Well this one should be a no-brainer. Why even have a Card Talk to explain this passage, right? This one is among the top contenders for “did you really have to write that down, Moses?” moments in the Torah. To which we (and Moses and God) might respond, “do you watch the news? People do stupid shit.”
However, as always, there is more than meets the eye with any passage of Scripture. In this case, we find this verse sets off a series of sexual laws: a list of who one can and cannot sleep with. Which includes your mother, but not your daughter.
What? Yeah.
The Sexual Set Up
The context (Leviticus 18:1-6) is pretty straightforward. God, speaking through Moses (vs 1), gives His people a set of commands to follow. God prefaces these commands with the reminder that He is God and they should do what He says (vs 2). Specifically, they should not copy the evil deeds of the Egyptians, whose lands they just left (the past), or the evil of the Canaanites, whose lands they are about to enter (the future), and attempt to slaughter, but that's another Card Talk (vs 3).
God tells them that they are surrounded by bad examples, but they should be better than "those people" (of course Ancient Near East scholars have repeatedly pointed out that there is no real evidence of many of the behaviors attributed to either the Egyptians or the Canaanites, but we always make our enemies look worse than they really are). If God's people do commit these evils, they won't live long (vs 4-5). To prove He's not messing around, God repeats this warning to bookend the chapter, making it clear that He will kill them all (vs 24-30).
All this preamble leads to a guiding principle/command in verse 6:
None of you shall approach anyone near of kin to uncover nakedness.
This sets up a formula which runs throughout verses 7-20:
“do not uncover the nakedness of X…”
where X includes your
mom
stepmom
sister
half-sister
stepsister
granddaughter
aunts
daughters-in-law
sisters-in-law
a woman and her daughter at the same time [which comes up again in Amos], and/or
a woman and her sister at the same time (because the Bible is against only certain types of threesomes).
While the chapter goes on to discuss sex during menstruation (which we just learned is called “parting the red sea”), adultery, child sacrifice, homosexuality, and bestiality (vs 19-23), the general focus of the chapter is on whose nakedness you are not allowed to "uncover," almost all of which is repeated in Leviticus chapter 20. Which begs the question, what does “uncovering nakedness” mean?
Uncovering Nakedness
The Hebrew word for "nakedness" is עֶרְוָה {`ervah}, which translates to literally mean "nakedness" and "nudity," but figuratively means to be "exposed" or "undefended." However, it also carries the concept of "shame," "indecency," or "improper behavior" along with it.
Based on its usage in the Bible, it is widely accepted that the word is also a euphemism for genitals.
We've previously written about the graphic use of sexually abusive language employed by the prophet Ezekiel in his efforts to shock his listeners out of their moral lethargy. Thus, it should come as no surprise that, outside of Leviticus, `ervah is used as a euphemism for female genitalia in Ezekiel often (see Ezekiel 16:8; 16:36-37; 22:10; 23:10; 23:18; 23:29).
Thus, as we will see below, the prohibition against uncovering the nakedness of another has a spectrum of interpretations:
Don’t look (and/or)
Don’t touch (and/or)
Don’t fu... have sex with.
On Mother-Loving and the Patriachry
Our card comes from verse 7, which reads
You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father, which is the nakedness of your mother; she is your mother, you shall not uncover her nakedness.
To begin unpacking this verse, it must be noted that there has been debate around how to interpret this verse.
Some read Leviticus 18:7 as a prohibition against committing sexual acts with either of your parents. This hearkens back to the first usage of the phrase in Genesis chapter 9 and the "awkwardness" of Noah's situation with Ham, which we discuss in a previous card talk. In that passage it has been alternately argued that Noah’s son Ham had sexual relations of some kind with Noah, that he merely looked at his father's naked body, and that Ham slept with Noah's wife, Ham’s mother.
However, a better reading of this phrase in Leviticus posits the first half of the verse as saying "the nakedness of your father is the nakedness of your mother," or "the nakedness of your mother is something reserved for your father." This interpretation carries more logical weight, both from a close reading of the Hebrew, but also because male homosexual relationships are covered later in Leviticus 18:22.
Why does it matter? Because this whole chapter is a case-study of patriarchy in action.
The whole of the law in this chapter
is addressed to men.
Once you realize this, it becomes clear that these are laws of sexual exclusivity and ownership: who men can and cannot have sexual relationships with.
But this isn't a surprise when you think about the more widely known sexual laws in the Bible. Think of The Ten Commandments: don't commit adultery. But now consider the laws and definitions of adultery in the Hebrew Bible:
If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death. ~ Leviticus 20:10
If a man is caught lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman as well as the woman. So you shall purge the evil from Israel. - Deuteronomy 22:22
As Douglas Knight and Amy-Jill Levine point out
"As the term is understood in the Bible, adultery does not apply equally to both spouses in a marriage. If a husband has intercourse with a women not his wife, he has not become an adulterer; only a wife who steps outside the bounds of marriage commits adultery. On the other hand, if a husband has sexual relations with another's wife, both that woman and the man are liable for punishment, because both have violated the rights of the woman's husband. Israelite women are not their husband's "property" per se, but the sexuality of a married woman belongs to her husband." (Knight and Levine, 319)
The biblical prohibitions about "uncovering nakedness" are all about the girls and women men should not have access to, not because those girls and women have inherent wealth and dignity, but because they are the possession of some other man.
It is reminiscent of Thomas Hobbes’ beliefs about the state of man. That, literally, every man (read: male) wars against every other man for control of limited resources, girls and women among them. So a social contract is arranged. A codified agreement is made among men to equitably divvy up the girls and women, clearly delineating who can and cannot be acquired, especially in situations which will pit males in the same kin group against each other: father against son against brother against uncle against nephew against grandfather.
For many this also helps to account for why the father-daughter relationship is missing from the list of male-female coupling above. The general consensus is that this omission is because it was culturally assumed that every man understood his duty to his daughter. Patriarchy at its finest assumes that the daughter is property owned by the father and protected from sexual corruption until she is passed on to another male, her husband. The thought of a father having sex with his daughter was so taboo, one would not write it down in the law. No father would "damage the goods." This is why the scandal of Lot’s relations with his daughters is so striking . In that story the father (Lot) is the victim: his daughters purposefully got him drunk so they could rape him. The prospect of someone breaching the father-daughter trust is within the scope of the Biblical imagination, but not in the way that we modern readers would obviously posit (See Genesis 19 and the Card Talk mentioned above for the parallels between Noah and Lot's stories).
Leviticus 18 makes the point that the nakedness of all the other girls and women belong to their husbands and fathers, specifically for the purpose of sex and reproduction. This, in part, is why the passage includes prohibitions against sleeping with menstruating women and homosexuality, which is also only directed to men (our lesbian clergy friends love to point this out!). The only prohibition directed to women is about bestiality (vs 23), which may be because this was the only form of sexual agency available to women. Furthermore, as scholar Wilda Gafney points out, "a married man has legitimate options for multiple sex partners, options that do not extend to married women" (Gafney, 121). This included sex with slaves (Exodus 21:7-11), women taken as war prizes (Deut 20:10-14), and the fact that prostitution is clearly tolerated to some degree in the Bible (Gen 38:21-23; Joshua 2:1; Judges 11:1), as long as you didn't let your daughter become one (Lev. 19:19). Such sexual freedom was not available to women.
However, there is another way to read this passage. Some posit the idea that God was not a complete asshole in the creation of God’s word. That there is something other than rank patriarchal control at work in this chapter.
Perhaps there is a measure of protection as well.
Redefining "Inscet"
Let’s start by way of example.
The second half of Leviticus 18:23 includes that prohibition against bestiality. As noted above, this is the only prohibition directed to women in the passage. However, in an important way, this is still being stated to the men. It tells men that it is an abominable act to couple their women with animals, that forcing a woman to have sex with an animal-- a practice the Israelites believed the (evil) Canaanites and other foreign powers around, enjoyed-- would not be a consensual situation for the woman (or the beast for that matter). This verse can stand as an example of a voice against the dehumanization of Hebrew women at the hands of their men.
In The Five Books of Miriam, Dr Ellen Frankel suggests that Leviticus 18 redefines the definitions and boundaries of what is considered "incest." That these words were meant as a source of protection for women during an age when any man, even those with close ties, may feel he has a "right" to their bodies. She writes:
The Israelite family was clearly defined by its sexual boundaries. Such taboos were obviously meant to protect the women within the family from precisely those males who had easier sexual access to them. In a society in which women had so little power and autonomy, such protection should have allowed them to sleep peacefully at night.
She goes further, reminding us today that
... as blended families become more common in our society, we’re discovering our own relational webs are becoming increasingly complex. Maybe we should reexamine and revise our definition of incest— so our own daughters can sleep peacefully at night (175).
While times have changed, it (hopefully) can be agreed that the people on this biblical list (and their male counterparts) should be off limits as sexual partners.
Perhaps what we owe the women in our lives is more respect that what is seen at first glance in this passage.
Perhaps we should remember that women are not property owned by men (unless they are into that sort of thing, but that's a whole other conversation), and men are not owed sexual favors from women because a man is capable of acting like a decent human being.
But what do we know: we made this game and you probably think we're going to Hell.
Note: To be clear
We believe you should not have sex with your mom/dad, stepmom/dad, sister/brother, half-sister/brother, stepsister/ brother, granddaughter/son, aunts/uncles, daughters/sons-in-law, sisters/brothers-in-law, and that it is a pretty safe bet that you should avoid poly-amorous relationships with members of the same family, or your own family.