Adultery involves mixing people in a way that they should not mix, so the antithesis is keeping things properly apart separate. The prohibitions against mixing seed, animals in yoke, and fibers in clothing (vv. 9-11) seem to have had a double significance. They taught the Israelites the importance of purity and keeping things distinct ". . . because the order of the world must not be endangered."247They also illustrated the importance of remaining separate from the Canaanites. God had told the Israelites not to mix their human seed with the seed of the Canaanites. The Israelites regarded the ox as a symbol of themselves and the ass as a symbol of the Canaanites. Wool was the fiber from which the Israelites made their clothing. However the Canaanites, especially the Canaanite priests, dressed in linen.248Tassels (v. 12) were also visual aids (cf. Num. 15:37-41).
"One of the ways the purity of the people is to be maintained, one that sounds rather strange in the contemporary world, is the insistence that things be kept in order and not mixed up inappropriately."249
