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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comKeil and Delitzsch Commentary - Leviticus 18:19 - 18:19
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Prohibition of other kinds of unchastity and of unnatural crimes. - Lev 18:19 prohibits intercourse with a woman during her uncleanness. טֻמְאָה נִדַּת signifies the uncleanness of a woman's hemorrhage, whether menstruation or after childbirth, which is called in Lev 12:7; Lev 20:18, the fountain of bleeding. The guilty persons were both of them to be cut off from their nation according to Lev 20:18, i.e., to be punished with death.
Lev 18:20
“To a neighbour's wife thou shalt not give שְׁכָבְתְּךָ thy pouring as seed” (i.e., make her pregnant), “to defile thyself with her,” viz., by the emissio seminis (Lev 15:16-17), a defilement which was to be punished as adultery by the stoning to death of both parties (Lev 20:10; Deu 22:22, cf. Joh 9:5).
Lev 18:21
To bodily unchastity there is appended a prohibition of spiritual whoredom. “Thou shalt not give of thy seed to cause to pass through (sc., the fire; Deu 18:10) for Moloch.” הַמֹּלֶךְ is constantly written with the article: it is rendered by the lxx ἄρχων both here and in Lev 20:2., but ὁ Μολόχ βασιλεύς in other places (2Ki 23:10; Jer 32:35). Moloch was an old Canaanitish idol, called by the Phoenicians and Carthaginians Melkarth, Baal-melech, Malcom, and other such names, and related to Baal, a sun-god worshipped, like Kronos and Saturn, by the sacrifice of children. It was represented by a brazen statue, which was hollow and capable of being heated, and formed with a bull's head, and arms stretched out to receive the children to be sacrificed. From the time of Ahaz children were slain at Jerusalem in the valley of Ben-hinnom, and then sacrificed by being laid in the heated arms and burned (Eze 16:20-21; Eze 20:31; Jer 32:35; 2Ki 23:10; 2Ki 16:3; 2Ki 17:17; 2Ki 21:6, cf. Psa 106:37-38). Now although this offering of children in the valley of Ben-hinnom is called a “slaughtering” by Ezekiel (Eze 16:21), and a “burning through (in the) fire” by Jeremiah (Jer 7:31), and although, in the times of the later kings, children were actually given up to Moloch and burned as slain-offerings, even among the Israelites; it by no means follows from this, that “passing through to Moloch,” or “passing through the fire,” or “passing through the fire to Moloch” (2Ki 23:10), signified slaughtering and burning with fire, though this has been almost unanimously assumed since the time of Clericus. But according to the unanimous explanation of the Rabbins, fathers, and earlier theologians, “causing to pass through the fire” denoted primarily going through the fire without burning, a februation, or purification through fire, by which the children were consecrated to Moloch; a kind of fire-baptism, which preceded the sacrificing, and was performed, particularly in olden time, without actual sacrificing, or slaying and burning. For februation was practised among the most different nations without being connected with human sacrifices; and, like most of the idolatrous rites of the heathen, no doubt the worship of Moloch assumed different forms at different times and among different nations. If the Israelites had really sacrificed their children to Moloch, i.e., had slain and burned them, before the time of Ahaz, the burning would certainly have been mentioned before; for Solomon had built a high place upon the mountain to the east of Jerusalem for Moloch, the abomination of the children of Ammon, to please his foreign wives (1Ki 11:7 : see the Art. Moloch in Herzog's Cycl.). This idolatrous worship was to be punished with death by stoning, as a desecration of the name of Jehovah, and a defiling of His sanctuary (Lev 20:3), i.e., as a practical contempt of the manifestations of the grace of the living God (Lev 20:2-3).
Lev 18:22-23
Lastly, it was forbidden to “lie with mankind as with womankind,” i.e., to commit the crime of paederastia, that sin of Sodom (Gen 19:5), to which the whole of the heathen were more or less addicted (Rom 1:27), and from which even the Israelites did not keep themselves free (Jdg 19:22.); or to “lie with any beast.” “Into no beast shalt thou give thine emission of seed,...and a woman shall not place herself before a beast to lie down thereto.” רָבַע = רָבַץ “to lie,” is the term used particularly to denote a crime of this description (Lev 20:13 and Lev 20:15, Lev 20:16, cf. Exo 22:18). Lying with animals was connected in Egypt with the worship of the goat; at Mendes especially, where the women lay down before he-goats (Herodotus, 2, 46; Strabo, 17, p. 802). Aelian (nat. an. vii. 19) relates an account of the crime being also committed with a dog in Rome; and according to Sonnini, R. 11, p. 330, in modern Egypt men are said to lie even with female crocodiles.