Read Leviticus 20 here or at Bible Gateway.
The Hebrew paragraph:
20:1-27 {p} Punishment for violations of YHVH’s holy statutes just expressed
This paragraph forms its own Chiastic Structure:
Please note that Lev 20:9,
‘For everyone who curses his father or his mother shall surely be put to death. He has cursed his father or his mother. His blood shall be upon him,’
is a loose end which does not find a place in this structure that I can see. We have seen this before in Torah, where loose ends end up being matching pairs to a greater structure (and it is, in the greater structure formed by Lev 19:1-20:27).
This chapter is one of the sore spot passages in Torah, that people turn to when they make a case that the God of the Old Testament is vengeful, wrathful, angry, and judgmental. Some wickedness is so heinous that the only just and merciful course is capital punishment. God is smarter than we are, and He understands the long term effects, over the course of several generations, that allowing these behaviors to flourish in a society has. We are on the front end of a society which allows some of these. We do not know what the end result of our little societal experiment in flaunting God’s standards will be. Our great- great- grandchildren may very well, through the grief of experience, realize what merciful wisdom it would have been if we had paid heed to these statutes of YHVH.
At any rate, the people who suffer the most when these standards of holiness in intimacy and relations are ignored, are the children who are produced by them, or who are enslaved to feed the appetites thus unleashed. They become the true victims of instability, negligence, and abuse. May YHVH send His Spirit of repentance and humility through this land!
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