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Leviticus
Chapter Eighteen
Leviticus 18
Chapter Contents
Unlawful marriages and fleshly lusts.
Here is a law against all conformity to the corrupt usages
of the heathen. Also laws against incest, against brutal lusts, and barbarous
idolatries; and the enforcement of these laws from the ruin of the Canaanites.
God here gives moral precepts. Close and constant adherence to God's ordinances
is the most effectual preservative from gross sin. The grace of God only will
secure us; that grace is to be expected only in the use of the means of grace.
Nor does He ever leave any to their hearts' lusts, till they have left him and
his services.
── Matthew Henry《Concise Commentary on Leviticus》
Leviticus 18
Verse 2
[2]
Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, I am the LORD your God.
Your God —
Your sovereign, and lawgiver. This is often repeated because the things here
forbidden were practised and allowed by the gentiles, to whose custom he
opposes divine authority and their obligation to obey his commands.
Verse 3
[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.
Egypt and Canaan —
These two nations he mentions, because their habitation and conversation among
them made their evil example in the following matters more dangerous. But under
them he includes all other nations.
Verse 4
[4] Ye
shall do my judgments, and keep mine ordinances, to walk therein: I am the LORD
your God.
My judgments —
Though you do not see the particular reason of some of them, and though they be
contrary to the laws and usages of the other nations.
Verse 5
[5] Ye
shall therefore keep my statutes, and my judgments: which if a man do, he shall
live in them: I am the LORD.
He shall live in them — Not only happily here, but eternally hereafter. This is added as a
powerful argument why they should follow God's commands, rather than mens
examples, because their life and happiness depend upon it. And though in
strictness, and according to the covenant of works they could not challenge
life for so doing, except their obedience was universal, perfect, constant and
perpetual, and therefore no man since the fall could be justified by the law,
yet by the covenant of grace this life is promised to all that obey God's
commands sincerely.
Verse 6
[6] None of you shall approach to any that is near of kin to him, to uncover
their nakedness: I am the LORD.
To uncover their nakedness — I think Mr. Free has made it highly probable, that this phrase does not
mean marriage, but fornication, throughout this chapter. So it unquestionably
means in the twentieth chapter.
Verse 16
[16] Thou
shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother's wife: it is thy brother's
nakedness.
Thy brother's wife —
God afterwards commanded, that in one case, a man should marry his brother's
widow.
Verse 18
[18]
Neither shalt thou take a wife to her sister, to vex her, to uncover her
nakedness, beside the other in her life time.
Thou shalt not take a wife to her sister — Perhaps this text doth not simply forbid the taking one wife to another,
but the doing it in such a manner or for such an end, that he may vex or
punish, or revenge himself of the former; which probably was a common motive
amongst that hardhearted people to do so.
Verse 19
[19] Also
thou shalt not approach unto a woman to uncover her nakedness, as long as she
is put apart for her uncleanness.
As long as she is set apart — No not to thy own wife. This was not only a ceremonial pollution, but an
immorality also, whence it is put amongst gross sins, Ezekiel 18:6. And therefore it is now unlawful
under the gospel.
Verse 21
[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.
Pass through fire —
This was done, either by burning them in the fire, or by making them pass
between two great fires, which was a kind of consecration of them to that God.
Moloch —
Called also Milcom, was an idol chiefly of the Ammonites. He seems to be the
Saturn of the heathens, to whom especially children and men were sacrificed.
This is mentioned, because the neighbours of Israel were most infected with
this idolatry, and therefore they are particularly cautioned against it, though
under this one instance all other idols and acts, or kinds of idolatry, are
manifestly comprehended and forbidden.
Verse 25
[25] And
the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the
land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants.
I visit — I
am about to visit, that is, to punish.
Verse 26
[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:
Nor any stranger — In
nation or religion, of what kind soever. For though they might not force them
to submit to their religion, yet they might restrain them from the publick
contempt of the Jewish laws, and from the violation of natural laws, which,
besides the offence against God and nature, were matters of evil example to the
Israelites themselves.
Verse 29
[29] For
whosoever shall commit any of these abominations, even the souls that commit
them shall be cut off from among their people.
Cut off —
This phrase therefore of cutting off, is to be understood variously, either of
ecclesiastical, or civil punishment, according to the differing natures of the
offences for which it is inflicted.
── John Wesley《Explanatory Notes on
Leviticus》
18 Chapter 18
Verses 1-5
Ye shall do My judgments
Safety in the observance of God’s laws
This preface of some is taken generally to concern all the laws of
God; the observation whereof is ever the sure safety of a state public or
private, for it is not the munition of walls, leagues, and alliance with
foreign princes, largeness of confines, plenty of treasure, or such like, that
preserve a commonwealth, but careful and diligent observation of public laws
ordained of God for the good of man.
It is said that Lacedemon flourished whilst Lycurgus’s laws were observed: much
more any commonwealth when God’s be kept. For what comparison betwixt
man’s laws and God’s? Demosthenes saith, It was the manner of the Loerenses,
that if any man would publish and devise a new law he should put his neck into
a halter ready to be put to death, if the law were not good, by which means
they made men more careful to observe old and ancient, tried and known laws,
than with busy heads to make new. Now what laws so old and so approved good as
God’s laws? Ever, therefore, are they to be regarded and hearkened unto. Others
take this preface particularly of these laws concerning marriage now following,
that if they be carefully kept, a kingdom long flourisheth, and if not, soon ii
cometh to a fearful fall. For so odious and abhorred of God is the unlawful
mixture of man and woman that the Lord cannot long withhold great judgments.
And thus much remember as you read them ever, that these laws do not concern the Jews only, as the
ceremonial laws now spoken of and judicial did, but these laws belong to all
men and women and to all succeeding times, being eternal, immutable, grafted by
God in man’s nature and given by Him for holiness’ sake. Note all the words well that God
would not have them like either the Egyptians or Canaanites, and wish with me
that there was a like law against our being like foreign nations near us, with
ruffs dipped in the devil’s liquor called starch, Turkish heads, Spanish backs,
Italian waists, &c., giving daily occasion to the mockers that say French
nets catch English fools. (Bp. Babington.)
Verses 6-30
None of you shall approach to any that is near of kin to him.
Consanguinity
1. God the institutor of marriage (Leviticus 18:6).
2. Faith in Christ not commanded in the law (Leviticus 18:5).
3. Of the several kinds of kindred by consanguinity or affinity.
4. Of the computation of the degrees of consanguinity.
5. Of the computation of the degrees of affinity.
(a) In what degree one is of consanguinity, the wife or husband is in
the same degree of affinity.
(b) The impediment in both continues not only during life but
afterward.
(c) The prohibition extends itself in both alike, in the right line
ascending and descending without limitation; and in the collateral to the third
degree expressly, and by a certain analogy to the fourth.
(a) The efficient cause of consanguinity is a natural obligation,
without any relation to the will and consent of man, in the propagation and the
line of consanguinity; but in affinity there is a voluntary bond or obligation
by consent in marriage.
(b) Consanguinity is by generation from one, both father and mother;
affinity is by the copulation of two. The first is real, the second by
relation.
(c) In consanguinity, on both sides the bond holds, both by the father
and mother, but the kinsmen of the husband are not of affinity to the kindred
of the wife; on the contrary, affinity holds only in the first kind, which changes by a new
copulation, though the degree alter not, as the brother’s wife’s second husband
is not properly of affinity; but in consanguinity, the kind and degree hold out
together.
6. Marriage of divers wives successively, lawful, though not together
(Leviticus 18:18).
7. The Scripture most pure, even when it makes mention of impure and
obscene things. (A. Willet, D. D.)
Moral observations
1. To walk constantly in the obedience of God’s law (Leviticus 18:4).
2. Against the monstrous sin of adultery (Leviticus 18:20).
3. Against the unnatural and most abominable sin of bestiality (Leviticus 18:23).
4. To profit by other men’s examples, and to be warned by their
punishments (Leviticus 18:25).
5. God not partial in His judgments, and therefore no man should
presume (Leviticus 18:28). (A. Willet, D. D.)
On marriage with a deceased wife’s sister
By the wording of the Hebrew text a man is permitted to marry
his deceased wife’s sister, but not to have two sisters for wives at the same
time, or one after the other while both are living--this is the logical
inference to be drawn from the qualifying addition “in her lifetime”; and yet
by the spirit of the Levitical laws, the former alliance also is like an
alliance with a sister, and therefore no less objectionable. Such scruples were
indeed unknown to the Hebrews of earlier times, since even in Genesis Jacob is
represented as the husband of the sisters Rachel and Leah; but they followed
with necessity from the severe theory of marriage gradually worked out and
adopted. Philo, in the oldest explanation of our law that has come down to us,
observes that it is impious for one sister to usurp the place of the other, and
to make the misfortune of the latter a stepping-stone of her own happiness;
thus bitter jealousies and implacable enmities must be engendered; and it would
be as if the different members of the body, abandoning their natural harmony
and fellowship, were to quarrel with one another, thus inevitably causing
incurable diseases and endless mischief. In this sense the prohibition has
commonly been understood, and if the words of our verse alone are weighed, it
can hardly be understood otherwise: and yet the matrimonial laws, taken as a
whole, were not prompted by considerations of mere expediency, such as the
prevention of unsisterly rivalry, since their main object was to warn against
alliances between near relations (verse 6). From whatever side we weigh the
question, we cannot help being struck by the incongruity of a code which
permits a woman to marry, at least under certain conditions, her sister’s
husband, but expressly forbids a man to marry his brother’s wife. If the wife
dies, her husband does not cease to be the brother of that wife’s sister; yet
practical life seemed to demand some relief from the rigour of abstract logic,
and the prohibition was limited to the lifetime of both sisters. It has bee
contended that this was a concession analogous to the levirat and the
permission of divorce; but the cases are not quite parallel: the Levitical
legislators are entirely silent with regard to the levirat and divorce; for in
their own time the former was unnecessary, and the latter was strongly opposed by
contemporaries, such as Malachi; a direct repeal of the two statutes, known to
the people as a part of Deuteronomy, or “the Book of the Law,” was unfeasible;
and silence on these subjects was sufficiently significant. We need hardly add
that these remarks are merely designed to elucidate the meaning and intention
of the command, without attempting to decide upon its value or its binding
force; the latter points must be left to individual judgment and feeling, which
in no other sphere claim greater respect and freedom. The prevailing laws of
matrimony may possibly, in the course of time, call for revision; and progress
and liberty of action should not be checked by a misconception of Biblical
authority. The very verse under consideration affords the strongest proof that
the ordinances of the Levitical code are not final and unalterable; for this
verse involves the sanction of polygamy, which, not even abrogated by Christ
and the apostles, is now regarded by western Jews and Christians not merely as
inexpedient, but as immoral. It is well known that from comparatively early
times, many chiefs of the Christian Church indeed translated the words of our
verse literally, yet weighing the spirit of the law, were strongly opposed to
the marriage with the deceased wife’s sister. By the Apostolic Canons (about
300) persons contracting such an alliance were for ever incapacitated for
clerical functions. The Council of Illiberis (about 305) excluded them from
holy communion for five years; St. Basil (375) imposed upon them for seven
years the ecclesiastical penalties fixed for adultery; his celebrated letter on
the subject proves that, in the Church “a custom equivalent to a law, and
handed down by holy men” had been established against such marriages; it was in
his time probably that the Septuagint (in Deuteronomy 27:23) received the
interpolation found in the Vatican copy of that version, “Cursed be he who lies
with his wife’s sister”; and similar views were enforced by the emperors
Constantius and Theodosius, Honorius, Theodosius II., and Justinian, and by all
the leaders of the Greek and Latin Church: the only notable exception is
Diodorus, bishop of Tarsus; but he was indignantly opposed by his contemporary
St. Basil, who declared that such marriages are indeed permitted to the Jews
because they are under the law and all its ceremonial enactments, but not to
the free Christians, and asked how the offspring of the two sisters would be
related to each other, whether they should be called cousins or brothers, since
by a deplorable “confusion” they could claim both names. In England those
marriages were forbidden in 1603 by the Convocation of the province of
Canterbury in a Canon which has never been formally ratified by Parliament.
Dispensations were, however, readily granted in the Roman Church; and since the
last century many Protestant theologians and jurists, and among the first those
of the pietistic schools, as Philip Jacob Spener, declared marriage with the
deceased wife’s sister unobjectionable, since the prohibition is not
unequivocally enjoined in the Bible. It was disapproved of by the Karaites; but
among the bulk of the Jews it has at all times not only been tolerated but
encouraged. (M. M. Kalisch, Ph. D.)
Of unlawful marriages
As the chosen and covenant tribes of Israel were soon to take up
their journey to the land of Canaan, the inhabitants of which were to be
exterminated for their multifarious iniquities in the sight of God, a recital is
here made of some of those aggravated forms of wickedness which were rife among
them, and which God had determined signally to punish. This is done not only to
illustrate the justice of the Divine proceedings in their excision, but also
with a view to put the peculiar people themselves on their guard against
yielding to the contagion of their pernicious example, and thus becoming
obnoxious to the same fearful retributions which were now about to be visited
upon the Canaanites. The particular class of abominations more especially
pointed out in this chapter, and to which the brand-mark of the Divine
reprobation is so conspicuously affixed, is that of incestuous connections. Not
only had that abandoned race been guilty of a total apostacy from the worship of
the true God, substituting in His room the sun, and moon, and host of heaven,
and bowing down to stocks and stones and creeping things, but they had mingled
with their idolatry every vice that could degrade human nature and pollute
society. In the black catalogue of these the abominations of lust Stand
pre-eminent; and whether in the form of adultery, fornication, incest, sodomy,
or bestiality, they had now risen to a pitch of enormity which the forbearance
of heaven could tolerate no longer, and of which a shuddering dread was to be
begotten in the minds of the people of the covenant. And in order that no
possible plea of ignorance or uncertainty might be left in their minds as to
those connections which were lawful and those which were forbidden, the Most
High proceeds in the present and in the 20th chapter to lay down a number of
specific prohibitions on this subject, so framed, as not only to include the
extra-nuptial pollutions, which had prevailed among the heathen, but also all
those incestuous unions which were inconsistent with the purit and sanctity of
the marriage relation. Both classes of crimes we think are in fact included; so
that it is doing no violence to the spirit of the text to regard it as
containing a system of marriage-laws by which the peculiar people were ever
after to be governed. As this is the only passage in the compass of the whole
Bible where any formal enactments are given on this subject, this and the
connected chapters treating of this theme have always been deemed of peculiar
importance in their relations to the question of the lawful degrees within
which the marriage connection may now be formed by those who make the law of
God the great standard of moral duty. (G. Bush.)
The wilderness a suitable place for the giving of these laws
The wilderness in which they now were was a very fit place for
enjoining these laws upon the Israelites, as they were now removed from the
snares and temptations of Egypt, and were not yet mingled with the people of
Canaan. (Bp. Kidder.)
Need for marriage laws
The necessity for laws on this point at once
discriminating, wise, and stringent, will be sufficiently obvious when we
consider the strength of the passion to be controlled--constitutionally common
to all ages of the world; the sacredness of the marriage relation and the
inestimable value of moral purity in all human society--also common to all ages
of the world’s history; and (peculiar to the earlier ages) the necessity of
defining the limits of consanguinity within which marriage should be prohibited.
Perhaps we need to remind ourselves that the race having sprung from a single
pair and the world having been repeopled a second time from one family, those
primitive examples may have sent down for many generations a certain looseness
which called for special restraint and a carefully defining law. The crimes of
Sodom, their polluting influence in so good a family as that of Lot; the low
morals of Egyptian life; some sad manifestations in the early history of
Jacob’s family; the horrible
contagion of Moab and Midian when the tribes of Israel came socially near them;
these and kindred facts will be readily recalled as in point to show the necessity of vigorous
legislation in the Mosaic code to counteract these untoward influences of their
antecedent life and of surrounding society. (H. Cowles, D. D.)
──《The Biblical Illustrator》