The book of Leviticus is read today by scholars, by weirdos like me who have determined to read the whole Bible, and, if cherry-picking skimmers count, by Christianist crackpots looking to excuse their homophobia. The rest of the population has better things to do, such as washing the car. Exodus began to suffer on account of the prevalence of the priestly source, and the trend continues in Leviticus, whose stolid readers are subjected to long passages concerning the elements of an acceptable animal or cereal offering, the remedies for ritual uncleanness of diverse etiology (such as those associated with "emissions" from the reproductive organs), sexual proscriptions enshrouded in euphemisms that may or may not be attributed to stiff translations ("uncover the nakedness of" means "have sex with"), calendrical considerations, crazy dietary rules that make distinctions between the flesh of cloven-footed animals that chew their cud and . . . etc., etc.
I suppose I should try and give the flavor of it, but I'd rather you just open and start reading at random. You will then almost surely see what I mean. In what follows, I'll try to provide a quick tour of why it is arguably necessary to include the weaseling "almost" in that last sentence.
Regarding the offering recipes: some are so bizarre as to be sort of intriguing. (Something similar might be said of the whole book, if you wanted to defend Leviticus against the charge of uninterrupted dullness.) For example, this
But if he cannot afford a lamb, then he shall bring, as his guilt offering to the Lord for the sin which he has committed, two turtledoves or two young pigeons, one for a sin offering and the other for a burnt offering. He shall bring them to the priest, who shall offer first the one for the sin offering; he shall wring its head from its neck, but shall not sever it, and he shall sprinkle some of the blood of the sin offering on the side of the altar, while the rest of the blood shall be drained out at the base of the altar; it is a sin offering.
is usually, in the commentaries, put forward as an instance of God's accommodation of the less fortunate. I, however, wonder what page after page of such bloody minute instruction says about God's character. Why does it matter so much to him what animals are offered as a sacrifice and the manner in which the whole dumb procedure is executed? Of course it doesn't. It matters to some people, the ones whose view of things comprises the priestly source to the Pentateuch. A psychological theory for this material might point out that it is pleasant to imagine that your acts are pleasing to God, but to make it believable the tasks can't be too easy to achieve. Thus the elaborate rules. When we come to the prophets, we will see that, as with so much else, the Bible is many-minded on the topic of these offerings. Amos:
"I hate, I despise your feasts,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings,
I will not accept them,
and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts
I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
to the melody of your harps I will not listen.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."
It is hard to see how the book of Amos is not a gob of spit in the face of the book of Leviticus.
Other highlights--the term is relative--likewise possess a certain interest either for a weirdness quotient or for their uneasy relationship with other Scriptural teachings. An instance of the former:
And the Lord said to Moses, "Say to Aaron, None of your descendants throughout their generations who has a blemish may approach to offer the bread of his God. For no one who has a blemish shall draw near, a man blind or lame, or one who has a mutilated face or a limb too long, or a man who has an injured foot or an injured hand, or a hunchback, or a dwarf, or a man with a defect in his sight or an itching disease or scabs or crushed testicles; no man of the descendants of Aaron the priest who has a blemish shall come near to offer the Lord's offerings by fire; since he has a blemish, he shall not come near to offer the bread of his God.
Aaron was the first High Priest of the Hebrew people, and in the Oxford Annotated Bible this passage is glossed: "Just as the sacrificial offering must be unblemished, so the priest who offers it must be without bodily defect." One wishes the editor had shed some light on what activities resulted in "crushed testicles" being sufficiently widespread in the population to earn a mention in this list of unacceptable deformities. If nothing else, reading Leviticus helps one to see that Jesus's foes, several of whom criticized the company he kept, were not necessarily mean or obtuse--or, at least, if they were, could have countered that in that case following Scripture is mean and obtuse.
Leviticus is also, not surprisingly, the source of the following familiar ethical theory:
He who blasphemes the Name of the Lord shall be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him; the sojourner as well as the native, when he blasphemes the Name, shall be put to death. He who kills a man shall be put to death. He who kills a beast shall make it good, life for life. When a man causes a disfigurement in his neighbor, as he has done it shall be done to him, fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; as he has disfigured a man, he shall be disfigured.
A popular bumper sticker argues that this principle "leaves everyone blind." It is also explicitly rejected by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:38). In the light of this and many other examples that could be adduced, the claim that every word of the Bible is the God-inspired truth seems problematic. If p, then not the opposite of p.
The 17th through 26th chapters of Leviticus, from which an-eye-for-an-eye comes, comprise the so-called Holiness Code, the only break in the long block of priestly material that makes Leviticus. Scholarship is more certain that this section is an insertion from a different source than it is about the source of that source: it is probably an amalgam of miscellaneous laws that has been edited and added to by editors sympathetic to the priestly view. (The eye-for-an-eye teaching is a prime candidate for a priestly addition to the material.) I think the honest, modern reader, if there were any, would find these chapters to be a puzzling mix of the high and low, the sublime and the stupid. I'll conclude by setting down a few excerpts from the Holiness Code. See if you think they are in descending or ascending order of moral import.
You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination. (18:22)
If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death. (21:10)
You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord. (19:18)
When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God. (19:33-34)
