2. I am the LORD your God. As elsewhere in the Torah, this declaration at the beginning, or the end, of a set of legal injunctions echoes the set form for royal proclamations in the ancient Near East, and has the sense: “By the authority invested in me as your sovereign I hereby enjoin you.”

3. the deeds of the land of Egypt . . . the deeds of the land of Canaan. Were such “deeds” (singular in the Hebrew) of incest and related forms of sexual license endemic in Egypt and Canaan, and not prevalent in Mesopotamia and Phoenicia, which go unmentioned here? Despite the presence of sister-brother marriages in the Egyptian royal house, and perhaps even beyond it, the association of both countries with unbridled sexuality surely cannot be grounded in historical observation. Egypt and Canaan are no doubt invoked because these are the two pagan countries in which Israel has collectively resided. Otherwise, the identification of both countries as theaters of sexual license may be attributed to a widespread reflex of projecting uncontrolled sexuality onto the cultural other (as Jews were sometimes thought of in Christian Europe, blacks in America). This reflex would have been reinforced by the tendency to see the polytheistic world as a realm lacking restraint, in contradistinction to the Israelite conception of one God and one clear-cut set of binding restrictions.

their statutes. Ḥuqot, as elsewhere, is translated as “statutes,” its etymological primary sense (“things inscribed”), in order to maintain the counterpoint with God’s statutes in the next verse. The meaning in context, however, by a kind of metonymic slide from law to action, is something like “habitual practice.” When the same term occurs in the last verse of this chapter, the context requires rendering it as “practices.”

6. No man. The male is singled out, one infers, because he is assumed to take the initiative in sexual acts. An exception here (verse 23) is the woman engaging in bestiality.

his own flesh. This phrase follows an idiomatic pattern of placing two synonyms together in construct state—here, sheʾer and basar, both of which mean “flesh”—in order to indicate emphasis or a superlative.

nakedness. The Hebrew noun ʿerwah transparently derives from a verbal root that means “to be naked,” but all its uses suggest either vulnerability (as in Joseph’s words to his brothers, “To see the land’s nakedness you have come,” Genesis 42:9) or shamefulness. Some characterize the term as a euphemism for the genitalia, but if that is the case, it constitutes one of those instances in which the euphemism itself becomes a potent and fraught term. When Saul denounces Jonathan for disloyalty “to . . . the shame of your mother’s nakedness” (1 Samuel 20:30), the term verges on an obscenity, as references to the mother’s pudenda are used in Arabic and other languages.

7. which is your mother’s nakedness. Although the Hebrew uses waw here (usually, “and”), it is in this case the equivalent of an explanatory subordinate clause, as the next sentence makes clear. A kind of contagion of nakedness is envisaged. Because the mother’s nakedness has been in contact with the father’s nakedness—and because in the patriarchal order her sexuality “belongs” to him—she is taboo.

8. your father’s wife. Especially given the circumstances of polygamy, one’s father’s wife would not necessarily be one’s mother.

10. your son’s daughter. Presumably, a prohibition on intercourse with one’s own daughter is also assumed, but no satisfactory explanation has been offered for why it is not explicitly stated.

18. a woman with her sister. As many interpreters have noted, this and several other prohibitions in the list are explicitly violated by figures in the national narrative of Israel: Jacob marries two sisters; Abraham claims that Sarah is his half sister; David’s daughter Tamar appears to think it possible that her father can arrange a marriage between her and her half brother Amnon. Either these laws represent a Priestly “reform” in sexual practice, as Milgrom proposes, or certain once acceptable sexual unions had come through evolving social consensus to be regarded as taboo.

to become rivals. This is the technical term, grounded in realism, for the condition of co-wives in polygamy. In the clause “while her sister is still alive” the words “her sister” are added for clarity.

20. to spill seed. “Spill” is merely implied by the compact lezaraʿ, “for seed.” The two defining elements for adultery, indicated here with legal precision, are penetration and ejaculation. The potential consequence, of course, is that the woman could produce a child of dubious paternity—a particularly problematic condition in this patrilinear society.

21. dedicate any of your seed to pass over to Molech. Molech is a Canaanite deity whose name suggests “king.” The authentic form of the name may have been Malik, revocalized by the Masoretes to make the word resemble boshet, “shame.” The most likely reference of the whole phrase is to child sacrifice, which in fact was widely practiced in the Syro-Palestinian sphere, as vividly attested by the vast number of children’s graves uncovered at the site of Carthage, the Phoenician colony in North Africa. The verb “pass over” would then be an ellipsis for “pass over through fire,” used in other texts for this pagan practice. Some scholars, however, maintain that what was involved was a dedication ceremony in which the child was passed over the fire but not burned as a sacrifice. The metonymy “seed” for “child” links this law with the preceding ones and those that follow in which seed in the sense of semen is deposited in a forbidden place.

22. with a male you shall not lie as one lies with a woman. The explicitness of this law—the Hebrew for “as one lies” is the plural construct noun mishkevei, “bedding,” used exclusively for sexual intercourse—suggests that it is a ban on anal intercourse and intercrural intercourse (the latter often practiced by the Greeks). Other forms of homosexual activity do not seem of urgent concern. The evident rationale for the prohibition is the wasting of seed in what the law appears to envisage as a kind of grotesque parody of heterosexual intercourse. (Lesbianism, which surely must have been known in the ancient Near East, is nowhere mentioned, perhaps because no wasting of seed is involved, although the reason for the omission remains unclear.) There is scant textual evidence to support the apologetic claim of some recent interpreters that the ban on homosexual congress is limited to the preceding list of incestuous unions. One may apply here the proposal of Mary Douglas that this is a culture that likes to keep lines of categorical distinction clear: no human-beast couplings are allowed (in contrast to the imaginative freedom on this topic of Greek myth), and any simulation of procreative heterosexual intercourse by the insertion of the male member in an orifice or fleshy crevice of another male is abhorrent.

23. a woman shall not present herself to a beast. The literal sense of the verb is “stand before” (which in other contexts can mean “to perform service”), but in fact she is crouching, with posterior toward the male beast, as the verb here for coupling, r-b-ʿ, indicates, since it is cognate (possibly via the Aramaic) with r-b-ts, the verb used for an animal’s crouching. It is puzzling that no mention is made in the present context of acts of bestiality by males, though in chapter 21 this is defined as a capital offense.

27. the men of the land. Perhaps the Hebrew ʾanshey also includes women, as the taboo in verse 23 suggests, but it is surely meant to pick up the initial “No man of you” in verse 6.

29. the person who does it. The Hebrew actually switches from the initial singular “whosoever does” to a plural “the persons who do it,” but the singular is used in the translation because of the requirement of consistency of English usage.