A Fresh Look at Cross-Dressing in Deuteronomy

A few years ago I was speaking with a colleague in ministry about how the church responds to trans people. I tried to suggest that, strictly speaking, as a question of chapter-and-verse citation, the Bible does not say anything about the morality of gender transitioning, and, therefore, it is probably best for the church not to frame it as a moral issue.

My friend cocked an eyebrow. “Really?” he said. “You don’t think the Bible addresses this?” And then he cited Deuteronomy 22:5—“A woman must not wear men’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing, for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this”—and he rested his case.

At the time, I hadn’t spent a great deal of time digging into Deuteronomy 22:5, so I didn’t argue the point. I was pretty sure, however, that a single verse in Torah hardly made an airtight argument. I felt this especially because Christians believe as a foundation of their faith that the Lord Jesus has fulfilled all of Torah in his death and resurrection, and the single command to love our neighbours faithfully in Jesus Christ fulfills the entirety of Torah (Galatians 5:14).

A while later, though, I had occasion to look more closely at the Hebrew text of Deuteronomy 22:5, and I noticed something I had never considered before.

You see: the most common word for “clothing” in the Hebrew Bible is beged. It comes from the Hebrew root word bâgad, “to cover,” and occurs 217 times in the Hebrew Bible. Other common words for clothing include lebûsh (32 occurrences), malbûsh (8 occurrences), śimlâh (29 occurrences) and mekasseh (4 occurrences).

In contrast to this, the word “kelı̂y” (319 occurrences) is a somewhat flexible word, which generally means something like “equipment” or “furnishings.” It can refer to a vessel or sack that contains something, to jewelry, to a tool or weapon, to gear that someone might wear for a specific purpose, or to a soldier’s armour. The meaning of kelı̂y is very much dependent on the context in which it is being used.

The most common word for “a man,” in Hebrew is the noun 'ı̂ysh. It occurs 2163 times and means “a man” in the most general sense. The second most common word for “a man,” is the word 'âdâm, with 541 occurrences. This is the word that the name “Adam” comes from and can mean a “man” specifically, or a human being more generally (regardless of gender, as in “God created 'man' in his image”). The Hebrew word for “male,” with special reference to the sexed-body, is zâkâr (with 82 occurrences).

In contrast to these various terms for a “man,” the word geber literally means something like “valiant man,” or, more loosely, a “warrior.” It occurs 65 times in the Hebrew Bible.

With that rough and ready Hebrew glossary in mind, let me return to Deuteronomy 22:5, and its prohibition, seemingly, against men and women wearing each other’s clothing. Because the word it uses for “man” is not 'ı̂ysh, or 'âdâm, or zâkâr. And neither is the word for the man’s clothing beged, lebûsh, or śimlâh. The word the NIV translates as “man” is geber, “a mighty man,” and the word the NIV translates as “clothing” is kelı̂y, “gear/equipment.” Admittedly, the word geber can be used in the Hebrew Bible to describe a man generally, in a way similar to how the word 'ı̂ysh is used, but in this context, paired with the word kelı̂y like this, it seems obvious to me that simple, generic “cross dressing” is not what the verse has in mind.

Literally, we might render it like this: “There shall not be ‘the gear’ of a ‘valiant man’ upon a woman, and a ‘valiant man’ shall not put on the mantle (simlat) of a woman.”

A rough and ready gloss of the verse might run like this: “A woman shall not put on the equipment of a warrior, and a warrior shall not put on a woman’s dress.”

It would take more unpacking than I have space for in a simple blog post like this to determine how accurate this gloss is to the original intent. It’s notable to me, however, that the prohibition against a woman “wearing a warrior’s arms” appears in Chapter 22, shortly after a lengthy list of laws pertaining to how the Israelites are to wage war (or not to wage war, as the case may be) with the nations they will encounter in the Promised Land. Verses 21:10-14, for instance, give careful guidelines for how the Israelites are to treat a woman taken captive in war.

With this context in mind, I can’t help but wonder if Deuteronomy 22:5 actually has nothing to do with the act of cross-dressing, but instead is prohibiting the people of Israel from using their women as soldiers in battle, or allowing their male soldiers to shirk their “manly” duty to fight on behalf of their people (both of which, in an Ancient Near Eastern context, would be an affront to the nation's honor (see, for instance, Judges 4:9)).

Even if these arguments aren’t conclusive, they strongly suggest that we cannot read Deuteronomy 22:5 as some sort of a definitive word on the modern day phenomenon of gender dysphoria, or use it as a some kind of directive on how we ought to respond to trans people. If we do, we'll be doing a kind of violence to the text (to say nothing of what it does to trans people themselves), wrenching the verse from its context and making it say something it’s not meaning to say.