Leviticus
Leviticus gets a bad rap. Anyone who commits to reading the Bible from the beginning usually blames Leviticus for the reason they couldn’t get past the third book. It’s just so borrrrrring. And weird. The only time we notice Leviticus is when random verses are blasted into the rhetoric of conservative vs. liberal Christians. One group lobs Leviticus 18:22 to prove that God frowns upon same-sex relationships. The other counters with food prohibitions against pork, shrimp, etc. to prove that conservatives are just cherry-picking verses that suit their ideas. Christians tend to either weaponize Leviticus or flat out ignore it as irrelevant.
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Now, I’m not promising that you’ll find Leviticus to be the most devotionally inspiring scripture you’ll read today, but I invite you to lay down your arms and consider its relevance and importance. In the Cornerstone Biblical Commentary series, Dr. David Baker makes three crucial points for considering Leviticus for its theological, religious, and historical importance. I’ll abbreviate them:
- Leviticus narrates a crucial step in Israel’s covenant life with God. Because the Christian church emerged from a very Jewish Messiah, we cannot truly begin to understand Jesus without paying attention to the scripture that shaped him. Taking time to understand the cultic practices of Israel, what is meant by clean/unclean, holy/profane, sinner/righteous brings theological depth to the language and stories of the New Testament.
- Leviticus is a “worship manual,” not just a weird list of antiquated rules. Worship is not just about singing and preaching, but “service for God done by his people,” and Leviticus the worship manual describes how we are “to serve and to work–and not just how we should feel about God” (Baker, Leviticus, 3). We may not live in the temple-centric covenant between God and ancient Israel, but we stand within that story, and therefore may consider how this worship manual may still instruct our work and service to God today.
- Leviticus is historically important, shedding light on Ancient Near Eastern practices. It is an insight into the development of a culture and a people. Brushing it off as irrelevant because it isn’t “modern” robs us of the beauty of discovering how our predecessors experienced community and the sacred.
If anything, the book of Leviticus details an incredibly incarnational way of living, where the worship of God extends way beyond a corporate hour-long program and into the most mundane and biological existence of the people. We can certainly pick apart what we find problematic, as Leviticus has certainly contributed to theologies of ableism, anti-feminism, and homophobia. It is important work to pick apart what has harmed so that we can discover what gives life. But we cannot deny that Leviticus establishes a very early belief that God is truly near, and God is truly interested in having connection with God’s people. In Leviticus, we find that humanity can be holy as God is holy, because God desires to make us holy.