Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, I am the LORD your God.
The verse opens the chapter's warning to Israel not to follow the doings of Egypt and Canaan, beginning the list of forbidden practices in verse 6 on the ground that I am the LORD your God. The chapter is shown by the evil those practices brought upon those nations. It gives full and explicit laws against incestuous marriages and unions that violate degrees of kinship, including marriage to a sister, daughter, or other near relative.
Those prohibitions are moral wrongs and not merely Jewish ritual pollutions or regulations, as shown by the fact that the land expelled its earlier inhabitants and the Canaanites were driven from the land for these abominations. The chapter shows that God's law is the standard by which such acts are identified as sin. Old Testament moral law of this kind remains binding even where the New Testament does not restate or name the prohibition, so such unions are still sinful.
Joined to its closing in Leviticus 20:22-26, the passage shows Egyptians and Canaanites were cast out and abhorred for doing all these things, which cover every command of the Decalogue, proving Gentiles were held amenable to that law and punished for breaking it before it was spoken from Sinai. The law expressed here states a moral principle binding on all nations and all men, not only Israel, not local or for a special people then and not local now. It was known to all where conscience was not seared by persistent disobedience and still stands to be used to convince the world of sin.
The prohibitions help explain that the bastard excluded from Israel's assembly in Deuteronomy 23:2 may have been the offspring of such a prohibited union, rather than any child born outside wedlock. As part of Leviticus, and of the Leviticus 18-20 portion appointed for February 17, the verse shares in the book's everywhere-emphasized lesson of the exceeding sinfulness of sin given in mighty object-lessons. It is to be read remembering that all the sacrifices point forward to Jesus Christ as the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world and that the yearly round closes on the tenth day of the seventh month in the Day of Atonement as a judgment-day typical of the great final judgment-day.
The verse opens the chapter's warning to Israel not to follow the doings of Egypt and Canaan, beginning the list of forbidden practices in verse 6 on the ground that I am the LORD your God. The chapter is shown by the evil those practices brought upon those nations. It gives full and explicit laws against incestuous marriages and unions that violate degrees of kinship, including marriage to a sister, daughter, or other near relative.
Those prohibitions are moral wrongs and not merely Jewish ritual pollutions or regulations, as shown by the fact that the land expelled its earlier inhabitants and the Canaanites were driven from the land for these abominations. The chapter shows that God's law is the standard by which such acts are identified as sin. Old Testament moral law of this kind remains binding even where the New Testament does not restate or name the prohibition, so such unions are still sinful.
Joined to its closing in Leviticus 20:22-26, the passage shows Egyptians and Canaanites were cast out and abhorred for doing all these things, which cover every command of the Decalogue, proving Gentiles were held amenable to that law and punished for breaking it before it was spoken from Sinai. The law expressed here states a moral principle binding on all nations and all men, not only Israel, not local or for a special people then and not local now. It was known to all where conscience was not seared by persistent disobedience and still stands to be used to convince the world of sin.
The prohibitions help explain that the bastard excluded from Israel's assembly in Deuteronomy 23:2 may have been the offspring of such a prohibited union, rather than any child born outside wedlock. As part of Leviticus, and of the Leviticus 18-20 portion appointed for February 17, the verse shares in the book's everywhere-emphasized lesson of the exceeding sinfulness of sin given in mighty object-lessons. It is to be read remembering that all the sacrifices point forward to Jesus Christ as the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world and that the yearly round closes on the tenth day of the seventh month in the Day of Atonement as a judgment-day typical of the great final judgment-day.