Leviticus: The Book Nobody Finishes

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Priests. Scholars see two main priestly layers: the instructions on sacrifice and purity, and a section called the Holiness Code (chapters 17 to 26).

When: Some of its practices are old. The book took its final form during or after the exile, in the 500s or 400s BC. In my day the Temple in Jerusalem still ran by it.

Where it fits: The story stands still. Every word is spoken at Mount Sinai, in the one month between the setting up of the sacred tent (Exodus 40:17) and the first census in Numbers (Numbers 1:1).

Where I quote it: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31, quoting Leviticus 19:18). I sent a healed man to the priest, as this book required (Mark 1:44; Leviticus 14).

If you only read three chapters: Leviticus 16, Leviticus 19 and Leviticus 25.

Words to Know

Clean and unclean — whether a person could enter the holy places. Being unclean was not the same as sinning. Childbirth, touching a dead body or a bodily discharge all made you unclean for a time.

Atonement — making things right between people and God. The Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, is described in chapter 16.

Scapegoat — the goat sent into the desert on the Day of Atonement, carrying the people’s sins.

Jubilee — every fiftieth year, when land went back to its original families and debt-slaves went free.

Holy — set apart for God. In chapter 19 it turns out to mean something very practical.

The Book in Brief

Leviticus has almost no story. It is a book of instructions that God gives Moses from the newly built tent, and it never leaves Mount Sinai.

Chapters 1 to 7 describe the offerings: animals burned whole on the altar, gifts of grain, shared meals, where the fat is burned for God and the meat is eaten by the priests and the worshiper, and offerings to set right sins and wrongs. Several come with cheaper choices for people who cannot afford an animal from the herd or the flock.

Chapters 8 to 10 hold the book’s main story. Moses ordains Aaron and his sons as priests, and fire from God burns up the first offering. Then two of Aaron’s sons, Nadab and Abihu, offer a fire God had not commanded, and fire comes out from God and kills them.

Chapters 11 to 15 cover being clean and unclean: which animals may be eaten, how long a mother is unclean after childbirth, skin diseases and mold, and discharges from the body. Chapter 16 describes the Day of Atonement, when the high priest purifies the sanctuary and sends a goat into the wilderness carrying the people’s sins.

Chapters 17 to 26 are often called the Holiness Code, because their refrain is that the people must be holy, as God is holy. They cover blood, forbidden sexual relations, the laws of chapter 19 on caring for the poor and the stranger, rules for priests, and the calendar of holy days. In chapter 24 a man who curses God’s name is stoned. Chapter 25 sets a year of rest for the land every seventh year, and the Jubilee every fiftieth. Chapter 26 promises blessings if the people obey and disasters, ending in exile, if they do not, but says that God will still remember the covenant.

Chapter 27, a kind of appendix, deals with vows and gifts to the sanctuary.

People joke about Leviticus. It is the book where good intentions to read the whole Bible go to die. Page after page of offerings, skin diseases, mildew and priests’ clothing.

But when a scribe asked me which commandment was first of all, I gave him two. The first was from Deuteronomy: love God with everything you have. The second was this:

You shall love your neighbor as yourself (Mark 12:31; Leviticus 19:18).

That line is in Leviticus. It sits between a law about grudges and a law about mixing two kinds of seed. I did not invent it. Other teachers in my time saw it the same way.¹

A handbook for priests

Leviticus is a manual. It tells the priests how to run the sacrifices, which animals may be eaten, how to tell when a person may come back to the holy place, and which days are holy.

You may picture sacrifice as an angry god demanding blood. Most of it was not like that. Many offerings were meals, shared between God, the priests and the family who brought them. There were offerings of thanks, offerings of grain and oil, and offerings to purify the sanctuary itself.

And the book makes room for the poor. If you could not afford a lamb, you could bring two birds. If you could not afford birds, a little flour (Leviticus 5:7, 11).

After I was born, my mother came to the Temple to make the offering for a new mother. Luke records what she brought: A pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons (Luke 2:24). That is the offering Leviticus allows when she cannot afford a lamb (Leviticus 12:8).² I was born into the cheaper line of this book.

Clean and unclean

The rules about clean and unclean confuse people, so let me be clear.

Being unclean was not a sin. A mother after childbirth was unclean for a time. So was anyone who touched a dead body, which means anyone who buried their own parent. It was a normal part of life. It meant you waited, washed, and then came back to the holy places.

The hardest case was the skin disease your Bible may call leprosy. It was not what you call leprosy today. The Hebrew word covered a range of skin conditions, and even mold on cloth and walls (Leviticus 13–14). A person with it had to live outside the camp, with torn clothes, calling out Unclean! Unclean! (Leviticus 13:45–46). It was a life of being shunned.

A man like that came to me and knelt. I touched him, and he was clean. Then I told him, Go show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing the things which Moses commanded (Mark 1:40–44).³

I did not tear up Leviticus there. I sent him back into it, because the priest’s word was the only thing that would let him go home to his village.

And when a woman who had been bleeding for twelve years touched my clothes in a crowd, which some readers think made me unclean by this book, I did not scold her. I called her daughter (Mark 5:25–34; Leviticus 15:25).

The food laws

Leviticus 11 lists which animals may be eaten. No pig, no shellfish. Of the land animals, only those that both chew the cud and have split hooves.

I said, There is nothing from outside of the man, that going into him can defile him (Mark 7:15). Food, I said, goes into his stomach, then into the latrine, making all foods clean (Mark 7:19).

Be careful with those last words. In the oldest copies of Mark, they are Mark’s comment, not something he reports me saying, and many translations print them that way, as a note that I declared all foods clean. Matthew tells the same story and leaves them out (Matthew 15:17). And for decades after I died, my followers fought bitterly over whether they still had to keep the food laws. Peter needed a vision on a rooftop to change his mind (Acts 10:9–16).⁴ If I had settled it in one sentence, they would not have needed to fight.

Go deeperWhy these animals and not others?

Leviticus gives signs for telling clean animals from unclean ones, such as a split hoof and chewing the cud (Leviticus 11:3–7), but it never says why those signs matter. It gives one reason for the whole list: For I am the LORD your God. Sanctify yourselves therefore, and be holy; for I am holy (Leviticus 11:44). People have been looking for more ever since.

The oldest explanations are symbolic. In a work known as the Letter of Aristeas, written by a Jew in Egypt in the 100s BC, the high priest explains that animals which chew the cud stand for memory, because they bring their food back up to chew it again, and that birds of prey are forbidden to teach people not to rule others by force.⁵ Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish thinker of my own time, read the food laws in much the same way, as lessons in self-control.⁶

In the Middle Ages the great Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides argued that the forbidden foods were simply bad for the body, pork above all.⁷ Many people still think so. But the Law never says it, and it is hard to make that case for every animal on the list, such as the camel and the hare.

In 1966 the British anthropologist Mary Douglas offered another answer. Leviticus sorts living things into land, water and sky, each with its proper kind of creature. On land, the model animal has split hooves and chews the cud. In the water, it has fins and scales. Creatures that do not fit their class are unclean. Holiness, she argued, meant wholeness and order. She later changed her mind on parts of this, and scholars still argue.⁸

Archaeology adds one more piece. In the hill villages of early Israel, pig bones are almost absent, while in the Philistine towns on the coast they are common. Avoiding pork may have marked my people off from their neighbors long before Leviticus was finished.⁹

The Day of Atonement

Leviticus 16 is the most solemn day of the year. The high priest enters the innermost room of the sanctuary, once a year, and purifies it.

Two goats are chosen. One is sacrificed to the LORD. Over the other, the high priest lays his hands and confesses all the people’s sins, and then the goat is led out into the wilderness as the scapegoat, carrying the sins away (Leviticus 16:8–10, 21–22).

The Hebrew word behind scapegoat is Azazel, and nobody knows for certain what it means. It may be a place, a desert demon, or simply “the goat that goes away.” When William Tyndale translated it into English in 1530, he called it the scape goat.¹⁰ That is where your word comes from.

Go deeperHow the Day of Atonement was kept in the Temple

The Mishnah, the first written collection of Jewish law, gives a whole section, called Yoma, “the Day,” to the way the high priest kept this day in the Temple. It was written down long after the Temple fell, so some of it is memory and some of it is ideal. But it shows you how my people pictured the day.

For a week before, the high priest was kept apart and rehearsed his duties. On the night before, young priests kept him awake. On the day itself he went into the Holy of Holies, the innermost room, which no one entered on any other day of the year.¹¹ The lots for the two goats were drawn from a box, and a thread of red wool was tied to the head of the goat for Azazel. When the priests and the people standing in the court heard the high priest speak the name of God in his confession, they knelt, bowed down and fell on their faces.¹²

Then the goat was led out into the desert, with ten huts along the way where its escort could rest. At the end, the man who led it pushed it backward over a cliff.¹³ The Mishnah adds that, according to some, a strip of red wool was tied to the Temple door, and when the goat reached the desert it turned white, as Isaiah promised: Though your sins are as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow (Isaiah 1:18). A later tradition in the Talmud says that in the last forty years before the Temple was destroyed, the strip no longer turned white.¹⁴

My followers knew this day well. Luke calls it simply the Fast (Acts 27:9). And the letter to the Hebrews describes my death as the work of a high priest who goes into the holy place once for all (Hebrews 9:7, 11–12).

What holy means

Leviticus 19 opens with a command: You shall be holy; for I, the LORD your God, am holy (Leviticus 19:2).

Then it tells you what that looks like.

When you harvest, leave the edges of your field and the fallen grapes for the poor and for the foreigner (Leviticus 19:9–10).

Do not keep a laborer’s wages overnight (Leviticus 19:13).

Do not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in front of the blind (Leviticus 19:14).

Do not take the side of the poor in court, and do not bow to the great. Judge fairly (Leviticus 19:15).

Do not hate your brother in your heart (Leviticus 19:17).

Love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18).

And then, near the end of the chapter: The stranger who lives as a foreigner with you shall be to you as the native-born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you lived as foreigners in the land of Egypt (Leviticus 19:34).

That is holiness in Leviticus. Not looking pious. Paying the worker on time. Leaving food in the field for the hungry. Loving the foreigner as yourself.

Matthew remembers me saying, Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect (Matthew 5:48). Luke remembers the same saying differently: Therefore be merciful, even as your Father is also merciful (Luke 6:36). Read Leviticus 19 and you will see why both of them were right.

Who is my neighbor?

A lawyer once quoted Leviticus 19:18 back to me and then asked, Who is my neighbor? (Luke 10:29).

In Leviticus, the neighbor in verse 18 is one of your people. The stranger is added in verse 34. The lawyer wanted to know where the line was drawn.

So I told him about a man beaten and left half dead on the road. A priest came by and passed on the other side. So did a Levite, a Temple assistant. Some readers think they were afraid of touching a corpse, which Leviticus forbids priests to do except for close family (Leviticus 21:1–3). The story does not say.¹⁵ Then a Samaritan came, a man from the people the lawyer had been raised to despise, and he stopped.

Then I turned the question around. Which one of the three seemed to be a neighbor to the man? I did not let the lawyer decide who counted as his neighbor. I asked him to be one.

The verses people quote

Two verses in this book are quoted in arguments today more than almost any others: Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, on a man lying with a man.

The gospels never record me saying anything about them.

You should also know what sits beside them. The same code forbids planting two kinds of seed in one field and wearing a garment made of two kinds of material (Leviticus 19:19). It forbids a man to lie with his wife during her period (Leviticus 18:19). It says that anyone who curses his father or mother shall be put to death (Leviticus 20:9).

Christians have long sorted the laws of this book into kinds. Since the Middle Ages, many have divided them into moral laws, which still bind, and ceremonial and civil laws, which do not.¹⁶ Where each verse falls is exactly what people argue about. I left no ruling on these two. So when someone uses Leviticus as a weapon, it is fair to ask how much of the rest of it he keeps.

The Jubilee

Leviticus 25 may be the most radical chapter in the scriptures.

Every seventh year, the land rests. Every fiftieth year is the Jubilee. In that year, land that was sold goes back to the family that originally held it, and Israelites who sold themselves into slavery for debt go free.

The reason is in one sentence: The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; for you are strangers and live as foreigners with me (Leviticus 25:23).

The trumpet that announced the Jubilee was blown on the Day of Atonement. And the command was to proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants (Leviticus 25:10). Pennsylvania’s colonial assembly had that line cast onto a bell for its State House in 1752, and two Philadelphia founders recast it the next year. You call it the Liberty Bell.¹⁷

Nobody can show that the Jubilee was ever fully carried out. But the idea never died. When I stood up in the synagogue at Nazareth, I read from Isaiah: to proclaim release to the captives … to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord (Luke 4:18–19). The word for release in that passage of Isaiah is the same word Leviticus uses for the Jubilee’s liberty.¹⁷

Everyone in that room knew what year I was talking about.

Go deeperDebt release was older than Israel

The Jubilee did not come from nowhere. In Babylon, more than a thousand years before Leviticus was finished, a new king often began his reign by proclaiming mīšarum, “justice.” He cancelled many debts and set free people who had been sold into slavery for debt. The best-preserved of these decrees comes from King Ammi-saduqa of Babylon, in the 1600s BC.¹⁸ The Babylonian word for this kind of release is andurārum. It is the same word, in a sister language, as the Hebrew deror, the liberty that Leviticus proclaims in the Jubilee.¹⁹

There is a difference. In Babylon, release came when the king chose, and it showed off his generosity. Leviticus puts release on a calendar, so that no king can hold it back, and it gives a different reason: the land belongs to God, not to the king or the lender (Leviticus 25:23).

Did anyone keep these laws? The seventh year, when fields were left unsown, really was kept in later times. During the Maccabean war in the 160s BC, the Jewish defenders of Beth-zur had to surrender because they ran out of food in a Sabbath year (1 Maccabees 6:49). Josephus says that when Herod besieged Jerusalem, the city was short of food because it was a Sabbath year, and the Roman historian Tacitus mocked my people for being idle every seventh year.²⁰

No record shows that a Jubilee year was ever kept.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Leviticus 19:9–18, then Leviticus 19:33–34.

You will find: that “love your neighbor as yourself” comes in a list about leaving food for the poor, paying workers on time and loving the foreigner.

Then read Luke 2:22–24 and Leviticus 12:8. See which offering my family could afford.

The Short Version

• Leviticus is a priests’ handbook, but the command to love your neighbor as yourself is in the middle of it.
• Unclean was not the same as sinful. I touched the unclean and sent the healed back to the priest so they could go home.
• In chapter 19, holiness means leaving food for the poor, paying workers on time and loving the foreigner as yourself.
• The line about all foods clean is, in the oldest copies, Mark’s comment, and my followers argued about food for decades after me.
• The Jubilee returned land and freed debt-slaves every fifty years. I read its language aloud at Nazareth.