Seeing as you can actually read Hebrew, and have read the Torah in Hebrew... what do you think of the following?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almah

...Scholars thus agree that almah refers to a woman of childbearing age without implying virginity,[6] while an unrelated word, betulah (בְּתוּלָה), best refers to a virgin,[7] as well as the idea of virginity, betulim (בְּתוּלִים).[8]

Although the concept is central to the account of the virgin birth of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, the scholarly consensus is that the words denote a woman's fertility without concern for her virginity.[1][2][3]

So uh, oops, the idea that Mary was specifically, literally a virgin... is kind of a translation error from going over into Greek.

https://www.jewishvoice.org/read/article/was-mary-virgin

This further explains, amongst many other things... if Joseph is not the literal father of Jesus... then... his lineage is irrelevant.

But his lineage going back to David is highly important to both Christian theology and the contextual, contemporaneous way that this would work in the Jewish culture of the time, that he would possibly be able to be seen as the Jewish Messiah.

So... that's another dimension of this problem for Christians.

The interpretation/understanding given here is more like... (I think?)... that the Holy Spirit, ie, the sort of ever present, non personified idea of God... well, he/it's role here is just to make sure the biological conception happens, and perhaps specifically bless it, by way of specifically making it happen... or maybe its more like... imbue it with the pure spiritual essence of God?

"... spiritually God, physically human, and legally the heir of the Kingdom."

I'm frankly not sure that I'm understanding exactly the idea being proposed here.

I should probably also note that the author of this is a Messianic Jew, ie, one who believes, unlike I think basically most, or perhaps all other variants of Judaism... that Jesus actually is the fulfilment of the Jewish Messiah traditions, where most other Jews do not believe the Messiah has yet arrived.

I would very much appreciate any corrections of misunderstandings I may be having here... I grew up Christian, but my cousins are Jewish, but also they were not highly religious, more like 'non-practicing Jews', who partook in the holidays and traditions, but were not like, super duper serious about the theology, so we did not ever really talk about theology.

There's another theory I've heard, that's based on what seems to have been a fairly common rumor/insult hurled at Christians fairly close to the time of Jesus' life, which is basically that Mary was raped by a Roman soldier, and Jospeh more or less did a kind of pity-marriage to her, as... she pretty much would have been cast out and viewed as tainted or worthless by her family and society.

Obviously that's impossible to ... 'verify', but it does at least strike me as plausibe.

Ezekiel made it pretty clear why Sodom was destroyed:

Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom:She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen

This is, of course, mostly ignored

This meme seemed inaccurate to me too. Focusing on greek terms rather than hebrew for leviticus struck me as weird.

I found an academics' discussion about arsenokoitai in Paul: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskBibleScholars/comments/18j1873/meaning_of_arsenokoites/

It seems like the question of the meaning of arsenokoitai is mostly about what paul meant by it. While all the posters above seem to agree paul's not saying all homosexuals and probably only situations we'd describe as non-consenual, they all describe no firm answer and disagree on many details.

I think this post takes unsettled scholarship about NT greek and presents it as settled scholarship about part of the torah.

Have you read the Septuagint(s) in Ancient Greek though? There's scholarly dispute over whether the Greek texts came first and in general Hebrew was a dead language akin to Latin today except with a vocabulary of only 9000 words at the time the Old Testament was written. No known medical texts or literature at that time was being written in Hebrew, maybe a few amulets and accounting documents exist prior to the Torah being written. Hebrew as a living, flourishing language was from before contact with the Greeks, maybe 800-1000 years prior. Jews of the time spoke Greek and had for centuries (as did Jesus), and synagogues of the time had Greek inscriptions on their walls.

Some of the criticism I've heard is that the writing of the Old Testament during Greek occupation was akin to the Babylonian Captivity where the Jews that considered themselves purists were angry with Jews who had adopted Greek culture and the writing of it was fundamentally reactionary to that, and trying to recreate a culture that in many ways had already been lost. Also, access to the Library of Alexandria and other libraries at the time (no earlier than 300 BC, probably later) seems to have played a large role in helping the reactionary Jews who led the movement that became dominant write a history of the world that put themselves first.

Anyone interested in this kind of perspective is encouraged to learn about and watch interviews with Dr. Ammon Hillman, who has been translating Ancient Greek for 35 years. He is a classical philologist, meaning his education focuses on Greek texts rather than a biblical scholar who only studies the bible. He has many interviews available on youtube and none of his books or media are monetized. He understandably has a huge number of powerful detractors and he is no longer affiliated with any academic institution but he teaches the largest course on Classical Greek online.