What a command in Leviticus was for, and how to tell which ones still ask something of you
Reading a Law
A third of the Old Testament is law: commands about altars and neighbors, roofs and oxen, what may be eaten and what may not. Most readers skip it, and the ones who do not usually pick out the commands they already keep. There is a better way in, and the law itself supplies it.
Lesson 3 of 12 · Reading a law
A law in the Bible was given to a people inside a covenant, at a place and a time, and it usually carries its own reason with it. So the way to read one is to ask what it was for before asking whether it binds you, and then to ask what Jesus and the apostles did with it, because they read the same law and left a record of how. The old sorting of the law into moral, civil and ceremonial is a reader’s tool, and a useful one, but it is not the Bible’s own division. What the Bible does mark off is the Ten Words, and it marks them off in the text itself.
A law carries its reason
Modern statutes do not explain themselves. The laws of Moses very often do, and the explanation is part of the law. Deuteronomy imagines a child asking what all these rules are for, and gives the parent an answer that is not a rule at all but a story.
When your son asks you in time to come, saying, “What do the testimonies, the statutes, and the ordinances, which Yahweh our God has commanded you mean?” — Deuteronomy 6:20 · WEB
Read the comment on When Your Son Asks
The answer that follows is: we were Pharaoh’s slaves, and God brought us out. The law is what a rescued people do. That reason is stitched through the whole code, and it turns up where you would least expect it.
The stranger who lives as a foreigner with you shall be to you as the native-born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you lived as foreigners in the land of Egypt. I am Yahweh your God. — Leviticus 19:34 · WEB
Read the comment on Love Him as Yourself
For you were foreigners in Egypt. A command about how to treat immigrants is anchored to what the people themselves had been. Read a law without its reason and you have a rule; read it with the reason and you have a people being taught who they are.
תּוֹרָה tôwrâh H8451
or תֹּרָה; from יָרָה; a precept or statute, especially the Decalogue or Pentateuch; law.
The word is usually translated law, and the translation is not wrong, but it is narrow. The root means to point, to direct, to teach; a parent’s instruction is called by the same word in Proverbs. So the Torah is less a statute book than a course of teaching, which is why it contains as much story as command, and why the commands so often stop to explain.
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The kinds of law inside the law
The law is not one kind of writing either. Set four commands side by side.
““You shall not murder.” Exodus 20:13 · WEB
A word: a flat prohibition with no case and no penalty stated.
““If a man opens a pit, or if a man digs a pit and doesn’t cover it, and a bull or a donkey falls into it,” Exodus 21:33 · WEB
A case: if this happens, then this follows. Most of the law is shaped like this.
“The pig, because it has a split hoof, and is cloven-footed, but doesn’t chew the cud, is unclean to you.” Leviticus 11:7 · WEB
A boundary: what marks this people off, at the table.
“When you build a new house, then you shall make a railing around your roof, so that you don’t bring blood on your house if anyone falls from there.” Deuteronomy 22:8 · WEB
A duty of care: build a parapet on your roof, so that no one falls from it.
A word, a case, a boundary, a duty. The first is absolute. The second is an example to reason from, and the rabbis reasoned from it for two thousand years. The third is about identity, and it was argued over in the first church. The fourth is a principle in the dress of a Bronze Age house: nobody now has a flat roof with people on it, and everybody now has some equivalent. Reading a law means noticing which of these you are holding.
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The Ten set apart
Readers have long treated the Ten Commandments as standing apart from the rest, and it is worth knowing that the text does so first. They are the only part of the law the people heard God speak directly. They are the only part written on stone, and the writing is credited to God himself.
He declared to you his covenant, which he commanded you to perform, even the ten commandments. He wrote them on two stone tablets. — Deuteronomy 4:13 · WEB
Read the comment on You Saw No Form
When he finished speaking with him on Mount Sinai, he gave Moses the two tablets of the covenant, stone tablets, written with God’s finger. — Exodus 31:18 · WEB
Read the comment on A Sign Between Me and You
The tablets were kept inside the ark, at the center of the sanctuary, where nothing else was. Whatever else a reader concludes about the law, the Bible has already drawn one line inside it, and drawn it in stone. Where readers divide is over what follows from that line, and the next section is where the division lies.
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What the New Testament does with a law
Jesus and the apostles read the law of Moses as their own scripture, and the New Testament records what they did with it. That record is the Bible’s own way of sorting the law, and it is more useful than any scheme imposed from outside.
“Don’t think that I came to destroy the law or the prophets. I didn’t come to destroy, but to fulfill. — Matthew 5:17 · WEB
Read the comment on Not to Destroy but to Fulfill
Not to destroy, but to fulfil. What that sentence means is one of the oldest arguments in the church, and this lesson is not going to end it. What can be said is what the apostles did next. When gentile believers asked which of the law’s boundaries applied to them, the church met in Jerusalem and answered with a short list.
For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us, to lay no greater burden on you than these necessary things: — Acts 15:28 · WEB
Read the comment on It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us
Four things, and the rest of the boundary laws not laid on them. That is the apostles reading Leviticus, and reaching a conclusion about which parts marked Israel off and which parts marked off the people of God as such.
One verse in this discussion is honestly contested, and it should be marked rather than used. Mark 7:19 ends a dispute about washing hands with a clause many translations render as Jesus declaring all foods clean. Whether that clause is the evangelist’s comment on the food laws, or a remark confined to the hand-washing rule the argument was actually about, is disputed by careful readers on both sides, and it turns partly on Greek grammar and partly on what you already think the answer is. A reader who wants to settle the question of the food laws will have to read more than one verse. That is the point of this lesson, not a failure of it.
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How to read a command now
Three questions, in order. What was this law for, in the words of the law itself? What did Jesus and the apostles do with it, or with laws of its kind? And what does it still say about the God who gave it, even where the command itself has been fulfilled and set aside? A parapet law read that way is not about roofs. It is about a God who holds a householder responsible for the neighbor who falls.
Choose a law from Exodus, Leviticus or Deuteronomy that you have never known what to do with. Ask the three questions of it in writing: what it was for, what the New Testament did with laws of its kind, and what it says about God whether or not it binds you.
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