Beastiality - Exodus 22:19

22:19 - I feel like verses 18 and 19 should have been switched in order because verses 16 and 17 talk about sex, 18 talks about apostasy, 19 talks about sex, then 20 talks about apostasy too. Verses 16 and 17 talk about sex in terms of the obligations a man has when he convinced a woman to have sex with him outside of marriage, but 19 is different. Verse 19 says, “whosoever lieth with a beast shall surely be put to death.” The word “beast” is cross referenced with D&C 59:6 which says, “thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Thou shalt not steal; neither commit adultery, nor kill, nor do anything like unto it.” While that’s a good frame of reference for most things, I’m not exactly sure what that has to do with bestiality specifically.

Don’t get me wrong, I personally think having sex with an animal is gross and wrong, but I dont see why it’s a capital offense. TB has a tangent about how prevalent it was anciently in most cultures, but I contest it’s pretty common now too, people just don’t talk about it. And as much as I wouldn’t do it, I think that there are so many more horrific crimes out there that people don’t care about that I look at someone who has sex with an animal and I think “well, if they absolutely couldn’t control themselves, I would rather them have sex with an animal than rape a child,” you know, stuff like that. People do so many horrific things, that this is going to go in my “I have enough problems of my own, I can’t deal with everyone else’s,” box.

The IM comments, “sexual perversions with animals; one of the most evil of sexual sins.” I personally disagree with that, I think one of the most evil sexual sins would be anything non-consensual or anything with a child. And again, it’s not like these occurrences are so uncommon that we can advance the “sexual purity” agenda, because they are. These things happen so often, to the vast majority of women and a significant portion of men, so I personally would feel like, let’s comment on the gruesome statistics of rape and sexual assault across all demographics and then look to saving the animals. That’s just me. And this isn’t to say that the solution to those who perpetrate sexual violence is for them to have sex with animals, that’s not what I’m saying at all. I just feel like getting so outraged over sex with animals but not having the same level of outrage over sexual violence toward people is hypocritical. But again, that’s for our society, not the ancient one that we are discussing from the Bible.

Maybe it’s a hygiene issue, many of the laws of Moses were related to hygiene and it helped with disease prevention throughout the ages. Maybe it was to protect the people from getting sexually transmitted diseases through animals, I don’t know. Personally, I think the whole point is self-control because it features so heavily in the gospel now. Mastery over self has always been the end goal for most of the commandments of God, so it’s not hard to see that this would be an additional law serving that end. But the fact that it’s an offence punishable by death is surprising to me.

The IM made a comment at the beginning of the chapter that says, “Abinadi said that the law was ‘a very strict law’ of ‘performances and of ordinances’ give because Israel was a ‘stiffnecked people.’” So it is possible that this specific law was because of the nature of the population and just how strictly their actions needed to be policed. It could also have just been a common practice among all cultures at the time and God needed to cut that off real quick. I understand a law saying, “don’t do it,” but the death penalty is quite severe and I don’t know why this action warranted that.