Understanding the Hebrew Scriptures is difficult. It is entering into a world quite unlike our own. It is most obvious when I get to the book of Leviticus. I sometimes think it is best to just skip it altogether. In not giving up on the text I have encountered it with fresh eyes recently and learned two new things. Narratively the major themes focus on the Hebrew verb hivdil (divide), drawing some mind-blowing parallels, and the literary structure centers around the love command, with profound implications for the reader.
On the first page of the Bible God speaks and divides the “welter and waste”[1]: “light from darkness, day from night, the upper waters from the lower waters, and dry land from the latter”[2]. It is with this in mind that we see the authors of Leviticus crafting the narrative of the division of clean and unclean; eaten and uneaten; the beasts of sky, earth, or water[3]; all so that the people of Israel “shall be holy to Me, for I the LORD am holy” (Lev 20:26) Just as God is depicted as dividing up the spaces of Creation, he is also depicted as setting apart (dividing, making holy) his people for himself and his ultimate purpose of redemption. The unity of divine space and earthly space was shattered in the first pages of Genesis, and here God is working within a community to bring it back into unity with the divine.
It is in this dividing that we also see a central purpose of love. In The Africana Bible Madeline McClenney-Sadler says that the structure of Leviticus is architecturally following the pattern of the tabernacle with love at the center[4]: “you shall love your fellow man as yourself” (Lev 19:18) As followers of Jesus we see this come to its pinnacle in the New Testament. When God became flesh, he both completed and expanded what he began in Leviticus. The command to love your neighbor is expanded to all people through the Spirit.[5] The implications for us today are that we can see the history of the God that is love drawing all of us into radical self-giving love, motivating us to further expand his kingdom.
While it is a difficult book and tends to bog down many “read thru the bible in a year” plans, just below the surface is a treasure trove of narrative brilliance and radical social change. It should continue to be an inspiration for further study and a pointer to the kingdom of God inaugurated in Jesus.
[1] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, 1st edition (New York ; London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018), 11.
[2] Ibid., 373.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Crystal Downing and Rodney S. Sadler Jr, The Africana Bible: Reading Israel’s Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora (Minneapolis, Minn: Fortress Press, 2009), 90.
[5] T. Desmond Alexander and David W. Baker, eds., Dictionary of the Old Testament: Pentateuch (Downers Grove, Ill: IVP Academic, 2002), 531.
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