Old Testament · Law · book 3 of 66 · 2 min read
The book of Leviticus
The book where most reading plans die, and it is a manual for how an ordinary person handles proximity to holiness without being destroyed by it.
“you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am Yahweh.”
At a glance
- Chapters
- 27
- Author
- Traditionally Moses
- Written
- Priestly material, final form likely sixth to fifth century BC
- Written for
- Priests, and a people camped around a tent
- Themes
- holiness, sacrifice, clean and unclean, atonement
What it is about
Leviticus is the reason January reading plans collapse in the third week. It is twenty-seven chapters of sacrifice, skin disease, mould, food, blood and festival calendars, with almost no narrative to carry a reader through.
Read as a manual rather than as a story it makes considerably more sense. The question it is answering is practical: a holy God has just moved into the middle of the camp, which is dangerous, and here is how ordinary people conduct themselves at that range. Almost every regulation is about maintaining a distinction — clean and unclean, holy and common — in a world where those categories were assumed to be physical rather than moral.
Chapter 19 is the one to know. Buried in a chapter of miscellaneous law, next to instructions about harvest edges and honest weights, is the line Jesus later names as the second greatest commandment.
Where to start
Chapter 19, which is the most readable chapter in the book and contains its most famous sentence. Chapter 16, the Day of Atonement, is the one to read next if you want to understand Hebrews later.
The chapters worth knowing
- Leviticus 16 — The Day of Atonement, which Hebrews spends several chapters explaining and which is unreadable without it.
- Leviticus 19 — Love your neighbour as yourself, sitting among instructions about harvest edges and honest weights.
- Leviticus 25 — The jubilee — debts cancelled and land returned every fiftieth year, the most radical economics in the Bible.
What people get wrong about it
That it is a list of arbitrary rules. Nearly everything in it is doing one of two jobs — marking a distinction, or providing a way back after a distinction has been broken — and the second job is what the book is actually for.
Questions
Why is Leviticus so hard to read?
Because it is a manual rather than a narrative, written for priests in a culture whose categories of clean and unclean were physical as much as moral. It is not designed to be read straight through, and reading plans that require that mostly fail here.
What is the main message of Leviticus?
How ordinary people live at close range to holiness — and, more practically, what happens when that goes wrong, which is what the sacrificial system exists to answer.