Leviticus

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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. Its first chapters lay out the system of offerings — burnt, grain, peace, sin, and guilt offerings, each with its own procedure. The middle chapters turn to purity: the distinction between clean and unclean animals, the handling of disease, discharge, and contact with death, and the great annual rite of the Day of Atonement, on which the high priest enters the innermost sanctuary and a goat is sent into the wilderness bearing the people’s wrongs. The later chapters, often called the Holiness Code, broaden the demand from ritual to conduct, and contain the command to love one’s neighbor as oneself.

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 dating is contested: many place its core in or after the Babylonian exile of the sixth century BCE, when the loss of the Temple made the careful preservation of its order urgent, though some of the material is held to be older. 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.

In Jewish tradition the book has carried particular weight. Much of the later legal literature draws on it, and it has by custom been the first book taught to children, on the reasoning that the pure should begin with matters of purity. Christian readers, after the Temple’s destruction, came to treat its sacrificial laws as superseded or as foreshadowing, while keeping its ethical commands; the distinction between letter and figure was worked out at length over the centuries. Anthropologists in the modern period found in its purity rules a coherent symbolic order rather than arbitrary taboo — a reading that recovered the book as a system 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