Holiness Code - Composition

Composition

The Holiness Code is a collection of many laws concerning several subjects. Critical scholarship therefore regards it as being generally a work constructed by the collecting together of a series of earlier collections of laws. One of the most noticeable elements of the work is a large section concerning the following sexual activities, which are prohibited lest the land spue you out:

• Do not be sexually involved with your close relatives
• Do not be sexually involved with your mother or step-mother
• Do not be sexually involved with your sister, step-sister, or sister-in-law
• Do not be sexually involved with your aunts (biological or through marriage)
• Do not be sexually involved with your granddaughter
• Do not be sexually involved with your daughter-in-law
• Do not be sexually involved with a woman as well as her daughter
• Do not be sexually involved with a ritually unclean woman
• Do not be sexually involved with your neighbour's wife
• Do not pass your seed/children through the fire to moloch
• Do not be sexually involved with a man as you would with a woman
• Do not be sexually involved with a beast

These are listed within Leviticus 18. They are also listed again, shortly afterward, with the same admonition against following the practices of the Canaanites lest the land spue you out, at Leviticus 20. While Leviticus 18 presents them as a simple list, Leviticus 20 presents them in a chiastic structure based on how serious a crime they are viewed, as well as presenting the punishment deemed appropriate for each, ranging from excommunication to execution. Leviticus 20 also presents the list in a more verbose manner.

Furthermore, Leviticus 22:11-21 parallels Leviticus 17, and there are, according to textual criticism, passages at Leviticus 18:26, 19:37, 22:31-33, 24:22, and 25:55, which, have the appearance of once standing at the end of independent laws or collections of laws as colophons. For this reason, several scholars view the five sections preceding between each of these passages as deriving from originally separate documents. In particular, the two segments containing the sexual prohibitions, Leviticus 17:2-18:26 and Leviticus 20:1-22:33, are seen as being based on essentially the same law code, with Leviticus 20:1-22:33 regarded as the later version of the two.

Chapter 19, which ends in a colophon, has a similarity with the Ritual Decalogue, though presenting a more detailed and expanded version, leading critical scholars to conclude it represents a much later version of that decalogue. Notably, it contains the commandment popularly referred to as love thy neighbour as thyself (the Great Commandment), and begins with the commandment ye shall be holy, for I, Yahweh, am holy, which Christianity regards as the two most important commandments. This chapter is widely regarded as a very elegantly written development of ethics.

By this reckoning, there are thus at least five earlier law collections which were redacted together, with an additional hortatory conclusion, to form the Holiness Code. Two of which contain a list of sexual prohibitions, and one of which was a development of the Ritual Decalogue.