God tells Moses to tell Aaron that he’s not allowed to just come into the sanctuary whenever he pleases. He has to make some special sacrifices first to account for his own sins and the sins of the whole rest of the camp. All the sins of the people get loaded onto a goat (the scapegoat) which is then released out into the wilderness. He needs to do this once a year.
Eating blood is forbidden because of something to do with life being in the blood. Anything you kill you have to drain before you eat it and cover its blood with Earth.
Sex with your close relatives is not allowed. I assume the definition of a close relative must have been something that was obvious to the Israelites. It must have been very specific because Abraham married his sister, Isaac married his cousin’s daughter and Jacob married two of his cousins and that all seemed to be okay. Although Simeon slept with Jacob’s wife and Leviticus also expressly forbids bedding your father’s women, and taking two sisters as your wives is also forbidden and Jacob did that, so maybe these rules just weren’t enforced until after Moses got them. That seems fair.
A lot of the rules for who you’re not allowed to sleep with involve not dishonoring friends and family members by sleeping with their wives. I feel like a lot of care is being taken to specifically include “don’t sleep with your uncle’s wife,” don’t sleep with your son’s wife,” “don’t sleep with your neighbor’s wife.” Was it okay to sleep with other people’s wives? I know that neighbor in the old testament is ideally supposed to cover all Israelites right? But even that’s not a very strong rule because there still doesn’t seem to be any rule against sleeping with your slaves or unwed girls or foreigners.
You can’t have sex with other men or with animals and you cannot sacrifice your children to Moloch. I know that this passage about sleeping with other guys gets a lot of air time when my fellow Christians are looking for a reason to dislike the gays. I think that it’s important to keep perspective here though. I’m not saying that we should ignore Leviticus when we’re deciding how to run our lives, but we are only about two chapters past the part about how menstruating makes you so unclean that you contaminate everything that you touch for two weeks. Also, no more shellfish or bacon according to Leviticus and we, as a church, don’t seem to have a problem with that, so I’m hesitant to take someone seriously when they get too bent out of shape about one verse while ignoring everything around it. I want to keep an eye on this issue though. I think the Bible can be kind of vague about sexual sins sometimes, especially homosexuality. And it’s so politically charged that it’s hard to get straight answers from anybody sometimes. I guess that’s one disadvantage to reading secondary sources.
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