Leviticus — Chapter 20

God Himself speaks the prohibition against offering children to Moloch (Lev. 20:1-5), threatening to cut off not only the offender but also those who close their eyes to it. Lapide: the complicity of silence in the face of grave public evil — child sacrifice, then; grave injustice and public immorality, now — is itself a sin calling down divine punishment. The citizen and the pastor who fail to oppose grave public evil share in the guilt of those who commit it.

The penalty of death by stoning for those who give their children to Moloch (Lev. 20:2) shows the gravity with which God regards the profanation of human life and the corruption of children. Lapide draws the analogy: just as Moloch demanded children pass through fire, so in modern times children are offered to demonic pleasure and worldliness by parents who neglect their spiritual formation. The punishment of God falls in this age too, in social dissolution and the loss of faith.

The soul that shall go aside after magicians and soothsayers, and shall commit fornication with them, I will set my face against that soul (Lev. 20:6). Lapide: divination and magic are a form of spiritual fornication — the abandonment of God for the consultation of demons. The punishment is the same as for literal fornication: divine abandonment. He notes that the Council of Elvira (can. 6) and subsequent Church law treated magic and divination as grave sins requiring serious penance.

Adultery is punishable by death for both parties under the Mosaic law (Lev. 20:10). Lapide insists this was not merely a civil penalty but a moral declaration: adultery is a sin against the divine institution of marriage, against justice to one's spouse, against the dignity of progeny, and against the social bond itself. He cites the universal testimony of natural law (Cicero, De Officiis) that marriage is sacred, and notes that the Mosaic sanction far exceeded the laxity of contemporary Gentile practice.

The Mosaic law prescribes death for sodomy (Lev. 20:13). Lapide says: this was not a merely ceremonial or positive law but the expression of the natural law, which all peoples could know from reason. He cites Paul (Rom. 1:26-27), who declares that God abandons to vile passions those nations that have turned from the knowledge of God — the sin against nature being both a punishment and a cause of further moral disintegration.

Walk not in the ordinances of the nations which I cast out before you: for they did all these things, and therefore I abhorred them (Lev. 20:23). Lapide: the Canaanites were expelled for their sexual immorality, idolatry, and the worship of demons. This shows that the moral law is universal: God punished the Canaanites before the Mosaic law was given, because they sinned against the natural law. The same punishments — national dissolution and exile — await any people that abandons the natural moral order.

A man or woman in whom there is a pythonical or divining spirit, dying let them die (Lev. 20:27). Lapide: divination by spirits is strictly forbidden because it involves real communication with demons, not merely superstitious or psychological phenomena. He cites Saul's consultation of the witch of Endor (1 Kg. 28) as an example — though the apparition of Samuel was real, Saul's sin in seeking such consultation was grave, and contributed to his ultimate ruin. The Church's prohibition of spiritism and necromancy is rooted in this Mosaic legislation.