Leviticus is treated as simultaneously obsolete and inerrant, depending on the verse number.
The Levitical Shell Game: How Christianity Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bacon
The central contradiction in contemporary conservative Christianity is no longer subtle; it is structural. Leviticus is treated as simultaneously obsolete and inerrant, depending on the verse number.
Chapter 11 (dietary laws) and chapter 19 (mixed fabrics, rounded haircuts, seed mixing) are declared “ceremonial,” fulfilled in Christ, and therefore non-binding.
Chapter 18 and 20 (sexual prohibitions, especially 18:22 and 20:13) are declared “moral,” transcending the Mosaic covenant, and therefore eternally normative.
This taxonomy is presented as ancient, obvious, and self-evident. It is none of those things.
The tripartite division of the Law (moral / ceremonial / civil) is a post-biblical construct, formalized by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century and popularized by the Reformers. The Hebrew Bible itself makes no such distinction; all 613 commandments are given equal weight under the single rubric of Torah. Jesus himself says he came not to abolish the Law but to fulfill it, and warns that not one jot or tittle will pass away until “all is accomplished” (Matt 5:17-18), language that offered his followers no obvious escape hatch for pork or polyester.
Yet today the average evangelical will quote Leviticus against same-sex relationships in one breath and order shrimp scampi in the next, without noticing that both prohibitions use the identical Hebrew term תּוֹ×¢ֵבָ×” (tôʿēbâ, “abomination”). The word appears 117 times in the Hebrew Bible; it describes shellfish, dishonest scales, and pride with the same severity it applies to male-male intercourse. No canonical hierarchy is provided.
The standard apologetic move is to insist that sexual sins in Leviticus 18 are “reaffirmed in the New Testament” while dietary and clothing laws are not. This is true only in the narrowest sense. The New Testament explicitly reaffirms very few Old Testament laws by name: idolatry, adultery, and (in some readings) same-sex activity make the cut. But it is silent on bestiality after the Torah, and no one concludes that bestiality is now permissible. Conversely, the New Testament never abrogates the ban on rounding the corners of one’s beard, yet no conservative congregation enforces it. The “New Testament reaffirmation” criterion is therefore applied selectively, exactly where cultural anxiety is highest.
The deeper issue is anthropological. Modern conservative readings treat sexuality as the final citadel of “biblical morality” precisely because every other citadel has already fallen. Slavery, genocide, subjugation of women, and usury were all defended with equal or greater scriptural warrant for centuries. Each was abandoned only after sustained moral pressure from outside the biblical text, followed by retroactive harmonization. The pattern is identical: first vehement denial, then grudging concession, then the claim that “we never really believed that anyway.”
What remains in the “non-negotiable” column is almost perfectly correlated not with textual weight but with contemporary Western culture-war flashpoints. Divorce is statistically more common among evangelicals than the general population and is almost never preached with the intensity once reserved for it by Jesus himself. Greed, gluttony, and neglect of the poor are named as sins far more frequently in both testaments, yet they generate no denominational schisms.
The Levitical shell game, then, is not an exegetical conclusion. It is a sociological survival mechanism: a way to maintain the appearance of scriptural fidelity while quietly updating the operating system every generation.
The Honest Options
Return to full Torah observance (dietary laws, fringes, stoning, the works). Almost no one, including the fiercest culture-war pastors, is willing to do this.
Admit that the Church, guided by the Spirit and reason, discerns which parts of Scripture remain binding and which do not, and that this discernment is an ongoing, fallible, culture-influenced process. This is what has already happened with slavery, women, and usury, and what is happening now with sexuality.
Continue the shell game and hope no one notices that the pea was never under any of the shells to begin with.
History strongly suggests the second path is the one actually taken, even by those who most loudly deny it. The only question left is how much damage will be done, and how many people will be wounded, before the next reluctant update is issued and retroactively declared to have been “the plain meaning all along.”
Read Leviticus Online
You can read Leviticus (or any other book of the Bible) in a very clean, online Bible with minimal distractions:
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