Scriptures: LEV 1:1-5, 10:1-3, 11-1:7, 14:1-7, 16:21-22, 19:2b, 19:13-18
[The text below diverges significantly in certain places from the sermon as preached and as available in audio form. All readings from the Bible were from Everret Fox’s The Five Books of Moses translation. All other quotations are from Jacob Milgrom’s 3 volume Leviticus commentary from The Anchor Bible series]
Our task for your hearing this morning, and it goes even beyond the task as announced in sermon by Marilyn last week, is to present Leviticus as the most interesting book in all of Scripture.
I’m serious.
Okay, you want a teaser. For starters, it has the most intriguing sex in all of Scripture. There are those long lists of people in Chatpers 18 & 20 who you are not to adulter with, lie with, or uncover the nakedness of. We only ever here tell about one or maybe two of those prohibitions, but there are dozens. Now, we all know that rules are made once they have already been broken. In other words, Leviticus is reporting from the eight century before Christ (aha, see some of you w/ academic, Bible alphabet soup backgrounds are showing physical signs of revolt already) … eight centuries [or more!] before Christ, and we have testimony to certain practices that might – just – raise serious eyebrows – maybe even the more well groomed eyebrows at Church and Wellesely.
Sexual relations with Mothers. Fathers too. Aunts. Uncles. Siblings. Menage a trois w/ a woman & her daughter. And then there are the pets, errr animal companions.
Okay, well you get the picture. Too much information, the kids would say, in shorthand.
So now, I’ll proceed, mostly, to leave out the intercourse and still make it rather interesting.
Or that’s the goal.
So let me start over. Try this again.
In the house we live in, in our community, our children are exposed to conversations around food that are rather intricate and unusual. With twelve adults, all just crazy enough to join in an experimental Christian community where multiple shared meals each week are the centre of spiritual life, we have more than a few food preferences, allergies, and avoidances, ethical divides, cultural likes and dislikes. In the past, we’ve had vegetarians. Presently we have two vegans, along with two of us who eat a kind of modified version of kosher. Two have worked or still work for one of the more radical food security outfits in North America, Toronto’s Food Share. One or two people have pretty serious needs around food and physical health. The oldest member, the inimitable Mr. Grant, is willing to be a little adventurous, but strongly prefers real food. Canadian food. FLESH! Activist food? (as we’ve begun to call it) Well … maybe I’ll saunter on down to the pub tonight.
So we have conversations like whether or not a strict vegan can eat stuff with white sugar since the charcoal it’s often filtered through is made with animal bones. Johanna came home after an overnight at what we affectionately call The Vegan House quoting facts and figures regarding how much of the rain forest is wiped out everytime we eat a hamburgers. But Johanna still wants no part of going Vegan. She’s of the persuasion that meat is delicious; or, as the old bumper sticker puts it, if God didn’t want us to eat animals, why’d he make them out of meat.
Suppose with me that all this turmoil in our current world around dietary aversions were eventually settled. Two or three centuries hence. Organic. Free range. Grass fed. Factory farmed. Raw diet.
Pescatarian. Suppose it all led to a new consensus, one that was so overwhelming it was eventually just taken for granted. Then suppose that someone from that time several centuries in the future came to overhear or read or tune into the debates that roil our world along these lines. Many of them would just want to roll their eyes, the way our older members or our grandparents or hipster allergic folks do even now. The debates would likely make as little sense as many of us can make of passages like the ones to be read out this morning. Charcoal filters, animal bones, processed sugar. Huh?
But suppose the debates themselves were considered healthy, inspired, transformational, even … Divine. Suppose that being able to slog your way through them became a badge of merit, a rite of passage, an intellectualist’s perserve. But then the consensus began to give way … Well that analogy has probably been extended far enough. Let’s dig into the text itself.
LEV 1:1-5 Offerings
Let’s begin with an explanation of the translation being used. Everett Fox’s The Five Books of Moses. It aims to make the text as it comes to us in English feel much more like the Hebrew original, and if possible to have us hear the kind of echoes and alliterations that would be present were the text to be read aloud in Hebrew. Grammatical ordering is far closer to the Hebrew. There is a goal of generally using one English word rather than multiple ones to translate single root words from the Hebrew. This, of course, is not always possible. Proper names are generally transliterated as closely as they can be, to sound as they would be pronounced in Hebrew. Moshe and Aharon, for instance, instead of Aaron and Moses. Every so often, as well, a word that is not a proper noun is so heavy laden in it’s traditional translation that the translator has deemed it best aa well to simply transliterate the word, using English lettering to sound out how something would be said in Hebrew. Let’s get to an example of that directly.
Michele just read the first five verses of chapter 1. No one, so far I can tell, has walked out or is sleeping quite yet!
These verses are the first of seven straight chapters, 172 verses, regarding the Hebrew sacrificial system. Completely unfamiliar. Strange. Hopefully stranger yet in this particular translation. Were Michele to read even thirty verses of it, I expect we’d have at least our first sleeper.
There are five main kinds of sacrifices. The Ola or offering up- offering. The Minha, a tribute or gift offering. The Shalom Offering, an offering of Peace or a “sacred gift of greeting.” An Asham, or Guilt, Offering. And, I skipped one order wise, the Hattat Offering. Hattat is one of the tricky words that is just generally left as Hattat in this translation. For some understandable reasons, Hattat has always been mistranslated as Sin. A Sin offering. But Sin is a horrible, confusing, unacceptable translation. In what might be the most glaring example of how poor this translation is, in the next book of the Bible, Numbers, there is a passage that would need, for the sake of consistency, to state that one is cleansed by washing in the Water of Sin/ the waters of Hattat. A far better translation is purifcation or decontamination. While our concept of sin traditionally may ver
y well include impurity or contamination, by no means all impurity or contamination is sinful. Married couples who make love are not considered to be in a state of sin in Leviticus. Burying the dead is not a sin in Leviticus. If you’ve got really dry skin, or excema, you are not a sinner according to the symbolic world of Leviticus. Menstruating. Even Gonohrrea? We’ll take a quick crack at these topics a bit later. Not particularly sinful.
In all of these circumstances, however, you do need to be bathed, baptized (raise eyebrows), purified by some sort of sacrifice before approaching what is called here The Tent of Appointment or The Tabernacle. As strange, even yuck, as some of this comes off to our modern ears, what’s happening is almost no more radical than showering and praying over your Quaker style oats before going to work in the morning.
Almost. Almost no more radical. The almost is important. Let’s leap ahead to the first few verses of chapter ten to understand why the “almost” is rather important, and more importantly, to understand the stunningly different narrative and symbolic culture that we are attempting to understand a bit better this morning.
III. LEV 10:1-3 Nadav/Avihu
Dead. They picked up the wrong incense in Kensington Market on their way to church, and fire went out from the altar of the Lord and smoked em. That’s how it sounds to us. Actually, part of the reason Leviticus is so hard for us to read is that there is not enough of this stuff. In the whole book, this is about the only story. Well, another guy gets himself stoned for blasphemy in chapter 24. The rest is laws, instructions, dictums, commandments, regulations, annunciation of Holy Days, first instances of riturals etc. etc. We generally prefer stories, and these aren’t laws that we are under anyway, thank you very much.
So what did Nadav and Avihu do that was so wrong in the world of the text? What’s all this about bringing the wrong fire, an “outside fire”? One that God, or as we are ennunciating the the Tetragrammaton this morning, The Name “had not commanded them.”
Here a brief, admittedly dense summary of Priestly Theology is in order. For a long time German inspired theology and Biblical scholarship gave us a very negative viewpoint on the material considered “Priestly” in the Jewish Bible. The prophets and the portions of the law primarily found in Deutoronomy were elevated, considered earlier, more inspired material. The stuff that Jesus and Paul liked. Whereas the Priestly material, the largest chunk of which is basically the entire book of Leviticus, was considered all late and all opposed by the early church.
To be frank, this way of sizing up the Biblical material is rooted in classic German anti-semitism. While this sort of Anti-Judaism has its echoes in almost all ages of Christianity, German Biblical scholarship managed to do it in a more thorough and noxious way then it had ever been done. Now, don’t get me wrong, German Biblical scholarship got a ton of things right. It was thorough. It was serious. It was creative.
In the last few decades, several scholarly strands have come together, but have not yet created the sea change they should in the field of Old Testament scholarship. Israel Knohl and Jacob Milgrom are two Jewish Biblical scholars from Hebrew University and UC Berkeley who have led the way. So let’s talk quickly about what Priestly theology was up to, especially according to Milgrom in his three volume (raise book and eyebrows) commentary on Leviticus.
In the time portrayed primarily in the wilderness wandering after the Children of Israel had left Egypt, the Priestly theology developed against the backdrop of general Mesopotamian, and likely also Egyptian, polytheism. There is strong evidence that the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten abandoned traditional Egytian polytheism, or worship of many gods, for monotheism, or worship of one god, in the 14th Century BC or BCE – an innovation which was shortlived and soundly rejected. Meanwhile in Mesopotamia, pagan religion, according to this view of the Priestly material can best be described as having these three basic premises
(1) gods as worshipped are themselves dependent on and influenced by a metadivine realm, a counsel of the gods, a heavenly court as it were
(2) from this metadivine realm spring all sorts of lesser gods both good and evil and
(3) humans who can tap into this realm can acquire the magical power to coerce the gods to do their own human will.
As one scholar put it “[E]veryday religion … was dominated by a fear of evil powers and black magic rather than a positive worship of the gods … the world was conceived to be full of evil demons who might cause trouble in any sphere of life. If they had attacked, the right ritual should affect the cure.”
Hebrew Priestly theology abandons these premises while still working in the same basic atmosphere. It would have been impossible to simply replace it w/ something entirely new; human culture requires some sort of continuity. The world of demons is abolished theoretically from the Priestly view. The only “demonic” power left is the will of the human being. Now seen w/ the primacy of freedom of will, human power is much greater. Not only can human beings obey or defy God but they can drive God out of God’s dwelling or sanctuary. In a strong sense, “humans have replaced demons.”[1]
Where polytheistic worshippers who believed in metadivine realms needed to constantly fear upsetting a whole host of Gods via some unknown impurity, string of words, or through being the subject of some unknown curse manipulated by an enemy, Priestly theology destroyed the demonic and basically turned impurity into something tame and harmless. In Priestly Israel, God’s holiness dwells in the sanctuary or Tent of Appointment, and there and only there was one required to be ritually pure. “Lay persons – but not priests – might contract impurity with impunity.” Before any possible contact with the sanctuary, however, purity rites were necessary in the form of water cleansings, sacrifices, and abstinence from certain practices.
Now there will be a certain powerful update to this theology that we will get to soon, but for now it might become clear why things are structured the way they are so far in Leviticus, and why this story of Nadav and Avihu messing things up with the Sanctuary rituals is so important.
The first seven chapters of Leviticus are primarily dedicated to how laity bring offerings to God. The opening words of Leviticus that Michele read earlier have brought about a real change. “Anyone—when (one) among you brings-near and near-offering f
or YHWH/The Name.” Sacrifice, purity, etc. in Leviticus begins in the hands of the people, the laity, and not the priest. Instructions and description of Priestly life in earnest doesn’t begin until chapter eight. Yes, the Priests better get things right, or they may face a swift and terrifying death, but the realm of the mysterious and awful and therefore necessarily holy has been basically reduced to the centre of the camp, and is much more manageable.
We don’t know exactly what Nadav and Avihu did wrong. But they didn’t get it right at the one place you really had to get things right.
Okay, we are going to move much more quickly now for a bit, and we’ll continue to unwind the basic theology of the Priestly material. Michele is going to read the first seven verses of chapter 11, some of the infamous dietary material.
IV. LEV 11-1:7 Dietary
The basic orientation of holy versus profane or unholy in Leviticus is very Mennonite, actually. It revolves around the question of life and death. Life is holy and is the purview of the sacred, the sanctuary, the Tent of Appointment, The Name. Death is profane, unholy, what is risked if you are not right with God.
As Jacob Milgrom puts it: “The forces pitted against each other in a cosmic struggle are no longer the benevolent and the demonic dieties who populate the mythologies of Israel’s neighbors, but the forces of life and death set loose by [humanity itself] through … obedience to or defiance of God’s commandments.”
The Priestly theology is so committed to life, that it portrays primordial humanity as vegetarian. It is the same language structure, grammar, etc. – the Priestly material in the book of Genesis – that suggests that only after the Flood does God allow humans to eat meat. Animals, in the priestly material are endowed with the same nephesh, or soul, or life force as humans. As we shall see soon, for the Priestly material, eating meat is in a sense a concession allowable for all humanity, but all humanity is required to avoid eating the blood of animals, because, as chapter 17 will repeat several times in quick succession, “the life of the flesh is in the blood.”
Further restrictions were placed on the people of Israel, as chosen, set apart by God. In a sense, they are restrictions, in a sense it is a greater affirmation of life, a more strict adherence to the boundaries dividing life and death that is at work. A long discussion could be had about what drives the dietary restrictions here, but to sum up this viewpoint, the restrictions in place are basically intended to limit Israelite meat consumption to three of the four domesticated animals (cows, sheep, goats) in the region and what could reasonably be taken in hunting or gathered from the sea in the region. Subtracted, however, from this mix were animals such as the pig and shellfish which were known to consume other animals in nature. In other words, respect for life meant cutting off the chain of life consuming other life. It’s not vegetarianism, as humans were – according to this theology – in the state of creational goodness, but the concessions that are made – not eating blood for everyone, not consuming other meat eaters for Israelites – are intended instill a strong sense of a division between life and death.
There are the famous passages, not here, but elsewhere in the Priestly material, about not eating a kid or young goat, cooked in it’s mother’s milk. The prohibition is used as the basis of the entire rabbinic kosher practice of keeping dairy, particularly milk, and meat entirely separate. The best argument in favor of this set of practices is that mixing milk, the life giving substance par excellence, and meat, iconic of death, violates the strict separation of life and death that is so critical to Priestly theology.
VI. LEV 14:1-7 Tzaraat/Leprosy/Living Water
Okay, for us these are some of the strangest and hardest to read passages. Traditionally translated as leprosy, our translator here simply leaves the word as Tzaraat. What is under consideration here is not necessarily at all what medieval or even in some places in the world, modern day leprosy looked like. We are not even sure what Tzaraat actually referes to, but Milgrom explains things well, in way that makes good sense. Remember, according to this view:
-Milgrom (see esp. all of p. 46) “Because impurity and holiness are antonyms, the identification of impurity w/ death must mean that holiness stands for life.”
There are then three great impurities that are under consideration in the first 17 chapters of Leviticus, or the heart of the Priestly material. I’ll talk briefly about the shift in chapter 18, but here, their are three great impurities that are under consideration. Death, genital discharges, and tzaraat or leprosy. All are connected to this line demarcating death and life.
In this vein, skin or scale problems, maybe even something as simple as excema are seen as the possibility of death breaking in upon life. Even mold in a house is indicative of the power of death breaking through into life. Now it is not necessarily the case, it has to be tested. And as suggested earlier, the impurity associated with death has been seriously limited by the Priestly material. It is imperative that those things possibly contaminated not come into the presence of the diety, but the presence of the diety is limited at this point, to the sacred Tent of Appointment. There is one God, and God’s dwelling place is known and can therefore be managed properly.
Before moving on, I just want to take note that what passes someone from a state of impurity to sanctuary ready holiness, from death to life. It is said to be? Living water. Baptism. And this was unrecognized by as great of a reformer as Jean Calvin, baptism does not have it’s roots in the Old Testament practice of circumcision, but rather in Torah originating cleansing in living water. It turns up in just a few passages here and there in the Hebrew Bible, but this is one of them. It’s also referred to in Chapter 15 here.
VIII. LEV 16:21-22 Day of Atonement
With more time, I would like to have commented at more length on the importance of the Day of Atonement here in chapter 16, where there are these two goats – one is sacrificed and the other of which bears the sins of Israel for the year out into the wilderness. The one time of year when everyone was expected to get themselves into a state of ritual purity. There developed a few others, Passover and the like. As Israelite history develops, most of the time, as one of my professors put it, most of the time, most of the people of Israel were thought to be in a state of ritual impurity. It really wasn’t a big deal. Having sex put you into a state of ritual impurity. For the average person, what was important was that the few times a year you were expected to approach the altar in the Tent of Appointment or later The Temple … then you needed to insure ritual purity. And washing in water and bringing the appropriate sacrifice did the trick. Jeff Taylor reminded me yesterday of the funny passage in A Year of Living Biblically w
here the guy basically has to take his own chair everywhere during the beginning every month of his wife’s cycle. It’s not exactly like that. Ritual purity is expected when you approach the most holy.
And w/ the concept of holiness we’ll move towards conclusion. Michele will read our final text from
Leviticus 19:2b, 13-18
Well, so far I’ve spent the bulk of my time for the sermon having texts read from and laying out the basic theology of Leviticus chapters 1-17 … really the heart of the Priestly material or Priestly innovations in the Old Testament. I am only going to take a few more minutes of your time in concluding, by describing what happens with a major shift in chapter 18. NOT GOING TO READ FROM A PRINTED SERMON DIRECTLY.
The remainder of the book is generally considered the Holiness code. with the exception of chapter 27 which may be quite a bit later
I. Holiness Code – Expansion outward
II. Stunning combination of some of the most conservative and most radically progressive text in scripture.
-There are the famous sexual texts, again there is something much more than simply homophobia at play here. I wish I had time to delve into that directly, but so many sermons, books, articles try and tackle a small portion of that material directly without a wider sense of what is going on in Leviticus
– Then there are the texts about slavery. While there is some limitation for slaves of Israelite
descent, there is allowance for perpetual slavery taken from other nations.
– Additional material or no, in chapter 27, women are counted as worth about half as much as
men when it comes to assessments for vow-offerings. And that’s just one aspect of the text’s
Sexism.
– And yet here also are the texts on jubilee, debt forgiveness, freedom that Marilyn preached upon partially last week.
– Here also, what we have known as the lex talionis actually worked to limit violence originally in its context. It wasn’t an eye for an eye and the whole world is blind. It was a limitation to the cycle of violence which allowed one no more revenge than that meeted out originally. Not the Sermon on the Mount, but a definite limitation of violence in its context nonetheless.
-Holiness is also includes definitive protections for the poor, for labourers, for the physically disabled, for the land itself.
We might say that in the movement of Divine Presence from a Tent in the Wilderness to a hovering holy presence over the entire land of Israel, the Priestly-Holiness tradition experienced all of the promise and peril of a rapid expansion. Jacob Milgrom followed up this massive three volume text with an article exploring what it would mean to think of an environmental ethic of God’s holiness in terms of Priestly theology for the entire earth. When approaching a difficult and admittedly opaque book of the Bible like Leviticus, it is understandable that we might be tempted to pick and choose ethically from those passages we like and find ethical and those we distrust or can’t stand. We might use the strangeness of sacrifice and view of menstrual impurity to dismiss texts used by conservatives with such force, but that puts us in a bit of a bind when it comes to how we can then pick the verses we like on caring for the poor and disabled, on Jubilee.
Instead, we would do better to have our best minds wrestle w/ the text in a way that seeks to understand its basic logic. A basic logic whose objective, in the words of Milgrom is “to sever impurity from the demonic and to reinterpret it as a symbolic system reminding [us] of the divine imperative to reject death and choose life.”