The Book of Leviticus

It's certainly not the most popular book of the Bible today so what's it about and what makes it so important.

We're going to look a little bit at this really important but often misunderstood book of the Bible now if you're really familiar with the Bible then you already know that the Bible falls into two major sections there's the New Testament which looks at the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of his followers and then there's the Old Testament which looks at the relationship between God and the people of Israel.

• Leviticus is the third book in the Bible.
• The third book of the Old Testament.

The first five books of the Old Testament are known as the Torah or the Pentateuch or the books of Moses and these were the foundations of the Hebrew faith and right in the middle of this group of five books.

The Book of Leviticus gets its name from the tribe of Levi which is a group in ancient Israel that was responsible for maintaining the temple and other holy artefacts the ancient Jews used to interact with God and this book is really important because it tells the beginnings of that whole story of how the ancient Hebrews interacted with this really powerful being that they believed was dwelling among them on earth.

The structure of Leviticus

Leviticus which can be summed up by a simple command that God repeats throughout the book. The book is set up with God giving messages to Moses and sometimes Moses and his brother Aaron to pass on to the people of Israel and a repeated message from God is be holy as I am holy so the people of Israel are supposed to be holy just like God is holy but 

what does holy actually mean? 

well holy means separate set apart 100% sacred it is not a common thing and so what the ancient Jews believed was that their God whom we'll just call God was very holy He was completely separate from the world that they lived and He was high and above all humans all animals all features of nature and all the gods of the other nations the other folks worshipped.

You might remember in the book of Exodus when God rescues the people of Israel from not only the people of Egypt but also the gods of Egypt that's what the ancient Jews believed.

What we find at the opening of Leviticus or right before Leviticus begins is God has rescued Israel he's taken them out of Egypt and led them into the wilderness where He has made this agreement with them and before He makes that agreement.

We have this scene of God at the top of a mountain Mount Sinai he's appearing in this form of a fiery cloud and then at the foot of the mountain.

You have the people of Israel they're camped out there and this great distance between God and Israel that happens in the middle of the book of Exodus that's when the people are hearing the 10 commandments but at the end of the book of Exodus we have God, we have this cloud coming down and dwelling within Israel's camp this is huge for the ancient world because you have this all-powerful cosmic being now living in a tent with regular mortal people it's a huge thing to have to deal with and so essentially.

We're looking at in the Book of Leviticus is God has moved in with Israel we have this huge powerful being that is now trying to coexist with mortals who are not as holy and not as special and powerful as their God so Moses makes a tent it's called the tabernacle and this is like a portable temple this is a place where heaven can meet earth where the divine in mortal realms can overlap and in the end of Exodus we have this problem Israel breaks some of the agreement that God made with them at that mountain.

We already have it established that humans have a hard time living up to the standards of God and even Moses isn't able to enter this portable temple so Moses can't even come into this tabernacle into to meet with God so this is a problem we have this very holy being surrounded by unholy people but by the end of Leviticus we have Israel knowing some laws that can allow them to interact with God and live in this camp with their God.

Moses can enter the tabernacle that's really good we see God speaking to Moses in the tent at the beginning of the next book of the Bible numbers and then by the end of Leviticus we have an order of priests from the tribe of Levi that maintain purity.

The Book of Leviticus as Israel's purity code for coexisting with their God now when we talk about purity it's very closely related to holiness it's not necessarily about being good or bad it's about being ceremonially clean or unclean.

The Book of Leviticus is God's holiness consumes impurity it consumes anything that is not ritualistically pure that hasn't made itself sacred to be in its presence it just consumes it almost like a fire consumes kerosene the holiness of God consumes impurity and so God helps the people of Israel live in his context because if they're going to be close to this powerful being that wants to look out for them and protect them and provide for them and guide them through the wilderness.

Then they're going to need to set themselves apart from the rest of the world because they need to be more ceremonially pure they need to be more reverent and more set apart if they're going to be living with this holy other being so that's the setup that we're looking at in the Book of Leviticus it's known as a rule book.

what Leviticus is it's God through Moses and Aaron giving the people of Israel in various groups of the people of Israel that is guidelines for how they can coexist in a very close proximity with a very powerful holy being so that's what's going on in Leviticus and if you keep this in mind then the structure of Leviticus becomes pretty straightforward.

We start with rules for the priests and the priests were these mortal people that went between God and the the rest of the humans so these folks were responsible for sacrificing animals they were responsible for performing various rituals that helped make remove uncleanness this ritualistic impurity from the people and from themselves and from the areas where they would worship God and meet with God and help move people toward this state of cleanliness or this state of purity this is where we see many of the sacrifices like burnt offerings and sin offerings that show up in various parts of the Old Testament.

This section the first 15 chapters some Aaron Moses brother a really terrible day Aaron is inaugurated as the high priest of Israel that's been set up before and his sons enter this priestly service but the problem is he has four sons and only two of them survived their priestly duties two of them die because they don't engage with God in a ritualistic Allah acceptable way they don't treat him with reverence we don't know specifically what it was that they did wrong.

 Book of Leviticus just says that they offered strange fire before God and there all kinds of theories about what that looks like but the point is they were in violation of this status of being clean and presentable for this very holy, very powerful, very set apart being but two of Aaron's sons survived and continued to serve as priests so we have this setup of a group of people designated to go between the mortals and the divine to offer sacrifices and perform rituals and this culminates with the sixteenth chapter which describes a very special ritual in ancient Israel.

Day of Atonement and what this ritual does is it essentially cleanses or makes sure or preserves the purity of that tabernacle that tent it cleanses the holy place where God and God and the priests could meet and so once a year they pretty much said you know we've been offering these sacrifices we've been doing all these things on behalf of the people to keep the people ritualistically clean but once a year we're going to do a full wipe make sure of the the place where we're meeting with God is is pure and clean make sure that any sort of sins or offences against God have been accounted for.

On this day this we see two goats getting sacrificed one of them dies and one of them bears the collective sin of the people off into the wilderness and if you hear people referring to someone as a scapegoat someone who bears the blame for someone else that's where that term comes from we've got a scapegoat in involved in this ritual that cleansed the holy place.

Tabernacle and then the second half of the book chapters 17 through 27 it's known as the Holiness code and so we've looked at the holy priests we've looked at the Holy Place and now we have guidelines for a holy people these are rules some of them are for the whole nation some of them are for the the priests but they basically spell out the the ways that the people of Israel can behave in a more ritualistically purer way or they can stay more ceremonially clean around God than the nation's that are worshipping other gods.

What we see happening here the standards are higher for the priests because they have to interface with God in the tabernacle obviously the tabernacle needs to stay very pure that's why we had that whole Day of Atonement ceremony that was covered earlier we learn about some festivals that God gives to the people Moses and Aaron teach the people how to celebrate and worship their God and how how he has taken them out of Egypt and made a dwelling place among them so this is a really big deal for the ancient for the ancient Israelite.

In this section that people need to face a choice and what Moses does is he says you can choose between the blessings of living in a way that recognises this holy being in your presence and maintaining purity, maintaining his laws and obeying him and that brings blessings or you can disregard this powerful God that is living amongst you at your own peril and risk bringing on the curses of his discipline.

Book of Leviticus it's a list of rules and rituals that the ancient Israelite believed would help them coexist physically with the creator of the physical realm it's a really fascinating concept that sparked the need for this book.