Leviticus

← Encyclopedia

Leviticus is the third book of the Torah, the five-part opening of the Hebrew Bible. Its Hebrew name, Wayyiqra, is simply its first word — “and he called”; the English title comes through the Greek and Latin and means, roughly, the book of the Levites, the priestly tribe. Where Genesis tells of beginnings and Exodus of deliverance, Leviticus largely stops the narrative to set down law: how sacrifice is to be offered, how the priesthood is to function, what makes a person or thing clean or unclean, and how holiness is to be kept.

The book presents itself as direct divine speech. Almost everything in it is framed as the words of God to Moses at Mount Sinai, to be relayed to the people or to Aaron and his sons. The setting is the wilderness, the people encamped around the tabernacle — the portable sanctuary built at the close of Exodus — and the whole book is, in effect, the instruction that issues from that tent once it has been raised. The voice comes from the tent; the law follows the voice. This is why the opening word matters. God does not merely command; he calls, and the calling locates the rest. Everything in Leviticus is spoken from inside a structure already standing, addressed to a camp already gathered.

The five offerings

The first seven chapters lay out the system of offerings. There are five, and the order in which they are presented is itself a kind of grammar. The burnt offering, the olah, is given over entirely — wholly consumed on the altar, no portion returned, the one offering that ascends complete. The grain offering, the minḥah, is the bloodless gift, flour and oil and frankincense, a token of the harvest. The peace or well-being offering, the shelamim, is the shared meal, part burned, part eaten, the rite in which the worshiper and the priests and the altar all take a portion. Then come the two offerings that address wrong: the sin or purification offering, the ḥaṭṭat, which cleanses what inadvertent fault has stained, and the guilt or reparation offering, the asham, which makes restitution where damage has been done. The sequence moves from pure gift toward repair, from the offering that is all ascent to the offering that settles a debt. Blood, in this system, is not a payment but a detergent: it is daubed and dashed and sprinkled to purge the sanctuary of the contamination that sin and impurity leave on it, so that the holy can keep standing in the midst of a people who are not.

After the offerings come the priests. Chapters eight through ten install Aaron and his sons in office, and then, almost at once, two of those sons, Nadab and Abihu, bring an unauthorized fire before God and are consumed by fire in return. The narrative breaks in for a moment and then withdraws, and the lesson it leaves is the book’s most unsoftened: holiness is not benign. It is power under exact terms, and the terms are not negotiable from the human side. What is given to the priests is also what can destroy them.

Clean and unclean

The middle chapters turn to purity. They sort the animal world into what may be eaten and what may not — the land creatures that both chew the cud and have a divided hoof are permitted, and the ones that meet only one test, the pig and the camel and the hare, are not. They prescribe what is to be done after childbirth, how the affliction the text calls tzaraat — a scaling disease of skin, and also of fabric and of the walls of a house — is to be diagnosed and contained, and how the discharges of the body and the touch of a corpse make a person temporarily unfit to approach the sanctuary. Impurity here is rarely a matter of sin. It is a condition, mostly contracted by ordinary living — birth, illness, sex, death — and it is removed not by repentance but by time and washing. Its single great danger is proximity: the unclean must not bring its condition into contact with the holy, and most of the apparatus exists to keep those two from meeting unprepared.

At the center of the book stands its central rite. Chapter sixteen sets out the Day of Atonement, the one day in the year on which the high priest enters the innermost chamber, the most guarded space behind the veil, where on any other day no one goes. He brings the blood of a purification offering and sprinkles it toward the cover of the ark, purging the sanctuary of a year’s accumulated defilement. Two goats are taken; lots are cast over them. One is offered to God. The other is designated for Azazel, and over its head the high priest confesses the people’s wrongs, after which it is led away and released into the wilderness, carrying what has been laid on it out beyond the camp and out of the ordered world entirely. The sins are not destroyed. They are sent away — removed to a place outside the system, where they can do no harm. It is the one rite that cleanses both the people and the sancta at once, and the book builds toward it as toward a hinge.

The Holiness Code

The later chapters, from seventeen through twenty-six, form a distinct unit that scholars since the nineteenth century have called the Holiness Code, after its recurring refrain: be holy, for I am holy. Here the demand widens. It no longer concerns only what is offered and what is touched; it reaches into conduct — the treatment of the poor, the laborer, the foreigner, the parent, the neighbor. Honesty in weights, the leaving of the field’s edge unharvested for the gleaner, the prohibition of grudge and revenge, all of it is folded into the same word that governs the altar. It is in this stretch, at chapter nineteen, that the command appears to love one’s neighbor as oneself — set not in a sermon but in a list, between a rule about gossip and a rule about mixed fabrics, as though love of neighbor were itself a statute of purity, one more way the holy is kept from harm. Chapter twenty-five extends the logic to the land: the sabbatical year in which the ground rests, and the Jubilee in which debts are released and ancestral holdings return to their families, because the land, like the people, belongs to God and cannot be held outright. Holiness, in this part of the book, is not an aura around the sanctuary. It is a way of arranging a whole society so that it can bear the presence at its center.

Source, date, and the word qodesh

Scholarship has long read Leviticus as the work of priestly writers, the source conventionally labeled P, whose concerns and vocabulary run through the Pentateuch. The Holiness Code is often assigned to a related but distinguishable hand, designated H — a separation first proposed in the nineteenth century, when August Klostermann coined the term Holiness Code in 1877 to mark off the unit’s distinct voice and its insistence on a holiness required of the whole people, not the priesthood alone. The dating is contested. Many place the core of the priestly material in or after the Babylonian exile of the sixth century BCE, when the loss of the First Temple made the careful preservation of its order urgent, and some read H as later still, the layer that framed and edited what P had set down; others hold substantial parts of the cultic legislation to be older, the written form of practice that long preceded its codification. The text adjudicates none of this; it speaks throughout in a single unbroken voice from Sinai.

What is not in doubt is the book’s center of gravity. Its governing word is qodesh, holiness — understood less as a feeling than as a state, something that can be guarded or lost, that separates the sacred from the common and the clean from the unclean. The priest’s whole task, in the book’s own terms, is to distinguish: between holy and common, between unclean and clean, and to teach the people the difference. The world Leviticus describes is not divided into good and evil so much as into the holy and the ordinary, with purity as the condition under which the ordinary may safely draw near the holy, and impurity as the condition under which it may not. Sin contaminates; impurity contaminates; both leave a residue on the sanctuary that must be purged, lest the presence withdraw from a house grown too defiled to hold it.

Reception and interpretation

In Jewish tradition the book has carried particular weight. Much of the later halakhic literature draws on it, and it has by custom been the first book taught to children. The reason given in the early rabbinic midrash, Leviticus Rabbah, is that the pure should begin with the pure: children are without stain, and the sacrifices are matters of purity, so let the unstained come and study what is unstained. That a book of slaughter and discharge should be the first text set before the young is, on its face, a paradox; the tradition resolves it by reading the whole book as a discipline of purity, and purity as the natural study of the innocent.

Among the Hellenistic Jewish readers, Philo of Alexandria treated the sacrificial and dietary laws as both binding ordinances and bearers of an inner sense, the literal rite carrying a meaning about the soul’s ascent and the mastery of the passions — an allegorical method that would shape later reading in more than one tradition. The vision of Ezekiel, the priest-prophet of the exile, shares the priestly preoccupation with sanctuary, gradation of holiness, and the careful zoning of sacred space, and his closing chapters lay out a temple plan in the same key. By the period of Second Temple Judaism the purity system had become a field of intense elaboration, the ground on which sects divided over how strictly the holiness of the sanctuary might be carried into ordinary life. Later still, the Kabbalah would read the same sacrificial procedures as a map of unifications above, the rite below mirroring a drawing-together of the divine powers — the offering reconceived as a movement within the Godhead.

Christian readers, after the Temple’s destruction, came to treat the sacrificial laws as superseded or as foreshadowing, the olah and the ḥaṭṭat read as figures of a sacrifice held to have fulfilled and ended them, while the ethical commands of the Holiness Code — and above all the love of neighbor — were retained and made central. The distinction between letter and figure was worked out at length over the centuries, and it is best understood as a historical interpretive stance within one tradition rather than a verdict on the living practice of another, which never ceased to read the same chapters as commandment.

Critical editions and the symbolic reading {#scholarship}

The modern study of Leviticus is anchored by two great line-by-line commentaries. Jacob Milgrom’s three-volume work in the Anchor Yale Bible — Leviticus 1–16 (1991), Leviticus 17–22 (2000), and Leviticus 23–27 (2001) — is the fullest treatment in any language, reading the sacrificial and purity systems as a coherent theology in which blood functions as a ritual purgative and the whole apparatus serves to keep the sanctuary habitable for the divine presence; Milgrom drew openly on anthropology to argue that the laws form a system, with ethical force embedded in the ritual rather than opposed to it. Baruch A. Levine’s Leviticus, in the Jewish Publication Society Torah Commentary (Philadelphia, 1989), gives the traditional Hebrew text with the modern translation and a series of excursuses on sacrifice, purity, holiness, and land tenure, framed within the ongoing Jewish reading of the book.

The decisive reframing of the purity rules came from outside biblical studies. The anthropologist Mary Douglas, in Purity and Danger (1966), argued that defilement is not arbitrary taboo but disorder — matter out of place — and that the dietary prohibitions enforce the categories of an ordered world: the animals forbidden are the ones that fall between classes, that meet one criterion of their kind and not another. Her later Leviticus as Literature (Oxford, 1999; the full text is also available online) went further, reading the book as a deliberate literary structure whose divisions mirror the zones of the tabernacle and the ascent of Sinai, the food laws and the touch laws bound into a single doctrine in which death, bloodshed, and pollution are all breaches of one covenant. Together with Milgrom’s commentary, Douglas’s work turned a text long dismissed as priestly minutiae back into what it had been within the tradition all along: a sustained piece of thought.

The text is spare and exact, a procedure manual more than a story. Its subject throughout is the problem of how the holy and the ordinary are to share a world without harm to either.

→ Related: Psalms · Ecclesiastes · Adam · Torah · Pentateuch · Aaron · Tanakh · Deuteronomy · Ketuvim · Ezekiel · Second Temple Judaism · Philo Of Alexandria · Kabbalah · Ten Commandments · Sacrifice Ritual