Leviticus: A Commentary

Christian Century, Oct 8, 1997 by Peter J. Haas

By Erhard S. Gerstenberger. Westminster John Knox, 450 pp., $42.00.

For Jewish Homileticians, early spring is not a good time. According to the rabbinic cycle of Torah readings, this is when we come down from the great heights of Genesis and Exodus, with their breathtaking perspectives and sweeping visions, and enter the flat and seemingly arid plain of Leviticus. As my Protestant friends sympathetically remind me, Leviticus simply "does not preach."

And yet Leviticus is central, literally and figuratively, to what the Pentateuch is all about. The Pentateuch is the story of how the people of Israel came into being and came to receive their gift of the Promised Land. Genesis and Exodus introduce us to the story and bring us to its crucial turning point, the arrival at Sinai and the reception of the Revelation. Numbers and Deuteronomy complete the narrative, describing the experiences and lessons of the people as they leave Sinai and finally arrive at the edge of the Promised Land. In the middle stands Leviticus. Leviticus lets us pause and consider the content of the Revelation. It offers instruction in the technology of the holy--instruction that will shape the divine service in the temple and the rhythm and content of Israel's holy life after it enters the land.

It is easy for us to skip over Leviticus because it appears so utterly foreign. The very institutions that Leviticus presupposes--the temple and its levitical priesthood--are completely alien to us, whether we are Jewish or Christian. To be sure, all Western religious traditions draw heavily on the vocabulary and symbolism of Leviticus: priesthood (whether clergy or "of the people"), sacrifice, offerings, uncleanness, purification, ablution/baptism, the redeeming power of blood, and on and on. But these are all bits and pieces of the levitical system taken out of their original context and transformed into the very different framework of church and synagogue. It is only in Leviticus that these elements come together naturally to form a comprehensive and coherent system.

Our challenge is to tease out what the book's familiar-sounding terms and themes meant to people of another time and place. How did the priests, Levites and commoners of that time understand what they were doing and what does their understanding mean for us today? Adducing and communicating this understanding is the job of modern critical commentaries like Erhard S. Gerstenberger's. They take on the difficult if not impossible task of preserving the foreignness of Leviticus while still making it relevant.

There seems to be a scholarly consensus that the Book of Leviticus, more or less as we have it, is from exilic times. The generally agreed-upon context is the permission given by Cyrus of Persia (in approximately 538 B.C.E.) to the exiled Judeans to rebuild their temple in Jerusalem. We know from archaeological evidence that Cyrus allowed a number of conquered peoples to rebuild their homelands and local temples. In each of these cases he required the newly re-established priesthood to publish its traditional law. Leviticus, in this scholarly view, is the result of the Judean priesthood's effort to do so. This is why Leviticus (and the "P" document generally) reads like a priestly handbook. It was composed to inform Cyrus and his officials about what the Jerusalem priesthood intended to do with its newly granted authority.

This historical context does not mean, however, that scholars think Leviticus was made up out of whole cloth by exiled priests in the sixth century B.C.E. No doubt the priestly writers brought to their task memories or traditions of what once had been and so should be again. It is also clear that that book was not written at one sitting by a single author. Leviticus has every sign of being a composite work.

It is best, then, to think of Leviticus as a complex document written over an extended period of time (the rebuilding of the temple took nearly 25 years) by a variety of authors. It should not be treated as an historically reliable description of how the temple actually operated. Whether or not the Second Temple ever followed this blueprint exactly is an interesting question, but one that goes beyond the purview of this essay. But it is evident that in its details, Leviticus offers remarkable insight into the priestly imagination of exilic and postexilic Judah. It tells us what the priesthood, or at least an influential part of it, thought temple ritual ought to be.

Leviticus can be divided into two major parts. The first (chapters 1-16) is concerned with the operation of the priesthood and proper disposition of the sacrifices and offerings brought to the altar. The second (chapters 17-26) has to do with the maintenance of a certain purity or holiness by the Judean community as a whole. This holiness is deemed necessary if the temple and its sacred altar are to abide in the land.

Historically there have been three ways of approaching the rather technical material in the portion of Leviticus that deals with sacrifice. The first is best exemplified in rabbinic writings, especially the Mishnah and Talmud. This approach tries to work out the legal intricacies of the rules for sacrifice, to fill in the gaps and reconcile the inconsistencies embedded in the text: for example, determining the status of an animal designated for one type of sacrifice but erroneously slaughtered for another, or determining what to do if an animal that has been properly slaughtered and its blood correctly sprinkled on the altar is then found to have a blemish that should have disqualified it.