Leviticus 18: The Land Is the One That Spits Them Out

Monday night I pulled the tomato vines because the forecast said 31 degrees by Wednesday morning. That bed has had tomatoes in it three years running, which every gardening book says not to do, and this year's fruit came in small and split and not worth the argument.

Leviticus 18 is thirty verses, and most of them are a list. Verses 1 through 5 are the frame. The Lord tells Israel not to follow the doings of Egypt behind them or Canaan ahead of them. Verses 6 through 18 name the relatives a person may not have sexual relations with, starting with a mother and father and working outward through sisters, granddaughters, aunts, a daughter-in-law and a brother's wife. Verses 19 through 23 add things one at a time: a woman during her uncleanness, a neighbor's wife, Molech, and then two verses I'll come back to. Verses 24 through 30 say why any of it matters.

What is Leviticus 18 actually about?

The phrase in nearly every verse from 6 to 19 is "uncover the nakedness of." It means sexual relations, and verse 20 says the same thing with "lie carnally."

The frame in verse 3 is worth a second look. Egypt is behind them and Canaan is ahead, and the Lord names both as places whose ordinances Israel is not to walk in. A people between two countries is being told which of the habits around them to leave on the road. Nobody in the chapter pretends the habits of the place they came from were any better.

If you want to know what verse 19 is pointing at, the rules for that kind of uncleanness are in Leviticus 15, which I went through in an earlier post on that chapter. The short version is that most cases end by evening.

Why does the chapter give so few reasons?

For most of the list it gives none. A man may not do this with his mother, and the verse stops there. But a few verses stop to explain, and the explanations are all the same kind. Verse 8 says of a father's wife, "it is thy father's nakedness." Verse 16 says the same of a brother's wife. Verse 10, about a son's daughter or a daughter's daughter, says "for theirs is thine own nakedness."

That's my reading, and I hold it loosely, but the reason offered isn't danger or tradition. It's closeness. These people are already part of you, or part of someone who is, and the chapter treats that as settled enough to need no argument. The list is long because a household has a lot of people in it.

Not every entry on it carries a reason, and a few look stranger the longer you stay on them. Verse 14 says not to approach the wife of your father's brother, "she is thine aunt," and that's the whole case. Verse 17 forbids a woman and her daughter together, and the reason it gives is that "they are her near kinswomen: it is wickedness." Verse 18 is the one about two sisters. Read in order, the verses keep moving outward from the person addressed, first to the people closest, then to those who joined the household by marriage, and I can't find a verse in the stretch that makes an exception for anyone.

Why does the land get the blame?

Most of the chapter's weight lands in the last seven verses, which turn from people to ground. Verse 24 says the nations the Lord cast out were defiled by all these things. Then verse 25:

And the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants.

The Lord visits the iniquity upon the land.

The land does the vomiting.

By verse 28 the Lord has stepped out of the sentence altogether: "That the land spue not you out also, when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that were before you." Verse 27 tells you what those earlier people did, in a parenthesis, as if it were old news, and then verse 28 goes straight back to the people listening. Almost all the attention goes to whether the nation standing there will be removed too, which is a strange proportion for a chapter that began by listing who may not marry whom, and a reader who came for the list has been moved without noticing to something else.

Verse 21 sits in the middle of all this and does something different. Everything near it concerns a partner, and this one concerns a child. The verse forbids letting a child "pass through the fire to Molech" and then, in the same breath, adds "neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God." It reads as if the Lord couldn't mention that offering without also mentioning his own name, and I don't know a better way to say what the verse is doing than that.

Nobody in verses 24 through 28 is asked to argue with the ground or negotiate with it. The warning is that it works this way, it worked this way for the nations before, and Israel is standing on the same dirt.

In verse 26 the rules bind "any of your own nation" and also "any stranger that sojourneth among you." Whoever lives on the land, whoever they were born to, lives on that ground and answers to it. The chapter doesn't fence the law to people with the right grandfather.

What does "I am the Lord" do in this chapter?

It shows up in verses 2, 4, 5, 6, 21 and 30. Three of those (2, 4 and 30) read "I am the Lord your God." The first two come before any commandment has landed. After that it turns up where one just did. Verse 6 comes right as the kin list begins. Verse 21 comes right after the sentence about passing a child through the fire to Molech.

The one I'd stop on is verse 5: "Ye shall therefore keep my statutes, and my judgments: which if a man do, he shall live in them: I am the Lord." It's the only promise in the chapter. Everything else is a prohibition or a warning about the land, and verse 5 sits at the top of the list and says the point of all this is that a man shall live. Thirty verses of "thou shalt not" can leave you thinking that's the whole tone.

What about verses 22 and 23?

They're in the chapter, so I'll quote them. Verse 22: "Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination." Verse 23 forbids lying with a beast, for a man or a woman, and ends "it is confusion." Both sit inside a list that also holds adultery and child sacrifice, and verse 24 says it was all of these things together that defiled the nations.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does "uncover the nakedness" mean in Leviticus 18?

It means sexual relations, an old idiom the chapter leans on from verse 6 through verse 19 before switching to "lie carnally" in verse 20. Nothing else in the text points to a different meaning.

Does Leviticus 18:18 forbid plural marriage?

I don't read it that way. The verse says a man shall not take a wife "to her sister, to vex her," while the first is still alive. The words that limit it are in the verse itself: two sisters, and the vexing. It isn't a general rule about how many wives anyone may have.

What does "cut off from among their people" mean?

The chapter doesn't say. Verse 29 says the souls that commit these abominations "shall be cut off from among their people," and gives no mechanism. People have read it as execution or exile or something spiritual. Any of those is a guess, and I'd treat it as one.

Who was Molech?

Verse 21 is all this chapter gives, and it's enough to see the practice was a child offered "through the fire." Most references describe Molech as a god of the Ammonites. How the rite was carried out is something the sources don't settle, and I'm not going to pretend they do.

I'd like to know how other people handle this chapter. Do you read Leviticus 18 aloud in your house, and if you do, where do you stop?

— D.