Live Leviticus Blogging


 


Leviticus is certainly the shoal on which most efforts to read the Bible cover-to-cover break. Plot summary: God tells Moses to tell Aaron a whole lotta law. Oh yeah, two of Aaron's sons try improvising the incense, and God kills them. So don't.
But beyond the fact that I'm a cussed sort, my training as a medievalist comes to my rescue here. Although I ultimately failed in my academic quest for my Ph.D. (It was *sniff* that nasty old First Comics' fault! Offering me all sorts of work while I was working like a good boy on 'Fact And Fictionalization in Geoffrey of Monmouth!")--it did teach me that reading stuff that takes some endurance to get through--like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or Gregory of Tours' Historia Francorum --can give important pictures that more artful and pleasant writing can't give. One of my little-boy delights of inhabiting Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago was leafing through the enormous folio volumes of the Patrologia Latina (221 volumes!) or the even bigger and more awesome Monumenta Germaniae Historiae (and I actually read the interminable French Vulgate Queste del Saint Graal.) So a couple of dozen pages won't daunt me, no sir thank you sir may I have another volume?
But like no other book in the Bible, Leviticus makes me feel that reading a translation (even, or especially the King James) is mostly inadequate. There's so much here that just seems blind fumbling about against the Hebrew. Trying to read the text closely--or even coming to anthropological conclusions--is obviated by the Vizzini Syndrome ("you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.")
Nevertheless.
These are impressions, and if some actual googling scholar of the Torah comes stumbling in I stand ready to get smacked around a bit. Anyway, here goes:

The big feeling I get from reading is that this is old. This is a picture of the deep past. And one of the things that contributes to the feeling is what's missing. In all the laws of sacrifice and obedience, there are no verbal formulae. The business of these priests is not done with words, but with the hands and the knife. Compare to the Vedas, which is saturated with ritual utterances: and in a culture which is so devoted to the Word, its absence here is striking. Instead of saying "Blessed art Thou, O Lord God, King of the Universe" it's cut here. Pour the blood there. There's nothing so preliterate and tactile as the sections on leprosy, where details on what sores to look for and what to do when they turn color does not even seem to be from the Bronze Age but the Stone.
And after the laws of sacrifice, the dietary laws, the laws of birth and death, I began to feel that the word 'unclean', which has so much resonance and application in modern christianity of all stripes, and seems sometimes to be the whole basis of the fundamentalists anti-gay, anti-sex stance--the word 'unclean' seems, after due consideration to mean--unclean. Not damned or damnable, not taboo, not evil--just unclean. Unclean animals? Don't eat them. Unclean people? Avoid them until they've been cleaned.
The distinction here may be too subtle and off-base, but it seems to me significant that God did not make them unclean, but rather he decreed them unclean--for these people, for these purposes, for these periods, with these remedies.
(If there's an aspect of Protestant theology I find dangerous, it's the repudiation of sacrifice and its successor, penance. By substituting repentance for penance, it creates crimes without remedy. From the strictly practical unspiritual point of view, it destroys the idea of compensation--and of human forgiveness. Instead you have crimes that are either a) unforgivable or b) already forgiven, depending on the person, dividing mankind into the saved and the damned--and in either case, the crime is not remedied. A great deal of nastiness has entered the western world by this denial.)
(But I digress.)
One last thing: In the ceremony of the scapegoat, there are actually two goats: one has the sins of the community put on its head, and is driven out into the wilderness.
The other goat? It's slaughtered.
Not only is this an inversion of what Christ (in the died-for-your-sins theology) went through--it seems to me that, were I a goat, I'd choose being a scapegoat every single time.

Next up: Numbers, and more barrier reefs.

Posted: Saturday - January 14, 2006 at 03:27 AM        

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