More on that idea

Picking up on a comment I made in the discussion on slavery with Todd Granger:
Obviously the parable of the origin of human sexuality (as the Jewish culture understood it) had greater impact on the course of the Jewish experience than did the story of Noah and his sons in terms of Canaanite slaver — at least for Jews. As you noted, this myth became a driving force for American slaveholders and racists.
I by no means speak as an expert on this subject, but my impression is that a greater “mandate” is attached to the commandment, “Be fruitful and multiply” from Genesis 1, than to the more plainly etiological story in Genesis 2. The commandment from the first chapter is regarded as “the first commandment” and is one of the reasons that celibacy is generally deprecated in the Rabbinic tradition. It is also one of the reasons advanced by the Rabbis for mandating the divorce of a sterile wife. (Mishnah Yebamoth 6.6) Neither of these teachings would find support in the Christian tradition, and represent a significant departure on Jesus’ part. In his teaching against divorce, Jesus appears to favor the importance of the permanence of the unitive function of the interpersonal relationship (Genesis 2) over the procreative function and law of Genesis 1.
Moreover, one of the striking features of the Genesis 2 story is that for the most part in the Jewish tradition, men did not in fact leave their parents’ household and join themselves to their new wife, but rather brought the wife into their household. (The operative Hebrew word for marriage, as still present in our marriage ceremony, is “lacach” = “take”). Some have suggested, given the overall apparent archaicism of the Genesis 2 narrative, that this represents a relic of an earlier age in which matrilocal marriage was the rule. In any case, I am not aware that this passage, unlike the earlier one, gave rise to much Rabbinic discussion. While Genesis 1 comes up a number of times in the Mishnah, Genesis 2-3 are passed over. This may reflect the fact that the passage in Genesis 1 is seen as a commandment, while the passage in Genesis 2 is seen as descriptive.
I suppose at the end I am forced to conclude that the material in Genesis 1-4 does not represent, as is commonly suggested, a strict mandate for “God’s plan for human sexuality” but rather an etiological reflection by a particular community upon its social origins and customs, assembled from various sources by various hands, not without certain tensions and contradictions, and more importantly, interpretations (some of them also at odds with one another) down through the ages.
If I can also take the opportunity to highlight another problem text, Romans 1: it is vitally important that this chapter of Paul’s letter be read in the context of Wisdom of Solomon 12-16, a Hellenistic Jewish reflection on the evils of idolatry and its consequences. One of the consequences of the Jewish linkage of male homosexuality with idolatry was a tendency for the Jewish community to blind itself to the presence of same-sex affection within its own community. As the Talmud says, “Israel is not suspected [of this kind of behavior]” while Gentiles universally are. This sort of cultural blindness is a well-known phenomenon even to this day; certain communities vociferously deny the existence of same-sex relationships within their population, and either render them invisible by calling them something else, or insisting, when they do become evident, that they are foreign intrusions, or an aspect of an “alien culture.” My point here is that Saint Paul carried this cultural bias as much as any of his fellow Jews; he no doubt saw any same-sex sexuality as a sign of corruption and degradation attendant upon an abandonment of God: because that was the only place he saw it.
—Tobias S Haller BSG