Were men guilty of homosexual acts to be put to death, or only driven out of the land?

The two passages are not about the same thing. Leviticus 20:13 is a law of Israel’s covenant, setting the penalty for an act. 1 Kings 15:12 reports what one king did in a religious reform. The people Asa removed were the qedeshim, which the KJV translates ‘sodomites’. The word means ‘consecrated ones’: men attached to the shrines of Canaanite gods, whom the BSB calls “male shrine prostitutes”. Deuteronomy 23:17 had forbidden any Israelite to be one. Asa’s reform was aimed at idolatry: in the same breath he removed his fathers’ idols and deposed the queen mother for making an image for Asherah (1 Kings 15:12-13).

The Hebrew says only that Asa ‘made them pass away’ (wayya‘aber) from the land; it does not say how. Gill thought he either drove them out or put them to death under Leviticus 20:13. Keil and Delitzsch thought these men were Canaanites who had found their way into Judah, in which case putting them out of the land fits. Either way the narrator does not say that Asa set Leviticus aside. Nor does praise of a king approve all he did or left undone: the same passage notes that “the high places were not removed” (15:14), and some of these men were still there in his son’s reign (22:46).

The moral question deserves a plain answer. The law of Moses did make homosexual acts, like adultery and several kinds of incest in the same chapter, capital crimes in Israel (Leviticus 20:10-16). It was the law of a nation God had set apart, with its own judges. The New Testament does not carry these penalties into the church. When a member of the church at Corinth was living with his father’s wife, a capital crime in Leviticus 20:11, Paul’s sentence was exclusion: “put away from among yourselves that wicked person” (1 Corinthians 5:13). The New Testament still counts homosexual acts as sin, with greed, theft, drunkenness and adultery, and what it offers is cleansing, not death: “such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified” (1 Corinthians 6:9-11).

Scholars debate what the qedeshim did. Many now doubt that sacred prostitution was practised as widely as was once thought, and some take the word to mean cult servants of other kinds. Christians also differ on how far, if at all, the civil penalties of the law of Moses should shape modern law. Some Christians today read the New Testament passages on same-sex relations differently; the answer above gives the historic teaching of the churches.