Social Cohesion and Sexual Boundaries in Leviticus Bruce Wells Introduction Different societies regulate sexual practices for different reasons. 1 Some recent scholarship has argued that many of the rules in the Pentateuch concerning sexual behavior were insti- tuted (textually, if not in practice) simply as a mechanism to facilitate and even expand the power of male elites in Israelite/Judean society. 2 I wish to argue that other factors complicate this picture. In my view, it is reductionistic to set aside any religious or other type of rationale on the part of the text’s authors and claim that they were engaged in nothing more than a power play. In what follows, my claim is that the need for group identity and security is one of the stronger forces driving the sex laws that we find in the Holiness Source (H), mainly in Leviticus 18 and 20. Perhaps this motivation could still be characterized as mere self-interest on the part of the authors, but other explanations strike me as more tenable. For instance, such a motive may have derived from a desire for the common good of their community. Perhaps H’s authors sincerely believed that a community regulated according to the sexual rules delineated in their corpus would be a community that served group interests, pleased the deity, and promoted a healthy form of unity and cooperation. It is my intention here, though, to go only so far as to demonstrate that the dynamics involved in trying to establish the distinctiveness of their group played a central role in how H’s authors put together their texts that sought to regulate sexual behavior within their community. Other biblical legal collections present significantly fewer rules concerning sexual behav- ior than the number we find in H. In the Covenant Code (CC) in Exod 21–23, one finds only two laws – or about five percent of its approximately forty different casuistic and apodictic laws – relating to sex. 3 About thirteen percent of the laws in the Deuteronomic Code (D) govern sexual behavior, although the percentage can vary depending on how one counts the total number of provisions in the code. 4 This is a clear increase over CC. When one examines 1 It is a genuine privilege to be able to contribute to this volume in honor of Reinhard Achenbach. He has been, for me, a model of dedicated scholarship as well as a treasured friend and colleague. I wish him many more years of active productivity in the field. 2 See, e.g., Ilan Peled, Law and Gender in the Ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible (New York: Routledge, 2020), 136. 3 Exodus 22:15–16 and v. 18. My total of forty is a conservative count of the different provisions in Exod 21:2–23:19. The provisions can be counted in different ways, depending on where one decides a new provision begins, and this is not always clear. Still, the numbers I am citing indicate in a general way the relative importance of sex laws in each of the biblical legal collections. 4 I count approximately 85 laws in Deut 12–25. If one counts those that relate to sexual relations liberally (e.g., by including basic marriage rules), then one finds a total of eleven (Deut 21:10–14, 15–17; 22:13–