Leviticus is the book of the Levites. Moses was a Levite. Aaron was his brother so he must have been a Levite too. It’s starting to look like the Levites are going to be the priest tribe, which still doesn’t make sense to me after that line from Exodus about all Israelites being a nation of priests in Exodus 19:6.
Just to recap, Levi’s blessing from Jacob back in Genesis is not that great. Jacob talks about how he and his brother are violent and fierce and he curses their anger and tells them they will be spread across the land of Israel. They were the two who killed all those Shechemites and I think Jacob was still carrying that with him. I guess that’s in keeping with the Levite’s jumping up and slaughtering 3000 other Israelites when Moses told them to. And with Moses killing that guard in the beginning of Exodus. Wow, Levites are some stone-cold killers. I wonder if they really had that reputation back then. It seems like the 12 tribes were all pretty clicky. I’ll bet each one had it’s own reputation, like how we think that Canadians are very polite and Texans are all in the NRA. I wonder if it made anyone a little nervous that the murderingest tribe was the one being given the mantle of priesthood.
Leviticus starts off with four different kinds of offerings that may be presented before the Lord: burnt offerings, grain offerings, fellowship offerings and sin offerings. I can’t discern from the text itself what each kind of offering is for, except the sin offering which is the way to apologize to God for accidently breaking a commandment. It seems reasonable that the fellowship offering has to do with fellowship, but even that is sort of vague. Fellowship at most of the churches I’ve attended is a code word for ‘potluck’ so it’s difficult to pin down exactly what the passage means. My Bible handbook and some online research says that the burnt offering and the sin offering were to nullify sin although it sounds like the burnt offering was kind of more general while the sin offering was targeted to negate a specific sin. The grain offering and the fellowship offering, which looks like it’s often called the peace offering, weren’t necessarily connected to sin, the grain offering was mostly about giving thanks to God and the fellowship offering was about entering fellowship with God, which was symbolic of a new beginning or rebirth. It sounds like you might make a fellowship offering if you had a scrape with death or if you just decided to turn over a new leaf and change something about you relationship with God.
This is the most useful single source I found on it. It’s still pretty complicated, but it’s got charts so that’s always helpful.
The priests often get something from sacrifices. In burnt sacrifices the whole animal is burnt, but in the others only a portion is burnt and then the rest is given to the sons of Aaron. Similar sacrifices were common in many religions in the ancient world. What makes these different though is that there isn’t really anything magical happening. In other faiths, sacrifices were meant to make your God do something like bring rain or kill you enemies, or else they were to feed a God who needed sacrifices to stay strong. Israelite sacrifices don’t really benefit God at all, they seem to be almost completely for the sake of the sacrificer. The system isn’t there because God needs it, it’s there because we need a physical experience that we can touch and participate in to help us remember not to break the Law.
I think of it kind of like the way rules work with little kids. Your toddler doesn’t understand that eating a bowl full of sugar cookies is going to make it sick, so it has to learn that sometimes the reason you can’t do things is because mommy said so. Once we start getting into some of the specific rules I’ll talk more about that, but one of the first things God is doing is setting up a system so we can remind ourselves to stay on the right path. If you do something really nasty like God laid down in the last few commandments, then you will likely get stoned or at least run out of town, but this is to help us keep the minor infractions a priority as well.
The Israelites are getting rules about washing their tables before eating and not touching dead bodies that seem very logical to us with our fancy understanding of germ theory, but for the time being, they’re just going to have to learn to do certain things and avoid certain things because God said so. It’s kind of funny that after Jesus came we, western society, just kind of declared ourselves completely above the law and summarily ignored everything God said in the Old Testiment. I understand that Jesus legitimately did change the way we read books like Leviticus, but then during the dark ages the average life expectance took a nose dive from which it is still recovering and hundreds of years later Ignatz Samelweis was laughed out of the field of medicine for proposing, and later proving, that people die less in hospitals if doctors would wash their hands after doing something gross. Just like the Bible says not to do. The mortality rate at Sammelweis’s hospital was a fraction of every other hospital around.
Maybe funny isn’t exactly the right word.
Chapter one mentions systematically three times “It is a burnt sacrifice, an offering made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the lord.” That’s right, that’s a King James Version quote, we’re going to class this place up a little bit today.
Repeating the same thing three times was a popular literary device in Moses’s era. It comes up a few times in these early books whenever God does something extra-important, like create man:
God created man in his own image/
in the image of God he created him/
male and female he created them. (Gen 1:27)
Or call Abraham:
I will make you a great nation and I will bless you/
I will make your name great and you will be a blessing/
I will bless those who bless you and whoever curses you I will curse (Gen12:2-3)
So I guess the sacrifices must be important.
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