Leviticus 20
Leviticus 20 is the companion to chapter 18. Where chapter 18 named the boundaries - the things God's people were not to do - chapter 20 sets out the judgments attached to breaking them. It is a hard chapter, and reading it honestly means holding two things at once. First, these are the laws of a particular covenant nation living under God's direct rule, with its own courts and its own justice; the penalties here describe how that nation was to deal with the gravest assaults on its life, not a pattern for any government that came after. Second, beneath the severity runs a single, steady claim: that sin is not a private mistake or a harmless preference, but something that defiles a person, a family, a whole land - and that the God who made His people will not look on it with indifference.3
The judgments fall into a clear order. The chapter opens with the deepest violations of all - giving one's own child to the fire of Molech, and turning to those who claim hidden power through familiar spirits and wizards - and the LORD answers them with words of terrible weight: I will set my face against that man… to defile my sanctuary, and to profane my holy name (v. 3). Then come the judgments touching the family: the one who curses father or mother, and a sober catalogue of sexual sins that break the covenant of the household and the marriage bed. Each is stated plainly, named for what it is, and left to stand. The repeated refrain - their blood shall be upon them - means the guilt is the offender's own; the responsibility is not transferred or shared.
But the chapter does not end in judgment. It ends in a frame that gathers everything that came before and gives the whole chapter its name. Ye shall therefore keep all my statutes… that the land, whither I bring you to dwell therein, spue you not out (v. 22). They are to live unlike the nations God cast out before them, because He has done something for them no other people could claim: I am the LORD your God, which have separated you from other people (v. 24). And then the crowning word: ye shall be holy unto me: for I the LORD am holy, and have severed you from other people, that ye should be mine (v. 26). The hard boundaries, in the end, all serve that one tender purpose - a people set apart to belong wholly to God.1
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.
Leviticus 20:1-8I Will Set My Face Against
1And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 2Again, thou shalt say to the children of Israel, Whosoever he be of the children of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn in Israel, that giveth any of his seed unto Molech; he shall surely be put to death: the people of the land shall stone him with stones. 3And I will set my face against that man, and will cut him off from among his people; because he hath given of his seed unto Molech, to defile my sanctuary, and to profane my holy name. 4And if the people of the land do any ways hide their eyes from the man, when he giveth of his seed unto Molech, and kill him not: 5Then I will set my face against that man, and against his family, and will cut him off, and all that go a whoring after him, to commit whoredom with Molech, from among their people.
The chapter opens with the gravest evil it will name, and it names it first because nothing is worse: Whosoever… giveth any of his seed unto Molech… he shall surely be put to death (v. 2). Molech was a god of the surrounding nations whose worship demanded the unthinkable - the offering of a child in fire. To give of one's seed to Molech meant a parent handing over a son or daughter to be consumed as a sacrifice. Scripture does not soften this or look away from it; it calls it what it is, an abomination, and places it at the head of the chapter as the deepest possible corruption of worship - idolatry that devours the most innocent and most helpless of all. Notice that the offense is described not only as murder but as something done to defile my sanctuary, and to profane my holy name (v. 3). The horror reaches in two directions at once: the child destroyed, and the holiness of God dragged into the dirt by a people who bore His name. This is why the judgment is so absolute. A nation that would tolerate the burning of its children to an idol had lost the very thing that made it God's.3
Twice in these verses the LORD speaks a phrase of terrible directness: I will set my face against that man (vv. 3, 5). It is the language of a personal adversary - not a law operating impersonally in the background, but the living God turning to face the offender as an opponent. The same idiom returns in verse 6 against the one who turns to familiar spirits, so that three times in eight verses God says, in effect, I myself am against this. And the judgment has a communal edge that is easy to miss. Verses 4-5 address what happens if the people of the land do any ways hide their eyes - if the community sees the evil and looks away, refusing to act. Then God sets His face not only against the offender but against the family and against all who follow him in it. The point is sobering: holiness was never meant to be a private matter that a community could shield by silence. A people who agreed to ignore the burning of children would themselves come under the judgment they refused to carry out. To hide the eyes from such evil was to share in it.
6And the soul that turneth after such as have familiar spirits, and after wizards, to go a whoring after them, I will even set my face against that soul, and will cut him off from among his people. 7Sanctify yourselves therefore, and be ye holy: for I am the LORD your God. 8And ye shall keep my statutes, and do them: I am the LORD which sanctify you.
Beside Molech worship the chapter sets a second great betrayal: turning after such as have familiar spirits, and after wizards (v. 6). A familiar spirit meant the claimed power to summon and speak with the dead or with hidden spirits; a wizard was one who professed secret knowledge from such sources. To go after them was, the verse says, to go a whoring - the same word used for idolatry throughout the chapter, because that is exactly what it was. God had bound Himself to His people as the one who speaks to them, who guides them, who gives them every word and wisdom they need. To turn instead to mediums and diviners for guidance or power was to leave the God who had spoken and chase after counterfeits behind His back - a spiritual unfaithfulness as real as any other. The danger here is quieter than Molech's fire but runs in the same channel: both bypass the living God and seek from somewhere else the help and knowledge that He alone is meant to give. That is why the same dreadful sentence falls on it: I will even set my face against that soul.
Leviticus 20:9-21Their Blood Shall Be Upon Them
9For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death: he hath cursed his father or his mother; his blood shall be upon him. 10And the man that committeth adultery with another man's wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbour's wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death. 11And the man that lieth with his father's wife hath uncovered his father's nakedness: both of them shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them. 12And if a man lie with his daughter in law, both of them shall surely be put to death: they have wrought confusion; their blood shall be upon them.
The judgments now turn to the family, and they begin in a place that may surprise a modern reader: every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death (v. 9). To curse a parent here means far more than a moment's hot word; it is the settled repudiation of the father and mother - calling down evil upon them, treating with contempt the ones to whom one owes one's very life. In the order of that covenant nation, honoring father and mother was a load-bearing pillar of the whole society, and to assault it at the root was to begin pulling the house down. That is why the judgment on cursing a parent stands at the head of this list, just before the sins of the marriage bed: both strike at the structure of the family that God had built into His people. The recurring verdict - his blood shall be upon him - is a phrase of legal responsibility. It means the guilt rests squarely on the offender; he, and not another, bears what his act has brought upon him. The phrase is solemn, not vindictive: it insists that each person answers for what he himself has done.3
13If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them. 14And if a man take a wife and her mother, it is wickedness: they shall be burnt with fire, both he and they; that there be no wickedness among you. 15And if a man lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to death: and ye shall slay the beast. 16And if a woman approach unto any beast, and lie down thereto, thou shalt kill the woman, and the beast: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.
These verses set out the sexual boundaries of the covenant people, and they are best read soberly, for what they plainly are: God marking the lines within which the gift of sexuality was meant to be kept. The pattern given runs back to the creation order - the one-flesh union of a man and a woman in marriage, set within clear bounds of kinship and fidelity. Each act named here crosses one of those lines: the marriage bed broken by adultery, the bonds of the family violated, the order of created things itself overturned. The chapter does not linger over these sins or describe them beyond the bare naming; it states the category, names it as defilement, and moves on - and that restraint is itself instructive. The weight of these laws does not lie in spectacle but in the seriousness with which God regards the structure He gave. What happens inside the covenant of marriage - trust, faithfulness, the bringing forth of life - cannot happen where that covenant is torn apart, and the boundaries exist to guard it. Verse 14 adds the reason behind the whole list in a single phrase: that there be no wickedness among you. The aim was never cruelty; it was the keeping of a people clean, that the holiness God required might dwell among them.
17And if a man shall take his sister, his father's daughter, or his mother's daughter, and see her nakedness, and she see his nakedness; it is a wicked thing; and they shall be cut off in the sight of their people: he hath uncovered his sister's nakedness; he shall bear his iniquity. 18And if a man shall lie with a woman having her sickness, and shall uncover her nakedness; he hath discovered her fountain, and she hath uncovered the fountain of her blood: and both of them shall be cut off from among their people. 19And thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy mother's sister, nor of thy father's sister: for he uncovereth his near kin: they shall bear their iniquity. 20And if a man shall lie with his uncle's wife, he hath uncovered his uncle's nakedness: they shall bear their sin; they shall die childless. 21And if a man shall take his brother's wife, it is an unclean thing: he hath uncovered his brother's nakedness; they shall be childless.
The list closes with a set of judgments touching the near relations of the household, and a careful reader will notice that the penalties are not uniform. Some breaches carry death; others are met with being cut off, or with bearing one's own iniquity, or with the sentence they shall die childless (vv. 20-21). The gradation matters. It shows that these were not the pronouncements of blind severity but the measured judgments of a covenant law, weighing different acts differently. The family was the place where a person was meant to be safest of all - where the lines of kinship were clear, where authority was settled, where one could grow from child to elder without those lines ever being crossed for harm. Every violation named here attacks that safety from within, turning the household's closeness into an occasion for ruin. The repeated verdict - they shall bear their iniquity, they shall bear their sin - again places the weight squarely on those who broke the covenant; no one is condemned for another's act. And the sober phrase they shall be childless reaches past any human court: it names the way such sin closes off the very future, the family line, that the marriage covenant was meant to carry forward.
Leviticus 20:22-27Ye Shall Be Holy: That Ye Should Be Mine
22Ye shall therefore keep all my statutes, and all my judgments, and do them: that the land, whither I bring you to dwell therein, spue you not out. 23And ye shall not walk in the manners of the nation, which I cast out before you: for they committed all these things, and therefore I abhorred them. 24But I have said unto you, Ye shall inherit their land, and I will give it unto you to possess it, a land that floweth with milk and honey: I am the LORD your God, which have separated you from other people.
With verse 22 the chapter lifts its eyes from the individual offenses to the people as a whole and to the land they are about to enter. Ye shall therefore keep all my statutes… that the land… spue you not out. The image is deliberately vivid: the land itself is pictured as unable to keep down a people defiled by such sins, casting them out as a body rejects what it cannot hold. And the warning is grounded in history close at hand. The nations already in the land had committed all these things, and the same defilement had brought them to ruin: therefore I abhorred them (v. 23). Israel was to learn the lesson rather than repeat it - not to walk in the manners of those nations, but to live a different kind of life entirely. This is the sober truth that runs beneath the whole chapter and reaches far past that one land and time: sin defiles, and a holy God is not mocked. What a people sow into their common life, they reap. The same God who set His face against Molech here sets a limit to how long unfaithfulness can dwell in His presence. Holiness, it turns out, is not a private virtue with no public weight; it is bound up with whether a people can stand in the place God gives them at all.3
25Ye shall therefore put difference between clean beasts and unclean, and between unclean fowls and clean: and ye shall not make your souls abominable by beast, or by fowl, or by any manner of living thing that creepeth on the ground, which I have separated from you as unclean. 26And ye shall be holy unto me: for I the LORD am holy, and have severed you from other people, that ye should be mine.
Verse 25 may seem at first to change the subject - from the gravest sins to the everyday matter of clean and unclean animals. But the connecting word is the key: Israel was to put difference between clean and unclean because God had separated the unclean from them. The dietary distinctions were a daily, tangible rehearsal of a far larger truth. Every meal became a small lesson in discernment, a reminder at the table that this people lived by drawing lines the surrounding nations did not draw. The discipline was not arbitrary fussiness; it trained a whole people in the habit of distinguishing - this belongs, that does not; this is for us, that has been set apart from us. And that habit, practiced over bread and meat, pointed straight to the great separation the next verse names. A people learning to put difference in the ordinary things were being formed to be a people set apart in everything. The clean and the unclean were a parable lived out three times a day: you are not like the nations; you have been marked off; you belong to another.
27A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them.
The chapter ends where it began. Verse 6 warned against turning to those who have familiar spirits; verse 27 closes the circle by naming the mediums and diviners themselves. The familiar spirits and the fire of Molech bracket the whole chapter on either end because, for all their difference, they are the same root sin - the reaching for spiritual power, knowledge, or security from anywhere other than the God who had bound Himself to His people. A medium claimed access to the dead and to hidden things; an idol promised what its worshippers could not get from heaven. Both were a turning away from the LORD to a counterfeit, and the covenant drew its sharpest line against exactly that. The placement is its own quiet sermon: the chapter that rises to the height of ye shall be holy… that ye should be mine comes back down, in its last verse, to the most basic loyalty of all. To be holy, to be God's, begins with this - that He alone is sought, He alone is consulted, He alone is trusted for the guidance and strength a life needs. Everything that wears a spiritual mask and offers those things apart from Him is, in the end, a rival for the heart that He has claimed as His own.2
Further study
- The Hebrew text of Leviticus 20 with Rashi, Ramban, and other classical commentators side by side - useful for qadosh (v. 26, “holy,” the root sense of being set apart), for the verb hivdil (vv. 24, 26, “separated… severed”), and for the repeated phrase I will set my face against that runs through verses 3, 5, and 6.
- Leviticus 20 ↔ 1 Peter 1 & 2 · 2 Corinthians 6 · Ezekiel 36Intertextual BibleTraces the threads tying Leviticus 20 to the rest of Scripture - the refrain be ye holy; for I am holy (v. 26) taken up for the whole people of God (1 Pet. 1:15-16; 2:9-10), the call to come out… and be ye separate (2 Cor. 6:17), and the land that would spue out its defilers read beside the promised cleansing and new heart of Ezekiel 36:25-27.
- Leviticus 20 - Translators' NotesNET BibleThe NET Bible's detailed footnotes on Leviticus 20 - the meaning of Molech worship and the giving of seed in verses 1-5, the idiom set my face against, the phrase cut off from among his people, the legal force of their blood shall be upon them, and the verb behind spue out in verse 22.
Where this echoes in Scripture
I Will Set My Face Against
- Leviticus 18:21And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God: I am the LORD.The boundary that verses 1-5 attach a judgment to - the prohibition of Molech worship in the companion chapter.
- Deuteronomy 18:10-12There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire... or a wizard... For all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD.The same two evils joined as here - child sacrifice and consulting spirits, both named abominations (vv. 2, 6).
- 1 Thessalonians 4:3For this is the will of God, even your sanctification.The call of verse 7 carried forward - sanctification named as the very will of God for His people.
- Hebrews 10:10we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.The promise of verse 8 fulfilled - the LORD who sanctifies His people, doing it through Christ.
- 1 Samuel 28:7Then said Saul unto his servants, Seek me a woman that hath a familiar spirit... behold, there is a woman that hath a familiar spirit at Endor.The sin of verse 6 lived out - a king turning to a medium, having abandoned the God who would no longer answer him.
Their Blood Shall Be Upon Them
- Leviticus 18:6-23None of you shall approach to any that is near of kin to him, to uncover their nakedness: I am the LORD.The boundaries this section attaches judgments to - the prohibitions named in the companion chapter.
- Exodus 20:12Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.The command behind verse 9 - the honor of father and mother that cursing them assaults.
- John 8:10-11Woman, where are those thine accusers?... Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.The law against adultery (v. 10) met by mercy - the sin taken seriously, and the sinner not crushed.
- Romans 6:23For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.The weight beneath the whole section - the death sin earns, and the life God gives in Christ.
- 1 Corinthians 6:9-11And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus.The sins catalogued here named again - and the washing that makes the guilty clean.
Ye Shall Be Holy: That Ye Should Be Mine
- 1 Peter 1:15-16But as he which hath called you is holy, so be ye holy... Be ye holy; for I am holy.The refrain of verse 26 taken up word for word - laid on the whole people of God.
- 1 Peter 2:9-10But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people... which had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy.The wonder of being severed to be His own (v. 26) - become the song of the church.
- 2 Corinthians 6:17Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord... and I will receive you.The call to live unlike the nations (vv. 23-26) - restated as the call to be set apart for God.
- Ezekiel 36:25-27Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean... A new heart also will I give you.The holiness this chapter demands - promised as a cleansing and a new heart God Himself works.
- Titus 2:14Who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.The line of verse 26 drawn in Christ’s own blood - a people purified to be His own.