Levítico 20

Verse-by-verse explanation

1. Levítico 20:1This opening formula introduces a chapter that revisits several prohibitions already seen in chapter 18, now adding the specific punishment for each one.
2. Levítico 20:2This law repeats the chapter 18 ban on handing children over to Molech, but now with the prescribed penalty: stoning by the people. The fact that it is the people of the land, not a single executioner, who carry out the punishment shows this crime was treated as an offense against the whole community, not a private matter.
3. Levítico 20:3God’s response against anyone who sacrificed a child to Molech uses the same personal, direct language — “I will set my face against that man” — already seen earlier against anyone who ate blood, showing the weight of this offense.
4. Levítico 20:4The text even foresees the possibility of the community closing its eyes and not carrying out the prescribed penalty for this crime — a scenario of collective neglect that the next verse resolves.
5. Levítico 20:5If the people let the guilty party escape punishment, the text itself says God would act directly against him and his family — the responsibility did not disappear just because the community failed to punish.
6. Levítico 20:6“To go a whoring after” is an expression the Bible uses several times for religious, not sexual, unfaithfulness — here applied to those who seek out mediums and fortune-tellers. It is the same metaphor used elsewhere for idolatry: seeking power or answers outside what the law considered the right relationship with God.
7. Levítico 20:7“Sanctify yourselves therefore, and be ye holy” repeats the call from chapter 19 almost word for word — the same identity refrain returns before the list of punishments that follows.
8. Levítico 20:8Keeping and practicing the statutes closes this introduction before the detailed list of cases and penalties that fills the rest of the chapter.
9. Levítico 20:9A legal formula repeats several times in this chapter: that the person is responsible for their own death, with no one else bearing the guilt for carrying out the penalty. The severity of this law shows how much weight parental authority carried in the social order of that world.
10. Levítico 20:10In this law, both sides of adultery receive the same penalty — not only the woman, as would happen in several ancient law codes of the time. It is one of the few points where the law treats man and woman equally before the same crime.
11. Levítico 20:11Relations with one’s father’s wife, already forbidden in chapter 18, receive here the specific penalty: death for both people involved.
12. Levítico 20:12Relations with a daughter-in-law, called “confusion” — the same word used elsewhere in the book to describe the mixing of family roles that were meant to stay separate — also carried the death penalty for both.
13. Levítico 20:13The prohibition had already appeared in chapter 18; here the text adds the penalty prescribed by the legal code of that time. Like the other sexual laws in this chapter, it describes the justice system of ancient Israel — the text does not engage with today’s discussions.
14. Levítico 20:14Taking a woman and her mother at the same time was considered “wickedness,” and the penalty here was the harshest in the chapter: death by fire, not just stoning.
15. Levítico 20:15A man’s relations with an animal led to the man’s death and also to the animal’s death — the animal, even without moral guilt, was eliminated as part of the process.
16. Levítico 20:16The same rule applied to a woman: both she and the animal involved were put to death — the text treats the male and female cases with complete symmetry.
17. Levítico 20:17Relations between siblings, called here “a wicked thing,” carried a lighter penalty than the previous ones: public cutting off, not execution — showing that not every prohibition on the list led to death.
18. Levítico 20:18Relations during a woman’s menstrual period also resulted in both people being cut off from the people, not put to death — another case on the list with a lighter penalty than execution.
19. Levítico 20:19Relations with an aunt, on the mother’s or father’s side, are described here as “they shall bear their iniquity” — a vaguer language of consequence, with no execution penalty specified.
20. Levítico 20:20Relations with an uncle’s wife brought a different consequence from the others: dying without children — in a culture where descendants were everything, this was considered a very grave loss.
21. Levítico 20:21Relations with a brother’s wife brought the same penalty of dying without children — another case where the consequence was not execution, but the absence of descendants.
22. Levítico 20:22The chapter asks that all these statutes be kept so that the land would not “spue” the people out — repeating almost the same warning already used in chapter 18.
23. Levítico 20:23The instruction was not to follow the customs of the nations driven out of the land, because it was exactly for these practices that God said He was disgusted with them.
24. Levítico 20:24Here comes the promise behind the whole requirement: inheriting a rich land, “that floweth with milk and honey” — and the stated reason is that the people had been set apart from the other nations to belong only to this God.
25. Levítico 20:25The distinction between clean and unclean animals, already detailed in chapter 11, is recalled here as part of the same package of separation laws — food and behavior went together in the same logic of identity.
26. Levítico 20:26The chapter closes by repeating the whole book’s central idea: be holy because this God is holy, and having been set apart from the other nations to belong only to Him.
27. Levítico 20:27Here the matter opened at the start of the chapter comes full circle: there the law targeted anyone who sought out a medium, here it targets the medium or fortune-teller themselves. Both ends of the same practice were treated as equally serious within this code.