Leviticus 18:23

The book of Leviticus contains laws given by God to Moses for the nation of Israel as they established themselves as a distinct community in the ancient world. Chapter 18 is specifically about sexual ethics, and it opens with God telling Israel not to imitate the practices of Egypt, where they had been enslaved, or Canaan, the land they were entering. Historical and archaeological evidence suggests that some surrounding cultures incorporated sexual relations with animals into religious fertility rituals. This verse explicitly prohibits both men and women from such acts, using the word "perversion" — a term suggesting a twisting or inversion of something's intended design. Alongside the other laws in this chapter, it places human sexuality within a framework of human dignity — the conviction that people, made in God's image, have a particular nature that shapes how they are to treat their own bodies and the bodies of others.

Father, you made us embodied — flesh and breath and bone — and you called it very good. Thank you that you don't look away from the physical reality of human life. Help me to honor the body you gave me, and to treat every person I encounter as someone whose body and dignity matters deeply to you. Amen.

Leviticus is the book most people quietly skip, and this verse is the kind that makes you wonder if your reading plan has gone wrong somewhere. But here is something worth noticing: God doesn't look away from the physical world. The laws in Leviticus 18 were given in a culture where some of what is listed here was practiced in religious settings — acts that modern readers would find obviously wrong but that surrounding nations sometimes treated as sacred ritual. God doesn't ignore it or spiritualize it away. He names it. He draws a line. Not because he's embarrassed by bodies or biology, but because he takes embodied human life seriously enough to protect it — including from distortions that religion itself can dress up and call holy. Every prohibition in this chapter implies an affirmation: there is something particular about being human, something worth guarding. Your body is not an accident. The laws here, strange as they feel in modern reading, point toward a God who cares about the specific, physical reality of the people he made — who refuses to treat what happens in human bodies as beneath his concern. You may never personally wrestle with what this verse addresses. But the principle underneath it touches everyone: you are not just a soul riding in a biological vehicle. The body matters. What you do with it matters. That's not a burden — that's a form of dignity.