Introduction to Leviticus

Title and authorship

The book opens mid-sentence, so to speak. Yahweh called to Moses, and spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting Leviticus 1:1.

That first verse assumes everything that came before it. The tent has just been built and filled with glory at the close of the previous book Exodus 40:34, and the voice now comes from inside it. Leviticus is what God says once he has moved in.

Almost the whole book is quotation. Roughly fifty times it begins a section with Yahweh spoke to Moses, saying, and what follows is speech rather than narrative. There are only two extended stories in twenty-seven chapters — the ordination of the priests and the death of two of them Leviticus 8:1–36 Leviticus 10:1–20, and a blasphemy case Leviticus 24:10–23 — and both are placed to illustrate the legislation around them.

The content is attributed throughout to God and the delivery to Moses, and the book says so twice at its close. These are the statutes, ordinances, and laws, which Yahweh made between him and the children of Israel in Mount Sinai by Moses Leviticus 26:46; and again in the last verse of all Leviticus 27:34.

The English title comes from the tribe of Levi and is only half accurate. The priests are the subject of chapters 8 to 10 and 21 to 22, but most of the book is addressed to ordinary Israelites — how a farmer brings an animal, what a mother does after childbirth, when a field is harvested, what is owed to a hired man. The Hebrew title is taken from the opening word, he called, which describes the book better.

One feature of the writing is worth noting at the start. It is repetitive on purpose. The same procedure is given four or five times with small variations for different offerings, different classes of person, and different means. A reader looking for argument will find lists; what the lists are doing is making sure that no one is left without instructions, including the man who can afford only two birds.

Date

The book fixes itself in a single month and does not move.

The tabernacle was set up on the first day of the first month in the second year Exodus 40:17, and the voice of Leviticus 1:1 comes from it. The camp leaves Sinai on the twentieth day of the second month, in the second year Numbers 10:11. Everything in these twenty-seven chapters belongs to the fifty days between.

The location is stated four times and never varies: Sinai Leviticus 7:38 Leviticus 25:1 Leviticus 26:46 Leviticus 27:34. Nothing in the book happens anywhere else, and nobody travels.

What that means for reading it is worth stating. This is legislation given before the situations it governs exist. It regulates harvests for people who have not planted, land sales for people who own none, houses for people living in tents, and a jubilee that could not begin for half a century. The instructions are handed over in advance, in a desert, to be used in a country nobody present has seen.

The one exception proves the point. The law about a house infected in its walls opens: when you have come into the land of Canaan, which I give to you for a possession Leviticus 14:34. The legislator knows he is writing for a future.

The internal chronology of the events is exact where it appears. The ordination runs seven days and the priests begin on the eighth Leviticus 8:33 Leviticus 9:1. The two sons die on that eighth day, which is the day the fire fell.

When the book was written down cannot be settled from the text, and nothing in the reading depends on it.

Backgrounds

The situation the book addresses is a practical one, and it is the situation the previous book ended in.

God has taken up residence in the middle of a camp. That is presented as an unqualified good and as a permanent difficulty: a holy presence at the center of an unholy people is dangerous to the people, and most of Leviticus is the management of that danger.

The camp is arranged around the tent, and the book's geography is entirely a matter of distance from it. Blood is brought to the altar or into the holy place or, once a year, behind the veil. What is unclean goes outside the camp. A man with a skin disease lives outside; the ashes of the sin offering are carried outside; the scapegoat is led out. Nearness and distance do all the work that maps do in other books.

The sacrificial system it regulates was not new and was not unique to Israel. Every nation around them killed animals for their gods. What is distinctive here is not the practice but the restrictions on it: one place, one priesthood, no images, no divination, nothing offered to any other power, and above all a strict account of the blood, which belongs to God and may not be eaten Leviticus 17:10–12.

The practices being legislated against are named twice with their sources: you shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived. You shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, where I am bringing you Leviticus 18:3. A people formed by four centuries in one country is about to enter another, and the book stands between the two.

The economy assumed is agricultural and precarious. Grain, oil, wine, flocks, herds; a poor man who brings birds instead of a lamb Leviticus 5:7; a man who sells his land and a relative who buys it back; someone who becomes so poor he sells himself Leviticus 25:39. The legislation keeps returning to what happens when someone runs out of money, and the answer is never that he is on his own.

Theology and purpose

The book's subject is holiness, and it is asserted as a fact about God before it is required of anyone. You shall be holy; for I, Yahweh your God, am holy Leviticus 19:2.

The order in that sentence governs everything. Holiness is not a standard God sets and then meets; it is what he is, and what is asked of the people is resemblance. And the word does not primarily mean moral purity. It means set apart — which is why the same book applies it to a day, a garment, a building, and a person, and why the reason given for Israel's holiness is separation: God has set you apart from the peoples, that you should be mine Leviticus 20:26.

What that resemblance covers is the second surprise. Chapter 19 is the book's clearest statement of it, and its contents are almost entirely ordinary: leaving the edges of a field unharvested, paying a laborer the same day, not cursing the deaf or tripping the blind, honest weights, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself Leviticus 19:18. That last sentence, which the Lord names the second great commandment Matthew 22:39, sits in the middle of a chapter about farming and wages. Holiness in this book is not withdrawal from ordinary life. It is the way ordinary life is conducted.

The third theme is atonement, and the book states its mechanism in one verse. The life of the flesh is in the blood. I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that makes atonement by reason of the life Leviticus 17:11.

Two things are claimed there. Blood stands for life, not for death — the reason it atones is that a life is in it. And the arrangement is a gift: I have given it to you. The sacrificial system is presented as something provided rather than demanded, a way for guilty people to come near without being destroyed.

The procedure enacts that. The worshiper lays his hand on the animal's head, and it shall be accepted for him to make atonement for him Leviticus 1:4. Something passes from the man to the victim, and what the victim receives is what the man had coming.

Everything in the book converges on chapter 16, which stands at its center. One day a year, one man, behind the veil, with blood for the sanctuary itself — for on this day shall atonement be made for you, to cleanse you. You shall be clean from all your sins before Yahweh Leviticus 16:30. The daily system dealt with sins as they arose; that day dealt with what the system had accumulated.

And the New Testament reads the whole arrangement as a pattern of something later, in language the book itself invites — the tabernacle a copy and shadow of the heavenly things Hebrews 8:5, and a high priest entering once for all with his own blood Hebrews 9:12. Where Scripture draws that line, this reading follows it.

The last theme is that the system is not automatic. Two priests offer strange fire before Yahweh, which he had not commanded them, and die Leviticus 10:1–2. Everything in Leviticus is a provision for approach; none of it is a technique for controlling the one approached.

Additional notes

Note — the Sabbath and the appointed feasts in chapter 23. The chapter is the fullest calendar in the law, and its arrangement repays attention because it distinguishes two things that are often merged.

It opens by announcing the set feasts of Yahweh, which you shall proclaim to be holy convocations Leviticus 23:2. Then, before any of them is named, comes the weekly Sabbath: six days shall work be done, but on the seventh day is a Sabbath of solemn rest, a holy convocation... It is a Sabbath to Yahweh in all your dwellings Leviticus 23:3.

And then the list restarts. These are the set feasts of Yahweh, even holy convocations, which you shall proclaim in their appointed season Leviticus 23:4, and the annual cycle follows — Passover, unleavened bread, firstfruits, weeks, trumpets, the day of atonement, booths.

Two features separate the weekly day from the annual ones. It is kept in all your dwellings, at home, rather than by appearing at the sanctuary. And the summary at the end of the chapter names the annual feasts as things to be observed in addition to the Sabbaths of Yahweh Leviticus 23:38 — the phrase distinguishes them explicitly.

The two also rest on different ground elsewhere. The seventh day was blessed and made holy at the close of creation, before any sanctuary or feast existed Genesis 2:3, and the commandment gives that as its reason Exodus 20:11. The annual days are dated to events in Israel's history and are tied to offerings.

That distinction matters later, where a New Testament passage lists a feast day or a new moon or a Sabbath day and calls them a shadow Colossians 2:16–17. The three terms together are a standing formula in the Old Testament for the sanctuary's offering calendar, and it recurs with the offerings attached 1 Chronicles 23:31 2 Chronicles 31:3 Nehemiah 10:33 Ezekiel 45:17. Honest readers have long differed here, and the difference is old. What the texts themselves supply is the separation chapter 23 draws between the weekly day and the annual cycle, and the consistent use of that three-term formula for the offering calendar.

Note — the day of atonement, and what it was for. The regular offerings dealt with sins as they were committed. Chapter 16 deals with something else: the accumulated defilement of the sanctuary itself, because of the uncleanness of the children of Israel Leviticus 16:16.

The sanctuary is cleansed once a year, on a fixed date — in the seventh month, on the tenth day Leviticus 16:29 — and the whole nation is required to keep it as a Sabbath of solemn rest and to afflict their souls Leviticus 16:31. It is the only day in the calendar with that shape, and it is the only day on which anyone enters the innermost room.

The two goats are the part most often misread, and the text is careful. One is for Yahweh and is killed as a sin offering; the other is sent away alive, bearing the iniquities, to a solitary land Leviticus 16:8–10 Leviticus 16:21–22. Only the first provides atoning blood. The second carries away what the first has already dealt with, and it is removed from the camp rather than offered in it.

Note — the penalties, and how they are reported. Several offenses in this book carry death, and the list includes things a modern reader will find disproportionate. Three observations belong together, and none of them softens the text.

First, the penalties are given as the criminal law of one nation under a covenant, in one land, for a limited period. The book itself frames them that way — the land vomits out its inhabitants for these practices, whoever they are Leviticus 18:25 Leviticus 18:28, so the standard is not a privilege of Israel.

Second, the record shows almost none of them carried out. Scripture reports two executions under this legislation in the whole of Israel's history, and both are narrated as difficult cases requiring a direct ruling Leviticus 24:10–23 Numbers 15:32–36.

Third, the same chapters that prescribe them also contain the command to love a neighbor as oneself and to love the resident foreigner as oneself Leviticus 19:18 Leviticus 19:34. Any account of Leviticus that reports only the penalties has read half a chapter.

Outline

How the book is built

Be holy, for I am holy inclusio 11:44-20:26

• A 11:44-45 At the close of the clean and unclean laws: sanctify yourselves and be holy, for I am holy — grounded in the God who brought them up out of Egypt.
• A′ 20:24-26 At the close of the holiness code: you shall be holy to me, for I am holy — grounded in God having set them apart from the peoples to be his own.

The same sentence opens and closes the long central section on separation, and both times it is attached to the same argument. At the end of the laws about clean and unclean creatures God says he is holy, therefore they are to be holy, and grounds it in having brought them out of Egypt. Nine chapters later, at the end of the laws about holy living, he says it again and supplies the reason in so many words: he has set them apart from the peoples, that they should be his. Between the two lie the uncleanness laws, the day of atonement, and the holiness code, and the frame tells a reader what all of it is for. The holiness required is not an achievement to be reached but a likeness to be kept, and the ground of it in both members is something already done to them rather than anything done by them.

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