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The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan
Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)
Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)
The Four: A Survey of the Gospels
Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom
From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John
Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture
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
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
By looking for the sources of biblical notions of kipper in texts dealing with bloodguilt for murder, Feder concludes that blood serves as a compensation for the damage done by sin. Sin is conceived as a debt, and the blood of sacrifice is payment for the debt.
To explain the logic of the lex talionis for murder, he uses Marx’s notion of “exchange value,” he suggests that “blood retaliation results in an abstraction of the value of the murdered party’s life. By turning the victim’s blood into an exchange value, it becomes a debt that can be ‘repaid’ by the death of the murderer, which, needless to say, would otherwise have no value to the inujured party.”
The same abstraction of blood, and its symbolization as a “currency” is at work in the sacrificial system: “the sin offering blood rite has adapted the symbolism and terminology of murder compensation and transformed them into a cultic means of expiating sin. Just as in the context of homicide expiation, kipper is used in reference to the repayment of a blood debt, the sin offering rituals employing this verb in reference to the use of blood as a means of making restitution for guilt, conceptualized as a debt vis-a-vis the Deity.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 11:00 am
Feder summarizes the scholarly consensus on the use of blood in Mesopotamian ritual, which, he says, “has little in common with the expiatory use of blood in the Bible.”
He elaborates: “In Mesopotamian rites, blood is usually associated with chthonic deities. In numerous cases, blood is applied to the door posts as a prophylactic means of repelling demons. The blood is intended to satisfy their blood lust so that they will not attack the ritual patron. Similarly, foundation rituals required the smearing of the foundation stones with blood in order to appease the infernal deities for the invasion of their territory. These apotropaic and propitiatory uses must be distinguished from the use of blood to remove metaphysical evil (impurity, sin, etc.) in the Hittite and biblical evidence. In other Meopotamian rituals, blood is also applied to a patient’s body in order to heal epilepsy and other illnesses.” He finds only one text where blood is used in a manner closer to Israel’s: the zukru festival of Emar, where “After eating and drinking, they rub all of the stones with oil and blood.” He compares this to the consecration of the altar in the ordination rites of Exodus 29 and Leviticus 8-9, but concludes that the rite is not the same: “the Emar blood rite repeats itself over the course of the festival,” and it seems that the blood is not a consecration but “preparation for the passage of Dagan between the stones” (an interesting item in itself – a birth? a Passover of sorts?)
Greek evidence for expiatory blood is much stronger.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 9:04 am
Greeks, like Jews, believed that corpses defiled. According to Robert Parker’s classic Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Clarendon Paperbacks)
There is some indication that not all corpses were impure or communicators of impurity. Parker finds it “tempting” to speculate that slaves, children, and others low on the social scale were considered less impure, and Plato says quite explicitly that the corpse of a good man cannot pollute. Simonides said that those good men who died in their country’s service are not impure: “Their tomb is an altar; in place of lament they have remembrance, grief becomes praise.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, November 9, 2010 at 9:29 am
The color “scarlet” is named most often in the Bible in connection with the tabernacle curtains and the garments of the High Priest.
It’s also, of course, the color of the whore of Revelation.
That means: Only a people already clothed in scarlet can become a prostitute clothed in scarlet. Only Bride Israel gets divorced.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, September 20, 2010 at 9:50 am
Yesterday, I suggested that the sequence of sacrifice in the Bible, reflected in Leviticus and the Song, is this: Like the original Adam, adams are divided and pass through the fire into order to be transformed into fiery bridal food, fragrance satisfying to God.
That is only an extension of natural reality: Earth passes through the fire of the sun and the many waters of rain in order to produce fruit. Earth is plowed and planted, divided and broken in pieces, to produce fruit. Seeds must die to produce trees and vines.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, July 23, 2010 at 4:56 am
Leviticus 26 uses the verb “make desolate” (shamem) seven times (vv. 22, 31, 32 [2x], 34, 35, 43). Yahweh threatens to de-create the land.
The link between the curses of Leviticus 26 and creation is not merely numerical. The desolations follow, roughly, the events of the creation week.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, April 27, 2010 at 5:49 am
In the tabernacle system, oil is used for light on the golden menorah. The priest receives aromatic oil that spread fragrance. Cakes and breads baked or spread with oil become a sweet savor, soothing the heated nose of Yahweh.
In both cases, oil bestows radiant power. In the Bible, Christs – anointed ones – create a field of radiance around them, a field of light or the aroma of a good name.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 5:40 am
In a 1996 article, Angel Manuel Rodriguez offers a close structural analysis of the day of coverings rite in Leviticus 16.
Overall, he finds that the chapter is a chiasm:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 7:52 am
Leviticus 23 has five speeches of Yahweh:
A. Sabbath, Passover, Unleavened Bread, vv 1-8
B. First Sheaf, Pentecost, Gleaning, vv 9-22
C. Trumpets, vv 23-26
B’. Day of Coverings, vv 26-32
A’. Booths, vv 33-44
Several links in this structure are worth noting.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 5:05 am
Pentecost is a bread feast, a feast of leaven (Leviticus 23:17). Animals are brought as offerings, plenty of them, but these are brought “with the bread,” accompaniments to the bread rather than the other way round.
It’s quite fitting, then, that after the leaven of the Spirit came upon the church at Pentecost, they went from house to house “breaking bread.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 4:37 am
The presentation of the first sheaf (Leviticus 23:9-13) provides a neat little allegory of redemption. The first sheaf is presented on the day after the sabbath, the day of resurrection. It is the “beginning” of the harvest (v. 10), and Leviticus uses the same word as is used in Genesis 1:1. This eighth day is the beginning of a new creation.
At the same time, a year-old lamb is brought as ascension to Yahweh, and that is followed by an offering of “bridal food” to Yahweh, a tribute of bread and a libation of wine. This is the first time Leviticus has used the word for “libation,” and the first time we’ve seen bread and wine offered up to Yahweh. And this happens after the harvest begins, after the first sheaf appears; a eucharistic feast begins on the eighth day.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 4:21 am
When Paul talks about the “fullness of time,” he’s likely alluding back to the calendar of Leviticus 23. Pentecost is calculated from the day of the first sheaf, and the time is described as a “complete” set of sabbaths. The word translated as “complete” is tamim, which describes perfect men and unblemished animals. A “perfect” time is a set of seven sevens, and this is the time that leads to Pentecost.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 4:17 am
Esau is a “hairy man” (sa’iyr), something we learn only when Jacob dresses himself in goat hair to approach his father (Genesis 27:11, 23). Jacob becomes a hairy one, subbing in for his brother. The only other use of the word in Genesis is in 37:31, where it describes the “kid” killed to fool into thinking that Joseph has died. Both passages involve substitution, and both involve deception of a father.
Leviticus 16 is the great chapter about hairy goats. The word is used 14x in the chapter to describe the two goats used in the day of atonement rite. On the day of “coverings,” Israel is covered with goat skin to receive the blessing of the firstborn; on the day of coverings, a hairy kid is killed in place of the beloved son.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 4:29 am
When Moses objects that he cannot speak, Yahweh assigns his “brother Aaron” to be his spokesman and prophet (Exodus 4:14; 7:1-2). The next time Aaron is identified as Moses’ brother is in Exodus 28, where he is given the garments of glory and beauty to approach Yahweh, and the phrase “Aaron your brother” appears again in Leviticus 16:2. In all these cases, Aaron as brother functions as mediator, the one who approaches the master, whether Pharaoh or Yahweh.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 3:53 am
Mary Douglas highlighted the analogies between body and social body in her work on Levitical defilements. Protecting the integrity and wholness of the individual body symbolized the aspirations of Israelite society for a whole and well-protected social body, without intrusions from outside or seepage from inside.
At the same time, Douglas sees ethical interpretations of Levitical purity rules as a Hellenic intrusion into Judaism. But why? If the individual body is homologous with the social body, can’t it also be the individual as a moral being? If the purity rules project a symbolic social universe, why can’t they intro-ject a symbolic psychological universe?
The quadriga rescues from this oversight, since the allegory of body and social body opens immediately into an allegory of body and soul.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, September 15, 2009 at 7:45 am
Mary Douglas writes in Leviticus As Literature
This is initially counter-intuitive: The covenant promises fertility, and central to the covenant promise is the promise of abundant seed. But Douglas may be onto something, because fertility for Abraham and his children does not come through flesh but through the Spirit (cf. Galatians 4). The circumcised people has renounced teeming in cutting off the flesh, and instead looks to Yahweh as the Lord and Giver of life.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, September 15, 2009 at 7:31 am
Nazirites were separated to Yahweh’s service and devoted to His holy war. Priests too were “separated” (nazir, Leviticus 22:2).
But Israel as a whole was a nation of devoted warriors. That is the whole rationale for the laws of cleanliness, that the sons of Israel will be “nazired” from their uncleanness (Leviticus 15:31).
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, September 15, 2009 at 5:16 am
Leviticus 8-9 are organized by repetition of phrases about Yahweh’s commandments. Everything in the ordination rite is done “as Yahweh commanded Moses” (8:5, 9, 13, 17, 21, 29, 36; 9:6, 7, 10, 21).
It works: When Israel does as Yahweh commands, the glory appears and eats the ascension and the fat. Yahweh eats with obedience people.
Then 10:1: “Nadab and Abihu . . . offered strange fire before Yahweh, which He had not commanded.”
Sin is breaking rhythm.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, September 1, 2009 at 6:57 am
That Paul says that the crossing of the sea is a “baptism” is surprising enough; but then he says that the baptism is “into the cloud.” Where’d he get that?
You can suss that out from the exodus story, but I suspect that Paul has conflated the exodus story with the procedures for sacrifice. Leviticus 1:9 says that the legs and entrails of an ascension offering are first “washed with water” and then “turned to smoke.” The washing is immediately followed by a transfiguration into cloud. Sacrificial animals were literally “baptized into the cloud.”
So also are we: Baptized into the cloud of witnesses that surrounds the throne, baptized into the company of angels that constitutes the glory of God, baptized into the cloud that is the Spirit-presence of the Son, baptized into sacrificial ministry, baptized to ascend, clothed in smoke and fire, into the Lord’s presence.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, August 24, 2009 at 8:16 am
Scattered, inconclusive remarks on the prohibition of brother-sister incest in Leviticus 18 and 20.
A number of the relations prohibited in these chatpers recall relationships that existed among the patriarchs. Leviticus 18:11 prohibits a man from taking his half-sister, the daughter of your father. That is exactly the relationship of Abraham and Sara. In Genesis 20:12, Abraham explains to Abimelech that “she actually is my sister, the daughter of my father but not the daughter of my mother, and she became my wife.”
A more subtle, but striking, example along the same lines comes from the related rule in chapter 20:17.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, July 31, 2009 at 3:24 pm
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