in question. Nor can we use them to establish how widespread same-sex marriages were in antiquity. But neither should we overlook what the passages actually say. These rabbis were capable of discussing relationships between people of the same sex in terms of marriage and its formal recognition, even while condemning the practices they described.

We should also resist reading these later interpretations directly back into the original meaning of Leviticus. The biblical text and its rabbinic reception belong to different stages in the history of Jewish interpretation. What these sources reveal is that, as rabbis interpreted Leviticus and applied its prohibitions to the world around them, their discussions could extend beyond particular sexual acts to the kinds of relationships people formed and whether those relationships should receive recognition as marriages.

That is a narrower conclusion than claiming that same-sex marriage was an established institution in the ancient world. It is also a conclusion that the surviving rabbinic texts give us good reason to accept.

Source Notes

Vayikra Rabbah 23:9, ed. Mordechai Margulies, p. 539.

Admiel Kosman and Anat Sharbat, “Two Women Who Were Sporting with Each Other,” discussion of textual witnesses, reporting the variants in Margulies, p. 539, and the Genesis Rabbah parallel (Theodor–Albeck, p. 248).

Sifra, Acharei Mot, Section 8:8, on Leviticus 18:3

Babylonian Talmud, Chullin 92b.

Saul Lieberman, notes to Margulies’s edition of Vayikra Rabbah, p. 877, as reported by Kosman and Sharbat.

Kosman and Sharbat, “Two Women Who Were Sporting with Each Other”.