Leviticus 20:17–21

Leviticus 20:17 — Sibling incest as public shame The opening law addresses the union of a man with his half-sister (whether sharing his father or his mother). Unlike many other prohibitions in Leviticus 18–20 that carry the death penalty, the sanction here is karet — being "cut off" — rendered publicly ("in the sight of the children of their people"). The Hebrew word for the offence is chesed in an ironic, inverted sense: a term normally meaning "covenant love" or "loyalty" is here applied negatively, often translated "shameful thing" or "disgrace." The LXX renders it aischron (shameful). Some commentators read this as a deliberate lexical inversion: what should be chesed — the faithful love binding family — is perverted into its opposite. The phrase "he shall bear his iniquity" (nasa' avon) is a distinctly priestly formulation indicating that guilt accumulates and is carried by the offender; it is not merely a legal infraction but an ontological defilement. Notably, the Talmud distinguishes the biblical penalty here as karet (divine excision) rather than judicial execution, suggesting the offense, while grave, resides in a different category from Chapter 20's opening capital crimes.

Leviticus 20:18 — Sexual intercourse during menstruation This verse extends a law already stated in Leviticus 18:19 and elaborates its imagery strikingly: the woman's menstrual discharge is called her "fountain" (maqor), a term used elsewhere in Scripture for a life-giving spring of water (cf. Prov 5:18; Ps 36:9). The deliberate exposure of this "fountain of blood" represents a collapse of the boundary between the sacred mystery of fertility and the defilement associated with blood loss. For the priestly worldview, blood — even menstrual blood — is never merely biological; it carries the aura of life itself (cf. Lev 17:11). Both parties receive the karet penalty, indicating mutual moral culpability. The woman is not merely a passive object but a moral agent who "uncovers the fountain of her blood," an unusual framing in a legal corpus that typically centers the male act. Notably, this passage sits within a purity framework that the New Testament and Catholic tradition will reinterpret (cf. Mark 5:25–34), but its underlying logic — the body's deepest rhythms are sacred and not to be manipulated or disregarded — perdures.

Leviticus 20:19 — Aunts by blood Verse 19 prohibits relations with maternal or paternal aunts, who are blood relatives ("close relative," she'er). The sanction is again that "they shall bear their iniquity" — no judicial execution, but the language of accumulated moral guilt before God. The rationale is explicitly relational: the aunt is she'er bisaro, "flesh of his flesh," a phrase that echoes the creation narrative's definition of the conjugal bond in Genesis 2:23. To violate a blood relative is to violate one's own body.

Leviticus 20:20 — Uncle's wife (aunt by marriage) The uncle's wife is related by marriage, not blood. The language shifts: "they shall die childless." The Hebrew ariri means more than simply dying without children — it connotes a cutting off of lineage, a form of living death in a culture where posterity was the primary form of human continuity. The punishment is not karet in the same direct divine-excision sense but a consequential sterility: the disordering of a relationship ordered toward generation produces, fittingly, the absence of generation.

Leviticus 20:21 — Brother's wife The final prohibition — taking a brother's wife — is particularly complex because Deuteronomy 25:5–10 (levirate marriage) commands precisely this in cases where the brother has died childless. The Leviticus prohibition therefore applies to a living brother, making it an act of usurpation and dishonor. The penalty of childlessness (yihyu ariri'm) is here applied to the living violators. John the Baptist's denunciation of Herod Antipas for marrying Herodias (his brother Philip's wife) will directly invoke this prohibition.

Typological and spiritual senses At the typological level, the entire system of bodily boundaries anticipates the New Testament's insistence that the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 6:19). The Fathers read the purity laws as pedagogical — schooling Israel in the principle that disorder in the body mirrors disorder in the soul, and that the sacred must be protected by visible limits. Origin (Homilies on Leviticus) reads these regulations allegorically as warnings against the soul's illicit unions with disordered passions — the "kinship" of virtues must not be violated by spiritual incest with vice.

Catholic tradition illuminates this passage through several converging lenses.

The family as a natural moral institution. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§§2201–2203) teaches that the family is the "original cell of social life," grounded in the natural law accessible to all peoples. Leviticus does not simply posit these prohibitions as arbitrary divine commands but presents them as intrinsic to the integrity of family bonds. The incest prohibitions are thus not merely ritual law but natural law, which is why the Church has consistently maintained them across all cultures and dispensations. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae II-II, q.154, a.9) explains that incest violates both the reverence owed to persons bound to us by natural affection and the proper ordering of family roles that makes society possible.

The body's sacred character. The elaborate attention to bodily fluids, reproductive organs, and the rhythms of fertility in vv. 17–18 is not prudishness or primitive taboo but an insistence — foundational to the theology of the body later articulated by St. John Paul II — that "the body, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine" (Man and Woman He Created Them, 19:4). The "fountain" of blood in verse 18 is not to be uncovered illicitly; it participates in the mystery of life that belongs ultimately to God.

Karet and the reality of moral consequence. The penalty of karet — excision from the people — prefigures the Church's understanding of mortal sin as a rupture of communion. The Catechism (§1033) describes hell not merely as an external punishment but as the consequence of definitively closing oneself off from God. Karet is the Old Covenant's pedagogical shadow of that reality.

Childlessness as moral consequence. The penalty of childlessness in vv. 20–21 resonates with the Catholic theology of marriage as ordered toward both the bonum coniugum and bonum prolis (CCC §1601). Sexual acts that violate covenantal order disorder the very goods they are meant to serve.

For a contemporary Catholic, this passage challenges a culture that increasingly treats sexual boundaries as purely conventional and bodily autonomy as absolute. Several concrete applications emerge:

First, these laws remind us that the family carries a sacred structure that is not merely social convention. The Church's ongoing insistence on the impediment of consanguinity in canon law (CIC c. 1091) is a direct heir to Leviticus, and it reflects the same conviction: family bonds create a moral ecology that sexual disorder destroys.

Second, the striking image of the "fountain" in verse 18 invites Catholics to recover a reverent, non-reductive understanding of the body's biological rhythms — an understanding developed in Natural Family Planning's spirituality and in John Paul II's theology of the body. The body's cycles are not inconveniences to be overridden but signs of the sacred.

Third, John the Baptist's prophetic courage in citing this very law against Herod (Mark 6:18) models that fidelity to moral truth sometimes requires speaking publicly and at personal cost. For Catholic professionals, parents, and pastors navigating contemporary sexual ethics, this prophetic dimension remains urgent.