Writer of Fancy: The Playful Piety of Jane Austen

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Bible - OT - Leviticus: Purpose of sacrifice

In an article in Religion Compass,  David Janzen challenges Milgrom’s understanding of sacrifice as “purgation” and his claims about the effects of sacrifice.  Rather than purging, sacrifice emphasizes Yahweh’s difference from Israel, the requirement of Israel’s obedience, and the consequences of her failure to obey.  He concludes:

“But the sacrificial rendering unto God what is God’s is . . . a public demonstration of Israel’s feudal relationship to the divine. In P’s narrative, sacrifice is largely about distinction and the obedience that follows upon accepting the feudal relationship implied in this distinction between the divine and human realms. Sacrifice demands obedience, and it signals a warning. The consequence of not sacrificing is not, as Milgrom sees it, that the divine presence will depart from Israel – an assertion that P nowhere makes – but that God will make a sacrifice out of Israel through famine, plague, and warfare, as so vividly described in Leviticus 18:24–30 and 26:14–39. The blood of sacrifice is ultimately not a detergent, but an indicator of something that belongs to God – an indication of God’s authority to demand obedience and power to punish sin.”

The whole discussion is skewed by Milgrom’s and Janzen’s focus on the non-existent P.

Bible - OT - Leviticus: Fragrance of the bride

The rhyming Hebrew phrase reyach niychoach (”soothing aroma”) is used frequently in Leviticus in conjunction with ishshah (”fire offering” or “food offering”; this combination found in Leviticus 1:13, 17; 2:2, 9; 3:5, 16). reyach niychoach is found without ishshah in Leviticus 4:31; 6:8, 14.

Two things suggest that the phrase has a bridal connection. First reyach (aroma) appears repeatedly in the Song of Songs (1:3, 12; 2:13; 4:10-11; 7:8, describing the oil worn by the King and the fragrances of the bride. Second, James Jordan has suggested that ishshah is related to ishah, the woman one taken from the man (ish).

Applied to the sacrificial system, this suggests that the sacrifice gives off a pleasing aroma, the fragrance of the bride, which awakens the love of the Yahweh, the divine Husband.

Bible - OT - Leviticus: Sacrifice and death

It has been customary since the middle ages to define sacrifice in terms of death. To sacrifice is to give something over to destruction. Roy Gane points out in his Cult and Character that this does not conform to the biblical usage. The bread of the presence is described as a “food-offering to Yahweh” (Leviticus 24:7), yet it was never destroyed but only consumed by the priests. It was a presentation offering before the Lord, and there was clearly no killing but also no destruction at all.

Bible - OT - Leviticus: Prematurely white

In his stimulating essay on Leviticus 13 (available from Biblical Horizons), Jim Jordan reflects on the fact that a white hair in the flesh makes a man unclean. White hair is associated with glory, and so the uncleanness results from the contradiction between glorification and flesh. The unclean “leper” is partially, not fully, glorified; his flesh is white but not wholly; he is prematurely glorified.

This is also the situation of Adam: He seeks glory before his time, the white crown of wisdom before he has grown up from fleshliness.

Bible - OT - Leviticus: Sacrificial sequence

Hicks again: He organizes his discussion of the New Covenant fulfillment of the sacrificial system in the phrases “life surrendered,” “life transformed,” and “life shared.” Reconciliation is made on the basis of life surrendered, blood shed, but that’s not the end point of the reconciling sacrifice. This enables him to affirm a sacrificial dimension in the Eucharist while simultaneously criticizing the direction of Catholic eucharistic theology, particularly after Trent. He affirms the 39 Articles that described the Mass as “blasphemy,” but sees the problem as centrally the problem of misunderstanding the character of sacrifice as such.

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Bible - OT - Leviticus: Burning flesh

FCN Hicks writes in his 1946 book on sacrifice that the burning of an animal on the altar was not destructive but transforming: “The offering is not destroyed but transformed, sublimated, etherealised, so that it can ascend in smoke to the heaven above, to the dwelling-place of God.” He cites Elijah’s sacrifice on Carmel to make the point that the burning was “God’s acceptance of that which is offered. In accepting, he transforms it into a condition in which it can enter into His life.”

He also states matter-of-factly that “To atone is kipper, to cover,” citing Psalm 73:38 and 79:9. He adds that sin offends the holy God who demands righteousness, and that the sinner himself needs to be covered, cleansed, forgiven. Throughout his discussion of atonement, though, he reverts to the basic notion of “covering.”

Bible - OT - Leviticus: Fat, Body Parts, Liver Lobes

In her Leviticus as Literature, the late Mary Douglas offers some interesting possibilities for interpreting the prohibition of eating fat and for the arrangement of animal portions on the altar.

Her interpretation is guided by her recognition of analogies between Sinai, the tabernacle, and the body, both of the animal and of the person. Within this overall parallel, which she finds in Jewish mystical writing and early Christian poetry (like that of Ephrem), the fat corresponds to the “boundary of forbidden sacred space on the mountain.” The boundary on the mountain protects the summit, where Yahweh meets with Moses in the glory; the fat protects the inner organs that represent the inmost being of the person offering.

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Bible - OT - Leviticus: Kiuchi on Leviticus

Some initial observations on Nobuyoshi Kiuchi’s recent commentary on Leviticus in the Apollos series from IVP.

1) Kiuchi intriguingly translates hata and hatta’t, traditionally rendered in terms of “sin” or “purification” in terms of “hiding”: “hata and hatta’t mean ‘to hide oneself’ and the condition of ‘hiding oneself,’ respectively,” and therefore “we can assume that the function of the sin offering is to uncover the offerer’s heart.” He connects this back to Genesis 3, and finds “hiding” as the basic reality of original sin. In Genesis 3, hiding is the condition that follows the violation of one of God’s commandments.

More fully,

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Bible - OT - Leviticus: Cleanse, consecrate, atone

Jay Sklar of Covenant Seminary carefully examined the uses of various terms for cleansing, consecrating, and atonement, particularly aiming to distinguish “atone” (Heb kpr) from the others. He took aim particularly at Milgrom’s claim that kipper “means purge and nothing else,” and is synonymous with other terms for purging.

Against Milgrom, Sklar examined passages that use these various verbs to determine their similarities and differences. Gramatically, Sklar noted that in both purification and consecration passages, kpr is never used in the reflexive hitpael aspect (no one is self-kippering) and very rarely takes a direct object. In terms of ritual, he noted that kpr always requires blood - it is never achieved by washing, anointing, laundering, or shaving, but only by sacrifice.

Why? “Atonement” is required, he says, in contexts of major impurities, which place Israel or the impure person in extreme danger. In these contexts, blood is required not only to cleanse but to rescue the sinner from the wrath of Yahweh. Thus, against Milgrom, he argues that krp means both “purge” and “ransom,” both expiation and propitiation.

Bible - OT - Leviticus: Impurity and caste

Mary Douglas has observed that “Levitical impurity is a fact of biology, common to all persons, and also a result of specific moral offences that anyone is liable to commit such as lying or stealing . . . Biblical impurity is of no use in demarcating advantaged social classes or ranks.”

But this is precisely what the Jews of Jesus’ time had made it!

Bible - OT - Leviticus: Feast of Booths

John Kleinig suggests that Luke’s account of the Transfiguration alludes to the feast of booths: Luke “alone of the Gospel writers relates that the transfiguration occurred on the eighth day after Peter’s confession of faith (Lk 9:28). The transfiguration was the epiphany of Jesus as God’s Son. It showed Peter, James, and John that the age of the Messiah ahd come when the righteous would be overshadowed by God’s presence and dwell with him in ‘heavenly shelters’ (cf. Lk 16:9), just as the Israelites had dwelt with him in earthly shelters in the desert and at Jerusalem during Booths. And so Peter offered to build ’shelters’ for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah (Lk 9:33).”

Bible - OT - Leviticus: Animal classifications

Naphtali Meshel of the Hebrew University gave an interesting paper on the dietary laws of Lev and Deuteronomy. He noted that Deut 14 divides animals simply into two categories - pure and impure. Impure animals are both ritually defiling (their corpses are) and are prohibited for consumption; pure animals are not ritually defiling and are permitted for consumption.

Lev 11, however, presents a more complex taxonomy, Meshel argued. First, it divides its concerns between consumption and contact, rather than treating both together. The terminology is different: TAME means both ritually defiling and prohibited for consumption, while SHAQETZ means only prohibited for consumption but not ritually defiling.

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Bible - OT - Leviticus: Disfigured Israel

By my count, there are twelve disfigurements listed in Leviticus 21:18-20 that disqualify a priest from serving at the altar and in the tabernacle: blind, lame, slit, deformed, broken foot, broken hand, hunchback, dwarf, defect of eye, eczema, scabs, crushed testicles. The listed disfigurements point to a disfigured Israel, twelve disfigurements for twelve tribes. And this adds some depth to the fact that Jesus heals many of these disfigurements as He creates a new Israel.

Bible - OT - Leviticus: Shared Nakedness

Leviticus 18 describes sexual sin as occasions of exposure, as “uncovering nakedness.” At times, the nakedness is not only an individual’s, but is shared. The reason given for the prohibition of maternal incest in Lev 18:8 is that the mother’s nakedness is the “father’s nakedness.” This makes sense: In the nature of the case, husband and wife share a single covering, and so an exposure of the nakedness of the one is an exposure of the nakedness of another. There’s more going on here, but the basis for the notion of shared nakedness is pretty obvious.

What about 18:10, which prohibits incest with a granddaughter on the basis of the fact that “they are your nakedness.” The grandfather’s nakedness and the granddaughter’s are the same. How is this the case? Perhaps John Kleinig’s suggestion is right: “Incest violates the nakedness of the family, its ordered intimacy; it exposes the sexuality of its members and confuses its sexual ecology. It shames the family publicly.” So if a grandfather uncovers the nakedness of his granddaughter, he brings the shame of public exposure on himself, he himself is stripped before the world. Perhaps, but I suspect there’s more going on, and that it is somehow connected with the naked Jesus on the cross, the fact that he bears the shame of our Adamic nakedness in his own exposure.

Bible - OT - Leviticus: Blood and life

In his recent Concordia commentary on Leviticus, John Kleinig gives a good summary of what I think is the best explanation of the blood prohibtiion of Lev 17:

“many animists regard blood as the most potent of all ritual substances. The blood of an animal was either drunk or, more commonly, eaten with its meat to gain its life-power, its vitality and health, its virility and fertility, its energy and strength.” For the nations surrounding Israel, blood was food for deities (cf. Book 8 of the Odyssey), and was used to ward off evil spirits.

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Bible - OT - Leviticus: Uncleanness and the body

In his recent commentary on Leviticus (Baker), Allen Ross suggests that genital discharges were defiling because “The nature of God is so different from our human condition that the two conflict. The law made it clear that bodily functions prevent people from entering the presence of God - here or in the world to come.” Also, normal discharges made a person unclean because “these things were all earthly and physical, and so they could never be included in the category of holy - they were in the category of common or profane.” And again, “The law was simply restricting sexual acts from the sanctuary, keeping the boundaries between the physical and the holy.”

To which one can only respond with a robust, WHOA! followed by a shocked, SAY WHAT?!? The theological implications of saying that “our human condition” is incompatible with the presence of God are staggering. What happens in the resurrection, when we have resurrection bodies? Perhaps Ross means simply that “flesh and blood will not inherit the kingdom,” which is true; but saying “flesh” does not inherit the kingdom is not the same as saying bodies with bodily functions will not inherit the kingdom.

And Ross is not even correct in the context of the Levitical system, where all kinds of physical things were included in the realm of the holy - consecrated priests, forks, snuffers, altars, tables, meat, and so on and on. What about the category of “holy ground”? I mean, what could be more earthly than earth? Physical is not equivalent to profane.

Bible - OT - Leviticus: RPW and Leviticus 10

Leviticus 10 is often cited in support of the Reformed “Regulative Principle of Worship.” It does support that principle, but not if the principle is formulated, as it often is, as “whatever is not commanded is forbidden.” The sin of Nadab and Abihu was offering “strange” or “unauthorized” fire on the altar. But there is no command anywhere about what fire was to be used for burning incense. Yet, the priests had to make some determination of what fire to bring, and from the experience of Nadab and Abihu it’s clear that they could make the WRONG decision.

In the absence of specific commandments about the fire, how were they to know? They should have reasoned from the structures of the sanctuary system. The distinction between holy and profane runs the length of the system: There is holy food and common food, holy people and common people, holy things and common things, holy incense and common incense, a holy God and strange gods. With that distinction being hammered again and again, they should have concluded that there is also holy fire and strange fire. With regard to the regulative principle, the important point is that they were supposed to make a liturgical decision NOT merely be searching for an explicit command, but by reasoning from the existing commands and patterns to draw conclusions concerning liturgical actions that were not dealt with explicitly.

Bible - OT - Leviticus: Sin and Impurity

Milgrom says that the “purification offering” deals with impurity and not with sin. Kiuchi says that it deals also with sin, suggesting that the “problem of terminology arises from the fact that the cultic law distinguishes between physical uncleanness and . . . (sin), whereas . . . (sin) itself can be an intense form of uncleanness.” Jonathan Klawans’ book on sin and impurity helps to resolve this dilemma; Klawans argues that the language of impurity is applied to sins in the Torah - idolatry and sexual immorality in particular defile the land and cause the land to wretch and vomit its inhabitants. Klawans thus justifies Kiuchi’s claim that the purification offering dealt with both “sanctuary” and “land” defilements. Beyond that, the question is, how is this all transposed when we move to the new covenant? How is it conjugated? It appears that the NT knows only moral impurity, which now is seen as defiling the sanctuary and the land (both fulfilled in the church). 1 Cor 6 gives a clue: Paul describes sexual sin (which would have defiled the land in the OT) as a defilement of the temple of God. But does this formulation - moral and ceremonial collapsed into a single moral category - really cover all the cases in the NT?

Bible - OT - Leviticus: Made sin

John Kleinig suggests in his commentary on Leviticus that 2 Cor 5:21 refers to Jesus’ fulfillment of the rites of Leviticus 4-5: “Even though Jesus was singless, God offered Jesus as the ’sin offering’ for human sin. In this case Paul employs the term HAMARTIA alone, which the LXX also uses for a sin offering in Lev 4:21, 24; 5:12; 6:10 (ET 6:17). Influenced by the use of ASAH, ‘perform, make,’ as a ritual term in Leviticus, he maintains that God ‘made’ Jesus a sin offering. . . . Those who are in Christ therefore share in his righteousness. He took on their sin so that he could give them his purity.” This is intriguing in part because Paul moves from a Levitical typology to the language of justification. What, if any, is the warrant for this move in Leviticus? How does justification language work in the Levitical system?

Bible - OT - Leviticus: Sexual Laws of Leviticus 18

The sexual laws of Leviticus 18 have long been puzzling on a couple of levels. The logic of the arrangement of the laws is difficult to discern; the gaps in the laws seems inexplicable (no prohibition, for instance, of father-daughter incest); and the question of how obedience to these laws fulfills the purpose of distinguishing Israel from the nations is difficult to answer because, with some exceptions, the rules of consanguinity in Leviticus 18 do not diverge significantly from the rules in adjoining cultures (though certain prohibitions would touch on certain practices of surrounding nations ?Ebrother-sister incest among Egyptians, or sodomy practiced in various ANE cultures).

Employing Mary Douglas’s anthropological categories, Doug C. Mohrmann attempts to address these questions in a helpful article in the September 2004 issue of JSOT. He first notes the “frame” surrounding the prohibitions of Leviticus 18: Verses 1-5 and 23-30 provide a set of “external boundaries” around Israel. Sexual laws “were to contribute to Israel’s identity vis-a-vis her neighbors. If an alien was admitted into the culture, they would only be allowed on the condition that they must not violate these external boundaries (18.26; 20.2). Penalties for violations were personal ?Edeath (20.2, 9-16) ?Eand national ?Eforfeiture of the land (18:25), which leads to cultural death. Within the context of the exodus narrative, Israel is here portrayed as entering a physical boundary that, by God’s design, had a cultural boundary invisibly superimposed upon it.”

The laws within the frame (contained in 18:6-23) present internal boundaries, and are arranged, Mohrmann argues, in a set of concentric circles. Verses 6-17 are concerned with violations of sexual boundaries within the family; verses 18-20 with boundaries regarding the clan (verse 18 is concerned not with a man’s relation with his own family, but with his relation with the family of his wife); and verses 21-23 with boundaries between Israel and the Gentiles. This matches other tripartite structures in Leviticus, most obviously the tabernacle. This makes prima facie sense, since the language of “drawing near” (Heb, QRB) in Leviticus 18 is taken from the “drawing near” (QRB, QORBAN) to the tabernacle that is described in Leviticus 1. I’m not certain of all of Mohrmann’s conclusions, and I am not sure that he fully answers the questions he poses, but the basic scheme makes a lot of sense.

In an appendix to his article, Mohrmann discusses Leviticus 18:5. He argues that the plural command and the wider context require us to take 18:5b as a reference to the whole nation. “The man” (HA-ADAM) is “everyone, a collective to represent Israel.” The people, the “humanity” that keeps these laws shall live. There is a clear practical side to this, because a people that ignores the rules of consanguinity will be economically and socially confused, precisely because it is sexually confused. In any case, the idea that Leviticus 18:5 has a collective thrust may hold some important implications for Paul’s use of this passage in Romans and Galatians.

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