Introduction, Part 2

I. Why Study Leviticus, or, What does it mean to read Leviticus as Scripture?

     So here's the lowdown: you have a direct stake in the study of Leviticus if any of the following issues have ever arisen in your faith community...

• The role of women in the church 
• Homosexual relations
• Divorce and remarriage amongst clergy
• Questions regarding ethical eating, land use, and animal care

Have you ever been a part of a conversation in which one of the parties thought they had a scriptural trump card, only to turn to one of the places where these issues are named and find that - it was given the time of day for all of one or two verses, and you couldn't figure out how we got from beard trimming to prostitution?  Why even mention it at all?

And what about all the trouble Leviticus has caused - or, rather, the trouble we've caused in our varied understandings and mis-understandings of it?  Consider, for example...

• Much of Paul's address to the early church involved controversy between Jewish Christians and other Jews over dietary regulations and purity issues
• Inasmuch as Leviticus remains a central text in Jewish communities, general Christian dismissal of Leviticus may not be unrelated to the long history of Christian theological anti-Judaism (note, I am not here referring to anti-semitism)
• The Jubilee legislation of ch 25 is arguably the most important and most overlooked civil rights passage in the Bible 

So what does it mean to read Leviticus as Scripture?  What does it mean to commit to the collection of books that we call the Bible - can we rightly privilege or neglect any of its parts?  What is the kind of theological thinking that informs Leviticus as a whole - how do we penetrate the strangeness of the language and content to see through the layers?  The question we'll keep coming back to is, perhaps, THE central question in any exercise of biblical interpretation: "How do we 1) understand the witness of the biblical text - on its own terms - and 2) how do we appropriate that witness for ourselves - are the systems that Leviticus offers us valid expressions of holiness in our life with God?

II. Getting Ourselves Situated: Context

     Let's think for just a minute about how Leviticus in situated within the canon we call Scripture: the third of the five books of Torah, which forms the core of the Hebrew Bible, apart from which the New Testament cannot be made sense out of.  You take out Leviticus, and Torah is shot through with holes.  Take out Torah, and the Hebrew Bible is unintelligible.  Take out the Hebrew Bible, and Paul's letters make no sense and Jesus was a babbling lunatic - from Genesis to the Psalms, through the prophets, Hebrews, and Revelation - at best it gets a little muddy and at worst, it's all gobbledygook.  If you're getting ideas about inter-connectedness, webs or concentric circles or pick-up-sticks or a Jenga tower, you're on the right track: and buckle your seat belts, because we are in for quite a few loop-de-loops on this ride that is Leviticus.  Shocking, I know.  We'll get to that in a moment.

III. Content and Structure

     Here it comes: the Genre Question.  Even before our questions about understanding and appropriating, the Genre Question ought to be one of the first that we ask - what kind of literature are we dealing with?  (Don't get all whacked out about hearing words like "literature" and "genre" and "text" when we talk about Scripture - all it means is that we're recognizing that we cannot read the Psalms the same way we read Revelation, or the Gospels the same way we read Colossians.)  If you happen to crack open a commentary or something similar, you'll probably come across what the author refers to as "P" - the Priestly source.  And who is P?  No one knows.  Possibly Israelite priests from antiquity.  But we do know what P is - a compilation, probably of various materials and sources, in which the vocabulary and interests are priestly, dealing specifically with details of ritual practices or narratives of sacred events.  As best we can tell, this compilation came together sometime around the 6th century BCE, when the Israelites had been packed off to Babylon and desperately needed a way to solidify what it was to exist as the people of YHWH in a land of exile.  In other words, P is concerned with theology and worship.

     Leviticus, as you know, follows Exodus: the Israelites have been delivered from Egypt, have received Torah at Sinai, the Tabernacle is completed and the cloud took-up-dwelling on it, and the Glory of YHWH, the kavod Adonai, filled the Dwelling.  Now what?  Well, now we learn what to do with the presence of God in our midst.  Now we learn how to stay alive while at the same time hosting the electric, dangerous kavod Adonai.  Now we begin to remember what it's like when YHWH is near to us.  Our book is situated within a long narrative extending from Exodus 25 through Numbers 10, "When the Tabernacle Stood at Sinai."  Do you remember what happened at Sinai?  God spoke to Moses, to the children of Israel.  By the way, the title "Leviticus"?  We English-speakers inherited that from a Latinized version of the Septuagint's Greek title for the book, which means "Book of the Levites."  True enough, but it's not just for the Levites, which the Hebrew title helps us keep straight: Vayikra means "And he called..."  God called, to Moshe, to the children of Israel.  This is God's address to God's people.  We ought - all of us - to listen carefully.

     Within Leviticus itself, we have two kinds of writing: short narrative blocks interspersed throughout long sections of law, or legal codes.  In this format, the purpose of the snippets of narrative is to provide the literary framework for the embedded laws and commandments - that is, a historical rationale and theological explanation.  Listen carefully to these narratives, pay attention to what comes before them and what follows, because their placement and context is about as much explanation as you're going to get - as Ellen Davis says, Leviticus' idea of an explanation is "I am the Lord your God. Any questions?"

     So if P is concerned with theology and worship, why does it include long sections of laws and regulations?  For us - assuming you happen to be a post-modern, Christian, Protestant reader - this is perhaps the most difficult hurdle to surmount.  Remembering that Leviticus addresses the question of how a holy God can be present with a sinful people by recalling the divisions and separations of creation, we find that the law is a way of delineating the realm of the holy.  In the theological thinking of Leviticus, these are not structures that impose constraint, limiting and stifling what would otherwise be blissful freedom - these are, instead, boundaries that protect life.  These are the fences around the power plant, the warning signs that say "Danger! Radiation Area."  And the three rails of this fence that delineates the realm of the holy are, 1) the Sacrificial Cult, 2) the Purity Regulations, and 3) the relationship between holiness and the ways that we use the created order - the land, the animals, the bodies, that sustain life.

Photo from David Hendin's blog, Sepphoris 2011

But why is this benevolent Creator-God so dangerous?  And why is the language of Leviticus so hard to understand?  These are questions for another day.