Leviticus 7-10

Leviticus 7 concludes seven chapters of laws about sacrifices. I have often wondered, and perhaps you have too, how Jewish people today make sense of their religion without sacrifice. Richard Elliott Friedman answers that question in this way:

Because it has been nearly two millennia since the Temple sacrifices ended, what can substitute for sacrifice as something that can give people some of the things that sacrifices provided: a feeling of fulfillment, closeness to God, sacredness of life, a link to Israel’s history? My friend Rabbi Lawson says: charity…. Many would say that we have prayer as well as charity to compensate for the lack of sacrifice. And we have other acts of atonement, such as fasting. All of this may be true, but I note that people had prayer and charity and fasting in biblical times, too. So these are not replacements for sacrifice. They existed beside sacrifice all along. My question is: what do we have now that they did not have? Answer: study. What we have that no one in the biblical world (until Ezra) had is: the Torah. What we have that no one at all in biblical times had is the full Tanak [that is the full Hebrew Bible]. Our task is to study it, to shine our own new light on it, and to shine its light on us. This is our task individually, in groups, and as a community.[1]

Chapters 8-10 provide one of only two narrative accounts in the entire book of Leviticus. It is the story of the consecration of Aaron and his sons to the priesthood. This is a lengthy and detailed account describing ceremonies that have already been described in Exodus 29, but here they are put into action. These ceremonies conclude with the shocking story of Nadab and Abihu. Scholars are not exactly sure what the offense of Aaron’s two oldest sons really was. They simply offered something in worship that YHWH had not commanded. Friedman explains:

In the realm of the ritual, they have failed to observe a boundary, and so their fate is settled. This is one of several biblical stories that indicate that on the highest levels of the ritual realm, intention does not matter. In the ethical realm it does.[2]

In Leviticus 10:8 we see God comforting Aaron, in a way, after the loss of his sons. This is the first time that we see God speaking directly to Aaron alone since God first sent Aaron to meet Moses in Exodus 4:27.

Leviticus 10:10 shows us that this book is, as I have said before, concerned with orderliness. According to Leviticus, it is essential to distinguish between the holy and the secular in quite a number of ways.

However, why the author(s) of Leviticus saw fit to make so many rules about what is clean and unclean remains a mystery to me and to many scholars. The uncleanness from a sanitary viewpoint of many of these things seems like a matter of common sense, while the uncleanness of other things remains obscure to us today.

Friedman summarizes,

The essential common point, it seems to me, is that these are all things that most people in most societies instinctively do not want to touch: blood, semen, diseased skin, corpses. It may be that ancient Israelites came to give all these things that they found repugnant to touch a common name…[3]

While the importance of defining what is clean and unclean does not have the same character or even urgency for us today, the importance of a sacrifice for sin remains. I think C. S. Lewis has a good insight about the sacrifices of the Old Testament, expressed in his book, Reflections on the Psalms….

Even in Judaism the essence of the sacrifice was not really that men gave bulls and goats to God, but that by their so doing God gave Himself to men; in the central act of our own worship [Holy Communion] of course this is far clearer—there it is manifestly, even physically, God who gives and we who receive.

[1] Friedman, Commentary on the Torah, 333-334

[2] Ibid, 340

[3] Ibid, 344

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