Leviticus 20:10

The laws of Leviticus 17–26, often called the Holiness Code, set Israel apart as a nation belonging to the LORD. Their keynote is “Ye shall be holy: for I the LORD your God am holy” (Leviticus 19:2), and Leviticus 19 carries that holiness into justice, worship and everyday dealings. In Leviticus 18 God lists the unions his people must avoid. He tells them to live after the doings of neither Egypt nor Canaan (Leviticus 18:3), and he warns that the nations before them defiled the land with these very things, so that “the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants” (Leviticus 18:24–30).

Leviticus 20 takes up many of the same acts and attaches a sentence to each. It begins with the man who gives his children to Molech (Leviticus 20:2–5) and the one who turns to mediums (Leviticus 20:6), comes in these verses to the home, and then calls Israel to stay separate from the nations (Leviticus 20:22–26).

God’s holiness reached into the household. The family was where faith, identity and the covenant passed from parents to children, so a sin against father, mother, spouse or kin struck at the life of the whole nation and at the God who had joined them together. These acts defiled the people who did them and the land they lived in, and the community was to put them away, “that there be no wickedness among you” (verse 14). The sentences also warned others away and showed all Israel how seriously God takes sin. Since God himself had named the penalty, those who carried it out were free of bloodguilt, which is why so many of these verses close with “their blood shall be upon them”. Israel’s law set blessing before the obedient and the curse before the rebellious (Deuteronomy 28), and near its end the chapter gives the reason behind all of it: “And ye shall be holy unto me: for I the LORD am holy, and have severed you from other people, that ye should be mine” (Leviticus 20:26).

The passage begins with parents. The verb rendered “curseth”, qâlal, at its root means to be light, and its uses range across being swift, small or of little account, being eased, and cursing. Here it is the reviling of a father or mother, words of contempt that wish them harm. The verse names the offence twice, “curseth his father or his mother” and “he hath cursed his father or his mother”, and it sets father and mother side by side, so that both are owed the same honour.

People ask why words alone should carry a death sentence. In Israel a curse was a weighty thing, spoken to call down ruin on the one it named, and parents stood in God’s place in the home, raising their children in his covenant and handing on his law. To curse them was to throw off the authority God had given them, which the fifth commandment ties to his own: “Honour thy father and thy mother” (Exodus 20:12). Exodus gives the same sentence (Exodus 21:17), Deuteronomy pronounces a curse on the one who dishonours his parents (Deuteronomy 27:16), and Proverbs grieves over a generation that curses its father (Proverbs 30:11). The same chapter sets the death penalty on those who gave their children to Molech (Leviticus 20:2), and the sin against parents stands beside it as an attack on the family God made.

The command to honour parents carries into the New Testament with its promise (Ephesians 6:1–3). Jesus is the Son who honoured his Father perfectly, saying, “I do always those things that please him” (John 8:29), and he was obedient unto death, even the death of the cross (Philippians 2:8).

The verb nâʼaph means to commit adultery, intercourse in which a married person breaks the marriage bond, and it is also used figuratively of falling away from God. Verse 10 says “committeth adultery” twice, first calling the woman another man’s wife and then “his neighbour’s wife”, so the man wronged is a neighbour and the sin tears at the whole community. The word for wife, ʼishshâh, is the ordinary word for a woman, here a married woman. The adulterer and the adulteress both die, and the law holds the man and the woman equally guilty.

This verse gives the sentence behind the seventh commandment, “Thou shalt not commit adultery” (Exodus 20:14), and Deuteronomy repeats it (Deuteronomy 22:22). Proverbs warns that the man who commits adultery destroys his own soul (Proverbs 6:32). A wife’s faithfulness pictured Israel’s devotion to the LORD, who called himself her husband, so adultery also became a picture of idolatry.

Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5) that this commandment reaches the heart. “Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). Paul lists adultery among the works of the flesh (Galatians 5:19–21), and Hebrews says, “Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge” (Hebrews 13:4). Marriage is a picture of Christ and his church (Ephesians 5:22–33), and Scripture looks ahead to the marriage supper of the Lamb (Revelation 19:7–9). To everyone who has broken this command and confesses it, God is faithful and just to forgive and to cleanse (1 John 1:9).

Seven of these verses deal with relatives by blood or by marriage: verses 11, 12, 14, 17, 19, 20 and 21. Their usual phrase is “uncover nakedness”. The verb gâlâh means to lay bare or uncover, especially in a disgraceful sense, and ʻervâh is nakedness, the private parts, and by extension shame or disgrace. Together they are the law’s modest way of speaking of sexual relations, and they keep the shame of the act in view. When a man lies with his father’s wife, his uncle’s wife or his brother’s wife, the law says he has uncovered the nakedness of the father, the uncle or the brother, because husband and wife “shall be one flesh” (Genesis 2:24), and to violate her is to dishonour him.

Verse 19 gives the reason that runs under them all: “he uncovereth his near kin”. The word shᵉʼêr means flesh, and by figure kindred by blood, so the person uncovered is one’s own flesh. God first set these limits in Leviticus 18:6–18. Deuteronomy pronounces a curse on the man who lies with his father’s wife (Deuteronomy 27:20) and on others who break these limits (Deuteronomy 27:22), and Paul found one of them broken in the church at Corinth, where “one should have his father’s wife” (1 Corinthians 5:1).

Verse 13 condemns sexual relations between two men, already forbidden in Leviticus 18:22. The words “as he lieth with a woman” make plain that the act condemned is intercourse. God calls it tôwʻêbah, “an abomination”, a word for what is utterly wrong and detestable in his sight. The same word names idols (Deuteronomy 7:25), the burning of children to false gods (Deuteronomy 12:31) and dishonest dealing in weights and measures (Deuteronomy 25:16). “Both of them” share the guilt and the sentence.

The New Testament keeps the same standard. Jesus pointed back to creation, where God made them male and female and joined man and wife as one flesh (Matthew 19:4–6). Paul describes these acts as against nature (Romans 1:26–27) and names “abusers of themselves with mankind” among those who shall not inherit the kingdom of God (1 Corinthians 6:9–10), and Jude sets Sodom and Gomorrah before us as an example of judgment (Jude 1:7). God’s design for our sexuality is a gift for our good, and the church holds to it with truth and with grace, for the Christ who bore every sin offers full forgiveness and new life to all who repent and believe.

Verses 15 and 16 give the sentence for lying with an animal, first for a man and then for a woman, so that the law covers both. The act is forbidden in Leviticus 18:23, punished in Exodus 22:19 and cursed in Deuteronomy 27:21. In verse 15 the phrase rendered “lie with” uses nâthan, the common verb to give, put or set, which has a very wide range of use. The word for beast, bᵉhêmâh, means a domestic animal, cattle or livestock, the animals of everyday life in Israel. In verse 16 the woman “approach[es]”, qârab, to come near, and “lie[s] down thereto”, râbaʻ, to lie down or stretch out for mating. The command “thou shalt kill” uses hârag, the ordinary verb to kill or slay, and the woman, ʼishshâh, dies with the beast.

This sin blurs the line God drew between people and animals. Man and woman alone are made in God’s image and given rule over the creatures (Genesis 1:26–28), and to join with a beast throws away that dignity and twists the purpose of sexual union.

Verse 18 concerns a man who lies with a woman during her monthly flow. The word for her “sickness”, dâveh, means sick or faint and is used of a woman in her monthly period. The word “fountain”, mâqôwr, means a spring or source, and it comes twice in the verse, “her fountain” and “the fountain of her blood”. The law of Leviticus 15:19–24 counts a woman unclean during her flow, a ritual state involving no fault of hers, and a man who lies with her shares that uncleanness. Leviticus 18:19 forbids a man to approach her at that time. Here both take part, “he hath discovered her fountain, and she hath uncovered the fountain of her blood”, and both are cut off.

The law gives blood a special honour, “for the life of the flesh is in the blood” (Leviticus 17:11), and the source of that flow was to be left covered while it ran. Sex at that time disregarded a separation God had set, and it carried impurity into a people among whom he dwelt.

The holiness these verses demand still binds every believer, while the penalties belonged to Israel as a nation under the old covenant. Paul tells us that “ye are not under the law, but under grace” (Romans 6:14), that we are delivered from the law to serve in newness of spirit (Romans 7:6), and that the law was our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ (Galatians 3:24–25). So the church carries no sword. When a man in Corinth had his father’s wife, Paul’s sentence was “put away from among yourselves that wicked person” (1 Corinthians 5:13), the discipline of the church in place of the death the law had named.

The moral standard behind the penalties stands in the New Testament, which repeats each part of it. It calls us to honour parents, to keep marriage pure, and to abstain from fornication, possessing our bodies in holiness (1 Thessalonians 4:3–5), so that it is “not once named among you” (Ephesians 5:3). Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, bought with a price (1 Corinthians 6:18–20). God’s word to Israel is spoken again to us, “Be ye holy; for I am holy” (1 Peter 1:15–16), and we are told to follow holiness, “without which no man shall see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14). The severity of these old sentences shows us how God sees sin even now, when he deals with his people in grace.

Verse 18 belongs with a different kind of law, the laws of clean and unclean. Jesus taught that what enters the body leaves the heart untouched, and so made all foods clean (Mark 7:19), and Peter was shown in a vision that what God has cleansed he must call clean (Acts 10:9–16). Believers are free of that ritual rule, and the respect for the body and the purity it guarded remain.

Jesus came to fulfil the law (Matthew 5:17), and these verses show why we need him. “By the law is the knowledge of sin” (Romans 3:20), and every one of these sentences, honestly read, tells us what our own sin deserves, “for the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). Christ lived the holiness the law demanded, and then he took its sentence. “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13), and God “hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Each sentence of this passage is answered at the cross. The guilty bore their iniquity, and the LORD laid on his Servant the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:5–6). The guilty were cut off from their people, and of Christ it was written, “he was cut off out of the land of the living” (Isaiah 53:8). Their blood was upon them, and his innocent blood was shed for us. He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), set forth as a propitiation through faith in his blood (Romans 3:25), offered once to put away sin (Hebrews 9:26). His blood purges the conscience (Hebrews 9:14) and cleanses us from all sin (1 John 1:7), and by that one offering we are sanctified (Hebrews 10:10).

So there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, and the righteousness of the law is fulfilled in us who walk after the Spirit (Romans 8:1–4). We who were far off are made nigh by his blood (Ephesians 2:13) and may draw near to God with a true heart and a clean conscience (Hebrews 10:19–22). The sentence of childlessness is answered too, for to as many as receive him he gives power to become the sons of God (John 1:12), born again of the Spirit (John 3:3–8).

God writes his law on the hearts of his people (Jeremiah 31:33). Whoever is in Christ is a new creature (2 Corinthians 5:17), being changed into his image (2 Corinthians 3:18), walking in the Spirit (Galatians 5:16) and bearing the Spirit’s fruit (Galatians 5:22–23). The grace of God teaches us to live soberly and righteously (Titus 2:11–14), as people dead to sin and alive to God (Romans 6:1–14). The holy nation of Israel was a forerunner of the church, a chosen people and a holy nation (1 Peter 2:9), which Christ loved and gave himself for, to cleanse it and present it without spot (Ephesians 5:22–33).

These verses show us a God who cares about the home. He guards the honour of father and mother, the faithfulness of husband and wife and the safety of kin, and he calls the sins that break them by their true names. His holiness reaches the most private parts of life, and he set his people apart so that they would be his. The same God who wrote these sentences gave his Son to bear them, so that sinners who come to him are washed, set free and made holy by his Spirit. The passage leaves us with a holy God, a serious view of sin, and a Saviour whose blood was shed so that ours would never have to be.