Feeling Levitical

Into the Heart of Torah

Don’t worry, we’ll eventually get into which of these animals are kosher and which aren’t. And whether fish with fins and scales make good boomerangs.

🎼 🎶It’s time to open Torah 🎶

🎵 🎶At last the goats are next

🎶 It’s time to start Leviticus

🎶 On Life is a Sacred Text! 🎶 🎵

Yep. It’s finally time. Let us all, together, voyage into the literal heart of Torah, into the oft-reviled, rich and powerful world of Leviticus. 

(There may be interludes with Other Kinds Of Cool Things as they present themselves, and/or as I feel like it, because why not! But mostly we’re back on the Torah train now, kids.🚂🚂🚂🚂)

We’ll start with a little background and overview today.  

(And you’ll trust that I’ll continue to strive to deliver you the queer and trans-liberatory content you depend on, yes? Those of you with trauma about this particular book of the Bible, I get it—trust me and hang around anyway—and wait to be pleasantly surprised?)

First of all, Leviticus’ role in the center of Torah isn’t an accident. 

In Ancient Near Eastern literature, there’s a literary motif known as chiastic structure–a way of ordering things so that the most important thing is in the middle, and things are layered or paralleled out from there.  Like, A-B-C-B-A, or A-B-C-D-C-B-A, or so forth.  You see it all over Biblical literature (and super all over Psalms, like Psalm 110, for example, with verse 4 as the center).  Or, like:

Here is someone’s Intro to Hebrew Bible homework, thank you whoever put this online, for Psalm 90:1-2, so you can see the thing diagrammed.

(So yes, if you are ever in synagogue or church and not paying attention to services—though how could that ever happen?—you could entertain yourself by looking at a Psalm and playing Find The Chiasm).

So here, for us, Leviticus is the literal heart of Torah, the middle of our chiastic sandwich.  Right? Genesis and Exodus on one side, Numbers and Deuteronomy on the other. All arrows are pointing inward to tell us that this is where our focus should be. 

And Leviticus itself is also a chiasmus! We see consecration, blemishes, atonement and laws relating to sexuality in chapters 1-18, and then again in chapters 20-27. (We’ll spend some time on Leviticus 19, and the key verse in Leviticus 19, when we get there, don’t worry.) (And yes, again, we’ll talk The Queer Verses when it’s time and I’ll happily (most likely) complicate whatever you’ve heard or been taught.)

So, anyway, Leviticus’ chiastic structure is the first thing to keep in mind. It is literally the center, the heart, the bull’s eye of the Torah.  We have to understand it as such.

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The English name for this book (that is, Leviticus) draws its name from the tribe of Levi, the Priestly tribe; it’s a variant on the Rabbinic expression for this book, Torat Kohanim, Book of the Priests. (Formally/technically in Hebrew, it’s known as Vayikra, which is the first word of the Book–”and [God] called.”)  And, indeed, this whole book has sort of a different orientation than the other four, a different set of concerns.  Not entirely different, mind you, but somewhat. 

Zooming out for a moment:

We had the creation of the world, and humankind. We met Abraham, and his whole dysfunctional family and lineage. The family went down to Egypt, a few generations later became enslaved, and by the time they were liberated they were not just a family, but a people. They got out of Egypt, went to get the Torah—the instructions for how to live, now, in covenant with the divine. Part of this involved the setting up of a Tabernacle, a space for worship. That’s how we ended Exodus.

And now we get into Leviticus, we enter the Tabernacle itself, and its sphere of concerns. (At least some of the time!)

According to most Biblical scholars, there are a number of different threads that make up the Torah that we have now.  There are different ideas about what this looks like, but generally folks tend to think that most of Leviticus (and the Tabernacle parts of Exodus, and a few other parts of Genesis and Numbers) were by a source called P for, you guessed it, the Priestly source. (For more on Biblical criticism, as this “threads of authorship” approach is called, Who Wrote the Bible? and Why Abraham Murdered Isaac are good overviews with really different takes; I recommend them as a cocktail. For Leviticus specifically, I like Baruch Levine’s commentary as an accessible way in.)

As we go, we’ll look at the question of who P was, what their concerns were and why, and some of what else that might illuminate for us about their time and place and context.

But on one foot, the priests in the Priestly Code are, functionally, Team Aaron, the first High Priest—as opposed to, say, stories in which Moses features prominently.

There are differing reads from scholars as to when and why it was written, but scholarly consensus seems to agree that it’s no accident that there was some disagreement between the central priests in Jerusalem who would have written P and the northern priests whose worship sites in BethEl and Dan were, uh, golden calves/bulls. (Archeological evidence backs this up.)

(So yes, the Golden Calf episode in Exodus is a P source and it is not just shade, but rather casting Aaron—the original priest!—committing a straight-up sin through the worship of this calf. That’s the Jerusalemite priests burning the northern modality of worship, and the idea that there could be any place of worship besides the Temple, straight down to the ground.)

P was likely written at a time of tension or upheaval, with the need to clarify or preserve.

Was it right after the North was conquered by Assyria in 721 BCE, prompting waves of Israelites to come down into Judea, bringing a strong Aharonic identification and this calf thing (thus causing the Jerusalemite priests to want to lay claim to Aaron once and for all and, uh, clarify who was in charge and how things are done?) Was it during or after the Babylonian exile (597-538 BCE) in an attempt to preserve crucial wisdom, after some power struggles between the traditional priestly line (known as the line of Tzadok— hence the priests and those who supported them being known as Tzakokim/Sadducees in the Second Temple era) and the northern branch, with the Tzaokim taking on the symbolic Aaron lineage as a compromise? Is it part of an argument for the priesthood in contrast to the more administrative approach of Nehemia? Is it part of the project of the vassal state of Yehud to report its laws to the Achaemenid Empire (via Nehemia) in return for the right to self-govern? Are these laws in the Torah for community accountability?

Theories abound. Definitive answers are thin on the ground.

But what we do know that Leviticus is largely about the agenda of the priests in Jerusalem.

What that agenda is, and what we can learn about them as we read, will unfold as we begin to learn together.

Thanks for being on this journey with me.

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