Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Leviticus · About this commentary
As They Do in Egypt and Canaan
Leviticus 18:1-30
1 Yahweh said to Moses, · WEB
The sexual laws are framed by two countries and one warning: the land itself expels whoever defiles it, whoever they are.
The frame is set before any law is given. You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived. You shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, where I am bringing you Leviticus 18:3.
A people is standing between EGYPT and CANAAN , two cultures, formed by one and about to enter the other, and the chapter is written for that position. What is forbidden is not invented for the occasion; it is what the neighbors did in both directions.
The positive statement comes next and it is the one Paul and others return to: you shall therefore keep my statutes and my ordinances, which if a man does, he shall live in them Leviticus 18:5.
The bulk of the chapter is a list of relatives a man may not approach, and the arrangement is worth noticing. It is addressed to men, it covers the household in widening circles, and it protects exactly the people who lived under a man's roof and could not refuse him. In a world where households were large and authority absolute, that is where the danger was.
Molech is named in the middle of the list Leviticus 18:21, and the placement is deliberate — child sacrifice belongs with what a man does to his own family.
The closing section is where the chapter's reasoning is exposed, and it is not what a reader might expect.
In all these the nations which I am casting out before you were defiled. The land was defiled. Therefore I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out her inhabitants Leviticus 18:24–25.
The Canaanites are being removed for these practices, and they had no covenant, no law given at a mountain, and no prophet. So the standard applied to them is not Israel's special legislation but something they were answerable to anyway.
And the same standard is then turned on the newcomers: that the land not vomit you out also, when you defile it, as it vomited out the nation that was before you Leviticus 18:28.
The figure is of a country with a stomach. It does not distinguish between occupants, and Israel is warned in the same sentence that describes its predecessors' fate. Nothing in the chapter offers the incoming nation an exemption, and the whole of the later history is the working out of that warning.
The rules are also applied to the stranger who lives as a foreigner among you Leviticus 18:26 — because if the land reacts to the conduct rather than to the people, the resident foreigner's conduct affects it too.
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