The Masoretic tradition preserves a distinctive scribal feature at the very start of Leviticus: in the word vayikra, 'and He called' (Leviticus 1:1), the final letter aleph is conventionally written smaller than the surrounding text in many Torah scrolls. Classical commentary reads the small aleph as an expression of Moses' own humility, contrasting the deliberate, invited calling given to him with the verb used for Balaam's encounter with God later in the Torah, vayikar, 'and He happened upon him,' written without the aleph at all to suggest a chance, lesser encounter rather than a sought and welcomed one; the contrast is drawn entirely from the two verbs' spelling rather than from any statement the text makes explicitly.
A long-standing Jewish educational custom, recorded in Midrash Vayikra Rabbah, begins children's earliest formal Torah study with the book of Leviticus rather than with Genesis, on the reasoning that just as sacrificial law is chiefly concerned with purity, the youngest students, held to be pure of sin, are best matched with a text concerned with purity before other material. Source critics attribute Vayikra's sacrificial legislation to the Priestly source, generally regarded as one of the latest strands to reach its final form, in contrast to this same portion's central place in the earliest stage of traditional Jewish education.