[First posted July 26, 2013. As the opening sentence of this article says: “Perhaps the greatest problem facing students of the Bible as literature is the fact that so much of the Bible is not literature at all.”
We, like most readers, have struggled with chapter after chapter of this book as well as the next book, wondering why we—gentiles living in this day and age, who can’t relate to details of how to build the tabernacle, instructions relating to the priesthood, etc.—have to study and wonder about the relevance of such commandments to us. We Sinaites have since resolved those why’s, but this literary approach adds to our understanding of this centrally-located book in the Torah. Thankfully, this article will leave you raring to read/reread Leviticus/Wayyiqrah, if only to start appreciating why the Revelator would indeed include a whole book that appears to read like a boring manual of operations for custodians of the tabernacle in the wilderness. We, readers, modern day recipients of the revelation are the problem, not the text.
Again, please note that the writers of these articles use the Christian Bible with its two-part testaments, “Old” and “New” and therefore use Christian terms and not Jewish terms. For example, they use “Pentateuch” instead of “Torah” for the first five books of the “Old Testament.” Continuing this series on a literary approach to the 5 books attributed to Moses, we highly recommend the resource book we’ve listed under MUST READ and MUST OWN: The Literary Guide to the Bible, eds. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode. Reformatting and highlights ours.
Related posts:
—Admin1.]
Leviticus
David Damrosch
Perhaps the greatest problem facing students of the Bible as literature is the fact that so much of the Bible is not literature at all. Amid the many and manifest glories of biblical historical narrative, prophecy, and lyric, we must also acknowledge frequent eruptions of intractably nonliterary, even anti-literary, material.
In the Pentateuch, the long compilations of laws which persistently interrupt the narrative in Exodus through Deuteronomy pose the greatest such stumbling block in the reader’s path. In all the Pentateuch, this problem is most clearly seen in Leviticus, composed largely of ritual ordinances which have warmed the hearts of few, if any, literary readers in any period.
Faced with such an unappetizing of most readers is simply to push it quietly off the plate. Thus Gerhard von Rad, in a summary of the narrative contents of the Pentateuch, neglects to mention Leviticus altogether, and literary studies of the book are virtually nonexistent. More polemically, Harold Bloom dismisses the Priestly regulations in Leviticus and elsewhere as pitifully belated attempts at domesticating the numinous and uncanny (in short, truly poetic) essence of the Pentateuch, the early Yahwistic source.
Such neglect, whether benign or hostile, misses—
- the central literary concern of the Priestly writers who shaped the final form of the Pentateuch, which was precisely the interweaving of law and history.
- Far from interrupting the narrative, the laws complete it, and the story exists for the sake of the laws which it frames.
- Leviticus is consequently important for the understanding of the overall role of law in the Bible.
- For in Leviticus the law is represented in its ideal, fully functioning form, the best model against which to assess the complicated uses and misuses of law by a Saul or a Solomon in the historical texts.
Equally, Leviticus is of great literary interest in itself, as the fullest expression of the pentateuchal effort not simply to set the law within a narrative context, but actually to subsume narrative within a larger symbolic order. An attentive look at the laws shows how it was possible for the Priestly writers to intersperse law and story so readily: in their hand, law itself takes on narrative qualities. Rather than a sterile opposition between law and narrative, the text shows a complex but harmonious interplay between two forms of narrative. Law and history meet on a common ground composed of ritual, symbolic, and prophetic elements. In achieving this union, Leviticus typifies a central movement in much of the Bible: the use of profoundly literary techniques for ultimately nonliterary ends.
The Ritual Order
The opening chapters of Leviticus provide one of the clearest illustrations of the narrative quality of law throughout the Pentateuch. In the earlier stages of the Priestly composition, before the Torah was divided into separate books, the material of Leviticus 1-7 was not included. The great account of the construction of the tabernacle, which now closes Exodus, would have been directly followed by the anointing of the tabernacle and the investiture of Aaron and his sons, the material which now constitutes chapter 8-10. A decisive literary decision was taken, then, to open the new book not with a direct continuation of the story from Exodus, but with seven chapters’ worth of ritual prescriptions concerning sacrifices. Why was this done?
Historical criticism variously accounts for this material as an instruction manual for priests at Jerusalem or, more politically, as the result of priestly disputes at the time of the text’s reformulation. On this reading, the priests from Jerusalem inserted this material in order to establish Sinaitic authority for their particular ritual practices, as against other ritual forms practiced at Shiloh or elsewhere in the country. The writing down of these laws may well have had some such impetus, but the choice to insert them here, at the start of the book, serves a literary purpose as well. Indeed, the theological meaning of the insertion is most clearly understood through the passage’s narrative function.
The whole section has been constructed with considerable care. Thus, the first three chapters show a consistent triadic form. Three kinds of sacrifice are described—
- (burnt offerings,
- cereal offerings,
- and peace offerings).
Each of these offerings is in turn divided into three variants, which describe different offerings that can be made to fulfill each type of sacrifice. This tripled threefold structure gives these chapters a certain lyrical aspect. Each subsection, a few verses in length, functions stanzaically, even ending with a refrain, some variation on the formulaic phase “it is an offering made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the Lord.”
The first chapter is the most consistent, giving its refrain identically each time, and furthermore giving the refrain a three-part form of its own: “it is a burnt sacrifice, an offering made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the Lord” (vv. 9, 13, 17). The repetition of “burnt sacrifice” and “offering made by fire” is instructive. The first term is the technical term for this particular sacrifice, ‘olah, whereas the second is the generic term for offerings involving fire, ‘isheh. Clearly there is no real need to repeat both terms, as the first presupposes the second, but the phrasing strongly suggests that parallelism characteristic of Hebrew poetry. (In chapters 2 and 3, where the cereal offering and peace offering are also burnt, but where the poetic potential of two parallel terms for burning is lacking, the text simply uses the term ‘isheh.)
Although the structure is lyric, the presentation is dramatic. Rather than simply prescribing the necessary details, the text stages the event, presenting a little ritual drama of interaction between the person offering the sacrifice, the priest, and God:
And if his offering be of the flocks, namely, of the sheep, or of the goats, for a burnt sacrifice; he shall bring it a male without blemish. And he shall kill it on the side of the altar northward before the Lord: and the priests, Aaron’s sons, shall sprinkle his blood round about upon the altar. And he shall cut in into his pieces, with his head and his fat: and the priest shall lay them in order on the wood that is on the fire which upon the altar: But he shall wash the inwards and the legs with water: and the priest shall bring it all, and burn it upon the altar: it is a burnt sacrifice, an offering made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the Lord. (1:10-13)
The identity of the priest(s) has been specified as “the sons of Aaron” in order to emphasize the narrative setting at Sinai, although occasional lapses into the singular indicate the use of the generalizing designation “the priest” before these rules were put into their present context. The style, though simple, is unhurried, with occasional flourishes such as “on the wood that is on the fire which is upon the altar” which emphasize the sense of ritual order and fill out the scene of ritual drama.
The presentation of the variants in each form of sacrifice reflects great skill. The burnt offering, for example, may consist of three types of animal: a bull, a lamb or goat, or a dove or pigeon. Lambs and goats are sacrificed in essentially the same way as bulls; birds require somewhat different treatment. The text could simply have mentioned the lambs and goats briefly as an alternative to bulls, but it gives them as much space as the birds, allotting to each variant a full scenic description, as in the example quoted above. These latter descriptions are slightly abbreviated from the first version, to avoid wearisome repetition, but they are full enough to impart an overall sense not so much of three choices as of a series of three sacrifices.
Thus the text dramatizes the sense of orderly sequence at the heart of ritual. The singularity of the giving of the Law at Sinai is extended, through the rituals inaugurated at Sinai itself, to a narrative order of varied repetition.
The emphasis on the different forms of sacrifice allows for narrative variety within the ritual order. The rites reflect different points in the ritual year, and different problems which require the several different types of sacrifice. Equally important, the variant forms allow for differences in the circumstances of the people making the offerings. Lambs and goats are permitted for people who cannot afford a bull; birds are specified for people too poor to offer a lamb or a goat (as is explicitly stated later, in 12:8 and 14:21). The ritual order is not a millenarian order which would gloss over details of wealth and poverty; it remains linked to individual circumstances as well as to the cyclical order of the ritual calendar and the structural order of different kinds of sin.
At the same time, individual circumstances is delimited and ordered, in the implicit division of society into only three economic groups (wealthy, average, and poor). This is not an individualized narrative, or even an image of extended contingency with a multiplicity of categories (envisioning, for example, other groups of people so poor that even a bird is unaffordable, or so rich that even a bull would be too trivial a sacrifice). It remains a ritual order, but one which gives a definite place both to circumstantial variations and to narrative progression.
History
Having establishes this orders ritual narrative, however, the text immediately calls it into question, in the story of the investiture of Aaron and his sons (chaps. 8-10). This is the only extended passage of full-fledge narrative in the book. In it, Moses follows the instructions given him in Exodus 29 for the anointing of the tabernacle and the consecration of Aaron and his four sons as the chief priests. The initial preparation alone takes a full week and is intricate and difficult, even dangerous, given the immense divine power with which they are dwelling. Aaron and his sons perform everything flawlessly, as we are told at the end of this phase:
And Moses said unto Aaron and to his sons . . . Therefore shall ye abide at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation day and night seven days, and keep the charge of the Lord, that ye die not: for so I am commanded. So Aaron and his sons did all things which the Lord commanded by the hand of Moses. (8:31, 35-36)
So far so good, and on the eight day Aaron offers the final series of sacrifice (chap. 9), which culminate in a direct response from God: “And there came a fire out from before the Lord, and consumed upon the altar the burnt offering and the fat: which when all the people saw, they shouted, and fell on their faces” (v. 24).
No sooner is the ritual complete, though, than disaster strikes, for Aaron’s eldest sons make the mistake of improvising an offering of their own, not specifically requested by God:
And Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took either of them his censer, and put fire therein, and put incense thereon, and offered strange fire before the Lord, which he commanded them not. And there went out fire from the Lord, and devoured them, and they died before the Lord. Then Moses said unto Aaron, this is it that the Lord spake, saying, I will be sanctified in them that come nigh me, and before all the people I will be glorified. And Aaron held his peace. (10:1-3)
A strange inauguration of the ritual order! Here the officiants themselves go the way of the burnt offering just made by their father. Clearly the episode serves, in part, a monitory purpose, warning against the invention of new practices or the importation of practices external to the cultic order. (“Strange fire,” ‘esh zarah, can also be translated “foreign fire” and suggests something either lying outside the prescribed order or literally coming from another people.)
The purely ritual message here stresses the danger inherent in God’s power. Like the fire, which concretely expresses God’s action in the scene, God’s power is the basis of civilized life is handled properly, but a raging, destructive force if misused. The passage draws this ritual moral through its description of the strange fire not actually as something forbidden but simply as something that God had not asked for. This is also the perspective of chapter 16, when the deaths are described as the result of Nadab and Abihu’s having come too close to God: “they drew near to the Lord and perished” (16:1 [AT]; the King James Version and some modern translations obscure this point by assimilating this passage to the earlier one, but the Hebrew simply uses the verb qarav, whose normal sense is “to approach”). Here the narrative details drop out as unimportant to the purely ritual message, which refers to the inherent structure of divine-human relations rather than to anything specific to the historical incident.
Yet the shocking quality of the event, both in its timing and in the stature of its victims, has a broadly disturbing effect. Indeed, within the text itself, the disaster shakes Aaron’s own faith in his ability to carry on with the ritual order. The chapter ends with Moses’ discovery that Aaron’s surviving sons have failed to eat the goat of the sin offering, as they were supposed to do. He angrily reproaches them, but Aaron replies:
Behold, this day have they offered their sin offering and their burnt offering before the Lord; and such things have befallen me: and if I had eaten the sin offering to day, should it have been accepted in the sight of the Lord? And when Moses heard that, he was consent. (10:19-20)
A clue to the wider meaning of the episode lies in the sudden shift from Aaron’s sons to Aaron himself, and specifically in Aaron’s sense that the death of his sons is something that has befallen him, a sign that he himself is not entirely worthy in God’s sight. In fact Aaron is the focus of this enigmatic episode, whose ramifications present a classic case of the biblical confrontation of the present in the form of the past.
Nadab and Abihu have no existence apart from Aaron; this is their one action in the Pentateuch, apart from accompanying Aaron on Sinai in Exodus 32. Their names, however, have a more extended referential life. In 1 Kings we read of a pair of brothers, Nadab and Abijah, the sons of King Jeroboam I. These brothers die young, both because of their own misdeeds and because of their father’s sins, which have determined God to destroy his lineage (1 Kings 14-15). Now Jeroboam’s signal sin is his establishment of a cult of a golden calf, atBethel and at Dan (1 Kings 13); at Bethel he personally offers incense at the altar—just the sort of offering which brings about the death of Nadab and Abihu in Leviticus.
The echo of Aaron’s great moral lapse, his forging of the Golden Calf at Sinai, is clear, and the story of Jeroboam has served as a model for the reworking of Exodus 32 into its present form. Indeed, the one alteration in the names of the brothers only serves to point to Aaron has the real focus of the Leviticus story. “Nadab” is retained unchanged, but “Abijah,” which means “God is my father,” is altered to the more general “Abihu,” “He is my father.” In the present context, the father is certainly Aaron, who here receives his punishment for the forging of the Golden Calf.
It is this punishment which gives a literal point to the initial cleansing of the people at the end of the Golden Calf incident. Moses calls together all the Levites, who disperse among the people and slay the three thousand ringleaders among the other clans. Since all the Levites have rallied around Moses, they are not slaying their own clansmen, but Moses describes their feat in a striking metaphor: “And Moses said, Today you have ordained yourselves to the Lord’s service, everyone at the cost of his son or of his brother, so that God may bless you this day” (Exod. 32:29 [AT]). Leviticus 8-10 presents the literal ordination, and the literal death of sons and brothers.
Four distinct layers of history are folded into the ritual order by this episode.
- First, the complexity of the historical moment at Sinai is encapsulated as Nadab and Abihu in effect recapitulate the Golden Calf episode and their father is brought to face the consequence of his sin. Aaron’s making of the Golden Calf stemmed from the people’s demand to have a tangible divinity, since Moses was remaining out of sight up on Sinai; the calf was an expression of the people’s spiritual weakness.
- The proleptic reference to the history of Jeroboam brings the action forward into the time of the monarchy, strengthening the association between priest and king already implicit in the regal paraphernalia given to Aaron as high priest (Exodus 28).
- In contrast to the weakness behind Aaron’s misdeed, Jeroboam’s making of the calves is an act of cynical power politics: king of the newly separate Northern Kingdom, he makes the calves in order to keep his people from returning to the shrine in Jerusalem, where he fears they will renew their allegiance to the Davidic dynasty, now represented by King Rehoboam of Judah.
- The episode is typical of the history of the monarchical period, with politics as the central testing ground of moral issues, whereas the premonarchical period represented by the time of the Exodus stages moral issues more directly in terms of divine leadership and ethical demands.
In addition to these specific historical references, the fact that it is Aaron’s eldest sons who fail in their duty ties the scene into the family politics of the Patriarchal period, when in case after case the younger brother takes the lead after the elder one is shown to lack moral strength. On the death of Nadab and Abihu, the younger brothers Eleazar and Ithamar for the first time begin to play an active role and become the forefathers of the divisions of Levites later organized by David.
In its reference to Aaron, the episode of Nadab and Abihu also completes the theme of the logic of Moses’ own predominance over his elder brother. On a deep symbolic level, this theme of the necessary triumph of the younger over the older represents, as has long been noted, one aspect of Israel’s self-awareness as the people chosen by God in preference to the older and more powerful cultures around them.
These three historical levels, patriarchal, Sinaitic, and monarchial, provide resonance for the fourth, that of contemporary history.
Leviticus reached its full form during or soon after the period of the Babylonian Exile. Both the fickleness of the people and the misuse of royal and priestly power under the monarchy were seen as responsible for the downfall of the nation. Nadab and Abihu serve as a warning of the importance of just leadership by the priestly class (in the absence of any formal government during the Exile) and, more generally, are an image of the justified destruction already visited on a large part of the population and a threat of even further woe to the remnant if the survivors fail to reform. In this aspect, the plaintive cry of Aaron concerning the sin offering acknowledges the shock of the Exile even while the story asserts the need to pick up the pieces and carry on.
The Symbolic Order
The fivefold interweaving of narrative orders (ritual, patriarchal, Sinaitic, monarchial, and contemporary) in chapter 10 forms a fitting conclusion to the first third of the book. Then overall, chapters 1-10 serve as a narrative introduction to the symbolic order of cultic regulations which make up the second two-thirds of the book: the laws of purity and atonement in chapters 11-16 and the group of ordinances known as the Holiness Code (chaps. 17-26, with an appendix in chap. 27). After long neglect, these latter sections have begun to receive attention on several fronts. As the structural anthropologist Mary Douglas has observed, “rituals of purity and impurity create unity in experience. So far from being aberrations from the central project of religion, they are positive contributions to atonement. By their means, symbolic patterns are worked out and publicly displayed.”
A symbolic structure can be deduced, although it is not explicit in the text; but do the assorted ordinances in these chapters have any connection with what has gone before? Readers who have come to appreciate the literary value of the previous chapters are likely to view the laws of Leviticus 11-25 with dismay, for the regulations and ethical statements given here largely lack the narrative form of the earlier chapters. In fact this section presents not a nonnarrative but an antinarrative, whose purpose is to complete the transformation of history inaugurated in chapters 1-7.
In the context of the Primeval History as portrayed in the Pentateuch, we can say in rhetorical terms that the Eden story describes a scene of metaphorically based union with God, in whose image and likeness man is created, whereas the fall away from God and into history takes the form of a series of metonymic displacements illustrated in the major stages of prehistory (Eden, Cain and Abel, the Flood, and the Tower of Babel). This world of metonymies, of cause-and-effect relations, parts standing in for inaccessible wholeness, is the world of most biblical prose writing.
By contrast, Leviticus seeks to undo the metonymic cause-and-effect relations of narrative; it struggles to recreate a metaphoric union with God in very different terms. Traditional narrative strategies are not so much abandoned as transformed, which is why Leviticus can be described as a book which uses literary methods for nonliterary ends. The narrative patterns examined above are still here—regulations are often described scenically, for example—but most of them are fractured and recombined in strange ways. The narrative order is subordinated to a conceptual order, and the surviving fragments no longer show a progressive narrative development. Instead, there are disconcerting moments such as the description in 16:3-4:
Thus shall Aaron come into the holy place: with a young bullock for a sin offering and a ram for a burnt offering. He shall put on the holy linen coat, and he shall have the linen breeches upon his flesh, and shall be girded with a linen girdle, and with the linen mitre shall he be attired: these are holy garments; therefore shall he wash his flesh in water, and so put them on.
The narrative goes backward here, describing first the entry into the inner part of the Temple, then how Aaron is to have dressed, and finally his bath before he dresses. In an extended series of variations on this rhetorical movement, the sacrificial order creates a series of disjunctions and displacements, by which the Holiness Code seeks to reconstruct a metaphoric wholeness from the pieces of the narrative metonymies it has taken apart.
In much of the Hebrew Bible, the rhetoric of displacement is presented through the theme of exile.
Leviticus is no exception, and exile can fairly be said to be the very basis for the construction of the antinarrative ritual order.
To be holy, qadosh, is to be set apart; the root means “separation, withdrawal, dedication.”
If a metaphoric union with God is no longer possible in a fallen world, the Law can on the other hand create a life built around a principle of separation which will serve as a metaphor for the transcendental otherness of God. God himself repeatedly makes the point that the people’s separateness is to mirror his own: “Ye shall be holy: for I the Lord your God am holy” (19:2).
The separation from what is not holy paradoxically creates a close spiritual connection not only between God and man but also between man and the material world. The purity laws concerning physical disfigurements apply not only to the people but also to their clothes and even their houses, which are subject to the same purity regulations, with mildew and mold analogized to leprosy (chaps. 13-14). The people are to be separated not only from their neighbors but even, in a sense, from themselves: “Thus shall ye separate the children of Israelfrom their uncleanness; that they die not in their uncleanness, when they [would] defile my tabernacle that is among them” (15:31).
The text quite directly makes the connection between holiness and exile as it goes about creating a metaphoric wholeness of God, people, and land through the mechanisms of purity and avoidance. Thus the people’s ritual link to the land of Israel expresses not a sense of possession but a permanence of exile.
The land itself must keep the Sabbath and cannot be sold in perpetuity, for it belongs not to the people but to God: “The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me” (25:23).
The term ger,”stranger,” might best be translated into modern English as “resident alien” and is the term used for the Israelites during their stay in Egypt. In taking up the term, the text transforms the lament of Moses, who named his eldest son in response to a life of exile: “he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger [ger] in a strange land” (Exod. 2:22). Leviticus expresses a desire for something closer than possession, a fellowship of exile, shared among the people, their servants, their cattle, their goods, and the land itself.
The transformation of exile makes alienation the basis for a renewed ethical closeness to one’s neighbors and even to strangers: “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the Lord … the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God” (19:18, 34).
Prophecy
The purpose of the Sinaitic setting for the symbolic order is ultimately not historical but prophetic.
Composed after Israel’s subjugation to Babylon, Leviticus presents a body of ritual which had never been fully observed and whose physical and spiritual focus, the Temple, had now been razed to the ground. Looking toward the future, the book concludes with prophecy. Chapter 26, originally the conclusion to the Holiness Code, now serves as the conclusion to the book as a whole, apart from the appendix of miscellaneous material in chapter 27. In describing the good that will follow from keeping the Law and the evils that will result from failure to keep it, the chapter looks to the contemporary history of the Babylonian Exile:
And I will bring the land into desolation: and your enemies which dwell therein shall be astonished at it. And I will scatter you among the heathen, and will draw out a sword after you: and your land shall be desolate, and your cities waste. Then shall the land enjoy her Sabbaths …As long as it lieth desolate it shall rest; because it did not rest in your Sabbaths, when ye dwelt upon it. (26:32-35)
The devastation of the land of Israel is seen, with rich prophetic irony, as the earth’s long-delayed chance to observe the fallow periods demanded by the Law but hitherto neglected by the greedy tillers of the land.
The chapter is laden with imagery of journeying, and it promises that if the people walk in the Law, God will walk with them (as he had walked with Adam in the Garden): “If ye walk in my statutes, and keep [literally, ‘hear’] my commandments …I will walk among you, and will be your God, and ye shall be my people” (26:3, 12).
In contrast to this orderly walking and hearing will be the disordered flight and aural perception of the sinful in their new exile:
And upon them that are left alive of you I will send a faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies; and the sound of a shaken leaf shall chase them; and they shall flee, as fleeing from a sword; and they shall fall when none pursueth. (v. 36)
Even in the new exile, though, God will be prepared to remember his Covenant if the people repent, as the conclusion of the chapter stresses (vv. 40-45). With faith and active repentance, the people can find a new Sinai even in Babylon.
Wilderness and Promised Land merge in Leviticus. The laws are inserted into the story of Sinai not only to give them authority but still more because the Wilderness exemplifies the fullest potential of a life of exile: that the place where everything has been lost can prove to be the place where everything is gained. The stark landscape of the Wilderness seems to the people to lack any source of hope, we might say any narrative possibility, to be a dead end: “and they said to Moses, Was it because Egypt lacked graves that you have brought us out to die in the wilderness?” (Exod.14:11 [AT]). Leviticus sees the Wilderness as the necessary lacuna, between cultures and between past and future history, in which the people can receive the redemptive symbolic order of the Law:
And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, I am the Lord your God. After the doings of the land of Egypt, wherein ye dwelt, shall ye not do: and after the doings of the land of Canaan, whither I bring you, shall ye not do: neither shall ye walk in their ordinances. Ye shall do my judgments, and keep mine ordinances, to walk therein: I am the Lord your God. (18:1-4)
In its presentation of the Law within this vision of the redemptive potential of exile, Leviticus is the very heart of pentateuchal narrative.