Incest
The value and use of the blood having been thus declared, the next proclamation warned all against any inclination to be careless in the observance of the command (13, 14). Circumstances, the people would perhaps have thought, might exonerate them from the observance of it, and an instance of what might otherwise have been held to justify their neglect of it, we do read of in 1 Sam. 14:31-34. Faint from pursuing the enemy, the people flew on the spoil, and ate of the animals without killing them properly. But this command remembered, and attended to by Saul, the Lord's interference in judgment was restrained, as His law was honored by being obeyed.
In connection with this comes the regulation for those who had eaten of an animal which had died of itself, n'belah, or had been torn by a beast, t'rephah. In Ex. 22:31, in the covenant made with Israel on Mount Sinai, they were forbidden to eat of the carcass of any animal which had been torn by beasts in the field. In Lev. 11:40, any one who ate of the carcass of a clean animal which had died of itself, had to wash his clothes, and to be unclean until the evening. Here (17:15) the purification enjoined on any one who ate of any animal torn or that had died of itself, is stated, with the penalty such would incur if disobedient to this ordinance. The Lord would not allow uncleanness in those connected with His camp to pass unchallenged, or unpurged. A difficulty has been made of all this to discredit the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. But, viewing this passage in its context, it may be that the law of Lev. 17:15 had respect to the finding of any carcass in the open country when hunting, whilst Lev. 11:41. treats of death among their flocks or herds. If this be the case they were allowed, under exceptional circumstances, to eat of that which had died of itself, or had been torn by beasts, subject to their compliance with the purification enjoined; whereas when they entered the land that which died of itself was forbidden them (Deut. 14:21), as well as that which had been torn by beasts (Ex. 21), though a stranger might eat of the former. There, surrounded with plenty, no exceptional circumstances could be pleaded on their behalf.
Jehovah, then, was their God—an immense privilege, as the Psalmist confessed: "Blessed is the nation whose God is Jehovah, and the people whom he hath chosen for his own inheritance " (Psa. 33:12). But of His people, responsibilities rested on them to which other nations were strangers. Some of these we have looked at, and we come now to others which marked them out as a separated people, whether from the Egyptians, among whom they had dwelt, or from the Canaanites, into whose land the Lord was about to take them. So the ways, the habits, the customs of men, were no guide for them. How could they be? Israel were what neither the Egyptians nor the Canaanites could boast of, or ever become: the Lord's peculiar people, whom He had chosen for Himself. Hence He thus addressed them: “After the doings of the land of Egypt, wherein ye dwelt, shall ye not do; and after the doings of the land of Canaan, whither I bring you, shall ye not do; neither shall ye walk in their ordinances. Ye shall do my judgments, and keep mine ordinances to walk therein. I am the Lord your God. Ye shall, therefore, keep my statutes and my judgments, which if a man do, he shall live in them. I am the Lord" (Lev. 18:3-5). All men on earth ought to have served the Lord, but they did not, neither did they even know Him who is the self-existing one, the true, the living God.
In what dense moral darkness was man, that Jehovah was to many unknown. In what depths of degradation and filth were they found, that God had to warn Israel against the ways of the nations of the land, both social and religious (18:24-28), because of which the land would vomit them out as a nauseous thing. What had man become, man made in the image of God, and originally after His likeness also? But how had this come about? Had he got into this condition, or was be originally made in it? Was primitive pre-historic man originally in a state of savagery, out of which he gradually raised himself by self-culture?" God made man upright (Eccl. 7:29). Man before the flood was no savage, dwelling in caves or like habitations. Cain built a city. His descendants were noted for arts and musical instruments. Cain, too, at first tilled the ground, and Abel was a keeper of sheep. After the flood Noah became a husbandman, and Ham's descendants were noted as builders, and rulers. Man's primitive condition, whether before the flood or after it, was not a state of savagery, but quite the reverse. How, then, did he descend into the degradation and uncleanness characteristic of savagery and idolatry?' As with earth, so with man, the chaotic state of the former, and the degraded state of the latter, were the consequences of causes at work after the creation of both the one and of the other. God did not create the earth a chaos (Isa. 45:18), nor man a savage. This question, then, about man's condition, which history cannot answer, nor can archeology solve, God in His word has cleared up to us.
"Men when they knew God, glorified Him not as God, but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened; professing themselves to be wise they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image like unto corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies among them, who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator who is blessed forever. Amen." And again, " As they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind," &c. (Rom. 1:21-28). Savagery was the result of man's departure from God. God did not create man in that condition, nor was he in it when Noah and his sons were blessed by God just after the flood. Men became vain in their imaginations, they became fools, their foolish hearts were darkened, not dark (see also Eph. 4:18). Hence man's degraded condition, whether as a savage, or an idolater, a condition out of which nothing can really bring him, but the converting power of the grace of God. What was the educated heathen, viewed morally or religiously, apart from the Spirit's work on his conscience? Contrast Rom. 1:32, with 2:14, 15.
Surrounded as Israel were with all the filth of heathendom, they were to be for Jehovah, and to keep His commandments and His ordinances. As His people, He told them what they were to do, and what they were to be. Certain instructions for their camp life to guard them from idolatry we have looked at in the previous chapter of this book. We now approach the chapter which treats of marriage, for, as Jehovah's people, He prescribed within what degrees of consanguinity or affinity, such unions would be deemed unlawful, and precursors of divine chastisement. Till Israel came to Sinai, we have no hint of any marriage law laid down by God. Before the flood, and certainly in the days of Cain, what the Levitical law ruled as incest, was lawful. Men married their sisters. And even in Abraham's day such unions do not seem to have been unlawful. Sarah was Abraham's half sister. Jochebed was Amram's own aunt, his father's sister. By the the law of Leviticus, such unions as Abraham and Sarah, Amram and Jochebed, and Jacob and Rachel, were distinctly forbidden (18:11, 12, 18).
Thus the law introduced changes in the innermost circle of social life, and Israel, Jehovah's people, had to learn from it what were the Lord's ordinances relative to marriage, and in what light He would view any infraction of them as there laid down (20.). In certain cases it would be wickedness, and death was the penalty annexed; in other cases, to die childless was the penalty such would suffer (20:20, 21). What, then, was lawful to Abraham and Amram, was, to their descendants, by the law made unlawful. The marriage, of the former if he had lived under the law, would have been wickedness. The marriage of the latter would have entailed on him and Jochebed the bearing of their iniquity. Now this deliverance of the Lord on the subject of marriage, clearly concerns not only Israel, but Christians as well; and although the marriage laws of our own land are not wholly regulated by this revelation made to Moses, still, all that God has here forbidden is reckoned illegal, and no Christian would act aright, if he transgressed the regulations laid down, which plainly tell us what to avoid, leaving us to gather from the prohibitions herein stated what unions are not reckoned unlawful in the eyes of the Lord.
Throughout the man is addressed, and never the woman, and the prohibitions are classed under three heads; first, what concerns certain blood relations of his own (18:6-13); next, certain relations in law (14-16); and lastly, certain relations of his wife (17, 18). Of his own blood relations, besides his direct line, i.e., his mother or his offspring, collateral branches are forbidden to him reaching out to his aunts by blood, the sisters of his father, or the sisters of his mother. All within that range are near of kin, and as such are debarred him. And if a man went in unto his aunt by blood, they were both to bear their iniquity (20:19). Of his relations in law three were forbidden; viz., his sons wife, his brother's wife, and his aunt by marriage, and all three on the ground that they had been wives of his relations by blood.
Hence it is clear that relations in law were not put in the same category as relations by blood. The penalty for going in to his uncle's widow was not the same as if he went in to his own aunt, who was near of kin to him (20:20). His son's daughter was forbidden him, because she was near of kin to him; but his daughter-in-law was forbidden, because she had been his son's wife. So whatever relation by blood. was forbidden to the man, the widow of the corresponding relations in blood was equally forbidden, but on the ground. that she had keen the wife of his near of kin.