gather the folks. tell the stories.

Please forgive me if I take a moment of personal privilege to publicly pat myself on the back for – finishing Leviticus! I have spent the past three hours on a lumpy couch in my local coffee shop, plodding through the text, verse by verse. Yes, it was tedious. Yes, it was discomforting and disturbing. Yes, it was enlightening. Yes, it was exhilarating! But, please, please, please, do not quiz me on what I just read. While I have a drastically improved sense of the book, I could not tell you, with any confidence, the difference between an offense offering, a communion offering, or a votive offering.

If you have three hours to devote to coffee-shop couch-sitting, I highly recommend it. If you do NOT have three hours, let me offer you a shortcut. I offer this shortcut because I do not want you to be deterred from this project. Or, if you are stopping by this blog for the first time, I do not want to hit you with any guilt about what you ‘must’ read in Scripture to be considered a well-informed, faithful Christian. I just don’t think it works that way.

Here it is:
Read Chapters 19 and 26. Chapter 19 is devoted to issues of social justice, and much of its content will sound familiar to you. It is interspersed, be warned, with some difficult text. Overall, it will give you a sense of the ethical imperatives of the Israelite community.
Though Leviticus has 27 chapters, chapter 26 makes more sense as a conclusion to the book (many interpreters consider chapter 27 to be an appendix). Chapter 26 addresses the blessing and curse of God’s covenant with the people Israel. If God’s people do as God commands, life will overflow with blessings. But if the Israelites should forego the covenant, life will be miserable. However, even in the midst of the atrocities rained upon an unfaithful people, there is God’s promise to restore them if they turn back to God. This theme of covenant broken and restored will resurface as our reading continues.

Remember that Leviticus was constructed, in some ways, as a cultic manual for the priesthood. And for the priestly circle, boundaries were of the utmost importance. So it is that we have so many lists and prohibitions, separating clean from unclean, and pure from impure. Creation itself was seen as the process of making order out of chaos. Without rules and restriction, prescriptions and proscriptions, the covenantal community might too easily resemble the communities which had NOT received a covenant with God; might even be assimilated with other communities and lose their identity. And here is another central theme of the Old Testament- the Israelite people are decidedly NOT like other people. And the differences were highlighted, codified and enforced. We modern people get ourselves into lots and lots of trouble if we read Leviticus without a commitment to understanding this important context.

Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 are the verses most commonly cited from the Old Testament of “proof” that God, or The Bible, condemns homosexuality. That is a presumptuous and inaccurate conclusion. For those who would like to read more about this particularly difficult issue, I will refer you to some well-regarded resources that can be found here.

Kudos to anyone who has ever sat down with the Book of Leviticus, intent on reading the entire thing, start to finish. Whoah! But first, an admission of my frailty- I have only just begun. I’m speeding up quickly and expect to be back on track with the ‘Bible in a Year’ group within a week, but the build up to Ash Wednesday, and the nuttiness that is January/February at the church, simply overcame me.

That said, I am pleasantly surprised by my own experience of this particular discipline- reading the Bible from front to back. I feel like I’ve had my nose up to the canvas of an important painting and now have now stepped far enough away to be able to contemplate the entire picture, not simply the brush strokes and detail work of a tiny square of the painting.

As I’ve said in earlier posts, it may seem the obvious way to read the Bible, but it’s not like starting a novel on page 1 and moving onwards. The Bible, as Peter Gomes puts it, is not a book so much as it is a library of books. There is some narrative continuity, of course, but then there are the roadblocks, the concentration killers like Leviticus, that make us question this entire endeavor. What the heck is Leviticus talking about? Why is it important to us? And why is it smack in the middle of the Pentateuch, the beating heart of Hebrew Scripture? (And perhaps, most importantly- can’t we just skip it?)

Well, let me try to answer these questions with as much expediency as possible (because you and I both need to get our heads back in the Bible). You would be correct to call the Book of Leviticus a priestly instruction manual. It was written by and for the priestly cult practicing early Judaism in Babylonia, after the destruction of the Temple and great exile from Jerusalem in the middle of the sixth century BCE. Their world had been destroyed, uprooted, transplanted. The Temple, the place of God’s dwelling, the central location of their religion, had been smashed to bits. Judaism, at the time, was still centrally focused on animal sacrifice- burnt offerings to God for just about every human condition and every human season.

Now in Babylonia, the priestly cult set about infusing the slowly evolving book that has become Hebrew Scripture (or the Old Testament, though these are not exactly interchangeable terms) with their cosmic view. It’s already happening in Genesis (the orderly Creation narrative) and Exodus (the detailed instructions for the building of the Tabernacle), and now it’s in full force. In the middle of the Pentateuch, we have a manual of cultic instruction that lifts up the Priestly concerns about order, division, and purity.

We’re not going to turn to Leviticus in moments of despair, looking for a message of hope. We’re not going to read it much in worship, either. It will take a back seat to other biblical books. But it is important. For one thing, certain verses have been used by particular communities as ‘proof’ of how God thinks about certain things (I will address this in a separate post). So, it is in our best interest to understand broadly what is going on in this book, even if we will never understand much of the minutiae. Even if Leviticus does not come into our normal rotation of favorite passages, it’s worth reading all the way through, at least once.

Here is my favorite paragraph about Leviticus from Robert Alter:

There is very little scholarship that “really mitigates the sense of strangeness that people of our own era are likely to feel in reading Leviticus. The preoccupation with dermatological conditions, genital discharges, mildew, the recipes for fritters and breads used in the cult, and the dissection of animals and the distinctions among their various inner organs does not correspond to modern assumptions about the content of great sacred literature.

“Nevertheless, all these regulations are reflections of a pervasive spiritual seriousness grounded in a comprehensive, coherent conception of reality… Holiness could be achieved, and had to be protected, only by a constant confirmation of hierarchical distinction, by laying out reality in distinct realms and categories separated by barricades of prohibitions.”