What Does Leviticus 18:20 Mean?
Do not give the lying down of your seed to your companion's wife, to soil yourself with her.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Moreover thou shalt not lie carnally with thy neighbour’s wife, to defile thyself with her.THE KEY
The Hebrew pictures the act as “giving your lying-down for seed,” joining bodily union with what it may set in motion.
THE MEANING
This verse names sex with another person’s wife as an act that makes the speaker unclean. Its wording pictures the act as giving one’s lying-down for seed, so the bond carries both bodily and relational weight.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that adultery is only a private bodily act, detached from the people and bonds it touches.
THE ROOT
זֶרַע
zeraʿ
GROWS FROM
זרע
z-r-ʿ
To sow; seed as what is sown and what continues as offspring.
“the lying down of your seed” in this verse is zeraʿ. The phrase “for seed” carries more than a physical image: the same Hebrew word can mean seed or offspring. That shared word lets the verse hold bodily union and its potential continuation together.
ALSO GROWS
zāraʿ: To sow or scatter seed.
זָרַע
The verb makes the seed image active: something is placed into the ground to grow.
zeraʿ: Seed, offspring, or descendants.
זֶרַע
The noun carries both the physical seed and what may continue from it, deepening the phrase “for seed.”
תִּתֵּן
titten
GROWS FROM
נתן
n-t-n
To give, set, or place.
The Hebrew does not only name lying down; it says not to give that lying-down for seed. The verb makes the act a directed giving, a nuance compressed into “lie carnally.”
ALSO GROWS
natan: To give, set, or place.
נָתַן
This is the verb’s root form and retains the concrete sense of placing or giving something.
mattan: A gift or present.
מַתָּן
This related noun shows the root’s reach into what is given, while the verse applies the verb to the act itself.
לְטָמְאָה
letamʾah
GROWS FROM
טמא
ṭ-m-ʾ
To become or render unclean.
“soil” in this verse is letamʾah. The verse names uncleanness as a result of the act, not as the person’s nature. The related words describe a condition of impurity and the state of being unclean.
ALSO GROWS
ṭamēʾ: Unclean or impure.
טָמֵא
This adjective describes the resulting state named by the verse’s verb.
ṭumʾāh: Uncleanness or impurity.
טֻמְאָה
This noun names the condition connected to the act of defiling.
THE PATTERN
Scripture treats sexual union as a bodily bond whose meaning and consequences reach beyond the immediate act.
Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother, and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.Whoever commits adultery with a woman lacks heart; he who does it ruins his own living soul.Or have you not seen that the one glued to a seller of bodies is one body? For, he says, the two will be one flesh.THE THREAD
And Onan knew that the seed would not be his, and whenever he went in to his brother's wife, he ruined it on the ground, lest he give seed to his brother.Both verses use זֶרַע (zeraʿ, “seed” or “offspring”). The shared word holds bodily seed and the continuation of a family line in the same image.
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