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LEVITICUS, BOOK OF

The third of the Five Books of Moses that comprise the Pentateuch or Torah. Leviticus forms the core of the Priestly source (P), which comprises about half of the Torah, beginning at Exod. 24:15, extending through most of Numbers, and including scattered interpolations in Genesis and Exodus. The title Leviticus bestowed by the early Church is a misnomer, as P actually discusses Levites mainly in Numbers. Leviticus covers a wide range of topics; but its focus on sacrifice in the first 10 chapters conveys a false impression that the book will deal only with a temple cult, which slaughters animals in order to offer up choice portions like the “fat covering the entrails,” “the two kidneys” and “the appendage of the liver” — all so a God called Yahweh may smell the “pleasing odor” of the burnt offering (3:1-5).

In reality, Leviticus goes far beyond the sacrificial concerns (e.g., thanks for God’s bounty, atonement for sin) presented in chs. 1-10. Its topics include dietary laws defining animals fit for food and sacrifice (ch. 11); treatment of virulent but curable skin diseases (chs. 13-14); rites of atonement for individual and communal sin (ch. 16); and daily, sabbath, and festival cultic rituals observed throughout the year (chs. 23-24). The book also regulates symbolic purification of women after childbirth (ch. 12); ritual cleansing of cultic pollution caused by genital discharges (ch. 15) or contact with corpses (chs. 21-22); and most importantly, the practice of sexual intercourse and related matters (chs. 18, 20). Many scholars view the Holiness Code (chs. 17-26) as a separate source (H) adopted by P. The book concludes with laws for sabbatical and jubilee years (ch. 25), depictions of dire punishment for disobeying God’s laws (ch. 26), and an appendix (ch. 27) listing the monetary value of various classes of Israelites, to be donated by one who pledges his value or that of his child to the sanctuary.

Dating and Provenance

Jewish exegetes dubbed Leviticus “the Instruction for Priests” (tôraṯ kōhănîm), as it is mainly a manual for conducting the Israelite cult of Yahweh. P portrays the temple in the guise of a portable sanctuary that accompanied the Israelites during their 40 years’ nomadic wandering from Egypt to the Promised Land. Whether the sanctuary symbolized the First (preexilic) or Second (postexilic) Temple depends on the book’s date of composition — a subject of ongoing controversy. Most scholars would date Leviticus to the 5th century b.c.e., after the 6th-century Babylonian Exile, when Israelite priests deported to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar II (2 Kgs. 25:18; Ezra 1:5) encountered first Babylonian religion and then Persian Zoroastrianism — both of which may have influenced the writing of P. A scholarly minority would date P to preexilic times, thus viewing it as an indigenous development within Israelite culture.

Leviticus’ character as a priestly manual distinguishes it from other sources of the Torah (J, E, and D) and from all other books of the OT. It is neither a myth of origins (like Genesis) nor historiography (Joshua through Kings), nor poetry (the Song of Songs), nor philosophy (Ecclesiastes), nor prophecy (Isaiah or Jeremiah). It contains little narrative and relatively few named characters, apart from the Israelite leaders Moses and Aaron. Leviticus regulates two of the Israelite castes: the high-caste hereditary priesthood called “sons of Aaron” and the common people called “sons (or ‘children’) of Israel.” (Levites or “sons of Levi,” an intermediate caste that ministered to the Aaronide priests, figure in P segments of Numbers.) Leviticus deals also with persons thought to pose a threat to holiness or cultic purity, such as sufferers from certain skin diseases (including one persistently misidentified as leprosy) and genital discharges; menstruants; and people who offended against both ethics and cult by engaging in forbidden sexual conduct, specifically adultery, incest, homosexuality, and bestiality.

Anthropological Perspectives

Its topics often introduced by the claim that “God spoke to Moses, saying . . . ,” Leviticus appears to present concrete rules of divine law. But closer scrutiny reveals a concern with abstract ideas important to theology and anthropology alike. Anthropologist Mary Douglas demonstrated that laws governing food and sex embody a desire to preserve harmony in nature and society; and historian of religions Mircea Eliade showed that a concern with sacred places (like the temple in Jerusalem) and sacred times (like sabbaths and other holy days) reflects an ethnocentric belief — widely prevalent in ancient cultures — in the cosmic importance of the activities of one’s own group, seen as a chosen people in a covenantal relationship with its god. In Leviticus this doctrine accounts for Priestly emphasis on “holiness” and “purity” and their connection to basic phenomena like childbirth, menstruation, sexual relations, and death.

Animal Sacrifice

Animal sacrifice, widespread in the ancient world (and still practiced in some cultures today), may strike modern readers as simply primitive. Yet it embodies sophisticated concepts characteristic of most or all religious systems. Anthropologists and scholars of religion agree that religious ideas developed from human efforts to make sense of the cosmos. An innate craving for order and harmony prompted the view that the universe was in principle orderly rather than chaotic (Gk. kósmos means “order”). When things went awry, whether in the form of natural disasters or societal disruptions, the disturbance of cosmic order called for symbolic action to restore the shattered equilibrium by placating the powers that rule the cosmos; and symbolic action often took the form of sacrifice to the tribal god or gods.

Conversely, if a god favored an individual or group with an abundance of crops or herds, thus tipping the scales in their favor, equilibrium could be restored by bringing a thank-offering (quid pro quo) from crops or herds (Lev. 1-3). Sometimes people tilted the balance toward heaven by bringing on offering in advance (do ut des), hoping to motivate their god(s) to restore the balance by granting an abundant harvest next time. One who had sinned by infringing some cultic regulation could appease divine wrath with a sacrifice (chs. 4-5). Leviticus prescribes offerings to fit all of these categories, the general goal being to retain or regain divine favor by symbolically righting a wrong or neutralizing some event that, for good or ill, had disturbed or threatened to disturb cosmic harmony.

Prominent among acts thought to upset cosmic balance was the commission of “sin” — a common but misleading translation of Heb. ḥēṭʾ, which in P does not carry the same moral overtones as the English word “sin.” From a root meaning “to miss the mark,” ḥēṭʾ really means “error” or “mistake” (the converse of tôrâ, which comes from a root meaning “to hit the mark”). In the worldview of the Israelite priests, cultic infractions — even unintended ones — offended God and required a sacrifice of symbolic expiation (chs. 4, 5, 16), whereas ethical offenses against fellow human beings demanded amends by restitution or compensation (as frequently spelled out in Exodus and Deuteronomy) to restore personal and societal equilibrium.

Holiness and Purity

The primary motivators of religious practice in the priestly systems are the twin themes of holiness (qĕḏûšâ) and purity (ṭohŏrâ) — distinct but closely associated concepts that require elucidation. The demand for Israelite holiness is articulated in a thrice-repeated call for imitatio Dei: “You shall be holy, for I Yahweh your God am holy” (19:2; 20:7; 11:44). The meaning of holiness here may not be readily apparent to modern readers, for whom the term often evokes a pious, ascetic individual — saint, mystic, priest, or nun. The association of holiness with sexual abstinence, however, is distinctive to Christianity and rooted in particular conditions of late antiquity. To understand holiness in Leviticus, we must draw on the insights of anthropology and comparative religion.

Holiness for Israelite priests resembled similar concepts in other ancient religions like Zoroastrianism and Hinduism. It meant being “special” or “set apart.” Since holiness must pervade every waking action, daily life was circumscribed by a catalogue of “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots” encompassing both cultic acts of worship expressing love of God (chs. 1–10, 23–24) and ethical acts expressing love of neighbor (19:18, 34, and ch. 19 generally), as well as physical acts vital to the survival of individual and group — namely those involving food (ch. 11) and sex (chs. 18 and 20). Not only the priesthood but Israelites in general (“a priestly kingdom and a holy nation,” Exod. 19:6) must separate themselves from others in imitation of their God Yahweh. The doctrine of election (“chosen people syndrome”) is not unique to the Israelites, but is found in most ethnic or national groups (e.g., the British White Man’s Burden, French mission civilatrice, German Herrenvolk, American Manifest Destiny); and in the context of religion it appears in the supersessionism of the early Church, which explicitly declared Christians to be the “Israel of God” (Gal. 6:16) and the new “chosen race” (1 Pet. 2:9).

Leviticus reinforces holiness by imposing strict standards of cultic purity in personal and communal life. Cultic purity (sometimes called ritual purity) is a concept even less accessible than holiness to the modern mind. Many ancients believed that some bodily processes triggered an intangible aura of contamination, which impeded human access to the divine. Cultic pollution could be generated by the discharge of bodily fluids associated with crucial phenomena like childbirth, menstruation, ejaculation, genital discharges, mysterious diseases, and above all by contact with death. Primitive societies lacking science and medicine viewed such events — poorly understood and largely beyond human control — as ordained by God. Not surprisingly, they became hedged around with rules of pollution and taboo and purification rituals to remove the taint that attached to people or things having physical contact with these phenomena. Such rules characterize Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Islam and are still to some degree observed in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Christian baptism as a means to remove the invisible taints of sin (cf. John the Baptist in Matt. 3) evolved directly from the cleansing procedures prescribed in Leviticus.

Status of Women

In the worldview of P, a priest who contracted impurity could not “come before Yahweh” to perform his duties unless he had first purified himself by ritual immersion. The same applied to an Israelite man healed from a genital discharge, who wished to “come before Yahweh” with his offering (15:13-14). As to women, however, the omission of the crucial phrase “before Yahweh” in the case of a woman healed of a genital discharge (15:29) reflects Priestly perception of women as ineligible in principle to enter the divine presence. Cultic taboos surrounding childbirth, menstruation, and sexual relations sociologically reflect and theologically define the place of women in the patriarchal culture of ancient Israel. Even priestly-caste women could not participate actively in the temple cult; rules designed to preserve the holiness and purity of individual Israelites and of the community at large banned women’s potentially polluting presence from the public cultural domain. Later, talmudic rules based on the Priestly worldview would effectively confine Jewish women to the private domain. Those laws impact the lives of women in traditional Judaism to this day, from the mandatory monthly visit to a mikveh (ritual immersion pool) to their ineligibility for public offices like rabbi, cantor, or religious court judge.

Historical Note

Ancient Israelite tradition viewed the Hebrew Bible as far more than simply “the word of God.” For 2500 years, Leviticus has formed part of the political, literary, and cultural history of the Jewish people as biological and cultural heirs of those who wrote the Hebrew Bible/OT. However, it is important to distinguish the ancient Israelite priestly cult from the rabbinic Judaism practiced today, which evolved concurrently with Christianity in the 1st century, at the time of the destruction of the Second Temple. What the OT actually depicts is the religion of ancient Israel, which was destined in the time of Jesus to produce two siblings: rabbinic Judaism and Christianity.

Bibliography. M. Douglas, Purity and Danger (New York, 1970); B. A. Levine, Leviticus. JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia, 1989); J. Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16. AB 3 (New York, 1991); J. R. Wegner, Chattel or Person? The Status of Women in the Mishnah (Oxford, 1988); “Leviticus,” in The Women’s Bible Commentary, ed. C. A. Newsome and S. H. Ringe (Louisville, 1992), 40-48.

Judith Romney Wegner

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

LEVITICUS, BOOK OF

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)