Alter suggests that in Leviticus, “the central concern of the book is the conduct of the cult” and that “purification is a paramount consideration in all of this.” Alter points to Mary Douglas’ conception of biblical writings as based on analogical representations. Following her lead, he posits, “Reality is conceived as an elaborate system of correspondences—correspondences between Sinai and the cosmos, on the one hand, and the Tabernacle, on the other, and between all three of these and the body segments of the sacrificial animal.” Alter claims, “there is a single verb that focuses the majors themes of Leviticus—“divide” (Hebrew, hivdil).” Finally, he puts forward a conception of the nature of biblical ontology. “Israel, in turn, by accepting these categorical divisions in the realm of appetite, sets itself apart from other peoples and becomes holy, like God. This last element of imitation dei suggests that God’s holiness, whatever else it may involve and however ultimately unfathomable the idea may be, implies an ontological division or chasm between the Creator and the created world, a concept that sets off biblical monotheism from the worldview of antecedent polytheisms, where at least the king could serve as mediator between human and divine…. The chief instruments for protecting the separation of ontological spheres are fire, blood, oil, and water…. Fire as we have seen abundantly in Exodus and will see even more emphatically in Deuteronomy, is associated with the deity…. Blood, as Leviticus emphatically reminds us, is the very life (nefesh) of the living animal…. Oil (it is specifically olive oil) has, by contrast, an association with the quotidian and with the social and political realms in ancient culture…. Finally, the efficacy of water as a purifying agent is self-evident and universal…. Fire is linked, as we have seen, with the divine; blood courses through the veins of living creatures, animal and human; olive oil is a product of agriculture, of the land, which sets it over against water, a manifestation of nature without human intervention (it is fresh running water that must be used for purification), recalling the primordial realm that must be set apart from dry land so that the world may come into existence.”
Alter points out that much of Leviticus is prescriptive. In Leviticus 3:17, Alter relates one such command, “no fat and no blood shall you eat. The prohibition on consuming blood is grounded in the idea of the sacredness of life (see Genesis 9:4). The prohibition on eating fat seems strictly related to the fact that it is reserved for the deity alone in the sacrificial rite—and, if one follows Douglas, because it marks a barrier of exclusion in a system of analogies between body and sacred cosmos. It is instructive that when the seventeenth-century antinomian messianic leader Sabbatai Zebi wanted to demonstrate to his followers that he was empowered to abrogate the Torah, he chose to demonstrate this by the public consumption of suet—the violation of a seemingly arbitrary prohibition, and a violation that could scarcely have given him much pleasure.”
In Leviticus, allowances are often given for the poor to participate equally in the priestly blessings through sacrificial offerings. Alter comments on Leviticus 5:7, “if his hand cannot attain. The primary sense of the verb is “reach.” “Hand” in biblical idiom is often used, as here, metonymically to indicate power or capacity. The law that follows here is what the rabbis called “an ascending and descending offering” (qorban ‘oleh weyored), that is, a sliding-scale offering which is devised to accommodate people of limited means.”
The Hebrew Bible returns to similar syntactical structures repeatedly. In Leviticus 8:4, it is the envelope form, “And Moses did as the Lord had charged him. A variant of this clause recurs at the very end of the chapter, framing the whole in an envelope structure. What is noteworthy is that in this chapter the Book of Leviticus for the first time moves from lists of cultic regulations to narrative.”
Leviticus 11:7 deals with dietary prohibitions. Alter explains, “the pig. It is only later, in the Hellenic period, that the pig becomes the prohibited animal par excellence, although the anonymous prophet of the Babylonian exile whose words are recorded in Isaiah 66:17 brackets eaters of pig and rat as participants in some unspeakable pagan rite. Pork was a common food among the Philistines and was also sometimes eaten by Canaanites, as archaeological inspection of the bones of animals consumed has determined. Interestingly, in the high country in the eastern part of Canaan, where [the] Israelite population was concentrated toward the end of the second millennium B.C.E., the percentage of pig bones discovered is only a fraction of what it is in the Canaanite lowlands. This suggests that the taboo was already generally embraced by the Israelites at an early period (well before the composition of the Torah) and also that some Israelites chose to disregard it.”
The scapegoat and the mystery of Azazel occur in Leviticus 16:8, “one for the Lord and one for Azazel. As countless seals and other ancient inscriptions unearthed by archaeologists attest, the use of a proper name or title, prefixed by the letter lamed (“for”) as a lamed possession, was a standard form of indicating that the object in question belonged to So-and-so (as in lamelekh, “the king’s”). These words, then (in Hebrew, each is a single word, LeYHWH and la’azaz’el) are the actual texts written on the two lots. Much ink since Late Antiquity has been spilled over the identity of Azazel, but the most plausible understanding—it is a very old one—is that it is the name of a goatish demon or deity associated with the remote wilderness. The name appears to reflect ‘ez, goat.” Alter elaborates on Leviticus 16:10, “to send it off to Azazel in the wilderness. Approximate analogues to the so-called scapegoat ritual, using different animals, appear in several different Mesopotamian texts. The origins of the practice are surely in an archaic idea—that the polluting substance generated by the transgressions of the people is physically carried away by the goat. Azazel is not represented as a competing deity (or demon) rivaling YHWH, but the ritual depends upon a polarity between YHWH/the pale of human civilization and Azazel/the remote wilderness, the realm of disorder and raw formlessness…. It is as though the goat piled with impurities were being sent back to the primordial realm of “welter and waste” before the delineated world came into being, but that realm here is given an animal-or-demon tag.”
The unique nature of monotheism against the polytheistic paganism surrounding the Israelites is, again, stressed in Leviticus 18:3, “[Not like] the deeds of the land of Egypt in which you dwelled shall you do, and not like the deeds of the land of Canaan…. Egypt and Canaan are no doubt invoked because these are two pagan countries in which Israel has collectively resided…. The identification of both countries as theaters of sexual license may be attributed to a widespread reflex of projecting uncontrolled sexuality onto the cultural other…. This reflex would have been reinforced by the tendency to see the polytheistic world as a realm lacking restraint, in contradistinction to the Israelite conception of one God and one clear-cut set of binding restrictions.”
Alter notes when previously accepted translations might be in error. He suggests in Leviticus 25:10, “call a release in the land to all its inhabitants. One must regretfully forgo the grandeur of the King James Version, inscribed on the Liberty Bell: “proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” In fact, the passage is concerned with the legal arrangements regarding property in the jubilee year, and modern scholarship has persuasively demonstrated that deror does not mean “liberty” but is cognate with a technical Akkadian term, anduraru, which means a release from, or moratorium on, debts and indenture.” Alter digs deeper and goes on to explain the etymology and history of “jubilee. Though debate persists about the etymology of this word (which has entered English from the Hebrew) the noun yovel in Exodus 19:13 clearly indicates a ram’s horn (the alternate term is shofar), and thus it is plausible that the fiftieth year was called jubilee, yovel, because this was when loud blasts of the ram’s horn were sounded throughout the land.”
Finally, Alter returns to the Israelite covenant with God in Leviticus 26:25, “the avenging sword of the covenant’s vengeance. A covenant is both a promise and a threat. From those who violate the covenantal obligations, vengeance is exacted.” Referencing Leviticus 26:44, he continues, “My covenant. The envelope structure formed by the reiteration of this key term at the beginning and the end of the entire section is meant as a reassurance. God will respond in terrible wrath to Israel’s dereliction, but the commitment to the covenant He expressed at the beginning will in the end lead Him to rescue Israel from exile as He once rescued them from Egyptian slavery.”
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