Leviticus 18: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

The LORD tells Moses to give the Israelites a set of laws about sexual conduct, beginning with the command not to follow the practices of Egypt, where they lived, or of Canaan, where he is bringing them. A long list names the close relatives a man must not have sexual relations with, followed by rules against relations during a woman's period, adultery, giving children to Molech, a man lying with a man, and sexual relations with animals. The chapter ends by saying the nations being driven out defiled themselves and the land by these acts, that the land vomits out those who live in it, and that anyone who does these things will be cut off from his people.

Claim by Claim

1. 18:1
   • The LORD spoke to Moses.
   • The LORD told Moses to say something.
2. 18:2
   • The LORD told Moses to speak to the children of Israel and say to them:
   • The LORD says he is the LORD their God.
3. 18:3
   • The Israelites must not do as is done in the land of Egypt.
   • The Israelites had lived in the land of Egypt.
   • The Israelites must not do as is done in the land of Canaan.
   • The LORD is bringing the Israelites into the land of Canaan.
   • The Israelites must not walk in the statutes of those peoples.
4. 18:4
   • The Israelites are to carry out the LORD's judgments.
   • The Israelites are to keep the LORD's statutes.
   • The Israelites are to walk in the LORD's statutes.
   • The LORD is the LORD their God.
5. 18:5
   • The Israelites are to keep the LORD's statutes and judgments.
   • The person who does them will live by them.
   • The speaker is the LORD.
6. 18:6
   • No one is to approach any close blood relative to uncover nakedness.
   • The speaker is the LORD.
7. 18:7
   • A man must not uncover the nakedness of his father.
   • A man must not uncover the nakedness of his mother.
   • She is his mother.
   • A man must not uncover his mother's nakedness.
8. 18:8
   • A man must not uncover the nakedness of his father's wife.
   • It is his father's nakedness.
9. 18:9
   • A man must not uncover the nakedness of his sister.
   • The sister may be his father's daughter or his mother's daughter.
   • The prohibition applies whether she was born in the household or born outside it.
10. 18:10
    • A man must not uncover the nakedness of his son's daughter.
    • A man must not uncover the nakedness of his daughter's daughter.
    • Their nakedness is his own nakedness.
11. 18:11
    • A man must not uncover the nakedness of the daughter of his father's wife.
    • That daughter was begotten by his father.
    • She is his sister.
12. 18:12
    • A man must not uncover the nakedness of his father's sister.
    • She is his father's close blood relative.
13. 18:13
    • A man must not uncover the nakedness of his mother's sister.
    • She is his mother's close blood relative.
14. 18:14
    • A man must not uncover the nakedness of his father's brother.
    • A man must not approach his father's brother's wife.
    • She is his aunt.
15. 18:15
    • A man must not uncover the nakedness of his daughter-in-law.
    • She is his son's wife.
    • A man must not uncover her nakedness.
16. 18:16
    • A man must not uncover the nakedness of his brother's wife.
    • It is his brother's nakedness.
17. 18:17
    • A man must not uncover the nakedness of a woman and her daughter.
    • A man must not take her son's daughter to uncover her nakedness.
    • A man must not take her daughter's daughter to uncover her nakedness.
    • They are close blood relatives.
    • It is depravity.
18. 18:18
    • A man must not take a woman as a rival to her sister.
    • A man must not uncover the sister's nakedness while the other is alive.
19. 18:19
    • A man must not approach a woman to uncover her nakedness during the uncleanness of her menstruation.
20. 18:20
    • A man must not have sexual intercourse with his neighbor's wife.
    • Doing so defiles him with her.
21. 18:21
    • A man must not give any of his offspring to pass through the fire to Molech.
    • A man must not profane the name of his God.
    • The speaker is the LORD.
22. 18:22
    • A man must not lie with a male as with a woman.
    • It is an abomination.
23. 18:23
    • A man must not have sexual intercourse with any animal.
    • Doing so defiles him with it.
    • A woman must not present herself before an animal to mate with it.
    • It is a perversion.
24. 18:24
    • The Israelites must not defile themselves by any of these things.
    • The nations have defiled themselves by all these things.
    • The LORD is driving those nations out before the Israelites.
25. 18:25
    • The land has become defiled.
    • The LORD punishes the land for its iniquity.
    • The land vomits out its inhabitants.
26. 18:26
    • The Israelites are to keep the LORD's statutes and judgments.
    • The Israelites must not commit any of these abominations.
    • The prohibition binds the native-born.
    • The prohibition binds the foreigner who lives among them.
27. 18:27
    • The men of the land who were there before the Israelites did all these abominations.
    • The land became defiled.
28. 18:28
    • The purpose is that the land not vomit out the Israelites when they defile it.
    • The land vomited out the nation that was there before them.
29. 18:29
    • Whoever commits any of these abominations is to be cut off.
    • The persons who commit them are to be cut off from among their people.
30. 18:30
    • The Israelites are to keep the LORD's charge.
    • The purpose is that they not practice any of the abominable customs.
    • Those customs were practiced before them.
    • The Israelites must not defile themselves by those customs.
    • The LORD is the LORD their God.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

18:1

In the King James Version, when "LORD" is printed in large and small capitals, it stands for God's own personal name in Hebrew. When you see "Lord" spelled normally, it is a title meaning master.

18:2

"The LORD" printed in capitals stands in for the personal name of God in Hebrew, four consonants usually written YHWH. Jewish readers of the Hebrew traditionally did not pronounce it, saying instead the ordinary word for "Lord," and English Bibles since the sixteenth century have followed that practice by using capitals.

18:3

Egypt is where the Israelites are described as having lived as slaves; Canaan is the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean coast that the book presents them as about to enter. "Doings" in the King James is not a vague word: it means established practices and habitual conduct, and the following list is what the chapter has in mind.

18:4

The King James uses two different words that are two different Hebrew terms. "Judgments" (mishpatim) are rulings of the kind a judge hands down in particular cases. "Ordinances" or "statutes" (huqqim) are standing decrees, from a root connected with engraving or inscribing. The pairing is a way of saying "the whole body of what I lay down."

18:5

"Live in them" reads oddly in modern English. The Hebrew means the person who keeps these will live by them, or stay alive because of them. How far that reaches (a long and secure life in the land, or something more) is not spelled out here, and readers have taken it in more than one direction.

18:6

"Uncover the nakedness" is a fixed Hebrew idiom for having sexual relations, not a reference to seeing someone undressed. The King James translates it word for word, which is why the phrase repeats throughout the chapter. "Near of kin" translates a Hebrew expression meaning literally "flesh of his flesh."

18:7

The doubled wording reflects a way of thinking in which a wife's sexuality was spoken of as belonging to her husband, so that a violation involving the mother is described first as an offense against the father. The second half of the verse makes clear that the mother is the person meant.

18:8

"Thy father's wife" rather than "thy mother" points to another wife of the father, a stepmother. The laws assume a household in which a man might have more than one wife, and might remarry after a wife's death.

18:9

"Born at home, or born abroad" is disputed. It most likely distinguishes a sister born within the father's household from one born outside it, that is, to the mother in an earlier marriage, the point being that the rule covers both. Some read it instead as legitimate versus illegitimate birth.

18:10

"Theirs is thine own nakedness" means these granddaughters are your own descendants; the shame would fall on your own line.

18:11

This verse is hard to place beside verse 9, which has already covered a father's daughter. It is usually read as the daughter of the father's other wife, born to the father, so a half-sister by a different mother within the same household; some read it as a stepdaughter of the father with no blood tie.

18:14

The prohibition is stated as an offense against the uncle, then made explicit: the woman meant is his wife, the reader's aunt by marriage.

18:15

A daughter-in-law is the woman your son married.

18:16

Elsewhere the law makes one exception to this: if a man died childless, his brother was expected to marry the widow so that a son could be counted as the dead man's heir (the arrangement modern writers call levirate marriage, from the Latin for brother-in-law). This verse concerns a brother's wife while the brother is alive.

18:17

"Take" here means take in marriage. The King James "wickedness" translates a specific Hebrew legal term (zimmah) used for deliberate, planned depravity, not for wrongdoing in general.

18:18

The Hebrew phrase translated "a wife to her sister" can also be an idiom meaning "one woman in addition to another," and a few readers have taken the verse as a restriction on having two wives at all. The usual reading is the literal one: a man's wife and her actual sister. "To vex her" means to set the two up as rivals; the same Hebrew root supplies the ordinary word for a co-wife.

18:19

Under these laws a menstruating woman was in a state of ritual impurity for a set period, during which she was kept apart from certain contacts. "Uncleanness" here is a ritual category, not a statement about hygiene or moral fault; men incurred similar temporary impurity from other bodily discharges.

18:20

"Lie carnally" translates a Hebrew phrase that refers literally to the emission of semen. "Defile" again means to fall into a state of ritual impurity.

18:21

Molech is the name attached in the Hebrew Bible to a deity, or to a type of offering, associated with the burning of children. Ancient and modern readers have disagreed over whether "pass through the fire" means the children were killed and burned or subjected to some rite of dedication involving fire; the biblical texts elsewhere describe it as killing. "Profane the name" means to treat as ordinary and common something set apart, the opposite of holding it holy.

18:22

"Abomination" translates to'evah, a word for something regarded as taboo or repellent within a community; it is used in the Hebrew Bible of ritual offenses and of things foreigners find disgusting as well as of moral ones. The Hebrew of the first clause is unusual and reads roughly "you shall not lie with a male the lyings of a woman."

18:23

"Confusion" is not the modern sense of being puzzled. The Hebrew word (tebel) appears only here and in one other place and seems to mean an improper mixing of things belonging to separate categories, the same concern that lies behind other laws against crossbreeding animals or sowing a field with two kinds of seed.

18:24

"The nations" means the peoples already living in Canaan before Israel arrived.

18:25

In the King James, to "visit" a sin upon someone means to come and deal with it, that is, to punish. The picture of the land vomiting out its inhabitants treats the land itself as able to be made sick by what happens on it.

18:26

"Stranger that sojourneth" translates ger, a resident foreigner who has settled among the Israelites long term, not a passing traveler. Such a person had a recognized legal standing and was bound by some, though not all, of these laws.

18:28

"Spue" is simply the older spelling of "spew," to vomit, continuing the image from verse 25.

18:29

"Cut off from among their people" translates a Hebrew penalty (karet) whose exact force is debated. It has been understood as execution by the community, as expulsion, and as a punishment carried out by God rather than by human courts, possibly meaning the person's line would end. The text does not specify.

18:30

"Keep mine ordinance" translates a phrase meaning roughly "keep my keeping", the noun is used elsewhere of a guard duty or an assigned charge that someone is responsible for maintaining.