Book of Leviticus

Leviticus contains two pieces of narrative and no more. In chapter 10 two sons of Aaron offer unauthorised fire and are killed by it, and their father is told not to mourn. In chapter 24 a man of mixed parentage blasphemes and is stoned. Everything else, twenty-five chapters of it, is instruction, and the book is spoken almost entirely by one voice addressing Moses at the tent of meeting.

The structure is orderly. Chapters 1 to 7 set out the kinds of offering and who eats what. Chapters 8 to 10 consecrate Aaron and his sons. Chapters 11 to 15 define what makes a person or a thing unclean: certain creatures, childbirth, skin disease, mould in a house, discharges from the body. Chapter 16 gives the rite of the Day of Atonement, including the goat sent into the wilderness that gave English the word scapegoat. Chapters 17 to 26 form a distinct block, and chapter 27 handles vows and valuations.

The purity laws are the part most often misread. They are not sanitation, and no ancient reader treated them as such: childbirth is not unhygienic, and the forbidden animals are not more dangerous to eat than the permitted ones. What the system does is sort the world into categories and treat what falls between them as anomalous. Creatures are classified by where they live and how they move, and the ones that do not fit a class cleanly are the ones excluded. Uncleanness is mostly not sin, it is a state, it is usually temporary, and the remedy is a procedure rather than a punishment.

Chapters 17 to 26 read differently from what precedes them, and the difference is consistent enough that scholars treat the block as a separate composition, designated H against the priestly material designated P. It was identified as a distinct unit in the late nineteenth century and the identification has held.

Three things mark it. The refrain you shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy recurs through it and appears nowhere in the earlier chapters. The address widens: where chapters 1 to 16 mostly instruct priests, this block speaks to the whole community, and holiness becomes something a farmer or a creditor can practise. And the subject matter turns social. The jubilee, in which land returns to its original holding, is here. So is the sabbatical year, the prohibition on charging interest to the poor, the command to leave the edges of a field unharvested for the destitute, the requirement to pay a labourer before nightfall, and the instruction to love your neighbour as yourself, which appears at chapter 19 and again a few verses later extended to the foreigner resident among you.

Where the block sits in the history of the text is still argued. The older view treated H as an earlier collection that P later absorbed. A substantial body of more recent work reverses that, reading H as the later editorial layer that framed the priestly material and gave the whole book its ethical range. The two readings produce different pictures of what the priesthood was for, and the evidence has not settled the matter.