Strangers In The Land: Ger 013

Leviticus 18:24-29

‘Do not defile yourselves with any of these things; for by all these the nations are defiled, which I am casting out before you. For the land is defiled; therefore I visit the punishment of its iniquity upon it, and the land vomits out its inhabitants. You shall therefore keep My statutes and My judgments, and shall not commit any of these abominations, either any of your own nation or any ger who dwells among you (for all these abominations the men of the land have done, who were before you, and thus the land is defiled), lest the land vomit you out also when you defile it, as it vomited out the nations that were before you. For whoever commits any of these abominations, the persons who commit them shall be cut off from among their people.

What Does It Say?

The first half of Leviticus 18 deals with sins of a sexual nature, and the list is a doozy. After warning the Israelites not to be like the Egyptians of Canaanites, the Lord unloads the following  prohibitions:

1). No sex with those who are "near of kin."
2). No sex with your step-mom ("father's wife")
3). No sex with half-sisters (your father or mother's daughters)
4). No sex with your grandchildren (your son's daughter or daughter's daughter)
5). No sex with your aunt (father's sister or mother's sister)
6). No sex with your uncle or your uncle's wife (your father's brother or his wife)
7). No sex with your daughter-in-law
8). No sex with your sister-in-law (brother's wife)
9). No sex with a mother/daughter pair
10). No sex with a grandmother/granddaughter pair
11). No sex with a woman's sister while the woman is still alive.
12). No sex while a woman is menstruating
13). No adultery
14). No sacrificing your children/grandchildren (descendants) to Molech
15). No profaning the name of God
16). No gay sex (specifically, lying with a male as with a woman).
17). No beastiality
18). Also, no beastiality for women.

I'll just leave this here.

Now, there's plenty to unpack in that list (for example, homosexual sex is the only one of the above acts described as "an abomination," meaning it's worse than incest), not the least of which being that most of the above are wildly popular fetishes in our day. But there's two things that should stick out in our mind here:

1). This is all stuff that the Canaanites were doing on the regular. This should make us feel better about them getting wiped out.
2). All of this stuff is horrible enough in God's eyes that it justifies a genocide.

God says that these things are bad enough to cause the land, the earth itself to vomit a people out of it. And God implies that allowing resident aliens to engage in this behavior will bring the natives under the same judgement. These actions defile the land itself, whether performed by ger or natives.

So we see a further restriction of ger's "freedom of conscience." The ger are not free to perform their sexual abominations (or religious abominations, vis-a-vis child sacrifice) in the midst of God's people. This is not presented only as a violation of Divine Commandments, but as a violation of the natural order.