Leviticus18chapter 18

Leviticus 18:1-3

The chapter sets Israel between two countries. Egypt is behind them and Canaan is in front of them, and verse 3 forbids the doings of both by name before a single rule is given. It calls the practices of those nations their ordinances, the same word the book uses for what God appoints, so custom is met on the ground custom claims.

Leviticus 18:4-5

Verse 5 is the sentence Paul reaches for twice. He quotes it at Romans 10:5 to describe the righteousness which is of the law, and at Galatians 3:12 to show that the law is not of faith. Ezekiel 20:11 takes the same words up when God recounts what he gave Israel in the wilderness, and Luke 10:28 puts a form of them in the mouth of Jesus to the lawyer who asked about eternal life. The promise attached to obedience is life, and the chapter that follows it is about what kills a nation.

Leviticus 18:6-8

Verse 6 is the heading and everything through verse 18 works it out. The Hebrew behind near of kin is she'er besaro, the remnant of his flesh, so the stated ground of the law is shared flesh rather than shared descent. The Babylonian Talmud, which reached its form around 500 AD, records at Megillah 31a that this chapter is the synagogue reading for the afternoon of the Day of Atonement, which puts the list of forbidden relations on the one day of the year the nation is cleansed.

Leviticus 18:9-11

The sister is covered twice, once by blood at verse 9 and once by household at verse 11. Verse 9 reaches a half sister born at home or born abroad, and Abraham's word about Sarah at Genesis 20:12, that she was the daughter of his father though not of his mother, falls inside it. Verse 10 gives a reason where most of the list gives none, that a granddaughter is his own nakedness. The law comes to Israel at Sinai and the patriarchs lived centuries before it, and the narrative of Genesis is left standing as it is.

Leviticus 18:12-13

Both aunts are named, the father's sister and the mother's sister, each a blood relation one generation above him. Exodus 6:20 says that Amram took Jochebed his father's sister to wife, and Moses is the son of that marriage. The man who carries this law down the mountain is the child of a union it forbids, and the text records both facts and reconciles neither.

Leviticus 18:14-16

These three are relations by marriage, the uncle's wife, the son's wife and the brother's wife, and none of them shares his blood. Judah and Tamar at Genesis 38 is the case of verse 15, and Deuteronomy 25:5 sets a named exception beside verse 16 by requiring a man to raise up seed to a brother who died childless. John the Baptist applies verse 16 to a king at Mark 6:18, telling Herod it is not lawful for him to have his brother's wife, and it costs him his head.

Leviticus 18:17-18

Verse 17 forbids taking a mother and her daughter together and calls it wickedness, a verdict the list rarely stops to give. Verse 18 is argued. Adam Clarke reads it as forbidding two sisters while the first is alive and points to the vexing between Leah and Rachel in Genesis 29 and 30 as the case in view, while the margin renders it one wife to another, which would reach polygamy itself. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown reports both readings and settles neither, and the words in her life time are where the dispute turns.

Leviticus 18:19-20

Verse 19 turns the law on a man and his own wife during the separation of Leviticus 15:19, and verse 20 turns it on his neighbour's wife. Ezekiel 22:10 and 22:11 arraign Jerusalem with these two offences standing side by side, and Ezekiel 18:6 puts both of them in a list of what a just man leaves alone. A prophet writing centuries later is reading this chapter as a charge sheet.

Leviticus 18:21

Molech occurs here for the first time in Scripture. The verse stands in the middle of the sexual law with no transition into it and none out of it, and the offence it names is against the name of God. What passing through the fire meant is left unsaid. Adam Clarke lists the readings on offer, a child burned as a sacrifice or a child led between two fires as a dedication, and Leviticus 20:2 through 20:5, 2 Kings 23:10 and Jeremiah 32:35 show the practice running on in Israel for centuries without ever being described.

Leviticus 18:22-23

Two verdicts close these verses, abomination at verse 22 and confusion at verse 23. The word rendered confusion is tebel, and it occurs once more in Scripture, at Leviticus 20:12. It carries the sense of a mixture of things that belong apart, which is the objection Leviticus 19:19 makes to a field sown with mingled seed. Romans 1:26 and 1:27 take up verse 22, and Leviticus 20:13 and 20:15 attach the penalties.

Leviticus 18:24-25

The ground of the conquest is stated here, and it is the conduct of the nations rather than the merit of Israel. Genesis 15:16 had held Abraham's descendants back four hundred years on the reckoning that the iniquity of the Amorites was not yet full, and Deuteronomy 9:5 says plainly that Israel enters for the wickedness of those nations. Adam Clarke calls verse 25 a personification, the land given a sense of moral good and evil so sharp that it sickens and throws its people up. The verse says the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants, which puts the eviction on the ground's own reaction to what was done on it.

Leviticus 18:26-28

The threat is then turned around and pointed at Israel, that the land spue not you out also. The same ground that vomits Canaanites will vomit Hebrews, and Leviticus 25:23 gives the reason when it says the land is mine and ye are strangers and sojourners with me. The rule binds the stranger that sojourneth among them on the same terms as one born in the nation. 2 Kings 17:7 and 17:8 report the northern kingdom carried away for walking in the statutes of the heathen whom the LORD cast out, which is this sentence carried into effect.

Leviticus 18:29-30

The penalty is to be cut off from among their people, and commentators read the phrase in more than one way, as a civil execution, as exclusion from the congregation, or as a judgment God carries out himself. The Mishnah, compiled about 200 AD, opens the tractate Kerithot by counting thirty six transgressions that carry this penalty, and most of that list is taken from this chapter. Verse 30 calls the practices abominable customs, which answers the word ordinances back at verse 3, and the chapter closes on I am the LORD your God, the sentence it opened with at verse 2.