This is the third of four Lenten meditations on Leviticus. The first is posted here and the second is posted here.
“You shall be holy; for I the Lord your God am holy”
The Holiness Code of Leviticus (ch. 17-26) is particularly significant since it sets before us the conditions of holiness – not just of being set apart but of wholeness – which is to be found in terms of our relation to God and his grace moving in us. The Holiness Code is repeatedly punctuated by recurring refrains about God as the I AM, the principle of our liberation and sanctification. That important spiritual idea is complemented by the ethical demands which belong to that sense of our identity with God.
In other words, holiness is necessarily connected to our identity with God which, in the Christian understanding, is about our identity and life together in the body of Christ. It is not accidental, then, that the second half of the Summary of the Law is based on Leviticus where the principle of loving your neighbour as yourself is first expressed (Lev. 19.18) and then later joined to the Deuteronomic principle of loving God. Love of God and love of neighbour belong together. If nothing else, the Christian understanding simply intensifies that way of thinking and acting.
As such, the ethical demands in Leviticus are grounded in the identity of God who identifies himself to us as the fruition and perfection of our humanity. In these chapters which seem to be forbiddingly particular and restricted to the limits of a tribal culture, we see the aspects of something more universal: an ethical understanding about the stranger in our midst, about the sabbath of the land, about the concept of jubilee, and about how one deals with the inequalities of wealth. Though Leviticus seems to point to older tribal forms of identity, the text makes clear that it also points forward to ‘the gestalt of the spirit,’ to our openness to the grandeur and grace of God; in short, to our wholeness as holiness in Christ.
This does not take away from some of the troubling forms of worship in its injunctions and prohibitions that we find in Leviticus. There is a rigour to the Holiness Code precisely about the holiness of God and thus about any disdain and dismissal of God’s holiness. The latter constitutes a form of blasphemy not just from within Israel but for all of humanity. The penalty is severe – being put to death for blasphemy whether one is of Israel or not! This challenges our contemporary viewpoint which, since it sees all religious conviction as essentially a personal matter, cannot help but regard the idea of blasphemy resulting in death as something utterly abhorrent and inhuman, primitive and barbaric. Yet the point in Leviticus is, I think, fairly clear. We only live when we are alive to God and his word. Those who do not are ‘the already dead,’ we might say, dead to God and to his word as Law. Like the deaths of Aaron’s own sons in Leviticus because of their presumption about ritual – namely, acting independently of the order, as it were – the stoning of the blasphemers, both Jew and non-Jew, is about their presumption in the denial of God, effectively making themselves God, but violating the conditions of life itself.
The idea of the violation of the created or natural order is not unique to the Torah or to Leviticus within the Torah. Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex concerns in part the idea of the violation of the order of the cosmos. The play begins with the city of Thebes being afflicted with a plague which is the result of a lack of justice in the city with respect to the death of the previous king, Laius. Oedipus famously undertakes to solve the problem of the city only to discover that he is the problem, not just in having murdered his father and married his mother, albeit unknowingly, but in assuming that his form of reasoning, a kind of calculative, problem-solving kind of thinking, is the only form of knowing. Sophocles’ interest is in how Oedipus comes to know who he truly is, which requires his acknowledgement of another form of knowing, the prophetic insight or intellectus of Teiresias. That is a knowledge of the whole. In that sense the play works through the wisdom of the Delphic Oracle – “know thyself.” It means to know your place in the order of the cosmos, to know your place within the order of reality which is greater than you.
Justice is a major concern in Leviticus. “You shall do no injustice in judgement” (Lev. 19.15) both in terms of deeds and in thought. “You shall not hate your brother in your heart” (Lev. 19.17). And the directives about justice extend to the stranger, the sojourner. “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” (Lev. 19. 33,34). The stranger, the sojourner is thus your neighbour, and this way of thinking is grounded in God’s relation to his people, “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God” (Lev. 19.34). This is one side of the argument of Leviticus.
Such ethical demands of Leviticus also extend to human dealings with the land, to dealing with the created order with justice and care; again, an echo of Genesis and the idea of creation as order. Thus Leviticus extends the sabbath of God to “a sabbath of solemn rest for the land, a sabbath to the Lord” (Lev. 25, 4), a time of leaving the fields fallow. There is also the idea of leaving the gleanings of the fields after harvest “for the poor and for the stranger.” The concept of Jubilee in the fiftieth year signals the proclamation of “liberty throughout the land” in terms of debts owed and in the making of contracts. What is emphasised is an ethic of justice, of not wronging one another in the pursuit of self-interest. Once again, the teaching is grounded in God. “You shall not wrong one another” in matters of the buying and selling of goods, “but you shall fear your God; for I am the Lord your God.”
It is easy, perhaps, to cherry-pick the passages that please us and/or to highlight those that offend us. There is no end of hard sayings in Leviticus, to be sure. The greater challenge is to understand the underlying spirit of Leviticus which ultimately informs the later expressions of ethical responsibility and behaviour. We should no doubt find slavery abhorrent and find its acceptance in Leviticus and elsewhere in both the Old Testament and the New Testament disturbing. But what is equally of significance is how Leviticus enjoins an ethic of care towards those who are slaves and towards “your brother who becomes poor.”
Leviticus articulates a series of regulations that belong to the ordering of the life of Israel and therefore maintains a sense of distinction between Israel and the other nations. This is the other side, the particular aspect of Leviticus. Slavery exists in that context of the relations between peoples; you may have “male and female slaves from among the nations that are round about you” (Lev. 25.44) but “over your brethren the people of Israel you shall not rule, one over another, with harshness” (Lev. 25. 46). But even there Leviticus undertakes to limit abuse of slaves, particularly women, and puts strictures upon those who do. “If a man lies carnally with a woman who is a slave, betrothed to another man and not yet ransomed or given her freedom, an inquiry shall be held. They shall not be put to death because she was not free; but he shall bring a guilt offering for himself to the Lord … a ram for a guilt offering … for his sin which he has committed” (Lev. 19.20-22). This is intriguing since it implies the idea of taking care of the victim while punishing the abuser.
Adultery is taken very seriously but unlike the scene in John’s Gospel about the woman taken in adultery (Jn. 7.53-8.11), Leviticus makes it clear that in matters of adultery “both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death,” not just the woman. Leviticus, too, is sometimes cited as proving that the Bible is opposed to homosexuality. “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination” (Lev. 20.13) but Leviticus like the rest of the Scriptures has no concept whatsoever of ‘homosexuality’ or for that matter of ‘sexual orientation.’ What is proscribed are acts; there is no sense of a ‘homosexual nature,’ whatever that might mean; such are the questions and assumptions that belong to the contemporary world and to its confusions.
Leviticus also undertakes to reduce the extreme inequalities of wealth within the community of the people of Israel. “If your brother becomes poor, and cannot maintain himself with you, you shall maintain him; as a stranger and a sojourner he shall live with you. Take no interest from him or increase, but fear your God; that your brother may live beside you. You shall not lend him your money at interest, nor give him your food for profit” (Lev. 25. 35-38). And “if your brother becomes poor beside you, and sells himself to you, you shall not make him serve as a slave: he shall be with you as a hired servant and as a sojourner” and “you shall not rule over him with harshness” (Lev. 25. 39-43). Moreover, he shall be liberated in the year of Jubilee, freed from all debt.
The Holiness Code in Leviticus with all of its rigour and strictness provides at the very least the foundations for the later expressions of ethical order and freedom that will contribute to the life of the Christian Church. It points to an idea of care and of responsible behaviour towards the natural world. The rituals of sacrifice point to the idea of forgiveness and mercy. It speaks to the strong idea of order for the sake of the whole community and for all those within it but as grounded, not in the abstract notion of the autonomous individual, but in God himself. “The letter killeth but the Spirit giveth life,” Paul will rightly note. What is at issue in our limited study of Leviticus is about trying to grasp something of the Spirit that is at work in the laws and regulations it lays down.
Since there can be no flight from the natural world nor from our lives in community, the task is to think seriously about what belongs to the ordered life of the community and to the sanctity which is about our holiness understood as wholeness. Leviticus belongs at the very least to that challenge.
“You shall be holy; for I the Lord your God am holy”
Fr. David Curry
Lenten Meditation # 3 on Leviticus
Tuesday, March 29th, 2022