God is for women. Period.
Throughout Leviticus God gives Moses rules that reveal His care for and protection of women.
Chapter twelve, verses 1-8 highlight the regulations regarding childbirth. If a woman has a son, she must undergo a time of purification that lasts forty days. If a woman has a daughter, that time is doubled. The days of purification permit physical healing and require sexual abstinence; therefore, the husband must practice self-control during this time. Certainly, this regulation affirms God’s care for women.
Chapter eighteen begins with God’s desire that His people differ from those of their past and those in their future, “According to the doings of the land of Egypt, where you dwelt, you shall not do; and according the the doings of the land of Canaan, where I am bringing you, you shall not do; nor shall you walk in their ordinances” (18:3). The LORD instructs Moses to record regulations regarding sexual boundaries within and without the family. He lists the sexual relationships that are forbidden:
- A man with his mother
- A man with his father’s wife
- A man with his sister (the daughter of his father or his mother)
- A man with his son’s daughter or daughter’s daughter
- A man with his father’s wife’s daughter
- A man with his father’s sister
- A man with his mother’s sister
- A man with his father’s brother’s wife
- A man with his daughter-in-law
- A man with his brother’s wife
- A man with a woman and her daughter or her son’s daughter or daughter’s daughter
- A man with a woman and her sister.
- A man with his neighbor’s wife
- A man with with another man
- A man with an animal or a woman with an animal
What do these and other regulations regarding women reveal about God? About sex? About community?.
Selfishness and chaos destroy the community that exists without rules and regulations.
Without rules and relationship boundaries Israel would be defiled—like the nations around them. Apart from God, gross sexual sins characterize communities and societies that remove stigmas attached to sexual immorality and that grant freedom in personal sexual preferences and expression.
Life outside of Eden requires self-control, so God in His goodness establishes relationship boundaries. Rules cannot stop violators, but enforced rules create safe places for people to thrive without living in constant fear.
A community without rules leave the weak vulnerable to the strong. A community without rules embolden the strong to act out their fleshly impulses.
~Iva May