Incest

Incest is sexual relations between people too closely related by blood or marriage to be married to one another, and Scripture treats it as a violation of the boundaries of the household rather than naming it with a single word. Biblical Hebrew and Greek have no one term for the concept; the texts describe particular acts instead — a man going in to his father's concubine, a man with his sister, a man with his brother's wife — and the reader is expected to recognize the pattern.

The narrative passages show what was at stake. Genesis 35:22 records that Reuben lay with Bilhah, his father's concubine, and that Israel heard of it; Jacob's deathbed word in Genesis 49:4 reads the act as going up to his father's bed and defiling it, and 1 Chronicles 5:1 draws out the consequence, that the birthright was given to the sons of Joseph because Reuben had defiled his father's couch. In 2 Samuel 16:21–22 Ahithophel advises Absalom to go in to his father's concubines in the sight of all Israel; the act is at once sexual and a public claim to the throne, and it places the revolt beyond any possibility of reconciliation with David.

Israel's law sets out forbidden degrees explicitly (Leviticus 18:6–18), and the narratives are told against that background, though the Hebrew Scriptures also record unions the law later prohibits without any comment from the narrator: Exodus 6:20 lists Amram taking Jochebed his father's sister as wife, and she bore him Aaron and Moses. The text neither condemns nor explains the union, and interpreters have long wrestled with the tension. The prophets treat such acts as covenant defilement — Ezekiel 22:11 lists a man humbling his sister, his father's daughter, among Jerusalem's abominations, and Amos 2:7 places a man and his father using the same maiden among the sins that profane God's holy name. In the Gospels, John the Baptist's rebuke of Herod for taking Herodias, his brother Philip's wife (Matthew 14:3; Mark 6:17; Luke 3:19), is presented as the reason for his arrest, and the objection plainly rests on the forbidden degrees of the law.

Traditions differ on how these texts bind. Jewish halakhah codifies the forbidden relations of Leviticus 18 and 20 and adds rabbinic fences around them; Catholic canon law prohibits marriage in the direct line of descent and, in the collateral line, to the fourth degree; Eastern Orthodox churches have historically followed Byzantine civil-law extensions that reached further than the Latin West; many Protestant churches appeal directly to Leviticus 18 and 20, sometimes with a printed table of kindred and affinity, as in the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer. A further and genuine disagreement concerns whether the Levitical lists are binding moral law for all people or belong to Israel's civil code, and how the unrebuked unions of the patriarchal narratives should be weighed alongside them.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.