18 Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

19 Whosoever lieth with a beast shall surely be put to death.

20 He that sacrificeth unto any god, save unto the Lord only, he shall be utterly destroyed.

We now shift back to a series of rapid-fire laws, which feel more akin in tone to the ten commandments. In fact, in tomorrow’s verses we will hear the Lord speak in the first person, making promises of divine punishment for transgressors of certain laws.

All of the crimes mentioned in today’s verses carry a death penalty. Two of them have to do directly with forms of idolatry. The witches mentioned in verse 18 were female mystics who would use strange mutterings and sell enchantments as an alternative to relying upon the Lord, and obviously anyone sacrificing to a god other than the Lord was abandoning the true faith to pursue false deities. The other commandment that warrants a death penalty, having sexual relations with a creature, might have also been related to pagan rituals.

But why do these commandments warrant the law’s ultimate punishment? Why the death penalty as opposed to a fine or expulsion? We have already seen some death penalties, but they were reserved for the most extreme transgressions against other people. In every one of today’s laws, however, they are transgressions against God and nature. The target of the offense, I believe, is the reason for the harsh penalty.

Of course, there are those who choose to interpret the Old Testament’s strong punishments upon the heretics as evidence that God is insecure and narcissistic. If God is the Supreme Being of the universe, then why does He get so bent out of shape when we mock him? I think that these arguments are erring on the side of making God too personified. Not to say that it is wrong to think of God in a personified way, but that shouldn’t be the only way we conceive of our creator.

God is also synonymous with truth and right and good. Perhaps it becomes easier to understand the harsh penalties given in today’s commandments when we think of God in these more abstract terms. The people being described in these verses are acting in defiance of truth itself. They are trying to destroy the truth, to pervert it, to replace it with a lie, and it is hard to imagine a faster way to bring suffering and destruction to a people than declaring war directly on the truth itself. The laying of lies and idolatry at our foundation corrupts things at such a fundamental level that it can claim far more lives and souls than any other crime, hence the strong motivation to cut that trend off immediately.