Leviticus, the viral tweet, and Aquinas.

The viral tweet, verified verse by verse

The meme that periodically resurfaces online lists five things Leviticus also prohibits, usually as a reply to someone citing Leviticus 18:22 or 20:13. We checked all five against the Hebrew Bible (NIV unless noted).

1. Charging interest on loans — confirmed.

   “Do not take interest or any profit from them… You must not lend them money at interest or sell them food at a profit.” — Leviticus 25:36–37

   Repeated in Exodus 22:25 and, in broader form, Deuteronomy 23:19–20.

2. Trimming the beard — confirmed.

   “Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard.” — Leviticus 19:27

   Repeated for priests specifically in Leviticus 21:5.

3. Selling land — partially confirmed.

   “The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers.” — Leviticus 25:23

   The text bans permanent sale, not all sale. Land had to be returnable in the Jubilee year (Lev 25:10) — effectively a 50-year lease ceiling.

4. Eating shrimp (shellfish) — confirmed.

   Anything in the water “that does not have fins and scales” is forbidden, called “detestable” (NIV) or “an abomination” (KJV). — Leviticus 11:9–12

   Shrimp, lobster, crab, oysters, clams. Repeated in Deuteronomy 14:9–10.

5. Wearing two different fabrics — confirmed.

   “Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material.” — Leviticus 19:19

   Deuteronomy 22:11 narrows the prohibition to wool-and-linen specifically. Known in rabbinic Judaism as shatnez, still observed by Orthodox Jews today.

The same legal code that prohibits male-male intercourse also prohibits…

Leviticus 18:22 (“Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable”) and Leviticus 20:13 sit inside the Holiness Code — the same legal collection that includes Lev 19:19 (mixed fabrics), Lev 19:27 (beards), Lev 19:28 (tattoos), Lev 11 (shellfish), and Lev 25 (interest and land).

They are presented with identical legal authority. Each section closes with the same formula: “I am the LORD.”

From Leviticus

• Lev 11:7–8 — Eating pork is forbidden.
• Lev 11:6 — Eating rabbit is forbidden (the text classifies hares as cud-chewers, which they are not).
• Lev 11:5 — Eating the rock badger (hyrax) is forbidden on the same grounds.
• Lev 11:13–19 — A list of forbidden birds includes the eagle, vulture, red kite, raven, horned owl, screech owl, gull, hawk, cormorant, stork, heron, hoopoe, and bat (which the text classifies among birds).
• Lev 11:20–23 — Most flying insects are forbidden, but locusts, katydids, crickets, and grasshoppers are explicitly permitted as food.
• Lev 11:29–30 — Weasels, mice, geckos, monitor lizards, wall lizards, skinks, and chameleons are unclean.
• Lev 3:17 / 7:26 — Eating any blood or animal fat (suet) is forbidden as “a lasting ordinance for the generations to come.”
• Lev 19:9–10 — Farmers are forbidden to reap the corners of their fields or pick up dropped grapes; these must be left for the poor and the foreigner. (The law that the book of Ruth turns on.)
• Lev 19:19 — Crossbreeding livestock and sowing a field with two kinds of seed are forbidden alongside mixed fabrics.
• Lev 19:23–25 — The fruit of a newly planted tree may not be eaten for three years; the fourth year’s crop must be given to the LORD; only in year five may the owner eat from it.
• Lev 19:26 — “Do not eat any meat with the blood still in it. Do not practice divination or seek omens.”
• Lev 19:28 — “Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the LORD.”
• Lev 19:32 — “Stand up in the presence of the aged, show respect for the elderly.”
• Lev 20:9 — A child who curses his father or mother “is to be put to death.”
• Lev 20:10 — Both parties to adultery “are to be put to death.”
• Lev 20:15–16 — Bestiality is punishable by death, for both the human and the animal.
• Lev 20:18 — A man and a woman who have intercourse during her menstrual period: “Both of them must be cut off from their people.”
• Lev 21:5 — Priests are specifically forbidden to shave their heads, trim the edges of their beards, or cut their bodies.
• Lev 21:18–20 — Men with physical defects are barred from serving as priests: “no man who is blind or lame, disfigured or deformed; no man with a crippled foot or hand, or who is a hunchback or a dwarf, or who has any eye defect, or who has festering or running sores or damaged testicles.”
• Lev 22:24 — Sacrificing an animal whose testicles are “bruised, crushed, torn or cut” is forbidden.
• Lev 22:27–28 — A newborn ox, sheep, or goat must remain with its mother seven days before being eligible for sacrifice; and an animal and its young may not be slaughtered on the same day.
• Lev 24:16 — “Anyone who blasphemes the name of the LORD is to be put to death. The entire assembly must stone them.”
• Lev 25:8–10 — Every fiftieth year (the Jubilee) must release Hebrew slaves and return all sold land to the original family.
• Lev 25:23 — Land may not be sold in perpetuity, because “the land is mine,” says the LORD.

From Deuteronomy

• Deut 14:21 — “Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk.” (Basis for the kosher separation of meat and dairy.) The same verse permits selling roadkill to foreigners but forbids Israelites to eat it.
• Deut 21:18–21 — A “stubborn and rebellious son” who is “a glutton and a drunkard” is to be brought before the town elders and then stoned to death by all the men of the city.
• Deut 22:5 — “A woman must not wear men’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing, for the LORD your God detests anyone who does this.”
• Deut 22:6–7 — If you find a bird’s nest, you may take the young but must let the mother go free.
• Deut 22:8 — When you build a new house, you must build a parapet around its roof so that no one can fall off — failure to do so brings bloodguilt on the household. (An ancient building code.)
• Deut 22:9 — Planting two kinds of seed in a vineyard forfeits the entire crop.
• Deut 22:10 — “Do not plow with an ox and a donkey yoked together.”
• Deut 22:12 — “Make tassels on the four corners of the cloak you wear.” (Basis for the Jewish tzitzit.)
• Deut 23:1 — “No one who has been emasculated by crushing or cutting may enter the assembly of the LORD.”
• Deut 23:2 — Those of “illegitimate birth” and their descendants “even to the tenth generation” are excluded from the assembly.
• Deut 23:12–14 — Soldiers must defecate outside the camp and bury the excrement with a tool kept for that purpose, “for the LORD your God moves about in your camp.”
• Deut 25:5–10 — Levirate marriage: if a man dies childless, his brother must marry the widow; if he refuses, the widow removes his sandal and spits in his face, and his family is publicly known as “The Family of the Unsandaled.”
• Deut 25:11–12 — “If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity.” The only commandment in the Torah prescribing physical mutilation as punishment.
• Deut 25:13–16 — Carrying two different sets of weights (one heavy, one light) for cheating in commerce is “detestable” to God.

From the same legal corpus (Exodus and Numbers)

• Ex 35:2 — Anyone who works on the Sabbath “is to be put to death.” Numbers 15:32–36 narrates the actual stoning of a man who gathered sticks on the Sabbath.
• Num 5:11–31 — The “ordeal of bitter water”: a husband who suspects (but cannot prove) his wife of adultery brings her to the priest, who mixes holy water with dust from the tabernacle floor and ink scraped from a written curse, and forces her to drink it. If guilty, “her abdomen will swell and her thigh waste away”; if innocent, she suffers no harm. (The Mishnah records that this rite was discontinued by R. Yohanan ben Zakkai in the first century CE.)

Why this matters — the inconsistency argument

The viral tweet’s underlying argument is a kind of reductio: if Christians cite Leviticus 18:22 or 20:13 against same-sex relationships, intellectual honesty would seem to require enforcing the rest of the same code — or at least giving a principled reason why one prohibition binds and the others do not.

Christian theology has answered this by distinguishing three categories of Mosaic law — moral, ceremonial, and judicial — and arguing that Christ fulfilled and abrogated the latter two while the moral law remains binding. This framework, however, was developed long after the biblical text itself.

Proto-versions appear in Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Augustine, but the first complete formal articulation comes from Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century (Summa Theologica I-IIae, q. 99, a. 4):

“We must therefore distinguish three kinds of precept in the Old Law; viz., ‘moral’ precepts, which are dictated by the natural law; ‘ceremonial’ precepts, which are determinations of the Divine worship; and ‘judicial’ precepts.”

John Calvin adopted it in Institutes IV.xx.14:

“We must bear in mind that common division of the whole law of God published by Moses into moral, ceremonial, and judicial laws.”

The classification of any specific law into one of these three buckets is not stated in the biblical text itself. The two leading academic specialists on the Holiness Code — Jacob Milgrom (Leviticus 17–22, Anchor Bible, 2000) and Israel Knohl (The Sanctuary of Silence, Fortress, 1995) — both treat Leviticus 17–26 as an integrated corpus that intermixes ritual, ethical, and social legislation without any internal markers distinguishing “moral” from “ceremonial” precepts.

Three textual facts worth noting

• The penalty attached to Leviticus 20:13 (death) is identical to the penalties attached to adultery (20:10), cursing one’s parents (20:9), and bestiality (20:15–16) — laws no Christian tradition enforces today.
• The word translated “abomination” (Hebrew to‘evah) in Leviticus 18:22 is also the word used in Deuteronomy 14:3 for eating unclean foods, in Deuteronomy 22:5 for cross-dressing, and in Deuteronomy 25:16 for dishonest weights.
• Several New Testament passages (Acts 10:9–16; Mark 7:19; Colossians 2:16–17) are cited as superseding the dietary laws specifically — but the New Testament does not explicitly abrogate the laws against beard-trimming, mixed fabrics, mixed planting, or charging interest.

If you’re responding to the meme

The most defensible position, in our view:

1. Concede the factual point. Every claim in the tweet is biblically accurate (with the small qualifier on permanent vs. all land sale).
2. Add the missing detail. The list of “weird Leviticus rules” is far longer than five. Tattoos, mixed planting, executing rebellious sons, parapets, the four-year wait on fruit trees, the Jubilee, and dozens of capital crimes are all in the same corpus.
3. Engage the actual theological question. The interesting argument is not whether these laws exist — they do — but whether Aquinas’s threefold civil/ceremonial/moral distinction has textual warrant in the Hebrew Bible itself. As of current scholarship (Milgrom, Knohl), no such textual marker has been identified.
4. Cite specifically. Generic “Leviticus says…” arguments lose to specific chapter-and-verse citations. Use the ones above.

Caveats

• Many of these laws were rarely or never enforced even in ancient Israel. The Talmud (Sanhedrin 71a) asserts that the rebellious-son law of Deuteronomy 21 “never happened and never will happen — it was written only that you may study it and receive reward.” The bitter-water ordeal was formally discontinued in the first century CE (Mishnah Sotah 9:9).
• The boundaries of the prohibitions are sometimes narrower in the original Hebrew context than English translations imply. Lev 19:19’s “two kinds of material” is specified in Deut 22:11 as wool-and-linen specifically; Lev 19:27’s “edges of your beard” likely refers to a specific pagan mourning practice; Deut 25:11–12’s “cut off her hand” is interpreted by later rabbinic tradition as monetary compensation rather than literal amputation.
• “Charging interest” applied to loans within the Israelite community, not to foreigners (Deut 23:20). The standard Reformed reading, as Kevin DeYoung has summarized it at The Gospel Coalition, is that “loans in the Old Testament were given to those who were destitute and poor… But a loan as a business venture or investment risk has historically been considered a different kind of loan.”
• The Hebrew Bible’s classification of animals does not match modern zoology — rabbits and rock hyraxes do not in fact chew the cud, and bats are mammals, not birds. The NIV itself footnotes Leviticus 11 with the disclaimer that “the precise identification of some of the birds, insects and animals in this chapter is uncertain.”
• Translations vary in how blunt they make some laws — KJV’s “abomination” (Lev 11:10) softens to “detestable” in NIV; “secrets” (KJV Deut 25:11) becomes “private parts” or “genitals” in modern versions. Specific verse citations are stable across translations even when wording differs.

This page is part of the Deeper Waters Library — cross-tradition fact-checks and explainers for seekers who want primary sources, not slogans.