Sexual Prohibitions

Why the promiscuous daughter of a priest and Tamar, the widowed daughter-in-law of Judah, are sentenced to die by fire. The “poetic justice” of immolation.

The Mishnah adds further humiliation to the biblical sotah ritual for a suspected adulteress. Other rabbinic texts from the same period critique this expansion, as well as the gender inequality inherent in the ritual itself.

Leviticus 18 and 20 condemn sexual sins using several harsh terms; toevah, zimmah, chesed, tevel. Do these terms have specific meanings and what do they tell us about the Torah’s reason for forbidding incest?

Leviticus 18 includes an extensive list of prohibited sexual relations, including incest, but it does not mention relations between a father and daughter. How can this glaring omission be explained?

Only two law collections in the ancient Near East discuss bestiality: the Torah and the Hittite laws. How do these laws differ, and what motivated them?

The Torah reading on the afternoon of Yom Kippur consists of the list of forbidden sexual relations (Leviticus 18).  How do these laws connect to Yom Kippur? 

Leviticus 15:24 does not declare sex with a menstruating woman to be forbidden, only that it results in temporary impurity. Leviticus 18:19 and 20:18, however, strictly prohibit it. What accounts for these two different approaches?

Popular legend tells us that Rabbenu Gershom (d. ca 1028) was the first to prohibit polygyny. The Damascus Covenant’s understanding of the law in Leviticus 18:18, however, suggests that polygyny may have been prohibited more than a thousand years earlier by the Priestly authors.

An investigation of the ideology behind Deuteronomy 22:12-29.

In reference to the parturient, the Torah speaks of a 33 or 66 day period of דמי טהרה “blood of her purity” as distinguished from a 7 or 14 day period “like menstruation.” What is the difference between these two periods according to Leviticus and how did later groups such as rabbinic Jews, Karaites, Samaritans, and Beta Israel understand it?

How do the laws of Leviticus 18 compare to the laws and practices of the Babylonians, Hittites, and Egyptians, and to the rest of the Bible?