Leviticus 20 Summary and Study Guide

Leviticus 20:4 turns from the man who gave his child to Molech to the neighbours who saw it and looked away. The chapter attaches sentences to sins God had already forbidden, and it holds a whole community answerable for them. This Leviticus 20 summary and study guide takes the chapter in order and stops where readers stumble.

Setting the Stage

God carried Israel out of Egypt and started them toward Canaan, a land already full of people who worshipped other gods.

Two chapters earlier He had told them to live like neither country: “After the doings of the land of Egypt, wherein ye dwelt, shall ye not do: and after the doings of the land of Canaan, whither I bring you, shall ye not do” (Leviticus 18:3). Leave the practices of the country behind you, and refuse the practices of the country ahead of you.

Leviticus 18 listed what was forbidden. Leviticus 19 called Israel to a whole way of life, including loving a neighbour as yourself. Leviticus 20 says what happens when someone does those things anyway. For the wider setting, see our Book of Leviticus Summary by Chapter.

Comprehensive Leviticus 20 Summary

God tells Moses to say it again, and this time a sentence comes with it. Anyone in Israel, citizen or foreigner, who hands a child over to the god Molech is to be stoned by the people themselves.

God adds His own judgment on top of theirs, and the two reasons He gives are about Himself: the act defiles His sanctuary and drags His name through the dirt. Then the sentence widens. If the neighbours see it and let him live, God says He will act Himself, against the man, against his family, and against everyone who joins him.

Anyone who goes to a medium is cut off from the people. Into the middle of all this comes the command the whole chapter serves: set yourselves apart and be holy, keep My statutes, for I am the LORD who makes you holy.

Then the list resumes. Cursing a father or mother carries death. So do adultery, three kinds of incest, a man lying with a man, and a man or woman lying with an animal. A man who marries both a woman and her mother is burned.

From verse 17 the sentences drop. Some offenders are cut off from the people, some carry their own guilt with no sacrifice offered for it, and two are left childless. The chapter closes by telling Israel why any of it matters. Keep these statutes, God says, so the land does not spit you out the way it spat out the nations before you.

Do not copy their customs. Keep the difference between clean and unclean even at your table, because I have set you apart and you belong to Me. Then one last sentence falls, on the person who is a medium rather than on the person who visits one.

One Word Summary

• Sentences: the chapter’s form is a list of penalties, not a list of commands.
• Accountability: the people carry out the punishment, and answer for it when they refuse.
• Separation: the reason God gives twice at the close, in verses 24 and 26.

In One Sentence

God tells Moses to repeat the laws of Leviticus 18 with penalties attached, sentencing any Israelite who gives a child to Molech, consults a medium, curses a parent, or breaks the boundaries God set around marriage and family, and He closes by telling Israel that He separated them from the nations to be His own.

Theme of Leviticus 20

Leviticus 20 is about holiness that God requires and God supplies. Most of it is a list of penalties for idolatry, occult practice, dishonoured parents and broken family boundaries, and each one is that requirement being enforced. Verses 7 and 8 carry both halves, where Israel is told to set itself apart and God at once claims the work as His own.

Two ideas run alongside. Holiness here is shared, because God holds answerable the community that shields a guilty man (20:4-5). And it is never a claim to be better than anybody, because God’s stated reason is that Israel belongs to Him (20:26).

Leviticus 20 Outline

• Leviticus 20:1-3: The LORD tells Moses that anyone in Israel who gives a child to Molech is to be stoned by the people, and that He will cut that man off for defiling His sanctuary and profaning His name.
• Leviticus 20:4-5: God warns that if the people hide their eyes and let the man live, He will set His face against him, against his family, and against everyone who follows him.
• Leviticus 20:6: God says He will cut off anyone who turns to mediums and wizards.
• Leviticus 20:7-8: God commands Israel to set themselves apart and keep His statutes, and names Himself as the one who makes them holy.
• Leviticus 20:9: Cursing a father or a mother carries the death penalty.
• Leviticus 20:10-13: Death is the sentence for adultery, for a man with his father’s wife, for a man with his daughter in law, and for a man lying with a man.
• Leviticus 20:14: A man who takes both a woman and her mother is burned with fire, so that no such wickedness remains in Israel.
• Leviticus 20:15-16: A man or a woman who lies with an animal is put to death, and the animal is killed as well.
• Leviticus 20:17-21: A man with his sister, a man with a woman during her monthly period, a man with an aunt, a man with his uncle’s wife, and a man with his brother’s wife are cut off, carry their own guilt, or are left childless.
• Leviticus 20:22-26: God tells Israel to keep His statutes so the land will not spit them out, to avoid the customs of the nation He is driving out, to keep clean animals separate from unclean, and to be holy because He is holy and has set them apart to be His.
• Leviticus 20:27: A man or a woman who is a medium or a wizard is to be stoned to death.

The Six Penalties of Leviticus 20

At first reading the chapter is one long run of death sentences. It is graded. Six different sentences fall across the twenty-seven verses, and where each one lands says how heavily God weighed the offence.

Two of them, carrying his own guilt and dying childless, leave the offender alive. Scholars who compare Israel’s law with the law codes of the surrounding nations note that those codes usually punished hardest the offences that cost somebody money. Israel’s heaviest sentences fall instead on offences against God and against the family.

Observations from Leviticus 20

Six Verses End the Same Way (20:9, 11, 12, 13, 16, 27)

“His blood shall be upon him” and “their blood shall be upon them” close six sentences in this chapter, and the phrase appears nowhere else in Leviticus. The guilty person carries his own death, with no one else to blame for it.

Three chapters earlier God had said it is the blood that makes atonement for the soul (Leviticus 17:11). Blood in Leviticus is normally the thing that covers a person. In this chapter it is the thing that condemns him.

The Chapter Opens and Closes with Stoning (20:2, 20:27)

The words “stone him with stones” and “stone them with stones” appear twice in Leviticus 20, once in the first sentence God gives and once in the last. Both fall on offences aimed directly at God rather than at a neighbour.

Everything else in the chapter sits inside that frame. Leviticus 20 has a great deal to say about what people did to each other, and it reserves stoning, the one sentence the whole nation carried out together, for what they did with God.

God Sets His Face Three Times in Four Verses (20:3, 5, 6)

In this chapter the phrase means God acts against the offender Himself rather than leaving the matter to a court.

They fall on the Molech worshipper himself (20:3), on his family and the people who join him in it (20:5), and on the person who turns to a medium (20:6). In each case God says He will act, whether or not anyone else does.

The Sentences Move from the Public to the Hidden (20:2-5, 20:18-21)

The chapter opens on an offence the whole community can see, with the community’s own hands carrying out the sentence. It closes on a woman during her monthly period, a man’s uncle’s wife, a man’s brother’s wife.

God treats both ends of that range as His business, which is the same point verse 4 makes from the other side.

The Word for Separating Is the Word from Genesis 1 (20:24, 25, 26)

Verses 24, 25 and 26 use one Hebrew verb, badal, both for what God did in setting Israel apart from the nations and for what Israel must do in keeping clean animals apart from unclean. It is the same verb Genesis 1 uses when God divides the light from the darkness and the waters from the waters.

That makes verse 25 less of an interruption than it looks. A rule about which birds may be eaten sits in a chapter of death sentences because it is the same act on a smaller scale, telling one thing from another, which is what God was doing on the first page of the Bible.

Difficult Verses Explained

Were People Really Burned Alive in Leviticus 20:14?

The text does not say, and Bible teachers have read it in more than one way. Most take it as burning after execution rather than burning alive, on the pattern of Achan, of whom Joshua records that “all Israel stoned him with stones, and burned them with fire, after they had stoned them with stones” (Joshua 7:25).

In other words, they killed him first and burned the body afterward. Adam Clarke argued for a third reading, that the wording covers a permanent mark of disgrace rather than a fire, partly because the man’s first wife in this verse may be entirely innocent. The Hebrew does not settle it, so the honest answer is death by fire in some form, without inventing the scene.

What Does “They Shall Die Childless” Mean in Leviticus 20:20-21?

It means the offender’s family line stops with him, and Scripture does not spell out the mechanism. Some take it as literal barrenness, some as children dying before the parents, and some as children who are counted to the dead brother’s or uncle’s line rather than to the natural father, which is how the law of the brother-in-law’s duty already worked in Israel (Deuteronomy 25:5).

What all three have in common is loss of a future, which in Israel was a heavy penalty in itself. This is a sentence attached to a named offence in Israel’s law, and Scripture nowhere lets anyone read a person’s childlessness as a verdict on them. Luke says of Zacharias and Elisabeth that “they were both righteous before God” and in the next breath that “they had no child” (Luke 1:6-7). They were righteous and childless at once.

Why Does God Command Death for Cursing a Parent?

Because the offence was far heavier than a sharp word said in anger. Verse 9 sits immediately after child sacrifice and the occult, and immediately before adultery. Many Bible teachers read all three as the same kind of act, calling on a power outside God to bring harm on someone, and here that someone is the person who gave them life.

Jesus quoted this law and refused to let religious tradition soften it: “He that curseth father or mother, let him die the death” (Matthew 15:4). He was saying that God had commanded it and no human rule could set it aside.

Why Is the Law About Mediums Given Twice, in Verse 6 and Verse 27?

Because the two verses sentence two different people. Verse 6 deals with the person who goes to a medium for answers, and God says He will cut that person off Himself. Verse 27 deals with the person who is the medium, and that sentence is death by stoning at the community’s hands. The heavier sentence falls on the one who practises it, not on the one who seeks it out.

Does Leviticus 20:13 Still Apply Today?

The moral standard stands, and the civil penalty belonged to Israel’s national law and ended with it. Leviticus 20 gave sentences to a nation governed directly by God, and the New Testament hands those sentences to the church and to modern states nowhere at all.

What it does do is repeat the moral judgment and then say something the Old Testament could not: Paul lists this among the sins that shut a person out of the kingdom, and then writes, “And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus” (1 Corinthians 6:11).

Some of the Corinthian believers had lived that way, and Christ had cleaned them, set them apart, and put them in the right with God. Read verse 13 the way the chapter files it: alongside adultery and incest, carrying the same sentence as they do and not a heavier one.

Common Misunderstandings

• “Leviticus 20 is just Leviticus 18 repeated with penalties added.” Nearly, and one offence is new. Cursing a father or mother (20:9) does not appear anywhere in Leviticus 18.
• “Verse 17 forbids relationships between step-brothers and step-sisters.” It names a sister, “his father’s daughter, or his mother’s daughter”, which is a full sister or a half sister. A step-sister shares no parent, and the verse does not describe her.
• “The chapter covers nieces and nephews.” No niece and no nephew appears anywhere in Leviticus 20. The relatives named are a parent, a father’s wife, a daughter in law, a sister, an aunt, an uncle’s wife, and a brother’s wife.
• “Cut off always means execution.” Sometimes it does, and in verses 17 and 18 it means being put out of the community in full view of everyone. The chapter uses the phrase both ways.
• “Verse 13 is singled out as the worst thing in the chapter.” It carries the same sentence as adultery in verse 10 and incest in verses 11 and 12, and not the fire that verse 14 attaches to the case of a wife and her mother together.
• “These sentences were carried out routinely.” Every capital case in Israel needed two or three witnesses, and the witnesses had to be certain enough to throw the first stone themselves (Deuteronomy 17:6-7). That requirement would have made convictions rare.
• “Verse 4 tells Israel to report offenders to the elders.” It says nothing about reporting. It addresses a community that has seen the crime and decided to do nothing at all.

Christ Connection

Six times this chapter says the guilty person’s blood is on his own head, and three times it says God will cut him off. Put those two together and you have a chapter with no substitute in it. Through most of Leviticus God gives Israel a way for something to die in a sinner’s place.

Here the offender carries it himself. That is the last place you would expect the gospel, and yet the New Testament reaches for this chapter’s own words when it describes what happened to Jesus.

• He was cut off. Isaiah says of the Servant, “he was cut off out of the land of the living” (Isaiah 53:8), and Daniel says, “shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself” (Daniel 9:26). Both describe the Messiah under the sentence this chapter passes on the guilty, and He had earned none of it. Paul names the result: “ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ” (Ephesians 2:13). He was cut off so that we could be brought near.
• The guilt was moved off the guilty. Isaiah writes, “the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:6). God put on His Servant the wrongdoing that belonged to everyone else, which is the exact reverse of a sentence that leaves a man’s blood on his own head.
• He died where the condemned died. In Israel a man under sentence was taken outside the camp (Leviticus 24:14). Hebrews puts Jesus in that place on purpose: “Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered without the gate” (Hebrews 13:12). He was executed where criminals were executed, and He did it to make His people holy.
• He is the one who sanctifies. Verse 8 of this chapter says the LORD is the one who makes Israel holy. Paul names the person: “Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption” (1 Corinthians 1:30). What God told Israel He would do for them, the New Testament says He does through His Son.

One more thread starts with the child at the top of the chapter. Micah asks aloud the question Leviticus 20 opens on: “shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” (Micah 6:7). Should I hand over my own child to pay for what I have done?

Leviticus 20 answers with a death sentence for anyone who tries it. The gospel answers a different way. God did not take anybody’s firstborn. He gave His own, and “spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all” (Romans 8:32).

When, Where, and Why

• When: In Israel’s first year after leaving Egypt. The tent of worship had been put up on the first day of the first month of the second year (Exodus 40:17), and Israel was still camped at the same mountain in the second month of that year (Numbers 1:1). Bible teachers usually place this somewhere in the fifteenth century BC, though the exact date is debated.
• Where: At Mount Sinai. Leviticus itself says so in its closing line: “These are the commandments, which the LORD commanded Moses for the children of Israel in mount Sinai” (Leviticus 27:34). The laws were given at the mountain, before Israel had set foot in the land the chapter keeps talking about.
• Why: Because Moses is writing to a nation about to move into a country whose people did all of this. The chapter says so itself in verse 23: the nations were driven out for these very practices. Israel needed to know that the land they were inheriting had already thrown out one set of tenants, and on what grounds. Some Bible teachers also ask why the penalties wait until chapter 20 rather than following the prohibitions of chapter 18, and suggest God put the high calling of chapter 19 between them on purpose, so that the sentence is what meets the person the calling did not reach.

Key Verses

“And if the people of the land do any ways hide their eyes from the man, when he giveth of his seed unto Molech, and kill him not:”

Leviticus 20:4

The phrase “of his seed” here means his own child. If the community sees a man handing his own child over to Molech and looks the other way instead of killing him as God commanded, God is speaking to them. This is the verse that turns Leviticus 20 from a list of other people’s sins into a question for everybody reading it.

“Sanctify yourselves therefore, and be ye holy: for I am the LORD your God. And ye shall keep my statutes, and do them: I am the LORD which sanctify you.”

Leviticus 20:7-8

Set yourselves apart and live it out, God says, and I am the one who makes you holy. God placed this command in the middle of the sentences rather than at either end of them, so the penalties on both sides of it are serving it.

“Ye shall therefore keep all my statutes, and all my judgments, and do them: that the land, whither I bring you to dwell therein, spue you not out.”

Leviticus 20:22

Keep everything I have told you, God says, so that the country I am taking you into does not throw you out of it. Israel did not keep them, and centuries later the land did exactly what this verse warned it would (2 Kings 17:7-23).

“And ye shall be holy unto me: for I the LORD am holy, and have severed you from other people, that ye should be mine.”

Leviticus 20:26

You are to be holy because I am holy, God says, and I separated you from every other nation so that you would belong to Me. The last three words are the reason for all twenty-seven verses.

Key Lessons from Leviticus 20

• God repeats a law He has already given, and attaches a consequence the second time (20:2).
• God holds a community answerable for the evil it sees and refuses to act on (20:4-5).
• God put the foreigner living in Israel under exactly the same law as the Israelite (20:2).
• The chapter names the woman’s case as carefully as the man’s (20:16, 20:27).
• Israel’s separation from the nations was God’s own act before it was ever their duty (20:24, 20:26).

To go deeper into the lessons from this chapter, read our full study: Lessons from Leviticus 20.

Bible Study Questions

1. Read Leviticus 20:2-5. What does God say He will do about the man himself, and what does He say He will do about the people who watched?
2. Read Leviticus 20:2 and notice who the law binds besides the Israelite. What does that say about who God holds answerable?
3. The sentences in verses 17 to 21 are lighter than the ones in verses 10 to 16. What does that difference suggest about how God weighs sin?
4. Verse 22 warns that the land could spit Israel out. Read Leviticus 18:28 alongside it. What is God saying about the connection between a people and the place they live?
5. Six verses in this chapter end with the guilty person’s blood on his own head. What difference does it make to you that Christ took that sentence when He had earned none of it?
6. Verse 26 gives the reason for everything before it: “that ye should be mine.” If you belong to God, how does that change the way you read a chapter this severe?

Frequently Asked Questions

Leviticus 20, The Full Text (KJV)

Read the full chapter below for reference.

1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying,

2 Again, thou shalt say to the children of Israel, Whosoever he be of the children of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn in Israel, that giveth any of his seed unto Molech; he shall surely be put to death: the people of the land shall stone him with stones.

3 And I will set my face against that man, and will cut him off from among his people; because he hath given of his seed unto Molech, to defile my sanctuary, and to profane my holy name.

4 And if the people of the land do any ways hide their eyes from the man, when he giveth of his seed unto Molech, and kill him not:

5 Then I will set my face against that man, and against his family, and will cut him off, and all that go a whoring after him, to commit whoredom with Molech, from among their people.

6 And the soul that turneth after such as have familiar spirits, and after wizards, to go a whoring after them, I will even set my face against that soul, and will cut him off from among his people.

7 Sanctify yourselves therefore, and be ye holy: for I am the LORD your God.

8 And ye shall keep my statutes, and do them: I am the LORD which sanctify you.

9 For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death: he hath cursed his father or his mother; his blood shall be upon him.

10 And the man that committeth adultery with another man’s wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbour’s wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.

11 And the man that lieth with his father’s wife hath uncovered his father’s nakedness: both of them shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.

12 And if a man lie with his daughter in law, both of them shall surely be put to death: they have wrought confusion; their blood shall be upon them.

13 If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.

14 And if a man take a wife and her mother, it is wickedness: they shall be burnt with fire, both he and they; that there be no wickedness among you.

15 And if a man lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to death: and ye shall slay the beast.

16 And if a woman approach unto any beast, and lie down thereto, thou shalt kill the woman, and the beast: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.

17 And if a man shall take his sister, his father’s daughter, or his mother’s daughter, and see her nakedness, and she see his nakedness; it is a wicked thing; and they shall be cut off in the sight of their people: he hath uncovered his sister’s nakedness; he shall bear his iniquity.

18 And if a man shall lie with a woman having her sickness, and shall uncover her nakedness; he hath discovered her fountain, and she hath uncovered the fountain of her blood: and both of them shall be cut off from among their people.

19 And thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy mother’s sister, nor of thy father’s sister: for he uncovereth his near kin: they shall bear their iniquity.

20 And if a man shall lie with his uncle’s wife, he hath uncovered his uncle’s nakedness: they shall bear their sin; they shall die childless.

21 And if a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing: he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless.

22 Ye shall therefore keep all my statutes, and all my judgments, and do them: that the land, whither I bring you to dwell therein, spue you not out.

23 And ye shall not walk in the manners of the nation, which I cast out before you: for they committed all these things, and therefore I abhorred them.

24 But I have said unto you, Ye shall inherit their land, and I will give it unto you to possess it, a land that floweth with milk and honey: I am the LORD your God, which have separated you from other people.

25 Ye shall therefore put difference between clean beasts and unclean, and between unclean fowls and clean: and ye shall not make your souls abominable by beast, or by fowl, or by any manner of living thing that creepeth on the ground, which I have separated from you as unclean.

26 And ye shall be holy unto me: for I the LORD am holy, and have severed you from other people, that ye should be mine.

27 A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them.