How are Leviticus 15:24 and Leviticus 20:18 meant to be understood together?

Question

These two verses seem to contradict each other.

Leviticus 15:24 (NASB)

If a man actually sleeps with her so that her menstrual impurity is on him, he shall be unclean seven days, and every bed on which he lies shall be unclean.

Then, Leviticus 20:18 (NASB)

If there is a man who sleeps with a menstruous woman and uncovers her nakedness, he has exposed her flow, and she has uncovered the flow of her blood; so both of them shall be cut off from among their people.

There is this question, Leviticus 20:18 on menstruation seems cruel and unusual, with helpful discussion, but I'm still not sure why there is such a contradiction between these verses. As one user said in their answer, "cut off" can sometimes refer to more of a temporary quarantine, rather than a permanent banishment. Are we to take Lev 20:18 as a temporary quarantine of the 7 days mentioned earlier, so that it matches Lev 15:24? And in that case, is there a reason why the same rule is repeated but in this different style?

(I'm sorry that this question is really more of a clarifying question on the user's answer, but I don't have enough reputation to make comments, so I could only ask this in a separate question.)

Answer 1

This is not complicated:

Lev 15

Lev 15 is about the general definitions of "clean vs unclean" - what we now call general hygiene practice and the associated quarantine periods (where appropriate). In this light, it is usually understood that the woman in Lev 15:24 is the wife of the man.

Lev 20

By contrast, Lev 20 is about illicit (unlawful) sex - the context suggests that the man and woman in Lev 20:18 are not married and therefore are performing an illegal act. The fact that this sex occurs during the woman's menstrual period makes the act doubly repulsive which is why the consequence is much greater.

Answer 2

First, regarding the reason the rule in ch. 15 is different from the rule in ch. 20. Critical scholars understand this as resulting from the fact that chapter 15 is part of the "priestly source," while chapter 20 comes from the holiness code. The hypothesis is that these two sources were eventually incorporated in the Bible as we have it today sometime during or shortly after the Babylonian exile.

Professor Christine Hayes of Yale University explains:

"You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy," ...finds [its] fullest expression in... Leviticus 17 through 26, referred to as the Holiness Code. There's an important difference between Leviticus 1 through 16 and the Holiness Code. According to Leviticus 1 through 16, Israel's priests are designated as holy: a holy class within Israel, singled out, dedicated to the service of God and demarcated by rules that apply only to them. Israelites may aspire to holiness, but it’s not assumed. However, in the Holiness Code, we have texts that come closer to the idea that Israel itself is holy by virtue of the fact that God has set Israel apart from the nations to himself, to belong to him, just as he set apart the seventh day to himself to belong with him.

To be sure, chapter 15 gives rules that apply to the Israelites generally. But if the hypothesis is correct, then the reason for the stricter punishment in chapter 20 would be that it comes from a different (later) source. We see another instance of harsher punishments after the Exile in the laws enacted by the priest Ezra regarding the commandment against intermarriage. In Ezra's time Jews were to divorce their foreign wives (not a requirement in the Torah). Such laws were meant to encourage the people to keep the highest standards of purity.

Unlike in the case of Ezra's reform, the harshness of the penalty need not bother us too much, since it describes an intimate act which would be known only to the man and his wife. There is no known instance of it ever being enforced, and it may have been meant to emphasize that this rule should be taken very seriously.

Conclusion: "How are Leviticus 15:24 and Leviticus 20:18 meant to be understood together?" According to those who hold that Leviticus is composed from more than one source, they are not meant to be "understood together." Chapter 20 was written later, during the period when Israel's priestly leaders were concerned to emphasize the highest possible standards of ritual purity among the people. They thus expressed the rule in stricter terms than the earlier iteration.