Anyone who has sexual relations with an animal is to be put to death. The prohibition on bestiality is part of the sexual ethics section that also addresses seduction. The prohibition is absolute — no case distinctions, no graduated penalties. Leviticus 18:23–25 grounds all the sexual prohibitions in the character of the land: do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, because this is how the nations that I am going to drive out before you became defiled. The sexual ethics of the covenant community are not merely personal standards but communal conditions for life in the land. The boundaries between kinds — established in Genesis 1 through God's repeated after their kind — are honored by the prohibition on interspecies sexual relations.

COMMUNITY REFLECTIONS

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