Leviticus: Chapters 18 to 22

Last time we saw Biblical wisdom on skin disease and scapegoating.  Here's the next chunk of Leviticus.  It's a lot more interesting than I thought it would be.

CHAPTER 18

Welcome everyone to the …. Leviticus Drinking Game.  Every time God says “I am the LORD” or “I am the LORD your God” or something like that – take a shot.  Beginning with this chapter, he starts saying it frequently.  It’s the Almighty Microphone Drop – he says it often at the end of paragraphs. Say it, drop the mike, and walk off the stage before anyone can respond. 

This chapter is all above sex – particularly, what to avoid.  Let’s see – incest, that’s out.  And then it goes into all of the combinations you’re not supposed to get into.  Cousin-on-cousin action is cool with the Lord.  Well, that’s good news for the patriarchs who kept marrying their own cousin.  But marrying your sibling?  That’s out.  Bummer for Abraham and Sarah, who were half-brother/half-sister.  And by the language, it looks like half-siblings are also verboten.  Good thing Abraham came before.  I guess we’ll grandfather in the grandfather of the Hebrew.

Oh, and it’s also a bad idea to sacrifice your children to Molech.  Yeah, I gotta agree with that one.   Sacrificing your kids to false gods does sound like a bad idea. 

Then things take a turn for the ugly and the modern politicized.  Here’s where God tells us “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman, such a thing is an abomination.”  Yup, it’s Leviticus 18:22 that denounces gay sex.  Immediately after, it comes out against bestiality. 

That sums up the key sex laws, but then comes the justification for these things.  Apparently the people of Canaan do all of these things and God ain’t happy with that.  “And so the land has become defiled, and I have punished it for its wickedness and the land has vomited out its inhabitants.”  Few things there – isn’t God jumping the gun with the verb tense?  People will be driven out later, not earlier.  Second, that’s some jarring imagery – “vomited out its inhabitants.”

As a non-believer who supports gay rights, this is a depressing part of the Bible.  I know the standard retort – there are a lot of Bible laws that are ignored.  (We have a doozy next chapter, in fact) and people always pick-and-choose which ones define their religion.  This is very true.  Then again, while the Bible doesn’t make a mania of denouncing gay rights, when the subject comes up, it isn’t just another thing.  It’s always associated with something especially repugnant.  It’s flatly called abhorrent here, and it one of the justifications for depriving the Canaanites of Canaan.  It’s a justification for the wholesale destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.  (There’s more to it than that, though.  They were going to rape angels of the Lord, and weren’t going to treat travelers well).  Later on it’s also used to justify war on the tribe of Benjamin.  I don’t like this aspect of the Bible, but going strictly off the Bible, the anti-gay edicts are a bit more than, say, mixing fabrics.  That said, care for the poor is a far bigger theme throughout.  As I said, anti-gay rhetoric is pretty damn infrequent in the Bible.

CHAPTER 19

OK, if you’re doing the Leviticus Drinking Game, you can get put in a real good mood by this chapter. I count about 10 shots in the course of its 37 verses. 

This is more laws, and much of it is rehashing of all laws we’ve already seen.  It does contain one great bit on justice: “You shall not act dishonestly in rendering judgment.  Show neither partiality to the weak nor deference to the mighty, but judge your neighbor justly.  You shall not go about spreading slander among your people, nor shall you stand by idly when your neighbor’s life is at stake.  I am the LORD” (drink!).  That sounds like a good plan for how judges should act.

If the last chapter had a part that Christian conservatives love to bring up, this chapter gives some meat for religious lefties.  There is a strong concern with social justice.  Don’t use up all your vineyards and fields – leave some behind for the poor and the alien.  So you’re supposed to let the poor pick from your fields.  Don’t exploit your neighbor.  That’s sound advice, but then it comes how you define exploit.  Plenty of legal behavior is exploitation, and this chapter has none of it. 

It’s part of a larger trend toward tolerance toward the meek.  For example, we’re told words that I assume all agree with – be nice to the blind, the deaf, and to your neighbor.  “Reprove your neighbor openly” so that you don’t have bad blood develop silently.

Oh, and then comes one of the strangest laws in the Bible: “do not put on a garment woven with different kinds of thread.”  Why would God care?  Well, he does.   It's become the official passage for people who oppose religious fundamentalism.  OK, so you think homosexuals are evil because of a passage in the Bible - well, what are your thoughts on mixing fabric?  After all, you don't here Pat Robertson & friends worry about this one too much.

Actually, the fabric thing is part of a longer stretch that goes like this: “do not breed ay of your domestic animals with others of a different species; do not sow a field of yours with two different kinds of seed, and do not put on a garment woven with two different kinds of threads.” It’s part of an overall ethos of not crossing streams, not mixing and matching.  It starts off reasonably enough, I guess, but it’s like God is so caught up in this train of thought that he forgets to get off at the right stop.  He just gets a little nutty with things.  Lucky for us that he stopped before telling us to keep our chocolate and peanut butter separate.

Oh, and here’s where we see the origins of Orthodox Jewish facial hair.  We’re told not to clip your hair at the temples and not to spoil the edges of your beard.  For that matter, don’t lacerate your bodies for the dead and no tattoos.  Guns’n’Roses wouldn’t have made it as traditional Jews. 

It ends with some good general advice – respect your elders, be good to aliens amongst you – ‘for you too were once aliens in the land of Egypt”, don’t cheat anyone, and oh yeah – don’t turn your daughters into prostitutes.  Nice of God to point out that last one, but it means people actually did that.

For those playing the Leviticus Drinking Game, the end of chapter 19 is when you’ll be drinking fastest and furiousiest.  You get six “I am the LORD”s in the last eight verses – including three in a row at one point.  It’s mike drop after mike drop.

CHAPTER 20

Now that we’ve been given a bunch of rules, it’s time to spell out the penalties.  It might actually work better if they’d given both at the same time – save on repetition – but no matter. 

This is a combination of sensible stuff (if you sacrifice children to Molech, you’ll be killed) with some ghastly ones.  The most famously and politicized one is gay sex is a capital offense.  Yeah, that sure sounds bad to modern ears.  But that’s not the most horrific thing in here.  20:9: “Anyone who curses father or mother shall be put to death.”  Wow.  Now, the footnotes say this doesn’t mean, “Dad, go fuck yourself” but something more like taking a blood oath to have your father cursed forever.  I sure hope that footnote is right, because that’s ghastly. Even if the footnote is correct, that's still ghastly.  It's hard to believe anyone ever really practiced this.  Combining threads gets the mocking of people who oppose being too fundamentalist in their actions, but this is the one part that no one really ever tries acting on (Marvin Gaye Sr. not withstanding).

Plenty of death penalties here. It’s either that or cutting them off from the community. Remember – there are no prisons to a wandering band in the desert.  A man who makes like Abraham and marries his sister is to be cut off from the people.  If you have sex with a woman during her period, you’re to be cut off from the community.  Well, that’s harsh.

Oh, and there’s a key bit of English history as well.  Really.  20:21: If a man takes his brother’s wife, it is severe defilement and he has disgraced his brother; they shall be childless.”  Catherine of Aragon married Arthur, the firstborn son of King Henry VII.  Then Arthur died, and she married his only other son – who became Henry VIII.  They didn’t have any kids and Henry VIII uses this to try to get an annulment.  Hey, the Bible says we’ll be cursed of having no kids, and we haven’t – clearly God doesn’t approve so this can’t be any holy matrimony!  Now, my memory is shaky but there is reason to think Arthur never consummated his marriage, and of course Henry VIII had his own reasons for a divorce that had nothing to do with religion, but that’s the background. 

There is some very striking language toward the end: “Be careful to observe all my statutes and all my decrees; otherwise the land where I am bringing you to dwell will vomit you out.”  Vomit.  That’s a hell of a verb to use; very graphic.  My theory: this is a bit put in by the Redactor, the editor who gathered the four main sources and created the modern Torah as we know it.  My hunch is that’s the case because, of course, they did lose their Promised Land.  And this is the official religious reasons why – we didn’t follow God’s laws and so we’ve been punished. 

(looks it up).  Nope.  Richard Elliot Friedman lists it as Source P.  Shows what I know – they always had some of this punishment talk in there from the beginning. 

Also, God makes clear that people aren’t to adopt the customs of those around them.  This is actually really crucial.  This is a big part of the reason why Jews still survive as a separate independent people.  They have their own customs, and traditions.  Yes, religion is a huge part of it – central even – but it’s more than just that.  It’s day-to-day practices that help reinforce this sense of separate identity. 

There’s not much drinking in the Leviticus Drinking Game here.  It gives you a chance to recover from the deluges at the end of Chapter 19.

CHAPTER 21

Now we get into priest rules.  Much is what you’d expect.  It’s a little too wordy for its own good.  An early part says he can’t marry a prostitute or someone divorced – then later is say he must marry a virgin (then repeats the bit about no divorced or prostitutes).  If the priest’s daughter becomes a prostitute, to the fire with her.  Lots of prostitute talk here, isn’t there? 

Oh, and there is no equal rights for the handicapped in the priesthood.  The following sons of Aaron need not apply: deaf, blind, lame, split lip, too long a limb, broken arm or leg, hunchback, dwarf, “has a growth in the eye” (?), skin disease, and last by not least – no crushed testicles.  It takes balls to be a priest.

Well, there are some actual physical duties of being a priest, so the above might get in the way. Yeah, but that’s not why they’re banned.  If you look bad or clearly flawed, well, that just looks bad for the whole presentation.  They’re the ones closest to good – so how come they’re messed up? 

CHAPTER 22

It’s more stuff on priests, and it’s largely a rehashing of what’s come before.  Here’s one bit – no priest “who suffers from a genital discharge may eat of the sacred offerings until he again becomes clean.”  Let’s see, if you sleep with your wife you’re unclean until nightfall.  Other “discharges” take a week to cleanse, so there’s definitely making sure people that jerk off aren’t allowed in.  And, of course, priests aren’t supposed to sleep around. 

At the end, the Lord comes back with a bunch of mike drops - -three “I am the LORD”s to drink to in the last four verses.

Click here for the end of Leviticus.