Day 40 Leviticus 26-27

            Wow.  God paints an amazing image of what life will be like if these laws are upheld.  All that buildup of rules and rituals and banishing or killing everyone and everything that might sully the camp feels like it just came to a crescendo in this passage.  This is God’s side of the covenant.  It’s only one small section, compared to the previous chapters upon chapters of things the Israelites have to do to uphold their end, but it’s very powerful in it’s simplicity.  In exchange for obedience, God will make the rains come and the crops grow, so that you’ll still be eating last year’s harvest when you have to move it outside to make room for this year’s harvest.  Everyone will have lots of kids to continue their names and everyone will be well-fed.  All of the neighboring nations will be terrified of the Israelites and will run away from them.  Even the mean animals will leave the land.

            On the other hand, if the people don’t follow the rules, God will throw down wasting diseases and famine and deliver them into enemy hands.  God mentions that then the land will have the rest that it did not have when the people lived there.  This seems to assume that the people would rebel against God by breaking the Sabbath.  Is this some kind of foreshadowing or is it just one further reiteration of how important it is to keep the Sabbath?  (it is very important)

            Even if this happens though, and I think that even if I didn’t know how this story ends, it would still seem like God is assuming that this will be the case, God will not forget the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob completely.  He will still watch over them even when they are sick and scared in foreign lands for when they decide to apologize return to the Lord.

            The very last part of the book outlines another form of voluntary sacrifice called dedicating.  I don’t completely understand this one, but it sounds like you just take something like your ox or a patch of land or your daughter over to the temple and give it to the priests, then immediately buy it back from them.  I guess having specific objects or people connected to your offering makes it more personal than just giving the temple money.

Day 39 Leviticus 24-25

            Priests have to maintain the lamps in the tabernacle.

            There’s a rare break in the deluge of laws and festival as we hear about a young man from an Israelite mother and an Egyptian father who swore the lord’s name during a fight as a curse.  The Israelites held him until God told Moses what to do with him, which ended up being to take him outside the camp and stone him to death.  Now anyone who blasphemes the name of the Lord, native or alien, must be put to death.  Also, damages done against someone else must be paid back equally, an eye for an eye.  If you kill someone, then the people have the right to kill you back for it.

            God declares that the land itself is to have a rest of its own.  Every seventh year is a Sabbath year and no crops can be harvested.  God promises to provide such a bounty on the sixth year that you will be able to get by through the next one.  Every seventh Sabbath year there’s a Sabbath of Sabbaths, which we call a year of Jubilee.  Every fifty years all property reverts back to the original owner, so when you buy or sell property, the price should be based on how long it is until the next year of Jubilee because you’re not really buying it, but only leasing it for a while.   The same is true for Israelite slaves.  Really you’re supposed to help out your neighbors if they fall on hard times so they don’t ever have to go so far as to sell their land or themselves off for food, but if that does happen, they get the chance to redeem themselves later on.  If they can come up with the money to buy back their house or themselves, then they have to have the option to do so.  If you buy foreign slaves, you can keep them forever, will them to your relatives, do pretty much whatever you want with them, but Israelites were slaves in Egypt so they are not allowed to be harsh or permanent owners to other Israelites.

            This is also enforced for foreign buyers.  Hopefully they let them know before hand, but either way, anyone who buys an Israelite slave has to give them the opportunity to be redeemed or to redeem themselves and even if no one does, they have to release them during the year of Jubilee.

            This one’s kind of tough to get my head around because of the idea of an original owner gets complicated after so many years.  I guess when they first get to the promised land everyone is going to go stake out their family plot, but after even a few generations those family claims are going to be complicated.  When I was in Israel, I was amazed that the whole idea of the original building or original owner were almost meaningless.  The Cardio is a famous road in the old city of Jerusalm, the original site (if you don’t count the city of David).  If you want to find out about the original roads though, youn find out that the cardio was built by the Romans thousands of years after the Israelites had settled there.  The city itself was already thousands of years old when the Isralites got there even.  Most modern Israelis don’t even know what tribe their from, let alone where their family parcel of land is.  And that’s if you don’t consider the confounding factor of the entire population of pre-israel Palistine living there for hundreds of years in the interim.  This system of ownership reverting back every fifty years is an unenforceable mess.

            I guess it was only designed to last for a few hundred more years though.  Once the messiah comes these rules become largely obsolete.

            I dated a Catholic girl in high school and when the year 2000 rolled around she said that the pope had declared a year of jubilee.  According to her there was a list of things you had to do in a year of Jubilee, personal, unquantifiable stuff like perform a merciful act, and if you completed the list then you got a free pass to heaven, or you got all your sins forgiven up through that point for free or something like that.  I wonder if that policy is based on this section of Leviticus.  It’s pretty loose if it is.   I think that sometimes the Catholic Church still likes to just make stuff up though.

Day 38 Leviticus 22-23

            Only the priests and their immediate families are allowed to eat the offerings from the tabernacle.  And the priests’ slaves.

            God only likes animals without defects and deformities for His sacrifices so He will not accept anything that is blind or has some kind of congenital defect.  Likewise if there’s something wrong with its testacles.  Unless it’s a freewill offering, then you can offer a stunted ox or sheep, but it still has to have pristine testacles.

            Every seventh day is a Sabbath day.  No working allowed.  If I didn’t know anything else about the Church and someone asked me what the most important thing in the Bible was based on what I’ve read so far, I would say that it was to keep the Sabbath, no contest.  God has mentioned the Sabbath in just about every conversation he has had with anyone about how they should be living.  Keeping the Sabbath has got to be either the most important commandment God handed down to the Israelites or the one they had the most trouble following because He feels the need to repeat it about once a chapter.

            Additional holy days are the Passover, the feast of first fruits, the feast of weeks, feast of trumpets, day of atonement and the feast of tabernacles.  Each event involves burning sacrifices and resting.  The day of atonement also requires that you fast or else you are to be cut off from your people.

Day 37 Leviticus 19-21

            Chapter 19 of Leviticus is the miscellaneous section for all the laws that don’t fit neatly into one of the other categories.  Most of it is pretty simple and intuitive.  Don’t cheat your neighbors. Don’t steal. Don’t worship idols.  Don’t do things that endanger your neighbor’s life.  There are a couple interesting parts though, that don’t seem to make any sense at the outset.  Don’t wear a shirt made of two different kinds of cloth.  Don’t cut your hair around the temples or trim the edges of your beard.

            I’m wearing a cotton/polyester blend t-shirt right now so where does that leave me?  I’ve heard that these things are forbidden because, at the time, they were practices associated with worshiping other Gods.  That makes sense, but it bothers me a lot that we don’t see that written in the actual text.  My problem is that we’re okay basically ignoring this rule because we feel we understand why it exists and it doesn’t apply the same way anymore.  We need to be really careful doing this kind of thing though because it puts us in a place where we’re telling ourselves “Well, God said that, but he really meant this.”

            Now I feel that it’s really important that we take the context of these passages into account as much as possible.  We sometimes forget that these things were written down at a certain time and place in a certain culture and, even if Moses is quoting God as accurately as he possibly can, you simply can’t completely separate that from his environment all of the time.  We need to try to account for that, but we are still in kind of dangerous territory when we try to tell ourselves that we can completely disregard something from the Bible.

            Of course, there’s some debate about what our relationship even is to the Law in the Old Testament, so I guess we’ll just have to revisit issues like this later in the context of the New Testament.  All I know is that you’re unlikely to get out of a speeding ticket by explaining that you understand why the speed limit is 25, but it doesn’t apply to you at this time.

            God says that when you collect your crops, you should leave some there and not be too thorough.  This is so the poor can come through and pick some grapes to eat.

            Punishments are pre-determined for the laws we’ve been given so far.  Most of them involve death, usually by stoning, but if you marry a woman and her daughter then all three of you are burned to death.  Other infractions get you cut off from your people.  There’s no fine and a night in jail punishments outlined in here though.  The lightest punishment is permanent exile.

            The priests have even stricter rules to live by.  They are not allowed to mourn except for a close family member.  The High priest is not allowed to at all.  None of them can marry a woman who has been a prostitute or divorced.  The high priest has to marry a virgin.  If a priests daughter becomes a prostitute then it is disgraceful to her father.  She has to be burned to death.

Day 36 Leviticus 16-18

            God tells Moses to tell Aaron that he’s not allowed to just come into the sanctuary whenever he pleases.  He has to make some special sacrifices first to account for his own sins and the sins of the whole rest of the camp.  All the sins of the people get loaded onto a goat (the scapegoat) which is then released out into the wilderness.  He needs to do this once a year.

            Eating blood is forbidden because of something to do with life being in the blood.  Anything you kill you have to drain before you eat it and cover its blood with Earth.

            Sex with your close relatives is not allowed.  I assume the definition of a close relative must have been something that was obvious to the Israelites.  It must have been very specific because Abraham married his sister, Isaac married his cousin’s daughter and Jacob married two of his cousins and that all seemed to be okay.  Although Simeon slept with Jacob’s wife and Leviticus also expressly forbids bedding your father’s women, and taking two sisters as your wives is also forbidden and Jacob did that, so maybe these rules just weren’t enforced until after Moses got them.  That seems fair.

            A lot of the rules for who you’re not allowed to sleep with involve not dishonoring friends and family members by sleeping with their wives.  I feel like a lot of care is being taken to specifically include “don’t sleep with your uncle’s wife,” don’t sleep with your son’s wife,” “don’t sleep with your neighbor’s wife.”  Was it okay to sleep with other people’s wives?  I know that neighbor in the old testament is ideally supposed to cover all Israelites right?  But even that’s not a very strong rule because there still doesn’t seem to be any rule against sleeping with your slaves or unwed girls or foreigners.

            You can’t have sex with other men or with animals and you cannot sacrifice your children to Moloch.  I know that this passage about sleeping with other guys gets a lot of air time when my fellow Christians are looking for a reason to dislike the gays.  I think that it’s important to keep perspective here though.  I’m not saying that we should ignore Leviticus when we’re deciding how to run our lives, but we are only about two chapters past the part about how menstruating makes you so unclean that you contaminate everything that you touch for two weeks.  Also, no more shellfish or bacon according to Leviticus and we, as a church, don’t seem to have a problem with that, so I’m hesitant to take someone seriously when they get too bent out of shape about one verse while ignoring everything around it.  I want to keep an eye on this issue though.  I think the Bible can be kind of vague about sexual sins sometimes, especially homosexuality.  And it’s so politically charged that it’s hard to get straight answers from anybody sometimes.  I guess that’s one disadvantage to reading secondary sources.

Day 35 Leviticus 14-15

            There is a process for coming back and being a real human being again after you’ve had an infectious skin disease.  If your symptoms go away then you can meet with the priests again and they can check you over to see if you’re still rashy.  I’ve heard the kosher laws praised for how they anticipate germ theory and modern health and safety customs, like how you’re not supposed to have anything to do with dead things or people with communicable rashes, but I feel, based on what I’m seeing so far, that we might be reaching a little bit there.  Honestly, as a society, it doesn’t take long to figure out that, for whatever reason, people who mess around with dead animals are not usually very healthy, and that poking at someone’s oozing sore is a good way to get one of your own.  Where the rules get more specific regarding actual treatments and practices, they are not that great.  If you fish a dead skink out of your rain barrel, the water it was floating in is unclean and you can’t drink it…until that evening when it becomes okay again.  Similarly, chapter 14 outlines the process by which the priest make someone ritualistically clean who had had a skin disease and it doesn’t sound any different to me than any other ancient magic spells.  The priests had to cut up a bird over some water and then put in the live bird along with some cedar wood, hyssop and red yarn, then sprinkle the potion on the sick man seven times.  There are more steps after that, many, many more steps, but you get the idea.

            We have not by any means mastered the science of medicine in our current era, but none of that stuff seems very helpful for skin conditions.  I don’t know, maybe in another couple thousand years we’ll learn that cedar wood and scared doves are wonder cures for shingles, but I’m going to wait until then to start ascribing that level of practical foresight to the Levitical laws.

            Some similar laws are given about mildew in one’s household for later when everyone eventually makes it to Canaan and gets to live in permanent dwellings.  These are actually pretty practical sounding though.  Go tell the priest about it, then scrape it all out, cut it out of the wall if you have to.  Basically you have to keep tearing out larger and larger chunks of your home until the priests are sure all the mildew is gone.  If you get a really nasty patch you may have to destroy the whole building and move.

            Any kind of discharge makes you unclean as well as pretty much anything that comes in contact with you.  And anyone who comes in contact with anything that’s come in contact with you.  If you’re a woman then you’re super unclean  and no one can touch you while you’re menstruating and then you’re just regular unclean for another week after that.  Then you can go make a sacrifice at the temple to become clean again until your next cycle.  So no matter what, you’re unclean or worse for two weeks out of every month and then it takes a moderately expensive sacrifice (2 doves) to be clean again.  I wonder how common it was for families to just skip it and let the women just be unclean all the time.  I mean that adds up, and it’s not like women in the ancient world got to go out much anyway.

            You’re also unclean for the rest of the day any time you have sex and there is a discharge of semen.  Semen makes things unclean.  I wonder if all the cool kids, when they first got married, would strut around camp all like “sorry guys, I’d like to go to temple with you, but, you know, I’m unclean right now.” *wink*

Day 34 Leviticus 11-13

            Only eat animals that have a split hoof and chew cud or have no split hoof and do not chew cud, but not an animal that only has one or the other.  Only eat sea creature with both scales and fins.  You can eat birds, but there’s a list of forbidden birds.  They’re mostly birds of prey and you can’t eat bats.  Don’t eat flying bugs that walk on all fours (sixes?) but it is okay to eat grasshoppers and some other flying bugs that jump.  Anything that walks on it’s paws is unclean.

            You can’t touch dead things at all without becoming unclean and the way that uncleanness spreads is kind of similar to the was germs work.  If unclean water gets on something then that thing is unclean and if it’s food the it’s not to be eaten.  If an unclean thing gets into a pot of water then everything in the pot is unclean and the pot must be destroyed.  One problem is that a lot of things stop being unclean after a day even if you don’t do anything to make them clean again, which is kind of gross, but better than nothing.  These are mostly rules that will keep a people healthier.

            You can’t eat snakes or centipedes or anything that moves along the ground.

            Childbirth is gross and any woman who engages in such a practice is unclean for at least a week, then still has to stay away from God for another month on top of that.  After that period is over she can take a lamb or some doves to the temple and be made clean again.

            Any skin diseases are to be inspected by the priests.  Aaron and his sons get some instructions for dealing with infectious diseases.  The examine rashes , boils and swelling and decide if someone is made unclean by them.  If someone is unclean they have to live outside of camp, remain unkempt and shout “unclean, unclean” wherever he goes L

            Anything with mildew on it will usually get burned.  If it doesn’t seem to be spreading then they can keep it under observation and maybe try washing it, but if it doesn’t go away they have to destroy it or burn it.  Living in Western Washington I can definitely sympathize with this one.  Mildew is incredibly frustrating.  I keep hearing all these old wive’s tales about using baking soda or vinegar or a lemon in your washing machine, but I think Moses might be onto something with this ritualistic fire thing.  I have a couple towels I’ll have to try that on.

Day 33 Leviticus 8-10

            Apparently being a priest of the Lord is not all it’s cracked up to be.  Aaron and his sons are ordained, which it turns out requires them to live in the tabernacle without leaving for 7 days.  They still don’t have any special relationship with God beyond what the average Israelite has so they basically just oversee the sacrificial system, maintain the Tabernacle and do whatever Moses tells them to.  They are janitors.

            Moses walks them through a big long set of sacrifices and rituals, including waving some meat at the alter as a wave sacrifice and then burning it on top of the burnt offering as an ordination offering.  I’m not sure if this implies that there was more covenant regarding offerings that just wasn’t covered in the first chapters of Leviticus or if these are special one-time-only offerings just for this occasion.  Honestly, the whole process sounds like Moses is just making stuff up as he goes along, but the book says that Moses was only doing what God told him to so I think this may be another obedience thing.

            Speaking of obedience, I talked a little yesterday about how good the ancient Israelites are at following directions, but I guess they kind of have to be.  All of the Israelites who don’t follow directions well are being culled from the tribes at a rapid pace.  The plague of the first born sons from Exodus probably took out a few Israelites who didn’t go through quite the right ritual or who accidently had some leftover lamb sitting around overnight, and anyone who wandered too close to Mt Mariah while God was there was to be instantly killed.  The days of God calling Abraham to Canaan and then patiently staying with him as he wanders through Egypt are long past.  When God tells you to do something now he is not screwing around.

            Two of Aaron’s sons, Nahab and Abhu, get caught up in the awesome party after the ordination week is over.  All the Israelites are super excited, God is there glowing and blessing people and stuff and Nahab and Abihu go to suppliment the stuff on the alter with an offering of incense.  Now back in Exodus 30:9, God said that Aaron and co were supposed to burn incense a couple times a day on the alter, but no one should put any unauthorized offerings of incense on the alter beyond that.  When Aaron’s sons go to burn their incense, God kills them with fire.

            Now the other shoe has dropped.  Moses tells Aaron and the other priests that their families may mourn for people God kills with fire, so that’s nice I guess, but they need to keep their hair tidy and they can’t tear their cloths or God will kill them.  Messing with your cloths and hair was part of the way you mourned back then, so the implication is that no mourning is allowed for priests.  Also, the same thing will happen to them if any of them screw up and break the Law and not only will they be punished (with fire) but God will be angry at the whole camp because of their misdeeds, so there’s some pressure there.  In addition to the regular law, Aaron’s sons are also forbidden from leaving the tabernacle while anointed with the holy oil and they may never drink any fermented beverage.

            After all this exposition Moses gets bent out of shape because the priests burnt some meat and grain that they were supposed to keep for themselves and eat in the tabernacle.  Aaron explained that his sons were making their own sacrifices with what was given to them, which I guess is acceptable under the Law.  So, no reason to kill anyone with fire today right Moses? *nervous chuckle*

Day 32 Leviticus 5-7

            Chapter 5 finishes up some details about the rules for sin offering.  To summarize, not being aware of your sin is not a good enough excuse.  Even if you don’t realize you touched something or did something or thought something that makes you unclean, you’re still unclean and need to deal with it as soon as you find out.  It’s also stipulated that you’re supposed to offer a lamb for this offering, or two doves if you can’t afford a lamb or some nice flour if you can’t afford two doves.  The other sacrifices have similar tiers.  I can’t believe I didn’t notice yesterday, through that whole rant about regressive taxes, that the entire sacrifice system is progressive.  And not only progressive, but it sounds like it’s also self-regulated.  You are the one who decides what you can afford because it’s between you and God.  Although I’m sure, in practice, there was a lot of brow beating done by the priests to keep people honest.  After all, they’ve got a vested interest in how extravagant an offering you make.  They’re the ones who get to eat the left overs.

            The last type of offering is the Guilt offering which is like a Sin offering, but, and again, this is coming mostly from commentaries and websites, the Guilt offering was more appropriate for a Sin for which proper restitution could be made, where the Sin offering was more for things that couldn’t be set right.  If it was a sin against someone else then you had to compensate them for it as well, for the full value times 1.2.

            God gives Moses the rules to hand off to Aaron’s sons regarding how to handle these offerings and what parts they’re allowed to eat, then He says something really interesting.  No Israelites are allowed to eat the fat of cattle, sheep or goats.  Now the Israelites, for all their flaws, are awesome at following the letter of the law.  To this day the practitioners of the Jewish faith have an astounding capacity for allowing themselves to be inconvenienced for the sake of the Law.  I mean this as a compliment.  I was able to visit Israel recently and we were surprised to find that you could not get cheese burgers anywhere.  It turns out, the popular way to interpret the kosher laws these days is so strict that they take that passage from back in Exodus about not boiling a baby goat in it’s mother’s milk to mean that you cannot prepare or serve any meat and dairy together.

            This is the first I’ve ever heard of this thing about not eating any fat though.  If I were trying to avoid eating any fat, I would have to become a vegetarian because there is some amount of fat in everything.  If I were trying to follow that no fat command to the same degree as the no baby goat milk command then I could never eat any meat.  This one is tricky because the sacrificial system designates certain meat that the priests are supposed to eat so obviously that meat doesn’t make one unclean.  Maybe what they meant to say is that you just can’t eat hunks of pure fat, like the chewy white sections of bacon.  Well, maybe that’s a bad example.  But then there’s no such thing really as pure fat right?  I think that even the white, greasy bits have meat in them, and even the purest meat pieces have fat, so where’s the line?  I guess since the sacrificial system is no longer active even within the Jewish community, the safest interpretation is just to never eat meat.  That puts me on the wrong side of like 4000 years of rabbinical tradition though.  They think it’s fine to eat meat.

            I don’t think I like this rule.

Day 31 Leviticus 1-4

            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.