Unnatural sexual intercourse of a man or a woman with an animal. The Mosaic Law emphatically condemned this perverted practice, sentencing the guilty person and the beast to death. “Where a man gives his seminal emission to a beast, he should be put to death without fail, and you should kill the beast. And where a woman approaches any beast to have a connection with it, you must kill the woman and the beast.”​—Le 20:15, 16; 18:23; Ex 22:19; De 27:21.

This prohibition, together with the rest of God’s laws governing sex relations, lifted the Israelites to a much higher moral level than their neighbors. In Egypt, bestiality constituted a part of idolatrous animal worship; historians attest to the cohabitation of women with goats, for example. Similar practices were also prevalent among the Canaanites (Le 18:23-30), and reportedly in Rome.

The depraved practice of bestiality is included in the Greek word por·neiʹa that is rendered “fornication.” (See FORNICATION.) Anyone indulging in such filthy practice is morally unclean, and if a member of the Christian congregation was to indulge in such a practice, that one would be subject to disfellowshipping.​—Eph 5:3; Col 3:5, 6.