 |
|
     |
|
|
|
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
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
Leavings from a paper on Leviticus 18.
Leviticus 18 is a chiastic structure consisting of smaller chiasms. 18:1 is an introductory formula, announcing the beginning of a new section of Leviticus. Verses 2-5 form the first section of the chapter, which repeats “I am Yahweh” three times and also contains a neat small-chiasm of judgment/statutes around the central declaration of the Lord’s Name.
A. I am Yahweh your God
B. Do not do what Egypt and Canaan do
C. Do my judgments and statutes
D. I am Yahweh your God
C’. Keep statutes and judgments
B’. To live
A’. I am Yahweh
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, July 31, 2009 at 12:17 pm
Leviticus 18 is about sex. Leviticus 20 goes over the same ground, but it’s about death. The phrase “dying you shall die” from Genesis 3 is used repeatedly in the passage, nine times. The verb “die” is used 20x. Let’s look a bit at the structure of chapter 20.
Verses 1-5 form the first unit, flanked by references to Molech. The first line of verse 1 warns against giving seed to Molech, while the last uses the phrase “play the harlot with” Molech. The link is important, since “give seed” can have a sexual connotation (18:20) as well as a connotation of idolatry. Israel is required to carry out the death penalty against the idolater, by stoning, but this is backed up by the Lord’s threat to “cut off” the person from Israel:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, July 28, 2009 at 11:40 am
Fragments from lectures given at the recent Biblical Horizons Summer Conference. The notes that follow examine the opening verses of Leviticus 18.
1) “I am Yahweh” or some equivalent phrase is used 49 (7 x 7) times in Leviticus. The phrase is never used before chapter 11, when the “holiness” section begins, and the concerns turn away from the rules of the sacrificial liturgy to the rules of cleanness and the land. Of the 49 uses in Leviticus, 24 are in chapters 18-20. This is the place where Yahweh most emphatically declares His name, and declares what it means for Israel to be bearers of that name.
2) The specific phrase “I am Yahweh your God” is used 21x in the book, and 12 of those are in chapters 18-20. Again, Yahweh is speaking to His twelve-fold people.
3) Verse 3 sets the context for these instructions. . . .
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, July 28, 2009 at 9:35 am
Radner has these final comments on the hermeneutics of the “holiness code”: “The difference between the sexual laws of Lev. 18 and the laws of clean and unclean flesh in Lev. 11 cannot simply lie in their respective relation to teh category of ceremonial character. The difference lies in the way Jesus himself carries these realities in his body and in the body of his church. With respect to the animals . . . they are gathered up by Christ as reconciled creative distinctions that he bears in his own death. But with respect to the laws of sexual relation and family, we see the legal particulars, much as in the Sermon on the Mount, taken up by Christ and passed on to his church in an almost exaggerated fashion, renewed and refocused. We see both these things, however, not according to a logic of categorization, but according to the discernment of time as the Scriptures have molded them in God’s good will. The Scriptures are the book of God in the same sense as Revelation speaks of ‘the Lamb’s book of life . . . they form the shape of life as God’s creative purpose.”
Then this key formulation: “The word/words distinction in this case is as potentially misleading as the ceremonial/moral distinction is unhelpful. Jesus as the word fulfills the words of the text by carrying them in his own flesh through time: word and words are one, and the bonds of blood and life are thereby made strong.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, June 3, 2009 at 6:19 am
Radner finds part of the fulfillment of the figures of Leviticus 18 in the genealoty of Jesus. On the one hand, Jesus’ own genealogy includes sexually illicit acts (Tamar, Rahab, Bathsheba) and the various sins (not only sexual, but idolatry and oppression) represented in the genealogy eventually lead to Israel’s exile. Yet, “God also achieves a renewal of life through the suffering of mercy and through the maintenance somehow of the line of descent.”
On the other hand, the laws of Leviticus 18 trace out the historical/geneological path of God’s coming into the world: “we ought to see the abominable as including all that rebels against the shape of God’s coming into and passage through the world. And this rebellion is overwhelmed by the coming and passage of God. This is the key: God comes in this particular way, as described in Lev. 18. And this is the nature of the injunctions’ final weight: the world is shaped by this coming. This is the life that the laws provide.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, June 3, 2009 at 6:12 am
In dealing with the sexual legislation of Leviticus 18, Ephraim Radner (Leviticus (Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible)
The prohibition of adultery, for instance, is “fulfilled by means of confession, self-recognition, forgiveness, and conversion in the Samaritan woman . . . and in the woman caught in adultery who is brought before Jesus.” The figure of sexual union is “fulfilled in Jesus’ own self-giving for the church in a full and exhaustive manner, a reality that draws together his own teaching on marriage . . . with the character of sacrifice as it is given in the mystery of human marriage.”
His remarks on the figuration of sodomy are particularly useful:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, June 3, 2009 at 6:04 am
Christian Eberhart of Lutheran Theological Seminary gave a presentation on the nature of sacrifice. I’m not a stickler for method, but there were basic methodological problems with Eberhart’s approach. He started from a definition of sacrifice from Wolfhart Stegeman, which laid out four meanings of the word “sacrifice” in modern European languages.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, November 24, 2008 at 12:03 pm
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.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, March 14, 2008 at 6:38 am
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.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, November 28, 2007 at 12:01 pm
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.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, November 15, 2007 at 7:14 am
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.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, November 14, 2007 at 4:54 pm
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.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, November 8, 2007 at 6:51 am
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.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, November 8, 2007 at 6:33 am
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.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, November 1, 2007 at 6:14 am
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,
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, May 8, 2007 at 8:16 am
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.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, November 16, 2006 at 4:12 pm
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!
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, May 1, 2006 at 9:36 pm
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).”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, December 1, 2005 at 11:28 am
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.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, November 22, 2005 at 2:42 pm
Permission is given to use material on this site, provided the source is cited, blog entries are republished in full, and the author is notified in advance.
