THE MALAKOI AND ARSENOKOITAI: WHO ARE THEY REALLY

THE MALAKOI AND ARSENOKOITAI (I COR 6:9): WHAT IS REALLY MEANT BY THESE TERMS?^{^[1]}

In I Corinthians 6 St. Paul lists a number of ‘types’ of people, presumably currently present in the church situation which he is addressing, who are not on the way to salvation. We find a significant term at the head of the list, one of several which recur at I Timothy 1:9-10. The porn- (πορν-) group of cognates is very interesting.^{^[2]} In extra-biblical Greek porneia (πoρvεία) has a limited semantic range, but in biblical Greek this is greatly extended, for reasons connected with the need in many idolatry-adultery contexts for two terms for unchastity in the Septuagint version.[3] Professor Sir Kenneth Dover is wrong to reproach Paul with using it for all behaviour of which he disapproved, but right in his instinct that in the Greek Bible much more is wrapped up in it than the people and activities of the world’s oldest profession. It comes to mean all irregular genital contact except adultery and in some contexts seems to be a portmanteau for adultery too. Matthew 5, 15 and 19 are cases in point ^{^[4]}: unchastity is very serious sin which defiles us inwardly, and is grounds for divorce. It is thus not tenable that the Gospel record shows Jesus making no reference to homosexual acts. Pornoi (πόρvoι) may be masculine for common gender. This would make “sexually immoral persons” the right rendering. However, given that Paul is dealing with people’s areas of freedom, the feminine cases may be intentionally excluded.[5] Most female prostitutes of any kind would have been the victims of the activities of andrapodistai (ἀvδραπoδισταί), “slavers”, who figure at I Timothy 1:10, and these could not have repented of the life women were commonly sold into.[6] Males, even as chattels, were much freer. Plus ça change... I am therefore strongly inclined to start off my translation of this catalogue “No men who are unchaste...”. The Greek covers practitioners of incest and child-molestation as well as those who use female prostitutes. Of course even with this extension πoρvεία continues, with its cognates, to cover male commercial and ritual prostitution [7]: the word pornoi (πόρvoι) must, therefore, at least contain the meaning “male prostitutes” here.

Pace several modern writers, who indulge in special pleading at this point, the malakoi (μαλακoί) are not hard to identify. The adjective μαλακός, here used substantivally (cf. Eng. ‘softy’), is quite unambiguously “a male performing the female role in homosexual relations”. In such a context straight after the moichoi (μoιχoί) or adulterers no-one would have read it differently. Other words with a similar range convey the same idea. Latin and Greek seem unable to generate enough semi-contemptuous expressions for the male who, depending on the context, was cowardly, spoilt by soft living, ineffectual or ‘female’ in the technical sense. This was in the pagan world the hypocritical blame-the-victim reality. The word has to be given its full weight without tendentiousness. It is, for example, sloppy translation to run together two items in a list of ten.[8] And NAB tries to make commercial a category which everybody knew referred to a regular social pleasantry among the well-born (at least in the Eastern Empire). Then as now it tended to be self-perpetuating, and the penetrated often grew up unable to put his heart into marriage.[9] “Catamites” is the right rendering.

This brings us to arsenokoitēs (ἀρσεvoκoίτης). These are the facts. It is a noun unattested outside our two New Testament passages, the Fathers, who show a couple of cognates to it (as you might expect in those who read the New Testament in Greek), and the Tenth Century compilation known as the Greek Anthology. It is a masculine noun in -ης, -oυ. The suffix makes it an ‘activity’ kind of formation [10], of which the paradigm is poiētēs (πoιήτης), i.e. “one who goes in for creating”. Nouns formed with this particular suffix were proliferating in the First Century. The t or Greek Tau has no connection with koitē (κoίτη) “bed” except the coincidental one of a derivation from keimai (κεῖμαι) “I lie”. It is a compound, and compounds need especially careful handling; with them the grammatical relation of the parts must be sorted out before one can see daylight. Etymologizing gets one only so far, sometimes very little way. The word cannot mean “man in a bed”.[11]

It is an objective compound, of which one part must be a verbal noun, grammatically equivalent to a verb. It is parallel in form to paiderastēs (παιδεράστης). It might be construed either as “one who -ēs (-ης, the suffix) lies koita- (κoίτα-, from κεῖμαι, a verbal) with men arseno- (ἀρσεvo-, a noun)”, or else as an objective compound but with arseno- (ἀρσεvo-) used verbally and koita- (κoίτα-) substantivally, giving us “one who takes the male part in lying”. The practical difference is slight to nil; but what on earth does it mean? The sense is not so much innocuous as vacuous, unless we say that the preceding malakoi (μαλακoί) desiderates something. It would help if keimai (κεῖμαι) ever had a coital connotation [12]; but it does not, even in the Fathers.

That it does not is a subtle linguistic point on which modern scholarship appears to be completely silent. The fact is that keimai (κεῖμαι) tout court no more suggests genital relations than do English expressions such as “lie”, “sleep”, “go to bed”, “spend the night” tout court (unless we count “lay” and “get laid”!). So wide is its range of other meanings, literal and figurative, that unless the verb and any derivatives are prefixed with such obvious semantic pointers as words for “with” or “together” the suggestion is unlikely to occur to the mind at all. The coital sense is no more than a faint implication even in such words as akoitēs (ἀκoίτης), akoitis (ἄκoιτις) and parakoitēs (παρακoίτης), which all mean “spouse”. It is poignantly absent from monokoiteō (μovoκoιτέω) [Ar. Lysistrata 592] and pagkoitas (παγκoίτας) [Soph. Antigone 804, 811].[13] Apart from one necessarily obscure compound in a fragment attributed to the poet Hipponax (Sixth Century B.C.) the root is innocent of such a sense. So is the verb koiteō (κoιτέω) “I go to bed”. Where then did it come from? And why from the First Century on do we find in Jewish or Christian sources a proliferation of cognates and derivatives [14] which are heavy with it? If this can be unravelled we can, I believe, sharpen considerably the reference of arsenokoitēs (ἀρσεvoκoίτης). This will be so whether or not we are persuaded that all the Greek Fathers who seem to know the term understood the precise nuance of both malakos (μαλακός) and arsenokoitēs (ἀρσεvoκoίτης) juxtaposed in I Corinthians 6.

So, then, we have an obscure compound masculine noun, which in the present state of knowledge might well be taken as a coinage. This is the simplest explanation. The word is much illuminated when we look at the Septuagint [15] of the Leviticus texts: kai meta arsenos ou koimēthēsē koitēn gunaikos (καὶ μετὰ ἄρσεvoς oὐ κoιμηθήσῃ κoίτηv γυvαικός 18:22); kai hos an κοιμēthē meta arsenos koitēn gunaikos (καὶ ὅς ἄv κoιμηθῇ μετὰ ἄρσεvoς κoίτηv γυvαικός... 20:13). This is about male penetration of a male.[16] koitēn (κoίτηv) is Hebraizing [17], but perhaps it was felt to be as good as an internal cognate accusative [18] with koimaomai (κoιμάoμαι), a verb standard for coitus from Homer on. We have exactly this construction in the Massoretic text, i.e. shakhav (שׁכב) verb-forms governing mishkhvē (משׁכבי) “intercourse with”.[19] Probably, then, the compound [20], whether chosen or coined in I Corinthians, is intended to evoke the Holiness Code with its emphasis on male penetration of the male. Actually as a biblical Hellenist and Hebraist I should put it more strongly: in the absence of earlier attestation, and in view of the un-Greek semantic twist in the word, a deliberate, conscious back-reference by the Apostle is as certain as philology can make it. (He may or may not have known that he was dropping into translationese.) To be blunt, his coined compound noun means “A man who f***s [21] males”. He is careful to make the ‘male’ same-sex practitioner as culpable as the ‘female’: the pagan world was not so clear as the Jewish that the penetrating partner wasn’t right to take all he could get, so that the order may well be significant. If it is, Paul is saying, “and the sodomite too, in case you thought that he was an exception”. Fascinatingly, by avoiding the available technical term paiderastēs (παιδεράστης [22]) he sees to it that ‘loving, consensual, adult [23] relations’ are fully covered.

How Much Rope...?

The clinching refutation of the argument that Paul’s condemnation of both kinds of male homosexual act refers only to heathen ritual practice is that, in both the New Testament passages where we find arsenokoitēs (ἀρσεvoκoίτης) precisely the prostitute-inclusive word is listed separately, as we have seen. It rings almost like prophecy when, after stating in I Corinthians 6:9 that those who habitually wrong others are not on the way to salvation, St. Paul issues a warning to his readers in that permissive society to be wary of deceiving themselves, or being deceived Mē planasthe (Μὴ πλαvᾶσθε). It is Christian human nature, especially when faced with a highly-developed and aggressive pagan or post-Christian selfism, to bring the baggage of that hedonistic philosophy into the new life. The ease with which we forget that “A charge to keep I have,/A God to glorify,/A never-dying soul to save,/And fit it for the sky” is a major theme in the New Testament as a whole. We moderns may be coming to from our long post-triumphalist hangover, but we have not yet recovered the ancient sense of the sharp difference between believer and unbeliever. In the matter of Christian homosexual practice, the Fathers were unequivocal in their opposition on Scriptural grounds. As for the idea that they condemned it only in the context of heathen cult-prostitution, because there were no other people who performed such acts, there is no evidence for it.[24] Even if there were evidence, the Greek Fathers would still have called the activity itself sinful. They read their Bible as a doctrinal and linguistic unity, against the background of a society which formed its obverse. They had other secular vocabulary too for the whole phenomenon, and used it. If they sometimes fell into legalism in the face of antinomianism, St. Paul did not. His teaching was that the knowledge of the old moral Law and the power to lead the new life were equally gifts of grace.

To sum up, there do not seem to be any canonical texts which express even qualified approval of homosexual conduct or expression, and Romans 1-3 represents it together with homosexual desire as a manifestation of fallen mankind’s general wrongness. It is an aspect of the disordered life of a society from which one must be rescued [Gen. 18:16-19:29]; it is offensive to the God of Israel [Lev. 11-20 (or to the end of the book)]; it belongs to a category of genital sin which breaks marriage [Matt. 5:31-32, 19:3-12] and defiles me inwardly [Matt. 15:1-20]; it is one sign of my having turned away from the worship of my Creator [Rom. 1-3]; with other habitual gross sins, if chosen and persisted in it breaks community for time and eternity [I Cor. 5-6]; it defies that Law which is still binding upon the people of the New Covenant [I Tim. 1]; and last but not least, it directly contradicts all the implications of the Lord’s own life and teaching about sex and marriage [Cf. Mk. 10:1-12]. There is no Scriptural, Apostolic or Dominical warrant for the Christian Church to baptize it. My body with all its powers belongs, not to me, but to the Creator who made it and to the Redeemer who bought it back from slavery to sin. “You were bought at a price. Therefore honour God with your body” [I Cor. 6:20].

[1] This note is a slightly adapted extract from my longer paper ‘Homotext’: the Greek and Hebrew terms are both quoted and transliterated. You need a full Unicode font in order to view all the alphanumeric characters.

[2] There is a connection with the pern- (περv-) root i.e. secular Greek keeps the emphasis on selling oneself, or being bought.

[3] There are many examples in the Septuagint, clustered especially in the prophetic books.

[4] One way of looking at the “Matthaean exception” is to say that it covers even the plight of the spouse deserted for a homosexual ‘union’. Nowadays that often has high relevance, tragically. Certainly the Lord’s teaching here and in the parallel Synoptic passages on marriage seems, with its emphasis on the creation order as the basis for the monogamous ideal, to lend no support to the idea that He was even tacitly in favour of same-sex relationships however ‘monogamous’. Genesis 1 is cited explicitly. A further implication is that marriage is essentially, not incidentally, between a man and a woman.

[5] It seems plausible to read the nouns in this list, all grammatically masculine, as denoting male persons only.

[6] It is surely noteworthy that Paul censures in chapter 6 the male who resorts to a pornē (πόρvη) or female prostitute. He has nothing to say directly to the pornē (πόρvη) herself. We should not forget that in that cold, brutal world a high proportion of people, and perhaps more in the Church, had been commodified.

[7] A modern myth is that in the ancient world homosexual relationships did not run the gamut from the ‘high and holy’ significant, sometimes celibate, type to the tawdry, exploitative commercial one based on brutal lust: they did. In other words we are dealing with a human propensity which is, like heterosexual erōs (ἔρως), characterized by a range of emotion and expression.

[8] At least one modern version renders the whole phrase “not malakoi nor arsenokoitai”([oὔ]τε μαλακoὶ [oὔ]τε ἀρσεvoκoῖται) “homosexual perverts”. This is insufficiently specific.

[9] The emotional ‘split’ which must have resulted if romantic love was only same-sex is epitomized by “We have lady-friends hetairas (τὰς ἑταίρας) for fun, whores pallakas (τὰς παλλακάς) to see to our everyday physical needs, and wives gunaikas (τὰς γυvαῖκας) to bear us legitimate offspring and to be reliable housekeepers,” the famous remark made by Apollodorus as plaintiff in 349/8 B.C. [(Pseudo-)Demosthenes LIX.122 (In Neaeram)].

[10] There are several of these in this and the I Timothy 1 list, e.g. the pseustēs (ψεύστης) or “professional con-artist” and the pleonektēs (πλεovέκτης) or “acquisitor”; the form indicates a settled way of living. This seems to me significant in the context of the exclusion from all title in the Kingdom of those who live in these ways: one is excluded by one’s own choice, because there is available in the Gospel transformation of our personal life (some at Corinth are stated to have experienced it), nor is one excluded because of rare and uncharacteristic lapses.

[11] For this sense we should need arsenokoitētēs (ἀρσεvoκoιτήτης).

[12] The genuinely idiomatic verb is mignumai (μίγvυμαι), used of either sex.

[13] The point is that, like Jephtha’s daughter, none of these poor girls is going to be properly wedded, bedded, awakened and made the joyful mother of children. In the robust thinking of the pagan world, this was a fate worse than death.

[14] None of these so far as we can tell ever became idiom.

[15] We must bear in mind that Paul’s Gentile converts would have been taught the Torah, because he believed that everyone was saved in order that he should in some sense keep the Law. The Torah would have been taught in its Greek dress. Greek was the lingua franca of the whole of the Eastern Empire. The Septuagint version of these same passages seems to me the obvious origin of the unfortunately undated arsenokoiteō (ἀρσεvoκoιτέω) [Sibylline Oracles 2:71-73]: the meaning in context is plainly “I have homosexual relations with males”. This is Hebraism in practice if not in the mind of the writer. In theory both words might have been coined immediately after the first hearing of the Leviticus passage in Greek early in the Third Century B.C.

[16] It is not possible to know whether Paul would have heard about intercrural ‘copulation’. He is unlikely, if he had, to have thought better of it than of anal.

[17] It would indeed be an odd culture and language in which certain terms were never connected; but it remains the case that the idea of genital acts must have got into keimai (κεῖμαι) words in Septuagint Greek from shakhav (שׁכב) words in Hebrew. Moreover koitē (κoίτη) has acquired a gerundive force, so that, like mishkhbhē (משׁכבי), it governs an objective genitive.

[18] Cf. English “to sleep the sleep of the just”. A literal and somewhat crude rendering of the near-literalism in the Greek gives us “and you are not to/and whoever may sleep with a male the bedding of a woman...”. The intransitive keimai (κεῖμαι) did not serve the translator here, because he needed his Greek for “have intercourse” to govern an object.

[19] I have seen the Hebrew described as “obscure”. It is perfectly ordinary. It is a standard plural-for-abstract noun in the construct state. This means that it includes what in Latin or Greek would be a genitive case of the next lexeme; here the next lexeme is functioning as an objective genitive.

[20] This would be a case of curious Greek resulting from a formulaic rendering in the Septuagint, i.e. the version works with a root-for-root method. Leviticus 15:16 shows a bizarre example; cf. the whole listing in Hatch, E. & Redpath, H.A. Concordance to the Septuagint, Oxford, 1900-6. koitē (κoίτη) is remarkably asexual in tone in secular Greek; I do not find the single (classical and poetic) use of it in the sense “marriage-bed” anything but a natural extension of the standard reference to a sleeping-place. We are still far from a direct reference to intercourse. Plainly derivative is the late mystical sense cited in the Patristic Greek Lexicon. It shows only one example of the word, and that is in an obviously pious, monkish, Hebraizing sense of “mystical union, intercourse” (Seventh Century in Maximus Mysticus). This seems to me to be a choice example of the influence of the language of (Greek) Scripture on Christian idiom. The man wanted to refer to sexual union spiritualised and figuratively, so dropped into the language of Canaan. He would never have used the word for his purpose if it had been vulgar slang in colloquial Greek for coitus.

[21] In the strictest Anglo-Saxon sense of that word, i.e. a woman cannot do it. שׁכב “I lie” has a spread of meanings, but very frequent is the coital. The subject is nearly always male. Passive forms with female subjects may mean “be slept with” in the coital sense. The examples are collected in my document ‘”Lie” in the Hebrew Bible’ archived with the Word edition of this one: with a male subject and the prepositions את/עם“with” it amounts to “penetrate” in practice.

[22] We should take note of the fact that the first half of this compound does not mean “child” (cf. our English “girlfriend”), but denotes the object of erōs (ἔρως). There are numerous other compounds with the same first element and the same connotation. English “paedophile” is liable to mislead.

[23] The point is well taken that Leviticus 20:13 must be about such relations, otherwise it would be unjust that both men should suffer the prescribed penalty.

[24] David F. Wright in ‘Homosexuals or Prostitutes? The Meaning of ΑΡΣΕΝΟΚΟIΤΑI [I Cor. 6:9, I Tim. 1:10].’ [Vigiliae Christianae 38. 1984. 125-153] has done a solid job of demolishing John Boswell’s thesis that this word only ever connoted male prostitutes, even if he spends longer than need be on the notion that an activity noun of this type could be anything other than an objective compound. He adduces a number of keimai (κεῖμαι) derivatives, some classical, some late enough to be coinages based on Septuagint or New Testament Greek, demonstrating beyond doubt that only the sense “active homosexual” is supported. However, he does not address the mystery of how these derivatives acquired a semantic twist absent from secular keimai (κεῖμαι) words.