Sissy: What Deuteronomy 23:18 Actually Says - UPDV Updated Bible Version

You will not bring the wages of a whore, or the price of a sissy, into the house of Yahweh your God for any vow: for even both these are disgusting to Yahweh your God. — Deuteronomy 23:18

The word 'sissy' in the UPDV translates the Hebrew כֶּלֶב (kelev), which literally means 'dog.' Previous English translations rendered this as 'sodomite,' 'male cult prostitute,' or 'homosexual prostitute.' None of these are what the Hebrew says. The Hebrew says 'dog' — and the question is what that meant.

This article traces the evidence from Akkadian cuneiform, Phoenician temple inscriptions, and the Septuagint to explain why the UPDV renders כֶּלֶב (kelev) as 'sissy' and קְדֵשָׁה / קָדֵשׁ (qedeshah / qadesh) as 'pagan whore.'

The Problem with 'Homosexual'

No Hebrew or Greek lexicon supports translating כֶּלֶב (kelev) as 'homosexual.' HALOT defines it as 'dog.'[1] BDB defines it as 'dog' with a secondary sense: 'male temple prostitute (a term of contempt).' BDAG's entry for κύων (kuōn, the Greek equivalent at Revelation 22:15) lists: 'In imagery of persons considered to be low, vile, detestable.' No sexual orientation is referenced.

The word 'homosexual' first appeared in English in 1892 (Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis). Applying it to a Hebrew text from the 7th century BCE is an anachronism — not just linguistically but conceptually. The ancient Near East did not categorize people by sexual orientation. It categorized them by cultic role, social status, and gender performance.[2]

What כֶּלֶב Meant: The Cuneiform Evidence

The key to understanding כֶּלֶב (kelev) lies in Akkadian cuneiform sources documenting a class of cultic personnel called the assinnu.

The assinnu in Mesopotamian texts

The assinnu (Sumerian: UR-SAL, literally 'dog-woman') was a devotee of the goddess Ishtar who occupied a gender-crossed cultic role. The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (CAD) documents:

UR-SAL = assinnu: the Sumerian logogram combines UR ('dog') with SAL ('woman') — 'dog-woman'[3]
Descriptions in ritual texts: the assinnu 'whose masculinity Ishtar changed to femininity,' who carried spindles (a female implement), wore female clothing, and performed ecstatic rituals
Middle Assyrian texts document assinnu receiving anal penetration as part of cultic activity

Hebrew כֶּלֶב (kelev) and Akkadian kalbu are cognates — the same pan-Semitic word for 'dog,' inherited from proto-Semitic and attested across Akkadian, Phoenician, Ugaritic, Arabic, Aramaic, Syriac, and Ethiopic.[3] The Sumerian logogram UR ('dog') in UR-SAL maps to this same Semitic root. The connection between the Hebrew כֶּלֶב and the Akkadian assinnu (UR-SAL, 'dog-woman') is therefore both etymological and functional: the same word, used in both cultures to designate a cultic servant.

The Kition inscription

A 4th-century BCE Phoenician inscription from Kition (Cyprus) — a temple payroll for the sanctuary of Astarte — lists temple personnel including כלבם (klbm, 'dogs') alongside עלמת ('lmt, 'young women').[4] The klbm are not animals. They are male temple functionaries listed in the same payroll as female cult servants. This is the closest extra-biblical attestation of כֶּלֶב as a cultic title.

Thomas (1960) argued the title means 'faithful servant of the god,' drawing from Akkadian kalbu in the Amarna letters and neo-Babylonian theophoric names (Kalbi-Sin, Kalbi-Marduk). He concluded that the title 'carries with it no proper sense of dishonour' and that 'a person with recognized cultic standing could [not] have been called keleb in any derisory or pejorative way.'[6] Margalith (1983) went further, arguing that כֶּלֶב in this context is a genuine homonym — a separate word meaning 'slave/servant,' supported by 31 relevant occurrences in the Amarna letters where kalbu functions as a term for 'servant' or 'subordinate' — in 10 cases paired directly with ardu ('slave').[6]

Thomas and Margalith establish what the title meant within the Canaanite cult: an honored functionary, not a term of abuse.

But Deuteronomy is not writing from inside the cult — it is writing from outside it, banning these functionaries from the Temple and pairing them with the word תּוֹעֵבָה (to'evah, 'disgusting'). Weinfeld demonstrated that to'evah originated in sapiential literature, paralleling ANE formulas like 'abomination in the sight of Re' (Amenemope). The term designates what Weinfeld calls 'the two-faced or hypocritical attitude of the malefactor' — practices involving pretension and deception.[10]

The contempt is not in the word כֶּלֶב itself but in what the Deuteronomic author does with it: he takes a Canaanite honorific and makes it a ground for exclusion. The UPDV's rendering reflects that Israelite contempt, not the original Canaanite dignity of the title.

What קְדֵשָׁה / קָדֵשׁ Meant: The Sacred Prostitution Debate

The terms קְדֵשָׁה (qedeshah, feminine) and קָדֵשׁ (qadesh, masculine) derive from the root קדשׁ (qdsh, 'holy, set apart'). They designate cultic personnel — literally 'holy ones' or 'set-apart ones.' The question is whether their role was sexual.

The revisionist challenge

Stephanie Budin's The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity (Cambridge, 2008) argued that cultic prostitution did not exist in the ancient Near East — that the qadishtu of Mesopotamia were non-sexual temple workers, and that modern scholars projected sexual content onto ambiguous texts. This argument has been influential, and the UPDV takes it seriously.

Where Budin is right — and where she is not

Budin successfully demonstrated that the female Mesopotamian qadishtu may not have been primarily sexual — her evidence for non-sexual cultic roles is strong. Brooks (1941) had already acknowledged this caution: 'There is no way of proving that qedeshoth of the OT and qadistu of Mesopotamia were altogether analogous.'[5] But neither Budin nor Brooks addressed the male evidence with equal rigor. The assinnu documentation — cuneiform descriptions of gender-crossing, ritual sexual acts, and the UR-SAL logogram — falls outside Budin's main argument.

Montalvão (2009) followed the male evidence chain through multiple independent sources: the Middle Assyrian Laws (§40, documenting veiling rules for qadiltu), the Code of Hammurabi (§181, inheritance rights), and ritual texts describing the assinnu's gender transformation.[7] Olyan (1994) and Walsh (2001) provide additional analytical context for the related Leviticus texts.[7]

The LXX preserves both dimensions

The Septuagint translators (3rd century BCE) rendered Deuteronomy 23:17–18 with a revealing double approach:

v.17: קְדֵשָׁה → πόρνη (pornē, 'whore') + τελεσφόρος (telesphoros, 'initiated one') — both sexual AND cultic dimensions
v.17: קָדֵשׁ → πορνεύων (porneuōn, 'one who whores') + τελισκόμενος (teliskomenos, 'one being consecrated') — same double rendering
v.18: זוֹנָה → πόρνη (pornē, 'whore') — sexual, matching the Hebrew
v.18: כֶּלֶב → κυνός (kunos, 'dog') — literal, no interpretation

The Septuagint gave the קְדֵשָׁה / קָדֵשׁ a double rendering — sexual AND cultic — showing that the tension between these dimensions is not a modern scholarly debate but was already live 2,200 years ago. The כֶּלֶב, by contrast, stayed literal even in Greek. The translators treated the qedeshah as both sexual and cultic, but left the 'dog' unexplained.

Hosea 4:14 preserves the same dual rendering: זוֹנוֹת (zonot) → πορνῶν ('whores') alongside קְדֵשׁוֹת (qedeshot) → τετελεσμένων ('initiated women'). The LXX translator distinguished the two Hebrew terms by giving each its own Greek word — one sexual, one cultic.

Why 'Pagan Whore' and 'Sissy'

קְדֵשָׁה / קָדֵשׁ → 'pagan whore'

The UPDV renders both the feminine and masculine forms as 'pagan whore.' This preserves:

The sexual dimension (the Hebrew author pairs these terms with זוֹנָה / zonah at Hosea 4:14 and Deuteronomy 23:17–18)
The cultic/foreign dimension ('pagan' marks these as non-Israelite cult personnel)
Consistency across gender (Hebrew masculine plurals like קְדֵשִׁים / qedeshim at 1 Kings 14:24, 15:12, 22:46, 2 Kings 23:7 cover mixed-gender groups)

Previous translations rendered the masculine forms as 'homosexuals' — importing a modern orientation category into an ancient cultic context. The UPDV removes that anachronism.

כֶּלֶב → 'sissy'

The UPDV renders כֶּלֶב (kelev) as 'sissy' for three reasons:

First, the Hebrew author is sneering, not describing. Deuteronomy 23:18 is not an anthropological monograph about Canaanite cult practice. It is a contemptuous dismissal of a class of people it wants banned from the Temple. The register is contempt, not clinical description. 'Male cult prostitute' preserves the academic description but loses the contempt — and nobody outside a seminary knows what it means.

Second, the assinnu evidence supports gender-crossing as the defining feature. UR-SAL ('dog-woman'), carrying spindles, wearing female clothing, having masculinity 'changed to femininity' — the cuneiform sources consistently describe a gender-crossed role. Brunet (1985) offered the strongest articulation: the kelabim were 'nothing but inverts, despised as bitches by the partisans of Yahwism' — a contempt 'entirely absent at Kition, but certain in the Bible.' Brunet specified the sexual role using classical terminology: the qadesh was not an erastes (active partner) but an éromène (passive partner) — 'like the qedesha, he held the passive role.'[8] 'Sissy' in English captures this: a male in the receptive, female-coded role, viewed with contempt by the biblical author.

Third, the economic dehumanization. Deuteronomy 23:18 pairs אֶתְנַן ('ethnan, 'hire/wages' — what you pay a worker) with מְחִיר (mechir, 'price' — what you pay for a commodity). The whore receives wages; the sissy has a price. The author deliberately used the word for pricing livestock or property. Der Toorn (1989) argued that both the zonah and the keleb made 'recourse to prostitution as a way to make profits for the Temple' — calling keleb 'a euphemism for catamite.' The temple 'used the money it thus acquired to pay for the production of images' (cf. Micah 1:7).[9] The prohibition is about temple funding from prostitution, not about orientation. 'The price of a sissy' preserves this economic dimension — he is not just mocked, he is commodified.

The footnote at Deuteronomy 23:18 reads: 'sissy, literally, "dog." See also Revelation 22:15.' The footnote at Revelation 22:15 reads: 'sissies, literally, "dogs." See also Deuteronomy 23:18.' The cross-testament echo is now visible in both text and footnote.

A Note on Modern Categories

The contempt in Deuteronomy 23:18 is directed at a specific ancient cultic practice — gender-crossed temple personnel serving foreign deities. It is not a statement about modern sexual orientation or gender identity. Olyan (1994) observed that even if כֶּלֶב (kelev) were a male prostitute, 'there is no evidence his activity involved other men' — the passages about kelev and qadesh do not represent general proscriptions of male-male sexual acts. The assinnu occupied a role that has no modern equivalent: a cultic functionary whose gender transformation was performed in service to Ishtar, documented in temple payrolls, and regulated by law codes. Mapping this onto any modern identity category — 'homosexual,' 'transgender,' or otherwise — collapses 3,000 years of cultural distance into a false equivalence.

The UPDV's rendering preserves what the text says (contempt for a cultic role) without importing what it does not say (a verdict on modern categories the ancient author could not have conceived).