Leviticus Review

Leviticus is a strange book, in that it doesn’t read like a religious text.  It reads more like an instruction manual or a rulebook; in fact, a more descriptive title of The Book of Rather More than Ten Commandments would be far more descriptive.  That’s essentially all Leviticus is.  Picking up from where Exodus’ instructions and specifications leave off, Leviticus proceeds to enumerate, with great specificity, all kinds of rules and requirements imposed upon the people of Israel.

Many of them have to do with offerings, which should not be confused with the kind of offerings you might put in the plate passed around in most Christian worship services.  These offerings are almost always food-related, in the form of live animals, bread, or other ingredients.  Many of them are presented in the fashion of burnt offerings (see our previous discussion about the ancient belief that smoke offered a vehicle to the heavens), although sprinkling of blood is quite common, too.  Leviticus specifies what species, ages, genders, conditions, and portions of offering animals are acceptable, how they should be butchered, when and where they should be butchered, what should be done with the parts not suitable for the offering, what is allowed to be eaten by humans and priests afterwards, and how the burnt offering should be seasoned (apparently, Jehovah likes His offerings well-salted).

It’s clear that many of these rules are the basis for the kosher diet, and probably the most interesting part of the whole book is how it revolves around ideas of cleanliness.  Although The Healing Hand is focused specifically on ancient wound treatment, I imagine Leviticus would form a significant basis for a parallel book on ancient ideas of disease and its treatment.  Some of this is overt, like the sections on leprosy and fleshly “issues,” but others are more implicit and therefore more intriguing.  One wonders how the Jewish people were affected by their religion’s emphasis on cleanliness in food preparation, choice, and bodily function.

There are specifications about acceptable and unacceptable sexuality, the keeping of the sabbath and various feast days, the treatment of slaves, of criminals, of the poor, which can form a sometimes disorienting contrast between specifications that seem distinctly amoral to modern sensibilities, and which seem surprisingly modern.  Generosity to the poor and acceptance of strangers are listed right alongside a specification that people who are born with flat noses are considered “blemished” before Jehovah and therefore are unacceptable as priests.

In several places, I found myself wondering about the resolution of the translation I read.  Certain word-choices seem confusing or ambiguous, which could probably be solved if I spent a few minutes with a search engine in one hand and the book in the other…which I did not do this time.  Perhaps if I did, I would find a different translation for the most evocative imagery in Leviticus, which references the “wave-breast” and the “heave-thigh.”  Significant passages are devoted to presentation of the “wave-breast” and the “heave-thigh,” and every time I imagined someone standing in front of an altar waving around a chicken breast and tossing chicken thighs at the congregation.

The rulebook-like nature of Leviticus is probably why you don’t see it referenced or quoted more often, or maybe it’s because people struggle to quote Biblical passages about wave-breasts and heave-thighs with a straight face (I am genuinely curious what is actually meant by these phrases, so please don’t mistake my emphasis on them as making fun of the text).  Read in isolation, it really doesn’t read like a book at all, and it is difficult to draw great insights from it about culture or even about religion as we might from other religious texts or ancient works.  As an ancient guide to clean living, though, it is fascinating to consider its implications, and it further emphasizes how exceptional Judaism is in world history.