1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying,
2 Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, I am the LORD your God.
3 After the doings of the land of Egypt, wherein ye dwelt, shall ye not do: and after the doings of the land of Canaan, whither I bring you, shall ye not do: neither shall ye walk in their ordinances.
4 Ye shall do my judgments, and keep mine ordinances, to walk therein: I am the LORD your God.
5 Ye shall therefore keep my statutes, and my judgments: which if a man do, he shall live in them: I am the LORD.
6 None of you shall approach to any that is near of kin to him, to uncover their nakedness: I am the LORD.
7 The nakedness of thy father, or the nakedness of thy mother, shalt thou not uncover: she is thy mother; thou shalt not uncover her nakedness.
8 The nakedness of thy father's wife shalt thou not uncover: it is thy father's nakedness.
9 The nakedness of thy sister, the daughter of thy father, or daughter of thy mother, whether she be born at home, or born abroad, even their nakedness thou shalt not uncover.
10 The nakedness of thy son's daughter, or of thy daughter's daughter, even their nakedness thou shalt not uncover: for theirs is thine own nakedness.
11 The nakedness of thy father's wife's daughter, begotten of thy father, she is thy sister, thou shalt not uncover her nakedness.
12 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy father's sister: she is thy father's near kinswoman.
13 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy mother's sister: for she is thy mother's near kinswoman.
14 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy father's brother, thou shalt not approach to his wife: she is thine aunt.
15 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy daughter in law: she is thy son's wife; thou shalt not uncover her nakedness.
16 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother's wife: it is thy brother's nakedness.
17 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of a woman and her daughter, neither shalt thou take her son's daughter, or her daughter's daughter, to uncover her nakedness; for they are her near kinswomen: it is wickedness.
18 Neither shalt thou take a wife to her sister, to vex her, to uncover her nakedness, beside the other in her life time.
19 Also thou shalt not approach unto a woman to uncover her nakedness, as long as she is put apart for her uncleanness.
20 Moreover thou shalt not lie carnally with thy neighbour's wife, to defile thyself with her.
21 And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God: I am the LORD.
22 Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.
23 Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith: neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto: it is confusion.
24 Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you:
25 And the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants.
26 Ye shall therefore keep my statutes and my judgments, and shall not commit any of these abominations; neither any of your own nation, nor any stranger that sojourneth among you:
27 (For all these abominations have the men of the land done, which were before you, and the land is defiled;)
28 That the land spue not you out also, when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that were before you.
29 For whosoever shall commit any of these abominations, even the souls that commit them shall be cut off from among their people.
30 Therefore shall ye keep mine ordinance, that ye commit not any one of these abominable customs, which were committed before you, and that ye defile not yourselves therein: I am the LORD your God.
We got us some serious hellfire and brimstone this time out.
- #1: God sez to Moses, he sez...
- #2: Tell the Israelites that "I am the LORD your God." (If you don't know me by now...)
- #3: Don't walk like an Egyptian or a Canaanite.
- #4: Do what I tell you, "I am the LORD your God." (Lighten up on that CapsLock key, sport.)
- #5: If you live the life I tell you to live, you'll live a life. You know how I just said to do what I tell you to do because I'm your LORD? Well, do what I tell you because I am the LORD. (When Rudy Giuliani did this Mad Lib, he put "9/11" where YHWH wrote "the LORD.")
- #6: Don't come on to your relatives "to uncover their nakedness: I am the LORD." ("Uncover their nakedness" is a rather bald euphemism for, well, you know... So, was Ham boning his father, Noah, back in Genesis 9?)
- #7: Don't uncover the nakedness of your father or mother. (Not sure how that wasn't covered, so to speak, by #6).
- #8: Don't uncover the nakedness of your father's wife. (Is this one of those logic puzzles? I get it, the doctor was a woman!)
- #9: Don't uncover the nakedness of your sister, who is the daughter of your father or mother, even if she was born abroad. (Make your own "born abroad" joke here, and then wonder why this fine point is necessary).
- #10: Don't uncover the nakedness of your granddaughter. (Dear Mr. Bible Writer Man, we understand the theory of relativity. Can we move on now? Or maybe not: the lack of a matching grandson clause is a little worrisome.)
- #11: Don't uncover the nakedness of your sister, y'know, your father's wife's daughter. (Um, two times in three verses. This is getting a little Freudian, my friend.)
- #12: Don't uncover you're aunt's nakedness, either. At least not the aunt on your father's side.
- #13: Same deal on your mother's side.
- #14: Your uncle's wife is also off limits. (No such clause for your aunt's husband. That's nice, a handy loophole for the kind of guy who puts the "uncle" into "unclean.")
- #15: Don't uncover the nakedness of your daughter-in-law. (But honest, officer, she was wearing a veil like a whore, and...)
- #16: No sisters-in-law, either.
- #17: You can't uncover the nakedness of both a woman and her daughter or granddaughter (Oh, no, Mrs. Burke! I thought you were Dale!).
- #18: Don't vex your wife by marrying her sister... while your wife is still alive, that is. (There's a murder-mystery premise for you. Also, this is another one without a reverse-gender version, which means that women aren't specifically banned from polygamy at this point, assuming that's what this one is about; maybe that "father's wife's daughter" distinction in #11 spoke to multi-wife scenarios, as well.)
- #19: Don't uncover a woman's nakedness when she's menstruating.
- #20: Don't copulate with your neighbor's wife "to defile thyself with her." (Interesting. When Mr. Bible Writer Man starts talking about the neighbor's wife, suddenly the euphemisms fall away. If it takes his mind off his sister, is that really such a bad thing?)
- #21: Don't "let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech." (How about a little context, guys? Apparently Molech was a competing god that digs human sacrifices, not that we're quite sure ol "I own all the firstborn males" doesn't swing that way, himself.) And don't "profane the name of thy God: I am the LORD." (This comes out of nowhere, too. Speaking of, does He mean not to swear with his name in the act of lovemaking, or in general?)
- #22: "Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination." (There it is. A Biblical ban on homosexuality — assuming, of course, that this was written for the male hetero audience; if the target audience was lesbians, then it's a whole other deal. Though trading in Hebrew slaves, killing Sabbath-day workers, and animal sacrifice have gone by the wayside, this narrowminded tradition just keeps on giving. Lines like this make the "holy" status accorded this book most troubling. Because of what some prejudiced twit wrote a few thousand years back, we're supposed to deny equality to one-tenth of our neighbors. Shame on anyone who prioritizes the "sanctity" of this dubious tome over the people it maligns.)
- #23: Bestiality is "confusion." (And a capital crime in YHWH's book).
- #24: Don't defile yourself in the ways I just said not to defile yourself with. The other nations I'm throwing out on their asses in your favor do these prohibited things.
- #25: "And the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants." ("Visit the iniquity" would be a great Vegas slogan, but it's an interesting choice of phrasing here. Is Yahweh saying he's bringing on the sinfulness or the shame?)
- #26: Don't you or any strangers among you do any of this forbidden stuff. (Correct me if I'm wrong, and I may be, but I don't think so: I'm getting the impression that he doesn't want us to do these things.)
- #27: 'Cause people have been doing this stuff, and they besmirched the land.
- #28: We wouldn't want you to get vomited out of the land, now, would we?
- #29: Anyone who commits "these abominations" will be excommunicated.
- #30: So don't do it, get it? Don't defile yourselves, OK!? "I am the LORD your God."
3 comments:
Again, some contextual verses have been added at the start. It really begins at "I am Yahweh, your god".
Its thought that the Holiness Code is a compilation to a certain extent, sometimes embedding earlier independent law-specification documents. This chapter is one of the main ones considered to have once been an independent document, and verse 2-5 seem to form a distinct introduction; you'll see one of the more obvious reasons why the core of this chapter is seen as an independent document in chapter 20.
Verse 3 is "don't follow the practices of the Canaanites", not "don't walk like them".
"the LORD" with caps-lock is the way the KJV translates YHWH (ie. Yahweh); late victorian translations put "Jehovah" (ie. Yahweh - vowels_of_Yahweh + vowels_of_Adonai) instead.
verse 6. Basically yes, that's what Ham was doing (I did point it out at the time); this is why the punishment is inflicted on the product of Ham's loins - Ham's son - rather than Ham himself. But the Ham-Noah-nakedness thing is really just an allegorical myth to explain why the Canaanites became 3rd class citizens [at least the way the bible treats them]; its also more generally a slur on the Canaanites, in that it accuses them of being descended from a guy who fucked his own father.
verse 6 is more ambiguous than it seems. Different cultures have very different ideas about what constitutes "kin"/"relatives". Some consider only extremely close family to be "kin"/"relatives", but others consider 2nd and 3rd cousins to be "kin"/"relatives". That's why the subsequent verses exist - they attempt to spell out exactly what "kin" refers to.
verses 7-11 are not covering the same ground. Its much more systematic than that:
verse 8 covers step-mothers.
verse 9 covers sisters AND half-sisters.
verse 10 covers granddaughters
verse 11 covers step-sisters
verse 14 is rather peculiar, because it suggests that it needed to list certain male relatives as being off-limits - ie. that there wasn't a general "no males" rule; this will become significant for understanding verse 22.
verse 16's significance is unjustly overlooked. Remember levirate marriage (marrying the wife of your dead brother - like Onan and Shelah back in Genesis), well, its forbidden by verse 16 here. The explanation of course is that the levirate marriage story is much older, and comes from the Jahwist source, and the Priestly source doesn't mention levirate marriage.
verse 17 is rather clever. Not only does it forbid general mother+daughter combinations. It also forbids your OWN daughter, which is NOT forbidden elsewhere, or explicitly mentioned.
verse 21 is a bit obscure. Its not certain that "to Moloch" is the correct reading, it could be "to the king", or "as Molk". "Moloch" could be "Melech" minus its vowels, plus the vowels of Bosheth (meaning "shameful thing"); "Melech" (sometimes rendered "Milcom", and in modern english as "Malcolm") means "king", and is a title that usually referred to the deity called "Hadad", another title of which was "Ba'al" meaning "lord". Or it might be a reference to a type of sacrifice called "molk".
Human sacrifice is certainly a feature of older passages in the bible, and on a few occasion such sacrifices are looked on favourably by the text, so its certainly not beyond reason that these verses are an attempt to put an end to that.
And so we come to the most well known, and divisive, verse in Leviticus. Verse 22. Firstly its nowhere near as clear as it seems. Translator bias certainly has a large part to play, with several modern translations dishonestly making it say "do not practice homosexuality" or "homosexuality is an abomination". Even the KJV could just as well be interpreted as "don't have sex with she-males" rather than "homosexuality is forbidden".
What it actually says, word-for-word is "and with a man, do not lay layings of a woman". The meaning is surprisingly ambiguous, and "lay layings" could legitimately be translated "lay in the bed of", ie. "if you have sex with a guy, don't do it in a woman's bed", which is a completely different meaning to the traditional translation; this law could have arisen, for example, if there was a concern about contact with menstrual blood (as seen in previous chapters). Also, and here's the more important detail, the word for "man" isn't the normal word for "man", but instead is a word that is ONLY used to refer to men who have been dedicated in some way to a deity, such as Nazarites and (male) religious Prostitutes; in other words, what it really says is "don't have gay sex with religious prostitutes".
The key to understanding it is to note that the first part of this chapter was clearly about incest rather than sex in general, and finished two verses ago. This chunk of laws (21-23) is really all about forbidding copying the practices of Canaanite religion (remember that Bestiality was listed among forbidden RELIGIOUS practices in Exodus 22). Its also worth remembering verse 14 here, and its implication that sex with certain male relatives was more acceptable than with others.
Just some extra information on 18:22
The masoretic text (from which the KJV is supposedly translated) says "V'et zachar lo tishkav mishk'vei ishah to'evah hu" (modern-hebrew transliteration; older transliteration would have "b" rather than "v" in several places, for example)
The septuagint says "kai meta arsenos ou koimêthêsê koitên gynaikos bdelygma gar estin"
"to'evah" ("To'ebah") is the word normally translated as abomination. But "to'ebah" doesn't mean sin, and is nowhere as strong as "abomination"; "zimah" means sin, and would have been used if a word that strong was meant. The septuagint has "bdelygma", which only means "ritually impure".
In Hebrew "human"/"teracotta"(colour) is "adama". And man is "ish"/"esh"; "ishah" is "woman". But the word translated as "man" in 18:22 is actually "zakar", which is a very different word entirely. "zakar" elsewhere is only used to refer to men who are somehow sanctified.
The Septuagint uses similarly unusual wording "arsenos" means "male" (as opposed to "man" ["andros"]). "gunaikos" means "woman" [as in "gynacology"], but can idiomatically refer to "wife", as in "my woman".
The hebrew "tishkav" (the core being "ishkv") means "lie down", although this can also be used to mean "sex". "mishk'vei" (again having "ishk'v" as the core) means "(thing in which) laying down occurs" - "layings", ie. "bed".
"koite" means "marriage bed". It can also idiomatically mean "sex" as in "person A BEDDED person B ".
The greek "Kai" is "and", and "meta" is roughly "with". The Hebrew equivalent ("ve'et") is "and with". "koimethese" roughly means "the same as".
The hebrew "lo" means "not".
So the septuagint says
"and with a male the same as a wife's marriage bed, it is ritually impure"
The Septuagint seems to be condemning adultery in particular, where the 3rd party just happens to be male, rather than making any sort of general statement on gay sex.
And the masoretic says
"and with a [zachar] do not lie down in bed of woman, it is a ritual error"
Which again seems less to do with homosexuality and more to do with women's beds in particular.
The traditional translations are basically being dishonest, preferring to meet their reader's prejudices, rather than accurately translate the text.
"mishk'vei" which actually means "layings"/"bed" is translated as if it means "have sex with". With this translation the verse becomes "and with a [zachar] do not lie down to have sex with a woman, it is a ritual error". Even with this distortion it still does't refer to homosexuality, instead appearing to condemn MMF threesomes; the translators have to be doubly dishonest to make it come out as attacking gay sex.
The translators have basically deliberately mistranslated "mishk'vei" into "as with", which is like translating the french "le gard du nord en paris" as "because".
In all that detail about 18:22, I forgot to mention something about the previous verse.
You see, although the Masoretic Text (which dates from the 800s AD) says "... passing children through the fire to Moloch ...", the older Septuagint (200s BC) says
"... causing children to serve a ruler ..."
[Hebrew for ruler happens to be MLK], and, more interestingly, the Syriac Peshitta (100s AD) says
"... causing children to have sex with a ruler ...".
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