part of that book, and to witness a couple of extraordinary moments in
the Biblical narrative, the Biblical story. I mean, almost all of us know the
story of God bringing the people out of Egypt, either through the movies
or the Bible, or both, probably. We saw how God began a new story, a
new way of being with the people of Israel, and then God handed off the
Ten Commandments to Moses, as God’s way of addressing, of being
clear about, this new type of relationship God was starting with Israel.
And yet we have this God whose new way of being in relationship with
the people is one in which God, oddly enough, God asks the people to
be in relationship with each other first and foremost, in ways that are life-
giving, in ways in which the people treat each other with respect and
dignity. “To be in relationship with me, is to be in right relationship with
each other,” God seems to be saying in the 10 Commandments, at least
in 8 of the 10 commandments which are focused on relationships
between people.
But then, ironically enough, Israel almost begins this new relationship
with God by immediately breaking one of the two commandments given
to the people on Mount Sinai that have something to do directly with
God—don’t make idols, but instead Israel proceeds to do so by building
a Golden Calf while Moses is on the mountain. But Moses talks God out
of destroying the people, and instead, God chooses to react to that
personal sense of outrage and broken-heartedness with something
extraordinary: the God whom Moses goes to the mountaintop to speak
with, the God who is up there, this God comes down from the mountain,
to be with the people, and the tabernacle, this tent, is then built, this
place, this sign and symbol that God is among them as they travel the
desert; this tent is now a sign that God will stay forever faithful, no matter
how many golden calves the people of Israel mistake for God.
So, now what? We left the people of Israel in the desert with this tent,
this sign that God was no longer on the mountain, but was now among
the people—so what now? Well, actually, the rest of the story, the story
about how the people of Israel got into the land that God promised them,
and all the drama that it took to get them there, the thread of that story
actually gets going again in the book of Numbers. Believe me, there is A
LOT more story to tell before they even step into the Promise Land. But
here we have the book of Leviticus, right in the middle of the story,
plopped down in the most inappropriate of places, and it is one of those
books that is just notorious for being…well, hard to understand. OK, not
even hard to understand, really, but sometimes, just simply baffling. I
mean, there is a whole way of understanding the world found in this book
of the Bible that is just a mystery to most of us, if not all of us. And, to be
honest, for a lot of us, even the name Leviticus sends shivers up our
spines—so many of us gay and lesbian people associate it with being
condemned because of a couple of verses in chapters 18 and 20. And
its hard book to tackle, at this point, because if I had my choice, I would
have kept following the story of Israel and would have gotten them into
the Promise Land, before I came back to the book of Leviticus, and tried
to explain what in the world they were talking about.
OK, so I’m going to share an email that most of you have probably
already read, the one that was going out through the Internet whenever
Dr. Laura was condemning lesbian and gay people a few years ago.
And you may have actually heard it hear first; when Mona taught on the
book of Exodus a couple of years ago, but I still think its worth listening
so that we can really hear how odd this book really is to us, to us modern
readers of Scripture.
Dear Dr Laura:
Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's law. I
have learned a great deal from your show, and I try to share that
knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend
the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus
18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need
some advice from you however, regarding some of the specific laws and
how best to follow them.
a) When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a
pleasing odor for the Lord (Lev 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They
claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
b) I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus
21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
c) I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her
period of menstrual uncleanness (Lev. 15: 19 - 24). The problem is, how
do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.
d) Lev 25: 44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and
female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend
of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans but not Canadians. Can you
clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?
e) A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an
abomination (Lev 11:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I
don't agree. Can you settle this?
f) Lev 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a
defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my
vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?
g) Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair
around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev19:
27. How should they die?
h) I know from Lev. 11:6 - 8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes
me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves.
i) My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev 19:19 by planting two different
crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of
two different kinds of threads (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to
curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the
trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? (Lev 24: 10 -
16) Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we
do with people who sleep with their in-laws? Lev 20:14.
I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you
can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal
and unchanging. Your devoted disciple and adoring fan.....
This letter to Dr. Laura does a great job of pointing out some of the odd
and interesting and baffling laws that the people of Israel were given by
God, or at least, laws that were attributed to God. Shellfish, slavery,
mixed fabrics, mixed crops, rules for facial hair, women, sex, and their
menstrual periods, men and their semen, burnt offerings that actually
“smell” good to God—I mean, all of these things really don’t make sense
to us. And we wonder why in the world would God be giving
such…seemingly silly rules to the people of Israel? Well, again, I think its
easy to laugh at this Dr. Laura letter, and its makes a great point, but I
think if we just outright dismiss Leviticus, we’re going to be missing an
incredible chance to look into the lives and hearts of our earliest spiritual
ancestors. These laws reflect those early challenging times when they
began a very long spiritual journey in a desert, a journey that seemed to
have no end, and that saw forces around them that seemed to want to
destroy them physically—and more important to them, forces around
them that want to destroy them spiritually, destroy them as a distinct
people of God, children of this Yahweh God who had brought them out
of Egypt.
Almost from the beginning, one of the distinctions of the Hebrew people
was that they were different, VERY different, and these laws, these
baffling, sometimes funny, or at the very least, these interesting laws that
governed how people were to sacrifice to God, and what one ate, and
how the social laws were to be set up—all of things were set up to
continue that work God did in choosing a specific people. I think a few
weeks ago in Bible study, I shared with you the idea that for some
reason, God chooses a strategy of giving away blessings to the WHOLE
WORLD by giving away blessings to A SPECIFIC PEOPLE, the people of
Israel. God tried it the other way first—be a generalist, and hope
everything filters down to everyone, but it didn’t work out all that well with
the tower of Babel, and the flood, etc, so God chose a different strategy:
instead of trying to reach out to all the world in broad terms, God chose
to reach out to every nation of the world through a specific nation, the
people of Israel, and God wanted to share the story of God’s love for
ALL THE WORLD by sharing God’s love with a specific people, again,
the nation of Israel. From the whole to the one back to the whole again,
is what I said a few weeks ago when were looking at the last part of
Genesis.
So, the strategy is to choose a specific people in order to let the rest of
world—us, you and I—know that we are loved by God. But, you know,
there is a great challenge to being chosen to be the primary voice by
which God sings a love song to the rest of the world—well, the problem is
making sure that voice is distinctive, that the voice doesn’t get lost in the
choir of voices. Thought I am not known for my musical abilities or
knowledge…I think the whole point of a choir is a blending of voices to
create a singular voice out of many beautiful voices. The point of any
choir is not to highlight one voice—the point of a choir, of course, is
never individuality, but commonality. But the God of Israel chooses to
teach a soloist, God chooses someone, a people, out of the choir of
nations in order to teach that one nation how to sing in a voice that is
pleasing to God, truly pleasing to God. And the reason why God
teaches this one singular voice, this one single nation, to sing in a
certain way, is so that the rest of world can hear the voice of God. I
mean, let’s face it: its easier to change the world, to change the song the
world is singing, by teaching one person, one people, the right song, and
then letting the world learn from that one voice that is singing the right
tune.
So, the strategy is to sing a new and different song—and its that
“different” part that we need to pay attention to tonight. All these laws
that we find in Leviticus are meant to distinguish the people of Israel from
the rest of world. There is a sense in which this book was probably
written much later, that is, it probably was NOT written during the time the
people were actually traveling in the desert, on the way to the Promised
Land. There is a lot of evidence that it was clearly a later book, one
written when they were actually living in the Promised Land, though it
reads as if it was given to the people before they even reach the
Promised Land. As the people of Israel settled into their new land—and
yes, we haven’t actually arrived there in the story, but for argument’s
sake, and to contextualize this book, let’s say we’ve arrived: when the
people arrive, God wants them to be different, that the song they sing to
honor God will be the one that is distinctive and one that can be found
heard above all the other voices the world lifts up. I think the key set of
verses is found in the 18 chapter of Leviticus, it’s the key to unlock the
mystery of why this book even exists. Here these words attributed to
God in Leviticus, chapter 18:1-5
The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to the people of Israel and say
to them: I am the Lord your God. You shall not do as they do in the land
of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of
Canaan, to which I am bringing you. You shall not follow their statutes.
My ordinances you shall observe and my statutes you shall keep,
following them: I am the Lord your God. You shall keep my statutes and
my ordinances; by doing so, one shall live. I am the Lord.
Its that third verse that is so key, to getting Leviticus, I think, to getting
why we have this body of laws and rituals and regulations, smack dab in
the middle of the Pentateuch, that first five books of the Bible. It seems
clear that Israel and Israel’s God wanted the people whom God had
adopted to be different, to be different almost in every aspect. The laws
that most of us find to be befuddling and odd and strange—in many
ways, they were probably as strange to the people of Canaan, the
people that surrounded Israel when they finally crossed the Jordan, as
they are to us. I don’t want to make it sound as if some of these laws don’
t have some roots in the ancient world, or even in ancient Egypt—some
of them surely do—but a lot of them are peculiar, because these laws
are meant to govern a peculiar and unusual people, a people taken on,
adopted, by an unusually peculiar God. God wants them to be different
than the people around them and these laws would clearly show them to
be different from the many nations they often did battle with, or traded
with, or simply had contact with. Things will be different in this new place
God is bringing them—and the rules about how to do things will reflect
the different kind of God Israel has—a God who asks them to do
different things and to be different people than the nations around them.
Now, I want to quickly look over the book of Leviticus—because let’s face
it: quickly is about all we can do in this one-night stand with Leviticus—I
want to quickly look over Leviticus and share with you one of the ways
you can divide this book up. If God is setting a up a particular and
strange new set of laws that the people are to follow, then what are they,
and how is the book of Leviticus divided.
Chapters 1-9
The first 1/3 of the book is about the right of offering sacrifices to God,
whether its sacrifices of grain or olive oil, incense, or unleavened bread.
That topic forms the first 9 or so chapters of the book. And again, we
don’t usually think of offering something to God to get God’s attention, or
to ask for forgiveness, or offer thanks for God—we just simply don’t think
of offering a 1-year lamb or a dove to God or burning them whole as a
way getting God’s attention, and we don’t think of the odor of those
offerings to be soothing or pleasing to God, as they rise up to God’s
nose. It’s not the way we think of God—a God who likes particular
smells, like fresh grain or burnt lamb’s flesh. But, again, beyond our
uncomfortableness, its important to remember that this was the way
Israel asked for forgiveness—and it was the way they thanked God—
only best grain should be offered to God, only the best of the animals
should be given to God. These laws around sacrifice say something
about the way they valued their relationship with God—the best of
whatever they had should first go to God. And this system, this set of
rules and regulations in the first 9 chapters is meant to give order to this
way of expressing remorse for sin, and expressing joy for thanksgiving.
And the people who were to do this work were the Levites, one of the
tribes of Israel, the priest of the nations, and the people that gave us the
name for this book—Leviticus. The other piece of it is that it had a
practical element is that these ritual sacrifices connected life to life—the
God of life is connected to the life of an animal and that same God is
connected to the life found in the farms and the fields. You know, we are
very disconnected to our food—we don’t really see the animals who must
die so that we can live, at least those of us who are not vegetarians. We
don’t even really pay attention to what it really takes to get grain from the
field. In Israel, the taking of an animal’s life was serious business,
whereas nowadays, in our culture, we don’t ever really see what must be
given up so that we can live, the life of another animal. Sometimes
people think of these laws as not taking the lives of animals as seriously
as we do, but, you know, in actuality, they respected the lives and
sacrifices of animals much more than we do nowadays—we really are the
ones disconnected to the web of life you see honored in this sometimes
baffling ritual sacrifices.
Chapters 11-17
Then the middle part of the book, from chapters 11-17, it actually has to
do with how to be ritually pure, how to be clean from the inside-out, so to
speak; what kinds of foods you should eat, what things you shouldn’t
touch, like dead bodies, or certain bodily fluids, like semen or menstrual
blood. Keep in mind that what they meant by being “pure” had nothing
to do with physical state—it really had to do with a spiritual state. If you
touched a dead body or you touched someone with a certain disease, or
ate a certain kind of shell-fish or bird, you weren’t getting dirty
physically—you were getting dirty spiritually. It seems odd to us, but
Israel’s obsession was never about being dirty on the outside, but it was
really an obsession with being dirty from the inside-out, and so these
laws are much more to do with the inside of us rather than outside. Now,
having said that, we also know that a lot of these rules attributed to God
probably had their roots in good old common sense: in an age of no
refrigeration and lots of deadly bacteria, having a shrimp cocktail
probably was NOT a good idea—and they had probably seen a few
people die because of those shrimp cocktails. Eating pork in an age of
no Frigidaire’s…not a good idea. So a lot of these laws probably exist
because practical customs has simply got transferred into divine law, by
the priests and leaders who eventually helped to write books like
Leviticus. Still, that sense that what you eat could you make you
disgusting to God—that is still a foreign idea to most of us, because we
don’t usually think that way. But it had a practical element—these laws
about what to eat, especially in chapters 11, probably saved a lot of
Israeli lives. And these odd, weird eating habits, or these odd
understandings of what makes one spiritually unclean, continued to set
the people apart from the rest of the nations and tribes around them. It
did what it was supposed to do SPIRITUALLY—and that was to set the
people of Israel apart from its neighbors.
Chapters 18-27
The third and final part of the book of Leviticus is probably the most
familiar to us, primarily because many of us have spent a lot of time
pouring over a couple of verses that condemn sex between men in
chapters 18 and 20. But these two small verses are set within a large
chunk of Leviticus in which you really can see how Israel was trying to
distinguish itself from its neighbors. The two verses, 18:22 and 20:13,
are rooted in a profound disgust that Israel had towards its neighbors
and the way that these neighbors conducted themselves in warfare.
Many scholars think the reason why this prohibition against males having
sex with each other exists because of a particularly brutal practice that
the nations of Israel did to their enemies: the victors in battle would often
humiliate the defeated the males by raping them, by making them a
women, which in that sexist culture was long on the totem pole—verse 13
of chapter 20 hints at that when it reads: “if a man lies with a male as with
a woman…” This is actually a really good example of what is happening
with these laws, especially as they expand out from the place of worship
and sacrifice found in the tabernacle or alter or temple—these laws and
rituals and even their holidays are again meant to showcase them, to
highlight, as being very different kind of people. For example, Israel
would not tolerate child sacrifice, as was the custom among some of
Israel’s enemies—you may have heard of Molech and the laws against
sacrificing one’s children to this god of the ancient world. The last
chapters of this section lay out the holidays of this new nation, and what
the rhythm of the year should look like. And one of the most beautiful
moments of this section is found in chapter 25—the year of Jubilee
happened after 7 full years, and that year was to be dedicated to God,
and the whole nation was to rest, even the fields were not to be tilled.
And then every 50th year, the nation was to return to the original owner
the property they may have sold years earlier to pay a debt—in that way,
people never got too rich or too poor and a social equality took place in
ways that we don’t practice here in this country.
So, you can really see how in this book the very oddity of Israel comes
into being—I mean, this was to be no ordinary nation, ruled by and in
relationship with, no ordinary god. And though they had not yet arrived
in their Promised Land, or at least, the book makes it sounds as if these
laws were given before they crossed the Jordan, the reality is that from
the beginning God wanted to do something different here, with these
people. If God was going to come off the mountain, if God was going to
do this new thing with these people, this Israel, then things really were
going to be different—and that means that the laws and rituals that to us
seem baffling, if not sometimes a little silly—that means these laws were
going to be as peculiar and, I would even say, eccentric, as the God who
decided to make a covenant with Abraham and Sarah, who rescued
them from Egypt to send them off to wander in the desert, and who, in
the end, never seem to give up on a people who, ironically, more often
than not, gave up on God. If this God was not going to be like all the
gods of the ancient world—a god forged in metal or stone, an idol, if this
God was going to be invisible, and demanding and loving and stubborn,
all at the same time, it shouldn’t surprise us that the way this God tries to
rule Israel sometimes defies comprehension. Leviticus, with its talk of
grain and burnt offerings, with its weird rules around mixed fabrics and
eating pork and shellfish, and its powerful and baffling way of
understanding equality—commanding a Jubilee, but regulating slavery—
it shouldn’t surprise us that these baffling rules reflect the surprising
relationship that God has with these people. The rules and rituals given
to Israel by God, or attributed to God by Israel, these rules and rituals
are as surprising and baffling as the God who is said to have given them
to Israel. It’s a fun read, actually—you get to see the world a different
way, which is always a good thing, but I also hope we don’t miss the
peculiar and interesting and baffling and wondrous God that we get a
glimpse of, in some of these ancient, ancient words.
