Leviticus 11-20 9789042949720, 9789042949737, 9042949724

Citation preview

HISTORICAL COMMENTARY ON THE OLD TESTAMENT Leviticus 11-20

by James W. Watts

HISTORICAL COMMENTARY ON THE OLD TESTAMENT *** LEVITICUS 11-20

HISTORICAL COMMENTARY ON THE OLD TESTAMENT

Editorial team: Carly Crouch (Nijmegen, The Netherlands) Bénédicte Lemmelijn (Leuven, Belgium) Gert T.M. Prinsloo (Pretoria, South Africa) Klaas Spronk (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) Wilfred G.E. Watson (Newcastle, UK)

LEVITICUS 11-20

by James W. Watts

PEETERS LEUVEN – PARIS – WALPOLE, MA 2023

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Cover design by Dick Prins. ISBN 978-90-429-4972-0 eISBN 978-90-429-4973-7 D/2023/0601/2 © 2023 — Peeters, Bondgenotenlaan 153, B-3000 Leuven (Belgium) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

XIII

ABBREVIATIONS & BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

XV

AUTHOR’S PREFACE: DRAWING LINES TO ADDRESS THE MORAL PROBLEM OF REPRODUCING IMMORAL BIBLICAL TEXTS . . . . . .

XXI

Additional Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Problem of Latent Normative Texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Moral Impact of Bible Publishing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How to Strike Through Immoral Biblical Norms . . . . . . . . . . . . Criteria for Striking Through Verses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Highlighting the Most Important Moral Norms . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

XXI XXII XXIV XXVII XXVIII XXXIV

COMMENTARY

INTRODUCTION TO LEVITICUS 11-20 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contents and Structure of Leviticus 11-20 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Rhetoric of Pollution in Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean Cultures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jewish and Christian Rhetoric about Purity and Pollution . . . . . . . . . Purity and Pollution in Recent Biblical Scholarship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pollution and Social Hierarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Polluting the Holy Sanctuary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Polluting the Holy People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pollution as Symbolizing Death . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Morality and Pollution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pollution and Disgust . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cosmology and Pollution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pollution Rules as Priestly Rhetoric. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Torah as Divine Rhetoric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

3 4 8 12 18 19 21 23 24 27 30 34 37 40

POLLUTING MEAT AND NAUSEATING CARCASSES (11:1-57) . . . . .

51

Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Essentials: Contents, Contexts, Rhetoric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

51 53

VI

Contents

Exposition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Additional Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Structure of Leviticus 11 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . History of Interpretation and Application of Biblical Diet Rules Biblical Diet Rules in Contemporary Academic Interpretation . . Lay People as Torah Interpreters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translating Animal Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Exegesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heading (11:1-2a) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Quadrupeds (11:2b-8) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nauseating Animals (11:9-23) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pollution by Touch and Purification by Time (11:24-40) . . . . . . Concluding Exhortations and Formulas (11:41-47) . . . . . . . . . . .

55 55 57 61 62 66 69 77 79 79 80 84 94 101

PURIFICATION AFTER GIVING BIRTH (12:1-8) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

108

Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Essentials: Contents, Contexts, Rhetoric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Exposition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Additional Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Structure of Leviticus 12 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . History and Interpretation of Childbirth Pollution in Cultural Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Symbolic Interpretations of Childbirth in Contemporary Scholarship Blood Purification in Priestly Rhetoric. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Exegesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

108 108 110 110 111 112 115 118 122

DIAGNOSIS AND PURIFICATION OF INFESTED AFFLICTIONS (13:114:57) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

129

Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Essentials: Contents, Contexts, Rhetoric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Exposition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Additional Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Structure of Leviticus 13-14 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . History and Interpretation of Skin Infestations and Quarantine (Leviticus 13) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . History and Interpretation of Purification Rituals for Infestation (Leviticus 14) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Rhetoric of Sinful Disease and the Power of Priestly Diagnosis Exegesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Infestations of Skin (13:2-8) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

129 136 138 138 139 143 147 154 158 159

Contents

VII

Infestations of Raw Flesh (13:9-17) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Infestations of Boils (13:18-23) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Infestations of Burns (13:24-28). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Infestations of Hair (13:29-37) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Blotchy Skin (13:38-39) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Baldness (13:40-44) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Isolating Infested People (13:45-46) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Infestations of Cloth and Leather (13:47-58) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Headings to the Purification Rituals for Cured Skin Infestations (14:1-2a) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Purification Ritual Outside the Camp (14:2b-7) . . . . . . . . . . Seven Days of Personal Purification (14:8-9) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Purification Ritual at the Tabernacle (14:10-20) . . . . . . . . . The Poor Person’s Purification Ritual at the Tabernacle (14:21-32) Infestations of Houses (14:33-53) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Concluding Torah Formula (14:54-57) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

166 168 170 171 174 174 176 178

PURIFICATION FROM GENITAL EMISSIONS (15:1-33) . . . . . . . . . . .

208

Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Essentials: Contents, Contexts, Rhetoric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Exposition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Additional Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Structure of Leviticus 15 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The History of Sexual and Menstrual Pollution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Symbolism of Menstrual and Sexual Pollution . . . . . . . . . . . The Rhetoric of Sexual and Menstrual Pollution . . . . . . . . . . . . . Exegesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heading and Summary (15:1-2) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Men’s Uncommon Genital Emissions (15:3-15) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Men’s Common Ejaculations of Semen (15:16-18). . . . . . . . . . . Women’s Common Menstrual Emissions (15:19-24) . . . . . . . . . Women’s Uncommon Genital Emissions (15:25-30) . . . . . . . . . Concluding Exhortations and Refrains (15:31-33) . . . . . . . . . . .

208 210 212 212 213 217 224 226 232 232 233 239 241 246 249

THE DAY OF MITIGATIONS (16:1-34) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

254

Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Essentials: Contents, Contexts, Rhetoric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Exposition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Additional Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Structure of Leviticus 16 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Editorial History and Position of Leviticus 16 . . . . . . . . . . .

254 256 259 259 260 263

182 183 187 189 194 196 206

VIII

Contents

History and Interpretation of the Day of Mitigations. . . . . . . . . . History and Interpretation of the Goat for Azazel . . . . . . . . . . . . Interpreting Leviticus 16 with Ritual Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Rhetoric of Leviticus 16 in Historical and Literary Context Excursus: Priestly Lineages in History and Rhetoric . . . . . . . . . Exegesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Divine Speech Formula (16:1-2) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Preparations for the Rituals (16:3-10) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Special Rituals for the Day of Mitigations (16:11-22) . . . . . . . . Reintegration through Bathing and Completing the Offerings (16:23-28) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Exhortations and Summaries (16:29-34) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

265 273 278 284 286 294 294 299 311

PROHIBITIONS ON MISUSING BLOOD (17:1-16) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

345

Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Essentials: Contents, Contexts, Rhetoric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Exposition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Additional Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Structure of Leviticus 17 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . History of Interpretations of Slaughter Outside the Tabernacle . History of the Prohibition on Eating Blood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . History of Interpretations of Blood in Mitigation/Atonement . . . Human and Animal Embodiment in Leviticus 17:11 . . . . . . . . . Exegesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Divine Speech Formulas (17:1-2). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Prohibition of Amity Slaughter Offerings Outside the Tabernacle (17:3-7) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Prohibition of Rising and Slaughter Offerings Elsewhere (17:8-9) Prohibition on Eating Blood and its Rationale (17:10-12) . . . . . Prohibition on Eating the Blood of Game and its Rationale (17:13-14) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Purification from Eating Animal Carcasses (17:15-16) . . . . . . . .

345 346 349 349 350 354 358 360 366 368 368

PROHIBITIONS OF ILLICIT SEX (18:1-30) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

389

Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Essentials: Contents, Contexts, Rhetoric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Exposition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Additional Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Structure of Leviticus 18 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . History of Interpretations of the Incest Prohibitions . . . . . . . . . . Sex and Power in Leviticus 18 and 20 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

389 390 393 393 395 400 406

331 336

368 374 377 384 386

Contents

IX

Exegesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Exhortations to Comply with YHWH’s Mandates (18:1-5) . . . . Prohibitions of Incest (18:6-18) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Prohibitions of Pollution from Illicit Behaviour (18:19-23) . . . . How the Canaanites Polluted the Land (18:24-30) . . . . . . . . . . .

409 409 414 426 436

SAMPLES OF VARIOUS KINDS OF RULES (19:1-37) . . . . . . . . . . . . .

444

Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Essentials: Contents, Contexts, Rhetoric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Exposition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Additional Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Structure of Leviticus 19 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . History of Interpretations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Love Commandments in History and Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . Exegesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

444 446 448 448 449 455 457 462

PENALTIES FOR ILLICIT RITUALS AND SEX (20:1-27) . . . . . . . . . . .

507

Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Essentials: Contents, Contexts, Rhetoric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Exposition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Additional Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Structure of Leviticus 20 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Interpretations of Biblical Death Penalties in their Ancient Contexts The Biblical Death Penalty and Procedural Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . Using the Biblical Death Penalty to Suppress Heresy . . . . . . . . . Using the Bible to Justify Legal Executions and Vigilante Violence Today . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Exegesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Polemic against Molek Worship and Necromancy (20:1-8) . . . . Penalties for Illicit Sexual Behaviour (20:9-21) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Exhortation to Holiness by Separating from Other Nations (20:22-26) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Supplemental Penalty for Spirit Possession (20:27) . . . . . . . . . .

507 508 511 511 511 515 517 521

AUTHOR INDEX OF BIBLIOGRAPHIES AND FOOTNOTES . . . . . . . .

525 528 528 536 551 558 561

To my wife, Maurine who has listened patiently to more about Leviticus than she ever bargained for, with my love and gratitude

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A long project like this commentary can only be written with sustained support. I am grateful for the continuing support and encouragement of my colleagues in the Department of Religion, and of the College of Arts and Science of Syracuse University that granted me research leaves in 2015-16 and in 2021. The research for this volume was also advanced significantly by a one-year fellowship at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg of the Center for Religious Studies (CERES) at Ruhr University Bochum in 2015-16. I am very grateful to Profs. Volkhard Krech and Christian Frevel for hosting me there so generously. The HCOT Board and its managing editor, Klaas Spronk, have also been generous in their support and patience with me. Some of the material in the following pages has been published previously in journal articles and book chapters. The Author’s Preface reproduces a slightly expanded version of “Drawing Lines: a Suggestion for Addressing the Moral Problem of Reproducing Immoral Biblical Texts in Commentaries and Bibles,” in Writing a Commentary on Leviticus: Hermeneutics – Methodology – Themes (ed. Christian A. Eberhart and Thomas Hieke; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019), 235-52, to which I have added a new section, “Highlighting the Most Influential Moral Norms.” Portions of the Exposition to Leviticus 11 revise and reproduce “From the Torah of Polluted and Inedible meats to Diet as a Marker of Jewish Identity,” in Torah: Functions, Meanings, and Diverse Manifestations in Early Judaism and Christianity (ed. William M. Schniedewind, Jason M. Zurawski, and Gabriele Boccaccini; Atlanta: SBL, 2021), 131-41. A few paragraphs in the Exposition to Leviticus 12 reproduce and supplement the discussion in “Text Are Not Rituals and Rituals Are Not Texts, With an Example from Leviticus 12” in Text and Ritual in the Pentateuch (ed. Christophe Nihan and Julia Rhyder; Philadelphia: Eisenbrauns, 2021), 172-87. Portions of the Exegesis to Leviticus 18 and 20 revise and reproduce paragraphs from “Biblical Rhetoric of Separatism and Universalism and its Intolerant Consequences,” Religions 11/4 (2020), 176. I am grateful to the publishers of these pieces for permission to reproduce them in whole or in part here. This commentary was composed using NotaBene 13 Workstation software.

ABBREVIATIONS & BIBLIOGRAPHY

The following list includes abbreviations not found in Leviticus 1-10 or in the HCOT list in the Appendix. It also includes full information on commentaries that in the main text are cited by author’s name only and other literature that is cited by author’s name and date of publication. Further bibliography that pertains specifically to certain topics or sections of Leviticus may be found listed at the beginning of the relevant Exposition sections of the Commentary, and in occasional footnotes. Achenbach-AlbertzWöhrle

AEMT Altmann-AngeliniSpiciarich Baden-Stackert BAG BHQ BibInt Brooten, Bernadette J. Burschel-Marx Burton, Gideon Carmichael, Calum –––. Cassuto, Umberto Childs, Brevard S. Cholewiński, Alfred

Achenbach, Reinhold, Rainer Albertz, and Jakob Wöhrle. The Foreigner and the Law: Perspectives from the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East. Ed. BZAR 16. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011. Borghouts, J. F. Ancient Egyptian Magical Texts. Nisaba 9. Leiden: Brill, 1978. Altmann, Peter, Anna Angelini, and Abra Spiciarich, eds. Food Taboos and Biblical Prohibitions. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020. Baden, Joel and Jeffrey Stackert. The Oxford Handbook of the Pentateuch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Bauer, W., W. F. Arndt, and F. W. Gingrich. Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957. Biblia Hebraica Quinta 3. ‫ ויקרא‬Leviticus. Ed. Innocent Himbaza. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2020. Biblical Interpretation (Brill) Beyond Slavery: Overcoming its Religious and Sexual Legacies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Burschel, Peter and Christoph Marx, eds. Reinheit. Vienna: Böhlau, 2011. Silva Rhetoricae, online at http://rhetoric.byu.edu/ (accessed May 29, 2020). Law, Legend, and Incest in the Bible: Leviticus 18-20. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. Illuminating Leviticus: A Study of its Laws and Institutions in Light of Biblical Narratives. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2006. A Commentary on the Book of Exodus. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1967 (Hebrew 1951). The Book of Exodus. OTL. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1974. Heiligkeitsgesetz und Deuteronomium. AnBib 66. Rome: Biblical Institute, 1976.

XVI Collins, John Cook, Stephen L. Cranz, Isabel De Troyer et al.

Eberhart, Christian Eberhart-Hieke Eilberg-Schwartz, Howard

Abbreviations & Bibliography The Invention of Judaism: Torah and Jewish Identity from Deuteronomy to Paul. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017. Ezekiel 38-48. Anchor Bible 22B. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Atonement and Purification: Priestly and Assyro-Babylonian Perspectives on Sin and its Consequences. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017. De Troyer, Kristin, Judith A. Herbert, Judith Ann Johnson, and Anne-Marie Korte, eds. Wholy Woman, Holy Blood: A Feminist Critique of Purity and Impurity. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2003. Kultmetaphorik und Christologie: Opfer- und Sühneterminologie im Neuen Testament. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013. Eberhart, Christian A. and Thomas Hieke, eds. Writing a Commentary on Leviticus: Hermeneutics – Methodology – Themes. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019.

The Savage in Judaism: An Anthropology of Israelite Religion and Ancient Judaism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. –––, ed. People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective. Albany: SUNY Press, 1992. Ellens, Deborah L. Women in the Sex Texts of Leviticus and Deuteronomy: A Comparative Conceptual Analysis. LHB/OTS 458. London: T. & T. Clark, 2008. Feinstein, Eve Levavi Sexual Pollution in the Hebrew Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Feldman, Liane M. The Story of Sacrifice: Ritual and Narrative in the Priestly Source. FAT 141. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020. Feucht, Christian Untersuchungen zum Heiligkeitsgesetz. Berlin: Evangelische, 1964. Frevel, Christian, ed. Einleitung in das Alte Testament. 9th ed. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2016. Frevel-Nihan Frevel, Christian and Christophe Nihan, eds. Purity and the Forming of Religious Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean World and in Ancient Judaism. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Frevel-Pola-Schart Frevel, Christian, Thomas Pola and Aaron Schart, eds. Torah and the Book of Numbers. FAT 2/62. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013. Frymer-Kensky, Tikva Studies in Bible and Feminist Criticism. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2006. Gafney, Wilda C. Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne. Louisville: Westminster, 2017. Gane, Roy Leviticus, Numbers. The NIV Application Commentary. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2004. Gane-Taggar-Cohen Gane, Roy E. and Ada Taggar-Cohen, eds. Current Issues in Priestly and Related Literature: The Legacy of Jacob Milgrom and Beyond. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2015.

Abbreviations & Bibliography Greenberg, Moshe Greenspoon-SimkinsShapiro

XVII

“Some Postulates of Biblical Criminal Law” (1960). In Studies in the Bible and Jewish Thought. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995. 25-41.

Greenspoon, Leonard J., Ronald A. Simpkins, and Gerald Shapiro, eds. Food and Judaism. SJC 15. Omaha: Creighton University Press, 2005. Grünwaldt, Klaus Das Heiligkeitsgesetz Leviticus 17-26: Ursprüngliche Gestalt, Tradition und Theologie. BZAW 271. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999. Harrington, Hannah K. “The Role of Second Temple Texts in a Commentary on Leviticus.” In Eberhart-Hieke (2019), 49-66. Hartenstein-Schmid Hartenstein, Friedhelm and Konrad Schmid, eds. Abschied von der Priesterschrift? Zum Stand der Pentateuchdebatte. Leipzig: Evangelische, 2015. HeBAI Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel (Mohr Siebeck) Hieke, Thomas Levitikus 1-15, 16-27. 2 vols. Herder’s Theologischer Kommentar zum Alten Testament. Freiburg: Herder, 2013. Hieke-Nicklas Hieke, Thomas and Tobias Nicklas. The Day of Atonement: Its Interpretation in Early Jewish and Christian Traditions. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Jenkins, Philip The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South. New York: Oxford University Press. 2006. Johnston, Sarah Iles Religions of the Ancient World: A Guide. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Kamionkowski, S. Tamar Leviticus. Wisdom Commentary 3. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2018. Kazen, Thomas Issues of Impurity in Early Judaism. CB 45. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2010. –––. Emotions in Biblical Law: A Cognitive Science Approach. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2011. Kilchör, Benjamin Kilchör, Benjamin. Mosetora und Jahwetora: Das Verhältnis von Deuteronomium 12-26 zu Exodus, Levitikus und Numeri. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2015. Lakoff-Johnson Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1980, 2nd ed. 2003. Landy-Trevaskis-Bibb Landy, Francis, Leigh M. Trevaskis and Bryan D. Bibb, eds. Text, Time, and Temple: Literary, Historical and Ritual Studies in Leviticus. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2015. Lemos, T. M. Violence and Personhood in Ancient Israel and Comparative Contexts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Leviticus 1-10 Watts, James W. Leviticus 1-10. Historical Commentary on the Old Testament. Leuven: Peeters, 2013. Lipka-Wells Lipka, Hilary and Bruce Wells, eds. Sexuality and Law in the Torah. LHB/OTS. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2020. MacDonald, Nathan Not Bread Alone: The Uses of Food in the Old Testament. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. –––, ed. Ritual Innovation in the Hebrew Bible and Early Judaism. BZAW 468. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016.

XVIII Marx, Alfred –––. Meshel, Naphtali S.

Nihan-Rhyder North, Gary OEBL Otto, Eckart –––. –––. –––. Poorthuis-Schwartz Quintilian Rhet. Her. Rhyder, Julia Rushdoony, Rousas John

Ruwe, Andreas Schwartz, Baruch J. –––. –––.

Schwartz et al.

Abbreviations & Bibliography Lévitique 17-27. Commentaire de l’Ancien Testament 3b. Geneva: Labor et fides, 2011. “Méthode et Mode dans la Recherche sur le Penteteuque.” RB 122 (2015), 321-39. The “Grammar”of Sacrifice: a Generativist Study of the Israelite Sacrificial System in the Priestly Writings with a “Grammar” of Σ. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Nihan, Christophe and Julia Rhyder, eds. Text and Ritual in the Pentateuch. Philadelphia: Eisenbrauns, 2021. Leviticus: An Economic Commentary. Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Bible and Law. Ed. Brent A. Strawn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Theologische Ethik des Alten Testament. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1994. Das Deuteronomium. BZAW 284. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1999a. “Innerbiblische Exegese im Heiligkeitsgesetz Levitikus 17-26.” In Fabry-Jüngling (1999b), 125-96. “Priesterschrift und Deuteronomium im Buch Levitikus: Zur Integration des Deuteronomiums in den Pentateuch.” In Hartenstein-Schmid (2015), 161-85. Poorthuis, M. J. H. M. and J. Schwartz, eds. Purity and Holiness: The Heritage of Leviticus. Leiden: Brill, 2000. Institutio oratoria. Tr. H. E. Butler. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920-22. [Cicero] Ad G. Herennium: De ratione dicendi (Rhetorica ad Herennium). Tr. Harry Caplan. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954. Centralizing the Cult: The Holiness Legislation in Leviticus 17-26. FAT 134. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019. The Institutes of Biblical Law, Volume 1. Valecito, CA: Chalcedon Foundation, 1973. Online at https://christianreconstructionist.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/institutes-ofbiblical-law-vol-1-rushdoony.pdf (accessed November 5, 2021). »Heiligkeitsgesetz«  und  »Priesterschrift«: Literaturgeschichtliche und rechtssystematische Untersuchungen zu Leviticus 17,1–26,2. FAT 26. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999. ‫ עיונים בחוקה הכוהנית שׁבתורה‬:‫[ תורת הקדושׁה‬The Holiness Legislation: Studies in the Priestly Code]. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1999. Introduction and Notes to Leviticus in The Jewish Study Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 203-80. “Introduction.” In The Strata of the Priestly Writings: Contemporary Debate and Future Directions. Ed. S. Shectman and J. S. Baden. ATANT, 95. Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 2009. Schwartz, Baruch J., David P. Wright, Jeffrey Stackert, and Naphtali S. Meshel, eds. Perspectives on Purity and

Abbreviations & Bibliography

XIX

Purification in the Hebrew Bible. LHB/OTS 474. London: T&T Clark, 2008. Shectman-Baden Shectman, Sarah and Joel S. Baden. The Strata of the Priestly Writings: Contemporary Debate and Future Directions. ATANT 95. Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 2009. Sklar, Jay Leviticus. TOTC. Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2014. SPCEM The Samaritan Pentateuch: A Critical Editio Maior, Volume 3: Leviticus. Ed. Stefan Schorch. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018. Speiser, E. A. “Leviticus and the Critics.” In Y. Kaufmann Jubilee Volume. Ed. M. Haran. Jerusalem: Magness, 1960. 29-45. Stackert, Jeffrey Rewriting the Torah: Literary Revision in Deuteronomy and the Holiness Legislation. FAT 52. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007. Stanton, Elizabeth The Woman’s Bible, Part 1: The Pentateuch. New York: Cady, et al. European, 1898. Stone, Ken Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018. Tigay, Jeffrey H. Deuteronomy ‫דברים‬. JPS Torah Commentary. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996. Trevaskis, Leigh M. Holiness, Ethics and Ritual in Leviticus. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2011. VanderKam, James C. “Calendars (Ancient Israelite and Early Jewish).” ABD 1992, 1:814-19. VTE Donald J. Wiseman. The Vassal Treaties of Esarhaddon. London: British School of Archaeology, 1958. Watts, James W. Leviticus 1-10. Historical Commentary on the Old Testament. Leuven: Peeters, 2013. –––, ed., 2013a. Iconic Books and Texts. Sheffield: Equinox, 2013. –––, 2013b. “The Political and Legal Uses of Scripture.” In NCHB, vol. 1. Ed. Joachim Schaper and James Carleton Paget. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 345-64. –––, 2013c. “Scripturalization and the Aaronide Dynasties.” Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 13/6 (2013), online at DOI:10.5508/ jhs.2013.v13. –––, 2015. “Writing Commentary as Ritual and as Discovery.” In The Genre of Biblical Commentary: Essays in Honor of John E. Hartley. Ed. William Yarchin and Timothy Finlay. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2015. 40-53. –––, 2016. “From Ark of the Covenant to Torah Scroll: Ritualizing Israel’s Iconic Texts.” In MacDonald (2016), 21-34. –––, 2017. Understanding the Pentateuch as A Scripture. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2017. “The Unstated Premise of the Prose Pentateuch: YHWH is –––, 2018. King.” JHS 18/2 (2018), online at DOI:10.5508/jhs.2018. v18.a2. –––, 2019a. How and Why Books Matter: Essays on the Social Function of Iconic Texts. Sheffield: Equinox, 2019. –––, 2019b. “Drawing Lines: a Suggestion for Addressing the Moral Problem of Reproducing Immoral Biblical Texts in Commentaries and Bibles.” In Eberhart-Hieke (2019), 235-52.

XX –––, 2019c. –––, 2020a. –––, 2020b. –––, 2021a. –––, 2021b. –––, 2021c.

–––, Forthcoming.

Watts-Yoo Weinfeld, Moshe Westbrook-Beckman Wiley-Eberhart WiBiLex Wright, Christopher J. H. Yoo-Watts

Abbreviations & Bibliography “Sensation and Metaphor in Ritual Performance: the Example of Sacred Texts,” Entangled Religions 10 (2019), online at https://doi.org/10.13154/er.10.2019.8365. “Biblical Rhetoric of Separatism and Universalism and Its Intolerant Consequences.” Religions 11/4 (2020), 176, online at https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11040176. “Mobilizing the Social Power of Iconic and Performative Texts for Justice and Reform,” Postscripts 11/2 (2020), 12743. Understanding the Bible as A Scripture in History, Culture, and Religion. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2021. “Text Are Not Rituals and Rituals Are Not Texts, With an Example from Leviticus 12.” In Nihan-Rhyder (2021), 17287. “From the Torah of Polluted and Inedible meats to Diet as a Marker of Jewish Identity.” In Torah: Functions, Meanings, and Diverse Manifestations in Early Judaism and Christianity. Ed. William M. Schniedewind, Jason M. Zurawski, and Gabriele Boccaccini. Atlanta: SBL, 2021. 131-41. “Incense in the Rhetoric and Political Economy of the Aaronide Dynasties.” In Contact and Exchange in Incense Practices of the Southern Levant. Ed. Katharina Pyschny. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, forthcoming. Watts, James W. and Yohan Yoo, eds. Books as Bodies and as Sacred Beings. Sheffield: Equinox, 2021. Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School. Oxford: Clarendon, 1972. Westbrook, Raymond, and Gary M. Beckman. A History of Ancient Near Eastern Law. Handbuch der Orientalistik. Leiden: Brill, 2003. Wiley, Henrietta L. and Christian A. Eberhart. Sacrifice, Cult and Atonement in Early Judaism and Christianity: Constituents and Critique. Atlanta: SBL, 2017. Das wissenschaftliche Bibellexikon im Internet, https:// www.bibelwissenschaft.de. Old Testament Ethics for the People of God. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004. Yoo, Yohan and James W. Watts. Cosmologies of Pure Realms and the Rhetoric of Pollution. New York: Routledge, 2021.

AUTHOR’S PREFACE:

DRAWING LINES TO ADDRESS THE MORAL PROBLEM OF REPRODUCING IMMORAL BIBLICAL TEXTS

ADDITIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY AVALOS, HECTOR. Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Ethics of Biblical Scholarship. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2013. BEAL, TIMOTHY. The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. BERKOWITZ, BETH A. Execution and Invention: Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. CHERRY, CONRAD. God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1971. EISEN, ROBERT. The Peace and Violence of Judaism: From the Bible to Modern Zionism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. FIRESTONE, REUVEN. “Holy War: Rabbinic to Modern Judaism.” EBR 12 (2015). GLANCY, JENNIFER A. Slavery in Early Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. GNUSE, ROBERT H. Trajectories of Justice: What the Bible Says about Slaves, Women and Homosexuality. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2015. GOLDENBERG, DAVID M. The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. HALBERSTAM, CHAYA T. Law and Truth in Biblical and Rabbinic Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. HALPERIN, DAVID J. The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1988. HAYNES, STEPHEN R. Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. HILL, ANDREW E. “The King James Bible Apocrypha: When and Why Lost?” In The King James Version at 400: Assessing Its Genius as Bible Translation and Its Literary Influence. Ed. D. G. Burke, J. F. Kutsko, and P. H. Towner; Atlanta: SBL, 2013. 345-58. LEVINSON, BERNARD M. “The Human Voice of Divine Revelation: the Problem of Authority in Biblical Law.” In Innovations in Religious Traditions. Ed. M.A. Williams et al. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1992. 35-71. MEGIVERN, JAMES J. The Death Penalty: An Historical and Theological Survey. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1999. MOORE, STEPHEN D. and YVONNE SHERWOOD. “Biblical Studies ‘after’ Theory: Onwards Towards the Past,” BibInt 18 (2010), 1-27, 87-113, 191-225 = Moore and Sherwood, The Invention of the Biblical Scholar, Minneapolis: Fortress, 2011. NEWTON, RICHARD. “Racial Profiling? Theorizing Essentialism, Whiteness, and Scripture in the Study of Religion.” Religion Compass (2020), 1-15. PARMENTER, DORINA MILLER. “Material Scripture.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and the Arts. Ed. T. Beal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. RAINEY, BRIAN. Religion, Ethnicity and Xenophobia in the Bible. New York: Routledge, 2019. SANTORO, ANTHONY. “Religion and Capital Punishment in the United States.” Religion Compass 8/5 (2014), 159-74. SAPOSNIK, ARIEH. “The Desert Comes to Zion: A Narrative Ends its Wandering.” In Exodus in the Jewish Experience: Echoes and Reverberations. Ed. P. Barmash and W. D. Nelson. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2015. 213-46. SCHABAS, W. The Abolition of the Death Penalty in International Law. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University

XXII

Preface: Drawing Lines

Press, 2002. SIKER, JEFFREY S. Liquid Scripture: The Bible in the Digital World. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017. STARK, RODNEY. For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. WARRIOR, ROBERT. “Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians: Deliverance, Conquest, and Liberation Theology.” Christianity and Crisis 29 (1989), 261-65. WOGAMAN, J. PHILIP. Christian Ethics: A Historical Introduction. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1993. WÜRTHWEIN, ERNST and ALEXANDER ACHILLES FISCHER. The Text of the Old Testament: An Introduction to the Biblia Hebraica. Tr. E.F. Rhodes. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014.

The book of Leviticus contains many norms and instructions that have fallen into abeyance in later Jewish and Christian congregations and cultures. Normative forms of Judaism and Christianity do not follow the plain meaning of these verses. Such verses therefore pose an interesting problem for interpreting their continuing theological and cultural significance (see Leviticus 1-10, 1-4). A subset of this material, however, also poses a moral problem for commentators and bible publishers. Some verses of Leviticus express norms that explicitly conflict with the legal and ethical teachings of contemporary Jewish and Christian denominations, and also with the laws of modern nations. Among them are texts mandating that readers treat some other people in ways now widely regarded as immoral, cruel, inhumane, and exploitive – texts that call for and/or have historically justified genocide, indiscriminate capital punishment, slavery, and the subjugation of women by men. National and international law today declares most of these behaviours illegal and subject to criminal prosecution. The moral problem for commentators and publishers is that, by publishing bibles and commentaries that reproduce these texts, we continue to promulgate claims of divine approval for immoral and illegal behaviour. I call this a “moral” problem rather than an “ethical” quandary because the issue does not require difficult ethical reasoning. The moral imperative to not perpetrate or condone genocide, indiscriminate capital punishment, slavery, and patriarchy are quite clear to most or, in the case of patriarchy, at least many Jews and Christians. For these people, therefore, this is not a problem of ethical reasoning but of moral will, because reproducing these particular texts prioritizes the religious ideal of preserving scripture unaltered over these moral imperatives. THE PROBLEM OF LATENT NORMATIVE TEXTS The negative social impact of immoral biblical norms has often been restrained by long-standing traditions of halakhah, preaching, canon law, and commentary. For example, whereas Pentateuchal texts mandate the death penalty for

Preface: Drawing Lines

XXIII

a wide variety of offences ranging from murder (Gen. 9:6) and blasphemy (Lev. 24:14, 16-17) to hitting or cursing one’s parents (Exod. 21:15, 17; Lev. 20:9), rabbinic halakhah intensified the biblical requirement of two witnesses for conviction (Num. 35:30; Deut. 20:15) to the point of making it virtually impossible to carry out capital punishment (b. Sanh. 37B, 161; b. Ketub. 30A, 30B; B. Berkowitz 2006; Halberstam 2010, 85-91). Modern national legislation has, over time, steadily reduced the number of offences that may be punished by the death penalty to only first-degree murder and, sometimes, treason. In many countries, capital punishment has been abolished entirely (Schabas 2002; Megivern 1999). Commentators often use historical context to argue that biblical texts raised moral standards at the time they were written, even if they seem immoral today. So nineteenth-century abolitionists argued that slavery contradicts the moral teachings of the Bible, despite verses that seem to validate the practice. Interpreters today continue to argue that the Bible’s moral trajectory supports liberty and justice (e.g. Gnuse 2015; Watts 2007, 142-72). However, the iconic status of the biblical text has often overridden these interpretive traditions. The example of slavery is instructive for the tension between violent biblical norms and restraining commentary traditions. Despite the prominence of Christian leaders in the abolitionist movement, Christian enslavers could cite solid biblical precedents for defending their right to enslave people (Wogaman 1993, 29-30, 180-86; Glancy 2002; Haynes 2002; Goldenberg 2009; see Exposition to Leviticus 25). The issue was settled in nineteenth-century America not by scriptural interpretation or by moral reasoning, but by a bloody and brutal civil war.1 The racist legacy of the Atlantic trade in enslaved people continues today to haunt cultures on at least four continents. The Bible’s latent potential for preserving abhorrent norms is exacerbated by Jewish and Christian religious movements that have, at one time or another, embraced the rhetoric of “back to the Bible.” Though the sixteenthcentury Protestant Reformation is famous for this rhetoric, it began much earlier with the Karaites, who already in the eighth-to-ninth centuries rejected rabbinic traditions codified by the Talmuds and focused sustained attention on Torah and Tanak. In twelfth-century France and Italy, the Waldensians challenged Catholic authorities with a popular appeal to the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels, as did the fourteenth-century Lollards in England. More 1 Historians debate the degree to which Christian ethics ultimately influenced the outcome of these debates. While many credit the tradition for influencing the culture’s morals for the better (e.g. Stark 2004), others think the bad effects outweigh the good (e.g. Avalos 2013). Of course, sweeping evaluations of the Bible’s influence, much less of entire religious traditions, are too general to offer much historical insight. The influence of particular biblical verses is easier to trace and evaluate through the history of their citation and application.

XXIV

Preface: Drawing Lines

recently, in colonial and post-colonial Africa and Asia, new ethnic churches have turned the Bible against the colonizing Europeans by revitalizing biblical practices, often from Pentateuchal law, to depict themselves as more authentically biblical than the colonizers. In Europe and Palestine, the Zionists found the Tanak more useful than the Talmud for establishing a modern Jewish state in the territory of ancient Israel (see discussion and literature in Introduction §2.3.9.4-5 in Leviticus 1-10, and Saposnik 2015). The religious and moral power of such movements to bring about reform and even revolution is undeniable. But the biblical text that they revive also contains material that can justify abhorrent social practices. In turning people’s attention to the original scriptures of Christian and Jewish traditions, bible-based reforms also risk empowering immoral texts. Recent examples include legislation introduced in the Ugandan parliament in 2009 mandating the death penalty for same-sex intercourse (see Exegesis to 20:13 below) and a movement among some ultra-Orthodox rabbis in Israel to revive the biblical mandates for holy war to defend Jewish occupation of Palestinian land (Firestone 2012, 2015; Eisen 2011). In the United States, political conflicts over capital punishment involve religious arguments invoking biblical texts on both sides of the issue (Santoro 2014; see Exposition to Leviticus 20 below).

THE MORAL IMPACT OF BIBLE PUBLISHING Historians record the prominent role of biblical interpretation in these ethical debates, but have paid little attention to the influence of bible publishing. For almost 600 years, technological advances in printing along with rising literacy rates have steadily expanded access to all parts of the biblical text, and are doing so again through the current digital revolution (Siker 2017). Previously, when most people heard biblical texts read aloud rather than reading them for themselves, lectionaries mediated biblical texts through interpretive lenses. Glossed bibles, rabbinic bibles and, now, “study” bibles still encase the biblical texts with interpretation on every page, but they also privilege the biblical text by their typography and layout. The visual format distinguishes scripture from commentary, and invites the reader’s eye to dwell on the ancient text more than on its modern interpretation. Many printed and digital bibles contain no explanatory commentary at all. Recent studies of the iconic dimension of sacred texts have demonstrated the powerful influence that ritualizing the material form and visual appearance of books has over readers, congregations, religious movements, and even nations (see the essays in Watts 2013a). The stereotypical bindings and distinctive page formats of many bibles legitimize the religious identity and status of their readers and handlers (Watts 2006; Watts 2019a, 7-30). Congregational rituals,

Preface: Drawing Lines

XXV

visual art, and mystical traditions combine to identify the book of scripture with God or Christ. For Jews and many Christians, the Torah scroll or the codex Bible is the most sacred or, even, the only sacred object in their religious experience (see the essays in Watts-Yoo 2021). The history of Jewish and Christian controversies over war, slavery, antiSemitism, and patriarchy shows that biblical texts retain their power to justify actions and institutions despite considerable moral teaching and commentary to the contrary. History therefore demonstrates that it is not enough for commentaries simply to argue that particular verses of scripture have been superseded by changing cultural contexts or that, in their original contexts, these verses advocated improvements over existing norms. The iconic status of their continuing appearance in the sacred text preserves their latent power to be invoked malevolently again and again. So I question the morality of my profession which insists on reproducing these verses as written. If I found an ancient manuscript that omitted them or if I advanced a compositional theory that identified them as secondary additions, the established practices of biblical studies would allow me to alter them or delete them from my commentary’s translation. If sufficient numbers of other biblical scholars agreed with my judgment, the change might be reflected in new Bible translations for the mass market (e.g. most bibles today reflect the text-critical indeterminacy of the end of Mark’s Gospel). But the discipline of modern biblical studies provides no similar precedents for dealing with immoral verses that have been used to justify pervasive and malevolent violence. The practice of encouraging scholars to emend the biblical text for historical but not for moral reasons is 200 years old, as Stephen D. Moore and Yvonne Sherwood (2010) have shown. Enlightenment thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries included serious moral criticism of biblical teachings. Leading philosophers thought about how to modify or adapt the text to meet the standards of rational thought.2 Subsequent biblical scholarship, however, sidelined the ethical problems posed by biblical texts to instead focus on historical research into the origins and development of biblical literature and ideas (Moore-Sherwood 2010, 91-107). This poses a moral problem for the discipline because it implicates the field of biblical studies in the evil perpetuated by people citing these texts. It is not just the Bible itself that is implicated in justifying genocide by providing the model of conquering Canaan to justify settler colonialism, as well as divine 2 One product of such thinking took the form of two editions of The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth created by Thomas Jefferson in 1804 and 1820, but published only in 1904. See The Jefferson Bible, Smithsonian Edition: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth by Thomas Jefferson, Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2011; Peter Manseau, The Jefferson Bible: A Biography, Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2020.

XXVI

Preface: Drawing Lines

support for slavery, religious inquisitions of heretics, witch-hunts, pogroms, and misogyny of all sorts. Present-day biblical scholars are also implicated for failing to take corrective measures and instead preserving and publishing immoral norms (Newton 2020). We are, of course, already implicated by the violent heritage of our history and society, in different ways depending on our own identities and social locations. For example, a 1790 census lists my ancestor, James Watts, who farmed former Cherokee land3 in Laurens County, South Carolina, as enslaving seven people. His brothers, George and John, enslaved ten more. Neither the census nor family records provide any more information about these people or how my ancestors justified enslaving them.4 In that time and location, they were presumably Africans or descendants of Africans forcibly brought to America. Given the times and my family name suggesting descent from English Protestants, these enslavers probably believed that the Bible justified their actions. More than two centuries later, I now find myself facing the task of reproducing in my Leviticus commentary some of the texts that excused my ancestors for violently enslaving these people. For me, then, as a white, male, U.S. citizen whose family has resided in North America for more than 300 years, the problem of immoral latent norms in the Bible not only implicates my ancestors for violent actions which they most likely justified by biblical texts, it also implicates me for promoting the career of these texts through my teaching and research about them, not least by writing a commentary and new translation of Leviticus. Moore and Sherwood (2010, 107) pointed out that feminist, ideological and post-colonial critiques are restoring ethical criticism to the repertoire of biblical scholars. I add that commentary’s long history of failing to restrain immoral uses of biblical texts shows the need to extend ethical critique to how the biblical text itself gets reproduced. Biblical commentators and translators usually focus our attention on the semantic dimension of the text and leave its visual features – the type-face, page layout, and binding – to printers and publishers. That practice conforms to the strong and ancient belief of scholars that what counts, what is most important, is interpreting the semantic text. Scholars usually regard iconic ritualization of the text’s appearance and material form as, at best, a concession to the ignorance of lay people or, at worst, 3 Ceded in 1755 by the Cherokee in a treaty with the English governor of South Carolina. On treaties between colonial powers and Native American nations, see Robert N. Clinton, “Treaties with Native Nations: Iconic Historical Relics or Modern Necessity?” in Suzan Shown Harjo (ed.), Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2014), 14-33. 4 The 1790 South Carolina census recorded the names of only the male heads of household. It counted other male and female adults in the household, as well as the number of children and enslaved people. My family’s records have preserved the names of these men’s wives and children, but make no mention of enslaved people at all.

Preface: Drawing Lines

XXVII

an encouragement to idolatry (Parmenter 2015; Watts 2019a, 163-66). By taking this position, we have ceded to publishers and book sellers the power to legitimize religious identities and ideas through the iconic dimension of scriptures. The problem of immoral norms in biblical texts needs to be corrected iconicly by altering their appearance to make clear in the text itself that Jewish and Christian traditions have repudiated them, as well as by notes and comments explaining the reasons for doing so and the history that makes it necessary. HOW TO STRIKE THROUGH IMMORAL BIBLICAL NORMS Modern software for editing documents provides a ready means for marking legible text as no longer applicable: the strikethrough (or cross-out). The practice of striking through mistakes to add corrections above the line or in the margins dates back to manuscript cultures. For example, even the rigid guidelines for copying Torah scrolls in the Talmud allow up to three corrections per page (b. Men. 29b). Though parchment can usually be corrected by scraping away the ink, ancient biblical manuscripts sometimes also contain strikethrough corrections.5 Now digital texts use strikethrough to track changes in evolving documents. It is so easy that striking through one’s own or other’s comments is a popular (and frequently ridiculed) practice on blogs and social media.6 However, strikethrough was also used philosophically by Martin Heidegger and became prominent in the writings of Jacques Derrida. He struck through words to place them sous rature “under erasure” to mark their meaning as problematically undecidable despite the fact that he must use them. Gayatria Spivak observed about Derrida’s practice: “Since the word is inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since it is necessary, it remains legible.”7 I propose that translators and commentators use strikethrough to mark normative statements in biblical verses that contemporary Jewish and Christian interpretive traditions have strongly repudiated as contradicting the moral teachings of the traditions and of scripture itself. The judgment indicated by 5 E.g. the Qumran Isaiah scroll (1QIsaa) at Isa 21:1; Latin Codex Laudianus (E) at Acts 8:37. For pictures of more elaborate strikethroughs in medieval manuscripts of all sorts, see Bryan C. Keene, “Medieval Copyediting,” The Iris: Behind the Scenes at the Getty, April 8, 2014, http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/medieval-copyediting/ (accessed April 18, 2018). 6 On the popularity of strike through in digital media, see Noam Cohen, “Crossing Out, for Emphasis,” New York Times, July 23, 2007; and Marko Ticak, “Strikethrough and Why It’s so Popular,” Grammerly Blog, https://www.grammarly.com/blog/strikethrough-formattingpopularity/ (accessed January 2, 2017). 7 Gayatri Spivak, “Translator’s Preface,” in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), xiv. See the discussion of using strikethrough for composition in Chris Barker and Emma A. Jane, Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice (5th ed.; Los Angeles: Sage, 2016), 98-9.

XXVIII

Preface: Drawing Lines

striking through biblical verses would not be text-critical and historical as in traditional biblical scholarship, nor epistemological as in philosophy, but rather moral. I propose that strikethroughs should mark biblical texts that fail even the lowest standards of moral decency, specifically texts that advocate or excuse human acts of genocide (including violent anti-Semitism), indiscriminate capital punishment, slavery, and patriarchy. For example, Lev. 20:26-27 should be printed like this: You are holy to me because I, YHWH, am holy. I have separated you from the nations to be mine. 27 Any man or woman who is possessed by a ghost or spirit must certainly be killed. They must stone them with rocks. Their blood is on themselves.

The strikethrough will mark this text’s mandates as immoral. I do not suggest deleting such texts, because doing so would erase the literary context and the historical record. Instead, the strikethrough indelibly marks this verse as superseded by basic moral standards expressed in other verses in Leviticus, most famously in the love commandments of 19:18, 34, and elsewhere in the Bible and its interpretive traditions. My suggestion to strike through immoral normative texts is not just a salve to my own conscience for reproducing them. A technical commentary offers a new translation as a model for mass-market publishers to follow. In the same way, this commentary strikes through these verses to suggest to publishers of mass-market translations of the Bible that they should do the same thing. Strikethrough has an advantage over other typographical means of marking a text (e.g. italics, different fonts, rubrication) because its meaning is intuitively obvious: the text is abrogated while remaining legible. Of course, no textual feature is immune to misunderstanding, so notes and introductions are still needed to explain the moral judgment conveyed by strikethrough. But the implications of strikethrough are more obvious than most other typographical marks. Another advantage is that bible owners can strike through immoral verses themselves, without waiting for publishers or denominations to do it for them. Everyone is empowered to strike through immoral texts in their own bibles, just like other ways of ritualizing the iconic dimension of scriptures (Watts 2019a, 21-23, 28-29; Watts 2017, 70, 74-77, 86-87).

CRITERIA FOR STRIKING THROUGH VERSES The problem, of course, is deciding what to strike through – literally, where to draw the line. I suggest striking through only laws, instructions, curses, and proverbs, but not stories, and only those norms with a known history of malevolent applications and consequences. Normative texts that fall most

Preface: Drawing Lines

XXIX

obviously into this category endorse slavery, stigmas about disease and bodily appearance, indiscriminate capital punishment, genocide including violent antiSemitism, and patriarchy. Even though modern countries disagree about whether capital punishment is ever an appropriate punishment, with some still executing murderers and traitors, all agree in principle that it should be restricted to the most heinous and violent crimes and that it can only be lawfully applied by the courts after a fair trial. Leviticus does not reflect such restrictions. I therefore strike all biblical endorsements of capital punishment, because they make adultery, idolatry, blasphemy, and sexual offences equivalent to murder by treating all of them as capital offences. That rhetoric has created many victims over time and does not stand the moral test of the recommended practices of either Christianity or Judaism. So I suggest striking through all verses calling for capital punishment. I do not strike through verses that threaten divine punishment, such as the threat to ‫“ כרת‬cut off” offenders (e.g. Lev. 17:9-10), because these threats do not explicitly authorize human violence even though they have often been read that way. Biblical literature and its commentary traditions often emphasize God’s monopoly over such retribution. For example, Deut. 32:35 was interpreted as limiting human vengeance in Rom. 12:17-19, 2 Enoch 50:4-5, the Testament of Gad 6:7, and Sifre 325 (cf. also warnings against judging other people, e.g. Rom. 2:1-8). Biblically-based traditions have regularly made creative use of divine threats of retribution to understand their own history and to teach responsibility. The rhetoric of divine punishment shapes the histories of Israel (Judges-Kings, Chronicles, and Ezra-Nehemiah) as well as the prophetic and apocalyptic books and related narratives (such as the Gospels), and has generated sustained theological reflections in the books of Job and Romans. On the other hand, the rhetoric of God’s judgment on the Canaanites’ immorality which justifies the Israelites’ conquest of their land (Lev. 18:24-25, 27; 20:23) has often served as a justification for crusades and colonial conquests around the world, and therefore deserves to be struck through. For example, the European conquest of the Western hemisphere frequently invoked the biblical rhetoric of a “promised land” inhabited by pagan “Canaanites” or, even, of an uninhabited land (Cherry 1971; Warrior 1989; see further in Exegesis to 18:25). It will be clear to most readers that verses that justify enslaving others and committing acts of genocide and indiscriminate capital punishment, and that stigmatize diseased and disabled people, do not reflect the Bible’s moral ideals according to the consensus of Jewish and Christian ethical thought, even though people in various times have continued to cite them to justify their violent actions. However, verses that justify patriarchy, misogyny, and second-class status for women have not yet achieved such a broad consensus. Jewish and Christian denominations continue to be divided about these

XXX

Preface: Drawing Lines

issues. Some still use these verses to justify limiting clerical roles (as priests, ministers, rabbis, and scribes) to men and to defend patriarchy within families. Others have opened all of their leadership roles to women and actively denounce patriarchy in families and societies as a severe moral failure. My proposal calls upon congregations and denominations that champion women’s rights, such as my own United Church of Christ, to use bibles consistent with their own moral stance. You may think that striking through immoral norms will introduce divisiveness into bible publishing. The Bible is often lauded for unifying various denominations and even providing common ground between Jews and Christians. The cultural reality, however, is quite different. The material forms of biblical books as scrolls or codices have historically differentiated the two religions. Christian liturgical use of bible translations has also distinguished churches from each other and fuelled schisms along ethnic and doctrinal lines (Watts 2017a, 92-105, 138-41). Today, publishers produce bibles customized for denominations as well as for different age-groups, genders, and many other social distinctions (Beal 2011, 41-84, 129-45). The ideal of the Bible’s unifying function does not accord with the cultural reality of diverse bible translations and publications. Therefore, the proposal to strike through biblical verses that endorse patriarchy and other forms of discrimination against women cannot be criticized for introducing divisiveness into bible publishing. Doctrinal, ethnic, and denominational divisions have long since been entrenched there by translations and bible editions. You may wonder why I do not strike through many more normative passages that have fallen into abeyance in many religious communities, such as the rules for offerings in Leviticus 1-7 and the purity regulations of Leviticus 11-16. I do not strike through them because the history of the interpretation and use of these texts is not as negative as the cases described above. Though Jews and Christians since 70 C.E. have not practised animal offerings (much), they have made productive theological and devotional use of the offering instructions. The purity rules have prompted extensive debates about ethics, especially around issues of social difference and inclusion. Minority religious and ethnic communities often use purity instructions to distinguish and legitimize themselves against oppressors and colonizers (see Introduction §2.3.9.5 in Leviticus 1-10). My criteria for striking through some verses as immoral – namely, explicitly mandating human violence and/or a history of oppressive use – enable clear decisions in some cases, but they inevitably lead to drawing ever finer distinctions in others. The complications of this kind of moral decision-making are illustrated by surveying the influence of Leviticus 18 on restrictions on sexual activity, past and present. (Most of the parallel sex rules in Leviticus

Preface: Drawing Lines

XXXI

20 that include penalties will already be struck through because they apply the death penalty indiscriminately.) In its Israelite cultural context, Leviticus 18 emphasized maintaining purity by protecting bodily and group boundaries. That motivation accords poorly with the contemporary Western ethical emphasis on protecting individual autonomy by prohibiting coercive sex. However, both motivations agree on outlawing intercourse among close relatives (incest), differing only over exactly which relationships should be permitted. On the other hand, Lev. 18:22 prohibits sex between males (it does not mention females) while the ethic of individual autonomy has led recently to decriminalizing homosexual intercourse in many jurisdictions. But a different set of interpretive trends have manifested around the next verse. Bans on bestiality (sex with animals) in Christian countries, which were inspired by 18:23 and which sodomy laws often conflated with 18:22, were gradually abandoned under the influence of Enlightenment legal reforms, but are now being strengthened again by the moral argument against animal cruelty (see Exegesis to 18:23 below). Thus Leviticus 18 continues to play a role in ethical debates over how to justify restrictions on sex. I leave most of these issues for the more nuanced discussion in the commentary, but I suggest striking through 18:22 and 20:13 because of their continuing and widespread use today to justify violence and discrimination against gays, lesbians, and others with non-heteronormative sexual orientations and gender identities (see Exposition to Leviticus 20: Using the Bible to Justify Legal Executions and Vigilante Violence Today). I do not advocate striking through normative texts simply because modern people no longer follow them. But normative regulations that explicitly mandate violence or that have been used in the past and present to justify oppression should be struck through to mark clearly their moral rejection by congregations and denominations. On these criteria, I suggest striking through the mandates for capital punishment for false worship (Lev. 20:2, 3-5), sexual offences (20:10-16), magical practices (20:27), and other capital offences (20:9; 21:9; 24:14, 16-17, 21b; 27:29), as well as the slave laws (Lev. 19:20-22; 25:44-46; 27:2-8), the justifications for genocide (18:24-25, 27; 20:23b-24a), and the purity laws that endorse a double standard for men and women (12:5; 21:7a, 13-15), that stigmatize diseased and disabled people (13:45-46; 21:17-21, 23; 22:4a), and that ban male-with-male intercourse (18:22; 20:13). In other biblical books, verses should also be struck through that endorse indiscriminate capital punishment and taking revenge (Gen. 9:6a; Exod. 21:12, 14-17, 29c; 22:17-19 Eng. 22:18-20; Num. 35:16c, 17c, 18c, 19, 21b, 21d, 27b, 30b, 31, 33b; Deut. 13:5, 8b–11, 15-16; 17:5, 7, 12-13; 19:12b13; 21:21-23b; 22:20-24, 25c; 24:7b, 16c; Ps. 137:8b-9), genocide

XXXII

Preface: Drawing Lines

(Gen. 1:28;8 Num. 31:2-3, 15-18; 33:52-53, 55; Deut. 7:2b, 16a; 20:11, 13-18; 25:17-19), slavery (Gen. 9:25, 26c, 27c; Exod. 21:2-11, 20-21, 26-27, 32; Deut. 15:12, 16-17), and patriarchy (Gen. 3:16; Exod. 22:1516 Eng. 22:16-17; Num. 5:11-31; 30:3-16; Deut. 21:10-14; 22:28-29; 24:1-4; 25:12). Verses in the Deuterocanon/Apocrypha and New Testament should be struck through that have justified genocide in the form of violent anti-Semitism (Matt. 27:24c-25; John 8:44; 1 Thess. 2:14c-16), slavery (Eph. 6:5-8; Col. 3:22-25; Titus 2:9-10; Philemon 8-21; 1 Peter 2:18-21a), persecuting same-sex relations (Rom. 1:26-27), and patriarchy in families and in religious communities (Sir. 25:24-26; 1 Cor. 11:3, 7-10; 14:33b-35; Eph. 5:22-24; Col. 3:18; 1 Tim. 2:11-15; Titus 2:5c “submissive to their husbands”; 1 Peter 3:1-6, 7c “as the weaker vessel”). Many readers will no doubt judge my strikethroughs as modern overreach. However, though my suggestion to use strikethroughs for this purpose is novel, the editing of biblical texts by scholars is not new. In fact, both Jewish and Christian traditions since ancient times have granted scribes and scholars various means for editing their sacred texts. Suspected additions have been marked in the margins of manuscripts, while rubrication has been used to emphasize especially significant verses (such as the words of Jesus in redletter bibles). Modern scholars have rearranged biblical texts to match their literary reconstructions (e.g. Exod. 22:2-4 in the NEB and NRSV). Religious traditions have also placed restrictions on reading certain scriptural texts. The ancient rabbis restricted study of the merkaba texts of Ezekiel to only the most advanced scholars (m. Hag. 2:1; Halperin 1988). They also prohibited translating certain embarrassing verses in the golden calf story in Exodus.9 The medieval Masorates preserved the consonantal Hebrew text of the Tanak scrupulously, but noted their corrections in the masorah’s vowels and marginal comments that they added to the text, including distinguishing qere from kethib, what is read from what is written (Wurthwein-Fischer 2014, 15-38). Most English translations follow in this tradition of reading something other than what is written by printing “the LORD” rather than transliterating the Hebrew name of God, ‫ יהוה‬YHWH. Christian lectionaries since antiquity have 8 While Gen. 1:28 remains an oft-quoted mandate for raising children, its command to procreate and “fill the earth and subdue it” has naturalized the view that a growing human population justifies violent conquests of territory and the destruction of natural ecosystems. 9 Exodus 32:21-25 in m. Meg 4:10; t. Meg. 3:31-38; y. Meg. 75c; b. Meg. 25a-b, all of which refer to Aaron’s speech in the golden calf story, though their lists of prohibited passages do not quite agree. See Louis H. Feldman, “Philo’s Account of the Golden Calf Incident,” JJS 56 (2005), 245-64 [245-46]; and Pekka Lindqvist, Sin at Sinai: Early Judaism Encounters Exodus 32 (Studies in Rewritten Bible 2; Turku: Åbo Akademi; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2008), 168-89, who pointed out that Targum Neofiti seems to have observed one form of the rabbinic proscription (178-80).

Preface: Drawing Lines

XXXIII

rendered mute large swaths of the scriptures, including all of the Leviticus texts I listed above, by not including them in weekly or even daily readings for liturgies (Lust 2009). The Protestant Reformers segregated parts of the Christian Old Testament that do not appear in the Jewish Tanak as a separate section of the Bible, the Apocrypha, and considered it of secondary authority. Later publishers unilaterally decided to drop the Apocrypha from most Protestant bibles, thereby omitting roughly 17% of what had been Christian scripture (Hill 2013). Such modifications to the biblical text are modelled by the biblical writers and editors themselves, most obviously in the Chronicler’s additions and deletions to Samuel-Kings and Luke’s editing and supplementing of Mark’s Gospel. The Pentateuch even models a process of legal revision in several passages, such as when the daughters of Zelophehad complain about their lack of inheritance. God responds by granting inheritance to daughters without brothers (Num. 27:9-10). However, when tribal leaders complain about possible loss of land because of this legal innovation, Moses restricts the daughter’s potential marriage partners to their tribal cousins (Num. 36:1-12; see Fishbane 1985, 105; Watts 1999, 105-106; cf. Levinson 1992, 43-63). Legal reasoning and revision were thus features of biblical law, and marking and proscribing deleterious verses has deep precedents in both Jewish and Christian publishing traditions. While some readers may think my proposal to strike through immoral biblical verses goes too far, others will likely think it does not go far enough. Why not also strike through the many stories about divine and human violence? And why not simply delete offensive verses? Though my list of strikethrough verses includes some curses and rulings in quoted dialogue within narratives, I do not suggest striking through entire stories of the Bible, no matter how violent and terrible. Stories work rhetorically in different ways than explicit norms like commands, laws, instructions, blessings and curses. It is possible to learn positive lessons even from stories of terror, violence, and evil. Besides, it would be the height of hypocrisy for me, a twenty-first-century American whose culture glorifies and profits from narrating violence in fictional books and films, to presume to pass judgement on the Bible for its violent stories. That discussion is best left to the commentary literature, where moral interpretation has been strengthened in recent decades by feminist and post-colonial critiques. The situation is very different in the realms of law and morality. Here modern secular culture joins Jewish and Christian ethical reflection in rejecting indiscriminate capital punishment, slavery, genocide, and, increasingly, patriarchy. The Bible’s visual text should therefore strike through these verses, so that this judgment is immediately apparent to anyone who opens a bible to that page.

XXXIV

Preface: Drawing Lines

I do not propose deleting verses, however. Deleting offensive texts, besides confusing the literary form of biblical books, would whitewash the biblical tradition. It would obscure its complicity in fuelling violence within and between religious communities as well as more broadly in the politics and economies of many societies. Deletion would hinder rather than advance the moral education of readers. Instead, I recommend striking through immoral biblical norms. The strikethrough preserves the position of these verses in biblical literature while clearly marking the interpretive traditions’ repudiation of their normative force. It is time for the texts of commentaries and of mass-market bibles to strike through verses that justify evil behaviour rather than good.10

HIGHLIGHTING THE MOST IMPORTANT MORAL NORMS Marking the biblical text by striking through immoral mandates conveys only a negative impression. It calls attention to the Bible’s negative influence, but not its positive moral teachings. In fact, many biblical verses have 10 As I was finishing this essay in 2018, three hundred French politicians and cultural leaders issued a manifesto calling for the Qur’an to be edited to eliminate texts that fuel antiSemitic violence. The manifesto recounted the history of recent murders of elderly Jews by Muslim immigrants and emphasized the vital role of Jewish contributions to French culture. Its second-to-last paragraph then demanded: “Nous demandons que les versets du Coran appelant au meurtre et au châtiment des juifs, des chrétiens et des incroyants soient frappés d’obsolescence par les autorités théologiques, comme le furent les incohérences de la Bible et l’antisémite catholique aboli par Vatican II, afin qu’aucun croyant ne puisse s’appuyer sur un texte sacré pour commettre un crime” (“Manifeste «contre le nouvel antisémitisme»,” Le Parisien, April 21, 2018, http://www.leparisien.fr/societe/manifeste-contre-le-nouvel-antisemitisme-2104-2018-7676787.php [accessed May 5, 2018]). Despite superficial similarities to my proposal here, the French manifesto expressed a very different political and moral position. Most obviously, it called on members of a different religion, Islam, to conform to the standards of its non-Muslim writers. The manifesto obscured the deep and continuing anti-Semitic tendencies in French culture that stem from Christian, not Muslim, roots. The manifesto claimed that Catholic culture shed its anti-Semitism through the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), but that is belied by the history of on-going anti-Semitic incidents in France as well as in other majority-Christian countries (“Anti-Semitism Worldwide 2017,” Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry, Tel Aviv University, online at http://kantorcenter.tau.ac.il/sites/default/files/Doch_full_2018_110418.pdf (accessed May 14, 2018). Though very many Christian denominations have disavowed antiSemitism in the twentieth century, just as they disavowed slavery in the nineteenth, neither the Second Vatican Council nor any other ecclesiastical bodies have modified the text of bibles to constrain their immoral use in justifying violence and oppression. My proposal calls instead for bible translators and publishers to strike through immoral norms in our own scriptures. The strikethrough marks these norms as abrogated by Christian and Jewish traditions, but leaves them legible to acknowledge the traditions’ complicity in perpetuating them.

Preface: Drawing Lines

XXXV

been widely credited with inspiring moral reforms in social, political, and judicial spheres. They include many verses from Leviticus, most obviously its commandments to love your neighbour and the immigrant “like you” (Lev. 19:18, 34). Therefore, the effort to mark the biblical text to discourage using immoral mandates should also mark it to call attention to its most widely admired norms. Publishers have a variety of typographical means for doing so: boldface, underlining, highlighting, italics, and rubrication. Individuals marking their personal bibles can underline and highlight. In this commentary, I mark these texts in boldface to make them more prominent. Just as with strikethrough, there are many precedents for marking biblical texts by hand and in print typography for emphasis. Scribes rubricated and illuminated some texts but not others. Publishers have also printed “redletter” bibles to highlight the words of Jesus and “green” bibles to emphasize environmental themes. Today, many different bibles are marketed with paratexts for particular kinds of readers (Beal 2011). Many modern readers highlight and underline their own bibles, often extensively. Despite all this religious and typographical variety, a core group of texts have been repeatedly quoted in moral exhortations and reform efforts since antiquity. They continue to be cited to motivate reforms today, not only in Jewish and Christian congregations but also in wider society and politics. While many are obvious, there are no clear limits to a list of influential moral mandates that should be emphasized by a bible’s typography. They should, at least, include: The love commandment and its variants: Lev. 19:18, 33-34; Deut. 10:19; Matt. 5:44; Luke 6:27-28, 35a; John 13:34, 15:12, 17; 1 Cor. 13:1-13; Jam. 2:8. Exhortations to moral behaviour: Exod. 20:12-17; 23:1-9; Lev. 19:11-18; Deut. 5:16-21. Requirements to promote justice, freedom, and equality: Lev. 19:33-34, 35-36a; 25:10b; Deut. 27:19; Job 31:15; Ps. 82:3-4; Isa. 1:17; 45:8; 61:1-2; Jer. 22:3; Mic. 6:5; Amos 5:24; Zech. 7:9-10; Matt. 7:1, 12; Luke 6:36-38; Gal. 3:28. Mandates to care for the poor and other marginalized people: Exod. 20:910; 23:10-12; Lev. 19:9-10, 35-36a; 23:22; Deut. 5:13-15; 24:14-17, 19-21; Prov. 29:7; Matt. 5:3-11; 7:12; Luke 6:20-26, 31; Jas. 2:14-18. Exhortations to protect the natural environment by recognizing that land, the earth, and all its inhabitants do not belong to people but to God: Exod. 19:5c; Lev. 25:23b “the land is mine”; Deut. 10:14; Pss. 24:10, 50:12b, 89:11; 1 Cor. 10:26.

XXXVI

Preface: Drawing Lines

Not included here are the many biblical texts that have been very influential theologically and for religious behaviour. Individual readers as well as denominations may well wish to highlight them too, as many already do. My point is that they also need to highlight the Bible’s more universal moral claims that regularly get obscured by religious controversies and niche bible marketing.

COMMENTARY

LEVITICUS 11-20

INTRODUCTION BIBLIOGRAPHY BLIDSTEIN, MOSHE. Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. BOIVIN, NICOLE. “Grasping the Elusive and Unknowable: Material Culture in Ritual Practice.” Material Religion 5/3 (2009), 266-87. BURRUS, VIRGINIA. “Sin, Pollution, Purity: Christianity.” In Johnston (2004), 511-13. CASTELLI, ELIZABETH A. “The Body.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Mediterranean Religions. Ed. B. S. Spaeth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 252-80. COLLINS, BILLIE JEAN. “Sin, Pollution and Purity: Anatolia.” In Johnston (2004), 504-505. COUTO-FERREIRA, ÉRICA and AGNÈS GARCIA-VENTURA. “Engendering Purity and Impurity in Assyriological Studies: A Historiographical Overview.” Gender & History 25/3 (2013), 513-28. DARSHAN, GUY. “The Casuistic Priestly Law in Ancient Mediterranean Context: The History of the Genre and its Sitz im Leben.” HTR 111 (2018), 24-40. EGO, BEATE. “Reinheit und Schöpfung: Zur Begründung der Speisegebote im Buch Leviticus.” ZABR 3 (1997), 131-44. EGO, BEATE. “Purity Concepts in Jewish Traditions of the Hellenistic Period.” In Frevel-Nihan (2013), 477-92. ERBELE-KÜSTER, DOROTHEA. Body, Gender and Purity in Leviticus 12 and 15. LHB/OTS 539. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017. FEDER, YITZHAQ. “Contagion and Cognition: Bodily Experience and the Conceptualization of Pollution (ṭum᾿ah) in the Hebrew Bible.” JNES 72 (2013), 151-67. FEDER, YITZHAQ. “The Semantics of Purity in the Ancient Near East: Lexical Meaning as a Projection of Embodied Experience.” JANER 14 (2014), 87-113. FEDER, YITZHAQ. “Defilement and Moral Discourse in the Hebrew Bible: An Evolutionary Framework.” Journal of Cognitive Historiography 3 (2016), 157-89. FEINSTEIN, EVE LEVAVI. Sexual Pollution in the Hebrew Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. FELDMAN, EMANUEL. Biblical and PostBiblical Defilement and Mourning: Law as Theology. New York: Ktav, 1977. FREVEL, CHRISTIAN. “Purity Conceptions in the Book of Numbers.” In Frevel-Nihan (2013), 369-411. FRYMER-KENSKY, TIKVA. “Pollution, Purification, and Purgation in Biblical Israel.” In The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman. Ed. C. L. Meyers and M. O’Connor. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1983. 399-414. GANE, ROY E., HANNAH K. HARRINGTON, HERMUT LÖHR, SIMON JONES, and GÖRAN LARSSON. “Ablutions.” EBR (2009), 1:108-23. GUICHARD, MICHAËL and LIONEL MARTI. “Purity in Ancient Mesopotamia: the Paleo-Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian Periods.” In Frevel-Nihan (2013), 47-113. HARRINGTON, HANNAH K. The Purity Texts. London: T. & T. Clark, 2004. HAYS, NATHAN. “The Redactional Reassertion of the Priestly Role in Leviticus 10-16.” ZAW 130 (2018), 175-88. HUTTER, MANFRED. “Concepts of Purity in Anatolian Religions.” In Frevel-Nihan (2013), 15974. KATZ, HAYAH. “‘He Shall Bathe in Water; then He Shall Be Pure’: Ancient Immersion Practice in the Light of Archaeological Evidence.” VT 62 (2012), 369-80. KAZEN, THOMAS. “Dirt and Disgust: Body and Morality in Biblical Purity Laws.” In Schwartz et al. (2008), 43-64. KAZEN, THOMAS. “Purity and Persia.” In Gane-Taggar-Cohen (2015), 435-62. KAZEN, THOMAS. “Disgust in Body, Mind, and Language: The Case of Impurity

4

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

in the Hebrew Bible.” In Mixed Feelings and Vexed Passions. Ed. F. Scott Spencer. Atlanta: SBL, 2017. 97-115. KAZEN, THOMAS. “Levels of Explanation for Ideas of Impurity: Why Structuralist and Symbolic Models Often Fail While Evolutionary and Cognitive Models Succeed.” Journal of Ancient Judaism 9 (2019), 75-100. LAWRENCE, JONATHAN D. Washing in Water: Trajectories of Ritual Bathing in the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Literature. Atlanta: SBL, 2006. LISS, HANNA. “Ritual Purity and the Construction of Identity: the Literary Function of the Laws of Purity in the Book of Leviticus.” In Römer (2008), 329-54. MACCOBY, HYAM. Ritual and Morality: The Ritual Purity System and its Place in Judaism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. MARX, ALFRED. “L’impureté selon P. Une lecture théologique.” Bib 82/3 (2001), 363-84. MESHEL, NAPHTALI S. “Some New Questions in the Fundamental Science of P.” In Eberhart-Hieke (2019), 127-38. NIHAN, CHRISTOPHE. “Forms and Functions of Purity in Leviticus.” In Frevel-Nihan (2013), 311-68. OTTENHEIJM, ERIC. “Impurity between Intention and Deed: Purity Disputes in First Century Judaism and in the New Testament.” In Poorthuis-Schwartz (2000), 129-47. PARKER, ROBERT. Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion. Oxford: Clarendon, 1983. PASCHEN, WILFRIED. Rein und Unrein: Untersuchung zur biblischen Wortgeschichte. SANT 24. Munich: Kösel, 1970. QUACK, JOACHIM FRIEDRICH. “Conceptions of Purity in Egyptian Religion.” In Frevel-Nihan (2013), 115-58. RAZU, INDUKURI JOHN MOHAN. Leviticus and Numbers. Dalit Bible Commentary 4. New Delhi: Centre for Dalit/Subaltern Studies, 2011. REGEV, EYAL. “Non-Priestly Purity and its Religious Aspects according to Historical Sources and Archeological Findings.” In Poorthuis-Schwartz (2000), 223-44. ROUWHORST, GERARD. “Leviticus 12-15 in Early Christianity.” In Poorthuis-Schwartz (2000), 181-93. SALLABERGER, WALTHER. “Körperliche Reinheit und soziale Grenzen in Mesopotamien.” In Burschel-Marx (2011), 17-46. TOMSON, PETER J. “Jewish Purity Laws as Viewed by the Church Fathers and by the Early Followers of Jesus.” In Poorthuis-Schwartz (2000), 73-106. VAN DER TOORN, KAREL. Sin and Sanction in Israel and Mesopotamia: A Comparative Study. Studia Semetica Neerlandia 22. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1985. VAN DER TOORN, KAREL. “La pureté rituelle au Proche-Orient ancien.” RHR 206/4 (1989), 339-56. WERRETT, IAN. “The Evolution of Purity at Qumran.” In Frevel-Nihan (2013), 493-518. WRIGHT, DAVID P. “The Spectrum of Priestly Impurity.” In Anderson-Olyan (1991), 150-81. WRIGHT, DAVID P. “Unclean and Clean (OT).” ABD (1992) 6:729-41. WRIGHT, DAVID P. “Law and Creation in the Priestly-Holiness Writings of the Pentateuch.” In Eberhart-Hieke (2019), 201-34.

CONTENTS AND STRUCTURE OF LEVITICUS 11-20 Concerns about pollution and purification dominate most of chaps. 11-20. With the exception of chap. 19, the material is organized topically. The chapter divisions follow major changes in topic. Leviticus 11-15 contains rules about avoiding or cleaning pollution from food (chap. 11), from childbirth (chap. 12), from afflictions of infestation (chap. 13) and purification after infestations are healed (chap. 14), and from genital discharges (chap. 15). Each chapter begins with divine speech formulas that address Moses and Aaron in 11:1, 13:1, and 15:1 (also in 14:33), but only Moses in 12:1 and 14:1. Each chapter concludes with torah-formulas (11:46-47; 12:7b; 13:59; 14:54-57; 15:32-33; also in 14:32). So chaps. 11-15

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

5

have clearly been shaped as a unified collection about pollution and purification. Leviticus 18 and 20 similarly consist of prohibitions of mostly sexual pollutions and their punishments. Chapter 17 returns to the topic of diet pollution by elaborating rules around the prohibition on eating blood. Chapter 16 provides instructions for mitigating “all” of Israel’s pollutions and sins in the Tabernacle on the Day of Mitigations. Chapter 19, however, breaks with this topical organization around pollution by collecting quotations and references to all kinds of Israelite normative traditions. The focus on polluted people distinguishes chaps. 12-15, 18, and 20 from the edible meats in chaps. 11 and 17. The focus on women in chapters on childbirth, genital discharges, and illicit sex form clear brackets around other rules, creating two of the four large arch structures in Leviticus: Pollution at childbirth (chap. 12) Infestations (chaps. 13-14) Genital pollutions (chap. 15) Prohibitions for illicit sex (chap. 18) A collection of diverse norms (chap. 19) Punishments for illicit sex (chap. 20)

(For a complete outline by chapters, see Leviticus 1-10, 19-20.) However, describing the structure of Leviticus 11-20 by chapter divisions obscures the very different amounts of text devoted to these subjects. Childbirth receives only eight verses (chap. 12) while 116 verses are devoted to infestation, its diagnosis, and its purification procedures (chaps. 13-14). The prohibition of eating blood receives seventeen verses (chap. 17), while fifty-seven verses enumerate illicit sexual intercourse and its punishments (chaps. 18 and 20). The rhetorical effect of hearing these chapters read aloud is therefore very different than viewing these outlines, for reasons of both structure and content. The details of chaps. 13-14 involve complicated considerations, most of which would have applied to ancient listeners only occasionally, if at all. The diet regulations of chaps. 11 and 17 deal only with meat, which ancient people consumed less frequently than many moderns. The unsettling regulations of chaps. 12, 15, 18, and 20, by contrast, address the most intimate experiences of individual and family life. And chap. 19 requires its audience to exhibit YHWH’s holiness in all kinds of interactions with other people. All this focus on personal pollution is encased in rhetoric of communal responsibility and mitigation, emphasized by periodic exhortations. Summaries exhort listeners and readers to be holy like YHWH (11:44-45; 19:2; 20:26) and to distinguish themselves from other peoples by observing YHWH’s rules (18:2-5, 24, 27). They threaten death for polluting the sanctuary (15:31; 20:3) and exile for polluting the land (18:25-28; 20:22-24). Chapters 17 and

6

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

20 feature many threats of being “cut of” or executed for breaking the rules about meat and sexual intercourse (17:4-10; 18:29; 20:2, 9-18). Chapter 16, however, instructs the priests in means for mitigating all of Israel’s pollutions and sins (16:16, 21, 30) by performing the special rituals of the Day of Mitigations. It requires lay Israelites to humble themselves and cease work on this day in conscious support of the rituals being performed on their behalf in the sanctuary (16:29). These chapters sometimes employ rapid repetition of fraught vocabulary for emphasis and emotional effect (pathos). Such emphatic use of repetitive vocabulary already appeared in 5:19 and 7:23-27. In chaps. 11-15, 18, and 20 its rhetorical effect is stronger because of the personal nature of pollution vocabulary. For example, 11:10-13 repeat the root ‫“ שׁקץ‬nauseating” five times; 11:41-43 repeat ‫“ שׁקץ‬nauseating” three times followed by ‫“ טמא‬polluted” twice; and 13:44-46 repeat the root ‫“ טמא‬polluted” seven times. Every prohibition in 18:7-18 begins with the titillating word, ‫ערות‬ “the nudity of” (see on 18:6), and the chapter concludes by repeating ‫טמא‬ “polluted” eight times along with other pollution vocabulary (18:20-30). The mandate to separate and avoid ‫“ טמא‬polluted” and ‫“ שׁקץ‬nauseating” meats reappears in 20:25 to form a thematic bracket about pollution around chaps. 11-20. (For the meaning of the antonyms, ‫“ טמא‬polluted” and ‫טהור‬ “pure,” see Exegesis on 11:4; for ‫“ שׁקץ‬nauseating,” see on 11:10.) The position of chaps. 11-20 in the book of Leviticus makes good sense. Their pollution regulations work out the implications of the command in 10:10-11 that the priests must separate “the polluted from the pure” and teach this torah to the Israelites. Thus chaps. 11-15 conclude with the injunction to Moses and the priests to “warn the Israelites about their pollutions, so they don’t die” from bringing them into the Tabernacle (15:31). These rules prepare for chap. 16 which instructs the high priest to “mitigate the Holy Space from the pollutions of the children of Israel.” The five chapters preceding chap. 16 thus describe some of those pollutions in detail. It is more difficult to explain why food rules (chaps. 11, 17) should introduce regulations for bodily pollutions (chaps. 12-15, 18, 20). They are not included in an attempt to be comprehensive, since a prominent form of pollution in ancient Israel, human corpse pollution (Num. 19), is not mentioned in these chapters at all. Calum Carmichael (2006, 19-26) suggested that the sequence of topics in Leviticus 11-14 was derived from elements in the plot of 1 Samuel 2-6: stealing meat with fat (2:12-17), death in childbirth (4:19-22), and skin disease resulting in a guilt offering (5:6-12; 6:8). These connections, however, are tenuous at best. It is more likely that the sequence of topics was motivated by P’s usual strategy of focusing first on lay people (Lev. 1-5, 11-12, 17-20) to draw attention away from the priestly prerogatives that follow (Lev. 6-7, 13-14, 21-22). The food rules involve lay listeners

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

7

and readers in the task of distinguishing pure from polluted, and impose on them an obligation to do so (11:46-47; 17:14; 20:25). Chapter 11 also explicitly invokes a cosmological framework for categorizing various kinds of animals, and 17:10-15 meditates on the blood and ‫“ נפשׁ‬personal energy” that animals and humans share. Therefore, it seems that the food rules were placed first because they require Israelites to reason correctly about food and because they model how to do so based on cosmological categories. They introduce the other pollution regulations by establishing the importance of avoiding pollution and also how to think about pollution. An emphatic exhortation to obey the meat regulations appears again in 20:25, creating a thematic bracket around chaps. 11-20. In fact, two exhortations in chaps. 11-15 (11:43-45; 15:31) remind critical interpreters of the style and themes of the author of Leviticus 17-26, H (e.g. Noth 96; Milgrom 62-63). That led Jacob Milgrom (62-63) to identify H glosses elsewhere in these chapters, in 11:43-45, 12:8, 14:34-57, and 15:31. Israel Knohl (1995, 6870) identified H only in 11:43-45 and 15:31, while Christophe Nihan (2007, 569) limited H to just 11:43-45. But Nathan Hays (2018) again used the terminological and structural links between 10:10 and the conclusions of the following chapters (11:47; 13:59; 14:57; 15:31) to argue that the post-H editor who inserted chap. 10 added these colophons as well. Though the arguments for regarding Leviticus 10 as an insertion are not strong (see Exposition to Leviticus 10), the links between 10:10 and the following chapters are clear, regardless of who wrote them into the text. Modern scholars also argue that H’s exhortations surround and incorporate pre-existing lists of sexual prohibitions and punishments in chaps. 18 and 20, though there is no evidence for independent incest lists from any other ancient culture (see Exposition to Leviticus 18). While their attention is devoted to distinguishing sources and authors, all these interpreters recognize that these exhortations have been used to tie chaps. 11-26 together as a thematically cohesive work. There is good reason to question the critical tendency to separate headings, colophons, and refrains from the material they summarize because of their distinctive vocabulary. First, this practice leaves the original lists without headings or conclusions, despite the fact that these are a common feature of ancient lists and instructions. Second, by their nature, headings, refrains, and colophons might require different vocabulary and resemble each other, rather than the rules that they introduce and conclude. Third, the isolation of a separate individual as author of chaps. 17-26 and editor of the preceding chapters in Leviticus shows joint authorship but does not, by itself, indicate a different work or demonstrate that H reflects a different time, social context, or religious stage than P (see the discussion in Introduction to Leviticus 2127 in this commentary’s third volume). Therefore, isolating the authorship of

8

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

these colophons adds little to our understanding of ancient Israel’s religion, and nothing to interpreting the meaning of Leviticus as it has been transmitted to us. The contents of this text are explained better by rhetorical analysis. The rhetoric of Leviticus 11-20 employs a range of techniques to make its regulations persuasive. The systematic shaping of these chapters, like chaps. 1-7, depicts them as a comprehensive, expert, and divinely authorized set of pollution regulations (logos). This self-presentation reinforces the ethos of the priests who must teach the pollution regulations, perform their more important rituals, and oversee the enforcement of quarantines for infestation. It also invites lay listeners and readers to reflect on the logic of pollution distinctions, especially regarding animal meat, infestations, and sexual intercourse, while warning them to be careful to purify themselves from food and bodily pollutions. To emphasize such warnings, these chapters repeat frightening vocabulary in exhortations and summaries to emphasize the danger of pollution in the bodies and homes of every Israelite (pathos). Therefore, the remainder of this Introduction to Leviticus 11-20 discusses pollution and purification before turning to priestly and divine rhetoric. The theme of holiness and sanctification, which becomes prominent in chaps. 1922, will be addressed in the Introduction to Leviticus 21-27 in the third volume of this commentary, which will also discuss and assess compositional theories of a different author (H) of chaps. 17-26.

THE RHETORIC OF POLLUTION IN ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN AND MEDITERRANEAN CULTURES Leviticus 11-20 provides more comprehensive and systematic discussions of pollution beliefs and purification practices than any other ancient Near Eastern or Mediterranean text until the Mishnah at the end of the second century C.E. However, ancient texts from throughout the region attest to widespread concerns about pollution and purification rituals. Egyptian texts regularly mention purification as necessary for entry into temples. In Mesopotamian cultures, Michaël Guichard and Lionel Marti (2013, 47) noted that “the notion of purity is omnipresent – to the point of obsession – in the texts of rituals, in incantations, in prayers and hymns in Sumerian or in Akkadian, in juridical documents, etc.” In Greek culture, Walter Burkert observed that “concern about purification appears to be characteristic of the archaic period.”1 Despite controversies in the Classical period, purification continued to feature 1 Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 56.

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

9

prominently in Hellenistic and Roman-period rituals. Examining the pollution beliefs of other ancient cultures allows us to contextualize the HB’s depiction of them within broader cultural norms and tendencies. (For more extensive summaries of ancient pollution beliefs, see Yoo-Watts 2021, 22-74, and the essays in Frevel-Nihan 2013). In all of these ancient cultures, fear of pollution seems to have been invoked when crossing cosmological boundaries, as Elizabeth Castelli (2013, 263) noted: Purity systems separate the material word into distinct categories, and they are particularly concerned with the policing of the boundaries in between. … Purity regulations are often most highly articulated on occasions when boundaries are being crossed – the boundaries of the body …, the boundaries separating one class of reality from another (e.g. human/divine), the boundaries between one mode of life and another (e.g. birth, marriage, death).

The cosmological belief systems of ancient Near Eastern and Eastern Mediterranean cultures tended to draw two basic distinctions – between the divine and the non-divine, and between life and death. However, closer examination of the ideas and practices of these cultures shows that they drew these distinctions in different ways, with the result that they also practised purification somewhat differently. The notion that entering the divine realm required purification obviously influenced people’s practices in ancient temples. Priests restricted entrance to those who met strict purity criteria. Inscriptions on Egyptian temples announced the requirements for entry, such as this one from Esna: Whoever wears a hairstyle of grief does not enter into this temple! Shaving, nail clipping and combing is what (justifies) entering into it. All fine linen as a dress is what (justifies) entering into it. Natron water is what (justifies) settling down in it. As for all having allowance to enter it, they should be pure from a woman in a purification (period) of nine days and should not have eaten any taboo in a purification (period) of four days. (Quack 2013, 120)

Guy Darshan (2018, 34-35) surveyed early Greek inscriptions of sacred laws. As early as the sixth century B.C.E., they proclaimed the purity requirements for entrance into Greek temples, including rules regarding purification from sex, menstruation, and childbirth. Darshan pointed out that, like the rules of Leviticus but unlike older Near Eastern ritual instructions, Greek sacred laws addressed lay worshippers more than priestly specialists. For example, an inscription in a Hellenistic-period Greek temple insisted: Whoever wishes to sacrifice shall enter the sanctuary, being pure: from childbirth on the ninth day; from an abortion, for forty-four days; from menstruation, on the seventh day; from bloodshed(?), for seven days; from (eating) goat meat and mutton, on the third (day); from other foods, having washed oneself

10

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20 from the head down, on the same day; from sexual intercourse, on the same day, having washed oneself.2

Entry requirements could include moral as well as ritual stipulations. A doorjamb in the Egyptian Edfu temple required entrants to recite: I I I I

have not been partisan in the judgment, had not allied with the strong one, have not convicted the weak one, had not led things in a violent manner. (Quack 2013, 126)

Temples usually contained springs or reservoirs in their entrances to provide water for purification before entering. Mesopotamian temples identified these pools with the cosmic ocean and their liturgies referred to purification in that ocean (Guichard and Marti 2013, 70, 77, 102-103). While water was a common means of purification almost everywhere, other materials and requirements differed not only between cultures, but also between temples of different gods in the same cultures. The differences appear especially around diet restrictions. Often, priests and worshippers were prohibited from eating animals regarded as sacred to particular deities. Greeks could not eat fish before worshipping Poseiden or cheese from Attica before worshipping Athena Polias at Athens.3 The Egyptian temple at Philae prohibited worshippers from eating red onions, donkeys, dogs, and small cattle, among other things (Quack 2013, 121). The diet of worshippers was expected to emulate the diet of their gods. So a list of offerings from Uruk in lower Mesopotamia not only specified which animals must be offered to which deity, it also precluded certain animals from being offered to particular deities: In the temple of the god Shamash, ram’s meat shall never be offered to the deity Shakkan. In the temple of the god Sin, bull’s meat shall never be offered to the god Harru. Fowl flesh shall never be offered to the goddess Beletseri. Neither bull’s meat nor fowl’s flesh shall ever be offered to the goddess Ereshkigal (ANET 343-45).

In Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Greece, purity might be required only by sky gods, while the underworld welcomed pollution. For example, a tablet from Emar in upper Mesopotamia explicitly distinguished pure offerings for celestial deities from impure offerings for chthonic deities (COS 1.122). Hittite purification rituals asked chthonic deities to take away pollution and confine 2 Inscription, ca. 200 B.C.E., in the Megalopolis Archaeological Museum, Inv. 133; translation by Eran Lupu, Greek Sacred Law: A Collection of New Documents (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 206-207. 3 Simon Price, Religions of the Ancient Greeks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 69.

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

11

it in the underworld.4 Thus ideas about the cosmic location and interests of particular gods led to variations in beliefs about what counts as pure and which cosmological realms require purity. Dealings with chthonic deities highlight another common cosmological boundary, that between life and death. Here, the purity concerns of ancient cultures diverged from each other based on their different expectations about the afterlife. The evidence from Mesopotamia and Greece suggests that these cultures, by and large, regarded afterlife as uncertain and negative. The ghosts of the dead existed in shadowy realms that resemble being buried alive. The responsibilities of living people to their dead ancestors often included feeding them, because food was not good or readily available to the dead. Therefore, death was regarded with fear and the condition of the dead was polluted. Death pollution could be contagious and threaten the realm of the living, so contact with the dead and their graveyards required purification afterwards. The distinction between pure sky gods and polluted chthonic deities in the underworld inscribed this cosmological distinction into the pantheons of Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Greece. (For more detailed descriptions and literature, see Yoo-Watts 2021, 22-74) The Egyptians, by contrast, regarded the afterlife more positively. They hoped to join the gods in their beatific existence that they imagined to include both the realms above and below the human world. Egypt’s elaborate funerary rituals aimed to ensure that the dead would be able to join Osiris, ruler of the underworld, and also to “become Osiris.” Then they could travel with the sun God, Ra, in his daily traverse of the sky during the day and the underworld at night.5 The Egyptians conceived of the realms of the gods and of the dead as the same, and therefore as requiring the same purification rituals. Dead corpses were subjected to elaborate purification rituals to prepare them for the afterlife, including the “Opening of the Mouth” ritual that was also used to vivify divine statues in royal temples (Quack 2013, 144-50). The spells of the Book of the Dead that were meant to be recited as the soul moves to the afterlife repeatedly claim purity (e.g. spells 105, 125, 169), just like the entry requirements to Egyptian temples. Cosmological divisions, however, cannot explain purification practices that disadvantaged women more than men. Women inhabit the same realm of the living as men, yet there was a tendency to attribute pollution to menstrual bleeding and to childbirth, and to sexual intercourse as well. Ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greek texts do not give us clear evidence of the consequences of these beliefs for women’s lives, contrary to the assumptions 4 Gernot Wilhelm, “Reinheit und Heiligkeit: Zur Vorstellungswelt altanatolischer Ritualistik,” in Fabry-Jüngling (1999), 199. 5 Lucia Gahlin, Egyptian Religion (New York: Southwater, 2002), 14-60.

12

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

of many modern interpreters (for the shortcomings in the evidence, see CoutoFerreira and Garcia-Ventura 2013; Quack 2013, 142-143; Collins 2004, 505; Parker 1983, 100-102). Nevertheless, across cultures, there is inconsistent evidence of gender discrimination on the basis of pollution (see further in Exposition to Leviticus 12 and Leviticus 15 below). These brief observations about pollution and purity in ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures already point to how biblical regulations resemble this broader cultural milieu and how they differ from it. Like surrounding cultures, Israelites thought they should protect the purity of their Tabernacle and temples (Lev. 15:31). Because their afterlife beliefs resembled those of the Mesopotamians and Greeks more than those of the Egyptians, they regarded contact with corpses as seriously polluting and as requiring extraordinary purification rituals (Num. 19). They regarded menstrual blood, childbirth, and semen as polluting (Lev. 12, 15) though, as elsewhere, they did not clearly explain how these fluids engage the cosmological concerns around temple purity. And the Israelites modelled their diet on that of their deity, though with allowances for wild game animals (Lev. 11; 17:13-16). The food regulations of Leviticus 11, however, do not just apply to people before visiting the Temple. They require Israelites to conform continuously in order to maintain their holy status in imitation of their god, YHWH (Lev. 11:44-45). Here, the HB’s henotheism eliminates the possibility of inconsistent requirements by different deities and temples. Israel’s covenant with YHWH identified the people with God and also led to YHWH residing among the people (Exod. 19:5-6; 40:34-38). Israel’s cosmology (or, at least, that of the HB) associated not just the temple with the divine realm, but also in some sense that portion of the human realm occupied by Israel. Israelites were therefore perpetually obliged to maintain or restore purity whenever possible. The Temple and its priests maintained even higher purity standards (Lev. 8; 21). Differing conceptions of how and where the divine and Israelite realms overlapped fuelled debates over pollution and purification requirements in Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaisms.

JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN RHETORIC ABOUT PURITY AND POLLUTION I will survey Leviticus’s influence on later purification practices and pollution beliefs about food, childbirth, infestation, genital discharges, and sexual intercourse in the Exposition sections of each chapter below (see also YooWatts 2021, 99-126). Here is just a preliminary sketch. Modern commentators have long emphasized the difference between P’s ideas and modern biomedical notions of hygiene. But ancient controversies about purity and pollution are not completely unrelated to modern concerns

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

13

about environmental pollution, food purity, and even hygiene. Modern discomfort with biblical ideas of pollution grows out of a long history of controversies about purity and pollution that dates back as far as the Second Temple period (e.g. Neh. 13:4-9, 28-30; 4QMMTc 2.1-10, 3.4-8; Mark 7:1-23). Hannah Harrington (2004, 7) summarized the ancient situation: The Second Temple period of ancient Judaism was marked by a heightened concern for purity. Issues of cult and purity engaged and divided Jews more in this period than at any other time in antiquity. ... Although arguments continued over the degree of purity required, there was general agreement among Jews that purification was necessary not just for priestly figures but also for laity. ... After the Temple’s destruction in 70 CE, purity continued as a consolatory substitute for the Temple cult, but its religious grip gradually waned.

This concern for purity was rooted in Leviticus. Even among the books of the HB, Leviticus 11-15 stands out for its systematic and objective-sounding treatment of pollution and purification, in contrast to more polemical uses of pollution vocabulary elsewhere. Later chapters of Leviticus already characterize sexual offences as ‫“ טמא‬polluting” (18:20, 24) and use this language to vilify Canaanites (18:24-30), mediums (19:31), and those who devote their children to Molech (20:3). The polemical use of ‫“ טמא‬polluting, polluted” and ‫“ שׁקץ‬nauseating” (for this translation, see Exegesis to Lev. 11:10) becomes even more overt in some prophetic books that employ this vocabulary to criticize religious apostasy (e.g. Jer. 2:7; 4:12; 7:30; 16:18; also Deut. 29:16; 1 Kgs. 11:5-7; 2 Kgs. 23:13, 24), often in close association with sexual promiscuity as a metaphor for religious infidelity (Hos. 5:3; 6:10). Ezekiel especially employs this vocabulary like Leviticus, but to more polemical ends. The prophet describes apostasy as ‫“ טמא‬polluting” (Ezek. 14:11; 20:7, 18, 30-31, 43; 37:23; 43:7-8) and idols as ‫“ שׁקוץ‬nauseating” (5:11; 7:20; 11:18, 21; 20:7-8, 30; 37:23) and ‫“ תועבה‬disgusting” (more than 35 times; cf. Lev. 18:22). He also labels sexual offences as polluting (Ezek. 22:10-11; 33:26) and turns them into an elaborate metaphor for Israel’s and Judah’s religious offences against YHWH (23:5-21, 30, 37-39). In Ezekiel, God declares that the people’s conduct is ‫“ כטמאת הנדה‬like a menstruating woman’s pollution” (36:17-18). Thus, in much of the HB, religious polemic employs pollution vocabulary and often builds on gender and sexual stereotypes. The fact that this language is not used in such an overtly polemical manner in Leviticus 11-15 should not blind interpreters to its fraught overtones for Judeans and Samaritans as well as later Jews and Christians who heard these chapters read aloud. Though historians debate the relationship between Ezekiel and various parts of Leviticus, most agree that the writers of Ezra and Nehemiah knew the book more or less as we have it today (for a dissenting view, see Lawrence 2006, 35). Ezra and Nehemiah therefore provide the clearest evidence of

14

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

Leviticus’s early reception, and they already show pollution rhetoric taking an even more polemical and divisive tone. Priests who cannot prove their descent from Aaron are excluded as “polluted” (Ezra 2:62 and Neh 7:64 use ‫“ גאל‬be filthy,” a near synonym for ‫“ טמא‬pollute, polluted”). Ezra and Nehemiah accuse priests of polluting themselves and the temple by marrying foreigners who worship ‫“ תועבות‬disgusting things” (Ezra 9:1, 11, 14) and by allowing foreigners into the temple (Neh. 13:28-29). They depict foreigners as inherently polluted: “it is a menstruating (‫ )נדה‬land because of the menstruation (‫ )נדה‬of the peoples of the lands, because of their disgusting things (‫ )תועבה‬that fill it from end to end with their pollution (‫( ”)טמא‬Ezra 9:11; also 6:21; see Klawans 2000, 45; on the translation of ‫נדה‬, see Exegesis to Lev. 15:19). In these books, fear of religious apostasy leads to an outright ban on intermarriage (Ezra 10) and to defining ethnic differences in terms of purity and pollution. Jewish purification practices during the later Second Temple period were influenced by Leviticus 11-15, as evidenced by archeology as well as literature (see Exposition to Leviticus 15). Interpretations of the biblical rules also spiritualized purity issues in ways that equated pollution with immorality (Aristeas 142-48; Philo, Laws 4.100-118; see Klawans 2000, 156; Harrington 2004, 27; Lawrence 2006, 64-70). The Dead Sea Scrolls reveal that the Qumran community maintained rigorous purity standards by extending the Bible’s restrictions on priests (Lev. 21) to the community as a whole, and holding priests to an even higher standard (Harrington 2004, 24). That community’s rules about purification became stricter over the course of its 200-year history, and increasingly equated purity with morality (Werrett 2013, 515; also Klawans 2000, 90; Harrington 2004, 41-42). The Qumran scrolls show, however, that scrupulous attention to bodily purification was quite compatible with spiritualizing interpretations of how purification works, as Harrington noted: “According to the Community Rule, only the spirit of holiness can actually cleanse the sinner from his ‘spirit of impurity’ (1QS 4.20-21) .... The ‘spirit of life’ is the only thing that can counteract the deadness of leprosy (4Q268; 4Q272)” (Harrington 2004, 40; also Lawrence 2006, 153). The rabbinic sages dealt with the same issues, but consistently “took a more lenient stance in matters of impurity” (Harrington 2004, 8). The danger of polluting the sanctuary became irrelevant after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 C.E. Yet the Mishnah devoted a great deal of attention to trying to understand temple rituals that were no longer being practised. The relationship of these ritual texts to post-70 ritual practice (see Introduction §2.3.6 in Leviticus 1-10) is therefore even more difficult to determine than usual, as Jacob Neusner (1973, 72) noted: “Certain Mishnaic pericopae take for granted a priestly and cultic setting, while others assume the law is to be kept at home by ordinary people, not priests. These assumptions constituted

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

15

two important and divergent interpretations of purity.” There is much evidence that many Jews in the Second Temple period were already trying to maintain their purity in every-day life and that people continued to do so in Late Antiquity. Rabbinic literature shows that concern for washing hands before eating (m. Ber. 8:1-2) spread to doing so before reciting the Schema (m. Ber. 3:4-6), praying (b. Ber. 14b), or studying Torah (t. Ber. 2:11-12; Klawans 2006, 201). While concerns about the effects of corpse pollution and infestation declined, eating only kosher meats and purification after intercourse and menstruation became characteristic practices of the Torahobservant life (see Exposition to Leviticus 11, 12, and 15 below). Rabbinic literature presupposed that one should preserve food and bodily purity, but focused primarily on the moral lessons taught by purity regulations through allegorical interpretation (Neusner 1973, 72-73). Many early Christians seem to have taken positions at the opposite end of the spectrum from the Qumran sectarians. They spiritualized pollution to the point of overriding most purification requirements (e.g. 1 Cor. 8:1-13, 10:23-30). The NT used debates around polluted foods and hand washing to distinguish Jesus and his apostles from other first-century Jewish groups (Mark 7:1-23; Matt. 15:1-20; also Gos. Thom. 14). Modern scholars disagree about the historical practices behind these distinctions. For example, Eric Ottenheijm (2000, 129-47) argued that, in contrast to Qumran, both Hillelite Pharisees and Jesus matintained that people’s mental intentions pollute, rather than any physical material itself. On the other hand, Peter Tomson (2000, 84-88) argued that Jesus (Mark 7:1-23) took a more conservative position than Pharisaic halakhah, while it was Peter who challenged social separation over pollution (Acts 10:1-29), which was more like Hillel’s position (m. Avot 2:4). At any rate, it is clear that the NT tends to characterize concern for food purity as “Jewish” (Mark 7:3; Acts 10:28) in order to highlight and distinguish Christian universalism: “Thus he [Jesus] declared all foods clean” (Mark 7:19; also Acts 10:14-15; Blidstein 2017, 229). That emphasis obscures how much NT ideas, which varied among themselves, were shaped by wide-ranging debates within first-century Judaism. The Christian churches of Late Antiquity did not pay much attention to the purity rules of Leviticus in their liturgical readings or even commentaries (e.g. Origen). The third-century Christian author of the Didascalia distinguished the abiding force of the Ten Commandments from the now superseded “second legislation,” which includes almost all other Pentateuchal regulations and especially the purity rules (Fonrobert 2000, 182). But Christian concern about pollution increased over time, especially for preserving the purity of the Eucharist (Rouwhorst 2000, 182-84). The popular view that Christianity replaced pollution with sin does not accord well with early Christians’ conflicting views of pollution and its various manifestations. For

16

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

example, Virginia Burrus (2004, 513) noted that whereas Tertullian argued that baptism and martyrdom both purify and sanctify, Origen insisted that baptism symbolizes purification of the spirit through ascetic practice, while Augustine described sin as infecting all humans since Adam, including the church which is therefore also impure. Thus, much more than rabbinic sources, many ancient Christian writers generalized sin’s polluting effects as omnipresent, except perhaps in some Christian communities (Rouwhorst 2000, 189). Furthermore, the fact that Christian leaders repeatedly felt the need to argue against observing purity rules is itself evidence that bodily purification was being practised in Christian communities in Late Antiquity (Tomson 2000, 75-76). Rhetoric about pollution and purification practices, which Leviticus 18 and 20 use to distinguish and separate Israel, was used by later communities to distinguish and separate themselves from each other, either by supporting or opposing its pollution regulations. Later Christians have often followed the NT’s model of using anti-pollution rhetoric to criticize real or imagined Jewish practices in order to show that they themselves are not Jewish. Thus Christian anti-pollution rhetoric has often reinforced anti-Semitic prejudices and still does so today in some Christian communities (Jenkins 2006, 65-66). Christians have also used anti-pollution rhetoric to criticize the purity and pollution practices of various cultures into which Christianity was imported. For example, several medieval Roman popes felt it necessary to write letters condemning the beliefs of various Irish, Anglo-Saxon, and German Christian communities who regarded sexual intercourse, childbirth, and menstruation as polluting.6 Yet the tendency to demonize enemies has also led many Christians to justify their wars as “purifying” land from polluted and polluting enemies. Popes and preachers accused Muslims of polluting sacred sites in the Holy Land to spur on medieval crusaders.7 Colonizers of the Americas denounced intermarriage with indigenous people as polluting the Europeans.8 Anti-pollution rhetoric has also been used by Christian minority groups against majority cultures in which they find themselves. In India today, for example, Christian criticism of pollution beliefs and purity practices is intensified by the fact that the majority of Indian Christians are Dalits. The traditional Indian caste hierarchy places Dalits at the bottom because they are regarded as inherently polluted and “untouchable.” The Dalit Bible Commentary on 6 Rob Meens, “ ‘A Relic of Superstition’: Bodily Impurity and the Church from Gregory the Great to the Twelfth Century Decretists,” in Poorthuis-Schwartz (2000), 281-93. 7 Penny J. Cole, “ ‘O God, the heathen have come into your inheritance’ (Ps 78.1): The Theme of Religious Pollution in Crusade Documents, 1099-1188,” in Crusaders and Muslims in 12th c. Syria (ed. M. Shatzmiller; Leiden: Brill, 1993), 84-111; A. Angenendt, “Die Kreuzzüge,” in Krieg und Christentum (ed. A. Holzem; Paderbor: Schöningh, 2009), 341-67. 8 Paul Stevens, “ ‘Leviticus Thinking’ and the Rhetoric of Early Modern Colonialism,” Criticism 35/3 (1993), 441-61 [453].

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

17

Leviticus and Numbers by Indukuri John Mohan Razu therefore recognized the social power dynamics in Leviticus 11-15 more clearly than most interpreters by explicit comparison with the Hindu caste structure: Like Hebraic tradition, Brahmanic Hinduism also demarcates between what is ‘pure’ and what is ‘polluted’. The Brahmin priests in a Hindu society take control of almost every aspect of a person’s life. ... We have seen in these chapters how a person afflicted with some disease or other is segregated from the society so that he/she does not ‘pollute’ others. Who will empathize with such unfortunate people more than the Dalits in Indian society? For more than three millennia they have been experiencing this humiliation of living a segregated life as ‘untouchables’ even when they are not even afflicted by any contagious disease. ... Contrary to these dominant practices and systems, the Dalits customary habits and belief systems are much more liberal and inclusive. For example, unlike Hebraic system and Brahmanic system who view a menstruating woman as ‘unclean’, the Dalits view it as normal biological factor and do not segregate them in any way. The community takes care when someone gets infected with skin or other disease like leprosy and gives support to him. The way they understand the world is more humane, rational and practical. (Razu 2011, 93-94)

Other Christians in India and Africa revived observance of some purity practices in Leviticus in opposition to Western Christian colonialism. The Hindu Christian Church was founded in the nineteenth century with an appeal to cleanse Christianity of its Western decadence by observing biblical festivals and purification regulations (Sugirtharajah 2005, 175-89). Twentieth-century members of the Shembe Churches of South Africa, many African Zionists, and Jamaican Rastafarians assumed the identity of biblical Nazirites (Num. 6) and followed the diet and personal purity regulations of Leviticus 11 and 15 (Jenkins 2006, 50; van Zyl 1995, 429-34; Savishinsky 1998, 139). Thus the reception of the pollution regulations of Leviticus has often been shaped decisively by the social and communal conflicts in which congregations find themselves. The pollution rhetoric from these kinds of communal conflicts continues to echo subconsciously in Western culture as well. It can be recognized behind academic debates about the difference between moral and ritual pollution (see below) and in congregational arguments about the “purity” of religious authorities that restricts the possibility of women becoming priests, rabbis, or Torah scribes. Pollution rhetoric continues to shape Christian preaching about sexual and institutional purity,9 and can infect nationalistic rhetoric, too. American Evangelicals, for example, preach purity as a national ideal in a “patriot’s prayer” circulated by some churches that links biblical scripture and purity directly: 9 Sara Moslener, Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

18

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20 I pray Thee, Lord, restore the love that once burned in our nation’s breast, For that old “Book” that’s from above that keeps a nation clean and blessed.10

PURITY AND POLLUTION IN RECENT BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP Recent scholarship on Leviticus has looked for the ideological system behind P’s ritual regulations. This effort was inspired especially by Jacob Milgrom’s belief that P is “a self-contained system – logical, coherent and whole” (1976, 2; for discussion, see Introduction §2.3.3 in Leviticus 1-10). This quest for ideological consistency, however, has been frustrated by the variety and gaps in the kinds of pollution and methods of purification described in Leviticus 11-22. Leviticus rarely interprets the meaning of its ritual regulations. The book, however, does provide three explicit motives for preserving or restoring one’s purity, and each is different. Leviticus 11:44-45 links purity to Israel’s holiness as a form of imitatio dei (also 19:2; 20:7-8, 26): For I am YHWH your God. You must make yourselves holy and be holy, because I am holy. Do not pollute yourselves with any swarmer that scrambles on the ground, for I am YHWH who brought you up from the land of Egypt to be God for you. You are holy because I am holy.

Leviticus 15:31 emphasizes the threat pollution poses to the Tabernacle (also 20:3): You must warn the Israelites away from their pollution, so they don’t die from their pollution by polluting my Tabernacle which is among them.

Leviticus 20:24-26 describes preserving purity as a means for protecting Israel’s holiness through social separation from other peoples: I am YHWH your God who separated you from the nations. You must separate pure quadrupeds from the polluted, and polluted flyers from the pure, so you do not nauseate yourselves with quadrupeds, flyers and everything that scrambles on the ground which I have separated as polluted for you. You are holy to me because I, YHWH, am holy. I have separated you from the peoples to be mine.

Commentators have detected the distinctive vocabulary and ideas of H in all three texts (see above). Separating these verses from P, however, leaves P’s purification regulations without any explanatory comments. It does not 10 “The Patriot’s Prayer” in Central Connection, newsletter of the Central Christian Church in St. Joseph, Missouri (June 22, 2005), quoted in full by Dorina Miller Parmenter, The Iconic Book: The Image of the Christian Bible in Myth and Ritual, Ph.D. Dissertation, Syracuse University, 2009, 154.

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

19

help to systematize H’s ideas of pollution either, since the three texts refer to three different ideas: imitation of God, the threat to the Tabernacle posed by pollution, and Israel’s cultural distinctiveness. The idea that pollution is antithetical to holiness unites all three texts (assuming the Tabernacle’s status as holy space), but that simply entangles the problem of how to understand pollution in Leviticus with the problem of how to understand ‫קדושׁ‬ “holy, holiness” in this book (see Exegesis to 2:3 and Introduction to Leviticus 21-27). Nor does etymology help much. The HB’s usage defines the dichotomy of ‫“ טהור‬pure” and ‫“ טמא‬polluted” almost entirely as each other’s opposite (e.g. 10:10). However, unlike many translations that render one as the lack of the other (“clean-unclean,” “pure-impure,” so already LXX: see ErbeleKüster 2017, 50), the Hebrew words are from different roots. Like English “pure” and “polluted,” each has its own semantic valence. ‫“ טהר‬pure,” for example, is associated with radiance in Ugaritic and in Exod. 24:10 (Feder 2014, 91). Nevertheless, the terms function in biblical Hebrew almost exclusively to define opposite ontological states. Commentators and other interpreters have usually tried to find one key idea that unifies P’s idea of pollution, and often a different one for H. The following survey, therefore, is organized around the principles that they have proposed. Pollution and Social Hierarchy Most attempts in the last half century to theorize the nature of purity and pollution take as their starting point the 1966 book, Purity and Danger, by the anthropologist, Mary Douglas. She is famous for stating that dirt is “matter out of place” (1966, 44). She argued that social hierarchies determine whether something or someone is out of place or not: Pollution powers … inhere to the structure of ideas itself and … punish a symbolic breaking of that which should be joined or a joining of that which should be separate. It follows from this that pollution is a type of danger which is not likely to occur except where the lines of structure, cosmic or social, are clearly defined. (Douglas 1966, 140)

Pollution beliefs not only instruct people in what to do or not do, they also express an ideal of social order (3-5). Pollution then is an anomaly in the system that must be dealt with by avoidance or by purification (48-50). Douglas argued that pollution does not really pose physical threats like disease but rather threats against the internal and external boundaries of society (151-53). She thought that Israel’s constant need to protect itself against more powerful groups led to its focus on food and bodily discharges that threaten an individual’s bodily cohesion (153, 157).

20

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

Douglas’s theory of pollution as maintaining social order has proven very influential in biblical studies as well as in anthropology. Leviticus explicitly invokes the social context of group competition by calling on Israel to “separate” itself from other nations, precisely by following the purity regulations (Lev. 20:25-26). Pollution’s function in maintaining internal divisions and hierarchies also explains why the burden of purification falls disproportionately on women, who were disadvantaged by Israel’s patriarchal hierarchies (see Exposition to Leviticus 15). David Wright (1991, 178) observed that noncompliance with relatively minor pollution rules can raise suspicions that these individuals might also not comply with moral regulations. Pollution rules can therefore serve purposes of surveillance and social control. Saul Olyan has highlighted the hierarchical function of the biblical purity system, a function that has often been denied (most notably by Douglas herself in her later books about the Bible). Olyan observed that “the gradations of pollution are implicit, reflected in the amount of time spent unclean, the content and time investment of the rites required to achieve purification, and the expense of purification in terms of the offerings required” (Olyan 2000, 39). Pollution taboos reinforce the hierarchies indexed by temple rituals: they distinguish male priests favourably as especially pure, they reinforce sexual norms, and women experience the most burdensome purification requirements. Olyan added that the rules for Nazirites (Num. 6) provide ambitious lay individuals a means to use purification to gain greater social and religious status, analogous to that of priests (Olyan 2000, 55-61). Some interpreters have given the social consequences of the pollution regulations a theological cast. Milgrom argued that P divided humanity on the basis of three covenants: one with all humans (Gen. 9), one with Israel (Gen. 17), and one with Aaronide Priests (Num. 25). So all animals are permitted as food to humans in general, only some to Israel, and even fewer on the altar. “The dietary system is thus a reflection and reinforcement of Israel’s election” (Milgrom 725). Other interpreters, however, object on moral grounds to depicting the Torah’s pollution regulations as enforcing social separation and hierarchy. Surprisingly, they include Douglas who, in her later works (1993, 82; 1999, vii-viii), repudiated her earlier views about hierarchy in the Pentateuch, arguing that it depicts Israel as a republic instead. She ignored the fact that Leviticus’s rituals and laws empowered the priestly Aaronide hierarchy of the Second Temple period. Douglas’s 1966 book reflected the social functionalism of anthropology in that era. Research of the following decades (see Bell 1992, 35-37, 13640) argued that rituals create social distinctions as much as they reflect preexisting ones, and so do ritual texts. Christophe Nihan (2013, 353) therefore observed that “the rituals defined in the text of Leviticus claim to overcome a basic, or central opposition (between clean and unclean), which

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

21

they contribute to generating.” The link between pollution and social order runs through the text of Leviticus itself, which is simultaneously a product of and a producer of pollution beliefs and the social structures that they generate and enforce. Polluting the Holy Sanctuary Very many interpreters accept and reproduce a spatial analysis of how P thought that pollution threatened God’s presence in the Tabernacle and Temple (e.g. Gorman 1990; Jenson 1990, 89-114; Gane 2005, 149-57; Klingbeil 2007, 159-68; Hundley 2011; Frevel 2013, 371-76, 379-81; Cranz 2017, 101-104, 126-42). I will focus on the arguments of the most prominent and influential advocate for this interpretation, Jacob Milgrom. P’s belief that ritual pollution endangered the sanctuary drove Milgrom’s reconstruction of pollution and purity in Leviticus. He argued consistently in many publications that holiness and pollution are polar opposites for P. They are conceived as dynamic forces whose contact threatens God’s residence in the sanctuary (Milgrom 256-59, 616-17, 731-33; also Milgrom 1990, 346-48, 444-49). He expounded on the four-fold distinction in Lev. 10:10 to argued that the categories of the common and pure are static while the holy and polluted are dynamic opposites that must be kept separate at all costs. Pollution of the sanctuary is a great danger because it was believed to drive away God’s presence (Milgrom 1990, 444-47). Milgrom’s description of this opposition has been decisive for many other interpreters. Milgrom thought that pollution of various strengths is an airborne miasma that penetrates into the sanctuary (Milgrom 1990, 445-46), but such a description does not appear in the HB. P does not depict gradations of pollution in the Tabernacle, but instead describes purification rituals that penetrate different distances into the sanctuary. Most go no further than the courtyard altar (4:34-35), but some go inside the Holy Space (4:5-7), and occasionally all the way into the Holiest Space (16:11-17). Interpreters usually assume that this reflects the severity of the pollution (e.g. Gorman 1990, 79-81; Cranz 2017, 104), as does the time required to cleanse it: one day or seven days, up to eighty days (e.g. Jenson 90-91, 165-71; Hundley 2011, 151-54; Nihan 2013, 332-34). However, Naphtali Meshel observed that describing various kinds of impurity as more or less severe does not accurately represent P’s thinking: There are, in fact, seemingly weak impurities of very long duration ... (Lev. 12:4, 5b ...). On the other hand, there are short-term, one-day impurities that require seclusion from the camp, just as some severe and highly contagious diseases can be of brief duration (Lev. 16:26; Num. 19:7). (Meshel 2019, 130-31)

22

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

He suggested that interpreters should instead rank pollutions on three separate scales measuring their tenacity, their degree of contagion, and their duration. One can also imagine other motives for ritually distinguishing spaces of purification in the Tabernacle that do not involve gradations in the severity of pollution (see Exegesis to 16:16). Though Milgrom’s theories of the opposition between holiness and pollution have been well received, his idea that the sin and guilt offerings purified only the sanctuary has been more controversial. Most other interpreters think that the person making offerings is also purified (see Leviticus 1-10, 321 and Exegesis to 16:16 below). The purification rituals described in Leviticus 11-15 all have people and their personal possessions as their objects. The theory that ritual pollution was primarily believed to endanger the sanctuary suffers other weaknesses. The pollution rules of Leviticus 11-20 do not mention the sanctuary much. The dangerous consequences of polluting the Tabernacle are mentioned in 15:31, probably to foreshadow the purification rituals of the Day of Mitigations in chap. 16 which focus on the sanctuary (Elliger 196). While new mothers are restricted from holy spaces and things (12:4), infested people are restricted from the entire camp (13:46), so the contagious pollution of infestation seems to endanger their neighbours, not just the Tabernacle. The punishments for illicit sexual intercourse begin by invoking the danger of polluting the Tabernacle (20:3), but end by emphasizing the danger of polluting the land (20:22-24). Defiling the sanctuary becomes a greater concern in chaps. 21-22 because they detail purity rules for priests and worshippers in the sanctuary (21:12, 23; 22:9). Interpreters have assumed that isolating infested people was believed necessary because contagious pollution might be carried unwittingly into the Tabernacle by other people. That idea then requires developing a theory of relative degrees of contagion (see above) to explain why other polluted people are not banned from the camp. It also produces diachronic reconstructions of Israel’s developing purity beliefs, since other texts do in fact ban all polluted people from the camp (Num. 5:2-4). The problem is that, aside from 12:4 and 15:31, chaps. 11-15 do not specify the negative effects of being polluted in relation to the sanctuary or to anything or anyone else, though they do hint at the social consequences. The purification rituals for people healed of infestation take them across a series of spatial boundaries over eight days, from outside the camp to outside the person’s own tent to the plaza of the meeting tent (14:3, 8, 11). However, the implicit but clear consequence of finally being mitigated and declared pure (14:20) is that purified people may now take up residence at home in their own tent (Gorman 1990, 152). The spatial movement accomplished by this ritual is from social isolation outside the camp to social reintegration at home. In that process, the rituals in the

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

23

Tabernacle plaza are an important way station, but not the final goal. Therefore, Erhard Gerstenberger (129) rightly concluded: The basic tendency of these purity laws seems focused on private life. Nowhere do they betray the intention of making the lay members of the congregation (who constitute the exclusive focus here) fit for a visit to a worship service or to the temple, that is, of purifying them. This purity is conceived rather within the context of daily and domestic life. Hence cultic purity is not only a prerequisite for visiting holy sites; it is also of significance for the discharge of one’s life as such.

Polluting the Holy People Chapter 11 concludes its food rules by urging obedience in order to preserve the holiness of the people of Israel and the purity of their land (11:44-45; similarly 18:25-28; 19:2; 20:22-26). That statement works in Leviticus 11-20 as a motivation for preserving purity more than does protecting the Tabernacle, which is mentioned only in passing in 15:31 and 20:3. Eyal Regev argued that the food rules of Leviticus 11 represent nonpriestly purity issues, because they are not associated with the Tabernacle or preserving its sanctity. He therefore concluded that they were voluntary in Second Temple Judaism. Late Second Temple concern for purity as attested by stone vessels and rabbinic discussions was, according to Regev, not due to imitating priests (contra Neusner 1973, 89) but rather “purity for its own sake ... it is the religious consciousness and the endeavor to approach God through Torah and prayer that lie behind the concept of non-priestly purity” (Regev 2000, 240). This evidence for spreading notions of “lay purity” in Second Temple Judaism shows how the increasing scripturalizing of Torah motivated purity observances. But it also suggests that political circumstances, especially antiHellenistic tendencies, may have fuelled the identification of purity observance as a group identity issue. Since it is clear that group identity through purity, represented most obviously by claims of gentile impurity, intensified in fourth-to-first-century-B.C.E. Judaism, some have argued that the issue was not original to the biblical system (Maccoby 1999; see further below and Gane 2005, 146-51). The language of separation from gentiles on the basis of purity, however, already finds a place in Leviticus’s rhetoric (18:2-3, 24-30; 20:22-26). Even if ideals of lay purity motivated the practices described in Leviticus 11-15, Lev. 11:44-45 does not clarify how pollution endangers the people’s holiness. Milgrom argued that “biblical impurity and holiness are semantic opposites” (Milgrom, 1990, 346) and that “the sacred may never be impure” (Milgrom 732). However, when consecrated priests become impure, they

24

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

must purify themselves but they are not reconsecrated (Num. 19:7).11 Pollution coming into contact with holy places endangers the polluted person rather than the sanctuary (Lev. 8:35; 10:6-7; 15:31; 19:8; 22:3-9; Kugler 1997, 14-15; Philip 2006, 121). Pollution does not seem to automatically drive out holiness. Therefore, Leigh Trevaskis (2011, 68-69) suggested that, for P, the states of being holy or secular could each have the condition of being either polluted or pure (also Wright 2019, 218-19). A more fundamental criticism was voiced by Nicole Ruane, who aptly noted that most theological explanations for pollution rules are circular arguments: they maintain that “purity is important for being near God because God is like purity” (Ruane 2013, 156). Pollution as Symbolizing Death Many interpreters have argued that the opposition between holiness and pollution was believed by priestly writers to represent the dynamic forces of life and death. Polluted things were marked by their association with death, either through the loss of life-forces by emission of genital blood and semen, or through visible bodily decay (infestations), whereas holiness is marked by life and wholeness (Milgrom 819; 1002-1003). This explanation for pollution beliefs as symbolizing death has been popular (also Feldman 1977; Wenham 218; Eilberg-Schwartz 1990, 179; Hartley 145; Gorman 1990, 168; Marx 2001; Hieke 446) and finds some root in the fact that infested people must comport themselves like mourners (13:45). Examining the vocabulary of Leviticus 11-15, however, undermines this thesis. The noun, ‫“ מות‬death,” does not appear, while its verbal root is used only for animal corpses (11:31-32, 39) and in the concluding warning (15:31). The word, ‫“ חי‬living, life,” does not necessarily distinguish purity but describes raw flesh which may be polluted by infestation (13:10, 14, 24), fresh water which is pure, and living birds which are also pure (14:4-7). Nor does fear of death explain the chapters’ interest in blood: they are not concerned by bleeding wounds which can threaten a person’s life, but only by menstrual and lochial bleeding which do not (Whitekettle 1996, 377; ErbeleKüster 2017, 144). Nicole Ruane (2013, 153-55) criticized theories of pollution as symbolizing death for not explaining why childbirth is the most severe impurity, as suggested by its longest purification period of forty to eighty days (12:3-4). She also observed that P never claims that death is the greatest impurity, despite the elaborate red-heifer ritual to create water that can purify corpse pollution (Num. 19). In fact, death pollution is much more 11 Richard E. Averback, “Clean and Unclean,” New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1997), 4:477-86 [482].

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

25

prominent in Numbers than in Leviticus (Frevel 2013, 400-406). All these observations show that Leviticus does not clearly categorize pollution as death or as resembling death. The association of pollution with death seems to have accumulated over time, confirming Michael Hundley’s (2011, 29) observation that “symbolism is not the driving force of ritual. Instead of being the raison d’être of the ritual system, symbolism merely ‘grows in and around’ sacrificial ritual.” Jacob Milgrom argued that Israel replaced beliefs in demons that were common in surrounding cultures with a symbolic system of life-death oppositions determined by human actions alone. This idea, he wrote, “constitutes the priestly theodicy … found not in utterances but in rituals, not in legal statutes but in cultic procedures – specifically in the rite with the hatta’t blood” (Milgrom 1079; 1990, 447; following Kaufmann 1952, 1:525-44, 539-45; 2:passim). Mary Douglas developed this idea to argue that Leviticus systematically eradicated and replaced the role of demonology in sacrifice and divination (1999, 10-11, 189-90). This theory was criticized by Baruch Levine (250-53; 1974, 79-91) who found apotropaic and prophylactic magic for warding off demons throughout the priestly ritual texts and especially in the scapegoat ritual (Lev. 16:20-22), by Yitzhaq Feder (2013, 159-64) who thought purification rituals were motivated by fear of infection in both the HB and other ancient cultures, and by Isabel Cranz (2017) who argued that the social location of Israel’s priests in the temple, rather than as healers in homes, explains the differences between Akkadian and Hebrew ritual texts, not the presence or absence of demonology. The fact that modern interpreters find evidence for opposite explanations in the same texts raises the question of where this postulated intellectual system of theodicy without demons resided: in the minds of worshippers, just in the minds of priests, or just among biblical writers (Nihan 2013, 327). One also wonders why the writers of Leviticus did not make their opposition to demonology explicit. Other HB texts describe “evil spirits” from YHWH (1 Sam. 16:14; cf. Exod. 12:23; 1 Kgs. 22:19-23). Leviticus is quick to denounce rituals involving other gods (Lev. 17:7), dead spirits (19:31; 20:6, 27), and Molek (20:2-5). Nevertheless, the absence of demons from Leviticus contrasts not only with other ancient Near Eastern cultures but also with later Second Temple Jewish and Christian apocalypticism (e.g. Tob. 3:8, 17; Test. Reub. 2:1; Matt. 8:16; 1 Cor. 10:20; Rev. 18:2).12 This distinctive feature does suggest that Leviticus may have suppressed mention of demons and exorcisms. That left it perpetuating fear of infection from pollution without providing any substitute healing rituals or providing explanations for pollution. 12

G. J. Riley, “Demon,” in DDD (1999), 235-40.

26

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

A variation on the thesis that pollution symbolizes fear of death maintains that pollution represents loss of control. Mary Douglas advanced this idea in her early anthropological research on pollution as a means of social control. She argued that fears of menstrual and sexual pollution appear especially in societies in which men struggle to control women: When the principle of male dominance is applied to the ordering of social life but is contradicted by other principles such as that of female independence, or the inherent right of women as the weaker sex to be more protected from violence than men, then sex pollution is likely to flourish. (Douglas 1966, 196)

Howard Eilberg-Schwartz (1990, 186-92) turned loss of control into one of three key dichotomies (along with men/women and life/death) for understanding not only P, but the development of purity ideas in Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaisms: as cultures increasingly expected individuals to control their own status, they increasingly internalized ideas of purity and pollution. Christophe Nihan integrated a theory of social control through purification rules with a spatial analysis of the defences around the Tabernacle’s holiness. He charted the danger of loss of control against the severity of the pollution (Nihan 2013, 328-36; but see the critique of such relative scales of pollutions by Meshel 2019, 130-31, quoted above). Dorothea Erbele-Küster (2017, 127-33) found pollution understood as lack of control in P’s description of a menstruating woman as ‫דוה‬, which she translated “destabilized.” Loss of bodily or social control, however, does not account for the systematically parallel presentation of male and female genital emissions in Leviticus 15, one of which is individually controlled while the others are not (Ellens 2008, 64), much less the diet rules of Leviticus 11 which seem to have nothing to do with loss of control. Many reconstructions of P’s ideology of pollution stumble over the food rules of Leviticus 11, which do not allow for easy classification under dichotomies like life versus death or holiness versus pollution. Therefore, interpreters have often concluded that the diet rules have different rationales from the rest (e.g. Wright 1991, 165; Klawans 2000, 32; Nihan 2013, 322, 336-38), but that leaves unexplained why P thought they belong together. Milgrom and Douglas tried to integrate the diet rules into their systems. Milgrom (735) concluded that, because the diet rules are motivated by a call to holiness (11:44-45) and holiness is associated with life, diet rules aim to teach reverence for life by restricting which animals can be eaten, where they can be slaughtered, how they should be slaughtered, and by prohibiting ingestion of blood and fat. Milgrom thus reintroduced a moralizing way of interpreting the purity rules that was popular among ancient and medieval interpreters, though he emphasized moral formation through ritual observance rather than allegorical significance. In her later work on Leviticus, Douglas (1999, 1-2, 11,

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

27

135-75) adapted Milgrom’s observations into a more symbolic interpretation of diet purity as protecting animal life. Their claims bring us to another major theme among interpreters of Leviticus’s pollution rules: the possible relationships between pollution and morality. Morality and Pollution The fact that sin and pollution must be rectified in the same way, by bringing sin and guilt offerings (Lev. 4-5, 12:6; 14:12, 19, 21-22; 15:15, 30), has puzzled and discomfited interpreters for millennia. It contributed to the ancient tendency to moralize purity rules (see above). However, the practice of using the same purification rituals to mitigate sin and pollution was already well established in Mesopotamian rituals in the early second millennium B.C.E. Guichard and Marti (2013, 106) concluded from their analysis of Sumerian and Assyrian purification rituals that Impurity, in the same manner as fault, provoked divine wrath that descended upon the victim, who then experienced numerous trials. Because of that connection, impurity appears now as intimately linked to the vocabulary of fault; purification happened at the same time as the elimination of sins.

Karel van der Toorn (1985, 27) argued that purity rules grew out of a sense of etiquette: Etiquette introduces the notion of pleasure as a norm of behaviour. ... both infringements of the moral code and offences against the etiquette aroused the strong disapproval of the gods. In religionibus, then, ethics and etiquette converge, notwithstanding the fact that the two realms may be differently perceived by man, because some of the divine desires are echoed by his sense of justice, while others can only be respected out of consideration for the personal likes and dislikes of the gods.

Modern scholarship on Leviticus 11-15 has emphasized that pollution does not involve any moral evaluation. Some actions that are morally acceptable and even divinely commanded, such as sexual intercourse and giving birth (Gen. 1:27-28), create pollution that must be purified. Like many other interpreters, Tikva Frymer-Kensky distinguished P’s clinical descriptions of pollution from the use of pollution to blame and shame in other biblical books: Biblical Israel had two separate sets of what anthropologists would consider “pollution beliefs”: a set discussed extensively as pollutions in the Priestly laws, since the priests were responsible for preventing the contamination of the pure and the Holy; and a set of beliefs that we might term “danger beliefs” .... The ritual pollutions may have accompanying rituals of purification and readmission; the danger pollutions cannot be ameliorated in this way, although there is a sense that repentance and sacrifice can avert some if not all of the calamity. The state induced by committing one of these infractions is also not contagious. (FrymerKensky 1983, 404)

28

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

Hyam Maccoby went further by utilizing Milgrom’s temple-centred theory of pollution against Milgrom’s tendency to moralize purity. He argued that the pollution regulations “are not a coded philosophy, but just what they purport to be, rules for the conduct of a priestly society, in which a sense of constant attendance on God demands a protocol which in no way supersedes the demands of ordinary duties to neighbours, family and strangers” (Maccoby 1999, 195). He argued that, apart from sexual intercourse with a menstruating woman, Leviticus does not forbid polluting acts which are therefore not sinful like immoral acts (Maccoby 1999, 38). This last assertion, however, does not take into account the food regulations of Leviticus 11 which explicitly forbid eating polluted meats, though they mandate no penalty for doing so. Attempts to explain the distinction and relationship between ritual and moral purity have therefore played a prominent role in recent scholarship (e.g. Neusner 1973; Wright 1991; Douglas 1999, 11, 141, 168; Klawans 2000; Milgrom 1572-75; Trevaskis 2011, 93-101; Nihan 2013, 339-50). Like Frymer-Kensky, most interpreters have argued that being ritually polluted simply meant that Israelites could not access the sanctuary and its offerings, but carried no other negative implications. Some have argued that moral pollution is a metaphorical application of ritual pollution to moral transgressions. Jacob Neusner (1973, 78) observed that Second Temple sectarian polemics led many groups to describe their opponents as more concerned for purity than morality. He argued that these concerns faded in later rabbinic literature, which was more likely to see pollution as a metaphor or sign of immorality. Maccoby (1999, 205) concluded that in Leviticus, moral injunctions explain what the ritual is for, namely to distinguish Israel as a holy people characterized also by moral behaviour. Jonathan Klawans argued that both the Bible and ancient Judaism distinguished between ritual impurity and moral impurity (Klawans 2000, vii). Contra Neusner, Klawans (34) maintained that impurity was not used metaphorically or as a sign of sin. Instead, he argued that ritual impurity was distinguished from moral impurity by three characteristics: its sources are natural and mostly unavoidable, it is not a sin to become ritually impure, and ritual impurity is impermanent (10, 23-24). Moral impurity, by contrast, is due to sin and is therefore not contagious by physical contact. It creates long-lasting degradations of sinners and of the land of Israel. Moral impurity cannot be ameliorated by purification rituals, but only by punishment (Klawans 2000, 26; he added “atonement,” but purification rituals also ‫כפר‬ “mitigate, atone,” Lev. 12:7, etc.). Klawans had to admit, however, that the ritual impurity of menstrual blood gets used frequently in the HB to castigate Israel for its sins. Other biblical books do use a metaphorical relationships between the two conceptions of purity, such as Ezra-Nehemiah’s description

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

29

of pollution due to intermarriage (Klawans 2000, 44-46). But he maintained that the distinction between moral and ritual purity continued in the earlier Qumran documents and in rabbinic literature (Klawans 2000, 117, 134). Klawans mounted the most sustained attempt to distinguish sharply between morality and pollution, something that many interpreters have tried to do. Leviticus, however, does not support such clear-cut distinctions. Nihan (2013, 344-48) pointed out the difficulties in applying Klawans’ thesis to the verses of this book: First, 16:16 extends ritual mitigation to all of Israel’s “pollutions ... their transgressions, for all their sins.” Second, 4:2 offers mitigation for “sinning by mistake against any of YHWH’s commandments that should not be done.” Third, 5:2-3 presupposes an equivalence between negligent pollution of the Tabernacle and breaking YHWH’s commandments. He concluded therefore that “the boundaries between ‘physical’ and ‘moral’ impurities are, in fact, fluid at least with regard to the rituals for pollution” (Nihan 2013, 248; see also 2014, 5-7).13 Interpreters’ attempts to sharply distinguish morality from pollution have been prompted by unease about the fact that biblical and post-biblical rhetoric seems to draw some kind of equivalence between ritual purity and morality, as do many traditional cultures studied by ethnographers (Douglas 1966, 16072). Just because ritual pollution involves natural and unavoidable physical functions does not necessarily mean that it escapes moral censure. This is best illustrated in biblical traditions by the fact that rhetoric about morality and pollution focuses especially on women by highlighting menstruation and sexual intercourse. Douglas (1966, 141-59) argued that purity regulations appear in patriarchal societies in which women nevertheless have some degree of autonomy. Therefore, Ruane observed: “even though something is natural, it may not necessarily be valued as positive. ... the biblical emphasis on sexual impurities reflects the worldview that sexuality and human reproduction are problematic, dangerous, and in need of regulation,” and she suggested that was also the view of women in Israel’s patriarchal culture (Ruane 2013, 158-59, 160-62). In that case, conceptions of ritual and moral purity were probably entangled long before P began to write down these regulations. Studies in cognitive science indicate that this has always been the case, as Kazen summarized them: “human morality is both a rational and an emotional development, innate as well as acquired, and intimately linked to bodily experience” (Kazen 2011, 16, also 23; see further below). Behind interpreters’ widespread concern to distinguish moral from ritual pollution lies the question of which rules continue to be relevant for Jews and Christians. For the ancient rabbis, the question was whether or not the 13 Similarly Joseph Lam, Patterns of Sin in the Hebrew Bible: Metaphor, Culture, and the Making of a Religious Concept (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 187-211.

30

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

Torah’s purification rules still need to be followed after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple. This temporal distinction finds a justification in the concluding motive clause of Lev. 15:31 that warns of deadly consequences for polluting the sanctuary. However, other general motive clauses in Lev. 11-20 connects the food rules to preserving the holiness of the people of Israel (11:44-45; 20:24-26). The question then became which pollutions endanger only the sanctuary but cause no harm in daily life, and which ones endanger the religious identity of the people of Israel. The vocabulary of “morality” versus “ritual,” however, also reflects Christian arguments over law and pollution. From their origins, Christians have tended to differentiate among Pentateuchal rules (see Introduction to Leviticus 1-10, §2.3.9.3). That tendency was codified in the Middle Ages by Thomas Aquinas (ST 2a.99.4-5), who categorized obligatory rules such as the Ten Commandments as “moral” while labelling Pentateuchal rules that were superseded by the Christian Gospel as “ritual.” Christians must observe moral rules, but must not observe ritual rules. This vocabulary is foreign to the text of Leviticus and the HB, as shown by the fact that “ritual” diet restrictions and “moral” rules about sexual intercourse, as well as religious rules about worshipping Molech, are all motivated by exhortations to avoid pollution (11:43-45; 15:31; 18:24-30; 20:3, 25-26). Therefore, deep-seated religious concerns in both Jewish and Christian traditions continue to fuel efforts to distinguish moral from ritual pollution in the Bible. Pollution and Disgust The difficulty with talking about purity and pollution lies precisely in talking about it, or writing about it. Words do not seem adequate for expressing the feeling of being polluted. The words that we employ for it (unclean, dirty, polluted, disgusting, abominated) or that Leviticus employs for it (,‫ שׁקץ‬,‫טמא‬ ‫ נדה‬,‫ תועבה‬,‫ )צרעת‬sound more like emotional expressions than analytical categories. Verbal commentary on written texts about pollution therefore faces greater-than-usual difficulties. Many interpreters have buttressed their belief that pollution was unrelated to morality by asserting that the ritual vocabulary of pollution in Leviticus 11-15 carried no negative emotional connotations at all. As Douglas (1999, 151) put it, “Unclean is not a term of psychological horror and disgust, it is a technical term for the cult” (similarly e.g. Frymer-Kensky 1983, 403; Klawans 2000, 23-25; Erbele-Küster 2017, 142). That description does not accord well with how these chapters frequently use ‫“ טמא‬polluted/ pollution” for rhetorical emphasis, which seems to aim precisely for psychological effect (see below on Priestly Rhetoric, and Exegesis to 11:10-13; 15:31-33; 18:19-30). David Wright described the book’s pollution rhetoric

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

31

more accurately by adopting the anthropologist Clifford Geertz’ definition of religion to argue that the system of pollutions “inculcates moods and motivations that uphold morality by various means. It creates for the society’s members a ubiquitous and perpetual experience of purity and impurity” (Wright 1991, 176). In the past few decades, a combination of linguistics, philosophy, and psychological research, often called “cognitive science,” has provided a powerful new paradigm for understanding pollution ideas and purification practices among other things. A central claim of cognitive science is that human thought is mostly metaphorical, and the most basic metaphors arise directly from bodily and social experiences. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson attributed these basic metaphors to the physiological structure of the brain. Neurons that customarily fire at the same time develop physical connections. They argued, therefore, that analogies generated by simultaneous experiences actually become hard-wired in human brains (Lakoff-Johnson 2003, 256). Affect Theory, developed from a very different intellectual tradition, has joined cognitive science in emphasizing that culturally conditioned affects rise out of embodied experiences that are common not only to humans but to many animals as well.14 Theories of embodied and material metaphors therefore point out, in Nicole Boivin’s words, “a non-linguistic side to understanding” (Boivin 2009, 280-81). Theories of embodied cognition have been introduced into biblical studies by Thomas Kazen and Yitzhaq Feder. They lead to radically rethinking some central arguments about pollution and purity in Leviticus. For example, the claim by cognitive scientists that metaphors are basic to human thought vitiates the many attempts by biblical interpreters to distinguish literal from metaphorical uses of pollution vocabulary. If the experience of becoming dirty with actual dirt is the basic bodily experience, than both ritual and moral applications of the label “dirty” are secondary metaphorical applications (Kazen 2011, 27-28). Psychological studies of disgust also undermine the common belief that fear of death motivated Israel’s pollution rules. Disgust involves especially the senses of taste, smell, and touch and is closely associated with oral ingestion, offensiveness, and the potential for contamination (Kazen 2011, 93). It is aroused especially by experiences of putrefaction and decay and fear of contamination from them, more than by just any encounter with death (Kazen 2011, 35; Feder 2013, 166). All the biblical forms of pollution can be related to reactions of disgust, but disgust is generated by different bodily experiences. Therefore biblical pollution ideas still have several different origins, as Feder (2016, 159-60) 14 Donovan O. Schaefer, Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 39, 56-57.

32

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

noted: “this invisible force was conceptualized variously, based on models rooted in embodied experience. For genital diseases, it was spread like a stain, while corpse impurity spread like a noxious gas.” Socialization also shapes disgust in decisive ways and focuses it on social as well as physical distinctions (Kazen 2011, 35-36; Feder 2016, 163). The rhetoric of Leviticus uses the vocabulary of disgust (‫“ שׁקץ‬nauseating,” ‫“ תועבה‬disgusting”) to instil such socialization, and is especially forceful when voiced by God (Lev. 11:10-12; 18:26-30; Kazen 2011, 88-89). Fear, another basic emotion, stimulates avoidance behaviour automatically, before thought and frequently even apart from conscious awareness (Kazen 2011, 42-43). This observation further undermines theories of ritual pollution that emphasize its systematic, even logical, character. Kazen argued against Douglas that: While violations of boundaries clearly play an important role, anomaly cannot by itself explain the evolution of the concept of impurity. Nor does it satisfactorily explain the strong links that we have observed between purity and morality. Dirt is to humans more than matter out of place. Danger stems from more than surprise. Fear and disgust in the face of death, decay and animality are important factors, too. (Kazen 2011, 92)

Instead of system, emotion plays a major role in stimulating cultural ideas about pollution and purity (Kazen 2011, 94; Feder 2013, 155). It is no surprise, then, to find that rhetoric about pollution in Leviticus 11-22, despite its systematic literary structure, also plays on its audience’s emotions (pathos), just as pollution rhetoric does elsewhere in the HB. Attention to disgust and fear of contagion revives a very old explanation for pollution beliefs, namely, the avoidance of disease. This intuitively obvious connection has generated popular explanations for particular purity practices in all eras (e.g. the belief that eating pork is more dangerous than beef) which have not withstood scientific analysis. Therefore most recent biblical interpreters have denied any connection between pollution and disease. A focus on embodied cognition, however, highlights the similarity between pollution beliefs and hygiene practices, and especially the conceptual association of pollution with infection (Feder 2013, 152). Feder concluded that purification practices were, first of all, attempts to avoid infection: The purpose (and reason for propagation) of pollution beliefs is first and foremost to facilitate the avoidance of physiological threats: sources of uncleanness (eliciting disgust) and pathogenic threats (eliciting fear). While pollution beliefs can be viewed as explanatory theories, their primary function is not to serve as commentaries on social structure or cosmology (pace Douglas 1966), but rather to articulate the normative implications entailed by contamination. (Feder 2016, 161-62)

Feder (2013, 158) reviewed the history of medicine’s use of metaphors of infection. One of the earliest examples comes from Mari in the 18th century B.C.E., when plagues were explained as divine punishment. But they

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

33

also inspired practical responses that included isolating individuals, quarantine, and abandoning entire cities. At the opposite end of history, Wilda Gafney used Leviticus 11-15 to urge greater attention in Protestant churches to public health measures, especially around sexual intercourse: “Taking one’s health and the health of one’s community seriously as a religious obligation also means taking seriously one’s own sexual health and the health of one’s sexual partners” (Gafney 2017, 108). Leviticus, however, does not use the vocabulary of healing in these chapters, except to describe recovery from infestation (14:3, 48). That is probably because it uses healing language to describe situations that may not involve any pollution at all (13:18, 37). For genital emissions, on the other hand, it speaks only of purification even in contexts where healing seems more appropriate (15:13, 28). Thomas Hieke (533) explained this as due to P’s focus on cultic participation but, as we have seen above, that theme does not dominate Leviticus 11-15. It is more likely that chap. 15’s structural parallel between common genital emissions that require no healing and uncommon ones that do (see Exposition: Structure to Leviticus 15) led the writers to describe their cessation with the same vocabulary of purification. As Eve Levavi Feinstein (2014, 18) observed, “while disgust may have evolved to protect the body, from a phenomenological perspective it protects the self.” Biblical scholars are always tempted to turn new approaches into methods for addressing old questions about the composition of biblical texts. Thus Feder (2016, 174) distinguished “natural outgrowths of fear and repulsion from pollution (purity praxis)” from “the deliberate and novel appropriation of purity terminology for rhetorical purposes (purity language)” and tried to date the “natural” ones earlier than their rhetorical extensions. Not only is this distinction hard to draw (as he admitted), it also leaves unexamined the implications of “natural” in contrast to “deliberate” and “rhetorical.” Cognitive metaphor theories suggest instead that this distinction is impossible to draw with any confidence. Furthermore, such an evolutionary schema presupposes that the Israelites started with only primary disgust schema (Feder 2016, 176-77), whereas they were – like every human culture – already heirs to many millennia of disgust socialization in various configurations. As a result, the embodied metaphors employed by texts provide no basis for dating them. More promising is Feder’s survey of social-science studies that showed how adding disgust language to social prohibitions increases the likelihood that they will endure for long periods of time (Feder 2016, 176). These studies have verified the intuitive belief that expressing disgust raises the rhetorical impact of prohibitions by involving the audience’s emotions. But can we reconcile the raw emotions stirred to motivate pollution avoidance with the commonplace observation that purity and pollution beliefs serve to organize society and even impose structure on the natural world? Actually, studies of embodied cognition do reconcile these claims. For example, Boivin connected

34

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

embodied metaphors that are very personal with the most expansive sociallyshared intellectual constructions, namely, cosmologies: Ritual activity and material culture are able to evoke such [metaphorical] comparisons at a deeper and more physical level that seems to enable elusive concepts to be understood, and cosmological belief systems to be felt rather than just understood. (Boivin 2009, 283)

Therefore, the last set of thematic interpretations of purity that I survey involves the connection between cosmology and pollution. Cosmology and Pollution In the thinking of very many cultures, pollution is produced by crossing certain boundaries or mixing certain materials. This relationship between pollution and boundary maintenance has been obvious to most interpreters. Furthermore, many traditional sets of purity beliefs draw clear parallels between the boundaries guarded by purification rituals and the large-scale structures of the universe presupposed in that culture. It has therefore been common for interpreters to remark on the connection between pollution practices and cosmological beliefs (e.g. for multiple cultures, Douglas 1966, 77; for ancient Mesopotamia, Guichard and Marti 2013, 79). Most point to the distinctions between life and death and between the divine and human as cosmic boundaries guarded by threats of pollution (e.g. for the Hittites, Hutter 2013, 159; for ancient Greece, Parker 1983, 33; for multiple ancient cultures, Castelli 2013, 263). I have surveyed the evidence for this conclusion above. Commentators investigate the cosmology of Leviticus’s purity regulations by attempting to explain the meaning of pollution in relation to divine cosmological realms represented by temples and the realm of death (see above). Biblical monotheism adjusted the usual ancient distinction between the human and the divine by including Israel in YHWH’s realm and by precluding the possibility of multiple divine realms. As a result, certain purity regulations that usually governed access to temples, such as food prohibitions, were generalized for Israelites and made permanent (Leviticus 11). The overlap between the realm of YHWH and that of Israel also deepened the overlap between rules of purity and of morality. Elsewhere, many purity rules applied just to crossing into the realms of the divine and the dead, while morality described the requisite conditions of the human realm (YooWatts 2021, 47-54, 68-109, 136). But the identification of the Israelites as YHWH’s people combined these two realms and so made purity practices more like moral rules. Thus the distinctive cosmology implied by putting Israel in YHWH’s realm led to many of the interpretive difficulties described above.

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

35

While the realms of the temple and of morality have been thoroughly examined by biblical interpreters, rather less attention has been given to the relationship between pollution and cosmology per se. Certain forms of pollution, such as corpse pollution, obviously invoke cosmological boundaries (Num. 19). However, P connects cosmology with pollution most explicitly in the rules for edible and inedible animals. Chapter 11’s concluding exhortation calls on the Israelite people to join the priests in “separating (‫ )בדל‬the polluted from the pure” (Lev. 11:47). P’s rhetoric of world origins describes God creating by “separating” (‫ )בדל‬light from darkness, sky from ocean, and day from night (Gen. 1:4, 6, 7, 14, 16). The priestly duty to separate (‫)בדל‬ holy from common and polluted from pure (Lev. 10:10) allows temple rituals to imitate the divine acts of creation. Now these food rules allow lay people to join in this activity at home. Thus an Israelite’s body in the act of eating meat reinforces a cosmological pattern (Ego 1997, 140). Eating in accordance with the diet rules of Leviticus 11 also separates (‫ )בדל‬Israel from other nations and identifies this people with YHWH (Lev. 20:25-26). Nihan (2007, 335, 339) observed that, more than other pollutions, the diet regulations call on Israelites to perform their religious identity. In this way, the identification of macrocosm (universal creation) with microcosm (a body eating food) also defines a middle level of cosmology consisting of individual choices that establish group identity. Positioned at the beginning of the pollution regulations in Leviticus 11-20 and invoked again at the end, the food rules set a precedent for understanding all the bodily pollution rules as establishing and maintaining the cosmic boundaries set at creation (Nihan 2007, 338). Other regulations for pollution, such as for ‫“ צרעת‬infestation,” create very explicit social boundaries (Lev. 13:45-46), but leave any relationship to cosmic boundaries implicit. The pollutions from genital emissions described by Leviticus 12 and 15 motivate avoidance behaviours, but like similar rules in other cultures, they do not seem to reinforce cosmic boundaries at all. Therefore, Olyan (2000, 40) among others argued that the biblical purity system included various sources of defilement, so there is no “single underlying organizing principle” (also Ruane 2013, 164; Erbele-Küster 2017, 19-20). Feder (2013, 165) explained pollution from genital discharges as a conceptual blending of the sight of a stain from a discharge with the fear of infection. He argued that different kinds of pollution arise from blends with different basic emotions: disgust at genital discharges, fear of infection, and outrage at moral offences. Ruane, however, tied these various motivations back to cosmology. She explained that the realm of death was extended by Leviticus’s purity rules to reinforce social distinctions: The purity system does not have death impurity as its sole foundation and purpose, but uses death and illness as a means of pointing out the problematic nature of birth and other phenomenon, including gender distinctiveness itself.

36

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20 ... Female birth becomes associated with death by its impurity, but death becomes symbolically female. Impure skin disease resembles death, but this death clings to those who challenge authority. (Ruane 2013, 193)

These observations about cosmology and pollution in Leviticus resemble those derived from ethnographic study of traditional cultures as well as from comparisons between ancient cultures. On the basis of all of these kinds of evidence, Yohan Yoo and I concluded: (1) In many different cultures and languages, “pollution” describes most, if not all, of the negative effects of the conditions of one cosmological realm infringing on another. It may also describe internal failures to meet a realm’s requisite conditions. (2) These cultures distinguish the nature of deities and divine things as “holy” from the conditions required of gods, people, and things to enter or remain in divine realms, which is “purity.” Despite many variations in how different languages label these phenomena, holiness tends to be an intrinsic quality of the divine, while purity is a requirement of divine realms that may or may not be met. (3) The connection between cosmology and pollution has been apparent to many ancient and traditional interpreters, as well as modern academics. These interpreters have then tried to systematize the relationship between cosmology and purity more consistently than the cultures did themselves. (4) In every case, such intellectual projects have confronted irreconcilable purity beliefs or purification practices that undermine the consistency of the cosmological system. (5) These irreconcilable elements most often involve sexual intercourse and bodily differences between the sexes. They therefore seem to enact microcosmic distinctions that are poorly integrated into macrocosmic systems. (Yoo-Watts 2021, 130).

The connections between pollution and cosmology tend to by metonymic: the pollution incurred by crossing bodily or social boundaries mirrors the consequences of crossing cosmic ones. However, most of the attention in Leviticus, as in other culture’s pollution practices, focuses on the microcosm of the body and the individual person rather than on the macrocosm of the universe. This observation suggests that pollution practices may not just be consequences of cosmological beliefs, but may also generate such beliefs. In other words, the relationship between pollution and cosmology may not be cause and effect so much as a continuous circular interaction. Cosmology generates pollution practices to deal with crossing cosmic boundaries, but pollution practices also generate some cosmological distinctions and shape the interpretation of others. The effect of cosmology on pollution practices is most evident when cosmologies change suddenly, such as when Christian missionaries converted sizable numbers of people in a given culture. As we have seen in the medieval letters of popes to Anglo-Saxons and Germans, conversion to a new religion and its cosmology led to changing traditional purification practices, though not without encountering resistance that sometimes lasted for centuries. The effect of pollution practices on cosmologies

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

37

is most apparent in creative explanations for purification practices by preachers and theologians. For example, the gendered pollutions from menstruation and child-birth do not fit cosmology easily, either in ancient Israel or elsewhere. That fact has lead biblical interpreters to look for justifications especially in the creation story about Eve (see Exposition to Leviticus 12 and to Leviticus 15). These considerations about the relationship between cosmology and purification practices can be generalized this way: The relationship between kinds of pollution ideas, and between purity and cosmology, is best addressed as a question of regular and repeated cultural production. That is, it is less likely that purity preceded cosmology, or that material pollution preceded social pollution, over the large time spans measured by history than that purification practices repeatedly and continually generate metaphors of social pollution and of cosmological realms, both in the experience of individuals and in broader cultural histories. The question is not so much about historical sequence as about the generation of psychological tendencies. The human tendency to divide the world into cosmological realms is a projection from innate and socialized feelings of disgust and the purification practices that respond to such feelings, as much as it is an internalization of the culture’s macrocosmic views. ... This explains the cultural persistence of purification practices even in the face of dominating cultural critiques, as in Classical Greece and in Christian history. Despite widespread criticism of pollution practices and the morality of the gods in Greek philosophy and literature, the purification requirements of Greek temples were not loosened. Despite opposition in Christian scripture and theology to the social divisions generated by purification practices, such practices continued to shape many social interactions within Christian cultures. So long as people continue to purify themselves, they continue to project cosmological realms distinguished by pollution whether their theological and philosophical commitments support them or not. (Yoo-Watts 2021, 139)

POLLUTION RULES AS PRIESTLY RHETORIC Most of these interpretations of purity and pollution in Leviticus 11-22 focus on the practices described by the text and their possible motivations. The Israelites, however, embraced ideals of purity and purified themselves long before these rules were written down, since such ideas and practices were common in the ancient Near East and elsewhere. In Israel, as in other cultures, there would have been many different interpretations of their meaning and importance. The writers of Leviticus 11-22 intervened in existing practices to codify them and, maybe, to change some of them, but the multivalence of these rituals and quotidian purification practices both preceded the writing of this text and continued despite its growing influence. Leviticus does very little

38

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

to alter this state of affairs by interpreting their meaning. It focuses instead on proper practice. These chapters, therefore, are a poor source for understanding how Israelites thought about purity or even what they did about it. Instead, Leviticus preserves the rhetoric of its priestly authors. The chapters about infestation even turn priestly rhetoric into a topic by emphasizing that the priest is responsible for both diagnosing and declaring whether someone is polluted or pure (see Exegesis to 13:8). Purity and pollution, as ErbeleKüster (2017, 150) observed, “are no intrinsic qualities of (gendered) persons, they are brought about through acts of attribution.” Interpreters should therefore focus on asking: Who was trying to persuade whom of what by writing Leviticus 11-22? (On this methodological point, see Introduction §3 in Leviticus 1-10, and Watts 2021b) Like the offering instructions in chaps. 1-7, the priestly writers gave the rules about pollution a systematic structure (see outlines in Exposition to each chapter) to emphasize the writers’ technical expertise, but they also included urgent and emotional rhetoric to motivate compliance (e.g. 11:41, 44-45; 13:44-46; 15:24, 31; 17:14-16; 18:24-30; 20:3, 25-26). Also like the offering instructions, these chapters delay the strongest claims for priestly authority until chaps. 13-14 and 16, while first describing purity issues that everyone must observe and cleanse for themselves. The food rules and blood prohibitions (chaps. 11 and 17) must be observed at home like the rules about normal genital discharges (15:16-24) and illicit sexual intercourse (chaps. 18, 20). Pollutions due to the more severe genital discharges (12:1-8; 15:1-15, 25-30) require sin offerings and therefore priestly involvement, but still depend on lay people to comply of their own volition. Leviticus buries in the middle of these rules the most consequential pollutants for individuals: cases of ‫“ צרעת‬infestation” of skin, cloth, and buildings. (Since Exod. 23:28 and Josh. 24:12 use ‫ צרעה‬to describe plagues of insects, maybe wasps, by which YHWH depopulates the land before the Israelites, the translation “infestation” better conveys its connotation of external invasion of bodies and objects than “infection”; see Exegesis on 13:2.) Infestation results in one of the worst individual consequences of any kind of pollution: banishment from the camp and destruction of property. These regulations therefore grant the priests regulatory control over potentially infested people and potentially infested property. However, offences against the sexual rules and all YHWH’s other mandates risk even worse corporate consequences, being “vomited” out of the land (18:24-30; 20:22-24). For individuals, many can result in their execution (20:9-16, 27). Though camouflaged by rules for less severe pollutants around them, chaps. 13-14 emphasize priestly control by meticulous descriptions of the various kinds of infestation that seem designed to instil dread. They frequently repeat the priests’ diagnostic verdicts, “they are infested” or “they

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

39

are polluted,” that reinforce this dread. By exercising their authority to declare whether someone is pure or polluted, the priests could banish people from the community (13:46; Egyptian priests exercised similar powers, see Exposition to Leviticus 13). Thus Leviticus’s pollution rhetoric, like its offering rules, validates the authority and responsibilities of priests. They have the ritual power to mitigate for “all” of Israel’s sins and pollutions (16:16-34). Leviticus 13-14 provide rhetorical justifications for priests wielding the power to quarantine and exile polluted people, and to expropriate and destroy polluted property. Of course, all these regulations reinforce the image of priests as ritual experts by their systematic differentiation of different kinds of pollutions. Even the food rules of chapter 11, which depend on lay people’s compliance in their own homes, certify what counts as food in those homes. This priestly torah tries to regulate the economics of animal husbandry (J. Z. Smith 1987b, 196-204), as well as hunting and tanning (chap. 17). Christophe Nihan (2013, 362) observed that Leviticus 11-15, “while conferring on the members of ‘Israel’ a degree of priestly competency in the domestic sphere, simultaneously establishes the authority of the priesthood over civil matters.” He noted that this combination buttressed the authority of the priesthood in Persianperiod Judea, leading eventually to the high priest becoming the recognized political as well as religious leader of the Jewish community. Later Christians would vest bishops with the power to “excommunicate” people in order to force compliance with church teachings. The fact that infestation rules functioned similarly to give Israel’s priests potent political influence is illustrated by two HB stories. Miriam’s challenge to Moses’ authority is punished by her temporary infestation (Numbers 12), a description that implicitly presupposes diagnosis of the infestation by a priest (Aaron? Moses?). This story is cited by the Deuteronomist in support of priestly authority: “Watch out for infestation; watch carefully! Do whatever the levitical priests instruct you to do, as I have commanded them. Remember what YHWH your God did to Miriam on the way out of Egypt” (Deut. 24:8). In the other story, priests use their diagnosis of skin disease to force King Uzziah out of the Temple and into seclusion for the rest of his life (2 Chr. 26:16-23). Perhaps Uzziah thought he had gained the right to officiate as a priest by marrying a woman from a priestly family, “Jerusha daughter of Zadok” (2 Chr. 27:2; 2 Kgs. 15:33). Or, since Kings contains this genealogical notice but not the story of Uzziah’s transgression, maybe the Chronicler composed this story as an object-lesson to show that marrying into the priesthood or matrilineal descent from priests does not qualify someone as a priest. Either way, the story shows that the priests’ diagnosis of infestation could be a powerful political weapon, even against a king. It is not accidental that stories of encroachments on priestly prerogatives often feature divine retribution by miracles of skin infestation. Priests and

40

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

other religious authorities have used excommunication for political purposes from antiquity to the current day. The power to diagnose ‫“ צרעת‬infestation” in cloth and buildings effectively extended the sphere of priestly diagnosis to tangible property and real estate. By diagnosing an infestation, priests had the power to affect the personal and economic lives of ancient Israelites, as well as their religious behaviour, far beyond the temple precincts. Though no biblical stories attest to it, the elaboration of incest rules and their punishments in chaps. 18 and 20 have similarly provided later rabbis and priests the power to dictate marriage policies in Jewish and Christian cultures. Leviticus’s pollution rules have proven to be potent tools for shaping even the laws and practices of modern secular states. THE TORAH AS DIVINE RHETORIC The pollution rules, however, are not presented as priestly rhetoric. They are presented as divine rhetoric, as rules spoken by YHWH, just like the rest of the laws in the first four books of the Pentateuch. Ancient priests customarily obscured their authorship of ritual texts which were usually anonymous or credited to kings. The written rhetoric of other ancient cultures preserves the boasts of kings about their temple (re)constructions and ritual regulations much more often than divine demands for them (Leviticus 1-10, 91-100; Watts 2009). The Hebrew Bible, by contrast, consolidates all of Israel’s ritual, civil, and criminal laws, as well as many of its moral precepts, in the voice of God. The Bible’s portrayal of a divine lawgiver has shaped Western ideas about law from its origins to the present day. Konrad Schmid asked why the Pentateuch portrays the God of Israel as a lawgiver.15 His on-going research project has prompted me to revisit my older work on the relationship between ritual rhetoric and law in light of my more recent research on ancient pollution rules. This comparison supports the following theses: (a) Ancient gods were regarded as the sources of ritual rules and therefore functioned as ritual lawgivers in their own temples. (b) The normative function of written laws began in Judea, as elsewhere, with ritual regulations. (c) The Pentateuch credited YHWH also with civil and criminal laws and moral maxims due to its refusal to recognize the authority of human kings. (d) The Torah gained normative regulatory authority in legal and moral matters as the jurisdiction of the Jerusalem temple and its priests expanded outward from the Temple to Jerusalem and then to Judea in the Second Temple period. 15 Konrad Schmid, “Divine Legislation in the Pentateuch in its Late Judean and NeoBabylonian Context,” in The Fall of Jerusalem and the Rise of the Torah (ed. Peter Dubovsky, Dominik Markl, and Jean-Pierre Sonnet; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), 129-54.

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

41

(e) The jurisdiction of biblical law continued to expand in later periods. Rabbinic literature limited many rules to the land of Israel while in other cases expanding Torah’s jurisdictional authority to wherever Jews find themselves. Imperialized Christians after the fourth century found in the codex-bound laws of Moses and of Christ a model for the collection and promulgation of Roman Law in Theodosian’s Code and in Justinian’s Code and Digest. Thus, divinely-spoken law shaped the Western idea of law at its roots in Rabbinic Judaism and in Christian collections of Roman law. Christian theologians and jurists increasingly incorporated biblical laws in their legal collections in the second millennium C.E. despite denying any normative authority to biblical ritual rules. The early part of this history is, in some ways, the clearest because it is detailed in the story in the Pentateuch. YHWH, the God of Israel, speaks torah to Israel, and the Israelites explicitly accept God’s laws as binding upon them and their descendants (Exod. 19; 20; 24). This literary depiction of God giving law at Mount Sinai adopts and develops the conventions of ancient suzerainty treaties, especially those of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. I suspect that the same political ideology shaped Persian texts too, but those treaty documents have not survived. The Pentateuch casts God in the role of the king or emperor who makes such treaties and issues edicts and law collections. The characterization of YHWH in the Pentateuch is, therefore, a legal characterization through quoted direct speech. It is notable that the law’s depiction of YHWH as just and merciful accords better with conventional Jewish and Christian theology than do many of the narrative characterizations of God in the Pentateuch (Watts 1996, 1-14 = Watts 1999, 91-109; also Watts 2018). In other words, despite the greater popularity of biblical stories over biblical law, it is the legal characterization that shaped subsequent theology most profoundly. Answering the question “how did God become a law-giver?” requires understanding why the Pentateuch casts God as Israel’s king. Part of the answer is obvious: most ancient high gods were cast as kings and queens. Most pantheons also depicted particular deities as supreme by proclaiming them as king over the gods: Marduk in Babylon, Ra in Egypt, Zeus in Greece, Baal at Ugarit, etc. However, Israel’s depiction of YHWH as king in many psalms, for example, does not yet explain the Pentateuch’s attribution of laws to YHWH. Mesopotamian law collections, if they were attributed to anyone at all, were attributed to human kings such as Ur-Nammu and Hammurabi, even if they claimed to act under divine inspiration. Nevertheless, some ancient texts do attribute commandments and regulations to gods. Examples appear in a wide variety of Near Eastern cultures (Watts 2009, 42). Gods were regularly credited with assigning ruling authority

42

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

to human kings. The kings of the gods sometimes assigned delimited jurisdictions to other gods (in Sumerian, “Enki and the World Order” lines 341-48, 368-80, COS 4.91; in Akkadian, Enuma Elish vi.39-44, 141-42, COS 1.111; in Hebrew, Deut. 32:8-9 and Psalm 82). Enuma Elish made the connection with ritual regulations explicit when the other gods’ acclaim Marduk as king: Henceforth, you shall be provider for our sanctuaries Whatever you command, we will do. ... He shall establish for his father great food offerings, He shall provide for them, he shall take care of their sanctuaries. He shall cause incense burners to be savored, he shall make their chambers rejoice. ... At his command let them heed their goddesses; Let these not be forgotten, let them sustain their gods. Let their holy places be apparent, let them build their sanctuaries. (Enuma Elish v.115-16, vi.109-118; COS 1.111).

The Hittite king, Mursili II, anticipated divine commands when he promised, “Whatever more the Sungoddess Arinna, my lady, repeatedly gives to do, I will carry out” (COS 2.16). Similarly, the Egyptian king, Thutmose III, was described by the god, Amun, as doing “all that my ka desires” (Lichtheim 1976, 2:38). At Ugarit, the god El gave king Kirta specific ritual instructions (KTU 1.14.ii.62-79; COS 1.102). The end of the Erra Epic promised blessings in the voice of the god Erra to anyone who hears, recites, copies, or preserves the epic itself (COS 1:113). Though the language of the Sun Disk Tablet (COS 2:135) is oblique, the implication of lines iii.16-20 is that the “lost appearance” of Shamash was revealed by the god himself. In first-millennium Egypt, ritual texts that had earlier been credited to human authors were increasingly credited to the god, Thoth.16 See also the Babylonian Marduk Prophecy for king Nebuchadnezzar I that is quoted in Leviticus 1-10, 147. The ritual means for conveying divine regulations were dreams and prophecies. Prophets demanded offerings in the names of their gods from the kings of Mari and Assyria. Let me add to the examples quoted in Leviticus 1-10, 146, this one from a prophet quoting the god Adad: “Sacrifice the zukrum with oxen and cows! My lord, in the presence of all the people, told me to sacrifice the zukrum, saying: ‘Never shall he break an agreement with me!’” (Nissinen 2003, 18; cf. 23, 49, 51, 53, 55, 123). The prophets’ oracles could even extend to criminal offences: “Whoever commits an act of violence shall be expelled from the city” (Nissinen 2003, 38). Pharaoh Nectanebo reflected the prophetic origins of his cultic actions and decrees, describing himself as someone “who convokes their prophets to consult them on all the functions of the temple; who acts according to their words and is not deaf to 16 Siegfried Schott, “Die Opferliste als Schrift der Thoth,” Zeitschrift für die Ägyptische Sprache 90 (1963), 103-110; Siegfried Schott, “Thoth als Verfasser heiliger Schriften,” Zeitschrift für die Ägyptische Sprache 99 (1972), 20-25.

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

43

their advice” (Lichtheim 1980, 3:88), as did the Neo-Assyrian king, Asshurbanipal (Nissinen 2003, 143-44). Many of these texts that quote or reflect divine rules turn out to be ritual texts: they contain divine commands to build or maintain temples, make offerings, and conduct other rituals in their temples. Though many can be interpreted as occasional commands that do not call for perpetual fulfilment, ritual interpretation frequently turned them into continual mandates. Martti Nissinen (2003, 101) observed that the collection and compilation of the Neo-Assyrian oracles many years after they were spoken indicates their continuing authority, as did mandates for the ritual treatment of the written texts of prophecies and divine covenants (Nissinen 2003, 120-21). Temple origin myths often depicted singular interactions with or between deities that become the justification for ritual repetition in perpetuity (e.g. Enuma Elish vi.59-68, COS §1.111; the Ugaritic Ba’al cycle, KTU 1.1.iv.40-vii.36, COS §1.86; biblical examples include Abraham on Mount Moriah/Jerusalem in Gen. 22; Jacob at Bethel in Gen. 32). Enuma Elish claims that Marduk created humans for the express purpose of providing food offerings to the gods (vi.5-8, 33-34). Many myths were adapted, or perhaps even composed, to model human requests and actions in prayers and spells (e.g. in Egyptian: COS §§1.1-22; AEMT §§84, 90, 91, 95, 108; in Hittite: COS §§1.57, 1.69; in Akkadian: Foster 2005, 766, 964, 969, 995, 1001, 1007; in Ugaritic: Pardee 2002, 167-70, 211-13). The distinction between occasional commands and perpetual mandates therefore disappears in the ritual application of myths about deities. Since human kings and even community leaders could also dictate ritual calendars when founding or renovating temples, the roles of human and divine royals overlapped in temple regulations (Watts 2009, 39-66). But deities were regularly regarded as the original sources of ritual regulations, whether they were quoted requiring them or not. Some texts make that claim explicitly. A fragmentary inscription of Babylonian king Nabonidus reports the illicit relocation of ritual regulations authorized by his predecessor, Nebuchadnezzar, but concludes by calling these same regulations “[the god] Sin’s great commandments.”17 A New Kingdom Egyptian funerary stele asks viewers to make offerings and recite prayers “in the form in which it is written, ... as said by the fathers, and as it comes from the mouth of god” (Lichtheim 1976, 2:20). Gods were therefore widely regarded as lawgivers in their own temples. That deities were regarded as the sources of temple rules becomes even more evident from pollution and purity rhetoric. Ancient texts and modern scholars both tend to assume that the differences between the purity rules of 17

315.

In Jean-Jacques Glassner, Mesopotamian Chronicles (WAW 19; Atlanta: SBL, 2005),

44

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

different temples can be explained by the different preferences of the gods residing in them. Many purity regulations were the same or similar from one temple to another, and myths and art depicted the gods themselves engaging in ritual purification, as did their statues and temples. However, food taboos varied dramatically based on the identities and characteristics or dietary preferences of the gods involved (see the examples listed above in The Rhetoric of Pollution in Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean Cultures; for more examples and discussion, see Yoo-Watts 2021, 31-33, 44-46). The presumption in these texts as well as by most modern interpreters of temple food regulations is that the gods’ food preferences were determinative, whether or not any text actually records the god saying so. Thus, for all ritual purposes, the gods were law-givers in their own temples even if the rhetorical agendas of the extant texts emphasize other agents. Competition between temples limited the jurisdiction of their rules. In Israel, however, YHWH’s pollution regulations overcame such limitations as henotheism and then monotheism spread. I stand by my earlier judgment (Leviticus 1-10, 143-49; Watts 2007, 46-47; Watts 2009, 42) that divine law-giving is rarely explicit in ancient texts and much less frequent than royal or other human ritual initiatives. Our evidence for this conclusion, however, is limited to mostly royal sources and may be skewed by their propagandistic goals. Even so, the royal rhetoric spoke of preserving or restoring rituals more often than establishing them. The rhetoric of preservation and restoration presupposed antecedent regulations, but did not usually attribute them to previous kings. Instead, they presumed that the rituals represent the will of the gods, even though the texts did not quote the gods giving these commands. The Pentateuch does not institutionalize any human governing institutions aside from the priesthood led by the high priest. Its only law regarding kings mandates simply that they read Torah (Deut. 17:16-20). Instead, YHWH monopolizes the royal activities of national defence, temple building (the Tabernacle), treaty-making, and law-giving, in addition to the usual divine roles of creating worlds and issuing ritual regulations. Like Neo-Assyrian and Persian emperors, YHWH also claims world-wide rule (e.g. Exod. 19:5; Deut. 32:8; Isa. 40:12-26; Ps. 103:19). Exceptionally among ancient Near Eastern Texts, YHWH’s ritual regulations for the Tabernacle have been supplemented by civil and criminal laws, along with moral injunctions. In Israel, the Temple law included this material either because its gradually expanding jurisdiction raised such issues or because YHWH’s royal status monopolized such matters. Both explanations likely played a role, with God’s royal status as Israel’s king rationalizing the expanding jurisdiction of temple law, which was in turn made possible by the growing political authority of Jerusalem’s high priests in the Second Temple period.

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

45

Unlike collections of laws, ancient ritual texts often demand compliance to their regulations explicitly “as written.” The importance of obeying written mandates emerged first around ritual texts already in late-third-millennium Sumerian texts and it was a continuing theme throughout ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean written cultures. While law courts were ignoring the written legal models of their kings, temples were assiduously following the written ritual requirements of their gods, in some cases even “checking off” ritual lists to ensure compliance (e.g. at Ugarit, Pardee 2002, 12-13, 200). The normative authority of written law therefore had ritual origins (Watts 2005). The normative authority of YHWH’s written Torah derived originally from its ritual components and then gradually bled into its civil and criminal laws, and eventually into its narratives as well. This development can be traced in Second Temple Jewish literature (Watts 2011, 489-506). The Torah was consulted first regarding ritual issues (the celebration of Sukkot, the marriages of priests). By the Hasmonean period, it was consulted regarding military procedures, though still with ritual implications (e.g. Sabbath observances). Only in Daniel and Susanna was Torah cited, for the first time in extant literature, to guide the procedures of a criminal investigation by requiring two witnesses. Around the same time in Hellenistic cultures, citation of written law was also playing an increasingly important role in legal procedures. The consequences of this divine voicing of priestly rhetoric are well illustrated by Leviticus 18 and 20 and their later influence. These rules regarding incest and other sexual relationships are not the first thing most people think about when discussing “law,” whether biblical or national. Yet they have shaped legal practice and ideas about law, scripture, and the divine lawgiver in a particularly influential manner right up to the present day. Leviticus 18 and 20 stand out as distinctive among ancient texts. They are the most extensive and systematic lists of incest rules from any ancient culture prior to Late Antiquity. Incest is not a major topic in Mesopotamian legislation. The Greeks regarded incest rules as conventional law and unwritten (Plato, Laws 8.838a-b). Temple laws required sexual abstinence of various kinds only for limited periods of time (as in Exod. 19; Lev. 15). Yet Leviticus 18 provides detailed prohibitions against sexual intercourse with close relatives as well as against bestiality, intercourse with a menstruating woman, and male-with-male intercourse. Leviticus 20 repeats most of these rules as casuistic laws, many mandating the death penalty. Both chapters surround these rules with exhortations against following the practices and laws of the Canaanites and Egyptians. Instead, Israel must be holy like YHWH by “separating” from other nations. Within the literary context of Leviticus which gives great attention to pollution in chaps. 11-16, chaps. 18 and 20 bring that pollution rhetoric to a crescendo. They threaten that failing to obey divine mandates will pollute the

46

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

land, which may “vomit” out the Israelites just like the Canaanites (18:24-30; 20:22-24). YHWH specifies that chap. 11’s diet rules define Israel’s identity as “my” holy people (20:25). Chapters 17-20 thus generalize obedience to divine law as essential for holiness while disobedience of any kind pollutes, which chaps. 18 and 20 denigrate as sexual pollution. Therefore, the most likely explanation for the exceptional interest of Leviticus in sexual relationships is the fear of polluting YHWH’s land and being expelled from it (see Exposition to Leviticus 18 below). The divine lawgiver who requires Israel to be holy has extended the temple’s purity rules to the whole land. The threat of exile from that land for polluting it raised the severity of illicit sexual liaisons to the level of capital offences. This may sound like another example of the strange pollution rules of Leviticus that many Bible readers, especially Christians, largely ignore, but that is not the case at all. In fact, Leviticus 18 and 20 have had more direct influence on Western law, specifically marriage law, than any other body of biblical law (Carmichael 1997, 1; see Exposition to Leviticus 18). In the early Middle Ages, church law extended Leviticus’s prohibited “degrees” of genealogical affiliation up to seven generations of a family. When that proved unworkable, successive legal reforms in the twelfth, sixteenth, and following centuries reduced the list of prohibited marriages, often citing Leviticus 18 and 20 explicitly as the minimal list. Debate continues in some countries today over the legitimacy of marriages between first cousins, which is permitted by Leviticus. The prominence of this biblical text in shaping marriage law appeared visually, for example, in England from the early 17th to the early 20th century, when a redacted list of the “Levitical degrees” was published in the Book of Common Prayer and was also inscribed on large boards hung in churches, along with the Ten Commandments. English law deferred to Church law regarding permissible marriages. In many countries, it still does to some extent: American clergy are bonded by the state to perform marriages at their own discretion according to denominational rules, though secular marriage is also available. In Israel, Orthodox rabbis monopolize legal weddings based on Talmudic interpretations of the biblical mandates. Debates over expanding marriage rights to same-sex couples in many nations feature frequent citations of the prohibitions on male-with-male intercourse in Lev. 18:22 and 20:13. Leviticus 18 and 20 have therefore shaped Western marriage laws from the first century (already in 1 Cor. 5:1) to the twenty-first century. This despite the fact that Leviticus 18 and 20 focus not on marriage but on sexual intercourse per se and that they motivate prohibitions by pollution concerns that have not been shared (at least in this form) by most later interpreters. Readers have nevertheless learned from these chapters to express disgust at sexual relationships that deviate from their understanding of these norms. Pollution

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

47

language has therefore played a large role in accusations of sexual deviance from antiquity to today. These examples of the continuing legal influence of Leviticus 18 and 20 illustrate the impact of the divine lawgiver on the shaping of biblical law and its subsequent influence on Western law. The divine lawgiver is first and foremost a promulgator of ritual texts to provision the temple and guard its lands from pollution. In between chaps. 18 and 20, Leviticus 19:30 says so explicitly: “You must observe my Sabbaths and revere my sanctuary – I am YHWH.” This rhetorical agenda led the priestly writers to compose lists of prohibited pollutions that detail sexual offences with much greater specificity than anywhere else in the ancient world. The severe consequences of breaking these rules – exile from the land – led them to threaten severe enforcement through human and divine sanctions, either by being executed by the community or being “cut off” by God. The appearance in the Pentateuch of these rules voiced by God led early Christians to adopt them as “moral law.” In the second millennium, church authority over marriages was extended by sanctifying marriage as a church sacrament and regulating it through church registries. Church practices became the models for modern legal definitions of marriage and state licenses for marriage, which either supplanted or supplemented denominational rules. Modern law inherited Leviticus’s incest prohibitions as well, which therefore still function as “law” in many places even where they are not recognized as such. The influence of the Bible’s divine lawgiver on the development of subsequent legal traditions has therefore been enormous. That influence is obscured by the fact that Christian cultures and their heirs usually trace their legal history back to Roman law. Medieval legal education was based upon Justinian’s Code and Digest, which therefore shaped the emerging national laws of early modern European nations as well as Roman Catholic canon law. While the Christian influence on Theodosian’s and Justinian’s legal collections is apparent, these collections almost never cite the Bible. The mass of civil and criminal laws in them stem from the decrees of Rome’s earlier emperors and the writings of its jurists. Christian Roman emperors were the first to authorize and publish Rome’s laws as a unified collection because of the influence of the model of biblical law. There were, in fact, earlier partial collections of the edicts and rescripts of Roman Emperors (the Codex Gregorius and Codex Hermogenianus, produced around 292 and 295-98 C.E., two decades prior to Constantine’s conversion to Christianity). Greek and Latin cultures had celebrated their investments in archives and libraries for many centuries,18 yet only the 18 See Sebastian Modrow, “Classical Antiquity,” in Libraries, Archives, and Museums: An Introduction to Cultural Heritage Institutions Through the Ages (ed. Suzanne M. Stauffer; Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), 17-40.

48

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

Christian emperors, Theodosian and Justinian, published their legal collections backed by imperial authority. Though many developments led to their legal efforts in the fifth and sixth centuries C.E., an important factor was the iconic status of the Christian Bible and its first five books, popularly known as “the Law of Moses.” Already in the fourth century, Constantine and his Christian successors on the Roman throne sponsored publications of the Christian Bible by the imperial chancellory. The Gospel codex had become one of the principal symbols of the religion, already decorated with icons. It was also functioning as an icon of Christian imperial power in Roman courtrooms, where Christ in the form of a Gospel codex presided over legal procedures that followed traditional Roman law.19 The iconic Bible’s influence on Christian imaginations led Justinian to believe that, just like the Law of Moses and the Law of Christ, Roman law should also be published in a standardized and authorized form as a series of codices (Watts 2017, 207). As Caroline Humfress (2007, 143) observed, he did so “by enveloping the hallowed classical books of the Roman jurists [and imperial edicts] within a new order of texts” defined by codices of the Christian Bible. “The Christian deity’s capacity for monumentalizing a collection of disparate, often conflicting, but potentially harmonious writings into a single codex was well attested before Justinian singled out that power explicitly for his own early sixth-century authoritative project” (Humfress 2007, 144). The Bible’s example thus influenced the idea of “written law” in Western legal traditions at its source in Justinian’s Code and Digest, even if it did not influence much of its contents. It has continued to do so throughout subsequent history. The medieval revival of legal education based on Roman law emulated theological education based in the Bible.20 That connection has continued in later developments of canon law: developments in its codification in the sixteenth and nineteenth-to-twentieth centuries were each accompanied by changes in the scripturalization of the Bible.21 Today, “law” is still a totem idea attached to whichever image of a legal text is most iconic in a nation’s history. The legal authority of written law is still reinforced by symbol and ritual. For example, in many places, the Reformation made 19 Caroline Humfress, “Judging by the Book: Christian Codices and Late Antique Legal Culture,” in The Early Christian Book (ed. William E. Klingshirn and Linda Safran; Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 141-58; more broadly, Parmenter 2013, and Jason Larson, “The Gospels as Imperialized Sites of Memory,” in Watts 2013a, 373-88. 20 Michael H. Hoeflich and Jasonne M. Grabher, “The Establishment of Normative Legal Texts: The Beginnings of the Ius commune,” in The History of Medieval Canon Law in the Classical Period, 1140-1234 (ed. W. Hartmann and K. Pennington; Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 1-21. 21 George Heyman, “Canon Law and the Canon of Scripture,” Postscripts 2.2-3 (2006/ 2008), 209-25, doi: 10.1558/post.v2i2-3.209.

Introduction of Leviticus 11-20

49

the Ten Commandments the emblem of law by placing Decalogue boards in churches and other public places. Religious changes and secularization led to removing many of them, which now prompts religious challenges to national conceptions of law. In the United States, they take the form of contentious defenses of “Ten Commandments monuments” in court houses and other public spaces (Watts 2019, 117-34). So my answer to the question of how YHWH became a lawgiver is that the gods were always lawgivers in their own temples. The story of biblical law is not about the changing role of the lawgiver, but about the expanding jurisdiction of temple law from the sanctuary to the city to the land to the nations. This expanding jurisdiction can be traced in texts from the Second Temple period through modernity. Though the form and contents of the written laws have changed a great deal, the ideals surrounding written laws still echo the imperial political ideologies of the Iron Age. As a result, the shifting jurisdictional claims of religious and legal institutions in modern states continue to generate debates about what texts we are willing to call “law” and what we refuse to recognize as such.

LEVITICUS 11:1-47

POLLUTING MEAT AND NAUSEATING CARCASSES

1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9

10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

YHWH spoke to Moses and to Aaron (saying to them): Speak (pl) to the Israelites: This is the kind of animal that you (pl) may eat of any quadruped on land. Any that has a hoof and splits the hoof while regurgitating cud – it you (pl) may eat. But this you (pl) must not eat among those that regurgitate cud or have hooves: the camel because though it regurgitates cud it does not have a hoof – it is polluting for you; the hyrax because though it regurgitates cud it does not have a hoof – it is polluting for you (pl); the rabbit because though it regurgitates cud it does not have a hoof – it is polluting for you (pl); the pig because though it has a hoof and splits the hoof it does not chew a cud – it is polluting for you (pl). Their meat you (pl) must not eat and their carcass you must not touch – they are polluting for you. This you (pl) may eat of everything that is in the water: everything in the water of oceans and rivers that has fins and scales – these you may eat. But everything in the oceans and rivers that does not have fins and scales, every swarmer in the water and every other kind of wildlife that is in the water – they should be nauseating for you (pl)! They will be nauseating for you (pl)! Their meat you must not eat and their carcasses should nauseate you. Everything in the water that does not have fins and scales – it should be nauseating for you (pl)! These should nauseate you (pl) of the flyers that you must not eat (because) they are nauseating: the nesher, the peres, the asniyah, the daah, the ayiah of any kind, crow-like (birds) of any kind, the bat yaanah, the tachmas, the shachaf, the nets of any kind, the kos, the shalak, the yanshuf, the tinshemet, the qaat, the racham, the chesidah, the anafah of any kind, the dukifat, the atallef. Every swarming flyer that crawls – it should be nauseating for you (pl)!

52

Leviticus 11 Translation

21

However, this you may eat of every swarming flyer that crawls: whatever has two legs bigger than the rest with which to hop on the ground. Of these you (pl) may eat: the locust of any kind, the grasshopper of any kind, the cricket of any kind, the mantis of any kind. But every (other) swarming flyer that crawls on paired legs should be nauseating for you (pl)! By these, you pollute yourselves. Everyone who touches their carcass becomes polluted until evening. Everyone who carries part of their carcass must wash their (ms) clothes. They (ms) become polluted until evening. For every quadruped that has a hoof but does not split it and does not chew the cud – they are polluting for you (pl). Everyone who touches one of them becomes polluted. Everything that walks on its paws among animals that crawl – they are polluting for you (pl). Everyone who touches their carcass becomes polluted until evening. Everyone who carries their carcass must wash their (ms) clothes. They become polluted until evening. These are polluting for you (pl). For you (pl), this is polluting among the swarmers that swarm on the ground: the cholek, the akbar, the tsav of any kind, the anaqah, the koch, the letaah, the chomet, and the tinshemet. These are polluting for you (pl) among all the swarmers. Everyone who touches one of them when they are dead becomes polluted until evening. Everything that one of these falls upon when they are dead becomes polluted: any container of wood or cloth or skin or sacking, any container used for any purpose. It must be put in water and stays polluted until evening. Then it is pure. Every ceramic container that one of these falls into, everything in it becomes polluted. It must be smashed. All edible food that comes into contact with (its) water becomes polluted, and all drinkable drink from any (such) container becomes polluted. Everything that part of their carcass falls upon becomes polluted. An oven and a stove must be broken up. They are polluted and they will stay polluted for you (pl). However, the pool of water from a spring or cistern remains pure. Only someone who touches their carcass becomes polluted. When part of their carcass falls on any sowable seed that can be sown, it remains pure, but when their carcass fall into water that touches the seed, it is polluting for you (pl). When an edible quadruped dies (naturally), whoever touches its carcass becomes polluted until evening.

22 23 24 25 26

27

28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35

36 37 38 39

Leviticus 11 Essentials 40

41 42

43 44

45 46 47

53

Whoever eats its carcass must wash their clothes and remain polluted until evening. Whoever carries its carcass must wash their clothes and remain polluted until evening. Every swarmer that swarms on the ground – it is nauseating! It must not be eaten. Everything that goes on its belly and everything that crawls on many legs, that is, every swarmer that swarms on the ground you (pl) must not eat, because they are nauseating! Do not nauseate yourselves with any swarming swarmer. Do not eat them and pollute yourselves with them, for I am YHWH your (pl) God. You must make yourselves holy and be holy, because I am holy. Do not pollute yourselves with any swarmer that scrambles on the ground, for I am YHWH who brought you (pl) up from the land of Egypt to be God for you. You are holy because I am holy. This is the law of the quadruped, the flyer, and all living beings that scramble in the water and even all beings that swarm on the ground to separate the polluted from the pure and edible animals from animals that you (sg) must not eat. ESSENTIALS

Contents Leviticus 11 gives instructions for how to distinguish polluting and inedible meats from meat that one may eat. The chapter’s goal is stated explicitly at the end: to teach the Israelite people (v. 2) “to separate the polluted from the pure and edible animals from animals that you (sg) must not eat” (v. 47). By doing so, the Israelites will maintain their holy status like their holy God (vv. 44-45). This chapter models how to distinguish polluted from pure meat and edible from inedible by presenting, on the one hand, lists of the kinds of animals that are polluted or pure (vv. 4-7, 13-19, 22, 29-30) and, on the other hand, criteria that distinguish between polluted and pure, edible and inedible on the basis of the animal’s anatomy and behaviour (vv. 3, 9-10, 12, 21, 26, 27, 42). The chapter first details inedible animals (vv. 4-23) before turning to animal carcasses that pollute on contact (vv. 24-40). It seems to use the label ‫“ טמא‬polluting” for the latter, while describing inedible animals that do not pollute on contact as ‫“ שׁקץ‬nauseating” (for this translation, see Exegesis to v. 10). Leviticus 11 categorizes inedible animals by the environmental spheres that they inhabit – land, air, or water. It also recognizes a category of “swarming”

54

Leviticus 11 Essentials

animals in all three spheres. The chapter thus categorizes animals within a comprehensive cosmological scheme. That cosmology together with the chapter’s criteria and lists of examples provide listeners and readers with models for how to determine whether a piece of meat is polluting or inedible. Contexts The rules about polluting and inedible animals introduce five chapters of pollution regulations in Leviticus 11-15. Unlike the following chapters that often require priestly mitigation of pollution through ritual offerings, these diet rules instruct lay people in how to distinguish polluted meat for themselves. Leviticus 11 thus extends and deepens the rhetorical strategy already apparent in Leviticus 1-7 of giving attention to lay ritual activities before turning to priestly rights and responsibilities. The call to holiness in the conclusion to this chapter (vv. 44-45) anticipates a major theme of Leviticus 19-22. Leviticus 20:25 invokes this chapter’s diet rules as the paradigm for how Israel should separate itself from other nations by obeying Torah. Here lies the biblical basis for making a kosher diet one of the key elements in a distinctive religious identity. This chapter’s prohibitions on eating polluted quadrupeds, fish, and birds (vv. 3-19) reappear in almost exactly the same words in Deut. 14:6-21. This is one of only two large-scale repetitions between Deuteronomy and earlier legislation in the Pentateuch. (The other is the Decalogue in Exod. 20:2-17 and Deut. 5:6-21.) Leviticus, however, uses the diet rules to introduce five chapters about pollutions, while Deuteronomy places them together with other food laws. Leviticus introduces a distinction between foods polluting to touch, which it calls “polluted,” and those that do not, which it calls “nauseating.” This distinction does not appear in Deuteronomy and gives Leviticus 11 a more strident tone than Deuteronomy 14 (cf. Lev. 11:9-12 with Deut. 14:9-10). References to meat prohibitions or to other polluted food are remarkably rare in the rest of the HB. For example, though archeological remains suggests that Israelites never ate much pork, references to pork as polluting appear outside Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 only in Isa. 65:4; 66:3, 17. More generally, food is depicted as a mark of piety only in Jewish texts from the middle of the Second Temple period (Dan. 1:8-17; Jdt. 12:1-4) and later. These facts suggest that it was the appearance of Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 in the newly scripturalized Torah that first motivated people to think of these food rules as defining their religious identity. Taboos on certain edible foods are common in most human cultures. Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures often attributed their food prohibitions to the preferences of the gods. When they worshipped multiple

Leviticus 11 Exposition

55

deities, however, the food restrictions varied from one temple to the next, even within the same culture (see Introduction to Leviticus 11-20 above). The prohibition on worshipping other gods in biblical tradition eliminated such variety and, in Leviticus, elevated YHWH’s diet preferences into a distinguishing mark of YHWH’s covenant people, Israel. Rhetoric Leviticus 11 is punctuated by frequent refrains urging its listeners and readers to avoid polluting and inedible meat. The contents of some verses serve only to emphasize the urgency of these commands (e.g. vv. 11-12, 43). This vehement repetition of the vocabulary of pollution and nausea aims to provoke feelings of disgust in its audience. The burden of understanding and observing the meat prohibitions falls completely on Israelite lay people in their daily lives, where priests cannot monitor their diet. Leviticus 11 therefore teaches lay people how to distinguish polluted meats for themselves (v. 47) and urgently exhorts them to do so. These food rules evoke the primal emotion of disgust to reinforce the importance of observing Torah. This rhetoric was very successful in antiquity, and still is today. By the late Second Temple period when observance of Torah had become a wide-spread ideal among Jews and Samaritans, conforming to these diet rules became a religious identity marker. Greek and Roman authors commented on the distinctive Jewish diet. They also knew that diet reinforced their sense of separation from other peoples. Jewish intellectuals began to seek rationales for the meat prohibitions in moral allegories. Many early Christians contested the necessity of following these diet rules and the tendency towards social separation that they reinforced. As a result, diet became a distinguishing difference between Christian and Jewish groups. Nevertheless, arguments over whether and how to observe the diet regulations in Leviticus 11 have continued in both Jewish and Christian communities up to the present day. Now, they distinguish denominations in both religions. They are also used by some religious groups to separate themselves from colonial and post-colonial secular societies.

EXPOSITION Additional Bibliography: ACHENBACH, REINHARD. “Zur Systematik der Speisegebote in Leviticus 11 und in Deuteronomium 14.” ZABR 17/9 (2011), 161-209. ALTMANN, PETER. Banned Birds: the Birds of Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019. ALTMANN, PETER and ABRA SPICIARICH. “Chickens, Partridges, and the /tor/ of Ancient Israel and the Hebrew Bible.” Die Welt des Orients 50/1 (2020), 2-30. ANGELINI,

56

Leviticus 11 Exposition

ANNA and CHRISTOPHE NIHAN, “Unclean Birds in the Hebrew and Greek Version of Leviticus and Deuteronomy.” In Le Texte du Lévitique – The Text of Leviticus. Ed. Innocent Himbaza. OBO 292. Leuven: Peeters, 2020. 1-19. BERTHELOT, KATELL. “L’interprétation symbolique des lois alimentaires dans la Lettre d’Aristée: Une influence pythagoricienne.” JJS 52 (2001), 253-68. BURNSIDE, JONATHAN. “At Wisdom’s Table: How Narrative Shapes the Biblical Food Laws and Their Social Function.” JBL 135 (2016), 223-45. COLLINS, BILLIE JEAN. “Pigs at the Gate: Hittite Pig Sacrifice in its Eastern Mediterranean Context.” JANER 6 (2006), 155-88. DAVIS, ELLEN F. “Identity and Eating: A Christian Reading of Leviticus.” Studies in Christian Ethics 30/1 (2017), 3-14. ERMIDORO, STEFANIA. “Food Prohibition and Dietary Regulations in Ancient Mesopotamia.” Aula Orientalis 32/1 (2014), 79-92. ERMIDORO, STEFANIA. “Animals in Ancient Mesopotamian Diet: Prohibitions and Regulations Related to Meat in the First Millennium BCE.” In Altmann-Angelini-Spiciarich (2020), 25-42. FIRMAGE, EDWIN. “Biblical Dietary Laws and the Concept of Holiness.” In Studies in the Pentateuch. Ed. J. A. Emerton. Leiden: Brill, 1990. 177-208. GRANT, ROBERT M. “Dietary Laws among Pythagoreans, Jews, and Christians.” HTR 73 (1980), 299-310. GREER, JONATHAN S. “Prohibited Pigs and Prescribed Priestly Potions: Zooarchaeological Remains from Tel Dan and Questions Concerning Ethnicity and Priestly Traditions in the Hebrew Bible.” In Altmann-Angelini-Spiciarich (2020), 73-85. HARPER, G. GEOFFREY. “Time for a New Diet? Allusions to Genesis 1–3 as Rhetorical Device in Leviticus 11.” Southeastern Theological Review 4 (2013), 179-95. HARPER, G. GEOFFREY. “I Will Walk Among You”: The Rhetorical Function of Allusion to Genesis 1–3 in the Book of Leviticus. University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2018. HOUSTON, WALTER. Purity and Monotheism: Clean and Unclean Animals in Biblical Law. JSOTSup 140. Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993. HOUSTON, WALTER. “Towards an Integrated Reading of the Dietary Laws of Leviticus.” In Rendtorff-Kugler (2003), 142-61. KUNIN, SETH D. We Think What We Eat: Neo-structuralist Analysis of Israelite Food Rules and Other Cultural and Textual Practices. London: T & T Clark, 2004. LEMARDELÉ, CHRISTOPHE. “Mary Douglas et la Bible: La (re)conversion d’une anthropologue.” L’Homme 212 (2014), 139-58. LISS, HANNA. “Ritual Purity and the Construction of Identity: the Literary Function of the Laws of Purity in the Book of Leviticus.” In Römer (2008), 329-54. MESHEL, NAPHTALI S. “Food for Thought: Systems of Categorization in Leviticus 11.” HTR 101/2 (2008), 203-29. MEYER, ESIAS E. “Leviticus 11, Deuteronomy 14 and Directionality.” JSS 23 (2014), 71-89. NIHAN, CHRISTOPHE. “The Laws about Clean and Unclean Animals in Leviticus and Deuteronomy and Their Place in the Formation of the Pentateuch.” In DozemanSchmid-Schwartz (2011), 401-32. RENDSBURG, GARY A. “The inclusio in Leviticus XI.” VT 43/3 (1993), 418-21. ROSENBLUM, JORDAN D. Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. ROSENBLUM, JORDAN D. The Jewish Dietary Laws in the Ancient World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. RUANE, NICOLE J. “Pigs, Purity, and Patrilineality: The Multiparity of Swine and Its Problems for Biblical Ritual and Gender.” JBL 134 (2015), 489-504. SCHÄFER, PETER. Judeophobia: Attitudes Toward the Jews in the Ancient World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. 69-81. SCHWARTZ, JOSHUA. “On Birds, Rabbis and Skin Disease.” In Poorthuis-Schwartz (2000), 207-22. SIMOONS, FREDERICK J. Eat Not This Flesh: Food Avoidances from Prehistory to the Present. 2nd ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. VOLOKHINE, YOURI. “ ‘Food Prohibitions’ in Pharaonic Egypt: Discourses and Practices.” In AltmannAngelini-Spiciarich (2020), 43-55. WARNING, WILFRED. “Terminologische Verknüpfung und Leviticus 11.” BZ 46/1 (2002) 97-102. WHITEKETTLE, RICHARD. “Rats are

Leviticus 11 Exposition

57

Like Snakes, and Hares are Like Goats: A Study in Israelite Land Animal Taxonomy.” Bib 82 (2001a), 345-62. WHITEKETTLE, RICHARD. “Where the Wild Things Are: Primary Level Taxa in Israelite Zoological Thought.” JSOT 93 (2001b), 17-37. WHITEKETTLE, RICHARD. “All Creatures Great and Small: Intermediate Level Taxa in Israelite Zoological Thought.” SJOT 16 (2002), 163-83. WHITEKETTLE, RICHARD. “Of Mice and Wren: Terminal Level Taxa in Israelite Zoological Thought,” SJOT 17 (2003) 163-82. WHITEKETTLE, RICHARD. “The Raven as Kind and Kinds of Ravens: A Study in the Zoological Nomenclature of Leviticus 11,2-23,” ZAW 117 (2005) 509-28. WHITEKETTLE, RICHARD. “One If By And: Conjunctions, Taxonomic Development, and the Animals of Leviticus 11,26.” ZAW 121 (2009), 481-97. WRIGHT, DAVID P. “Observations on the Ethical Foundations of the Biblical Dietary Laws: A Response to Jacob Milgrom.” In Religion and Law: Biblical-Judaic and Islamic Perspectives. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1990. 193-98.

Structure of Leviticus 11 Leviticus 11 focuses on one topic: prohibitions on eating certain animals and avoiding the polluting contact of some animal carcasses. It categorizes animals by habitat: land quadrupeds (vv. 2-11), water animals (vv. 9-12), “flyers” = birds (vv. 13-19), “swarming flyers” = winged insects (vv. 20-23), and “ground swarmers” = lizards and rodents (vv. 29-30). Sometimes it lists polluted species (vv. 4-7, 13-19, 29-30) or, in one case, pure species (v. 22). Elsewhere, it describes criteria for distinguishing edible or polluted animals: quadrupeds with split hooves that chew the cud (vv. 3, 26), fish with fins and scales (v. 9-10, 12), insects with a pair of large jumping legs (v. 21), quadrupeds with paws (v. 27), and anything that crawls on its belly or with many legs (v. 42). Verses 2-23 and 41-42 deal with food restrictions, while vv. 24-40 address polluting touch. Therefore, despite its topical unity, this chapter appears very heterogeneous and disorganized, especially in contrast to chaps. 1-7. Some commentators have tried to find more structure here. For example, the clear chiastic arch in vv. 24-28 (see Exegesis) led Luciani (2005, 54-59, 372-73) to use it as the centre of an arch spanning the entire chapter, but he himself admitted dissatisfaction with the results (55). More obvious than its literary structure is the chapter’s effort to provide a comprehensive classification of animals by their habitats (land, air, water), adding a class of “swarmers” to each habitat. But the details become complicated: Whitekettle (2001b, 31-33) observed that Lev. 11:2-23//Deut. 14:3-20 contains a four-fold taxonomy of animal species between animals of the land, water, and two- and six-legged aerial animals, while Lev. 11:46-47 presents a different four-fold taxonomy that distinguishes high- from lowcarriage land animals as well as those of water and air, a taxonomy that also appears in Deut. 4:17-18. While Deuteronomy mentions them separately, Leviticus 11 combines these into a five-fold taxonomy of species.

58

Leviticus 11 Exposition

Animal taxonomies from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia did not connect them to diet rules (see Nihan 2007, 334 and bibliography there). Their food prohibitions tended to be temporary and contextually variable (Ermidoro 2014). Erhard Blum observed that the instructions regarding clean and unclean animals in Leviticus 11 are understandable only against the background of the food instructions in Genesis: animal meat was forbidden at the beginning (1:29-30), but allowed after the flood (9:3-4). Now God’s renewed residence among humans is accompanied by restrictions on what animals they may eat (Blum 1990, 324; also Harper 2013; Harper 2018). Attention to the rhetorical impact of reading aloud (see Leviticus 1-10, 24-28) suggests that interpreters should focus more on repeated formulas than on topical structures. While the eye of a silent reader tends the skip repetitive refrains in search of unique information, reading aloud emphasizes the refrains by their repetitive rhythm. Formulas both frame and punctuate the food instructions of Leviticus 11. They also clearly divide the chapter into three sections: vv. 2-23, 24-40, 41-47. The refrains of vv. 2-23 label various kinds of meat as polluting (‫טמא‬, vv. 2-8) or nauseating (‫שׁקץ‬, vv. 10-23) while designating what is edible. 2-3 ‫ אתה תאכלו‬... ‫ זאת החיה אשׁר תאכלו‬this is the kind of animal that you may eat ... it you may eat 4 ‫ אך את־זה לא תאכלו‬but this you must not eat ‫   טמא הוא לכם‬ it is polluting for you 5 ‫   טמא הוא לכם‬ it is polluting for you 6 ‫   טמא הוא לכם‬ it is polluting for you 7 ‫   טמא הוא לכם‬ it is polluting for you 8 ‫   טמא הוא לכם‬ it is polluting for you 9 ‫ אתם תאכלו‬... ‫ את־זה תאכלו‬this you may eat ... these you may eat 10 ‫   שׁקץ הם לכם‬ they should be nauseating for you 11 ‫   ושׁקץ יהיו לכם‬ they will be nauseating for you ‫ מבשׂרם לא תאכלו‬their meat you must not eat and ‫   ואת־נבלתם תשׁקצו‬ their carcasses should nauseate you 12 ‫   שׁקץ הוא לכם‬ it should be nauseating for you 13 ‫   ואת־אלה תשׁקצו‬ these should nauseate you ‫ מן־העוף לא יאכלו‬of the flyers that you must not eat ‫   שׁקץ הם‬ they are nauseating 20 ‫   שׁקץ הוא לכם‬ it should be nauseating for you 21 ‫ אך את־זה תאכלו‬but this you may eat 22 ‫ את־אלה מהם תאכלו‬these among them you may eat 23 ‫   שׁקץ הוא לכם‬ it should be nauseating for you

The refrains of vv. 24-40 label carcasses that pollute on contact. Labels in the second person alternate with casuistic formulas in the third person:

Leviticus 11 Exposition 24

25 26 27

28

29 31 32

33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40

59

‫ לאלה תטמאו‬by these you pollute yourselves ‫ יטמא עד־הערב‬... ‫כל־הנגע‬ everyone who touches ... polluted until evening ‫ וטמא עד־הערב‬... ‫כל־הנשׂה‬ everyone who carries ... polluted until evening ‫ טמאים הם לכם‬they are polluting for you ‫ יטמא‬... ‫כל־הנגע‬ everyone who touches ... polluted ‫ טמאים הם לכם‬they are polluting for you ‫ יטמא עד־הערב‬... ‫כל־הנגע‬ everyone who touches ...polluted until evening ‫ וטמא עד־הערב‬... ‫כל־הנשׂה‬ everyone who carries ... polluted until evening ‫ טמאים המה לכם‬these are polluting for you ‫ זה לכם הטמא‬for you, this is polluting ‫ אלה הטמאים לכם‬these are polluting for you ‫ יטמא עד־הערב‬... ‫כל־הנגע‬ everyone who touches ... polluted until evening ... ‫כל אשׁר־יפל־עליו‬ everything that one of these falls upon ... ‫טמא עד־הערב‬ polluted until evening ‫ יטמא‬... ‫כל‬ every/all ... polluted ‫ יטמא‬... ‫כל‬ every/all ... polluted ‫ יטמא‬... ‫כל‬ every/all ... polluted ‫ יטמא‬... ‫כל‬ every/all ... polluted ‫ טמאים הם וטמאים יהיו לכם‬they are polluted and they will stay polluted for you ‫ טהור‬... ‫ אך מעין ובור‬however, a pool or cistern ... remains pure ‫ יטמא‬... ‫ונגע‬ someone who touches ... polluted ‫ טהור הוא‬... ‫וכי יפל‬ when it falls ... it remains pure ... ‫וכי‬ but when ... ‫ טמא הוא לכם‬it is polluting for you ‫ יטמא עד־הערב‬... ‫ הנגע‬... ‫וכי‬ when ... whoever touches ... polluted until evening ‫ וטמא עד־הערב‬... ‫האכל‬ whoever eats ... polluted until evening ‫ וטמא עד־הערב‬... ‫הנשׂה‬ whoever carries ... polluted until evening

Verses 41-47 mix the refrains from both previous parts of the chapter together: 41 42 43

44 47

‫שׁקץ הוא‬ it is nauseating ‫ לא יאכל‬it must not be eaten ‫ לא תאכלום‬you must not eat ‫שׁקץ הם‬ they are nauseating ‫אל־תשׁקצו‬ do not nauseate yourselves ‫ ונטמתם‬...‫לא תטמאו‬ do not pollute yourselves ... and become polluted ‫לא תטמאו‬ do not pollute yourselves ‫הטמא‬ the polluted ‫ לא תאכל‬you must not eat

60

Leviticus 11 Exposition

I provide this detailed schematic representation of the chapter’s refrains because refrains make a greater impact on the listening ear than the reading eye. Readers easily skip the repetition to look for the differences between verses. But listeners feel the rhythmic effect of the repetition which is likely to imprint on their memories more than the differences in detail. Since this material was written for listening audiences (see Leviticus 1-10, 24-28), the thematic emphasis of the chapters and its sections can be found in its refrains. The rhythmic repetition of phrases that juxtapose the words ‫“ אכל‬eat” and ‫“ נגע‬touch” with ‫“ טמא‬polluted/polluting” and ‫“ שׁקץ‬nauseating” aim to provoke feelings of disgust in the listening audience. A topical outline strips the repetitions to differentiate the contents based on visual reading and so misses the emphatic effect: OUTLINE 1-2a Divine speech formula 2b-8 Quadrupeds 9-23 Nauseating animals 24-40 Pollution by touch and purification by time 41-47 Concluding exhortations and formulas

Many commentators identify the prohibitions on polluting touch (vv. 24-38) as a later addition. Milgrom (691-93) argued that vv. 24-40 and 46-47 were inserted into the original dietary prohibitions (vv. 2-23, 41-42) by a second priestly author also responsible for Leviticus 12-15 to tie the food laws to the contact impurities of the following chapters. The vocabulary of vv. 43-45 resembles H (cf. 20:25) as many commentators have noted. But Rendsburg (1993) observed that v. 45’s unusual use of ‫“ עלה‬bring up” builds a literary inclusio with the verb’s repeated appearance in the first set of diet regulations in vv. 3-7. Milgrom identified vv. 39-40 as also from H (Milgrom 1857, changing his previous view 695; see also Hieke 429). He thought that the criteria (cud-chewing, split hooves) were older than the list of four excluded animals (except pigs), which led him to ask about the original purpose for formulating the criteria (Milgrom 731). Nihan (2007, 295-96) also regarded the criteria as additions, but dated them earlier than H’s rules in 17:15-16. This chapter’s frequent motivation clauses (“it is polluted,” “it should be nauseating for you”) are a notable departure from Leviticus’ previous ritual instructions, which have restricted themselves to procedures with very few explanatory glosses. They also authorized priests to adjudicate ambiguous cases (10:10). Now, lay people are explicitly invited (11:47) to participate in the priestly activity of distinguishing polluted from pure animals, and the chapter never mentions priestly intervention. So Leviticus 11 is an example of teaching torah to the Israelites (10:11) with the express purpose that they will learn to reason about pollution and purity for themselves. It presents both criteria (11:3, 9-10, 21) and lists of examples (11:4-7, 13-19, 22, 29-30)

Leviticus 11 Exposition

61

to teach how to use both deductive and inductive reasoning, as has been typically the case of persuasive and didactic rhetoric from antiquity to today (Aristotle, Rhet. 1356). The history of this chapter’s interpretation has focused on explaining and elaborating the criteria and examples, exactly what the chapter’s rhetoric encourages readers and hearers to do. The complicated structure of Leviticus 11 suggests that a process of explaining and elaborating the diet rules also contributed to its composition through supplementation. The chapter does not preserve the questions that prompted its elaboration, though they can be deduced from its contents. Therefore its literary growth may have had less to do with Pentateuchal sources and large-scale redactions than with irregular additions prompted by particular concerns raised by attempts to enact its rulings. Scholarship of the last fifty years, especially in Germany, has explored such editorial extensions (Fortschreibungen) in biblical literature, including Leviticus 11 (e.g. Gerstenberger 132: “It seems that generations of postexilic theologians and congregations have also worked on these catalogues of edible animals and their interpretation, so that the second half of Leviticus 11 can be read largely as a commentary on the first half”; also Ego 1997, 132-35; Hieke 431-32). Supplementation and creative rearrangement of parts of the chapter continued down to the second and first centuries B.C.E., as attested by manuscript evidence of different lists of birds in the Greek translation (LXX) as well as the Hebrew of both Deuteronomy and Leviticus (Angelini and Nihan 2020). Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 Leviticus and Deuteronomy both contain these diet laws. However, Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 do not just address the same subject, they actually seem to use the same text. Signs of direct dependence between Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 are especially clear when they use the same strange phrasing, such as ‫“ את־זה‬this” to start Lev. 11:9 and Deut. 14:9. Elsewhere (e.g. v. 7), the phrasing of MT Deuteronomy 14 diverges from Leviticus 11 while SP and LXX Deuteronomy match Leviticus. (For tables of the parallel Hebrew phrases and their differences, see Achenbach 2011.) On the other hand, the LXX of Lev. 11:17-19 and Deut. 14:16-18 diverge, while the MT of both passages matches (see Angelini and Nihan 2020). Like Leviticus 11, Deuteronomy 14 groups animals by their habitats: land (14:3-8), water (14:9-10), and air (14:11-20). The last category includes “swarming flyers,” that is, insects (14:19-20). Leviticus adds swarmers on land and in water, and so places swarmers in all three habitats (11:10, 29-31, 41-43). The position of the verses about land and water swarmers makes them look like additions to the main discussion. Therefore many commentators

62

Leviticus 11 Exposition

have regarded Deuteronomy 14 as the original list. Milgrom (698-704) argued instead that Deuteronomy 14 copied and abbreviated Leviticus 11, a view more recently defended by Reinhard Achenbach (2011) who considered both chapters to be late additions to their contexts. The complicated structure of Leviticus 11 makes it more likely that the overlap between its first section and Deuteronomy 14 reflects an older written source incorporated into both books (so Dillman; Driver; Elliger; Wright 1991, 167-69; Houston 1993, 63-65; Nihan 2007, 299; Meshel 2008, 209; Kazen 2011, 78; Hieke 416-17; for a full review of all the arguments for this position, see Nihan 2011, and cf. Meyer 2014). Leviticus elaborated on this shared source to a much greater extent than Deuteronomy. Its additions emphasized parallels with P’s creation stories in Genesis (so Nihan 2007, 293; Harper 2013; Harper 2018, though I do not find convincing Harper’s attempt to show that Lev. 11 alludes also to the non-P story in Gen. 2-3). Why does the Pentateuch reproduce the rules for quadrupeds and birds in both Leviticus and Deuteronomy? This is one of only two examples (the other is the Decalogue) of paragraph-length verbatim repetition within the Torah’s legislation. Interpreters have long recognized that, while Leviticus addresses priestly concerns, Deuteronomy is more oriented to the affairs of lay people. It is not surprising, therefore, that Deuteronomy’s longest discussion of pollution involves meat, which impacts the daily lives of lay Israelites. Leviticus will soon turn its attention to the priests’ role in diagnosing and mitigating pollution (chaps. 12-15, especially 13-14). But P’s typical rhetorical strategy is to soften its assertions of priestly rights and responsibilities by focusing first on lay peoples’ roles in rituals (see Leviticus 1-10, 152, 16768). Therefore, Leviticus begins its discussion of pollution and purification by addressing the topic that lay people must adjudicate daily for themselves, namely, food. Meat, then, is a common concern of the priestly and Deuteronomic writers because, on this topic, they address the concerns of the same audience, Israelite lay people, and for the same purpose, to teach them how to observe YHWH’s covenant. History of the Interpretation and Application of Biblical Diet Rules A popular explanation in antiquity for biblical diet laws was that they teach control over appetites (Philo, Laws 4.100-101; 4 Macc. 1:33-34, 4:16-27; see Kugel 1998, 748-59; a modern version of this theory was advocated by Carmichael 2006, 17-19). But the specific provisions and explanations of Leviticus 11 called for more specific interpretations of the details. The Letter of Aristeas in the second century B.C.E. already provided a moral interpretation of the lists of unclean animals:

Leviticus 11 Exposition

63

Do not take the contemptible view that Moses enacted this legislation because of an excessive preoccupation with mice and weasels or suchlike creatures. The fact is that everything has been solemnly set in order for unblemished investigation and amendment of life for the sake of righteousness. The birds which we use are all domesticated and of exceptional cleanliness, their food consisting of wheat and pulse – such birds as pigeons, turtledoves, locusts, partridges, and, in addition, geese and others of the same kind. As for the birds which are forbidden, you will find wild and carnivorous kinds, and the rest which dominate by their own strength, and who find their food at the expense of the aforementioned domesticated birds – which is an injustice; and not only that, they also seize lambs and kids and outrage human beings dead or alive. By calling them impure, he has thereby indicated that it is the solemn binding duty of those for whom the legislation has been established to practice righteousness and not to lord it over anyone in reliance upon their own strength, nor to deprive him of anything but to govern their lives righteously, in the manner of the gentle creatures among the aforementioned birds which feed on those plants which grow on the ground and do not exercise a domination leading to the destruction of their fellow creatures. (Aris. 142-148; similarly Philo, Laws 4.103, 117; Letter of Barnabus 10:4; see Kugel 1998, 749-50)

Aristeas interpreted the emphasis on divided hoofs as an exhortation to carefully distinguish righteous from unrighteous acts and to separate oneself from unrighteous people (Aris. 151-52). It also suggested that by declaring all animals that chew the cud pure, Lev. 11:3 emphasizes the importance of remembering and meditating on God’s blessings (Aris. 150, 153-55 and others; Kugel 1998, 748-49). Aristeas reflected its Hellenistic context and, specifically, the influence of Pythagorean vegetarianism (Grant 1980; Bertholet 2001). However, the motive for obeying the food laws involved Jewish identity, an idea drawn directly from Lev. 20:22-26: “In his wisdom the legislator ... surrounded us with unbroken palisades and iron walls to prevent our mixing with any of the other peoples in any matter, being thus kept pure in body and soul, preserved from false beliefs, and worshipping the only God, omnipotent over all creation” (Aris. 139). Philo of Alexandria later extended Aristeas’s approach by interpreting the biblical diet laws as ascetic exercises that teach moderation (Laws 4.100-118).1 As Judeans in the Second Temple period became increasingly Torah observant, they defined Jewish identity around observance of a small subset of the Pentateuch’s laws and instructions. Prominent among them were diet restrictions. Keeping the torah of the animals (v. 46) distinguished Torahobservant lay people in their day-to-day activities.

1 On Philo’s interpretation of diet laws, see James N. Rhodes, “Diet and Desire: The Logic of the Dietary Laws according to Philo,” ETL 79 (2003), 122-33; and Hans Svebakken, Philo of Alexandria’s Exposition of the Tenth Commandment, Atlanta: SBL, 2012.

64

Leviticus 11 Exposition

This trend appears not just in the Egyptian Jewish literary circles of Aristeas and Philo, but also in a wider variety of Second Temple literature from the third century B.C.E. on. For example, both Judith and Daniel demonstrated their piety by abstaining from polluted food (Judt. 12:1-4; Dan. 1:8-17). Greek authors commented on Jewish diet laws, especially pork avoidance, already by the second and first centuries B.C.E. (so Diodorus, who was perhaps quoting Posidonius; see Schäfer 1998, 66-67). Jewish aversion to pork was widely noted by later Greco-Roman authors (Schäfer 1998, 69-81; Rosenblum 2016, 28-45). Pigs then became emblematic for the whole system of Jewish food laws and were instrumentalized in conflicts over ethnic and religious identity. The books of Maccabees, written in the second to first centuries B.C.E., accuse Seleucid persecutors of force feeding Jews pork as a symbol of renouncing their religion (1 Macc. 1:47; so also Josephus, Ant. xii 235f.). Other stories claim that Seleucid torturers tempted faithful Jews to eat pork in order to save their lives (2 Macc. 6:18, 20; 7:1). According to 2 Maccabees, the martyrs’ refusal to eat unclean meat motivated God to support the rebellion of Judah Maccabee (Ego 2013). Late Second Temple sectarians took diverse stands on diet regulations. It is notable that Qumran texts did not reflect any significant development of food laws beyond biblical mandates or in conflict with other Jewish groups, in contrast to their distinctive views on corpse impurity, bodily discharges, and sex (Werrett 2013, 511). They were, however, scrupulous about not only eating but also preparing food in a condition of bodily purity (1QS 5.13; Harrington 2004, 23). Harrington observed that they combined the purification rules of Leviticus 11-15 with the rules for eating offerings in Lev. 7:19-21 to require that everyone bathe before eating (Harrington 2004, 25). Rabbinic Jewish texts elaborated especially on how the food rules should be observed. Jordan Rosenblum has described the effects of rabbinic legislation for distinguishing not only Jews from non-Jews, but also Jewish men from women and rabbanate Jews from those who did not follow rabbinic teachings. In tannaitic literature, “a connection is established between commensality, intermarriage, and idolatry” (Rosenblum 2010, 11) in which “a Jew who eats pork is considered an apostate; the bread of Samaritans ... is deemed equivalent to pork” (Rosenblum 2016, 93). The Talmud’s rules have shaped Jewish food practices and debates over how to keep kosher ever since. Early Christian texts, by contrast, explicitly disputed or mitigated diet restrictions (Mark 5:25–34; Matt. 9:11; Acts 10:15; Rom. 14:14-23). Many Christians therefore ignored Pentateuchal prohibitions of unclean animals. Some instead followed the apostolic compromise prohibiting consumption of blood, strangled animals, and food “offered to idols” (Acts 15:20, 29; Tomson 2000, 75-78), but even these restrictions fell away in many Christian communities (see Introduction to Leviticus 11-20 for Christian rhetoric about

Leviticus 11 Exposition

65

pollution, including diet rules). Frederick Simoons (1994, 32-33) observed that the rising popularity of Christianity therefore coincided with increasing consumption of pork while cults that avoided pork were suppressed. That tendency was reversed with the rise of Islam. The pig is the only species that the Qur’an prohibited by name from the Muslim diet (2:172; 5:3; 6:145; 16:115). Like Christians, medieval Muslim interpreters of the Qur’an discussed the Torah’s other diet rules to distinguish Muslim practice explicitly from Jewish.2 The lists of animals in chap. 11 drew the attention of Christian artists, unlike the rest of Leviticus (see Introduction to Leviticus 1-10 §2.2.3). They often illustrated the various species, sometimes with their moral implications. For example, the thirteenth-century illuminated manuscipt, the Rohan Hours, gave considerable attention to depicting the food rules along with their allegorical interpretation for Christians. Its illustrations compared the clean animals of 11:3 (Pl. 94/f. 217v) with monks reading the scriptures (Pl. 95/f. 218r) and interpreted the polluted animals (Pl. 96/f. 218v) as representing immoral behaviour: Just as Moses forbade to eat the flesh of the wolf, the lion, and the hog, so Christ forbade his disciples to display covetousness or live by means of ‘rapine,’ that is, from ill-gotten gain. The lion is likened to the wicked prince who oppresses his subject; the wolf to the evil prelate who sins through lust and gluttony; the hog to the userers who are ready to make money from anything. (Pl. 97/f. 219r)

In modern religious cultures, the diet rules of Leviticus and Deuteronomy continue to be influential, and also controversial. The political emancipation of Jews in many nations in the nineteenth century fuelled debates within Jewish communities about whether and how they should adapt to modern culture. Many considered keeping kosher (observing the Talmud’s diet rules) as old-fashioned and unnecessary. The ordination of the first class of American Reform rabbis was celebrated in 1883 in Cincinnati with a banquet that included shellfish, and prompted immediate outrage.3 This incident and the larger debate over kosher split American Jews into rival denominations (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform). Later, in the mid-to-late twentieth century, the regional and then national marketing of kosher foods such as National Brand hot dogs, Pepperidge Farms cookies, and Heinz ketchup led to advertising them as more natural and healthy than non-kosher products (Nathan 2005, 11). In this way, modern American culture transformed the image of kosher, as Jenna Joselit 2 Brannon Wheeler, “Food of the Book or Food of Israel: Israelite and Jewish Food Laws in the Muslim Exegesis of Quran 3:93,” in Greenspoon-Simkins-Shapiro (2005), 281-96. 3 Jenna Weissman Joselit, “Food Fight: The Americanization of Kashrut in Twentieth Century American Judaism,” in Greenspoon-Simkins-Shapiro (2005), 335-45 [335]; Joan Nathan, “A Social History of Jewish Food in America,” in Greenspoon-Simkins-Shapiro (2005), 1-12 [1, 5].

66

Leviticus 11 Exposition

(2005, 337) observed: “proponents of the dietary laws drew on modern values and forms of expression – science, consumer culture, and sentimentality – to plead their virtues.” These adaptations to modern consumerism also turned kosher food production into a large and profitable business. As a result, Kenneth Lasson could report “the persistent perception by numerous people within the kosher meat industry that their business involves ‘two percent halachah (Jewish religious law) and 98 percent ego and money and politics’.”4 Apart from Jewish groups, some other contemporary religious movements also observe at least some of these diet rules. Seventh Day Adventists should eat only “clean” meat as defined by Leviticus 11, but many are completely vegetarian.5 Jamaican Rastafarian traditions encourage Rastas to imitate biblical Nazirites by eating only clean foods (Savishinsky 1998, 139). Pentateuchal food regulations are also observed by many people in African Zionist churches (van Zyl 1995, 429-34; Jenkins 2006, 50). Among Western Evangelical Christians, “biblical diets” based on Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 have recently become popular. They do not take the diet rules as mandatory, but rather as good advice for living well. Influenced perhaps by the marketing of kosher foods, they regard “biblical diets” as cleaner and healthier than other foods.6 Biblical Diet Rules in Contemporary Academic Interpretation The most influential explanation of the polluted animals in Leviticus 11 was propounded by Mary Douglas in 1966, but her views changed over time. In her early work, a cross-cultural study of purity and pollution, she applied to Leviticus 11 a social definition of purity and holiness: “individuals shall conform to the class to which they belong” (Douglas 1966, 67). Noting along with many commentators that, like Genesis 1, this chapter classifies living creatures by their environments, land, air, and water, she concluded: Leviticus takes up this scheme and allots to each element its proper kind of animal life. In the firmament two-legged fowls fly with wings. In the water scaly fish swim with fins. On the earth four-legged animals hop, jump or walk. Any class of creatures which is not equipped for the right kind of locomotion in its element is contrary to holiness. (Douglas 1966, 69)

4 Kenneth Lasson, Sacred Cows, Holy Wars: Verities and Vagaries in Deciding What’s Kosher and What’s Not (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2017), xiii-xiv. 5 Roy E. Gane, Old Testament Law for Christians: Original Context and Enduring Application (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017), 356. 6 For a survey and discussion of this trend, see Nathan MacDonald, What Did the Ancient Israelites Eat? Diet in Biblical Times (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 94-101.

Leviticus 11 Exposition

67

In the preface to the 2003 edition of Purity and Danger, however, Douglas labelled her previous description of the diet rules “a major mistake” (xiii). She now believed that Israel’s purity rules were unrelated to enforcing social hierarchy (see Pollution and Social Hierarchy in Introduction to Leviticus 11-20) because they contain no punishment for misbehaviour. She argued instead that the rules were meant to protect weak animals from human predation (xv; also Douglas 1993b; Douglas 1999, 134-75). Influential on Douglas’s later work was Jacob Milgrom’s (733-35) argument that the diet regulations were shaped to teach reverence for life in anticipation of the purity rules in chaps. 12-15 that teach abhorrence of death. Their purpose is to restrict Israelites’ diets so as to acknowledge God’s grace in allowing humans to eat meat at all (Gen. 9:1-7). However, Douglas’s earlier explanation of purity as based on an animal’s fitness within its environment works much better for Leviticus 11 (and Genesis 1) than her and Milgrom’s exposition of these chapters as expressing an ethic of God’s protection of animal life, which struggles to find any basis in the biblical text (for more detailed analyses and criticisms, see Wright 1990; Houston 2003, 150-57; Watts 2007, 23-24). While some biblical scholars embraced Douglas’s later work with enthusiasm,7 her earlier book made a more enduring contribution to understanding pollution. Commentators have often affirmed her insight that the chapter conforms animal locomotion to environment. Some, however, have added other or additional motivations that they perceived in this chapter. Edwin Firmage thought that the diet rules of Leviticus 11 were prompted by a variety of reasons. He argued that a “temple paradigm” of animals acceptable on the altar shaped the definition of pure, edible meats by analogy: wild ruminate ungulates (deer) may be eaten because domesticated ruminate ungulates (cattle, sheep, goats) may be eaten and offered to God. He argued that the only fish without fins and scales that Israelites would have encountered were eels and catfish, which they excluded as analogous to snakes. Crustaceans were frequently classified with locusts in Akkadian and Arabic onomastica (Firmage 1990, 202). The pig, he thought, was already excluded by Israelite custom, so the criterion of chewing the cud was added simply to explain its exclusion (Firmage 1990, 193-94; similarly Milgrom 189; for a critique, see Houston 1993, 117-19). Walter Houston argued instead that the lists of edible animals matched the common diet among Israelites and neighbouring peoples. He observed that pigs were never offered in temples in this region. This observation suggests that diet emerged as a distinguishing Israelite ethnic marker only in 7 E.g. Suzette Heald, Lester L. Grabbe, Don Handelman, Alan F. Segal, and Ronald S. Hendel in the Journal of Ritual Studies 18/2 (2004), 152-191; Martin Reilich, Grenzfall Mensch: Biblische Impulse für eine Theologie der Berührung (SBB 69; Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 2013), 72-86.

68

Leviticus 11 Exposition

contrast to the Philistines, the Babylonians, or the Greeks (Houston 1993, 178-89). Houston argued that this common Canaanite diet was turned into general prohibitions by making Israel’s religious commandments absolute. “Only at the stage of the development of monolatrous Yahwism as exemplified in our present texts was the distinction absolutized into a demand for total abstinence from ‘unclean’ food as a mark of dedication. Purity became the guardian of monotheism” (Houston 1993, 123). Seth Kunin criticized previous explanations of the diet rules for presenting implicitly structuralist models that are not sufficiently abstract to convey the “clear and consistent structural equation” that structuralist theory requires (Kunin 2004, 83). Structuralism presupposes dichotomies at the roots of human thought. Kunin found that the food rules present perfect examples of dyadic distinctions between polluted and pure animals that exclude the possibility of any intermediate categories (Kunin 2004, 91). Naphtali Meshel also analyzed the diet rules in Leviticus 11 from a structuralist theory of binary oppositions (but ignored Kunin’s work). He suggested that the chapter was supplemented by a series of editors who tried to systematically distinguish prohibitions on consuming some meats from the polluting effects of touching other meats. He concluded that the chapter presents “a coherent argument regarding the relation of culture to nature” by displaying “a conscious, gradual, consistent differentiation of the categories ‘impurity’ and ‘prohibition,’ presented not in abstract terms but through a grid of ritual regulations” (Meshel 2008, 228-29). Kunin also traced the development of some rules, such as the exception for locusts (11:20), which he thought accommodated preexisting cultural practices through a “theoretical bricolage” (Kunin 2004, 88, 98). Meshel, by contrast, believed that the writers wanted to make the cultural diet system conceptually consistent more than normative for personal practice (221). Thomas Kazen (2011, 78-79) agreed with Meshel and many others (see above) that Leviticus elaborated a common tradition that also appears in Deuteronomy 14. He differed in maintaining that P clarified issues in the common tradition in ways that do not require structuralist analysis, rather than complicating them as Meshel suggested. Kazen also noted that P’s elaborations on contact impurity establish a conceptual bridge to the contact contagions of emissions and skin disease that follow in chaps. 12-15. Meshel’s and Kazen’s different reconstructions of which verses belong to the core of the chapter and which are supplemental additions, and the alternative reconstruction of Nihan (2007, 293-301), illustrate clearly the contradictory results of diachronic reconstructions of compositional processes as the micro-textual level, as Kazen (2011, 78) admitted. This commentary therefore abstains from such speculations. It is enough to note that the text shows the marks of editorial supplementation, but by whom and when remains beyond our ability to reconstruct in detail.

Leviticus 11 Exposition

69

Jonathan Burnside (2016) maintained that Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 drew on Israel’s “social knowledge” shaped by its material environment. The rules develop preexisting ideas about categories of pure and polluted animals which they often assume, rather than define. P and D’s categorization of them are “self-executing narrative rules” that train lay people how to think about purity (Burnside 2016, 243). Leigh M. Trevaskis (2011, 47) argued that the H addition at the end of the chapter (11:43-45) “made explicit what is implicit, in a symbolic dimension, within P’s dietary prescriptions.” He therefore maintained that P, like H, focused on the holiness of the Israelites, but H made this theme more explicit. Ancient and modern attempts to explain the diet rules of Leviticus 11 founder on unexamined presuppositions about what counts as an explanation for a ritual rule. I counted five different kinds of questions that such explanations may address: Why did P write about diet rules? What did P think the diet rules mean? Did P’s diet rules reflect the actual diet of the Israelites? If so, what did they mean to the Israelites? How did diet rules function in Israelite society? (Watts 2007, 27-29). Kazen has recently enumerated seven different levels of interpretation (Kazen 2019, 77). Symbolic explanations of conceptual meaning have been most popular with biblical interpreters from antiquity to present (see Leviticus 1-10, Introduction §2.3.3), but the priestly writers provide almost no symbolic interpretations of the purity rules, or any other rituals. Therefore, a general explanation that addresses only the first question will have to suffice. The anthropologist Roy Rappaport (1999, 144) observed: “Taboos, while often or usually liturgically assumed, are generally realized outside of ritual. The orders from which they spring are thus extended by them into the secular world where they become not only material but apparently natural as well.” Leviticus 11’s prohibitions on eating certain meats and on touching certain animal carcasses certainly had their conceptual home in Israel’s temple rituals, which required only certain animal offerings (chaps. 1-7) and were concerned about contagious touch (Lev. 6:11, 20-21 Eng. 6:18, 27-28). Leviticus 11 and the chapters that follow extend these concerns onto Israelite bodies, buildings, and possessions outside the temple walls. As Nihan (2011, 423) observed about Deuteronomy 14, “the household somehow functions as an extension of the central sanctuary.” Lay People as Torah Interpreters The usual research question about the subject of Jewish food rules (kashrut) has been: why these rules in particular? Scholars have focused on the specific contents of the regulations in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 to ask, for example, what is the problem with pork or shellfish?

70

Leviticus 11 Exposition

I want to draw attention to a neglected but historically and religiously more important question: Why did the food laws become such prominent markers of Jewish identity? This question is more important because most cultures avoid some kinds of food, but only rarely does this avoidance become one of their most well-known and distinguishing features. Out of the 613 separate laws that the rabbis identified in the Torah, why did food restrictions emerge, along with circumcision and resting on the Sabbath, as distinguishing characteristics of observant Jews? One answer is simply that the Jewish diet was different from that of Greeks and Romans, and so drew attention as distinctive. However, the classical authors who commented on Jewish diets also observed that different cultures regularly have different food taboos. For example, they talked as much about the Egyptians’ distinctive dietary preferences, which they exaggerated, as about Jewish food laws.8 A second answer from ancient critics is the observation that Jews tried to separate themselves from other peoples. Seleucid apologists and other GrecoRoman critics charged Jews with misanthropia because they avoided pollution in general and, especially, from food (Schäfer 1998, 21-22, 67). The community at Qumran insisted on eating every meal in a state of ritual purity (Harrington 2004, 24) and many Pharisees insisted on washing hands before eating (Mark 7:3; Luke 11:38; m. Hul. 2.5). Leviticus itself claims that the motivation for the food laws is to “separate” Israel from other peoples: I am YHWH your God who separated you from the peoples. You must separate pure quadrupeds from the polluted, and polluted flyers from the pure, so you do not nauseate yourselves with quadrupeds, flyers, and everything that scrambles on the ground which I have separated as polluted for you. You are holy to me because I, YHWH, am holy. I have separated you from the peoples to be mine. (Lev. 20:24-26).

This justification grounds social and ethnic separation in cosmological distinctions between divine and human realms and different realms of nature (Gen. 1; Harper 2018, 144-45). A third answer suggests that the rules of kashrut attracted attention because they conflicted with Hellenistic cultic meals. Robert Doran argued that Antiochus changed Jerusalem’s “ancestral laws” about circumcision, Sabbath, and diet just to demonstrate his own power and to conform them to practices 8 Philippe Borgeaud, “Greek and Comparatist Reflections on Food Prohibitions,” in Frevel-Nihan (2013), 261-87 [269-74]. Giuseppina Lenzo, Christophe Nihan and Alessandra Rolle in an unpublished paper, “Jewish and Egyptian Food Prohibitions: A Reexamination of Ancient Sources,” presented in Lausanne in 2017 argued that the Greco-Roman tradition of comparing Jewish and Egyptian food prohibitions dates only from the 2nd century C.E. and later.

Leviticus 11 Exposition

71

he knew, not out of particular knowledge of Jewish distinctives.9 On the other hand, John Collins (2017, 15) observed that “one might equally well argue that these practices were singled out because of their symbolic value as boundary markers of Judean ethnicity” since the Seleucids also attacked Torah scrolls as iconic symbols of Jewish identity. (On the growing iconicity of Torah scrolls in the Second Temple period, see Watts 2011b and Watts 2017, 68-122.) I suggest that Leviticus 11 lays another foundation for linking diet and Jewish identity by explicitly grounding both in the interpretation of Torah. Leviticus 11 does so by exhorting lay people not only to Torah observance, but also to engage themselves in Torah interpretation about the rationales for the rules of pure, polluted, and nauseating meats. Right after the startling events of chap. 10 and at the beginning of bodily purification rules that continue through chap. 15, the prominent position of Leviticus 11 emphasizes its reasoning about pollution rules to those listening to the book being read aloud (Harper 2018, 108). Walter Houston (1993, 17) observed that, while most cultures prohibit consumption of some foods, it is rare for them to describe rules that categorize all meats as either edible or inedible as Leviticus 11 does. Like many others, he argued that the criteria and lists of animal species in this chapter and its parallel in Deuteronomy 14 were not just catalogues of customary practices, but the products of scribal reflection on those practices. Comparison of the two chapters shows how the authors of Leviticus extended those reflections to more categories (vv. 21-22, 29-31, 41-42) and, especially, to purification rules (vv. 24-40; see Nihan 2007, 293-301; Meshel 2008; Kazen 2011). On the other hand, Israel’s diet rules are restricted to meats, while other cultures often proscribed strongly scented vegetables too, such as garlic and leeks on certain Babylonian holy days, apparently to avoid offending the gods by bad breath (van der Toorn 1985, 33-34; Ermidoro 2014, 86-89). Leviticus 11 stands out in cultural comparisons for its attempt to define pure and edible meats comprehensively, and also for its failure to prohibit any vegetables (cf. prohibited fruit in Gen. 2:17; 3:3). However, describing the chapter as scribal reflection on popular practices does not do justice to the vehement rhetoric of disgust that the chapter deploys to motivate observance of its regulations. Leviticus 11 is persuasive rhetoric, most obviously in its tirade about nauseating carcasses in vv. 10-12, but also in the repetitious formulas about nauseating and polluting animals throughout 9 Robert Doran, “The Persecution of Judeans by Antiochus IV Epiphanes: The Significance of ‘Ancestral Laws’,” in D. C. Harlow et al., The “Other” in Second Temple Judaism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 423-33 [432].

72

Leviticus 11 Exposition

the chapter (see above on Structure). What social or religious challenges could have elicited such vehement rhetoric? The diet instructions in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 categorize animals by their habitats, as does Genesis 1:20-25. They also provide criteria (divided hoofs and chewing cud: Lev. 11:3/Deut 14:6; fins and scales: Lev. 11:9-10/ Deut. 14:9-10; two bigger legs: Lev. 11:21/not in Deuteronomy) that can be applied to species beyond those named in these chapters. This classification and these criteria portray their contents as a comprehensive system capable of covering all animal life. In other words, the diet rules try to teach hearers and readers how to think for themselves about inedible and polluting animals. The path towards this conclusion begins with the literary structure of Leviticus 11-15, in which food laws get regulated (chap. 11) before the more severe pollutions from blood, semen, and infestations of skin, cloth, and buildings (chaps. 12-15). By contrast, Deuteronomy 14 frames its nearly identical rules about meat with a prohibition on cutting skin or hair in mourning (vv. 1-2), a prohibition on eating animals that die naturally and the rule against boiling a kid in its mother’s milk (v. 21), followed by laws for tithing crops (vv. 22-29). So Deuteronomy groups various kinds of food and offering laws together while Leviticus focuses attention on pollution and nausea (or disgust), and the transmission of pollution by touch, which goes unmentioned in Deuteronomy. Leviticus 11 makes a unique distinction between animal meats that pollute on contact, which it labels ‫“ טמא‬polluted, polluting,” and those that may not be eaten though they do not pollute, which it labels ‫“ שׁקץ‬nauseating” (see Exegesis to 11:10 and Milgrom 656-59; Meshel 2008, 214-16; Kazen 2011, 75-76). Another unique feature of Leviticus 11 is its concern that water sources not be polluted by animal carcasses. This concern probably motivates the analytical distinction between “polluting” and “nauseating,” because if the corpses of water fowl, crustaceans and insects pollute water on contact, very few water sources would remain clean and fit for drinking. The influence of this chapter’s description of clean pools and cisterns (11:36) appears concretely in the many water installations that archeologists have found in late-Second-Temple-period Jewish settlements (Stuart 2015). Why does Leviticus 11 include specific regulations for cleansing the effects of touching polluted animal carcasses but not for purification after eating prohibited species? In chap. 15, the most important effect of touching polluted things is that they are contagious: persons and things that come in contact with them become polluted themselves, and polluted things and people cannot enter the sanctuary (15:31). The basic food rules (Lev. 11:2-8 and all the food rules in Deut. 14:3-21) direct Israelites in how to avoid becoming

Leviticus 11 Exposition

73

polluted by ingesting polluted food, but do not suggest that people become contagious by doing so. Nor do they prescribe purification rituals for eating polluted food, though Lev. 11:24 can be understand as including eating as a form of “touching,” for which waiting until evening provides purification. That interpretation is confirmed by Lev. 17:15-16 which adds bathing and laundering clothes to the purification procedures after eating blood in carcasses. Otherwise, the lack of purification procedures makes the diet rules resemble the regulations about sex in chaps. 18 and 20, which also lack purification procedures, more than the rules about genital emissions and skin infestations in chaps. 12-15 (Wright 1991, 150-81). The writers’ effort to extend the conceptual system of bodily pollutions to objects polluted by contact with animal carcasses encounters overwhelming practical difficulties, especially around water. Fresh water sources teem with fish, shell-fish, mussels, insects, and birds, and keeping them out of artificial reservoirs is nearly impossible. The most obvious responsa-like addition in Leviticus 11 responds to this problem by distinguishing animal carcasses which pollute on contact, for which it reserves the traditional label ‫טמא‬ “polluting,” from inedible animal carcasses which do not pollute on contact, which it calls ‫“ שׁקץ‬nauseating.” The latter include all the animals of water and air that regularly mix with water sources. The label ‫ שׁקץ‬provides a conceptual innovation that allows the system to be extended consistently to all animal species without making it unworkable in practice. However, the repetitive use of the vocabulary of ‫ שׁקץ‬shows that the chapter’s rhetoric uses analytical categorization for emotional emphasis and appeal. ‫ שׁקץ‬appears six times in four verses to try to prompt the audience to feel disgust at the sight of certain species of dead birds and seafood. Later verses add insects and rodents (Wright 1990, 197). I translate with the English words “nauseate/nauseating” because of the close association between ‫ שׁקץ‬and potential food: They should be nauseating to you! They should be nauseating to you! Their meat you must not eat and their carcasses should nauseate you. Everything that does not have fins and scales that is in the water – it should be nauseating to you! These should nauseate you of the flyers that you must not eat because they are nauseating: ... (11:10-13; also vv. 20, 23, 41-43)

This repetition of the root ‫ שׁקץ‬serves no rational analytical purpose. Redundant repetition instead signals emotional content and intent. The writers wanted listeners and readers to feel nauseous at the sight of these animal carcasses so that they will never eat them. But they do not pollute on contact, so water in which they may be found remains drinkable. The chapter ends by connecting the identity of the people through their observance of these food laws to the essential identity of their god: they

74

Leviticus 11 Exposition

must be a holy people like their holy god (11:44-45).10 This implies that Israel’s identification with YHWH binds them to a certain diet, a connection already implied by Exod. 22:31 and Deut. 14:21. But how does extending the rules to seafood, predatory birds, insects, and burrowing animals advance this Israelite distinctive? There is no evidence that anyone regularly ate buzzards or spiders, though Altmann (2019, 74-122) compiled evidence that some of the prohibited birds were in fact eaten somewhere in the ancient Near East. Leviticus 11 instead provides a comprehensive categorization of wildlife in order to train listeners and readers in how to think about distinguishing polluted from clean meats, and edible from inedible. So the chapter’s summary also requires Israelite lay people to make ritual distinctions regarding diet for themselves. That may come as a surprise, because the priestly (P) material in Exodus 25 through Leviticus and Numbers concentrates on issues of cult and priestly ritual. It emphasizes the central and essential role of the hereditary Aaronide priests in all temple rituals, and also in the most important purification rites. We expect Deuteronomy to focus on lay behaviour more than P. That expectation led Achenbach (2011, 173) to propose that Deuteronomy 14 is a simplified version for lay people of the priestly rules in Leviticus 11. His interpretation ignores the explicit framing of Leviticus 11 as instructions for all the people of Israel (11:2, 44-45). Chapters on lay ritual and life are scattered throughout P, either in the middle of the more ritually oriented material or bracketing it or introducing it (Lev. 2; 11; 18-20; 23; 25; Num. 5-6). Like Leviticus 11, P’s other layoriented material tends to address hearers and readers directly in the second person (see Leviticus 1-10, 230-33). These chapters require lay people to be concerned with ritual behaviour (Nihan 2013, 356-57). The exhortations and refrains at the end of Leviticus 11 make this explicit (Lev. 11:43-47). The previous chapter gave the priests, Aaron and his sons, the authority to draw ritual distinctions, “to separate the holy from the secular and the polluted from the pure” (10:10). Now all Israelites are called upon to share in the second part of these duties, “to separate the polluted from the pure and edible animals from animals that you must not eat” (11:47). This verse makes the food laws emblematic of the fact that lay Israelites also have the ability and responsibility to draw ritual distinctions. It makes the diet rules a badge of the whole people of Israel’s semi-priestly status before God (a claim made explicitly only in the not-P text, Exod. 19:6). 10 Christine Hayes observed that the command to be holy appears especially around purity rules, where it marks the irrational nature of the rules and emphasizes their role in distinguishing Israel from other peoples (What is Divine About Divine Law? [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015], 17).

Leviticus 11 Exposition

75

The phrase in the chapter’s subscript, “this is the torah of…” (11:46), is a distinctive locution of P legislation to label specific regulations. It echoes throughout Leviticus as a subscript to regulations for distributing various kinds of offerings (six times in Lev. 6-7) and for cleansing different kinds of impurities (eight times in Lev. 11-15; also six times in Numbers). Twice it is followed by infinitive verbs describing the priests’ responsibility to diagnose polluted people and things (13:59; 14:54-57), just like “this is a permanent mandate” before requirements that priests distinguish holy from common and clean from unclean in 10:10-11 and mitigate for the people in 16:34. In 11:46-47, however, “this is the torah” followed by an infinitive verb summarizes lay people’s responsibility to distinguish polluted animals and to avoid inedible meats. The refrains of Leviticus 10-16 thus single out meat regulations as a sphere not only for lay people’s observance, but specifically for lay people to exercise discriminating judgment. Torah observance here requires them to do more than obey the priests. When it comes to meat, lay people must reason about pollution and purity for themselves. In Leviticus 11-15, food laws introduce a set of more serious pollution concerns that place social and religious restrictions on people (12:1-13:46; 15:1-33) and on property (13:47-59; 14:33-53). But whereas more serious pollutions require priestly diagnosis and mitigation, the meat restrictions require lay people to decide ambiguous cases for themselves. Milgrom (688-89) denied this conclusion because he argued that P, to which he credited 11:47, maintained the priestly monopoly over ritual interpretation, in contrast to H which expanded it to lay people. Nihan (2007, 339) captured the implications more accurately when he concluded that H in Lev. 20:24-26 “correctly points to the unique significance of this tôrâ within Lev. 11-15” by emphasizing that the diet laws set Israel apart from the nations. However, Lev. 11:47 does not just emphasize observance of preexisting diet rules. It requires every Israelite to reason correctly about their application. That explains why Leviticus 11, in contrast to Deuteronomy 14, extends the meat regulations to include conceptually every kind of animal. While both chapters contain lists of examples (the list of quadrupeds in Lev. 11:4-7 parallels Deut 14:7-8, though Deuteronomy precedes it with a list of clean edible animals that does not appear in Leviticus; the list of birds in Lev. 11:13-19 parallels Deut 14:12-18) and various criteria (for quadrupeds in Lev. 11:3 and Deut 14:6; for sea food in Lev. 11:9-10 and Deut 14:9-10), the criteria for flying insects in Lev. 11:21 and the lists of edible insects in 11:22 and of swarming land animals in 11:29-30 have no parallels in Deuteronomy 14. Leviticus has extended its regulations to all kinds of animals to teach listeners and readers how to reason about animals and animal carcasses that

76

Leviticus 11 Exposition

they encounter. As Jonathan Burnside (2016, 244) observed, Leviticus 11 is “an exercise and an education in practical wisdom.” The juxtaposition of criteria with lists of species implies that further lists can be generated from the criteria or by analogy with the lists. Already in the fourth century B.C.E., Aristotle (Rhet. 1356) observed that rhetorical arguments to general audiences depend on deductive and inductive reasoning which, as he explained, means criteria and examples. Just so, Leviticus 11 presents criteria and examples to encourage listeners and readers to engage in reasoning about polluting and nauseating meats, and to motivate them to act on their conclusions. As a result, reasoning about torah also became a distinguishing characteristic of Israel’s identity. The effort of subsequent interpreters from Aristeas to modern commentators to understand the diet regulations responds to the persuasive rhetoric of this chapter itself. The frustration of interpreters who fail to reach definitive conclusions about how to apply explicit or implicit criteria to the lists of examples does not contradict the fact that they are attempting to do what Leviticus 11 wants them to do. Leviticus 20:24-26 connects diet restrictions with Israel’s corporate identity explicitly, as Milgrom (689) pointed out: “The separation of the animals into the pure and the impure is both a model and a lesson for Israel to separate itself from the nations.” The torah of the animals (11:46) then becomes explicitly an exhortation to stay separate from other peoples in order to maintain Israel’s holiness like God (11:44). Whereas Ezra and Nehemiah defined the purity of the people on the basis of endogamous marriage (Neh. 10:28), Leviticus exhorts the people of Israel to maintain their distinctiveness by what they eat. Nihan (2007, 335) observed that this made it possible for “a Judaean to eat clean food in any place of the world.” The evidence of later Second Temple literature, both Jewish and Greco-Roman, suggests that increasing numbers of Jews internalized this rhetoric to do just that. Leviticus’s rhetoric of lay inclusion in reasoning about food impurities encouraged acceptance of the authority of the priestly hierarchy in other matters (see Introduction §3.4-5 in Leviticus 1-10). But it did more than that: it turned diet into a symbol of lay fidelity to Torah and of Israel’s status as the people of Torah, in their own minds and increasingly in the view of outsiders as well. The prominent position and formulation of the food laws at the beginning of Leviticus’ purity regulations therefore led to consolidating Jewish lay identity around an observant diet, as well as around other regulations that fell under lay control, such as circumcision and refraining from working on the Sabbath. As the Torah’s status rose and its authority spread, its rhetoric increasingly shaped Jewish practices. But Leviticus 11’s effort to teach how to reason about ritual practices through criteria and examples also spread in late Second Temple Judaism. Now reasoning about torot became an important part of keeping Torah.

Leviticus 11 Exposition

77

Translating Animal Names Translating the names of animal species in Leviticus 11 is particularly difficult, not only because many names appear only rarely in the Hebrew Bible, but also because ancient animal taxonomies do not correspond well with those of modern zoology. Even the names of common animals can cause difficulties, as is demonstrated by the names of the birds that Leviticus allows to be offered on the Tabernacle altar. In Exegesis to 1:14, I argued for translating ‫ תור‬as “chicken” instead of the usual “turtledove.” That translation has recently been challenged by Peter Altmann and Abra Spiciarich, who surveyed the archeological evidence for fowl remains in the Levant (Altmann 2019, 27-41; Altmann and Spiciarich 2020). They found widespread chicken remains only in strata dating to the Hellenistic period. They argued that earlier iconography of roosters indicates their symbolism as fighting birds rather than as food or offering materials. Pigeon bones, but not turtledoves, appeared mostly near the Temple Mount in the Hellenistic period but not much in domestic residences. Altmann and Spiciarich (2020, 13) therefore concluded, “the zooarchaeological evidence opposes the hypotheses of tor either as turtledove or as chicken on the altar of the First or Second Temples in Jerusalem to the degree that the fowl appearing in the biblical texts accord with the fowl on the Jerusalem altar.” Much more common across all ancient periods were partridge bones. Surprisingly, the most common domesticated bird among the faunal remains, the goose, is rarely if ever mentioned in the HB (possibly in 1 Kgs. 5:3 Eng. 4:23). Most animal names are difficult to align accurately with the species designations of modern zoology. Philology offers little help, so archeozoological finds provide the best evidence. On that basis, Altmann concluded that ‫ תור‬indicated not a single species but the “members of the family of Phasianidae fowl, especially chukar partridges but also possibly including the random chicken” (Altmann 2019, 41; the rabbis also considered the partridge – see Schwartz 2000, 211-18). The absence of partridges in Egypt may have led the LXX to think of turledoves instead (Altmann and Spiciarich 2020, 14). Altmann’s plausible conclusion leads me now to translate ‫ תור‬as “landfowl,” a name that encompasses partridges and chickens in a larger avian family by their most obvious behavioural characteristic, foraging on the ground. Altman and Spiciarich also argued that neither partridges nor pigeons were domesticated, but were rather ensnared and then fattened before being slaughtered. It is surprising that Leviticus permits the offering of wild birds, because other offering animals are domesticated cattle, sheep, and goats. Many interpreters have used the criterion of domesticated animals for insight

78

Leviticus 11 Exposition

into the symbolism of Israel’s offerings (e.g. J. Z. Smith 1987b; Milgrom 720; Houston 1993, 149). The suggestion that live wild animals could also be offered undermines these interpretations (which was already implicit in the traditional translation, “turtle dove,” that usually refers to a wild species of pigeon that is neither domesticated nor feral). If wild landfowl and pigeons could be offered to YHWH, why not gazelles and fallow deer? In fact, the remains of fallow deer were discovered around the alters on Mount Gerizim11 and at Dor (Milgrom 720), which may indicate their use as offerings in some early Israelite cults. But Leviticus limits quadruped offerings to cattle, sheep, and goats. The reason may have to do with the requirement that the animals be killed in the sanctuary (1:5, 11, 15). In contrast to the loaded offering tables depicted in Mesopotamian and Egyptian art, Leviticus mandates that cattle, sheep, goats, and birds must all be presented alive “before YHWH” (1:3, 10, 14; 3:1, etc.) and only then slaughtered. This provision allows them first to be judged suitable (‫“ תמים‬perfect,” though this qualification is omitted for birds: 1:14; 5:7). Wild birds were commonly snared in nets and caged, and so could easily be presented alive. That was much less practical with larger wild animals that were usually killed, or at least damaged, during the hunt. In that case, the criteria for designating a sub-set of edible animals as suitable offerings has less to do with being domesticated or wild than with the practical constraint of how to bring live animals to the temple to be slaughtered there for ritual offerings. If common offering animals can be difficult to specify, the many rare names of animals in Leviticus 11 are much harder to translate. Most of the species names in vv. 13-23 appear otherwise only in the parallel list in Deuteronomy 14. Most of the names of ground swarmers in vv. 29-30 are hapax legomena that appear only here in the HB. Much interpretive ingenuity has been devoted to discovering their exact equivalents in modern zoological taxonomies. Angelini and Nihan (2020, 8), however, pointed out that no ancient taxonomies correspond to the modern system of Linnaean taxa that was established in the eighteenth century. Furthermore, species endemic to Israel-Palestine may well have changed over the past 2,500 years. Peter Altmann carefully collected all the evidence for identifying the birds named in vv. 13-19, but concluded that “the dearth of data indicates scholarly reliance on (1) the Greek renderings, (2) presuppositions about the way these fowl are grouped, and (3) the notion that the carnivorous or carrion-consuming nature of these birds served as the characteristic disqualifying them from the 11 Adam Zertal, “An Early Iron Age Cultic Site on Mount Ebal: Excavation Seasons 1982– 1987: Preliminary Report,” TA 9 (1986), 105-65.

Leviticus 11 Exegesis

79

table” (Altmann 2019, 87).12 The taxonomical problem is especially obvious in the way that this chapter describes a separate category for “swarming flyers that crawl” (vv. 20-23) consisting apparently of insects, that is distinct from “the swarmers that swarm on the ground” (v. 29-30) which apparently consists of small land animals that belong to various modern taxa (mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and maybe more insects). Houston (1993, 29) therefore left untranslated most of the terms for birds, locusts, and swarmers because translation “would have given a totally spurious impression of certitude as to the identification of these creatures.” I think Houston has taken the most honest approach, so I simply transliterate the Hebrew names of the birds and swarmers and leave their possible identification for discussion in Exegesis.

EXEGESIS Heading (11:1-2a) For the first time in Leviticus, Aaron joins Moses in hearing the divine revelation. This change reflects his elevated stature since being ordained (chap. 8) and especially since receiving a divine oracle (10:10-11) – directly and independently (10:8) – that granted priests the authority to interpret and teach the rituals. Subsequent superscriptions vary between mentioning Moses and Aaron together (13:1; 14:33; 15:1) or Moses alone (12:1; 14:1) before settling onto Moses alone for the rest of Leviticus (16:1, etc.; but cf. Num. 2:1; 4:1). Including Aaron among those who must repeat these regulations means that the priest takes part in granting all Israelites some of the responsibilities placed on the priests in 10:10, namely to “separate the polluted from the pure” (11:47). Chapter 11, then, serves as an example of what it means for priests to “teach the children of Israel all YHWH’s mandates” (10:11). 11:1-2a YHWH spoke to Moses and to Aaron (saying to them): Speak (pl) to the Israelites: ‫“ לאמר אלהם‬saying to them” is odd, and LXX and Vg omit the second word. Usually the infinitive ‫“ לאמר‬saying” marks the beginning of a quotation with the next word, as it does in v. 2. This commentary has therefore left it untranslated. The addition of the direct object ‫“ אלהם‬to them” (or ‫להם‬ 12 See also Semitic Etymological Dictionary, Vol. II, Animal Names, ed. Alexander Militarev and Leonid Kogan, AOAT 278/2; Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2005.

80

Leviticus 11 Exegesis

“to them” in SP) draws unusual attention to this transition to direct speech, perhaps to emphasize the fact that Aaron has now been added as a recipient of this command to repeat YHWH’s words to the Israelites (Milgrom 645; Hays 2018, 183). Quadrupeds (11:2b-8) This paragraph promulgates two criteria that must be met for land quadrupeds to be edible: they must have a split hoof and chew the cud. It then lists four species that meet one criteria, but not the other. According to this paragraph, camels, hyraxes, and rabbits chew the cud but do not have split hooves, while pigs have split hooves but do not chew the cud. Animals that do not meet either criteria are obviously excluded, which is made explicit by the rules about contagious pollution from animal carcasses (vv. 26-28). 11:2b This is the kind of animal that you (pl) may eat of any quadruped on land. The singular noun, ‫“ החיה‬the animal,” usually has a collective meaning (HAL), so I translate “kind of animal.” For the translation of ‫בהמה‬, which is also collective, as “quadruped,” see Exegesis to 1:2. The rules for inedible animals are organized by environment. The animals of ‫“ הארץ‬the land” here contrast with animals of the sea in vv. 9-12 and of the air in vv. 13-23. The chapter will later return to land animals when it describes ground “swarmers,” which are apparently lizards and rodents (vv. 29-30). Unlike this verse, Deut. 14:4-5 includes a list of ten edible quadrupeds: domesticated oxen, sheep, goats, and seven varieties of wild deer, goats, and sheep. The absence of that list here is one indication that the two chapters of diet rules depend on a common Vorlage that both have supplemented (see Exposition), since it is hard to explain why P would have omitted the list if it copied directly from Deuteronomy. 11:3

Any that has a hoof and splits the hoof while regurgitating cud – it you (pl) may eat.

The six words in the phrase, ‫“ כל מפרסת פרסה ושׁסעת שׁסע פרסת‬any that has a hoof and splits the hoof,” repeat variations of the same two Hebrew roots, literally, “hoofs a hoof and splitting splits a hoof.” The use of cognate accusatives here and in v. 7 (“cuds a cud”) cannot be reproduced in good English. The root ‫“ פרס‬hoof” appears here twice as forms of the noun ‫ פרסה‬and once as a hiphil participle derived from the noun. The root ‫“ שׁסע‬split, break open”

Leviticus 11 Exegesis

81

appears both as verb and noun. Both roots show up primarily in lists of permitted foods: Deut. 14:6 adds a numeral, ‫“ שׁתי פרסות‬two hooves” or “two parts of the hoof,” while otherwise reproducing the sentence almost exactly. Furthermore, the two roots are nearly synonymous. ‫פרס‬, like ‫שׁסע‬, is usually translated “divide, separate” (Targums, HAL), but Milgrom (646) pointed out its use for the “hooves” of horses (Isa. 5:28; Jer. 47:3; Ezek. 26:11) that are not split. Idiomatic English refers to the behaviour indicated by ‫ מעלת גרה‬as “chewing the cud,” but the Hebrew participle refers to “bringing up” swallowed food, so “regurgitating cud” (cf. v. 7). Ruminant animals, including cattle, sheep, goats, deer, and camels, have multiple stomachs. They swallow large amounts of food when grazing on grass or browsing on twigs, then regurgitate and chew this cud when resting. 11:4

But this you (pl) must not eat among those that regurgitate cud or have hooves: the camel because though it regurgitates cud it does not have a hoof – it is polluting for you;

The ‫“ גמל‬camel” is the only domestic pack animal in this list, which seems to be confined to animals that meet one of the two criteria but not both. Donkeys and horses were common in ancient Israel but fail both criteria for edible animals. See further on v. 26 below. The criterion, ‫“ פרסה איננו מפריס‬it does not have hooves,” appears in the next two verses using a finite verb instead of a participle, (‫פרסה לא יפריס)ה‬, but with the same meaning. The refrain ‫“ טמא הוא לכם‬it is polluting for you” concludes this and the next four verses. The philology of ‫ טמא‬suggests a basic meaning of “dirt, dirty” (Paschen 1970, 27; Kazen 2017, 104),13 but verbs and nouns from the root ‫ טמא‬deserve to be translated by a strong term like “pollute, pollution” because (a) ‫ טמא‬can describe a contagious, hence active agent (15:5; Milgrom 1990, 445); (b) the Hebrew word is not simply a negation of its opposite, ‫“ טהר‬pure,” like English “unclean” or “impure,” but has a semantic field of its own (Erbele-Küster 2017, 139); contrast the apparently not-P flood story (Gen. 7:2, 8; 8:20) which classifies animals as ‫“ לא טהרה‬impure” rather than as ‫“ טמא‬polluted” (Meshel 2008, 209); (c) Leviticus 11-15 frequently uses the term in repetitive refrains to emphasize avoiding pollution, as it does here, which suggests that it conveys strong negative feelings (contra Douglas 1999, 151). Since this chapter distinguishes animals like these whose carcass pollutes on contact (vv. 4-8, 23-40), which it labels ‫טמא‬, from animals that must not be eaten but do not pollute on contact, which it labels ‫שׁקץ‬ 13

Also H. Ringgren, ‫ט ֵמא‬,” ָ TWAT 3:352 = TDOT 5:330.

82

Leviticus 11 Exegesis

“nauseating” (see on v. 10 below), I translate ‫ טמא‬followed by “for you” with the English participle “polluting” to express the contagious quality that is the focus in this chapter. In the third century C.E., Origen (Comm. Matt. 15.15) seized on this declaration that the camel is polluted to explain Jesus’ strange comment that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25). He argued that the needle’s eye was the name of a narrow gate in Jerusalem and that the camel cannot enter because of its deformity and pollution, not its size. Origen’s idea has echoed through later Christian interpretation (Clark 1999, 96). 11:5

the hyrax because though it regurgitates cud it does not have a hoof – it is polluting for you (pl);

The ‫“ שׁפן‬hyrax,” also called a “dassie” or “rock badger” (Procavia syriaca), looks like a large guinea pig but is actually related to the elephant. It is endemic to Africa and the Middle East, and is associated with rocky terrain in Prov. 30:26 and Ps. 104:18. Modern biology does not classify hyraxes as ruminants, but the repetitive movement of their jaws and their multichambered stomachs led to including them here.14 11:6

the rabbit because though it regurgitates cud it does not have a hoof – it is polluting for you (pl);

‫“ ארנבת‬rabbit” or “hare” appears only here and in Deut. 14:7 in the HB. Mishnaic Hebrew and cognates in Aramaic, Akkadian, and Arabic make it clear that the term refers to species of the Leporidae family. Rabbit bones do not appear in the archeo-zoological remains of any period in Israel-Palestine (Houston 1993, 178-80). 11:7

the pig because though it has a hoof and splits the hoof it does not chew a cud – it is polluting for you (pl).

The ‫“ חזיר‬pig” was domesticated widely in the Near East since the Neolithic period (Borowsky 1998, 140). Its exclusion from Israel’s diet has therefore elicited a great deal of commentary from antiquity until today, especially because pork avoidance became emblematic of all the Torah’s diet rules and of Jewish identity (see Exposition). Popular explanations for this ban have 14 For the interpretive history of this term, see Rolf Krauss, “Beiträge zur ‫( ָשׁ ָפן‬Klippschliefer, rock badger, daman) in der Wissenschaftsgeschichte vom 17. Jahrhundert bis heute,” BN 169 (2016), 111-28.

Leviticus 11 Exegesis

83

included the notion that pork is more dangerous to people’s health (not true if cooked properly) and that pork is more delicious than other meats (a very subjective judgment). Interpreters have often advanced allegorical and symbolic speculations that pigs’ behaviour models immoral human behaviour that, like pork, should be avoided. For example, pigs’ omnivorous diet suggests theft and ingratitude (Epistle of Barnabas 10:3-4), or violence (Albert the Great, in Elliott 2012, 99) and gluttony. Pigs’ muddy styes can represent filth (Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 5.8, in Lienhard 2001, 177), while the fact that sows bear litters from multiple sires challenges patrilineality (Ruane 2015). As Kazen (2019, 83, 87-88) observed, these value judgments reflect the interpreters’ interests more than any discernible emphasis in Leviticus. Another approach to explaining the pig prohibition compares the diets of ancient cultures. Houston (1993, 147) observed that “the pig is the only creature commonly eaten in the ancient Near East that is declared unclean in Leviticus.” Pigs were raised either in a sty or in herds in a forest (Ps. 80:13). Egyptians raised them for food throughout ancient history, but some myths associate pigs with the god, Seth (Coffin Text spell 158). They were therefore reviled by his rival, Horus, and may have been prohibited for the priests of some temples (Simoons 1994, 14-21; Volokhine 2020, 52). Similarly, pigs could be banned from certain temples and on certain days in many other ancient cultures. Akkadian texts often revile pigs as unclean, but pork was a frequent part of the Mesopotamian diet (van der Toorn 1985, 34-35; Ermidoro 2020, 30). Pigs were commonly offered to chthonic deities in Hittite, Greek, and Roman cultures, but were offered to many other deities as well (Simoons 1994, 21-32). Among the Hittites, pigs were offered especially to goddesses of childbirth, fertility, and fate (Collins 2006, 162, 169-71). In Iron Age Palestine, pig bones appear most frequently in larger sites associated with the Philistines (Borowsky 1998, 145). Consumption of pork may therefore have been a Philistine identity marker in the Canaanite context. However, pork consumption increased in the Northern Kingdom of Israel along with the growing population of its larger cities. The ban on pork may then have become a conservative or Judean distinctive.15 Or perhaps it was originally a priestly practice: Jonathan Greer (2020, 81-82) noticed that pig bones are rare in zooarcheological remains from Israelite cult centres like Tel Dan as well as Jerusalem. In addition to Deut. 14:8 and here, the prohibition on pork appears also in Isa. 65:4 where eating it is associated with cults of the dead. Therefore, biblical writers may have promulgated the pork ban to standardize 15 So Lidar Sapir-Hen, Guy Bar-Oz, Yuval Gadot, and Israel Finkelstein, “Pig Husbandry in Iron Age Israel and Judah. New Insights Regarding the Origin of the ‘Taboo’,” ZDPV 129 (2013), 1-20.

84

Leviticus 11 Exegesis

a local or class marker to apply it to all Israelites.16 By at least the Hellenistic period, however, the prohibition on pork became emblematic of all the Torah’s diet rules and of Jewish identity generally, and it remains so today (see Exposition: History of Interpretation and Application). ‫“ גרה לא־יגר‬it does not chew a cud” uses noun and verb of the same root, literally “cud a cud,” which is probably synonymous with ‫“ מעלת גרה‬regurgitating cud” in vv. 3-6. Compare the wordplay on ‫“ פרס‬hoof” throughout vv. 3-7 (see on v. 3 above). MT of Deut. 14:8 abbreviates this to ‫ לא גרה‬and omits the preceding phrase too, though SP and LXX there reproduce Leviticus’s phrasing. 11:8

Their meat you (pl) must not eat and their carcass you must not touch – they are polluting for you.

This vocabulary here and in v. 11 distinguishes the animal conceived as food, ‫“ בשׂר‬meat,” from its dead body, ‫“ נבלה‬carcass.” Meshel (2008, 213, 219) regarded the prohibitions on eating and on touching as distinct and legally unrelated. He argued that Leviticus regards prohibited animals as possibly pure or polluting, and some polluted animals as possibly available for consumption so long as purification rituals follow (11:24). Such technical distinctions, however, ignore the chapter’s emotional rhetoric expressed by its vocabulary of pollution and nausea in repetitive refrains. The rhetoric aims to motivate avoidance of these animal carcasses whenever possible. See further discussion on v. 24. This rule is anticipated in 5:2. Breaking it requires confession and a sin offering for forgiveness (5:6). Nauseating Animals (11:9-23) Verses 9-23 belong with the preceding verses by their focus on prohibited food (see Exposition). These prohibitions on species of sea-food (v. 9), birds (vv. 13-19), and insects (vv. 20-23) stand out by describing them as ‫שׁקץ‬ “nauseating” instead of ‫“ טמא‬polluting” as in other parts of the chapter and in the parallel list in Deuteronomy 14. Sea-food is classified by criteria (fins and scales), birds only by a list of nauseating species, and insects by both a criterion (a pair of long legs for jumping) and a list of edible species. A three-verse tirade about how nauseating they are (vv. 10-12) appears between the criteria for sea-food and the list of birds. Leviticus 11 may use ‫“ שׁקץ‬nauseating” to categorize inedible sea-food and fowl differently from land animals in order to prepare for categorizing only the carcasses of land animals as conveying ‫“ טמא‬pollution” (vv. 24-28). 16 Julia Rhyder, “The Origins of the Jewish Pig Prohibition: Pig Consumption and Ethnicity from Leviticus to the Maccabees,” Paper to the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX, November 20-23, 2021.

Leviticus 11 Exegesis

85

See further on v. 10 below. However, the concluding exhortation in v. 43 applies both terms to the same animals. Deuteronomy 14 does not include the tirade or the word ‫“ שׁקץ‬nauseating” at all, but instead brackets the list of unclean birds with the assurance that “you may eat all clean flyers” (14:11, 20). These nearly identical lists of unclean animals are therefore framed by very different rhetoric. 11:9

This you (pl) may eat of everything that is in the water: everything in the water of oceans and rivers that has fins and scales – these you may eat.

The verse is repetitious because of its arch structure: ‫ את־זה תאכלו‬This you may eat ‫מכל אשׁר במים‬ from everything that is in the water: ‫כל אשׁר־לו סנפיר וקשׁקשׁת‬ everything that has fins and scales ‫במים בימים ובנחלים‬ in the water of oceans and rivers ‫ אתם תאכלו‬these you may eat.

‫“ את־זה‬this”: it is odd to begin a sentence, much less a paragraph, with the sign of the direct object (but see also v. 15 and 25:5). The parallel paragraphs also put the direct object first for emphasis but start with an emphatic particle (‫“ זאת‬this” v. 2) or at least a conjunction (‫ ואת־‬v. 13). But the parallel in Deut. 14:9 also starts with the sign of the direct object. In both places, SP, LXX, and Syr have the conjunction. ‫“ סנפיר‬fins” is singular and appears only here and in the parallel list in Deuteronomy. LXX πτερὺγια is plural, “wings, fins,” from πτέρυξ and is used commonly for the fins of fish (LSJ). ‫“ קשׂקשׂת‬scales” refers to a feature of fish also in Ezek. 29:4 in addition to Deuteronomy 14 and here. In 1 Sam. 17:5, it seems to describe scaly armour. LXX translates λεπίδες “scales,” plural of λεπίς. ‫“ במים בימים ובנחלים‬in the water of oceans and rivers” distinguishes fish that live in salt water from those in fresh water, or possibly that live in bodies of water rather than in flowing water (Whitekettle 2002, 167). LXX makes all three words parallel: “in the water and in the oceans and in the rivers.” Excavations in monarchic period strata in Jerusalem and in the Western Galilee yielded many fish bones from at least six species, including the Nile perch which may have been imported from Egypt (Borowski 1998, 174). 11:10 But everything in the oceans and rivers that does not have fins and scales, every swarmer in the water and every other kind of wildlife that is in the water – they should be nauseating for you (pl)! The first part of this verse negates v. 9 while reproducing its description, except for omitting ‫“ במים‬in the water,” which SP and LXX therefore supply.

86

Leviticus 11 Exegesis

The second part describes any animal that does not meet the fins and scales criteria as a ‫“ שׁרץ‬swarmer” and ‫“ נפשׁ החיה‬wildlife.” ‫“ שׁרץ‬swarm/swarmer” refers to small creatures that appear in large numbers. The word appears mostly in HB stories about animal species – the creation story (Gen. 1:20-21), the flood story (Gen. 7:21; 8:17; 9:7), and the Egyptian plagues (Exod. 7:28) – besides fifteen times in this chapter (also in Lev. 5:2; 22:5; Ezek. 47:9), but only once in the Deuteronomic parallel (Deut. 14:19). The term can also be applied to large numbers of humans (Gen. 9:7; Exod 1:7). English “swarm” generally describes the behaviour of birds and insects, but ‫ שׁרץ‬also applies to small land animals (vv. 29-30), for whom the term ‫“ רמשׁ‬scramblers” (vv. 44, 46) seems more accurate (Houston 1993, 104). “Swarming” marine animals have usually been understood to be shellfish and other creatures that walk under water rather than swim (Douglas 1966, 70). However, Houston (1993, 105) argued that “swarmers” and ‫נפשׁ החיה‬ “kinds of wildlife” are inclusive terms for all water creatures, including edible fish. He suggested that schools of fish might naturally be described as “swarming.” So the point could be that only a subset of both categories that lack fins and scales are polluting. Houston concluded that ‫ שׁרץ‬does not describe a mode of propulsion at all. What is clear is that Leviticus 11 uses ‫ שׁרץ‬to describe categories of animals in all three realms of nature: water (v. 10), air (vv. 20-21, 23), and land (vv. 29-31, 41-44). Swarming creatures may be edible (v. 21) or inedible (vv. 10, 20, 23, 41-44), polluting (vv. 29-31, 43-44) or non-polluting (vv. 10, 20-23). Yet v. 33 apart from its context labels all “swarming swarmers” as nauseating and polluting, though in context it seems to apply only to ground swarmers. Thus Leviticus 11 introduces an otherwise unattested category of animals: nauseating swarmers (Kazen 2011, 78). The idea may reflect Persian influence: Kazen (2015, 458) pointed to the Zoroastrian category of khrafstra animals that must not be eaten, pollute food, and should be killed, including mice, ants, frogs, and worms. Chapter 11 here switches from labelling inedible animals as ‫“ טמא‬polluting” (vv. 4-8, 24-40) to calling them ‫“ שׁקץ‬nauseating” (vv. 10-23). Kiuchi (196) suggested that ‫ שׁקץ‬is used in vv. 20, 23, 41-42 for its assonance with ‫“ שׁרץ‬swarmer.” The root ‫ שׁקץ‬appears in nominal and verbal forms eleven times in this chapter. It appears twice elsewhere in Leviticus, where it also refers to pollution from animal carcasses (7:21; 20:25). Two of its four occurrences elsewhere in the HB also characterize “swarming” creatures (Ezek. 8:10 and, probably, Isa. 66:17). Psalm 22:25 uses the term to describe feelings of nausea at human poverty. Deuteronomy 7:26 encourages feelings of nausea and ‫“ תעב‬disgust” at idolatrous cult objects. The noun, ‫שׁקוץ‬, usually translated

Leviticus 11 Exegesis

87

“abominable or detestable thing,” is deployed widely in the HB to denounce idols (e.g. Deut. 29:17 Eng. 29:16; 1 Kgs. 11:5, 7; 2 Kgs. 23:13, 24; Isa. 66:3; 5× in Jeremiah; 9× in Ezekiel). Kazen (2008) and Feinstein (2014, 20-41) demonstrated that ‫ שׁקץ‬and ‫( תועבה‬18:22) refer to feelings of disgust. These words are usually translated with variants of “abhor” and “abominate,” but both sound old-fashioned in contemporary English. Colloquial English conveys these feelings with expressions like “that’s disgusting!” Other possible translations of either term include “detestable” (Kiuchi), “nasty,” “repugnant,” “revolting,” “gross,” “loathsome,” and “nauseating.” Because ‫ שׁקץ‬seems to refer here to a visceral reaction to a food’s edibility, I translate it with nominal, verbal, and adjectival forms of “nauseate, nauseating,” and render the more common (in the HB) root ‫תעב‬/‫ תועבה‬by “disgust, disgusting.” Milgrom (656-59) observed that Leviticus 11 labels as ‫“ טמא‬polluting” those quadrupeds (vv. 2-9, 24-28) and land swarmers (vv. 29-40) that pollute by touching their carcasses. Animals which may not be eaten but whose touch is not polluting – flyers, flying insects, and seafood – are called ‫שׁקץ‬ “nauseating.” Verses 43-45 collapse any distinction between polluting and nauseating creatures, but like many others Milgrom argued that these verses are an addition to the chapter by the H source. So he concluded that P distinguished carcasses that pollute by touch as ‫ טמא‬from those that pollute only by being eaten but not by touch as ‫שׁקץ‬, while H used the two terms indiscriminately (20:25; Milgrom 694). Deuteronomy 14 does not use ‫שׁקץ‬, but like Leviticus 11 prohibits touching only mammal carcasses (14:8; Meyer 2014, 80-81). Meshel (2008, 214-16) argued on the basis of 11:41 and also 7:21’s ‫“ כל־שׁקץ טמא‬any nauseating pollution” that ‫ שׁקץ‬describes inedible animals, but implies nothing about pollution which is only designated by ‫טמא‬. He pointed out that lay Israelites may eat polluting carcasses so long as they bathe afterwards (v. 40), though priests must abstain (22:8). Meshel concluded that Leviticus 11 anticipates all four possible combinations of the categories of pure/polluted and edible/inedible. For example, a cow is pure and edible, a cow that dies naturally is polluting but still edible for lay people, a crow is pure but inedible, and a camel is polluting and inedible. Kazen (2011, 75-76) criticized Milgrom’s and Meshel’s strict distinction between ‫ טמא‬and ‫ שׁקץ‬as applying, at most, to the pre-history of Leviticus 11. He observed that the carcasses of ‫“ טמא‬polluted” quadrupeds should not be eaten or touched (v. 8), but are never called ‫“ שׁקץ‬nauseating.” Kazen was correct that the words ‫ טמא‬and ‫ שׁקץ‬carry highly charged emotional connotations that are not fully accounted for by logical distinction between carcasses that pollute on contact and those that do not. Some interpreters try to minimize the emotional component. Gerstenberger (137) translated

88

Leviticus 11 Exegesis

‫ שׁקץ‬with “dangerous” to emphasize the threat to cultic order rather than just an emotional reaction. Liss (2008, 339) argued that ‫ שׁקץ‬is a spatial term that labels animals outside domestic human activity. Hieke (423) suggested paraphrasing: “You must keep away from them.” Though rules like these make food taboos explicit, Simoons (1994, 298-300) observed that food taboos are often unconscious until they provoke strong negative reactions of shock, fear, and even nausea. Leviticus’s repetitive emphasis on ‫ שׁקץ‬in the tirade of vv. 10-13 does not serve analytical distinctions of relative danger, but rather aims to provoke an emotional reaction to motivate avoidance behaviours. Psychologists classify feelings of disgust as one of the basic human emotions, like fear and anger. Disgust is rooted in bodily responses to the threat of ingesting harmful material and is triggered by smell and touch as well as taste. But reactions of disgust are shaped by socialization from an early age and therefore vary from one culture to the next (Kazen 2011, 35-36). Verses 10-13 contain the kind of emphatic rhetoric that socializes a listening or reading audience to react with disgust at encountering particular kinds of animal carcasses. Why should the emotional rhetoric of nausea be deployed especially for unclean sea creatures and birds? An ancient and plausible interpretation of the list of birds is that it consists of predators and scavengers (Aris. 142-48). Among them appear some species that were usually valued positively for their strength, elegant flight, and beauty (eagles, ospreys, hawks, falcons). Perhaps the writers were trying to counter the intrinsic appeal of some of these birds by this vehement rhetoric of nausea. That does not explain, however, the inclusion of shellfish and other seafood in this rhetoric. Rabbinic commentary associated the prohibited animals allegorically with oppressive empires: the camel for Babylon, the rock badger for the Medes, the hare for Greece, and the pig for Rome (Lev. Rab. 13:5; Rosenblum 2016, 117). It is possibile that the ancient rabbis were on the right track, though focusing on the wrong animals and using an anachronistic interpretive method. Older Israelite culture is more likely to have thought iconographicly than allegorically. It is therefore possible that images of animal species inspired some of this chapter’s classifications and especially its rhetorical valuations. Figures of animals appeared frequently in ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean art, particularly in the royal art of empires. Altmann (2019, 74-123) explored the significance of the prohibited bird images in religious iconography, but he did not consider their political significance to Israelites. For example, vultures and snakes (cobras) adorned the headdresses of Egyptian kings and their statues, and Egyptian royalty associated themselves with falcons that represented the god, Horus (Altmann 2019, 86). Stone lions and bears guarded the gates of Mesopotamian and Levantine palaces. Greek mosaics, coins, and vase art that often depicted dolphins, crabs, and octopi were exported throughout the

Leviticus 11 Exegesis

89

Near East. The fact that idolatry is denounced as ‫“ שׁקץ‬nauseating” in other HB books suggests the possibility that the vehemence directed at such species warned Israelites against the iconography of the imperial cultures that surrounded and frequently oppressed them. This suggestion finds support in Ezek. 8:10, which describes a vision of Judean elders offering illegitimate incense before artistic depictions of ‫“ כל־תבנית רמשׁ ובהמה שׁקץ‬every kind of image of swarmer and nauseating quadruped” (see also Deut. 4:18). An iconographic interpretation of some of these food prohibitions must acknowledge the counter-example of bulls, which were prominent in ancient iconography (1 Kgs. 12:28) and also on the altar of the Tabernacle (Lev. 1:3), as well as permitted as food. But it is possible that repugnance at the iconography of surrounding empires may have been one motivation for developing the criteria and lists for nauseating swarmers, birds, and sea life in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14. 11:11 They will be nauseating for you (pl)! Their meat you must not eat and their carcasses should nauseate you. This prohibition on eating their meat repeats the phrase from the climactic refrain about polluted quadrupeds (v. 8), which draws attention to the parallel between nausea at the sight of an animal’s carcass and avoiding touching it (Trevaskis 2012, 83). This parallel complicates the logic of those who think ‫ שׁקץ‬indicates a technical distinction rather than an emotional response. So Meshel (2008, 219) argued that this verse is an exception: “it appears that here, the legislator made use of the nontechnical sense of the verb ‫שׁקץ‬, attested in Deut. 7:26 and elsewhere, refining its meaning to carry a new legal sense: prohibition of contact that is unlinked to ritual impurity.” The emotional rhetoric of vv. 10-23 indicates less a technical refinement than an emphatic application (Trevaskis) of literal and metaphorical associations of ‫“ שׁקץ‬nausea” to certain categories of seafood and wildlife. 11:12 Everything in the water that does not have fins and scales – it should be nauseating for you (pl)! This verse repeats and abbreviates v. 10. 11:13 These should nauseate you (pl) of the flyers that you must not eat (because) they are nauseating: the nesher, the peres, the asniyah, For translating ‫ עוף‬as “flyer,” see Exegesis to 1:14. Zoological remains in archeological sites attest to Israelites and Judeans eating pigeons, chickens, geese, and partridges, but “we can find very little evidence of the eating of

90

Leviticus 11 Exegesis

unclean species in Israel’s immediate environment” (Houston 1993, 143; see also Altmann 2019; Altmann and Spiciarich 2020). See Exposition: Translating Animal Names for why I transliterate rather than translate the poorly understood names of bird species. ‫ נשׁר‬nesher is a relatively common word in the HB for a large bird of prey. It often carries very positive associations (e.g. Exod. 19:4; Isa. 40:31). The word is traditionally translated “eagle,” but more likely indicated vultures or, perhaps, did not distinguish clearly between them (Angelini and Nihan 2020, 9-10; Altmann 2019, 77-81). The noun, ‫ פרס‬peres, appears only here and in the parallel list in Deut. 14:12. The verb ‫“ פרס‬divide, break” (cf. “hoof” in v. 3) leads HAL to suggest a “type of vulture which breaks the bones of its prey, esp. lambs” (for a thorough summary of all the evidence, see Altmann 2019, 81-82). ‫ עזניה‬azniyah also appears only here and in Deut. 14:12. LXX and Vg lead HAL to suggest sea eagle, osprey, black vulture, or the bearded vulture (similarly Altmann 2019, 82-83). TgPsJ interpolated criteria for nauseating flyers from m. Hullin 3:6: “those that do not have an extra toe, and one that does not have a crop and whose gizzard cannot be peeled” (translated by Rosenblum 2016, 123). 11:14 the daah, the ayiah of any kind, ‫ דאה‬daah appears with an alternate spelling, ‫דיה‬, in Deut. 14:13 and also in Isa. 34:12. An Ugaritic text puts d᾿y parallel to nšr “vulture,” so HAL suggests a “kite,” NRSV “buzzard” (see Altmann 2019, 84-85). ‫ איה‬ayiah appears in Deut. 14:13 and also in Job 28:7. HAL suggests that this is an “onomatopoeic word, imitating the cry of a bird like Arb. yu᾿yu᾿, Akk. ayau” and translates “black kite.” ‫ מין‬is the typical biblical vocabulary for kinds of animals (Whitekettle 2003, 165). ‫“ למינה‬of its kinds” appears also in vv. 15, 16, 19, 22, 29 to describe all subdivisions of a particular category of animal, so I translate “of any kind.” Here, Deut. 14:13 applies ‫“ למינה‬of any kind” to the ‫ דיה‬diah instead of the ayiah, but also adds another bird name at the beginning of the verse, a ‫ ראה‬raah, which appears to be a misspelling of ‫ דאה‬daah (see Altmann 2019, 83-84). 11:15 crow-like (birds) of any kind, The word ‫ ערב‬appears eight times in the HB (e.g. Isa. 34:11; Ps. 147:9; Prov. 30:17; and Cant. 5:11 referring to its black colour) which allows us to dependably translate it as “crow, raven.” However, LXX and Origen omitted these three words, which led Altmann (2019, 91) and Angelini and Nihan

Leviticus 11 Exegesis

91

(2020, 16-17) to argue that the ‫ ערב‬was a late addition to the list of unclean birds. They observed that the raven is depicted positively elsewhere in the HB (Gen. 8:6-12; 1 Kgs. 17:5-7) and originally may not have been regarded as unclean in Israel. For a survey of biblical and other ancient traditions about crows, see Altmann 2019, 87-92. However, crows are notorious scavengers, which fits later Second-Temple-period interpretations of the unclean birds as scavengers or predators (see Exposition). This verse adds ‫“ כל‬all, every” in the phrase, ‫“ את כל־ערב למינו‬every crow of its kind,” in contrast to vv. 14, 16, 19, 22, 29. Whitekettle (2005) argued that ‫ כל‬marks the name, ‫“ ערב‬crow,” as an “aggregate of things rather than the name of a particular thing” as it is elsewhere in the HB, so “crow-like birds” (cf. on v. 14). Altmann (2019, 92) took this unique use of both ‫ כל‬and ‫ למינו‬as further evidence that the crow was added in the Hellenistic period to both Leviticus’ and Deuteronomy’s lists of prohibited birds. 11:16 the bat yaanah, the tachmas, the shachaf, the nets of any kind, ‫ בת היענה‬bat yaanah has often been translated “ostrich.” HAL suggested that some kind of owl is more likely because it is associated with ruins and dry areas (Isa. 13:21; 34:13; 43:20). The phrase always includes ‫בת‬, literally “daughter of,” which may indicate several kinds of related birds, like ‫בני‬ ‫“ היונה‬kinds of pigeon” in Lev. 1:14. However, the singular may indicate that the word ‫ בת‬was a conventional part of the animal name. Altmann (2019, 94-95) preferred to translate “ostrich,” noting among other things that its Arabic name has a similar construction: abu eṣ-ṣaḥārā “father of the desert.” A large number of ostrich remains were found in Persian and Hellenistic strata of Tel Michal on the northern coast of Israel. So ostriches were probably eaten in Phoenician culture, and perhaps more widely in the Persian Empire (Altmann 2019, 95). ‫ תחמס‬tachmas appears only here and in Deut. 14:15. HAL does not translate because of its obscurity. LXX and Vg suggest “owl,” but KJV, NRSV, and NJPS translate “nighthawk.” The root ‫ חמס‬refers to violent action. See further in Altmann 2019, 97-98. ‫ שׁחף‬shachaf also appears only here and in Deut. 14:15. LXX and Vg suggest translating as “seagull.” SP and many LXX manuscripts read ‫“ למינו‬of any kind,” which supports a wider category of bird, such as “gull” (Altmann 2019, 99). ‫ נץ‬nets appears in Deut. 14:15 and also in Job 39:26, which describes its soaring flight. LXX and Vg therefore suggest a hawk, as do most modern translations. Altmann (2019, 100-102) noted the appearance of the term in an Ugaritic list of provisions (KTU 4.14:5, 11), but it is hard to know whether that term refers to birds.

92

Leviticus 11 Exegesis

11:17 the kos, the shalak, the yanshuf, ‫ כוס‬kos appears in Deut. 14:16 and also in Ps. 102:7. It probably indicates some kind of small owl. Altmann (2019, 102-3) cited a reference in a Hittite myth to support that identification. ‫ שׁלך‬shalak appears only here and in Deut. 14:16. Suggestions include heron, pelican, and cormorant. The root could be from verbs meaning “throw” or “walk,” but that does not help much in identifying the bird (Altmann 2019, 104). ‫ ינשׁוף‬yanshuf appears in Deut. 14:16 and Isa. 34:11 and may be an ibis. But Altmann (2019, 107-8) argued on the basis of Akkadian cognates that the yanshuf is more likely some kind of owl or hawk. He suggested that the LXX translators produced ἴβις “ibis” because of their Egyptian context. 11:18 the tinshemet, the qaat, the racham, ‫ תנשׁמת‬tinshemet appears both here, among the birds, and in v. 30, among the ground “swarmers,” and otherwise only in the parallel to this verse in Deut. 14:16. Translators have therefore presumed that the same word refers to two different species: here probably to some kind of owl according to LXX, Vg, and Syr, and in v. 30 maybe to a chameleon. HAL discusses at some length the problem of “how one and the same word can come to be used to indicate two such very different animals.” However, the same species name can refer to two very different referents in modern languages as well: in English, for example, “locust” is the name of both a family of trees and a class of insects. Altmann (2019, 109) cited an ancient example, Akkadian akkannu, which names both wild donkeys and a kind of bird. Tinshemet appears as a swamphen in LXX, but as an owl in Pesh. Altmann (2019, 108) supported translating “swamphen,” because these birds are known to appear in the northern Negev and they make a panting sound, as suggested by the name’s verbal root, ‫“ נשׁם‬pant, puff.” ‫ קאת‬qaat appears in Deut. 14:17 and also in Isa. 34:11, Zeph. 2:14, and Ps. 102:7, where it describes birds perched on ruined walls. HAL suggests a pelikan, based on LXX πελεκᾶν, but the HB usage does not indicate water fowl (though Altmann 2019, 109-12, tried to keep the pelikan in contention amidst a variety of contradictory evidence). HAL also suggests a goose, but geese were regarded as clean and edible animals in Second Temple Judaism (Aris. 142-48) and are the most common domesticated bird in the faunal remains of earlier periods (Altmann 2019, 27). ‫ קאת‬is more likely some kind of raptor or scavenger, or perhaps a “woodpecker,” which is another meaning of the Greek word, πελεκᾶς (LSJ). ‫ רחם‬racham appears as ‫ רחמה‬in Deut. 14:17 and also among a list of birds in the Deir Alla I inscription (line 8). Both forms are usually translated

Leviticus 11 Exegesis

93

“vulture” based on the Arabic cognates, raḫam and raḫamat. The ancient translations varied among themselves (Altmann 2019, 112-14). 11:19 the chesidah, the anafah of any kind, the dukifat, the atallef. ‫ חסידה‬chesidah appears in Deut. 14:18 and also in Job 8:7 (which mentions that it is migratory), Zech. 5:9, and Ps. 104:17 (which mentions it nesting in trees), hence the traditional translation “stork” (supported by Altmann 2019, 114-15). ‫ אנפה‬anafah appears only here and in Deut. 14:18. HAL suggested a plover (so LXX manuscripts) or cormorant. An Akkadian cognate, anpatu, means “flamingo.”17 Only one kind of flamingo every appeared in the Middle East, but the modifier “of any kind” indicates a larger class of birds. So Altmann (2019, 115-18) translated “heron” because its long beak might be indicated by the Hebrew root, ‫“ אנף‬nose.” ‫ דוכיפת‬dukifat appears only here and in Deut. 14:18 and looks like a nonSemitic loan word. LXX and Vg suggest a hoopoe, which is supported by cognates in Egyptian qwqwpt/d and Coptic koukouphat or kakoupat (Altmann 2019, 118-20). Hoopoes eat insects and often forage for them in dung heaps, which may explain their appearance in this list of “nauseating” birds. ‫ עטלף‬atallef appears in Deut. 14:18 and also in Isa. 2:20. The traditional meaning “bat” derives from LXX νυκτερίσις and is supported by cognates in rabbinic Hebrew and Aramaic, though Pesh translated ṭws “peacock” (Altmann 2019, 120). 11:20 Every swarming flyer that crawls – it should be nauseating for you (pl)! ‫“ שׁרץ העוף ההלך על־ארבע‬swarming flyer that crawls,” literally “swarming flyer that walks on four,” indicates flying insects as the following verse makes clear. But “walks on four” legs describes no insect species, all of which have six or more legs. Hartley (148) suggested that the phrase describes the manner of motion, “darts about.” The phrase is used of insects here, but in v. 42 also of ground swarmers (lizards and rodents). Whitekettle (2001, 23-24) pointed out that ground swarmers (vv. 29-31) are distinguished from other land animals (vv. 3-9, 26-27) by their carriage low to the ground. It is likely, therefore, that ‫ההלך‬ ‫ על־ארבע‬is an idiom for walking low to the ground (Wenham 175), not the number of legs. In English, that posture is idiomatically referred to as 17 Armas Salonen, Vögel und Vogelfang im alten Mesopotamien (Annales Academiae scientiarum Fennicae, Ser. B 180; Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1973), 120.

94

Leviticus 11 Exegesis

“crawling,” and insects and lizards are more often described as “crawling” than “walking.” But cf. v. 27. 11:21 However, this you may eat of every swarming flyer that crawls: whatever has two legs bigger than the rest with which to hop on the ground. The Qere replaces ‫“ לא‬not” with ‫“ לו‬to it,” as do some manuscripts from the Cairo geniza, which makes better sense of this exception. ‫ כרע‬means “lower leg” in 1:9, but here must mean something more. The following verse names varieties of grasshoppers, so ‫ כרעים ממעל לרגליו‬literally “two lower legs above its feet” describes their distinctive pair of large legs, “two legs bigger than the rest.” Deuteronomy does not mention this or any other exceptions to its ban on ‫“ כל שׁרץ העוף‬all swarming flyers” (Deut. 14:20). 11:22 Of these you may eat: the locust of any kind, the grasshopper of any kind, the cricket of any kind, the mantis of any kind. The four species listed in this verse are all varieties of grasshoppers or mantises, as the description of their legs in v. 21 makes clear. In English, some grasshoppers are called locusts or crickets, so I have translated with these names, but I do not claim to have accurately labelled each word. This is the only list of edible species in the chapter. Deuteronomy 14 omits both the criterion of long legs and this list, but it includes a list of edible quadrupeds. 11:23 But every (other) swarming flyer that crawls on paired legs should be nauseating for you (pl)! ‫רגלים‬, though usually translated “legs,” is pointed dual, so here could indicate “pairs of legs” (GKC §88f) or “paired legs” (Whitekettle 2001, 24). For ‫ארבע‬, literally “four,” see on v. 20 above. Pollution by Touch and Purification by Time (11:24-40) At this point in the chapter, the concern shifts from prohibiting consumption to prohibiting touch. A list of ground swarmers, consisting apparently of reptiles and rodents (vv. 29-31), is incorporated into more general instructions about how the carcasses of polluting animals pollute by touch. One prohibition (v. 26) does not mention carcasses, but that is probably implied by the context.

Leviticus 11 Exegesis

95

Verses 24-28 fall into a chiastic arch centred on v. 26c, as recent commentaries note (Milgrom 670; Hieke 426-27): ‫א ולאלה תטמאו‬ ‫ב כל־הנגע הנבלתם יטמא‬ ‫אד־הערב וכל הנשׂא מנבלתם‬ ‫יכבס בגדיו וטמא עד־הערב‬ ‫ג לכל־הבהמה אשׁר הוא‬ ‫מפרסת פרסה ושׁסע איננה‬ ‫שׁסעת וגרה איננה מעלה‬ ‫טמאים הם לכם‬ ‫ת כל־הנגע בהם יטמא‬ ‫גʹ וכל חולך על־כפיו‬ ‫בכל־החיה ההלכת על־ארבע‬ ‫טמאים הם לכם‬ ‫בʹ כל־הנגע בנבלתם יטמא‬ ‫עד־הערב‬ ‫והנשׂא את־נבלתם יכבס בגדיו‬ ‫וטמא עד־הערב‬ ‫אʹ טמאים המה לכם‬

A By these, you pollute yourselves. B Everyone who touches their carcass becomes polluted until evening. Everyone who carries part of their carcass must wash their (ms) clothes. They (ms) become polluted until evening. C For every quadruped that has a hoof but does not split it and does not chew the cud – they are polluting for you (pl). X Everyone who touches one of them becomes polluted. Cʹ Everything that walks on its paws among animals that crawl – they are polluting for you (pl). Bʹ Everyone who touches their carcass becomes polluted until evening. Everyone who carries their carcass must wash their (ms) clothes. They become polluted until evening. Aʹ These are polluting for you (pl).

The arch emphasizes the change of subject to polluting touch. Then a list of ground swarmers (vv. 29-31) precedes details about how the carcasses of dead polluted animals contaminate people, food, and water supplies (vv. 32-40). 11:24 By these, you pollute yourselves. Everyone who touches their carcass becomes polluted until evening. ‫“ לאלה‬by these” could refer to what follows, but Whitekettle (2009, 487-88) pointed out that it almost always refers to an antecedent in the HB. In that case, it must refer to the prohibited quadrupeds in vv. 2-9, if the birds and water creatures do not pollute on contact (see above on v. 11). However, reading ‫ לאלה‬as referring to what follows makes better sense of the chapter’s structure (Hieke 425), and is confirmed by the chiasm that places this phrase in parallel with v. 28c. Meshel (2008, 218) translated ‫ לאלה תטמאו‬as “by these, however, you are permitted to become defiled” on analogy with 21:3 ‫“ לה יטמא‬by her (in contrast to most others) he is permitted to become defiled.” Only in these two verse in Leviticus is ‫ טמא‬hitpael not negated by ‫ לא‬or ‫אל‬. Meshel argued that this verse is drawing a contrast to v. 8 that prohibits eating or touching the carcasses of, in his interpretation, only camels, rabbits, hyraxes, and pigs. Most interpreters, however, understand v. 8 to prohibit eating or touching the carcasses of any quadruped that does not meet the criteria of split hooves and chewing the cud in v. 3 (Sifra, Rashi, Ramban, Milgrom 653, Hieke 421, etc.). That interpretation is supported here by the repetition of these criteria

96

Leviticus 11 Exegesis

in v. 26, though the prohibition is not repeated. Meshel reconciled the logical contradiction between the prohibition (v. 8) and the allowance for purification (vv. 25) by applying them to different animal species. His solution, however, created the impractical situation that touching dead camels is prohibited while touching dead donkeys is allowed, despite the fact that the carcasses of both domestic species must have been disposed of in similar ways. These problems develop when interpreters focus on logic whereas the priestly writers aimed at persuasion. Common rhetoric may employ contradictions to achieve a consistent persuasive goal. For example, a parent might tell a child, “Don’t get dirty! If you do get dirty, make sure you wash up before dinner!” In the same way, Leviticus 11 says, “Don’t pollute yourself! If you do, wash up before evening so you can be pure then!” Touching the carcasses of polluted animals is a mild pollution that requires waiting until evening to be pure. Verse 25 adds laundering clothes. For purifying those who eat animals that die naturally, 17:15 adds bathing to laundering and waiting until evening, on analogy with 15:6-13. Chapter 11, however, never mentions bathing, though that may seem like a natural accompaniment to laundering one’s clothes. At this point, interpreters’ presuppositions about the genre of priestly instructions determine their decisions about whether bathing is assumed here or not. It seems to me that the repeated rhetoric of “bathing and laundering and remaining polluted until evening” becomes such a heavy drumbeat in chap. 15 that it would lead most listeners to think that all three actions should always be taken together. See Exegesis to 15:10 below. Verses 24-25 can be read as including eating as a form of touching, and therefore as providing a purification procedure for those who eat polluted meat. 11:25 Everyone who carries part of their carcass must wash their (ms) clothes. They (ms) become polluted until evening. Presumably, carrying a carcass runs the risk of dripping polluted blood on clothes, so the clothes must be washed. But such considerations may be too specific: the rhetoric of the following chapters will increasingly make bathing and laundering seem like automatic accompaniments to waiting until evening for purification. 11:26 For every quadruped that has a hoof but does not split it and does not chew the cud – they are polluting for you (pl). Everyone who touches one of them becomes polluted. Whitekettle (2009, 484) argued that the vav conjunctions indicate additional criteria, “and,” rather than alternatives, “or” (contra Milgrom 669;

Leviticus 11 Exegesis

97

Hieke 426). In that case, this verse refers specifically to equids – donkeys, horses, and mules – that have unsplit hooves and do not chew the cud. The prohibition on touching here is not limited to carcasses. But that restriction must be assumed from the previous and following verses (Ibn Ezra), or riding donkeys and horses would pollute the riders. So some Hebrew manuscripts and LXX added “their carcasses.” 11:27 Everything that walks on its paws among animals that crawl – they are polluting for you (pl). Everyone who touches their carcass becomes polluted until evening. Quadrupeds with paws instead of hoofs that were endemic to the ancient Near East included the major carnivore families of canines (dogs), felines (cats), and ursids (bears). Unlike insects, these animals can literally be described as ‫“ ההלכת על ארבע‬walking on (all) fours” rather than “crawling” (see on v. 20 above), though their carriage is still lower than deer, cattle, and equids. Two very low-carriage species with paws, rabbits and hyraxes, are specifically prohibited in vv. 5-6. 11:28 Everyone who carries their carcass must wash their (ms) clothes. They become polluted until evening. These are polluting for you (pl). The final phrase, ‫“ טמאים המה לכם‬these are polluting for you,” appears in this position to complete the chiastic arch in parallel with v. 24a, ‫ולאלה‬ ‫“ תטמאו‬by these you pollute yourselves.” 11:29 For you (pl), this is polluting among the swarmers that swarm on the ground: the cholek, the akbar, the tsav of any kind, The use of ‫“ שׁרץ‬swarmer” (see on v. 10) here to describe land animals distinguishes very low carriage creatures that ‫“ רמשׁ‬scramble” (v. 44) from animals with longer legs (Whitekettle 2001, 27). See Exposition: Translating Animal Names for my reasons for transliterating rather than translating the poorly understood names of these species of small ground animals. ‫ חלך‬cholek and ‫ צב‬tsav appear only here in the HB. ‫ עכבר‬akbar appears also in the story of the Covenant Chest among the Philistines in 1 Sam. 6:4-5, 11, 18, where it seems to designate a mouse. 11:30 the anaqah, the koch, the letaah, the chomet, and the tinshemet. Four names of species listed in this verse – ‫ אנקה‬anaqah, ‫ כח‬koch, ‫לטאה‬ letaah, ‫ חמט‬chomet – appear only here in the HB. ‫ תנשׁמת‬tinshemet appears

98

Leviticus 11 Exegesis

in v. 18 and Deut. 14:16 as the name of a bird species, but only here among the ground swarmers. These words probably refer to different kinds of reptiles, rodents and, possibly, amphibians. But missing from this list is the ‫“ צפרדע‬frog” that plagued the Egyptians (Exod. 7:28-8:8; Ps. 78:45). One would expect it to appear here, since Exod. 7:28 and Ps. 105:30 describe frogs explicitly as ‫“ שׁרץ‬swarming.” Even more surprising is this chapter’s failure to mention ‫“ נחשׁים‬snakes” (cf. Gen. 3:1, 14; Num. 21:6, 9). See further on v. 42 below. 11:31 These are polluting for you (pl) among all the swarmers. Everyone who touches one of them when they are dead becomes polluted until evening. Verses 31-32 use ‫“ במתם‬when they are dead” rather than ‫“ נבלה‬carcass” (v. 27), perhaps because of the small size of these animals. Interpreters debate here and in v. 39 whether waiting until evening presupposes bathing and laundering clothes as well. See v. 24 above and on 15:10. 11:32 Everything that one of these falls upon when they are dead becomes polluted: any container of wood or cloth or skin or sacking, any container used for any purpose. It must be put in water and stays polluted until evening. Then it is pure. ‫“ בהם במתם‬one of these when they are dead” is repeated from v. 31 and so refers to the lizards and rodents listed in vv. 29-30. Their carcasses pollute people and things that come into contact with them, but the carcasses of birds, fish and insects apparently do not, since these animals were called ‫שׁקץ‬ “nauseating” but not ‫“ טמא‬polluting” (vv. 9-23; Milgrom 656-59; but cf. vv. 43-45). Logically, of course, the carcasses of larger polluting animals would also pollute these objects, but the typical situation involving their carcasses leads to carrying them away (vv. 25, 28) while the typical situation with dead lizards and rodents is that they are found on or in containers of various kinds (vv. 33-38). 11:33 Every ceramic container that one of these falls into, everything in it becomes polluted. It must be smashed. ‫ חרשׂ‬usually describes pots (Num. 5:17; Jer. 19:1; 32:14; Lam. 4:2) or potsherds (Isa. 30:14; 45:9) made from fired clay, so “earthenware” or “ceramic.” This verse specifies that ceramic ware cannot be purified by washing, unlike containers made from other materials (v. 32). The requirement to smash

Leviticus 11 Exegesis

99

polluted ceramic vessels while only washing vessels of other materials appears also in 6:21 and 15:12. While the contrast between bronze and ceramic vessels in 6:21 might suggest that ceramics were considered more porous, that cannot explain the contrast here and in 15:12 between ceramics and wooden, leather, and cloth materials (v. 32). The most likely explanation for the difference is economic value. Ceramics were cheap and plentiful and more easily replaced than containers of wood, cloth, or leather (Wright 1987, 112; Milgrom 673). Their disposable quality may have recommended them for distinctive rituals involving water. The P writers require that ceramic bowls be used in the rituals for purifying people and houses of infestation (14:5, 50) and for the accused adulteress’s ordeal (Num. 5:17). Though these texts do not say so, ceramic may be required so that the bowls used for rituals involving these severe impurities could be smashed afterwards (Milgrom 1990, 39). ‫“ אל־תוכו‬into” is literally “into its midst.” The rabbis concluded therefore that an animal carcass does not pollute by touching the outside of a pot, but only if it actually falls on or inside it (m. Kelim 2:1; b. Hul. 24b). Wright (1987, 95-98), followed by Milgrom (675), argued instead that the phrase does not indicate the place of contact with the carcass, but rather the shape of the ceramic object as a container with an inside. 11:34 All edible food that comes into contact with (its) water becomes polluted, and all drinkable drink from any (such) container becomes polluted. The pollution from dead swarmers contaminates the pot, which then contaminates any food or water in the pot or that is put in the pot. Some ancient and medieval rabbis thought dry food might remain pure (Sifra, Rashi), but the more obvious meaning is that any food or water in the pot becomes polluted by the presence of the swarmer carcass (Milgrom 678). 11:35 Everything that part of their carcass falls upon becomes polluted. An oven and a stove must be broken up. They are polluted and they will stay polluted for you (pl). ‫ ִכ ַיריִ ם‬is pointed dual and appears only here in the HB. The parallel with betterknown ‫“ תנור‬oven” supports the rabbinic description of ‫ כירים‬as a stove for two pots (m. Shabb. 3:1), which is attested archeologically (Milgrom 679). Like ceramic dishes (v. 33), ovens and stoves cannot be purified but must be destroyed. Ancient ovens and stoves were made of clay and were relatively easy to build and destroy. To the requirement to break them, SP and LXX added the specification, “in a stream of water.”

100

Leviticus 11 Exegesis

11:36 However, the pool of water in a spring or pit remains pure. Only someone who touches their carcass becomes polluted. Application of the regulations in vv. 32-35 regarding the polluting effects of animal carcasses would make it very difficult to find pure sources of water in nature. This exception for springs and cisterns ameliorates that problem. ‫“ מקוה־מים‬pool of water”: This verse exerted decisive influence over later discussions of which water is polluted or pure. The rabbis (b. Shab. 81a) decided that any pool cut out of rock counts as a spring or cistern, and therefore that rock-hewn jars do too. That judgment was apparently already widespread in the later Second Temple period: rock-hewn pools and jars appear extensively in archeological finds from Jewish communities in Judea and Galilee from the second century B.C.E. through the mid-second century C.E. The pools continued, in smaller numbers, to be built and used until the end of the Western Roman empire, though the jars do not seem to have been constructed much after the second century (Miller 2015, 20-21, 182; for further discussion, see Exposition to Leviticus 15). Today, the word ‫ מקוה‬miqveh “pool” is used in English as well as Hebrew for a Jewish ritual bath. 11:37 When part of their carcass falls on any sowable seed that can be sown, it remains pure, ‫“ זרע זרוע אשׁר יזרע‬sowable seed that can be sown” means it has not yet been sown, that is, dry seed in a container of some kind. Mice are drawn to seed stores, so this exception was important for preserving the ability to store seed for the next planting season. 11:38 but when their carcass fall into water that touches the seed, it is polluting for you (pl). Qumran texts interpreted this rule about polluted water touching seed to mean that only full members of the sect in a state of purity could harvest food (4Q284a 1.208; 4Q274 3.ii.7-9). Rabbinic rules limited the danger of contagious pollution from harvesters to crops like grapes and olives whose liquid gets expressed (m. Toh. 9-10; m. Makh. 1.6, 4.6; Harrington 2004, 26-27). Rashi reasoned that this rule about polluted water falling on seed cannot apply to planted seeds in the ground. Milgrom (690) found in these verses an underlying rule, that the ground and everything in it (seeds, cisterns) cannot be polluted. Only objects unattached to the ground are susceptible to contagion, with the exception of stoves and ovens. However, the ground and even the whole land can be polluted by murder (Num. 35:33-34) and immorality (Lev. 18:27). This leads many interpreters to draw a distinction

Leviticus 11 Exegesis

101

between ritual and moral pollution (see Introduction to Leviticus 11-20 above). These disagreements among ancient and modern interpreters show that if the writers had an underlying rule in mind, they did not make it clear to readers. 11:39 When an edible quadruped dies (naturally), whoever touches its carcass becomes polluted until evening. ‫ ימות‬here must mean “dies naturally” in contrast to animals slaughtered for food or offerings (1:5-9; 17:3-7, 13-14). Otherwise, animal offerings would pollute the worshippers and priests in the sanctuary. Milgrom (694) argued that “originally the carcass of a pure animal did not carry impurity by contact.” His strongest evidence are the rules in 5:2 and 7:21 that mention only the carcasses of polluted animals (Milgrom 681-82). He thought this extension of pollution to the carcasses of pure animals accompanied H’s ban on secular slaughter outside the sanctuary (17:4). But the language of this verse excludes any kind of slaughtered animal regardless of the location of its slaughter. It does look like it has been added to correct the omission of edible quadrupeds from the previous lists of animal carcasses that pollute by touch, but there is no evidence to show whether this addition was made by the original author or someone later. The rabbis (m. Hullin 9.1) and Rashi argued that this verse refers only to the meat, but excludes animal products made from bones, teeth, horns, claws, or skin. The Qumran community (4QMMT B 22-23; 11QT 51:4-5) regarded such animal products as also polluting. 11:40 Whoever eats its carcass must wash their clothes and remain polluted until evening. Whoever carries its carcass must wash their clothes and remain polluted until evening. Verses 39-40 extend the contamination from the carcasses of polluting animals in v. 28 to the carcasses of pure animals that die of natural causes. They also combine the concern with touching polluted carcasses that has dominated the preceding section (vv. 24-39) with a concern about eating them, and so build a bridge to the following verses (Nihan 2007, 295). Concluding Exhortations and Formulas (11:41-47) The third part of chap. 11 returns to prohibitions on eating swarmers (vv. 41-43) before concluding with two sets of formulas in styles typical of different parts of Leviticus. The torah formula of vv. 46-47 echoes seven other torah formulas in chaps. 11-15, while the holiness formulas of vv. 44-45

102

Leviticus 11 Exegesis

echo similar language in chaps. 19-22 (in fact, 20:25-26 explicitly invokes the regulations of Leviticus 11). In this way, the food regulations are connected to all the other purity rules for the community of Israel. Milgrom (683) pointed out arch structures in both the prohibition on eating swarmers (vv. 41-42) and in the holiness formulas (43-44). These arches are not elaborate and can also be analyzed as simple parallelism, so that v. 42 repeats and elaborates v. 41, and vv. 44b-45 re-emphasize the message of vv. 43-44a. 11:41 Every swarmer that swarms on the ground – it is nauseating! It must not be eaten. Previous verses of this chapter have established that ground swarmers are polluting (vv. 29-31) and that swarmers in water and swarming flyers should be nauseating and therefore inedible (vv. 10, 20). Now this verse declares ground swarmers to be nauseating and inedible, thereby combining the judgments of polluting and nauseating that previous parts of the chapter have distinguished. Though historical critics find it logically contradictory and therefore evidence of this verse’s later addition (Nihan 2007, 297-98; Hieke 429), summaries that unify disparate discussions into a climactic statement like this are typical of P’s rhetoric (see Exegesis to 5:6, 15:33, and 16:16). The original position of vv. 41-42 in this context was defended by Elliger (147-48) and Milgrom (683, 691). 11:42 Everything that goes on its belly and everything that crawls on many legs, that is, every swarmer that swarms on the ground you (pl) must not eat, because they are nauseating! ‫“ גחון‬belly” appears otherwise only in Gen. 3:14, where it describes the punishment of the snake. Surprisingly, however, the word ‫“ נחשׁ‬snake” does not appear in the lists of polluted animals in Leviticus 11 or Deuteronomy 14. Kiuchi (196) argued that this language here nevertheless makes a snake the paradigmatic “swarmer” (also Harper 2018, 140). He suggested that water animals without fins and scales resemble snakes, but some of his examples (e.g. eels endemic to the Nile) work better than others (e.g. lobsters). The omission of snakes here undermines attempts to see allusions to Genesis 2-3 in this chapter. The word ‫“ גחון‬belly” is written in L with an enlarged vav to mark the exact centre of the Torah, as counted by letters (b. Qidd. 30a). However, different ancient scribes might write vowel letters or not (plene or defective spelling) which makes this count unreliable, as the Talmud itself admits. Most translations treat the preposition ‫עד‬, which is omitted by some manuscripts, as if it were another vav conjunction. That and the three-fold

Leviticus 11 Exegesis

103

repetition of ‫ כל‬supports finding three categories of ground swarmers here: those that walk on their bellies or crawl or walk on many legs (NRSV; NIV; NJPS; Milgrom 645; Whitekettle 2002, 166). But it makes more sense to read ‫ עד‬as meaning “even to, up to” (Waltke-O’Connor §11.2.12.c) when followed by ‫“ מרבה‬many” (though the ‫ כל‬between them is awkward). That creates just two categories, animals on their bellies and those that “crawl on many legs” (Wenham 164; CEB; Hieke 429; for the translation of ‫חולך‬ ‫על־ארבע‬, literally “walk on four,” as “crawl,” see on v. 20 above). The ‫ ל‬before “every swarmer that swarms on the ground” puts this phrase in apposition to what precedes it as the more general category, so I translate “that is” (Walke-O’Connor §11.2.10.h; Hieke 413). 11:43 Do not nauseate yourselves with any swarming swarmer. Do not pollute yourselves with them and become polluted by them, ‫ אל‬usually marks a weaker negative and dominates Wisdom literature, while the stronger negative ‫ לא‬is preferred by the Pentateuch’s legal texts. They are synonymous, however, when they appear side-by-side in lists of prohibitions, as they do here (also in 19:4, 29, 31; 25:14).18 Like v. 41, this verse combines categories that have previously been distinct in this chapter, in this case rhetoric about what is ‫“ שׁקץ‬nauseating” with what is ‫“ טמא‬polluting” (see chart in Hieke 430). Here Milgrom (684) must change his translation of the verb ‫ שׁקץ‬from “abominate” in vv. 11, 13 where it applied to animal carcasses to “defile” because of its reflexive object ‫“ נפשׁתיכם‬yourselves” (see Exegesis to 2:1). Contra Milgrom, this does not indicate a change in the meaning of the Hebrew word but rather that the English word he chose is too restrictive. The translation “nauseate” works equally well in both places (see on v. 10 above). The distinction implied by juxtaposing hitpael and niphal forms of the root ‫ טמא‬is not clear: ‫“ לא תטמאו בהם ונטמתם בם‬do not pollute yourselves with them and become polluted by them” (SP supplies the missing ‫ א‬in the second verb). B. Yoma 39a and some medieval rabbis derived the second verb from the root ‫“ טמם‬be stupid,” so “be made stupid by them.” But Milgrom (685) rightly pointed to the parallel syntax of v. 44 and the repetition of this formula in 18:24 to defend the double use of ‫ טמא‬here. He translated the second phrase as a consequence of the first, “and thus become impure” (so also Hieke 429), which is possible but not necessary.

18 Erhard Gerstenberger, Wesen und Herkunft des Apodiktischen Rechts (WMANT 20; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1965), 50-54; cf. John Bright, “The Apodictic Prohibition: Some Observations,” JBL 92 (1973), 185-204 [196-97].

104

Leviticus 11 Exegesis

The prohibition on pollution by all ground swarmers is emphatic and unconditional: unlike all other categories of animals in this chapter, no ground swarmer is permitted as food. Milgrom (686) recommended the explanation by Wilfried Paschen (1970) that ‫“ הארץ‬the earth, the ground” is associated with graves and the underworld, i.e. with death, which Milgrom believed to be the fundamental fear behind all the pollution regulations. Death, however, does not work well as an all-encompassing explanation for pollution (see Introduction to Leviticus 11-20 above). It is more likely that lizards and rodents were never routinely included in the Israelite diet, because lizards and rodents in the Middle East are not large enough to be significant sources of nutrition. The writers’ aim to present a comprehensive schema of inedible and polluting animals probably motivated their mention here. 11:44 for I am YHWH your (pl) God. You must make yourselves holy and be holy, because I am holy. Do not pollute yourselves with any swarmer that scrambles on the ground, ‫“ כי אני יהוה אלהיכם‬for I am YHWH your God” here and in the following verse are the first statements of a leitmotif that will echo more than twenty times in Leviticus 18-26. The introduction by ‫“ כי‬for” connects v. 44a to v. 43b (see my discussion of literary structure before Exegesis to v. 41 above). This connection between God and the purification and sanctification of Israel becomes explicit in the imitatio dei command that follows and that also appears at the end of v. 45: “You must be holy because I am holy.” This command also echoes the holiness rhetoric of the latter part of Leviticus, especially 20:7, 25-26. Verses 44-45 are therefore widely regarded as an H addition to this chapter (see, e.g., Milgrom 686-87; Nihan 2007, 298-99). These same interpreters think that the idea that Israelites can sanctify themselves is distinctive to H: ‫“ התקדשׁתם והייתם קדשׁים‬you must make yourselves holy and be holy.” Previously, P has depicted Moses sanctifying the priests and the Tabernacle (chap. 8). At the beginning of the Sinai story, God designated all Israel as a “holy people” and “royal priesthood” (Exod. 19:6). But the reflexive hitpael verb, “make yourselves holy,” followed by the stative, “be holy,” here and in 20:7 grants Israelites agency over their own holiness and the obligation to exercise it to become holy like god. How? By following the diet restrictions of this chapter, as explicitly stated in 20:25-26. As Ellen Davis (2017, 8) put it, “Holy living begins with regulated eating.” An association between the people’s holiness and their observance of diet restrictions appears here and in Lev. 20:26, but also in Exod. 22:30 and Deut. 14:3, 21. Therefore, the idea of Israel’s self-sanctification was not unique to H or Leviticus (see Exegesis to 20:7-8). The priestly writers elaborated, but did not invent, an association between the people’s diet and their covenant identity as YHWH’s people (Wright 1991, 167-69).

Leviticus 11 Exegesis

105

Where previous verses have always used cognate noun and verb from ‫שׁרץ‬ “swarm/swarmer,” here the noun appears with the verb ‫“ רמשׂ‬scramble” (also v. 46; 20:25). That word is more common in the P creation and flood stories (Gen. 1:26, 30; 7:8, 14; 8:17), though they also use the verb ‫שׁרץ‬ “swarm” (Gen. 1:20, 21; 7:21; 8:17). This chapter has previously referred to these animals’ mode of locomotion with ‫“ הלך‬walking” or “crawling” (see on v. 20 above). 11:45 for I am YHWH who brought you (pl) up from the land of Egypt to be God for you. You must be holy because I am holy. This occurrence of God’s oft-repeated claim in the Pentateuch, ‫המעלה אתכם‬ ‫“ מארץ מצרים‬who brought you up from the land of Egypt” (Exod. 20:2; 29:46; Lev. 19:35; 22:33; 25:38; Num. 15:41) is unusual for using the verb ‫“ עלה‬bring up” instead of ‫“ יצא‬bring out.” Rendsburg (1993) pointed out that it echoes the beginning of this chapter, which uses ‫ עלה‬repeatedly to refer to animals “bringing up, regurgitating” cud (vv. 3-7, 26), which I have translated with the English idiom, “chewing cud.” God’s deliverance of Israel from Egypt established the people’s obligation to YHWH. That obligation is described as YHWH’s ownership of the people in Exod. 19:5 (‫“ לי סגלה‬my property,” cf. Lev. 25:42), but here in different terms: ‫“ להית לכם לאלהים‬to be God for you.” This phrasing is reminiscent of YHWH’s promise to Abraham (Gen. 17:7-8) and Jacob’s acceptance of it (28:21), but also of Moses’s relationship with Aaron: ‫תהיה לו לאלהים‬ “you will be God for him” (Exod. 4:16). This verse then describes YHWH’s divinity not ontologically but functionally through God’s actions on behalf of Israel that establish YHWH’s rule over the people as king (Watts 2018; also in 22:33; 25:38; 26:12, 45). ‫“ והייתם קדשׁים כי קדושׁ אני‬you must be holy because I am holy” is the classic imitatio dei command (to imitate God) that appears three other times in Leviticus. LXX added κύριος “the Lord” (presupposing ‫ יהוה‬YHWH) here and in v. 44 to match its later appearances. In 19:2, the command introduces the wide array of moral and ritual laws in that chapter, but its three other appearances in Leviticus motivate compliance with purity regulations. In 21:8, it motivates the more stringent purity requirements on priests. This verse and 20:26 call on Israelites to sanctify themselves specifically by obeying this chapter’s rules regarding food. Why holiness should especially be associated with diet is explained by 20:24-26: God separates (‫ )בדל‬Israel from other nations, so Israel must separate (‫ )בדל‬pure animals from those that God has separated (‫ )בדל‬for Israel as polluted. As Geoffrey Harper (2018, 143) observed, “food choice becomes a mimetic act” with cosmological consequences. This separation vocabulary echoes God’s actions in creating the

106

Leviticus 11 Exegesis

world by separating its elements (Gen. 1:4, 6, 7, 14, 16), just like Leviticus 11 has echoed Gen. 1:20-25 by categorizing animals according to their environments on land, in the water, or in the air. Elizabeth Clark (1999, 216) noted that Lev. 11:44-45 and similar verses that command holiness were “regularly cited by patristic authors to counsel sexual abstinence.” 11:46 This is the law of the quadruped, the flyer, all living beings that scramble in the water and even all beings that swarm on the ground The phrase, ‫“ זאת תורת‬this is the law,” echoes seven other times in chaps. 1115 (12:7; 13:59; 14:2, 32, 54, 57; 15:32; also Num. 5:29; 6:13, 21; 19:2, 14; 31:21), like it did in the rules for distributing offering meats (see Exposition to Leviticus 6-7). Most of the other torah formulas refer to rules that include procedures for priestly mediation. But this torah is aimed explicitly at all Israelites (see further below). ‫“ נפשׁ‬beings,” which appears twice here, takes its broadest possible meaning (cf. on v. 43 above and Exegesis to 2:1 and 17:11). The ‫ ל‬that introduces the last of the four categories of animals (‫ )ולכל־נפשׁ‬is an emphatic lamed (Milgrom 689), so “and even all beings.” 11:47 to separate the polluted from the pure and edible animals from animals that you (sg) must not eat. The syntax mirrors 10:10 and 16:34 where ‫“ חקת עולם‬permanent mandate” precedes an infinite phrase specifying the priests’ duties. Similarly ‫זאת תורת‬ “this is the law” introduces an infinitive describing the priests’ responsibility to diagnose impurity in 13:59 and 14:54-57. Here, however, the diagnostic activity is delegated to every Israelite lay person, a point emphasized by the second-person singular prohibition that concludes the verse: ‫“ לא תאכל‬you must not eat.” The verb ‫“ בדל‬separate” describes God’s creative actions in Genesis 1, but also the priests responsibility to discriminate between holy and secular and polluted and pure in Lev. 10:10. This verse therefore extends the responsibility for such crucial decisions over purity and pollution to lay people as well, who now are included among the holy (v. 45) with a measure of priestly responsibilities (Exod. 19:6). Though this verse does not include separating holy from secular in lay people’s responsibilities, vv. 45-46 have made clear that the food rules have implications for Israel’s holy status. So distinguishing polluted from pure foods contributes towards maintaining Israel’s holiness by including lay people in these priestly functions. Leviticus 20:24-25 draws the connections with Israel’s corporate identity explicitly: “I am YHWH your God who separated you from the peoples. You

Leviticus 11 Exegesis

107

must separate pure quadrupeds from the polluted, and polluted flyers from the pure.” Milgrom (689) concluded, “The separation of the animals into the pure and the impure is both a model and a lesson for Israel to separate itself from the nations.” But he denied that 11:46-47 delegates authority for distinguishing clean from unclean to lay people, because he maintained that these verses stem from P, not H, and that P’s theology gives priests a monopoly on ritual discernment. The last words of v. 47, however, explicitly grants this authority to “you (sg)” which, like all the other second person pronouns in this chapter, addresses every individual Israelite. The change to singular here after consistent second person plural pronouns throughout the chapter is surprising, but maybe that is its purpose. The chapter’s last word focuses all its teachings on the individual hearer’s responsibility to reason correctly about polluted and nauseating meats and then eat accordingly. This commentary has argued that P regularly involves lay people both in performing rituals (see Exegesis to 1:5-6) and in hearing the ritual regulations (1:2; 11:2) because the writers understood that this has the effect, not of diminishing, but of increasing priestly authority. By publishing the mandates for their authority and perquisites, priests gain legitimacy in the performance of their offices. By involving lay people in parts of the rituals, priests gain their complicity in ensuring correct performances. So here, priests include lay people in guarding against pollution and even in making themselves holy like God in order to motivate compliance with these priestly regulations. The history of the growing power of the Aaronide priesthood in the Second Temple period attests to the effectiveness of this publication strategy (see Introduction §3.4-5 in Leviticus 1-10).

LEVITICUS 12:1-8

PURIFICATION AFTER GIVING BIRTH

12:1 12:2

12:3 12:4

12:5

12:6

12:7

12:8

YHWH spoke to Moses: Speak to the children of Israel: When a pregnant woman gives birth to a male, she is polluted for seven days just like she is polluted during her menstrual period’s uneasiness. On the eighth day, his body’s foreskin must be circumcised. She remains in blood purification for thirty-three days. She must not touch anything sacred and she must not go to the sanctuary until the days of her purification are finished. If she gives birth to a female, she is polluted like in her menstrual period for two weeks, but she remains in blood purification for sixtysix days. When the days of her purification for a son or a daughter are finished, she must bring a yearling sheep as a rising (offering) and any kind of pigeon or a landfowl as a sin (offering) to the priest at the entrance of the meeting tent. He must present them before YHWH. He mitigates for her and she is purified from the fountain of her blood. This is the law for the bearer of a male or female. But if she cannot get her hands on a caprid, she must take two landfowl or two of any kind of pigeon, one for a rising (offering) and one for a sin (offering). The priest mitigates for her and she is purified. ESSENTIALS

Contents Leviticus 12 is the shortest chapter in the Pentateuch. It is surrounded by three very long chapters about polluted animals (chap. 11) and about infestations (chaps. 13-14). Its separation from its surroundings is marked by a divine speech formula at the beginning (v. 1) and a mitigation formula at the end (v. 7), followed by an addendum substituting less expensive offerings for poor women (v. 8). Its separate treatment is also justified by its content, which is uniquely focused on the purification of mothers after childbirth. The chapter declares new mothers polluted on explicit analogy with the pollution from their menstrual periods (vv. 2, 5). Included in this schedule

Leviticus 12 Essentials

109

is a brief note that boy babies must be circumcised on the eighth day after birth (v. 3). After the standard seven-day period for menstruation, this chapter requires new mothers to observe a further period of “blood purification.” Altogether, these periods last forty days after the birth of a boy but double to eighty days after a girl’s birth (vv. 4-5). Then the mother must bring rising and sin offerings to the sanctuary (vv. 6, 8). The priest will use them to mitigate for her, after which she is declared to be purified “from the fountain of her blood” (v. 7). The chapter thus uses purification from the pollution of bleeding in childbirth to justify the need for offerings after every human birth. The mother’s purification period provides the rationale for scheduling the offerings forty or eighty days after giving birth, depending on the sex of the child. However, the amount of offerings required after giving birth to a girl is the same as for a boy. Contexts The contents of Leviticus 12, about purification of new mothers from blood pollution, form a thematic bracket with 15:19-30, about women’s pollution from common and uncommon vaginal bleeding. That thematic link is confirmed by explicit comparisons to menstrual periods in 12:2, 5. The vocabulary of menstruation and insemination in these verses also reappears in the torah formula (15:32-33) that concludes the rules for bodily pollutions in chaps. 12-15. In the context of all of the pollution rules in chaps. 11-15, Leviticus 12 introduces the theme of using temple sin offerings to achieve purification through priestly mitigation. Mitigation by offerings does not appear among the diet rules of chap. 11, but is the concluding ritual for all of the uncommon bodily pollutions mentioned in chaps. 12-15. The prominent position of purification rules for new mothers here is surprising. There is no mention of such practices anywhere else in the HB, nor is there much evidence for them from other ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures. The prominent position of Leviticus 12 exerted considerable influence on later Jewish communities, where the restrictions on new mothers were often interpreted more strictly than the biblical text indicates. These rules also shaped Christian rituals for new mothers. Though Christians ignore most other purity rules, the story of Mary observing the rules of this chapter after Jesus’ birth (Luke 2:22-24) has been taken to mean that Christian mothers should do something similar. The practice of “churching” new mothers some time after giving birth extended well into the twentieth century. Then many women rejected any implication of pollution from childbirth, which led to the ritual being abandoned by most denominations and congregations.

110

Leviticus 12 Exposition

Rhetoric Leviticus 12 focuses on the ritual purification of new mothers, but otherwise tells us nothing about the experience of pregnancy and childbirth in ancient Israelite society. Compared to ethnographic studies of childbirth in various cultures today, or even to ancient Hittite texts that provide a rare window into these experiences in the second millennium B.C.E., this chapter lacks any information about the personal, social, or gender consequences for new mothers of being polluted by giving birth. Instead, Leviticus 12 focuses tightly on scheduling rising and sin offerings, along with circumcision, at a set period of time after the birth of a child. Its purification rhetoric, however, has had massive ritual and social consequences for women in subsequent Jewish and Christian communities. By doubling the purification period after giving birth to females, the chapter reinforced the notion that women, maybe even baby girls, are inherently more susceptible to pollution than men. Together with the rhetoric about menstruation in chap. 15, Leviticus 12 became a major source for using fear of pollution to justify discrimination against women in religious leadership. Though the text never mandates isolation, its rhetoric led to encouraging women to withdraw from society during their “periods” of purification in very many communities that regarded Leviticus as scripture.

EXPOSITION Additional Bibliography: BERNAT, DAVID A. Sign of the Covenant: Circumcision in the Priestly Tradition. Atlanta: SBL, 2009. CASPERS, CHARLES. “Leviticus 12, Mary and Wax: Purification and Churching in Late Medieval Christianity.” In Poorthuis-Schwartz (2000), 295-309. COHEN, SHAYE J. D. Why Aren’t Jewish Women Circumcised? Gender and Covenant in Judaism. Berkeley: University of California, 2005. CRESSY, DAVID. Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. DE TROYER, KRISTIN. “Blood: A Threat to Holiness or toward (Another) Holiness?” In De Troyer (2003), 45-64. DRESEN, GRIETJE. “The Better Blood: On Sacrifice and the Churching of New Mothers in the Roman Catholic Tradition.” In De Troyer (2003), 143-64. ERBELE-KÜSTER, DOROTHEA. “The Ritual Texts of Leviticus and the Creation of Ritualized Bodies.” In Nihan-Rhyder (2021), 240-54. GARROWAY, KRISTINE HENRIKSEN. Growing Up in Ancient Israel: Children in Material Culture and Biblical Texts. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2018. GOLDSTEIN, ELIZABETH W. Impurity and Gender in the Hebrew Bible. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2015. GRUBER, MAYER I. “Women in the Cult According to the Priestly Code.” In Judaic Perspectives on Ancient Israel. Ed. J. Neusner et al. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. 35-48. KOREN, SHARON FAYE. Forsaken: The Menstruant in Medieval Jewish Mysticism. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2011. KORTE, ANNE-MARIE. “Reclaiming Ritual: A Gendered Approach to (Im)Purity.” In Poorhuis-Schwartz (2000), 313-37. MAGONET,

Leviticus 12 Exposition

111

JONATHAN. “ ‘But if it is a girl, she is unclean for twice seven days ...’: The Riddle of Leviticus 12:5.” In Sawyer (1996), 144-52. PHILIP, TARJA S. Menstruation and Childbirth in the Bible. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. ROLL, SUSAN K. “The Old Rite of the Churching of Women after Childbirth.” In De Troyer (2003), 117-41. SCHEARING, LINDA S. “Double Time ... Double Trouble? Gender, Sin, and Leviticus 12.” In Rendtorff-Kugler (2003), 429-50. SCHIFFMAN, LAWRENCE H. “Laws Pertaining to Purification after Childbirth in the Dead Sea Scrolls.” In Strength to Strength: Essays in Appreciation of Shaye J. D. Cohen. Ed. M. L. Satlow. Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2018. 169-78. SYNEK, EVA M. “Wer aber nicht völlig rein ist an Seele and Leib ...”: Reinheitstabus im Orthodoxen Kirchenrecht. Kanon, special edition 1. Egling: Roman Kovar, 2006. THIESSEN, MATTHEW. “The Legislation of Leviticus 12 in Light of Ancient Embryology.” VT 68 (2018), 1-23. WHITEKETTLE, RICHARD. “Leviticus 12 and the Israelite Woman: Ritual Process, Liminality and the Womb.” ZAW 107 (1995), 393-408.

Structure of Leviticus 12 Leviticus 12 focuses entirely on the timing of two kinds of rituals: circumcision and offerings. Verse 2 specifies that a new mother remains polluted (‫ )טמא‬seven days after bleeding while giving birth to a boy, on explicit analogy with her sevenday period of menstrual pollution (15:19). Verse 3 requires that the boy be circumcised on the eighth day after his birth. Verse 4 specifies that his mother remains in blood purification (‫ )דמי טהרה‬for thirty-three more days during which she is not allowed to touch anything sacred or enter the sanctuary. Verse 5 specifies a two-week period of pollution after giving birth to a girl, followed by sixty-six days of blood purification. Verse 6 requires the mother to offer a sheep rising offering and a bird sin offering after her period of blood purification is over. Verse 7 contains the standard concluding refrain to such an offering instruction, promising purification after the offerings are complete (cf. 14:9, 20). Verse 8 allows poor mothers to offer a bird rising offering instead of a sheep. The appearance of v. 8 after the concluding formulas of v. 7 indicates that it was added to provide an accommodation for poor mothers, as many commentators have realized (Nihan 2007, 281). Christophe Nihan (2007, 299-300) assumed that P incorporated a preexisting torot consisting of 12:2aβ-7 which was already grouped with the rules of chap. 15 “to form a small collection … in the temple library, where it could be consulted and copied.” He did not see any particular reason for isolating 12:3 as supplementary (Nihan 2007, 281 n. 46, following Elliger; contra Milgrom 746; Hieke 443). The subscript, ‫“ זאת תורת‬this is the law” (12:7) then linked this chapter to the rest of Leviticus 11-15 (cf. 11:46-47;

112

Leviticus 12 Exposition

13:59; 14:54-57; 15:32-33) with which it was already connected before P incorporated it by adding the narrative framework (12:1-2a; Nihan 2007, 271). Leviticus 12, however, does not provide instructions for the priests’ ritual practices, but rather prescribes an offering schedule for new mothers (see further below). The chapter’s origins must therefore be sought in priestly rhetoric directed at lay people rather than in manuals for the internal procedures of the temple. Since these rules are not reflected elsewhere in the HB (cf. 1 Sam. 1:21-24), we have no way of knowing whether they pre-existed P or not. History and Interpretation of Childbirth Pollution in Cultural Contexts Modern studies of pollution and purity practices in the ancient world have usually stated that childbirth and menstrual blood were widely regarded as polluting (e.g. Milgrom 763-64, 950-51; Guichard and Marti 2013, 74-75, 83-85).1 Hittite rituals have drawn particular attention, because the Hittites regarded babies as polluted for different periods of time: three months for a boy, four for a girl (Milgrom 764; Garroway 2018, 85-86).2 The Hittite rituals, however, also differ markedly from Leviticus 12 (Philip 2000, 118-19) by, among other things, regarding the baby, not just the mother, as polluted and by engaging the entire birthing experience – pregnancy, giving birth, genderdifferentiated birthing gifts, multiple offerings, and liturgical responses – rather than this chapter’s limited focus on purifying the mother and circumcising boy babies. The generalization that ancient peoples widely regarded blood from childbirth as polluting has now been seriously challenged because it is based on very little evidence (so Philip 2000, 5-8; Couto-Ferreira and GarciaVentura 2013). Jewish and Christian interpretive traditions following Leviticus 12 have taken various paths. In the Second Temple period, Jubilees incorporated and explained Leviticus 12’s rules of impurity after childbirth on the basis of the sequence of human creation in Genesis 1-2: “In the first week Adam and his wife – the rib – were created, and in the second week he showed her to him. Therefore, a commandment was given to keep (women) in their defilement seven days for a male (child) and for a female two (units) of seven days” (Jub. 3:8; similarly 4Q265).3 Jubilees grounded the purification rules for 1 Also Karel van der Toorn, From Her Cradle to Her Grave: The Role of Religion in the Life of the Israelite and Babylonian Woman (tr. Sara J. Denning-Bolle; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1994), 49-55. 2 Gary M. Beckman, Hittite Birth Rituals: An Introduction, SANE 1/4, Malibu: Undena Publications, 1978. 3 See James VanderKam, “Exegesis of Pentateuchal Legislation in Jubilees and Related Texts Found at Qumran,” in Pentateuchal Traditions in the Late Second Temple Period (ed. Akio Moriya and Gohei Hata; Leiden: Brill, 2012), 178-200 [185-90].

Leviticus 12 Exposition

113

new mothers in its version of the creation story. It treated Adam and Eve as newborns and the Garden of Eden as a temple (Schiffman 2018, 173). The first man can enter the Garden of Eden only forty days after his creation, while the first woman can enter eighty days after her creation. Therefore a new mother accesses the temple with her child in imitation of either Adam, for a boy, or Eve, for a girl (Schearing 2003, 431-33; Ego 2013, 486). The Qumran community expected new mothers to isolate themselves to comply with Leviticus 12 (11QT 48:16). In the first millennium C.E., many Jewish communities also expected new mothers to isolate themselves like menstruating women (Milgrom 765). The Babylonian Talmud, however, permitted menstruating women to remain active at home (b. Ketub. 61a; Milgrom 948-49). Jewish debates about the pollution of new mothers clearly depended on the model for menstrual pollution in Leviticus 15, as indicated by the text of Lev. 12:2 itself: “... just like she is polluted during her menstrual period.” Like later interpreters, the rabbis struggled to explain why pollution after giving birth to girls lasts twice as long as for boys. One suggestion imagined the mother herself drawing the distinction: R. Simeon b. Yoḥai was asked by his disciples, “Why did the Torah ordain a woman after childbirth should bring a sacrifice? He replied, “When she kneels in bearing she swears impetuously that she will have no intercourse with her husband. The Torah, therefore, ordained that she should bring a sacrifice.” “And why did the Torah ordain that in the case of a male [the woman is clean] after seven days and in the case of a female fourteen days?” “[On the birth of a] male with whom all rejoice she regrets her oath after seven days, [but on the birth of a female] about whom everybody is upset she regrets her oath after fourteen days” (b. Nidd. 31b; tr. W. Slotki in Neusner 1973, 84).

Many Hellenistic medical writers (e.g. Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, Philo; see Exegesis to 12:5) were of the opinion that male embryos develop faster than females, causing more menstrual blood to build up around female babies which must be expunged after birth (Thiessen 2018). Some rabbis thought that explained the gendered difference in periods of blood purification, though the rabbinic majority did not agree (m. Nidd. 3.7; t. Nidd. 4.7; b. Nidd. 30B). Other rabbinic texts wondered how these regulations apply to abortions, to non-vaginal births, and to hermaphrodite babies (Shearing 2003, 433-35). For the most part, rabbinic literature treated these regulations for new mothers as a subset of the rules for menstruating women and so discussed them in the talmudic tractate, Niddah (Fonrobert 2000, 2; see discussion in Exposition to Leviticus 15). In contrast to Rabbinic Judaism, Christian traditions have focused more ritual attention on new mothers than on menstruating women. That is entirely due to three verses in Luke’s Gospel. Luke 2:22-24 relates that Mary, the

114

Leviticus 12 Exposition

mother of Jesus, observed the post-partum purification period “according to the law of Moses.” This story drew the attention of Christian interpreters to the literal meaning of Leviticus 12 much more than to other purification rules in Leviticus. They seized on v. 2’s reference to insemination (see Exegesis to 12:2) to argue that Mary’s virginity left her unpolluted by childbirth, but they thought that she observed the law to show respect for scripture. Her behaviour inspired the church festival of Candlemas, forty days after the celebration of Jesus’ birth at Christmas. The Greek Orthodox Lectionary still recommends reading Lev. 12:1-4, 6-8 for Vespers on Candlemas – a very rare use by a Christian lectionary of any text from Leviticus besides 19:18 (but see also Exegesis of 21:6 and Exposition to chap. 23). Mary’s observance of the ritual regulations of Leviticus 12 forced Christian interpreters to struggle with the literal meaning of these rules (Elliott 2012, 113-25). Therefore Origen, in the third century, felt the need to defend the idea that childbirth is polluting, though he spiritualized other kinds of pollution (Rouwhorst 2000, 186-87). Some Christian interpreters extended the scope of pollution in childbirth: the Hippolytus Canon 18 (fourth century) ruled that even midwives become polluted while helping with births. They must not take Communion until their own purification periods have ended (Roll 2003, 119). Most penitential handbooks in the Middle Ages stipulated that menstruating women and new mothers are polluted, and often cited Leviticus 12 and 15 explicitly (Roll 2003, 122-24). Women who died in child-birth were often refused burial in consecrated church graveyards, though several bishops and church councils countermanded these practices. Luke’s story also generated the belief that Mary’s ritual example should be followed by Christian women. Her model generated the practice of “churching” new mothers after they ended forty days of seclusion after childbirth, a ceremony that was in turn modelled on the annual rituals of Candlemas as well as the wedding ceremony (Caspers 2000, 295-98, 303). Thus the motive of imitating biblical models advocated already by Jubilees was transferred to a Christian and Marian context. Susan Roll (2003, 125) described the medieval Greek Orthodox churching rite: The priest would pray over the mother: “Cleanse her from every sin and from every stain, so that she may be able to share in the sacred mysteries without fault. ... wash her of the stain of the body and the contamination of the soul at the close of these forty days.” Then the priest would carry the child forward into the church; the mother would follow. ... A male baby is carried right up to the altar, while a female child is only carried as far as the doors separating the altar from the nave. In case of miscarriage or abortion the woman was required to do penance to atone for the death of the fetus, whether deliberate or accidental, before the act of purification could take place.

These practices became standardized after the twelfth century, and were accompanied by increasing fears of menstrual blood pollution (Synek 2006, 144-45).

Leviticus 12 Exposition

115

The Reformation-era Puritans denounced the custom of churching new mothers as Jewish and Papist (Caspers 2000, 304). Nevertheless, the practice of isolating new mothers from their normal social obligations and interactions continued in many Protestant as well as Catholic and Orthodox communities into the twentieth century. A survey of mothers in London in 1950 documented that 90% still participated in churching after giving birth (Schearing 2003, 448). David Cressy observed that “Churching became embroiled in the liturgical and disciplinary contests of English protestantism and the struggles of religious politics; but it also had social, sexual, and festive associations that lay beyond the reach of the church.” He claimed that “women normally looked forward to churching as an occasion of female social activity, in which the notion of ‘purification’ was uncontentious, minimal, or missing” (Cressy 1997, 197, 199). However, the documented reflections of later twentiethcentury women who experienced the ritual suggest otherwise. Churching was gradually abandoned in the twentieth century by women who felt uncomfortable with its implication that they were polluted by childbirth – an implication that continued despite theologians’ attempts to reinterpret the ritual in terms of thanksgiving rather than purification (Roll 2003, 117, 133-35). The contradiction between church rhetoric about the churching ritual and modern women’s rejection of it indicated to Roll that “the shape of the rite itself, its own gestures and movements, and the symbolic elements employed communicated clearly to women the ambivalence at best, fear and repulsion at worst, of churchmen toward women’s sexuality and childbearing” (Roll 2003, 137-39; similarly Korte 2000, 314-15; Dresen 2003, 146-47, 152-53). The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) rescinded the rite for Catholics (Korte 2000, 313), and Eastern Orthodox churches are increasingly modifying its performance and wording as well (Synek 2006, 116-20, 145, 148-53). Contemporary feminist blessing rituals for new mothers do not reflect the traditional churching ritual in any way, and make no reference to purification at all (Roll 2003, 140-41). Similarly, Jewish congregations in the latter twentieth century developed birth rituals for new-born daughters “to counter the gender assymetry of Lev. 12:3” (Schearing 2003, 444). Nevertheless, Linda Schearing (2003, 429) observed that, “From distaste to despair, from ridicule to pious adherence, this passage retains its power to stir the emotions of its readers.” Symbolic Interpretations of Childbirth in Contemporary Scholarship As usual in Leviticus, this chapter does not explain the meaning of the rituals it describes, much less the meaning of childbirth, motherhood, postpartural bleeding, circumcision, or purification. By contrast, interpreters have focused much of their commentary on precisely such questions. Suggestions from just

116

Leviticus 12 Exposition

the last few decades have included the following theories about the meaning of this chapter. Baruch Levine (249-50) noted that childbirth creates anxiety for the welfare of both mother and child that in ancient cultures was usually expressed as demonic danger. Though biblical texts suppress most mention of demons, P still provided “ritual means ... to accomplish for the Israelite mother and her community what magic was supposed to accomplish for a pagan mother.” So the long purification period was meant to protect the mother as well as the sanctuary. Levine also suggested that it separated the fertility implications of birth from any association with YHWH. Richard Whitekettle (1995, 397400) observed that the rules for a new mother follow the familiar pattern of a rite of passage that moves from purity to the liminal state of pollution, then back to purity. Tikva Frymer-Kensky (1983, 401) speculated that birth, like touching the dead (Num. 19), involved an encounter with the life/death boundary that requires a longer period of reintegration. Jacob Milgrom (766-68, 1000-1004) understood all the impurities in Leviticus 12-15 as symbolizing death, and avoidance of them as imitating God’s holiness. But Whitekettle (1995, 392-95) observed that Leviticus 12 and 15 are interested in blood only as a fluid of reproduction, not in the kind of bleeding that might indicate a threat of death. Christophe Nihan (2007, 309) agreed: “If death were such a concern to the P editor of Lev 11-15, one does not understand why he omitted any reference to corpses as a source of pollution, an issue discussed only in the later supplements to P found in Num 5:2 and 19:11-22.” Others therefore added sex to death on the list of P’s ultimate concerns (e.g. Wright 1992, 739; Marx 2001) . Nihan (2007, 306-307) followed Robert Parker (1983, 66) in suggesting that the rules of purification around sex and death served to remind people of the absolute difference and perfection of God. He pointed out that semen is the least polluting substance of any mentioned in these chapters and most easily cleansed (one day and bathing: 15:18). Nihan therefore argued that Leviticus 12-15 is primarily about “these discharges which are either abnormal (gonorrheic issues …) or the symptom of provisional disfunctioning of the reproductive system, such as menstrual … and puerperal blood” (Nihan 2007, 310, following Eilberg-Schwartz 1990, 183-86 and especially Whitekettle 1995). He used Louis Dumont’s definition of pollution as “the irruption of the biological into social life”4 and Parker’s application of it to ancient societies. They argued that impurity flows from biological processes over which individuals or societies have no control, but which impact society fundamentally 4 Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (rev. ed.; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 85.

Leviticus 12 Exposition

117

(Nihan 2007, 317-18). The rituals of Leviticus 12-15 therefore serve symbolically to re-establish social control over human biology (Nihan 2007, 321). The appearance of the command in v. 3 to circumcise newborn boys has also provoked symbolic speculation. Daniel Eilberg-Schwartz (1990, 174, 180) thought that the pure blood of circumcision reduced the purification period of the boy’s mother, but Tarja Philip (2006, 116) observed that circumcision texts (Gen. 17; Lev. 12) never mention blood. Shaye Cohen (2005, 19) admitted that the link between purification and circumcision in Lev 12 is only implicit, but argued, “Surely it is no coincidence that the eighth day after birth, the first day of diminished impurity for the mother, is also the day of circumcisions for the infant.” Similarly, Nihan (2007, 319) thought that the girl’s birth doubles the period to compensate for the lack of a circumcision ritual. David Bernat (2009, 64-65), however, challenged any connection between the boy’s circumcision and the mother’s purification period on the grounds that no pollution language is associated with foreskins here nor is circumcision said to purify. For that matter, the baby is never described as polluted, only the mother. Milgrom (746-47) correctly observed that the issue in v. 3 is neither the performance of the circumcision ritual nor its ritual or social effects, but only its timing. Psychoanalytic interpretation has oriented itself around the ritual of circumcision as the patriarchal separation of the son from his mother. Julia Kristeva commented about the progression in chaps. 11-12 from polluted and nauseating meats to new mothers: Dietary abomination has thus a parallel – unless it be a foundation – in the abomination provoked by the fertilizable or fertile feminine body (menses, childbirth). ... In that case, it would be a matter of separating oneself from the phantasmatic power of the mother, that archaic Mother Goddess who actually haunted the imagination of a nation at war with the surrounding polytheism (Kristeva 1982, 100).

She then interpreted the detailed focus on skin infestations in chaps. 13-14 after the brief description of mothers in chap. 12 as an obsession about bodily perfection in denial of a body’s true maternal origins. Similar conclusions arise from cultural comparisons, as Nancy Jay (1992) showed by comparing sacrificial rituals in different cultures. She argued that sacrifice in many different patriarchal cultures represents a “remedy for having been born of woman.” The application of this thesis to biblical law was developed with greater nuance and scope by Nicole Ruane, who observed that: The physical disparity between male and female is no more pronounced than in the act of childbirth. … Childbirth is also a realm where males have no place and where control over women is most irrelevant and unsure. Therefore, it is in childbirth where the social power of ritual most needs to be asserted for society to manage potential female power. (Ruane 2013, 184)

118

Leviticus 12 Exposition

Ruane argued that giving birth to a daughter pollutes the mother more than giving birth to a son because the daughter will remain outside the patrilineal system and, in fact, represents its opposite: a matrilineal line (Ruane 2013, 184, 187). However, ritual provides the means for reintegrating both child and mother into the patriarchal social structure. Childbirth is the sole occasion on which a healthy woman is required to make offerings: making offerings then is an opportunity to show herself as a mother and therefore as a person of social and material consequence. The childbirth offerings might have been the only ones made in the life of an average woman. Thus the priestly sacrifical system recognizes motherhood as an important cultic and social role. At the same time, however, a mother’s offering also marks her agreement to the social structure that she is rejoining. Implicit in her offering is an acceptance that she was, indeed, unclean when bearing the child and that her relationship to her offspring is under the control of the social structure. (Ruane 2013, 30; see also 184-90, and Dresen 2003, 161)

Kristine Henriksen Garroway (2018) introduced a childcentric interpretation that focused on how the purification rituals of Leviticus 12 gender the newborn as male by forty days of purification and circumcision, or as female through eighty days of purification. She tried to put a positive spin on the claim that circumcision separates a boy from his mother and brings him into the patrilineal line. Thus modern scholarship has found in Leviticus 12 indications of symbolic systems ranging from demonism and life forces to social control, gender socialization, and patriarchy. The chapter, however, talks explicitly about none of these topics. The new mother’s avoidance of the sanctuary for forty or eighty days is obviously a ritual absence and therefore socially-marked. It is very tempting to assume that the new mother’s period of “blood purification” must have had other social consequences, perhaps isolation at home with her baby, perhaps relief from household duties, probably social interactions with other women. But the text’s silence provides no grounds for such speculation. Whether she is also isolated within the family and society is not mentioned at all (Ruane 2013, 187). The chapter shows no interest in any of the practical and ritual features that usually accompany childbirth as a rite of passage for both mother and baby (compare its eight verses with the much longer and detailed descriptions of these changes in descriptions of pre- and post-natal rituals around the world: van Gennep 1960 [1909], 41-53). Nor does the text mention other themes favoured by interpreters, such as death, sex, social instability, or divine perfection. Blood Purification in Priestly Rhetoric The lesson about the difference between texts and rituals (see Leviticus 1-10, 63-64) is that this text will not tell us anything more about social rituals

Leviticus 12 Exposition

119

for new mothers in ancient Israel. Even ritual theories do not help much. The mother’s rising and sin offerings simply serve to mark the occasion (Modeus 2005; see the summary in Leviticus 1-10, 62-63). Their form has nothing to do with the nature of that occasion, the end of blood purification for a new mother, but are rather dictated by the standard form of these kinds of offerings (Lev. 1; 4). The fact that this is obvious in Leviticus 12 should caution interpreters against drawing connections between the ritual form and social significance of more unusual rituals, such as the purification of those suffering from infestation in Leviticus 14 or the rite of the red heifer in Numbers 20. The form that a ritual takes should be regarded as arbitrary and its details as unsymbolic, unless we have access to an explicit commentary tradition that interprets them. Even then, that tradition has no claim to being authoritative, but only reflects a particular stage of interpretation, as Nancy Jay (1992, 8) observed: “The meaning of any action not only varies with the way in which it is interpreted, it is the way in which it is interpreted.” Absent any such interpretation in the text itself or in the rest of the HB, Leviticus 12 can only tell us about the priestly writers’ goals. So how do these offering regulations for new mothers fit into P’s rhetorical agenda? The text of Leviticus 12 focuses attention on the mother. Showing no interest in the father, other family members, or even the child (except for v. 3), its spotlight shines on the new mother alone. It is her purification that draws the text’s attention. Chapter 12 stands at the beginning of four chapters of rules for purification from bodily pollution. Many of these rules, like those for childbirth, require rising and sin offerings in the sanctuary at the conclusion of purification periods (12:6-8; chap. 14; 15:14-15, 29-30). So Leviticus 12 marks the beginning of the requirements of offerings after purification by requiring them after the longest purification periods of all. That may explain why this chapter divides the new mother’s purification into two periods. Its use of the analogy with menstruation (vv. 2, 5) for the initial seven or fourteen day period cannot justify bringing offerings, because regular menstruation did not require offerings (15:19-24) and is far too common to require expensive rituals. The new mother’s offering is more analogous to the offering of a woman cured of uncommon vaginal bleeding: two birds for a sin offering and a rising offering (15:28-30). The new mother has the option of presenting a more expensive yearling sheep for the rising offering, if she can afford it (12:6, 8). It therefore seems likely that the priestly legislators invented the forty- and eighty-day blood purification periods, which are otherwise unattested in the HB, to justify requiring the rising and sin offerings at their conclusion. One can imagine symbolic interpretations for the length of these periods. In the HB, the number, forty, describes several long periods that can be thought

120

Leviticus 12 Exposition

of as purification periods. Forty days of rain flood the earth (Gen 7:4),5 but the only reference to purity in the flood story describes some of the animals, not the flooding or its results. Israel spends forty years in the wilderness waiting for the rebellious generation to die off, but again this period is never described with the language of purification. Only Leviticus 12 contains an explicit purification period of forty days, but even this chapter never actually mentions the numerals “forty” or “eighty,” only their components: 7+33 and 2×7+66 (vv. 2, 4-5). Instead of being a symbolic meditation on childbirth, Leviticus 12 is a payment schedule: it lists how much is owed to the sanctuary for the birth of a child and when it must be paid. The text’s clear interests lie in the rising and sin offering rituals that end a mother’s “blood purification.” Since the text mentions no other effects of the period of her blood purification, the enumeration of forty or eighty days serves here only to specify the timing of the offerings. Can we at least make something from the fact that these are the only offerings in P’s legislation that women are required to bring to the sanctuary? The text makes no reference to male assistance, except the priest’s mitigation. However, that fact serves the interests of a universal payment schedule: the omission of any information about the mother’s social status emphasizes that a rising and sin offering must be paid for every newborn child, regardless of the mother’s status. Even doubling the time period for newborn girls serves this purpose by rhetorically giving patriarchy its due while actually requiring the same offerings for a girl as for a boy. Despite doubling the purification period for girls, the text’s valuation of the sexes is economically equal: mothers incur the same costs for girl babies as for boys, and the priests gain the same income (the meat of the sin offering) from the birth of one as from the other. That income is low – pigeons and landfowl were relatively cheap – but at the rate of one for every birth, they may have accumulated into a noticeable supplement to the priests’ diet (Lev. 6:19, 22; 7:6-7). Does this chapter expand the number of occasions on which offerings were required? That is very likely. No other biblical text requires offerings after every birth. The old institution of redeeming the firstborn with a rising offering is required only after the birth of a mother’s first son (Exod. 13:2, 12, 15; 22:30; 34:19; Num. 18:15-16; Deut. 15:19-22; Neh. 10:36). Leviticus 12 extends the offering requirements to all births, though it probably requires less expensive offerings. Actually, neither P nor any other biblical text specfies the animal or type of offering required to redeem a firstborn son. The story of the Aqedah indicates that a ram rising offering would be appropriate 5 Richard Whitekettle, “Levitical Thought and the Female Reproductive Cycle: Wombs, Wellsprings, and the Primeval World,” VT 46 (1996), 376-91 [387-88].

Leviticus 12 Exposition

121

(Gen. 22:13). Hannah offers a bull, flour, and wine, but 1 Sam 1:24 does not specify the type of offerings. Of course, rising offerings burnt whole on the altar provided no income to priests. By focusing on the mother’s purification, Leviticus 12 justifies also requiring a purifying sin offering which provides priests a little income (Lev. 6:19, 22 Eng. 6:26, 29). There is reason to think that the sin offering was an innovation at some point in Israel’s history. P or its priestly predecessors added the sin and guilt offerings to Israel’s older ritual traditions of rising, commodity, and amity slaughter offerings in order to increase temple revenues, either during the violent disruptions of the seventh century or in the absence of a royal patron in the Second Temple period (see Exposition to Lev. 4-5). In that case, requiring a sin offering after the birth of a child extended this ritual innovation. In place of or in addition to the old tradition of redeeming the oldest son with an unspecified offering, P requires that the birth of every child requires rising and sin offerings. Leviticus 12, then, is about a payment schedule for offerings. Like the surrounding chapters, it also expresses a thematic concern for purification. Every other theme that interpreters expound on this text involves speculations about institutions and ideologies that it does not describe. Nevertheless, its text has wielded great influence on shaping Jewish and Christian institutions and gender ideologies, as the above surveys have shown. The priests, as Erbele-Küster (2021, 251) observed, gained “a grip on the body through their textual discourse.” Leviticus 12 took an initial step towards the religious sanctification of life transitions, since circumcision was not a temple ritual and marriages and funerals did not fall under religious, much less state, regulation for at least another 1,500 years. Leviticus 12 also took an early step in universalizing the relationship between offering/tax systems and every individual (every mother, every child) in a society, rather than with collective groups of families, villages, clans, and tribes. Its rationale, purification, that reproduced the stigmatizing fear of women’s vaginal blood (see Exposition to Lev. 15), joined with increasing specialization of labour in ancient economies to weaken women’s economic solidarity with each other by individualizing their roles, and sometimes isolating them, within the households of wage-earning men.6 Men who earn income outside their households become less dependent economically on the household, turning children and female members of their households into their dependants. That observation brings us back once more to priestly rhetoric, because in the Pentateuch the most prominent examples of wage-earning men are priests (Lev. 6-7). 6 Carol Meyers, Discovering Eve: Ancient Women in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 168-96, esp. 191, dated this shift to the rise of monarchy in ancient Israel. Her later book (Rediscovering Eve [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012], 203-12) less plausibly delayed this transition to full patriarchy to the Hellenistic period.

122

Leviticus 12 Exegesis EXEGESIS

12:1

YHWH spoke to Moses:

Unlike the preceding and following chapters, Aaron is not included with Moses in the address here (also 14:1). 12:2

Speak to the children of Israel: When a pregnant woman gives birth to a male, she is polluted for seven days just like she is polluted during her menstrual period’s uneasiness.

MT ‫“ אשׁה כי תזריע‬when a pregnant woman” is literally “when a woman produces seed.” The hiphil of ‫“ זרע‬produce seed” appears for pregnancy only here and in Sir. 42:10. SP, LXX and 4Q367 (SPCEM) record a passive verb, “inseminated, pregnant,” which appears with this meaning elsewhere only in Num. 5:28. Contrary to the usual ancient belief that only men produce “seed/ semen,” Erbele-Küster (2017, 34, 107-9) defended the active hiphil verb by collecting evidence for belief in female seed from ancient Egypt, Babylon, Ugarit, Greece, and rabbinic sources. She also pointed to the use of the hiphil participle to describe agricultural fertility in Gen. 1:11-12. Similarly, here the hiphil verb indicates a pregnant woman. However, this verse’s vocabulary is echoed by 15:32-33 where the noun ‫ זרע‬refers explicitly to male “semen.” English offers a stative option, “pregnant,” which accurately reproduces the main point of the Hebrew verb, but interpreters should keep the meaning, “inseminated,” in mind to see the thematic bracket around chaps. 12-15. See further in Exegesis to 15:33. The third-century Christian theologian, Origen (154), found an implicit contrast between “an inseminated woman who gives birth” and an uninseminated woman who gives birth, that is, the Virgin Mary. This implication has been echoed in much subsequent Christian interpretation that finds here a proof for the pure (“immaculate”) conception of Jesus (Elliott 119-20). ‫“ זכר‬male” emphasizes the sex of the infant, like ‫“ נקבה‬female” in v. 5. For the translation of ‫ טמא‬as “pollute, polluted” in “she is polluted,” see Exegesis to 10:10 and Introduction to Leviticus 11-20 above. Neither here nor elsewhere is the baby described as polluted. Rather it is the mother who is polluted and must undergo purification. For ‫“ נדה‬menstrual period” in ‫“ נדת דותה‬her menstrual period’s uneasiness,” see Exegesis to 15:19 below. LXX translates with its usual term for menstruation, ἄφεδρος, but adds another rendering, χωρισμός “isolation,” instead of translating ‫( דוה‬Wevers 165; similarly TgOnq). ‫ דוה‬has traditionally been translated to intensify the negativity of pollution and menstruation, so “corrupt” (Wycliffe), “disease” (Tyndale), “infirmity”

Leviticus 12 Exegesis

123

(KJV). Modern translators usually merge ‫ דוה‬with the meaning of ‫ נדה‬or translate it as “sickness, infirmity.” Erbele-Küster (2017, 127-33) argued that ‫ דוה‬instead means “destabilization,” so I translate “uneasiness” (see further on 15:33 below). 12:3

On the eighth day, his body’s foreskin must be circumcised.

This verse summarizes the circumcision command in Gen. 17:9-14 (which is also from P), to which it adds nothing. Bernat (2009, 23) noted that P often includes asides referring to relevant provisions described previously (he cited 23:22 referring to 19:9-10). He also pointed out that the sequence – wait seven days, then do something on the eighth – is a typical pattern in P’s rituals (Lev. 8:33-9:1; 14:8-10; 15:13-14, 28-29; 22:27; 23:36, 39; Num. 6:9-10). Thus both the subject of childbirth and structural logic encouraged a reference to the rule here. Ruane (2013, 188) observed that baby animals must also stay with their mothers seven days and may only be “cut,” that is, slaughtered as offerings, on the eighth day at the earliest (Exod. 22:30; Lev. 22:27). Thus both baby animals (usually male for offerings) and human boys get separated from their mothers and “included in the sacrificing community” on the eighth day after birth. Despite this verse’s digression on the circumcision of boy babies, however, the chapter otherwise stays focused on the mother’s purification. In addition to the noun ‫“ ערלה‬foreskin” that appears here, the root ‫ ערל‬provides the adjective “uncircumcised” (Gen. 17:14) and the verb “to foreskin” (Lev. 19:23). P usually uses the noun in the phrase ‫“ בשׂר ערלתו‬his body’s foreskin” (Gen 17:11, 14, 23-25) like it does in this verse. For this translation of ‫“ בשׂר‬body,” see Exegesis to 15:2 below. Ketib ‫“ מול בשׂר ערלתו‬circumcise the flesh of his foreskin” provides an imperative but not a sign of the direct object, ‫את‬, which is supplied by SP. Qere instead changes the verb to ‫ יִ מּו ֺל‬niphal imperfect, “his foreskin must be circumcised.” Imperatives are very rare in Leviticus, which prefers finite verbs for instructions (see Introduction §1.1.2 in Leviticus 1-10), so Qere matches the style of Leviticus better than Ketib. Nothing here says who must perform the circumcision, nor anything else about the ritual. Perhaps the eighth day is specified so that his mother may take part, but even that is at most implicit. There is also no clear link here or elsewhere in the HB between circumcision and purification (Bernat 2009, 63-66; contra Eilberg-Schwartz 1990, 180). However, their juxtaposition here and in Isa. 52:1 and the exclusion of both the polluted and the uncircumcised from Passover celebrations (cf. Exod. 12:48 with Num. 9:6) hints at a connection (Propp 1999, 236, 453) that became explicit in later interpretations: LXX translates ‫ מול‬twice with περικαθαρίζω “purify” (Deut. 30:6; Josh. 5:4)

124

Leviticus 12 Exegesis

and Philo and the Mishnah stated explicitly that uncircumcised men are polluted (Philo, Laws 1.5; m. Yev. 8:1). This conclusion may have been encouraged by the appearance of this circumcision rule here in Lev. 12:3 in the middle of the laws about pollution. Christians have generally not circumcised boys, despite the example of Jesus (Luke 2:21), because Paul opposed requiring it of Gentile converts (Acts 15; Rom. 2:25-29). In Christian history, then, the ritual requirements of Leviticus 12 have fallen only on mothers. 12:4

She remains in blood purification for thirty-three days. She must not touch anything sacred and she must not go to the sanctuary until the days of her purification are finished.

The phrase, ‫“ דמי טהרה‬blood purification” (also in v. 5), has generated much debate. What blood? If the new mother is polluted for only seven days (v. 2), why does her purification last 33 days more? In this phrase, ‫ טהרה‬can be read with MT’s pointing as the feminine noun, “purity, purification,” or, by adding mappiq to the final heh, as the masculine noun with a feminine pronoun, “her purification,” as in MT at the end of the verse (Milgrom 749, 755). The verb ‫ טהר‬means “to purify” (v. 8; see Erbele-Küster 2017, 146-48). Of course, mothers lose blood while giving birth, but most commentators assume that this verse refers to post-partum bleeding (lochia) that can continue up to six weeks. However, just as the ‫“ נדה‬menstrual period” is set at seven days without regard to how long bleeding actually lasts (see Exegesis to 15:19), this verse sets the period of “blood purification” at 33 days (40 including the seven-day “menstrual period,” v. 2) regardless of the mother’s actual experience. The arbitrary nature of these time periods is highlighted by the fact that P elsewhere requires a seven-day waiting period after the cessation of uncommon genital emissions (15:13, 28; Whitekettle 1993, 396). See further on v. 6 below. LXX translated ‫“ דמי טהרה‬blood purification” with ἐν αἵματι ἀκαθάρτῳ αὐτῆς “her blood pollution” here and in v. 5. It also rendered ‫תשׁב‬ “she remains, resides” with καθεσθήσεται “she will sit apart” which, unlike the Hebrew, indicates isolation (Wevers; Erbele-Küster 2017, 51). LXX thus made the mother polluted for the full 40 or 80 days and required her to remain isolated, which MT does not require (De Troyer 2003, 57-62). A forty-day period of post-natal separation appears in some Greek sources (Milgrom 750). See Exposition above for discussion of the possible meanings of this purification period. This verse only makes clear that the blood purification period, like other kinds of bodily pollution (Lev. 7:20-21; 15:31; 22:2-3; Num. 5:2-3), prevents a person from entering the Tabernacle or coming into

Leviticus 12 Exegesis

125

contact with sanctified food or objects. 4Q266, a fragment of the Damascus Document from Qumran, declared that breaking this commandment is a capital offense (Schiffman 2018, 170-71). 12:5

If she gives birth to a female, she is polluted like in her menstrual period for two weeks, but she remains in blood purification for sixtysix days.

Interpreters have struggled to find a biological reason for doubling the polluting power of girl babies. Similar distinctions also appear in a few other ancient and contemporary cultures, but in some cultures they are also reversed (Milgrom 750). Some ancient writers postulated developmental differences between male and female embryos and the effects on their mothers (e.g. Aristotle, Hist. anim. 7.3; Hippocrates, De natura pueri, chap. 17; Theodoret of Cyrus; Ramban)7 while others suggested typologies based on Adam and Eve’s different creations in Genesis 2 (Jub. 3:8-14; Midr. Tadshe 15). Among modern interpreters, Magonet (1996, 152) speculated that P may have known that some baby girls briefly experience vaginal bleeding from exposure to their mother’s hormones, so P doubled the purification period when the birth involves two females, mother and daughter. Levine (250) and others have suggested that girls double the purification period because they will eventually become mothers themselves, though Tarja Philip (2006, 118) observed that in priestly thought, “ a person is never impure of something that might happen in the future.” Others have wondered if the purification period was doubled because there is no circumcision ritual for girl babies (Nihan 2007, 319; Goldstein 2015, 37-38). There is, however, no suggestion here or anywhere else in that HB that circumcision purifies, though that interpretation appeared in later Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaisms (see Exegesis to v. 3). Even before the spread of second-wave feminism, many modern interpreters found a discriminatory bias against women in this verse (so Elliger, Noth, Wenham). Some have tried to defend the verse against this charge on the grounds that greater pollution, such as from human corpses in comparison with animal carcasses, does not indicate lesser social worth (Gruber 1987, 43; Milgrom 751; Goldstein 2015, 38). This verse, however, does not ground its distinction between male and female babies in any biological process of either the baby or the mother (in sharp contrast to chap. 15’s distinction between male and female pollutions from their different kinds of genital emissions). It therefore leaves the 7 Milgrom 751, citing J. Preuss, Biblisch-talmudische Medizin (Berlin: S. Karger, 1911), 452; for Theodoret, see Rouwhorst 2000, 192; see also Thiessen 2018.

126

Leviticus 12 Exegesis

impression that girls and women are intrinsically more polluting than boys and men. That claim has been used (implicitly in the HB, often explicitly in later traditions) to exclude women from positions of religious leadership (see Expositions to Leviticus 12 and 15). More generally, it contributes to a common tendency to value boys more than girls. This kind of thinking has had manifestly immoral consequences in both Jewish and Christian interpretation and practice quite apart from how other kinds of pollutions have been regarded (see Exposition to Leviticus 15). This verse therefore deserves to be struck through in bibles to indicate overtly that many congregations and denominations reject such sexist thinking as immoral. On the rationale and justification for striking through immoral verses in Leviticus and elsewhere, see the Author’s Preface to this volume. The vocabulary of ‫“ נקבה‬female,” ‫“ טמאה‬she is polluted,” and ‫“ נדתה‬her menstrual period” link this verse not only to v. 2 but also to the summation of all the human pollutions in Leviticus 12-15 that appears in 15:32-33 (see discussion there). This verse reads ‫“ על‬upon blood purification” instead of v. 4’s ‫“ ב־‬in.” The parallel formulations are synonymous and probably a memory variant, though De Troyer (2003, 48) thought they reflect the fact that here the length of time is double the usual duration of a menstrual period. 12:6

When the days of her purification for a son or a daughter are finished, she must bring a yearling sheep as a rising (offering) and any kind of pigeon or a landfowl as a sin (offering) to the priest at the entrance of the meeting tent.

The implication of ‫“ במלאת ימי טהרה‬when the days of her purification are finished” is that the mother has been purified by the days of “blood purification” (v. 4). Erbele-Küster (2017, 39) therefore concluded that, while the 7 or 14 day periods are separation rituals, the 33 or 66 day periods are transformation rituals (as described by van Gennep 1909) which purify the new mother. The mother then presents offerings so that the priest will certify her purification publicly (v. 7), just like healed infested people who are already pure (14:2) present offerings so that their purification will be certified (14:20). The yearling sheep must be male for the rising offering (1:10). Most male herd animals are culled as yearlings anyway. However, the purification offerings for someone healed of infestation require a yearling female as a sin offering (14:10). So there may have been some cultural association of yearlings with purification rituals. The reversal in the order of bird names from 1:14 may be a deliberate marker that this verse is citing that one (Seidel’s Law). For the translation “any kind of pigeon or a landfowl,” see Translating Animal Names in Exposition to Leviticus 11.

Leviticus 12 Exegesis 12:7

127

He must present them before YHWH. He mitigates for her and she is purified from the fountain of her blood. This is the law for the bearer of a male or female.

This verse presupposes without repeating the instructions for making rising and sin offerings in 1:10-13 and 5:7-9. It repeats and modifies the mitigation formula that appears ten times in the rules for sin and guilt offerings in chaps. 4-5 (see Exegesis to 4:20). Now that formula promises purification rather than forgiveness, and will be repeated in various formulations also in 12:8; 14:18-19, 20, 29, 31, 53; 15:15, 30, until 16:16 portrays the offerings of the Day of Mitigations as resulting in both purification and forgiveness. LXX’s active verb, καὶ καθαριεῖ αὑτήν “he purifies her,” breaks the pattern throughout Leviticus of the priest’s active mitigation being followed by a passive or stative verb expressing the result, either forgiveness or purification. See Exegesis to 1:20. MT’s ‫“ טהרה‬she is purified” here and in v. 8 matches the stative form in concluding formulas in 14:9, 20, etc. ‫“ מקור‬fountain” is usually translated “flow,” but elsewhere refers mostly to springs of water (e.g. Hos. 13:15; Jer. 8:23; 51:36). The same phrase, ‫מקור דמיה‬, in the context of sexual intercourse in Lev. 20:18 refers to exposing not just blood but bleeding genitals, that is, “the fountain of her blood.” The ‫ מן‬preposition is usually translated “from” to indicate that the new mother is purified from her blood flow. But Erbele-Küster (2017, 47-49) translated “because of the fountain of her blood” and argued that the new mother is purified by her blood flow (see on v. 6 above). However, the position of this phrase immediately after the priest’s action suggests that it is a consequence of the rituals. After the priest’s mitigation, the phrase “s/he is purified” in chaps. 12-15 should be understood as referring to the priest’s public certification of their purity (see further in Exposition to chaps. 13-14). ‫“ הילדת לזכר או לנקבה‬the bearer of a male or female” uses very clinical language instead of something like “the mother of a boy or girl.” As in English, Hebrew ‫“ זכר‬male” and ‫“ נקבה‬female” describe the sex of animals (Lev. 3:6) as well as humans (Gen. 1:27). Leviticus 12 and 15 distinguish the sexes on the basis of an essentializing biological dichotomy without making any reference to gendered social roles (Erbele-Küster 2017, 34-35). 12:8

But if she cannot get her hands on a caprid, she must take two landfowl or two of any kind of pigeon, one for a rising (offering) and one for a sin (offering). The priest mitigates for her and she is purified.

This verse presupposes the instructions for bird rising offerings in 1:14-17, but quotes 5:7. Its different verbs (‫“ מצא‬get, find” and ‫“ לקח‬take” for 5:7’s ‫“ נגע‬touch” and ‫“ בוא‬bring”) do not change the meaning, and so are probably memory variants.

128

Leviticus 12 Exegesis

Philip (2006, 112) pointed out, however, that this vocabulary resembles 25:28 more than 5:7, 11, and so was probably added by H. This verse’s secondary status is relatively obvious from its position after the concluding formulas of v. 7, which it partly repeats. Luke 2:24 quotes this verse as “the law” fulfilled by Mary after the birth of Jesus.

LEVITICUS 13:1-14:57

DIAGNOSIS AND PURIFICATION OF INFESTED AFFLICTIONS

13:1 13:2

13:3

13:4

13:5

13:6

13:7

13:8 13:9 13:10

13:11

13:12

YHWH spoke to Moses and Aaron: When someone has discolouration or flaking or a spot on the skin of their flesh that might be afflicted by an infestation, they (ms) must be brought to Aaron the priest or to one of his sons the priests. The priest must look at the affliction on the flesh’s skin. If hair in the affliction has turned white and if the affliction appears deeper than the flesh’s skin, then they (ms) are afflicted by infestation. When the priest sees that, he must declare the person polluted. But if there is white in the spot on the flesh’s skin and it does not appear deeper than the skin and its hair has not turned white, the priest must quarantine the afflicted person for seven days. The priest must look at them (ms) on the seventh day. If he now sees that the affliction in his opinion is arrested and has not spread in the skin, the priest must quarantine them another seven days. The priest must look at them (ms) on the seventh day again. If the affliction has now faded and has not spread in the skin, the priest must declare them pure. It is only flaking skin. They must wash their clothes and they are pure. But if the flaking actually spreads over the skin after they (ms) show themselves to the priest for their purification, they must appear again before the priest. The priest must look. If now the flaking has spread in the skin, the priest must declare them (ms) polluted. They are infested. When an affliction of infestation appears in someone, they (ms) must be brought to the priest. The priest must look. If there is a white discolouration on the skin and if it is the case that the hair has turned white and there is really raw flesh in the spot, then it is a chronic infestation in the skin of their (ms) flesh. The priest must declare them polluted. He does not (need to) quarantine them, because they are polluted. If an infestation blossoms all over the skin so that the infestation covers all of the afflicted skin from head to foot wherever the priest can see,

130 13:13

13:14 13:15 13:16 13:17 13:18 13:19 13:20

13:21

13:22 13:23 13:24 13:25

13:26

13:27

13:28

13:29 13:30

Leviticus 13-14 Translation the priest must look. If the infestation covers all of their (ms) flesh, he must declare the afflicted persons pure. All of it is white, so they are pure. But on the day that raw flesh appears in it, they (ms) become polluted. The priest must look at the raw flesh, and declare them (ms) polluted. Raw flesh (means) they are polluted, they are infested. But if the raw flesh recedes and turns white again, they must come to the priest. The priest must look at them (ms). If the affliction has turned white, the priest must declare the afflicted person pure. They are pure. When flesh has a boil on its skin that is cured, and there is a white discolouration or a pink spot where the boil was, they (ms) must appear before the priest. The priest must look. If it appears deeper than the skin and its hair turns white, the priest must declare them (ms) polluted. It is an infested affliction of the blossoming boil. But if the priest looks at it and there is no white hair in it and it is not deeper than the skin and it has faded, the priest must quarantine them (ms) for seven days. If it has actually spread in the skin, the priest must declare them (ms) polluted. They are afflicted. But if the spot stays the same and does not spread, it is the boil’s scar. The priest must declare them (ms) pure. When flesh has a burn from fire on its skin and the raw flesh turns into a pink or white spot, the priest must look at it. If the hair in the spot has turned white and it appears deeper than the skin, they (ms) are infested. It has blossomed in the burn, and the priest must declare them polluted. They are afflicted by infestation. But if the priest looks at it and there is no white hair in the spot and it is not deeper than the skin and it has faded, the priest must quarantine them (ms) seven days. The priest must look at them (ms) on the seventh day. If it has spread in the skin, the priest must declare them polluted. They are afflicted by infestation. But if the spot stays the same and does not spread in the skin and it has faded, it is a flaking burn. The priest must declare them (ms) pure, because it is the burn’s scar. When a man or woman has an affliction on the head or in the beard the priest must look at the affliction. If it appears deeper than the skin and there is thinning yellowed hair in it, the priest must declare them (ms) polluted. It is eczema. Their head or their beard is infested.

Leviticus 13-14 Translation 13:31

13:32

13:33

13:34

13:35 13:36 13:37

13:38 13:39 13:40 13:41 13:42

13:43

13:44 13:45

13:46

131

When the priest looks at the eczema affliction, if he sees that it does not appear deeper than the skin and there is no yellowed hair in it, the priest must quarantine the person afflicted with eczema for seven days. The priest must look at the affliction on the seventh day. If the eczema has not spread and there is no yellowed hair in it and the eczema does not appear deeper than the skin, they (ms) must shave themselves, but they must not shave the eczema. The priest must quarantine the eczema (sufferer) for another seven days. The priest must look at the eczema on the seventh day. If the eczema has not spread in the skin and if it does not appear deeper than the skin, the priest must declare them (ms) pure. They must wash their clothes and they are pure. But if the eczema actually spreads in the skin after he has declared them (ms) pure, the priest must look at it. If the eczema has spread in the skin, the priest does not need to look for yellowed hair. They are polluted. But if in his opinion the eczema is arrested and there is black hair growing in it, they (ms) are cured of eczema. They are pure, and the priest must declare them pure. When a man or a woman has spots on the skin of their flesh, white spots, the priest must look. If the spots on the skin of their flesh are dull white, it is just a blotch blossoming in the skin. They (ms) are pure. When a man’s head becomes bare, he is just bald. He is pure. When a man’s head becomes bare beside his face, he has receding hair. He is pure. But if there is a pink affliction in the baldness or receding hair-line, it is a blossoming infestation of his bald condition or his receding hair-line. The priest must look at it. If there is pink discolouration of the affliction in the baldness or receding hair-line, like the appearance of infested skin of the flesh, the man is infested. He is polluted. The priest must certainly declare him polluted because of the affliction on his head. Infested people (ms) who have the affliction: their clothes must be torn, their heads must be disheveled, they must cover their upper lip, and they must call out “Polluted! Polluted!” They (ms) will be polluted as long as they have the affliction. They are polluted! They must live apart. Their residence must be outside the camp.

132 13:47 13:48 13:49

13:50 13:51

13:52

13:53 13:54 13:55

13:56

13:57

13:58

13:59

14:1 14:2 14:3

Leviticus 13-14 Translation When fabric has an infested affliction in it, whether in wool fabric or in linen fabric or in the warp or woof of linen or wool, or in skin or in skin products, and there is greenish or reddish affliction in the fabric or in the skin or in the warp or in the woof or in any skin vessel, it is an infested affliction. It must be shown to the priest. The priest must look at the affliction. Then he must quarantine the affliction for seven days. He must look at the affliction on the seventh day. If the affliction has spread in the fabric or in the warp or in the woof or in the skin whatever function the skin serves, the affliction is an obstinate infestation. It is polluted. He must burn the fabric or the warp or the woof in wool or in linen or any skin vessel that has the affliction in it, because it is an obstinate infestation. It must be burned with fire. But if, when the priest looks, the affliction has not spread in the fabric or in the warp or in the woof or in any skin vessel, the priest must command them to wash what has the affliction in it. Then he must quarantine it again for seven days. The priest must look at the affliction after it has been washed. If in his opinion the affliction has not changed even though the affliction has not spread, it is polluted. You (pl) must burn it with fire, whether the patch is on its back or on its front. But if when the priest looks, the affliction is colourless after being washed, he must cut it from the fabric or from the skin or from the warp or from the woof. If it appears again in fabric or in warp or in woof or in any vessel made of skin, it is blossoming. You (sg) must burn the affliction that is in it with fire. The fabric or the warp or the woof or any skin vessel that you (sg) washed and the affliction abated in it, you must wash again. Then it is pure. This is the law for an infested affliction in fabric of wool or linen, or in the warp or the woof, or in any skin vessel, to declare it pure or to declare it polluted. YHWH spoke to Moses: This is the law for the infested, when they (ms) have been purified. They must be brought to the priest. The priest must go outside the camp, where the priest must look at it. If it appears that the affliction of infestation has been cured in the infested person,

Leviticus 13-14 Translation 14:4

14:5 14:6

14:7

14:8

14:9

14:10

14:11 14:12

14:13

14:14

14:15 14:16 14:17

133

the priest must command them (ms) to take for the purified person two birds – living pure ones – and a cedar stick and crimson threads and hyssop. The priest must command them to slaughter one of the birds over a ceramic basin of fresh water. But as for the living bird, he must take it and the cedar stick and the crimson threads and the hyssop and dip them and the living bird in the blood of the slaughtered bird on the fresh water. He must sprinkle the person purified of infestation seven times, and declare them pure. Then he must send away the living bird into the open field. The purified person must wash their (ms) clothes, shave off all their hair, and bathe in water. They are pure. Afterwards, they may enter the camp, but they must live outside their tent for seven days. On the seventh day, they (ms) must shave off all their hair – their head, their beard, their eyebrows – all their hair they must shave off. They must wash their clothes and bathe their flesh in water. They are pure. On the eighth day, they (ms) must take two perfect sheep and one perfect yearling ewe and a commodity (offering) of three-tenths of semolina mixed with oil and one log of oil. The priest who declared purity must station the purified person with these things before YHWH in the entrance of the meeting tent. The priest must take one sheep and incinerate it as a guilt (offering) with the log of oil. He must raise them as a raised (offering) before YHWH. They must slaughter the sheep in the place where they slaughter the sin (offering) and the rising (offering), in the holy place, because like the sin (offering), the guilt (offering) is the priest’s. It is most holy. The priest must take some of the blood of the guilt (offering) and the priest must smear it on the purified person’s right ear lobe and on the thumb of their (ms) right hand and on the big toe of their right foot. The priest must take some of the log of oil and pour it into the priest’s left palm. The priest must dip his right finger into the oil in his left palm and sprinkle some of the oil with his finger seven times before YHWH. The priest must smear some of the remaining oil in his palm on the purified person’s right ear lobe and on the thumb of their (ms) right hand and on the big toe of their right foot on top of the blood of the guilt (offering).

134 14:18

14:19

14:20

14:21

14:22 14:23

14:24 14:25

14:26 14:27 14:28

14:29 14:30 14:31

14:32 14:33

Leviticus 13-14 Translation The priest must smear the rest of the oil in his palm on the head of the purified person. So the priest mitigates for them (ms) before YHWH. The priest must make the sin (offering) and mitigate the purified person from their (ms) pollutions. Then they (ms) must slaughter the rising (offering), and the priest must raise the rising (offering) and the commodity (offering) on the altar. So the priest mitigates for them and they are pure. But if they (ms) are poor and do not have enough at hand, they must take one sheep guilt (offering) as a raised offering to mitigate for them, and one-tenth of semolina mixed with oil as a commodity (offering), and a log of oil, and two landfowl or two of any kind of pigeon that they (ms) have at hand, one for a sin (offering) and one for a rising (offering). They (ms) must bring them on the eighth day to the one who declared them pure, to the priest in the entrance of the meeting tent before YHWH. The priest must take the guilt (offering) sheep and the log of oil and the priest must raise them as a raised offering before YHWH. The priest must slaughter the sheep for the guilt (offering). The priest must take some of the blood of the guilt (offering) and the priest must smear it on the purified person’s right ear lobe and on the thumb of their (ms) right hand and on the big toe of their right foot. The priest must pour some of the oil into the priest’s left palm. The priest must sprinkle with his right finger some of the oil in his left palm seven times before YHWH. The priest must smear some of the oil that is in his palm on the purified person’s right ear lobe and on the thumb of their (ms) right hand and on the big toe of their right foot on the spots of blood of the guilt (offering). He must smear some of the oil in the priest’s palm on the head of the purified person to mitigate for them (ms) before YHWH. From the landfowl or pigeons that they (ms) have at hand, he must make one a sin (offering) and one a rising (offering) with the commodity (offering) upon the altar. So the priest mitigates for the purified person before YHWH. This is the law for someone who was afflicted by infestation and who does not have enough at hand when they are purified. YHWH spoke to Moses and to Aaron:

Leviticus 13-14 Translation 14:34

14:35 14:36

14:37

14:38 14:39 14:40 14:41 14:42 14:43 14:44 14:45

14:46 14:47 14:48

14:49 14:50 14:51

135

When you enter the land of Canaan which I am giving you as property, and I put an affliction of infestation in a house on the land of your property, the person whose house it is must come and inform the priest, “(Something) like an affliction has appeared inside my house.” The priest must command that they (pl) clear the house before the priest comes to look at the affliction, so that everything in the house is not polluted. After that, the priest must come to look at the house. The priest must look at the affliction. If the affliction in the walls of the house is greenish or reddish dents that appear deeper than the (surface of the) walls, the priest must exit the house into the courtyard of the house and he must quarantine the house for seven days. The priest must return on the seventh day and look. If the affliction has spread on the walls of the house, the priest must command that they (pl) pull out the infested stones and throw them away in a polluted place outside the city. They (pl) must scrape the inside of the house all around, and pour out the dust which they scraped in a polluted place outside the city. They (pl) must take other stones to replace the stones, and take (ms) other dust to plaster the house. If the affliction returns and blossoms in the house after pulling out the stones and after scraping the house and after plastering it, the priest must come and look. If the affliction has spread in the house, there is an obstinate infestation in the house. It is polluted. They (ms) must tear down the house – its stones, its timbers, and all of the house’s (plaster) dust. They (ms) must take (it) away to a polluted place outside the city. Anyone who enters the house while it is quarantined becomes polluted until evening. Anyone who sleeps in the house must wash their (ms) clothes. Anyone who eats in the house must wash their clothes. But if the priest comes and looks, and the affliction has not spread in the house after the house has been plastered, the priest must declare the house pure, because the affliction has been cured. To sin-offer the house, he must take two birds and a cedar stick and crimson threads and hyssop. He must slaughter one of the birds over a ceramic basin of fresh water. He must take the cedar stick and the hyssop and the crimson threads and the living bird and dip them in the blood of the slaughtered bird and in the fresh water and sprinkle the house seven times.

136 14:52

14:53 14:54 14:55 14:56 14:57

Leviticus 13-14 Essentials So he must sin-offer the house with bird blood, with fresh water, with the living bird, with a cedar stick, with hyssop, and with crimson threads. Then he must send away the living bird outside the city into the open field. So he mitigates for the house and it is pure. This is the law for any affliction of infestation, for eczema, for an infestation of clothing or a house, for discolouration or flaking or a spot, to teach when it is polluted and when it is pure – this is the law of infestation. ESSENTIALS

Contents Leviticus 13 describes how priests should diagnose skin diseases that it calls “infestation,” traditionally translated as “leprosy.” It details the diagnostic criteria for possible infestation on seven different parts of a human body (13:1-44). Leviticus 14 then provides purification rituals for infested people who have been healed of the disease (14:1-32). But these chapters also anticipate the need for priests to diagnose infestation in cloth and leather (13:47-58) and in the walls of houses (14:33-53). The diagnostic instructions often call for quarantining possibly infested people for one or two weeks to see if the infestation spreads or fades (13:4, 21, 26, 31, 33). Once people are diagnosed as infested, they must live isolated from the community in perpetuity (13:45-46). Clothing and walls that are found to be infested must be destroyed (13:52, 55; 14:40, 45). The severity of these consequences for being infested leads the chapter to hint that people will not volunteer for the priests’ examination, but must be reported by others (13:2). These chapters provide no instructions for treating infested people. However, if an examination by a priest shows that they have been healed (14:3), they can be readmitted to the community through an eight-day-long ritual of purification. It begins outside the camp, where the infested person has been living, and involves killing one bird while releasing another that has been dipped in blood (14:4-7). The people healed of infestation must then bathe and shave and enter the camp, but live outside their tents for seven days (14:8-9). On the eighth day, they can enter the Tabernacle plaza, where they offer guilt, commodity, sin, and rising offerings and the priest anoints them with blood and oil (14:10-20). Poorer people go through the same ritual, but can offer less expensive commodity, sin and rising offerings (14:21-32). When infestation has been removed from a house, purification rituals at the house resemble the rituals for healed people outside the camp (14:49-53).

Leviticus 13-14 Essentials

137

Contexts Chapters 13-14 are the two longest chapters in Leviticus and the most detailed instructions in P for any one set of issues and rituals. They sit at the centre of the chiastic arch that spans all the regulations for bodily pollutions in Leviticus 12-15. Both the detail and the position emphasize these chapters’ description of infestation as one of the most devastating pollutions that can afflict people or property. The broader HB usually describes a diagnosis of infestation as constraining powerful people. Infestation puts an end to Miriam’s challenge to Moses’ authority (Num. 12:10-18). It humiliates the pride of the foreign general, Naaman (2 Kgs. 5:8-14). And it stops King Uzziah from usurping priestly prerogatives in the Jerusalem temple (2 Chr. 26:16-23). These stories illustrate the power of priestly diagnosis to quarantine and to isolate even the most powerful members of society. Only one HB story shows infested people as impoverished outcasts (2 Kgs. 7:3-10), a portrayal usually read into NT depictions of them (Matt. 8:1-4; Mark 1:40-45; Luke 5:12-14; 17:14). The stereotype of “lepers” as visibly deformed and highly contagious people shaped medieval and modern social attitudes. Religious charities and government policies tried to isolate them in monastic institutions and on islands, especially in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries and in the nineteenth to twentieth centuries. Hagiographies celebrated saints and missionaries who ministered to such isolated people. Medical science, however, questioned the diagnostic criteria for “leprosy” already in the Middle Ages. The isolation of the leprosy bacterium in the nineteenth century showed that its effects, now renamed “Hansen’s Disease,” are not very contagious and do not resemble the description in Leviticus 13. But isolation of sufferers remained the policy of many governments until the mid-twentieth century. The social stigma conveyed by the word, “leprosy,” persists today. Rhetoric The length and detail of the diagnostic distinctions and ritual details in Leviticus 13-14 guarantee that a listening audience would be unlikely to remember them all. Repetition, however, would get across the major point, that Aaronide priests have the authority to diagnose infestation in people, clothing, and houses, and to quarantine and isolate people and destroy infested property. Reintegration of healed people into Israel’s community also requires ritual mediation by priests. The chapters state but do not emphasize the devastating consequences of infestation for bodies and properties (13:45-46). Instead, the repetitive focus on diagnostic details emphasizes the professional expertise of the priests. The reintegration rituals even implicitly elevate the healed person’s status by anointing their ears, thumbs, and toes like

138

Leviticus 13-14 Essentials

in the priests’ inauguration ritual (compare 14:17, 25 with 8:23-24). The chapters thus assert the priest’s control over bodies and properties without emphasizing the point. The subsequent history of infestation, however, shows that readers did not miss the political implications of these regulations. In the rest of the HB, infestation appears primarily in stories of power struggles as a means of defending the prerogatives of YHWH’s priests and prophets from being usurped by powerful rivals. Even the NT’s Jesus accepts the priests’ authority over diagnosing infestation. In medieval and modern cultures, the instructions in Lev. 13:45-46 to isolate infested people served as religious warrant for segregating lepers into specialized hospitals and colonies. Like Leviticus 13-14, these institutions did not do much to heal people of disease, but rather protected the rest of society from the supposed dangers of contagious disease. Care for “lepers” therefore fell largely to religious orders and missionaries rather than medical personnel. The stigma of “leprosy” followed people with skin diseases and deformities outside such institutions, and spread to those suspected of other infectious diseases as well. Leviticus 13-14 has therefore negatively influenced the treatment of disease and of suffering people for thousands of years. Though quarantine and isolation are proven methods for containing infectious diseases, the influence of these chapters’ mandates for isolating infested people have proven particularly harmful to people’s rights and social status. They have provided biblical warrant for stigmatizing diseased people and people who appear diseased right up to the present day.

EXPOSITION Additional Bibliography: BADEN, JOEL S. and CANDIDA R. MOSS, “The Origin and Interpretation of ṣāra῾at in Leviticus 13-14.” JBL 130 (2011), 643-62. BRODY, N. S. The Disease of the Soul: Leprosy in Medieval Literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974. CHACE, JESSICA. “Diagnostic Medievalism: The Case of Leprosy’s Stigma.” Disability Studies Quarterly 39/3 (2019), online. DEMAITRE, LUKE. Leprosy in Premodern Medicine: A Malady of the Whole Body. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. EDMOND, ROD. Leprosy and Empire: A Medical and Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. FEDER, YITZHAQ. “Behind the Scenes of a Priestly Polemic: Leviticus 14 and its Extra-Biblical Parallels.” JHS 15/4 (2015), 1-26. FISCHER-ELFERT, HANS-WERNER. Abseits von Ma’at: Fallstudien zu Außenseitern im Alten Ägypten. Würzburg: Ergon, 2005. HAMILTON, BERNARD. The Leper King and His Heirs: Baldwin IV and the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. HELLER, RICHARD M., TONI W. HELLER, and JACK M. SASSON. “Mold: ‘Tsara’at,’ Leviticus, and the History of a Confusion.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 46/4 (2003), 588-91. HIEKE, THOMAS, LLOYD

Leviticus 13-14 Exposition

139

PIETERSEN, TREVOR W. THOMPSON, PAUL CIZEK, INGE MAGER, ELISABETH HILL, STEPHEN R. BURGE, ERIC ZIOLKOWSKI, RANANA DINE, NILS HOLGER PETERSEN, and ANTON KARL KOZLOVIC. “Leper, Leprosy.” EBR (2018), 16:144-93. HULSE, E.V. “The Nature of Biblical Leprosy.” PEQ 107 (1975), 87-105. KAPLAN, DAVID L. “Biblical leprosy: An anachronism whose time has come.” Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology 28 (1993), 507-510. KRAUSS, ROLF. “Kritische Bemerkungen zur Erklärung von ṣāra῾at als schuppende Hautkrankheit, insbesondere als Psoriasis.” BN 177 (2018), 3-24. LIEBER, ELINOR. “Old Testament ‘Leprosy’, Contagion and Sin.” In Contagion: Perspectives from Pre-Modern Societies. Ed. L. I. Conrad and D. Wujastyk. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. 99-136. LLOYD DAVIES, MARGARET. “Levitical Leprosy: Uncleanness and the Psyche.” ExpTim 99/5 (1988), 136-40. MARTIN, DALE B. The Corinthian Body. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. MEIER, SAM. “House Fungus: Mesopotamia and Israel (Lev 14:33-53).” RB 96/2 (1989), 184-92. MONOT, MARC AND NADINE HONORÉ, ET AL. “On the Origin of Leprosy.” Science 308 (2005), 1040-42. OLANISEBE, SAMSON O. “Laws of Tzara’at in Leviticus 13-14 and Medical Leprosy Compared.” JBQ 42/2 (2014), 121-27. REVENTLOW, HENNING GRAF. “Krankheit – ein Makel an heiliger Vollkommenheit. Das Urteil altisraelitischer Priester in Leviticus 13 in seinem Kontext.” In Studien zu Ritual und Sozialgeschichte im Alten Orient / Studies on Ritual and Society in the Ancient Near East. Ed. T. R. Kämmerer. BZAW 374. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007. 275-90. SAWYER, JOHN F. A. “A Note on the Etymology of Ṣāra‘at.” VT 26 (1976), 241-45. SCHMITT, RÜDIGER. “Leviticus 14.33-57 as Intellectual Ritual.” In Landy-Trevaskis-Bibb (2015), 196-203. SCURLOCK, JO ANN, AND BURTON R. ANDERSEN. Diagnoses in Assyrian and Babylonian Medicine. Champagne, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005. 70-73, 233. SCURLOCK, JO ANN. Sourcebook for Ancient Mesopotamian Medicine. Atlanta: SBL, 2014. 432-38. SEIDL, THEODOR. Torah für den “Aussatz”-Fall. St. Ottilien: EOS, 1982. SHINALL, MYRICK C. “The Social Condition of Lepers in the Gospels.” JBL 137/4 (2018), 915-34. SHOHAM-STEINER, EPHRAIM. “Pharaoh’s Bloodbath: Medieval European Jewish Thoughts About Leprosy, Disease, and Blood Therapy.” In Hart (2009), 99-115. STAUBLI, THOMAS. “Die Symbolik des Vogelrituals bei der Reinigung von Aussätzigen (Lev 14:4–7).” Bib 83 (2002), 230-37. TOUATI, FRANÇOISOLIVIER. “Contagion and Leprosy: Myth, Ideas and Evolution in Medieval Minds and Societies.” In Contagion: Perspectives from Pre-Modern Societies. Ed. L. I. Conrad and D. Wujastyk. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. 179-201. WATTS, SHELDON. Epidemics and History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

Structure of Leviticus 13-14 The two chapters are united by the topic of ‫“ צרעת‬infestation.” Chap. 13 describes how priests should diagnose skin and cloth infestations. Chapter 14 describes purification rituals for people healed of infestations and how to deal with infested houses. Each chapter begins with a divine speech formula and concludes with torah formulas. However, chap. 14 concludes with a longer torah formula (14:54-57) that clearly summarizes all of the contents of chaps. 13-14. Moreover, the rules for infested houses in 14:33-53 are preceded by a torah formula (14:32) and begin with a new divine speech formula (14:33), though the rules for infested cloth and leather in 13:47-59 do not. Chapters 13-14 therefore have

140

Leviticus 13-14 Exposition

overt structural indicators, some of which distinguish the chapters and their parts while others unite them. This commentary chooses to treat them together because of their thematic unity, despite the fact that they are the two longest chapters in Leviticus. The instructions in 13:2-44 describe seven different cases of possible skin infestations, each introduced by a subject followed by ‫כי‬. They conclude with a brief description of the infested person’s permanent isolation (13:45-46). Then 13:47-58 describe analogous cases in cloth and leather before the concluding formula, “this is the Torah for infested afflictions” (13:59). Chapter 14 presents three versions of the purification ritual after recovery from infestation: for people who can afford three sheep (14:2-20), for people who cannot afford so much (14:21-31), and for houses after their diagnosis (14:33-57). The concluding formulas (14:54-57) refer back to all this material, and therefore recommend treating the chapters together as one literary unit despite their separate divine speech formulas. OUTLINE 13:1 Divine speech formula 13:2-8 Infestations of skin 13:9-17 Infestations of raw flesh 13:18-23 Infestations of boils 13:24-28 Infestations of burns 13:29-37 Infestations of hair 13:38-39 Blotchy skin 13:40-44 Baldness 13:45-46 Isolating infested people 13:47-58 Infestations of cloth and leather 13:59 Concluding torah formula 14:1 Divine speech formula Torah formula about purification rituals for people healed of infestation 14:2 14:3-7 The purification ritual outside the camp 14:8-9 Seven days of personal purification 14:10-20 The purification ritual at the Tabernacle 14:21-31 The poor person’s purification ritual at the Tabernacle 14:32 Concluding torah formula 14:33 Divine speech formula 14:33-53 Infestations of houses 14:54-57 Concluding torah formulas

The instructions for the priests’ diagnosis of ‫“ צרעת‬infestation” in people, cloth, and houses clearly parallel each other (Reventlow 2007). Other structural patterns in chap. 13 are more difficult to describe consistently. Michael Fishbane (1980, 442-43) argued that the sequences of symptoms of various kinds of skin infestations have been formulated by chiastic reversals: ... ‫ מספחת‬... ‫פשׂה‬... ‫ בהרת‬13:4, 6, 10 ‫שׂאת‬

“a spot ... not spread ... only flaking ... discolouration”

Leviticus 13-14 Exposition

141

‫ בהרת‬... ‫ פשׂה תפשׂה‬... ‫ שׂאת‬13:19, 22, 23 “discolouration ... actually spread ... spot” ‫ שׂאת‬... ‫ פשׂה תפשׂה‬... ‫ בהרת‬13:24, 27, 28 “spot ... actually spread ... discolouration” ‫ בהרת‬... ‫ פשׂה יפשׂה‬13:35, 38 “actually spread ... spot”

Jacob Milgrom (789-90) found the chiasm in 13:19-28 particularly convincing, and Didier Luciani (2005, 62-63) used it to justify treating the cases of boils and burns as a single structural unit. However, the chiastic patterns are not as tight as Fishbane maintained. The irregularities include the fact that the word, ‫“ בהרת‬spot,” appears more often than the pattern can explain (especially in vv. 24-26) and ‫“ ספהת‬flaking” gets replaced by ‫“ פשׂה תפשׂה‬actually spread,” both of which also appear twice in the second sequence of vv. 6 and 8. That sequence cuts across the ‫ כי‬heading in v. 9 that divides two different cases. The repeating vocabulary in chap. 13 is difficult to schematize, as this more complete chart shows: ‫ שׂאת או ספחת או בהרת‬13:2 “discolouration or flaking or a spot” ... ‫ מספחת‬... ‫לא פשׂה‬... ‫ בהרת‬13:4, 6, 8, “a spot ... not spread ... only flaking ... ‫ שׂאת‬... ‫ פשׂתה המספחת‬10 the flaking has spread ... discolouration” ... ‫ פשׂה תפשׂה‬... ‫ בהרת‬... ‫ שׂאת‬13:19, 22, “discolouration ... spot ... actually ‫ בהרת‬23 spread ... spot” ... ‫ בבהרת‬... ‫בבהרת‬... ‫ בהרת‬13:24, 25, “spot ... in the spot ... in the spot ... ‫ שׂאת‬... ‫ בהרת‬... ‫ פשׂה תפשׂה‬26, 27, 28 actually spread ... spot ... discolouration” ‫ בהרת‬... ‫ בהרת‬... ‫ פשׂה יפשׂה‬13:35, 38, “actually spread ... spot ... spot” 39

Nevertheless, the patterns of repetitive vocabulary indicate that literary and rhetorical considerations beyond diagnostic precision were at work in the composition of these instructions. As Fishbane suggested, the reversing sequences may have been intended as a mnemonic aid for scribes memorizing the instructions. The instructions are punctuated by diagnostic verdicts, Hebrew nominal sentences that must be translated into English as verbal statements (see Exegesis to 13:8): ‫“ צרעת הוא‬they (ms) are infested” vv. 3, 8, 15, 20, 25, 27, 49; ‫“ טמא הוא‬they are polluted” vv. 11, 36, 46, 51, 55; ‫“ נגה הוא‬they are afflicted” vv. 22; ‫“ טהור הוא‬they are pure” vv. 13, 17, 37, 39, 40, 41. The seven-fold repetition of the root ‫“ טמא‬polluted” in just three verses at the end of the last case of skin infestation (13:44-46) brings these diagnostic descriptions to an emotional climax. These decisive formulas emphasize what is at stake in the examination. They also emphasize the priests’ absolute authority over these most fraught determinations of pollution and purity, as announced already in 10:10.

142

Leviticus 13-14 Exposition

The two versions of the ritual in the Tabernacle for healed infested people fall more obviously into chiastic arches, as interpreters have long realized (see Exegesis to 14:10-20 and 14:21-32). Listening audiences, however, would be less likely to recognize the literary arches and their centres in the priest’s seven-fold sprinkling of guilt-offering blood towards the sanctuary (14:16, 27) than they would the four-fold verbatim repetition of the phrases about smearing blood and oil on the person’s right ear, thumb, and big toe (14:14, 17, 25, 28). This memorable image also appears twice in the description of the priests’ ordination (8:23-24; also Exod. 29:20). While scribes copying and, perhaps, memorizing the text might appreciate the larger chiastic patterns in chap. 14, listening audiences would be struck by the repetition of the image of smearing blood and oil on the healed person’s body. They would probably recognize that, in this regard, people healed of infestation were being treated in the same way as the priests. Fishbane (1980, 440-42) drew both structural and compositional conclusions from the colophon in 14:54-57 which, as he observed, systematically summarizes all of the contents of chaps. 13-14. The summary about infestations of cloth and buildings (14:55) interrupts infestations of skin (14:54, 56) just like the instructions for cloth and wall infestations appear as an interruption (13:47-58) and an addendum (14:33-53) to the instructions about skin infestations. Fishbane therefore concluded that 14:55 was inserted at the same time as the instructions for cloth and wall infestations. Milgrom (883) and others have argued, however, that 14:56 is the addition. Leviticus 11-15 devotes more space to ‫“ צרעת‬infestation” (116 verses in chaps. 13-14) than to all other kinds of pollution combined (88 verses in chaps. 11-12 and 15). Though this mass of material may convey visual emphasis to readers, its effect was likely quite different on a listening audience. These instructions for how priests should conduct the intricate details of diagnosis and ritual purification probably did not hold the attention of many audience members, who would have learned from listening to them little else than that infestation has horrible consequences. The text extends its detailed discourse by repeating the Tabernacle ritual for infested people (14:10-20) in its entirety for poor people (14:21-32). The resulting fourfold repetition of the vivid imagery of the commands to daub the right ears, thumbs and big toes of healed persons (14:14, 17, 25, 28) emphasizes the parallel ritual treatment of priests (8:23-24). Aside from this vivid ritual, the audience’s attention would likely be caught more by what follows the long recitation of infestation instructions: the subject of genital discharges (chap. 15) arouses personal and prurient interests and is followed by the climactic instructions for the rituals of the Day of Mitigations (chap. 16). As with other arch structures in the book of Leviticus, the emphasis in the arch of chaps. 12-15 does not fall at its centre, the infestation instructions,

Leviticus 13-14 Exposition

143

but rather on what follows it (see Introduction §1.3: Structure and Form in Leviticus 1-10). It was probably lost on most listeners, as it has been on most later interpreters, that chaps. 13-14 provide a warrant for Aaronide priests to exert coercive control over other people’s bodies and property. History and Interpretation of Skin Infestations and Quarantine (Leviticus 13) ‫“ צרעת‬infestation” has a tumultuous history both in the Hebrew Bible and in subsequent Jewish and Christian cultures. Infestation appears most often as divine punishment on ambitious leaders: the prophet Miriam when she challenges Moses (Num. 12:10), the foreign general Naaman (2 Kgs. 5), and king Azariah/Uzziah (2 Kgs. 15:5) who tries to usurp priestly privileges (2 Chr. 26:20-21). Moses’ hand turns infested and is immediately healed as a sign of God’s power (Exod. 4:6). Only one HB story shows a group of outcasts suffering from infestation (2 Kgs. 7:3), though this became the common stereotype in Jewish and Christian commentary (see Exegesis to 13:46). The inaccurate association of ‫ צרעת‬infestation with leprosy (see Exegesis to 13:2) gave Leviticus 13-14 a paradigmatic role in Western ideas about contagious disease. Despite the fact that modern medicine does not regard Hansen’s Disease (leprosy) as very contagious (Olanisebe 2014, 123), its reputation says otherwise, as François-Olivier Touati (2000, 179) observed: “this disease is tantamount to contagion itself – its most highly developed metaphor, its paradigmatic exemplar.” The devastating social consequences of contracting ‫ צרעת‬are indicated briefly in 13:46 and became a distinguishing characteristic of “leprosy” in later cultures. Chronicles claims that infested King Uzziah had to live apart (2 Chr. 26:21). Josephus noted that infested people should be expelled from cities and added the idea that they should be treated as if they are dead (Ant. 3.261, 264; JW 5.227, 6.426; Ag.Ap. 1.281-82; Shinell 2018, 921-22). Qumran texts specify that places should be reserved outside cities for infested people (11QT xlv.17-18, xlvi.17-18, xlviii.14-15) and that they should maintain a distance of twelve cubits (more than five meters or seventeen feet) from the food of non-infested people (4Q274 1 1.1-2). The Mishna reflects fear of contagious infestation by touch and in enclosed spaces, and requires infested people to leave walled towns (m. Kelim 1:4-7). It devotes a tractate, m. Negaim, to interpreting the infestation rules of Leviticus 13-14, but also makes provision for allowing infested people to participate in synagogue services (m. Neg. 13:12; Shinell 2018, 924). In later cultures, fear of leprosy provided an excuse for casting suspicion on entire groups of people, especially in periods of rapid population change such as during the medieval Crusades and in nineteenth-century colonial empires (Edmond 2006, 7). In the Middle Ages, charges of leprosy

144

Leviticus 13-14 Exposition

provided a ready means for attacking personal enemies and business rivals (Brody 1974, 83; Demaitre 2007, 77-80). Leviticus established the precedent for the medieval practice of calling upon religious authorities (priests, bishops, and their delegates) to diagnose leprosy so that civil authorities could impose the legal penalties for contracting the disease (Brody 1974, 62-64). These penalties could include being declared legally dead and losing all legal rights to property (Brody 1974, 81-86). Following Lev. 13:45, medieval lepers were often required to live apart and warn other people away by wearing distinctive clothing and making noise with clappers or bells, rather than cries of “polluted!” (Demaitre 2007, 56-59), though Touati (2000, 185) argued that clappers and bells were used by begging lepers to attract charitable attention. Charitable concern for lepers, motivated by NT stories of their healing (Matt. 8:1-4; Mark 1:40-44; Luke 5:12-14; 17:12-19), led to establishing institutions where they could live: monastic-style communities (a leprosaria) in the Middle Ages, and leper colonies in modern centuries (Brody 1974, 74-78). In both time periods, such communities were staffed largely by religiously motivated volunteers – nuns, monks, missionaries – rather than medical professionals (Watts 1997, 71-79; Demaitre 2007, 4-5). The purpose of these institutions was not to heal leprosy, but to protect wider society from contact with lepers. Frequent edicts banning lepers from towns and cities suggest that such restrictions were inconsistently applied in the Middle Ages (Brody 1974, 93-100). Without legal rights and property, lepers were frequently attacked and abused. Many regarded leprosaria and leper colonies as refuges as much as prisons (Brody 1974, 86). Admission to medieval leprosaria often required large financial donations (Demaitre 2007, 4-5). Medieval Christian sources also reveal a strain of compassion for lepers that drew less on Leviticus than on the Lazarus story in Luke 16:25. Elliott (127) observed that, “becoming a leper could be even seen as a vocation, discipline, and occasion for conversion; lepers were even considered blessed to be with the disease.” Medieval leprosaria were therefore often call lazaria. Many were founded by returning crusaders as a charitable means of continuing their holy vocation (Watts 1997, 54). Some saints were famous for ministering to lepers, such as Francis of Assisi in the thirteenth century and Father Damien of Hawaii in the nineteenth. Medieval medical authorities were well aware of the ambiguities and difficulties in diagnosing leprosy (Demaitre 2007, 22-33) and did not regard it as especially contagious (Touati 2000, 187-89). When they began to be called upon regularly to diagnose leprosy, starting in the fourteenth century, physicians’ judgments often aimed to protect people from vicious rumours and legal charges (Demaitre 2007, 37-45). They were most concerned about the contagious breath of lepers, rather than their touch (Demaitre 2007, 148-49),

Leviticus 13-14 Exposition

145

ideas shaped by ancient Greek medicine (Martin 1995, 150-62). However, civil and church authorities rather than medical professionals usually determined a leper’s fate (Demaitre 2007, 15-16, 234-35). Mark Elliott noted that, “By the end of the fifteenth century, fear of infection became the dominant reason .... Ironically, it would seem that medicalization progressively removed the air of sanctity” (Elliott 2012, 127-28). By that time, however, the number of cases of leprosy seemed to be waning. The more pressing threat of bubonic plague led to lazaria, especially on islands, being used to service quarantined ships, first outside Venice in 1403. Such quarantine stations spread worldwide along with the name, lazaretto. As foreshadowed by Leviticus’s delegation of quarantine authority to priestly experts, Sheldon Watts (1997, 2) observed that, “the creation of plague controls greatly strengthened both the image and the reality of elite authority.” Early modern governments closed or repurposed leprosaria throughout Europe.1 They did not disappear entirely, however, and popular fear of leprosy’s resurgence in the nineteenth century led European colonial empires to found leper colonies around the world. Rod Edmond (2006, 8) recounted this history: The persistence of leprosy in parts of Europe, and an enduring tradition of stigmatisation, intersected with a rapidly changing imperial world from around the turn of the nineteenth century to produce a modern version of the disease that drew heavily on biblical and medieval ways of understanding it.

Modern medicine has progressively distinguished “leprosy,” renamed Hansen’s Disease for the Norwegian physician who isolated the bacterium, Mycobacterium leprae, in 1873, as entirely different from the symptoms described in Leviticus 13-14 (Olanisebe 2014, 122). That discovery, however, did not quickly change the fate of lepers, who continued to be stigmatized and segregated well into the twentieth century. Samson Olanisebe (2014, 125) summarized modern accounts of their treatment: Some HD sufferers in the United States were banished by their families when diagnosed; and many were never again visited by their relatives after they entered the famed leper’s home in Carville, Louisiana. New patients at Carville not only met with stigmatization, they were also likely to lose most of their former identity, including their names. While being admitted to Carville, patients were encouraged to hide their true identities. ... even the name of their home town was kept secret, to avoid embarrassing their family.2 Historians enumerate some of the persecution endured by lepers, including reports of a man in the U.S. being left to die of starvation in a cattle truck; the shooting of 80 victims of leprosy 1 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (tr. R. Howard; New York: Vintage, 1965 [French 1961]), 3-7. 2 Citing M. Gaudet, “Telling it Slant: Personal Narrative, Tall Tales, and the Reality of Leprosy,” Western Folklore 49:2 (1990), 192.

146

Leviticus 13-14 Exposition in China (1937), after which they were thrown into a lime pit; and the beating to death of ten patients in a leper’s house by a mob in Korea (1957).

Television pundits evoked the fear of leprosy as recently as 2018, while debating whether to admit immigrants and refugees into the U.S.A (Chace 2019). However, Sheldon Watts (1997, 81-83) pointed to evidence that the stigma of leprosy was not universal or even common among the world’s cultures that experienced the disease. The stigma’s world-wide appearance is instead a colonial export of Christian beliefs. Leviticus 13 has therefore directly influenced the quarantine and isolation of very many people believed to suffer from contagious diseases. This history of stigma from the misapplication of Leviticus 13 has led modern commentaries to be preoccupied with trying to explain what ‫צרעת‬ tsaraat is. Etymology provides little help (see Exegesis to 13:2) and there are no useful cognates in languages older than biblical Hebrew. An Akkadian label for skin diseases, saḫaršubbû, appears in diagnostic and therapeutic manuals dating from the second and first millennia B.C.E. The Akkadian manuals apply the term to afflictions that shorten digits and cause numbness, as well as discoloured skin, suggesting that it covered Hansen’s Disease as well as others (Scurlock and Anderson 2005, 70-73; Scurlock 2014, 432-38). An Old Babylonian list of defects that exclude people from priesthood includes saḫaršubbû (Fischer-Elfert 2005, 72-73). The oldest physical evidence of Hansen’s Disease in the Middle East appears in a few mummified bodies found in Ptolemaic- and Roman-period graveyards in Dakhleh Oasis, west of the Nile. Its appearance only in this isolated location has raised the suspicion that diseased people were sent here to be segregated from the rest of the population (Hieke et al 2018, 144; FischerElfert 2005, 40-42, 62, 87-90). However, only two diseased bodies in more than 3,000 graves does not indicate a leper colony. Recent surveys of Egypt’s western oases suggest that the Ptolemies deliberately encouraged a growing population for greater agricultural development of the oases.3 Hans-Werner Fischer-Elfert (2005, 39-41, 88-89) speculated that Hansen’s Disease entered Egypt by the beginning of the first millennium B.C.E., but that “lepers” were probably refused mummification and their bodies burned. He assumed that the social consequences of medieval leprosy obtained throughout earlier history (e.g. pp. 87-88), but could find no evidence of that. Jacob Milgrom (816-20) cited Akkadian evidence to argue that ‫ צרעת‬in biblical texts does not describe a disease, but rather particular cases of ritual pollution: “we are dealing with ritual, not pathology” (818). That conclusion can be challenged. Akkadian has three terms for “clean, pure”: ellu, ebbu, 3 James C. R. Gill, Dakhleh Oasis and the Western Desert of Egypt under the Ptolemies (Oxford: Oxbow, 2016), 160-61.

Leviticus 13-14 Exposition

147

and qašdu. Ellu appears most commonly in ritual as well as non-ritual contexts. All three terms are usually negated by lā ellu “unclean,” which suggests less distinction between holiness (Akk. qašdu, cognate of Heb. ‫)קדשׁ‬ and purity than in the Hebrew Bible. Akkadian, however, describes the cleansing of skin disease, saḫaršubbû, with ebēbum rather than elēlum, which led Walther Sallaberger (2011, 19-20) to conclude that Babylonians thought of skin disease as a medical, rather than ritual, condition. Though ‫ צרעת‬leads to isolating afflicted Israelites, the stories and rules about it do not emphasize that it is contagious (Lev. 13-14 only mention contagion of mould in buildings, 14:46-47). Milgrom (805) therefore concluded that pollution from ‫ צרעת‬infestation was not contagious like the pollution from menstrual blood or semen, but only “ritually polluting” under the same roof. Similarly, Yitzhaq Feder (2015, 24) argued that the priestly writers asserted control over pollution by redefining it as simply a ritual problem, not as contagious disease as was believed in popular culture. Milgrom (819) argued that all the pollutants in Leviticus 11-15 evoke death symbolically: skin flaking off, bleeding, and putrefying carcasses. Sallaberger (2011, 21-23), however, found no evidence that either death or blood was regarded as particularly polluting in Mesopotamian cultures. Modern psychological studies of disgust indicate that people are disgusted not be death itself, e.g. a corpse, as much as by a decaying corpse and the sight, smell, or touch of other decaying matter (Kazen 2011, 35). The focus in Leviticus 13-14 on visual symptoms supports this association of disgust with visual signs of decay in skin, cloth, and housing. The fact that diagnosis of infestation often requires quarantine outside the camp (14:3), that infested people are isolated outside the camp as long as their condition persists (13:46), and that they must warn away other people with the cry, “Polluted! Polluted!” (13:45), all seem motivated by a clear, if implicit, fear of contagious infection. History and Interpretation of Purification Rituals for Infestation (Leviticus 14) The purification ritual for infested persons (14:1-31) is an example of a rite of passage, as classically described by Arnold van Gennep (1909) and many interpreters since. Healed persons get reintroduced to Israelite society by stages: first, the purification ritual begins outside the camp (14:3) where they are inspected, then sprinkled with bird blood (14:5-7). They must then wash and shave while another bird covered in blood is released into the wild (14:8). They can then enter the camp but must live outside their tents for seven days, after which they must wash and shave again (14:9). Then they must enter the sanctuary to make offerings (14:10-31), where they are anointed with blood and oil (14:15-18, 25-29). Only then has their pollution been fully mitigated (14:20, 31) so that they can return home to live inside their own tents.

148

Leviticus 13-14 Exposition

Traditional Jewish interpreters have tended to focus their attention on how the ritual should be performed. The Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, accused Jerusalem priests of allowing people undergoing the ‫ צרעת‬purification ritual to get too close to holy spaces (4QMMT B 62-72; 11QT xlv.17-18). Nahmanides worried about what kind of birds may be used. Christian interpreters saw symbolic meanings in the materials for this ritual. For example, Origen interpreted the purification ritual for previously infested people as symbolizing the saving death of Christ: red ribbon for his blood, bird and water for the Holy Spirit in baptism, and shaving for the removal of impure thoughts (Elliott 139). A pictorial example appears in the Rohan Hours (pl. 105/f. 223) which depicts the ritual of the two doves as referring to Christ’s crucifixion. The moralization of the sacrifice of the two sparrows ... likens it to that of Christ on the Cross, ‘above the water of the world.’ The sparrow that flies away prefigures Christ returning to His Father. The wood mentioned in the text from Leviticus (but omitted in the legend for the preceding image) represents the Cross; the ‘red thread,’ the stream of blood flowing from Christ’s wounds.

Modern interpreters have also tried to explain the symbolism of the materials used in this ritual (see also Exegesis to 14:4). All of them note that the hyssop, cedar, and crimson thread are also used in making purifying water for corpse pollution (Num. 19:6), another ritual that takes place outside the camp. Cedar wood resists decay and so may symbolize endurance (Hartley 194). Cedar has a reddish colour, so like the crimson threads can represent blood, which is also an element in this ritual, and therefore soil, humanity, life (Staubli 2002, 235). Both also have associations with sanctuaries in the HB (Hieke 500), since crimson threads were woven into the Tabernacle (Exod 26:1) and cedar planks were used to build Solomon’s temple and palace (1 Kgs. 6:9-10; 7:3). Hyssop is associated with warding off harm (Exod. 12:22) and purification (Ps. 51:9). Fresh running water, of course, is regularly associated with cleansing and purification (Staubli 2002, 235), and therefore with the removal of contagion and pollution (Gorman 1990, 166-167). Blood is also a detergent in the HB (Wright 1987, 77-78), perhaps because it represents both death and life (so Gorman 1990, 167). Recent commentators have devoted even more effort to interpreting the meaning of the ritual procedures. They have especially focused on freeing the living bird, because it resembles the famous goat for Azazel ritual in Lev. 16:20-22. Just as the goat carries sin into the wilderness, the bird carries polluted blood away to “an open field.” The Philistines sent away an ox cart carrying the Chest of the Covenant along with golden tumours as a guilt offering, leaving it to “go on its way” (1 Sam. 6:8; Carmichael 2006, 23-24). Ezekiel 16:5, 29:5, 32:4, 33:27, 39:5 associate “the open field”

Leviticus 13-14 Exposition

149

with judgment and death, perhaps symbolically similar to the desert wilderness in Lev. 16:22 (Gorman 1990, 169-71). David Wright (1987, 83) pointed out some Mesopotamian and Anatolian texts that describe releasing birds in elimination rituals, and also prayers and spells that invoke the metaphor of birds flying away. Thomas Staubli (2002, 236) countered that this is not an elimination rite, because the person has already been healed of infestation. The freed bird instead represented to Staubli a ritual analogy to the newly freed life of the healed person (a traditional interpretation reflected also by Hartley 195 and Hieke 500).4 The blood of the killed bird identifies both birds with the same person, who was previously considered dead because of infestation, but is now healed and so alive. Staubli (2002, 232-33) observed that the symbolic significance of birds tends to be quite different than goats. Capturing birds in nets is a frequent metaphor for falling into sin in the Psalms, while the free flight of birds represents freedom almost universally (233). Daubing blood and oil on right ear, thumb, and toe of the healed person led Frank Gorman (1990, 174-75) to associate this ritual with other Israelite anointing rituals in rites of passage when ordaining priests and inaugurating kings. John Hartley (197) allegorized the extremities: “It is imperative that his whole being be consecrated to God, his ears to hear God’s word and his hands and feet to do God’s will.” Ephraim Shoham-Steiner (2009, 101) compared this ritual more explicitly to placing owner’s marks on livestock, writing that the healed person “is both metaphorically and physically ‘earmarked’ with sacrificial blood in the process of purification.” Overall, many interpreters see this ritual as a rite of passage from death, marked by transitioning away from the mourning clothes and actions prescribed for infested people in 13:45 towards restoration to life within the community (e.g. Gorman 1990, 168; Staubli 2002, 236; Hieke 503). Leviticus itself does not provide symbolic interpretations of these ritual materials or actions. It is therefore likely that ancient priests and participants, as well as subsequent readers, anticipated many of these ideas, though people can also perform rituals without interpreting them symbolically at all. Readers are more likely to puzzle over such details than ritual participants (see Introduction §2.3.3-4 in Leviticus 1-10). Furthermore, ritual form does not necessarily reflect ritual function. This point is obvious when a standard sin offering is used in the purification of a new mother (12:6-8): the form of the ritual offering remains the same despite being applied to a different situation than the one anticipated in Leviticus 4-5 (see Exposition to Leviticus 12 above). Therefore, the similarities of some aspects of this ritual with 4 And Boris S. Ostrer, “Birds of Leper: Statistical Assessment of Two Commentaries,” ZAW 115 (2003), 348-361.

150

Leviticus 13-14 Exposition

the scapegoat ritual of Leviticus 16 and of other aspects with the red heifer ritual of Numbers 19 cannot be assumed to indicate a similar function. Yehezkel Kaufmann (1952) already recognized the reduced potency of priestly ritual in Leviticus 14 in contrast to ANE demonic exorcisms that claim to heal the patient (see Feder 2015, 21). Milgrom (889) agreed and concluded that, instead of an exorcism or healing, “the entire purification process is nothing but a ritual, a rite of passage, marking the transition from death to life.” These observations have now been confirmed by publication of a thirteenth-century B.C.E. ritual from Emar.5 This Akkadian therapeutic manual includes a ritual after healing saḫaršubbû, a skin disease. It resembles the ritual in Leviticus 13-14 in its diagnostic attention to the discolouration of hair and skin and also in its purification ritual that includes burning branches of specific plants, using coloured thread, and offering two birds, one to be killed and the other released. When he has recovered, he burns with fire whatever bandages he repeatedly bound on. He sets up a table before Shamash. You put out a censer burning burāšu-juniper. You set out mersu-confection (made with) honey and ghee. That patient stands before Shamash. You burn a ḫurru-bird and a crab before Shamash. [And] you wipe him off with (another) ḫurru-bird and then he releases it. And when you have the patient stand before Shamash, you bind his head and his hip region with lapis-colored wool (dyed with dye) from the garden. When he comes out from before Shamash, you throw the lapis-colored wool from his head and his hip region [and] all of the ritual paraphernalia which was placed before Shamash into the river. The river will carry off its evil. And the patient should unburden his heart before Shamash. (Akkadian text and translation in Scurlock 2014, 437-38; see also Feder 2015, 6).

However, the Akkadian text differs from Leviticus 13-14 in a fundamental respect: before this ritual, it offers therapeutic means for treating saḫaršubbû disease with ointments made of various ingredients (Feder 2015, 9). Leviticus gives no instructions for how to heal ‫ צרעת‬infestation, or any other kind of disease. What then did P mean by claiming that its ‫“ חטאת‬sin offering” resulted in ‫“ טהור‬purification” of previously infested people? A clue appears in 14:49, 52 where P uses the verb ‫ חטא‬in the piel stem to describe what the priest does to a previously infested house. There is an ancient and continuing tradition of translating the verb ‫ חטא‬piel here as meaning “to purify, cleanse, purge,” usually analyzed as a privative use of the verb’s meaning in 5 Akio Tsukimoto, “ ‘By the Hand of Madi-Dagan, the Scribe and Apkallu-Priest’ – A Medical Text from the Middle Euphrates Region,” in K. Watanabe (ed.), Priests and Officials in the Ancient Near East (Heidelberg: Winter, 1999), 187-200. See also Yoram Cohen, The Scribes and Scholars of the City of Emar in the Late Bronze Age (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2009), 217-19, 232.

Leviticus 13-14 Exposition

151

the qal, so literally “to de-sin.” Milgrom (253; also 1971, 237-39) used this understanding of the piel verb to argue that the related noun, ‫חטאת‬, when it names an offering, does not mean “sin” as usual but rather “purification offering” (see Exegesis to 4:3). Milgrom (254) recognized that, in Leviticus 14, people remove physical pollution by bathing themselves, so he argued that the subsequent ‫ חטאת‬offering purifies the sanctuary and its contents rather than people. Since the sprinkling of persons and houses already declared pure of infestation takes place outside the Tabernacle and without stating any concern for the Tabernacle’s purification, Milgrom (255, 273-77) argued that these rituals are not true ‫ חטאת‬offerings as described in Leviticus 4-5 and 16, but rather pre-Israelite exorcism rites that have not been integrated into P’s system. Milgrom’s distinctive theory of the ‫ חטאת‬offering rests on the common claim that ‫ חטא‬piel can mean “to purify,” which makes it synonymous with both ‫“ טהר‬purify” and ‫“ כפר‬mitigate” (Milgrom 255). Milgrom’s theory of the ‫ חטאת‬has proven very influential among subsequent interpreters. Many commentators have accepted the translation, “purification offering” (Wenham, Kiuchi, Hartley, CEB), but have disagreed with other aspects of his theory. Marx (1988) and Gane (2005) argued that the offering purifies the person presenting it, while Kiuchi (1987) and Schwartz (1995) maintained that it purifies both the person and the sanctuary. Other interpreters have redescribed the offering’s effects as “expiation” (Gane 2005, 206-43; earlier Gray 1925, 59-60) or as “separation” (Marx 1988; 2005, 184-85) or as “empowerment” (Baumgarten 1996). Milgrom’s theory of the ‫ חטאת‬rests on the assumption that the verb ‫חטא‬ piel means “to purify” or something similar, and most subsequent interpreters have shared this presumption (in addition to those listed above: Gilders 2007, 30-31; Sklar 2005, 109-116). There are, however, significant reasons to doubt this translation. The Exegesis to 14:49 argues that ‫ חטא‬piel always means “to offer or use a sin-offering” (more simply though less fluently, “to sin-offer”). That meaning is widely accepted in, at least, Lev. 6:19 and 9:15. If the piel verb always carries this meaning, then Milgrom’s theory of the development and meaning of the ‫ חטאת‬offering is unnecessary. Nor does the bird ritual outside the camp have to be dismissed as a “primitive” or “pagan” rite not fully integrated into P’s system of offerings (as did Wright 1987, 80, 83-86; Milgrom 834). Instead of ‫ חטא‬piel being a privative verb meaning “de-sin” from which the offering name ‫ חטאת‬developed, ‫ חטא‬piel and hitpael should be understood as denominative verbs meaning “to sin-offer” based on the offering name, ‫“ חטאת‬sin offering,” which in turn was derived from the meaning of this verb in the qal stem, “to sin” (so Feder 2011, 104; see also Exegesis to 4:3). However, Milgrom’s basic insight that the P writers revised the typical ANE understanding of expiatory rituals is still valid. Leviticus 13-14 carefully

152

Leviticus 13-14 Exposition

distinguishes the priest’s certification that a person or object is pure (‫)טהר‬ from the rituals that an already “purified person” (‫ )מטהר‬must undergo to be readmitted to the camp and then to the Tabernacle. Unlike the Akkadian therapeutic manuals, but like Demotic Egyptian temple regulations (see below), these chapters never credit priests with curing infestation, only with diagnosing it and certifying its presence or absence. Neither do they credit offering rituals with purifying previously infested persons, just as the concluding formulas of Leviticus 4-7 and 11-15 do not claim that the ‫ חטאת‬sin offerings produce either forgiveness or purification. Instead, these chapters consistently distinguish the priest’s ability to ‫“ כפר‬mitigate” for persons and objects with the ‫“ חטאת‬sin offering” from the results of doing so, which are divine forgiveness or purification (see Exegesis to 4:20). Of course, Milgrom (254) recognized this distinction, which is why he argued that the rituals did not purify people but only the Tabernacle and its contents. That conclusion is unnecessary once one abandons translating ‫חטא‬/‫ חטאת‬with variations of “purify.” Isabel Cranz has made the reverse argument, that P’s exclusive focus on protecting the sanctuary accounts for its omission of healing rituals from the repertoire of Aaronide priests, unlike their Babylonian peers (Cranz 2017, 132-33). Similarly, Yitzhaq Feder (2015, 15) concluded that, in the later stages of Leviticus’s composition, “Pollution has been transformed from a threatening cause of disease to a secondary effect, whose implications are limited for the most part to the sacred domain.” However, concern for the sanctuary appears only twice (12:4; 15:31) in all the pollution regulations of Leviticus 11-15, and nowhere in the rules about ‫ צרעת‬infestation. In fact, the infestation regulations are extraordinary precisely for extending the priests’ activities outside the Tabernacle to examining human bodies outside the camp (14:3) and clothing and walls in private habitations (13:50; 14:36-42), for requiring priests to conduct blood rituals outside the camp (14:3-7; also Num. 19:6), and for granting priests the authority to banish bodies and destroy possessions (13:36, 52; 14:45). The sanctuary is not a focus in these regulations. How then can we understand the function of the rituals in Leviticus 14? The multivalence of rituals is one of their distinctive characteristics. Rituals have many different meanings to the various people who conduct them, who participate in them, and who observe them or hear about them (see Introduction §2.3.6 in Leviticus 1-10). We should therefore expect that many people in ancient Israel, Judea, and Samaria, maybe even priests, thought that these rituals did, in fact, purify them from pollution. But their interpretations of these practices are forever lost to us. We can only interpret the written text of Leviticus. Its rhetoric distinguishes sharply between the priest’s diagnosis of purity and his ritual certification of purity, on the one hand, and the cure

Leviticus 13-14 Exposition

153

that makes someone pure, on the other. However, as usual in Leviticus, the writers do not explain how the rituals work. The evidence of Leviticus suggests that, at least for the P writers and perhaps also for wider Israelite society, the ritual pattern of purification retained its social power despite omitting demonic etiologies and healing procedures that were common in other ancient cultures. Though the text declares people “pure” at several different points in the process (14:7, 9, 20), ritual purification apparently conducts people through a liminal state between the physical cure, which has already been accomplished, and religious and social acceptance, which is produced by completing the ritual. This rite of passage enacts a metaphorical relationship between the experiences of bathing, of being anointed, and of moving from open fields into the settled community, on the one hand, and changing religious and social status from severely polluted to pure, on the other. The ritual enacts this metaphor through bodily sensation, which means that the metaphor’s meaning is established through physical sensation more than by verbal interpretation (Lakoff-Johnson 2003, 14, 29, 57, 234-235; Yoo-Watts 2021, 132-40). Though cure from infestation has already been effected, the ritual provides a bodily experience of passing from the status of being polluted to being pure (similarly Staubli 2002, 237). On the basis of cognitive theories of metaphor, Nicole Boivin (2009, 284) observed: Ritual activity and material culture are able to evoke such comparisons at a deeper and more physical level that seems to enable elusive concepts to be understood, and cosmological belief systems to be felt rather than just understood.

The ritual actualizes purification socially and religiously. The process is depicted as a unified whole that resists demarcations into stages of purity. It therefore makes no sense to describe graduated levels of purity to correspond with the various points in the ritual process, as many interpreters do. For example, there are many transition rituals in modern life that take place some time after the change in status has already occurred or has already been decided: birth celebrations, coming-of-age ceremonies, inaugurations, funerals. It would be strange to describe someone between the event and its ritualization as partly born or partly grown up or partly inaugurated or partly dead. Only rarely is it necessary to name their liminal state at all (exception: “the president-elect”). A person is born or grows up or is elected or dies, and then a ritual takes place to mark that fact. It would be wrong to say that the ritual creates the new status, but the ritual is frequently necessary for the person’s new status to become socially functional. The ritual indexes the person’s new status to themselves and also to everyone else who participates in it, observes it, or hears about it (see Introduction §2.3.6 in Leviticus 1-10).

154

Leviticus 13-14 Exposition

The Rhetoric of Sinful Disease and the Power of Priestly Diagnosis Interpreters have usually assumed that ancient Israelites regarded ‫ צרעת‬infestation as divine punishment for sin. The association of ‫ צרעת‬with sin is explicit in Num. 12:10 and 2 Chr. 26:19. This association of skin disease with sin probably antedates the Bible, since that view was widespread in ancient Near Eastern sources as well as in interpretive traditions from the Dead Sea Scrolls on (Milgrom 820-24; Harrington 2004, 91-92). While some early interpreters worried about the exact application of Leviticus 13’s rules (e.g. Qumran and the Mishnah; see above), others spiritualized skin infestation as different kinds of sin (so Philo, Origen). These two approaches were not mutually exclusive: the Talmudic rabbis also expounded on the various sins that merited punishment by infestation (b. ῾Arak. 16a-b; Tanḥ. 5:10; Neusner 1973, 90-91). Leviticus 13-14 does not associate sin with infestation. Nevertheless, its use to justify later leprosy diagnoses and policies of isolating lepers, together with the wider biblical association with sin, guaranteed that leprosy would be regarded as a mark of sin (Brody 1974, 108). Because ancient and medieval medicine interpreted leprosy (with which it identified ‫ )צרעת‬as an imbalance of bodily fluids (“humours”) in which blood predominates over water, leprosy also became associated with that other “bloody” impurity in Leviticus 12 and 15, menstrual blood. Ephraim Shoham-Steiner (2009, 102) noted that, “By the European Middle Ages, Jews and non-Jews alike strongly associated leprosy with punishment for sexually promiscuous behavior or transgressions of a sexual nature,” especially sex during menstruation which was believed to give leprosy to the child conceived in this way (also Elliott 2012, 128). That association continued in early modern culture and became racialized under colonialism, even to the point of attributing dark skin to leprosy (Edmond 2006, 9). The view that leprosy is a hereditary disease became popular in the mid-nineteenth century and was endorsed in Britain by a Royal Commission in 1867. However, experience with the spread of leprosy in the colonies, as well as the isolation of the leprosy bacterium by G. H. A. Hansen in 1874, fuelled widespread fears of infection that led to the founding of leper camps and colonies around the world between 1860 and 1960 (Edmond 2006, 19-21). The message from twentieth-century medicine that Hansen’s Disease is not very contagious influenced government policies very slowly, and still has not reversed popular stereotypes about “leprosy.” Though Leviticus 13-14 never says so, many interpreters find a connection to sin implied here, too (Shoham-Steiner 2009, 100; Reventlow 2007, 287). Nobuyoshi Kiuchi (228) argued that Leviticus uses ‫ צרעת‬infestation as the most severe case of pollution because it symbolizes “the human egocentric nature,” specifically, the human tendency to want to hide one’s own

Leviticus 13-14 Exposition

155

polluted nature. Margaret Lloyd Davies (1988, 137-138) even regarded ‫צרעת‬ as a “neurodermatitis” brought on by the anxiety of believing that God holds sinners accountable and possibly relieved by the placebo of the priests’ mediation. Leigh Travaskis (2011, 108-71) argued that infestation of ‫“ בשׂר‬flesh” symbolically represented YHWH’s judgment on human rebellion. Joel Baden and Candida Moss (2011) disputed such conclusions. They argued that, while other biblical documents regard ‫“ צרעת‬infestation” as punishment for sin (Num. 12:10-16; 2 Sam. 3:21; 2 Chr. 26:16-21), the priestly writers (P) did not. They pointed out the position of the ‫ צרעת‬rules among other non-sinful impurities in chaps. 11-15 and the fact that, like skin infestation, corpse pollution and genital discharges can result in being excluded from the community, though neither is regarded as a consequence of sin (Num. 5:2-4, but Lev. 11-15 mentions permanent isolation only for ‫)צרעת‬. Similarly, Feder (2015, 15-17) maintained that P’s failure to blame infestation on sin was part of its sacralization of disease into an issue of ritual purity only. This debate should be contextualized culturally by using the history of reception to inform estimates of the likely meaning of Leviticus 13-14 in ancient Israel. Judging sick people as responsible for their own affliction is an old and widespread tendency that deepens with the severity of the illness. What distinguishes ‫“ צרעת‬infestation” both in Leviticus 11-15 and in the HB as a whole is the severity of its consequences. Though corpse pollution and genital discharges can lead to self-exclusion, only legislation about ‫ צרעת‬gives the priests the diagnostic authority to enforce exclusion from the community (13:45-46) as well as destruction of property (13:52-57; 14:45). Other bodily pollutions depend on self-diagnosis and self-restraint to contain contagion. In these cases, priests serve only to present offerings after self-purification of the more serious kinds (12:6-8; 15:14-15, 29-30). While the literary structure of Leviticus 11-15 does not say that a diagnosis of ‫ צרעת‬is divine punishment for sin, it does depict it as one of the most severe pollutions that an individual can suffer, with devastating personal and social consequences. Therefore, it is not surprising that Leviticus 13-14 have wielded outsized influence on later social attitudes that stigmatized and oppressed “lepers” as late as the twentieth century (Sheldon Watts 1997, 71-72). Because of its prominence in the Bible, people continue to justify stigmatizing the ill by invoking the paradigm of “leprosy,” with which later epidemic diseases are often compared, such as HIV/AIDS in the 1980s. Jessica Chace (2019) summarized the continuing social effects of this history: The stigma of leprosy persists not only because of the term’s metaphorical connotations, but also because of the disease’s complicated history, in which nonleprous populations who confronted the disease ignored medical knowledge and favored a reconstructed medieval view of the disease, judging it to be highly contagious and a result of sin.

156

Leviticus 13-14 Exposition

In light of this history of pervasive stigma, the debate over whether sin causes ‫ צרעת‬infestation is overly scholastic and disconnected from human experience. It is true that P does not address this issue, but it is very reasonable that its readers would understand infestation as punishment, as Baden and Moss (2011) themselves documented. These debates over P’s theology of skin disease and sin obscure another issue which is very overt in Leviticus 13-14 and yet rarely discussed by commentators, namely, the extension of the priests’ authority from diagnosing defects on the bodies of offering animals (1:3, etc.) to diagnosing infestations on human skin and property. Feder (2015, 23) observed that Leviticus 13-14 mentions priests 95 times. These chapters extend the priests’ diagnostic power outside of the sanctuary into people’s homes and onto their bodies. Leviticus 13 gives priests the power to quarantine people until they can make a diagnosis (13:4, etc.), and then to isolate infested people from their families and communities (13:45-46). Priests can order the destruction of private property that they judge infested. Yet few interpreters have noticed this remarkable extension of priestly power (one exception is the medical historian, Elinor Lieber 2000, 121). Some texts from other ancient cultures reflect temporary banishment of polluted people. For example, the Sumerian king, Gudea, claimed to have banned polluted people from a city while he rebuilt temples: “The impure man who is frightening, the man inflamed with venereal disease, (and) the woman in (her impure) birth period went out of the city.”6 Letters from the kings of Mari commanded various responses to outbreaks of plague, ranging from the isolation of individuals to group quarantines to the abandonment of entire cities (Feder 2013, 158). Apart from such royal edicts, Akkadian medical texts also indicate an awareness of the need to isolate people with contagious diseases, though little evidence of policies for doing so (Scurlock and Anderson 2005, 17-20). They mention two common kinds of medical practitioners, the asû and the āšipu. Some interpreters distinguish them as physicians and magicians respectively. That impression is reinforced by the Hebrew cognate to āšipu, ‫אשׁפים‬, in the list of Babylonian magicians in Dan. 1:20 and 2:2. But Jo Ann Scurlock (2014, 2-3) maintained that the Akkadian words describe a pharmacist (asû) and a physician (āšipu). The latter employed physical remedies such as ointments as well as ritual remedies such as spells.7 Physicians and 6 Gudea Statue B iii 15-v 7; translated by Richard Averbeck, in The Ancient Near East: Historical Sources in Translation (ed. M. W. Chevalas; Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2006), 48. 7 Distinguishing the roles as magician versus physician was Edith K. Ritter, “Magical Expert (= Āšipu) and Physician (= Asû): Notes on Two Complementary Professions in Babylonian Medicine,” in Assyriological Studies 16: Studies in Honor of Benno Landsberger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 299-321. Scurlock’s rediscription as pharmacist and physician was anticipated by Hector Avalos, Illness and Health Care in the Ancient Near East (HSM 54; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), 166-57.

Leviticus 13-14 Exposition

157

pharmacists appear together in Sir. 38:7-8, but the HB otherwise makes only passing references to “healers” (2 Chr. 16:12; Job 13:4). A Demotic book of temple regulations from Egypt in the Ptolomaic-Roman periods prohibits people with white skin or red skin from temple service (Fischer-Elfert 2005, 48-49). Another section of the same text describes the job of the priest of Sakhmet to inspect people for signs of a particular disease, in order to ban that disease “outside of the city” (Fischer-Elfert 2005, 58-59, 88). Like Leviticus, this Egyptian ritual book makes no provisions for healing diseased people. In Egypt, as in Israel, it was the job of priests to certify the bodily integrity of both animals and humans through visual inspection, as Joachim Quack explained: The “scribe of the divine book” . . . inspected the staff of the temple for skin diseases, especially leprosy. Infected people were removed from the community. The so-called priest of Sakhmet was not a priest of a specific deity but a kind of veterinarian. He had to confirm the good health and ritual purity of all animals that were to be slaughtered; it was forbidden to offer an animal without his approval. This included watching for external marks indicating that a particular animal was sacred and therefore not to be killed. Being connected with Sakhmet, a goddess responsible for pestilence, he also had to check the environment for indications of potential outbreaks of epidemics. Several times a year, he had to conduct rituals to appease the dangerous goddess.8

This Egyptian example suggests that the examination of offering animals to certify them as ‫“ תמים‬perfect” (Lev. 1:2) laid the basis for Israelite priests’ expertise and responsibility for examining human skin defects, and decaying cloth and buildings as well. Like offering animals, priests with any ‫“ מום‬blemish” are banned from officiating at the altar (21:17-23). The list of defects for priests overlaps with the list of defects of offering animals in 22:22-24, though not with the vocabulary describing ‫ צרעת‬infestations here in chaps. 13-14. This extension of priestly diagnostic authority from animal offerings to people and their property provided a long-lasting precedent for religious authorities to diagnose “leprosy” and also to oversee the living conditions of lepers. Just as medieval rhetoric credited these actions to charitable motivations and concern for the falsely accused, interpreters have also imputed noble motives behind the legislation of Leviticus 13-14. Milgrom (887) refused to use the language of “quarantine” for the priests’ actions because they did not try to stop the infection nor to cure it. David Kaplan (1993, 510) argued that the ambiguity of the symptoms described by Leviticus 13-14 meant that “almost everyone who was examined was destined to fail to meet the criteria for diagnosis.” 8

Joachim Friedrich Quack, “Religious Personnel: Egypt,” in Johnston (2004), 290.

158

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

However, stories about ‫ צרעת‬infestation in the rest of the HB do not describe exonerations but rather determinations of guilt. They illustrate the political power of the diagnostic role. In conflicts between priests and kings (2 Chr. 26:19) or between prophets and foreign generals (2 Kgs. 5:3-7, 27) or within Moses’s own family (Num. 12:10), a diagnosis of ‫ צרעת‬weakens and frustrates human ambitions while it empowers the defenders of YHWH’s cult. A diagnosis of ‫ צרעת‬could lead to the expulsion or isolation of the most powerful people in society. Leviticus 13-14 provides justification for this diagnostic power by putting priests in control of admission to the camp as well as to the sanctuary. Leviticus, however, does not describe these political consequences. As always, its rhetoric focuses on the priests’ responsibility, not the power and privileges that comes with it (see Introduction §1.3, §3.4, and Exposition to Lev. 10 in Leviticus 1-10). Chapters 13-14 describe the priests’ authority over what does and does not count as ‫ צרעת‬in long and detailed descriptions of symptoms and rituals which do not draw attention to priestly power. Leviticus surrounds them with chapters that focus attention on pollution that lay people can identify and purify for themselves. When its emphasis turns to the high priest in chap. 16, it depicts him back in the sanctuary, mitigating for all the sins and pollutions of the people. Leviticus provides the divine warrant for priests to wield diagnostic power over everyone and everything that may be infested (‫)צרע‬, but its rhetoric emphasizes priestly duties and responsibilities on behalf of Israel. The priests’ authority in these matters was accepted by Deut. 24:8, and even by NT Gospels (Matt. 8:4; Mark 1:44; Luke 5:14; 17:14) that otherwise have little use for temple priests. EXEGESIS Heading (13:1) 13:1

YHWH spoke to Moses and Aaron:

Like the diet regulations (11:1), the rules for dealing with infestation are addressed to both Moses and Aaron, because Aaron and his descendents must instruct the Israelites in all the Torah regulations (10:10). The address to Aaron is even more vital in chaps. 13-14, because these chapters require the priests to diagnose infestation, with severe consequences for people and property whom they declare to be infested. Deuteronomy 24:8 also emphasizes the priests’ authority in matters of skin infestations. The address to Aaron therefore highlights the priests’ responsibilities and powers in a document intended to be heard and accepted by Israelite lay people, too. But unlike 12:2 and 15:2, this introduction does not mention repetition to the Israelites, which

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

159

emphasizes that only the priests have the power to diagnosis infestations (Milgrom 772; Nihan 2013, 357). This omission is about rhetoric, however, not liturgical practice: in a public reading of the Leviticus scroll, the lay listener is here allowed to overhear instructions to the priests, which consequently serves to strengthen the priests’ reputation for ritual expertise. Infestations of Skin (13:2-8) Diagnosing infestation in people’s skin depends on a combination of symptoms. In ambiguous cases, priests are empowered to quarantine people to observe whether their symptoms spread or fade before declaring them polluted or pure. 13:2

When someone has discolouration or flaking or a spot on the skin of their flesh that might be afflicted by an infestation, they (ms) must be brought to Aaron the priest or to one of his sons the priests.

‫“ אדם כי‬when (some)one” appears only in 1:2, Num 19:14, and here. For translating ‫“ אדם‬human, person” as “one,” see Exegesis to 1:2. Leviticus places the relative conjunction ‫ כי‬after the subject, in contrast to its placement before the subject by other Pentateuchal sources (e.g. Exod. 21:2; 22:4; Deut. 12:20, 21; for a complete list of comparisons, see Milgrom 772). ‫ בשׂר‬refers to the “meat” of animals in distinction from their ‫“ עור‬skin” (4:11). But 16:4 commands the priests to wash their ‫בשׂר‬, which can only mean their skin. Chapter 13 regularly combines the words in a construct phrase like here, ‫עור־בשׂרו‬, literally “the skin of his meat/skin.” Compare Job 19:20 where both words appear in parallel to the phrase, ‫“ עור שׁני‬the skin of my teeth.” So in Job, ‫( עור בשׂרי‬emended, see HAL) may mean “the skin of my flesh,” which is appropriate in Leviticus 13 too. Rashbam and Milgrom (773) suggested that this means skin without hair. Leigh Trevaskis (2011, 170) argued that ‫“ בשׂר‬flesh” here “is partially symbolic of humanity’s rebellion against Yahweh (cf. Genesis 6-9).” He reviewed the primary and secondary domains of meaning associated with ‫“ בשׂר‬flesh” in the HB to conclude that the ‫ צרעת‬disease represents God’s judgment on rebellion, that is, on symbolic “flesh.” He did not maintain that Leviticus judges those suffering from the affliction to be sinners, but rather that “the legislator has adopted pre-existing cultic customs and utilized them to make a theological point” (Trevaskis 2011, 159). Leviticus 13-14, however, does not make this point explicit. P does use vocabulary that resonates with significance drawn from other literary and social contexts, but leaves it to listeners and readers to draw their own conclusions here (see Exposition above).

160

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

‫“ שׂאת‬discolouration” is a noun from the infinitive of ‫“ נשׂא‬raise.” It can refer to God’s majesty (Hab. 1:7) or the rising of Leviathan (Job 41:17). Its six occurrences in chaps. 13-14 refer to something on the skin, so this etymology suggests a “swelling” (NRSV, NJPS), “inflammation” (Ibn Ezra), or “eruption” (HAL). The ancient rabbis observed, however, that the various terms in this verse designate different shades of white skin (m. Neg. 1:1), so Milgrom (773) translated ‫ שׂאת‬with “discolouration” (also Hieke). That seems most likely, since vv. 10, 19, and 43 associate ‫ שׂאת‬with white skin and hair, ‫“ ספחת‬flaking” appears only here and in 14:56. A participle of the verb ‫ ספח‬appears three more times in 13:6-8. The verb means “to attach” (HAL), so flakes of skin seem intended here. Milgrom (773) observed that there is no separate diagnosis in this chapter for ‫ ספחת‬and the rabbis considered it a secondary manifestation of other problems (m. Neg. 1:1), so he translated “scab.” But “scab” in English usually refers to coagulated blood on wounds. Flakes of dried skin are more appropriate in this context. ‫“ בהרת‬spot” appears twelve times in chaps. 13-14, but nowhere else in the HB. Its appearance on skin arouses suspicion if white (vv. 4, 19), though it might still be benign (vv. 6, 23). Levine and Milgrom defended translating “shiny spot” from ‫“ בהיר‬bright,” but this word’s sole appearance in Job 37:21 may mean “dusky, dim” instead (HAL). The difference between ‫ בהרת‬and ‫“ שׂאת‬discolouration” is not clear, so a vague translation like “spot” (NRSV) seems best. The rarity of these three words elsewhere and their frequency in chaps. 13-14 suggests a technical vocabulary. (On the problem of recognizing and translating technical terms, see Leviticus 1-10, 4-8, 302.) However, this vocabulary was not widely understood even in the Second Temple period. LXX translates all three terms with the phrase ούλὴ σημασίας τηλαυγής “scar of a bright spot,” which suggests that its third-century B.C.E. translators did not recognize the technical terms either. If the terms had precise, technical definitions for the P writers, we no longer have the contextual data to reconstruct them, so they must be translated vaguely. ‫ נגע‬refers both to violent blows and to plagues, so I translate “afflict, affliction” (HAL) to cover both meanings. Hieke (473) translated Anzeichen “symptoms” (vv. 3-8), but the term is very common in the HB for affliction itself. These chapters use ‫“ נגע‬affliction” to describe skin problems and also discolourations in cloth materials (13:47) and in house walls (14:34). The connection (‫ )והיה‬between this phrase and the preceding three terms is not obviously causal or sequential. The rest of the chapter makes it clear that the appearance of discolourations, flakes, and spots may or may not indicate ‫“ צרעת‬infestation,” so I translate here “might be afflicted.”

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

161

‫“ צרעת‬infestation” appears thirty times in chaps. 13-14, where it applies to people’s skin and also to growths on cloth, leather, and walls. Elsewhere, this noun appears in only three contexts: in Deut. 24:8 which reinforces priestly authority over the diagnosis and care of ‫צרעת‬, in 2 Kgs. 5:3-7, 27 about Naaman’s affliction, and in 2 Chr. 26:19 about King Uzziah’s affliction. The verb ‫ צרע‬appears only as a participle, ‫מצרע‬, and designates an afflicted person four times in chaps. 13-14 and more commonly elsewhere: Moses in Exod. 4:6, Miriam in Num. 12:10, in a curse in 2 Sam. 3:29, an afflicted group of men in 2 Kgs. 7:3-8, and King Azariah (= Uzziah) in 2 Kgs. 15:5, as well as in the above contexts. Outside Leviticus 13-14, ‫צרעת‬/‫ מצרע‬applies only to people. A related word, ‫צרעה‬, refers to stinging insects (Exod. 23:28; Deut. 7:20; Josh. 24:12; see Sawyer 1976; DCH). Milgrom (775) translated “scale disease” on the basis of Akkadian and Sumerian terms that describe dust-like conditions and also because “scaling is the common denominator in all of the sores described in this chapter.” However, ‫ספחת‬/‫“ ספח‬flake, flaking” appears only five times in chaps. 13-14, all but one in the first case in 13:3-8. The more pervasive concern in these chapters is with discolourations of the skin. LXX translated ‫ צרעת‬with λέπρα, which was transliterated into Latin and then into English as “leprosy” (Tyndale, KJV, NRSV, etc.). In English, however, “leprosy” is the colloquial name for Hanson’s Disease caused by Mycobacterium leprae, which appeared in India by 600 B.C.E., but not in Syria or the Mediterranean until the Hellenistic period (Gerstenberger 156-58; Monot and Honoré et al., 2005; Hieke 473-74). Modern efforts to identify the skin disease described here have suggested psoriasis, vitiligo, or similar rashes (Hulse 1975; criticized by Krauss 2018), but none fit most of the symptoms listed in Leviticus 13, nor are they contagious. Actually, only mould infestations of buildings are described here as explicitly contagious (14:46-47), but the use of diagnostic quarantine throughout this chapter shows that fear of contagion motivates these rules (see Exposition). Erhard Gerstenberger (15657) argued persuasively that attempts to identify ‫ צרעת‬in modern medical terms are misguided because our conceptions about the nature of disease and the methods of diagnosis cannot be reconciled with ancient ones. Elinor Lieber nevertheless argued that ‫ צרעת‬originally designated a disease endemic to Middle Eastern deserts, bejel (treponarid, endemic syphillis) and/or possibly cutaneous leishmaniansis, diseases which were then confused with psoriasis and even Hanson’s Disease in the long process of developing the legislation of this chapter (Lieber 2000). But recent translations have, like Gerstenberger, avoided the vocabulary of modern medicine and provided general descriptions instead, such as “skin disease” (HAL, DCH, NIV, CEB), “scaly affliction” (NJPS), and “scale disease” (Milgrom 775; Schwartz 2004, 235).

162

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

‫צרעת‬, however, also names mould infestations of cloth and buildings (13:47-59; 14:34-53), so another translation is needed. In this case, etymology provides no help, except to note the similar word used, perhaps, to describe swarms of wasps in Exod. 23:28, Deut. 7:20, and Josh. 24:12 (Sawyer 1976). Heller, Heller, and Sasson (2003) suggested that ‫ צרעת‬be translated “mould” because Stachybotrys mould spores can cause rashes and respiratory problems in people as well as green-black growths in their houses. “Mould,” however, does not match well the chapter’s emphasis on rashes, discolourations, and swellings of the skin. ‫ צרעת‬requires a more general translation. Reventlow (2007, 285) suggested the German term, Makel “stain,” but that does not reflect the chapter’s concern with contagion. I suggest translating ‫ צרעת‬as “infestation” to convey in English the similarity between skin afflictions and mould, the homonymy with an insect swarm, and the fear of a spreading contagion that leads to isolating people and destroying property. The end of the verse summarizes the emphatic point of all of chaps. 13-14, that the Aaronide priests must diagnose infestations to determine the consequences for people and property afflicted by them. Such examinations do not take place in the sanctuary but outside the camp (14:2-3), which is where this verse requires that people suspected of being afflicted by infestation “must be brought” (‫ הובא‬hophal) to the priest. The severe consequences of an infestation diagnosis makes it unlikely that they will volunteer for examination (but cf. v. 16). Wilda Gafney proposed that ‫“ בני־אהרן‬sons of Aaron” should be translated here in gender neutral terms, “Aaron’s descendents,” to include female Aaronides because it is “unreasonable that, given Israel’s modesty codes, men would examine women’s bodies for any reason, including disease or contagion” (Gaffney 2017, 114). Her interpretation requires that two Aaronides be involved in the purification ritual (14:1-8), a woman to inspect a female cured of infestation and a man to make the offerings. The text refers only to a singular “priest” with male pronouns, but one can imagine that putting it into practice might require such ritual improvisations. 13:3

The priest must look at the affliction on the flesh’s skin. If hair in the affliction has turned white and if the affliction appears deeper than the flesh’s skin, then they (ms) are afflicted by infestation. When the priest sees that, he must declare the person polluted.

Hair coloured “white” or the depth of the discolouration raises concern about skin infestation. As the following verses show, however, white skin by itself is not enough to settle the issue.

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

163

‫“ עמק‬deeper” is clarified by 13:20 and 14:37 as “below the skin.” The next case describes “raw flesh” as a decisive indicator of infestation (v. 10), so observing the depth of the affliction indicates a similar concern. MT’s singular pronoun on the verb, ‫“ ראהו‬he sees it/that,” here and in vv. 5, 17, 27, and 36, is omitted in every case by SP and LXX. The meaning is the same either way. English requires a direct object, as in MT. The pronominal direct object for the afflicted person, in the phrase ‫טמא‬ ‫אתו‬, makes the priest the subject. So ‫ טמא‬piel here and ten more times in this chapter cannot mean “to pollute” as usual, but rather “to declare polluted” (GKC 52g; HAL; Jenson 1992, 53-54). Though the priest must diagnose infestation, it is his declaration about the person that certifies polluted or pure (10:10). 13:4

But if there is white in the spot on the flesh’s skin and it does not appear deeper than the skin and its hair has not turned white, the priest must quarantine the afflicted person for seven days.

Priests have the authority to ‫“ הסגיר‬quarantine” someone or something to examine the progress of the suspected infestation. ‫ סגר‬carries connotations of shutting away and enclosing and, in the hiphil, of delivering someone into another person’s power (HAL). In the terminology of modern public health, healthy people who are exposed to a contagious disease may be “quarantined” while waiting to see if they become sick, but people ill with contagious diseases may be “isolated” to prevent the disease from spreading. Leviticus 13-14 use ‫ הסגיר‬eleven times (13:4, 5, 11, 21, 26, 31, 33, 50, 54; 14:38, 46) to describe short-term confinement for the sake of diagnosis, so “quarantine” is the more appropriate translation here (DCH, CEB). The priest’s examination takes place outside the camp (14:3), which is also where infested people are isolated (13:46), so quarantine no doubt involved banishment from the camp as well. Why quarantines should last for seven or fourteen (v. 5) days is not explained, except by the tendency of the priestly writers to demarcate time in units of seven (e.g. Gen. 2:1; Lev. 8:33; 14:8; 23:3, 6, 8, 15-16, 24, 34; 25:4, 8). When fourteenth-century Venice isolated arriving ships during the Black Plague, it used an equally biblical number, forty days, in Italian quaranta giorni, which was transliterated into English as “quarantine.” Wilfried Warning (1999, 104) observed that the number seven appears more often in chaps. 13-14 than anywhere else in Leviticus. His effort, however, to draw structural conclusions from its appearances here is not convincing: the number seven appears naturally in cases that require quarantine and is omitted in cases that do not (such as vv. 9-17).

164

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

The final heh on ‫“ שׂערה‬its hair” should be marked with mappiq as a feminine possessive pronoun, as supported by LXX, TgOnq, and TgPsJ (BHS, Hieke 471). 13:5

The priest must look at them (ms) on the seventh day. If he now sees that the affliction in his opinion is arrested and has not spread in the skin, the priest must quarantine them another seven days.

The phrase, ‫ והנה‬... ‫“ וראה‬he must look ... and see,” which reappears 25 times in these chapters (Hieke), emphasizes that only visual inspection determines the priest’s diagnosis. ‫“ בעיניו‬in his opinion,” literally “in his eyes,” usually indicates a person’s view, hence their opinion. Milgrom (780-81) justified translating “in its appearance” by the singular suffix (‫ עינו‬BHS, cf. v. 55) implied here by the LXX and Pesh translations, and concluded that there must be “two criteria for a positive diagnosis: the sore has changed colour and has spread.” But his interpretation is more exact than the Hebrew text (BHQ 93). Priests can declare ‫ צרעת‬infestation at any point in the process, but diagnosing purity requires a quarantine period first. In cases of boils or burns (vv. 18, 24), the priest must decide on a diagnosis after one week of quarantine, but here and in possible infestations of hair or beard (vv. 29-37), priests can declare purity only after two weeks of quarantine. The chapter does not explain why the quarantine period for some cases is longer than for others. 13:6

The priest must look at them (ms) on the seventh day again. If the affliction has now faded and has not spread in the skin, the priest must declare them pure. It is only flaking skin. They must wash their clothes and they are pure.

HAL translates ‫ כהה‬as “colourless,” but since the spot was originally white (v. 4), “faded” (Milgrom 781) or “dimmed” (DCH) is more appropriate here. Like the piel verb ‫ טמא‬in v. 3, ‫ טהר‬piel here does not mean “purify” but rather “to declare pure.” Cf. the qal verb in 14:2. ‫“ מספחת‬flaking skin” appears in this form only in vv. 6-8, but see ‫ספחת‬ “flake” in v. 2 and the discussion there. The phrase, ‫“ מספחת היא‬it is only flaking skin,” states the diagnosis and perhaps quotes the priest’s verbal declaration (Gerstenberger 159) in contrast to his declaration, ‫“ צרעת הוא‬they are infested” (vv. 3, 8, 14). The emphasis here shows that the decisive mark of infestation is not just flaking skin (contra Milgrom 775), but its appearance in combination with other symptoms, such as spreading discolouration (vv. 7-8) or raw flesh (vv. 10-11). The chapter does not entertain the possibility that skin can be both ‫“ צרעת‬infested” and ‫“ טהור‬pure” (contra Lieber 2000; see below on v. 13).

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

165

Besides washing their clothes, the purification ritual will require purified people to bathe and wait a period of time (14:8-9), as is usually the case when purified from pollution (15:6-13). 13:7

But if the flaking actually spreads over the skin after they (ms) show themselves to the priest for their purification, they must appear again before the priest.

The emphatic phrasing, ‫“ פשׂה תפשׂה‬actually spreads,” indicates a change in the condition after the priest declared them pure when they previously appeared before him (v. 6) for ‫“ טהרתו‬their purification.” 13:8

The priest must look. If now the flaking has spread in the skin, the priest must declare them (ms) polluted. They are infested.

‫“ צרעת הוא‬they are infested” states the priest’s verdict (also in vv. 15, 20, 25, 27, 49). Similar nominal formulas include ‫“ טהור הוא‬they are pure” (vv. 13, 17, 37, 39, 40, 41), ‫“ נגה הוא‬they are afflicted” (v. 22), ‫“ טמא הוא‬they are polluted” (vv. 11, 36, 46, 51, 55; see Exposition above), and perhaps ‫מספחת‬ ‫“ היא‬it is flaking skin” (v. 6, see above). Chapters 11 and 15, however, state such verdicts without the presence of priest, which led Erbele-Küster (2017, 149) to conclude that they may “constitute a form of literary, not medical, diagnosis.” The consonantal text uses a pronoun, ‫הוא‬, in almost every case, which probably indicates that the antecedent is the afflicted person. Then we should translate the formulas into English with verbs: “they are infested.” MT, however, vocalizes the formula containing the feminine noun ‫ צרעת‬as a feminine pronoun as if it says ‫( צרעת היא‬as it also does in vv. 6 and 20),9 which should then be translated as referring to the symptom or the skin disease: “it is an infestation.” Most modern translations follow MT’s vocalization, which obscures the consonantal text’s repetition of the ‫ הוא‬formulas throughout the chapter. I try to reproduce the feeling of the consonantal texts by taking the afflicted person as the antecedent in most cases and translating the formulas with English verbs, even though elsewhere I render ‫ צרעת‬as a noun, “infestation.” 9 The consonantal text of the Pentateuch almost always writes both the masculine and feminine singular pronoun as ‫הוא‬, though the Masoretic Qere vocalizes as feminine or masculine depending on its apparent antecedent. The consonantal text’s failure to distinguish the gender of the pronoun may reflect an older dialect of Hebrew that is preserved in the Pentateuch because it was standardized earlier than the rest of the HB (S. E. Fassberg, “The Ketiv/Qere ‫הוא‬, Diagony and Dialectology,” in Diachrony in Biblical Hebrew [ed. C.L. Miller-Naudé and Z. Zevit; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2012], 171–80). My practice of translating most Hebrew personal pronouns with English plural pronouns matches the ambiguity of the consonantal text.

166

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

Infestations of Raw Flesh (13:9-17) The appearance of raw flesh in discoloured white skin is decisive for a diagnosis of infestation that does not require a quarantine period. If, however, the wound heals by being covered by white skin like the skin everywhere else on someone’s body, they must be declared pure. 13:9

When an affliction of infestation appears in someone, they (ms) must be brought to the priest.

This chapter regularly introduces a new case by the afflicted subject (‫אדם‬ “someone” v. 2; ‫“ בשׂר‬skin” v. 18, 24; ‫“ אישׁ או־אשׁה‬a man or woman” vv. 29, 38; ‫“ אישׁ‬a man” v. 42; ‫“ הבגד‬the cloth” v. 47) followed by ‫“ כי‬if, when.” Only this verse places the problem, ‫“ נגע צרעת‬an affliction of infestation,” before the ‫ כי‬and the afflicted subject afterwards in a prepositional phrase, ‫“ באדם‬in someone.” In contrast to v. 2, where the emphasis falls on the description of the affliction and on the identity of the dynastic priesthood, here the inverted sentence structure that juxtaposes ‫באדם והובא אל־הכהן‬ “in someone, they must be brought to the priest” emphasizes the coercive situation. Though neither this chapter nor any other HB texts indicates who should bring infested people to the priests, the passive verb ‫ הובא‬hophal “be brought” anticipates that such examinations will not be voluntary (cf. the active verbs for healed persons in 13:16, though the passive appears in 14:2). That is not surprising given the drastic consequences of a diagnosis of ‫“ צרעת‬infestation” – see vv. 45-46. 13:10 The priest must look. If there is a white discolouration on the skin and if it is the case that the hair has turned white and there is really raw flesh in the spot, For the translation of ‫בשׂר‬, see on v. 2 above. Here, ‫בשׂר חי‬, literally “living meat/skin,” is usually translated “raw flesh” (KJV, NRSV) or “open sore” (NIV) or “exposed flesh” (Levine 78). The adjective, ‫“ חי‬living,” means “raw” animal meat in 1 Sam 2:15 (Milgrom 785). ‫ מחיה‬indicates “provision” or “sustenance” elsewhere in the HB. But in v. 24, ‫“ מחית המכוה‬raw burn” seems to collapse what is indicated here by ‫ מחית בשׂר חי‬into the single word, ‫מחיה‬. So v. 10 doubles two uses of the root ‫“ חי‬living” for emphasis to mean “really raw.” 13:11 then it is a chronic infestation in the skin of their (ms) flesh. The priest must declare them polluted. He does not (need to) quarantine them, because they are polluted. ‫“ נושׁנת‬chronic” is literally “old, grow old” (HAL). An open wound within the discolouration indicates long-standing and progressive infestation, so no

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

167

quarantine period is needed to make a diagnosis. LXX found this contradictory and so omitted the negative particle (Wevers 175). According to MT, however, chronically infested people escape quarantine, but they will be isolated immediately from the camp and community (v. 46). 13:12 If an infestation blossoms all over the skin so that the infestation covers all of the afflicted skin from head to foot wherever the priest can see, ‫“ פרח‬blossom” usually refers to flower buds (Gen. 40:10). Context suggests that the emphasis conveyed here by duplicating ‫ פרח‬as infinitive and finite verb means “blossom all over.” ‫“ לכל־מראה עיני הכהן‬wherever the priest can see” indicates that the physical exam may be limited by clothing and propriety (Sifra; m. Neg. 6:7; Milgrom 785). 13:13 the priest must look. If the infestation covers all of their (ms) flesh, he must declare the afflicted persons pure. All of it is white, so they are pure. This ruling that someone whose skin turns completely white must be declared pure has struck many interpreters as contradictory. The ancient rabbis declared it a paradox (m. Neg. 8:1; b. Sanh. 97a; Milgrom 786). Other interpreters have tried to explain it medically: “the scaly crust peels off, leaving white beneath” (Milgrom 785, summarizing others). Reventlow (2007, 282), however, observed that by declaring a completely discoloured person clean while a partially discoloured person is unclean, this verse betrays an overriding concern for consistent appearance rather than with disease as in modern bacteriological medicine. Lieber (2000) understood vv. 12-13 to mean that someone whose skin turns completely white is both ‫“ צרעת‬infested” and ‫“ טהור‬pure.” Though one can read the verses literally that way, this chapter’s use of diagnostic refrains does not support that conclusion. Verses 10-17 alternate between cases determined to be “polluted” (vv. 11, 15), and cases determined to be “pure” (vv. 13, 17), but applies the pronouncement, ‫“ צרעת הוא‬they are infested,” only to a case of pollution (v. 15). This means that other mentions of “infestation” in vv. 9-13 indicate only the appearance of possible infestation. 13:14 But on the day that raw flesh appears in it, they (ms) become polluted. This verse makes explicit that a state of pollution exists from the moment that symptoms of infestation appear, not just after the priest diagnoses infestation (v. 15).

168

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

13:15 The priest must look at the raw flesh and declare them (ms) polluted. Raw flesh (means) they are polluted, they are infested. The last six words of this verse juxtapose “raw flesh” with a doubled diagnostic formula, ‫“ טמא הוא צרעת הוא‬they are polluted, they are infested.” These formulas otherwise only appear singly in Leviticus 13. Most translations obscure the formulaic repetition by rendering one or both phrases as subordinate clauses. For a listening audience, however, the diagnostic formulas become a rhythmic beat throughout the chapter, which here takes the form of an unexpected double beat. The Vg translation of ‫“ טמא הוא‬they are polluted,” that a person should be inmundos reputabitur “reputed among the unclean,” echoed in many official judgments of leprosy during the Middle Ages (Demaitre 2007, 79). 13:16 But if the raw flesh recedes and turns white again, they must come to the priest. Levine (79) suggested translating ‫ ישׁוב‬here as “recedes” on the basis of 2 Kgs. 20:9. In contrast to vv. 2 and 9, where passive verbs suggest that afflicted people may be brought involuntarily to the priest, this verse uses the active verb ‫“ בא‬they (ms) must come,” since people hoping to be rehabilitated can be expected to come voluntarily (but cf. the passive in 14:2). 13:17 The priest must look at them (ms). If the affliction has turned white, the priest must declare the afflicted person pure. They are pure. Since v. 13 specifies that discoloured persons can be declared pure only if all of their skin turns white, here “if the affliction turns white” presupposes that it becomes like the rest of their unusually whitened skin. Infestations of Boils (13:18-23) Cured boils may indicate skin infestation in combination with other symptoms. 13:18 When flesh has a boil on its skin that is cured, ‫“ בו־בערו‬on it on its skin” is redundant. SP has only ‫“ בו‬on it” while many other manuscripts and ancient translations reflect only ‫“ בערו‬on its skin” as in v. 24 (BHS; BHQ 94). My translation follows suit. The word ‫“ שׁחין‬boil” describes a plague on the Egyptians (Exod. 9:9-11), as well as the illnesses suffered by Hezekiah (2 Kgs. 20:7; Isa. 38:21) and Job (2:7). Moses threatens the Israelites with boils as punishment if they do

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

169

not observe the covenant (Deut. 28:27, 35). Cognates in various languages suggest heat (HAL; Milgrom 787), so a warm inflammation of the skin seems to be indicated. 13:19 and there is a white discolouration or a pink spot where the boil was, they (ms) must appear before the priest. For these translations of ‫ שׂאת‬as “discolouration” and ‫ בהרת‬as “spot,” see on v. 2 above. The precise meaning of ‫ אדמדמת‬is disputed because it only appears in chaps. 13-14. HAL, Milgrom (788), and Hieke (471) followed the ancient rabbis in regarding it as a superlative, so “bright red.” Its juxtaposition with ‫“ לבנה‬white” then indicates a strong colour contrast. DCH, Levine (79), and Hartley (176) regarded the form as a diminutive, so “reddish” or “light red.” In that case, the combination with “white” indicates a light colour, so “pink.” Another reduplicative term for a green shade of colour, ‫ירקרק‬, appears with ‫ אדמדם‬in 13:49 and 14:37 about infestations on clothing and house walls, where light tinges of green or red are more plausible than bright colours. Athalya Brenner reviewed the rabbinic discussions to conclude that the two different applications of ‫ אדמדם‬to skin and to clothing/walls have different meanings.10 However, the word’s limited HB usage does not provide enough basis for drawing this distinction. ‫ נראה‬could mean either “it must be shown” (KJV, NRSV, CEB) or “they (ms) must appear” (NIV, NJPS), depending on whether one takes the subject as the boil or the person. 13:20 The priest must look. If it appears deeper than the skin and its hair turns white, the priest must declare them (ms) polluted. It is an infested affliction of the blossoming boil. The feminine suffix on MT ‫“ מראה‬it appears” points to the ‫“ שׂאת‬discolouration” or ‫“ בהרת‬spot” as its antecedent, while SP and many LXX manuscripts have a masculine suffix for the ‫“ שׁחין‬boil.” But feminine pronouns dominate vv. 20-21, so MT is correct. For “deeper than the skin” and white hairs, see v. 3. On skin “blossoms,” see v. 12. Only here in the consonantal text of chaps. 13-14 does the feminine pronoun appear in the diagnostic formula: ‫“ צרעת היא‬it is an infestation.” But cf. v. 6 ‫“ מספחת היא‬it is flaking skin” and discussion on v. 8 above. 10 Athalya Brenner, Colour Terms in the Old Testament (JSOTSup 21; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1982), 129-30.

170

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

13:21 But if the priest looks at it and there is no white hair in it and it is not deeper than the skin and it has faded, the priest must quarantine them (ms) for seven days. ‫“ כהה‬colourless” in contrast to white or pink (v. 19) supports translating “faded” (Milgrom 789). 13:22 If it has actually spread in the skin, the priest must declare them (ms) polluted. They are afflicted. For the emphatic duplication, ‫“ פשׂה תפשׂה‬actually spread,” see above on v. 7. Only here does the diagnostic refrain use ‫“ נגע‬afflicted” instead of ‫צרעת‬ “infested” or ‫“ טמא‬polluted.” Milgrom (789) suggested that the writers wanted only seven refrains with ‫ צרעת‬to appear in the chapter. ‫ נגע צרעת‬in v. 2 has already established that the words refer here to the same problem and the following case uses the two terms together (vv. 25, 27). However, Milgrom also observed that the appearance of this alternative formula here may have led to regarding ‫ צרעת‬and ‫ נגע‬as different diseases in 11QT 45:15, 18 and m. Neg. 1:1. 13:23 But if the spot stays the same and does not spread, it is the boil’s scar. The priest must declare them (ms) pure. ‫ תחת‬with ‫ עמד‬means “to stand in place” (1 Sam. 14:9), so in the case of skin spots, “to stay the same.” ‫ צרבת‬occurs in the HB only here and in v. 28. LXX, TgPsJ and m. Neg. 9:2 support the meaning, “scar” (Milgrom 789). Infestations of Burns (13:24-28) Infestations in burns get diagnosed like cases in boils. 13:24 When flesh has a burn from fire on its skin and the raw flesh turns into a pink or white spot, Only here in this chapter does ‫“ או‬if” precede the usual casuistic formula for starting a new case, noun + (‫“ כי )יהיה‬when.” LXX has the typical conjunction “and” instead (Wevers 181). ‫ מכות־אשׁ‬is a “burn” (from the root ‫ )כוה‬caused by ‫“ אשׁ‬fire,” which could also mean by coals or ash (Milgrom 790; Hartley 170; Hieke 472). As with boils (v. 18), the concern here is not with the burn itself, but with what the wound becomes. For the vocabulary of “raw flesh” and “pink,” see above on vv. 10 and 19.

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

171

13:25 the priest must look at it. If the hair in the spot has turned white and it appears deeper than the skin, they (ms) are infested. It has blossomed in the burn, and the priest must declare them polluted. They are afflicted by infestation. This verse is unusual for stating the refrain, ‫“ צרעת הוא‬they are infested,” twice and for lengthening it the second time to ‫“ נגע צרעת הוא‬they are afflicted by infestation.” The juxtaposition of ‫ נגע‬with ‫ צרעת‬is reminiscent of the opening case (vv. 2-3). It may appear here and in v. 27 to call attention to the fact that this fourth case is at the centre of the list of seven cases of possible skin infestation. 13:26 But if the priest looks at it and there is no white hair in the spot and it is not deeper than the skin and it has faded, the priest must quarantine them (ms) seven days. This verse is nearly identical with v. 21. 13:27 The priest must look at them (ms) on the seventh day. If it has spread in the skin, the priest must declare them polluted. They are afflicted by infestation. See on vv. 22 and 25. 13:28 But if the spot stays the same and does not spread in the skin and it has faded, it is a flaking burn. The priest must declare them (ms) pure, because it is the burn’s scar. See on v. 23. Infestations of Hair (13:29-37) Infestations of skin under hair are diagnosed the same way as the first case about possible infestations of skin (vv. 4-8; Seidl 1982, 38; Milgrom 784). 13:29 When a man or woman has an affliction on the head or in the beard, The focus here is on skin infestations in hairy parts of the ‫“ ראשׁ‬head” or the face, in the ‫“ זקן‬beard.” Perhaps the assumption that men usually grow hair on their faces while women do not leads to specifying both sexes in the introductory formula, where previous cases have been gender neutral. That is confirmed by the last case involving baldness, which mentions only men (v. 40) on the assumption that it is typically men who go bald. But the next case (v. 38) distinguishes the sexes for no apparent reason.

172

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

13:30 the priest must look at the affliction. If it appears deeper than the skin and there is thinning yellowed hair in it, the priest must declare them (ms) polluted. It is eczema. Their head or their beard is infested. ‫ צהב‬is a colour term (“yellow” KJV, NRSV; “bright red” HAL). Sifra and Ramban suggested that the hair has turned from black to red or yellow, but not yet white as in previous cases. DCH translated “gleaming” with TgPsJ and Pesh (cf. Ezra 8:27 where the participle of this root describes “gleaming” bronze in explicit distinction from ‫“ זהב‬gold”), but the following verses support a focus on the hair’s colour. “Black” is the normal and healthy colour of hair in the writer’s experience (v. 37). White hair might be due to infestation (vv. 10, 20, 25), but is ambiguous because it may be due to aging. Yellow hair is a possible sign of infestation. Verses 30-32 discuss only hair that may have been yellowed by disease, not naturally yellow or red hair, which may have been unknown to the writers. The different experiences of readers may alter the meaning of this verse, as Gafney (2017, 113) noted: “As an Afro-diasporic reader in a Euro-centric world that frequently embodies white-supremacist norms, I was delighted as a young reader to discover a text that demonstrated blond was not a normative hair color for the people of Israel.” Only in this verse is the hair also described as ‫“ דק‬thinning” (but see vv. 40-46). The noun ‫ נתק‬occurs in the HB only in this paragraph and in 14:54, but it comes from a more common verbal root meaning “to tear apart.” Interpreters often attempt a medical diagnosis (Hartley 192; Milgrom 793-94; Hieke 472) such as “scabies” (HAL, CEB). The verb’s meaning suggests that the noun might reflect people scratching at their affliction, so some translate “itch” (NRSV, NIV). But medical terms presuppose knowledge unavailable to ancient writers and “itch” implies a very mild affliction. The term “scall” (DCH, KJV, NJPS) is stronger and sufficiently vague, but no longer colloquial English. A broad term used today for various kinds of dermatitis is “eczema,” which describes chronically dry and itchy skin that turns red from scratching. 13:31 When the priest looks at the eczema affliction, if he sees that it does not appear deeper than the skin and there is no yellowed hair in it, the priest must quarantine the person afflicted with eczema for seven days. ‫ וכי‬presents a temporal contrast, “when,” rather than the usual conditional contrast ‫“ ואם‬but if” (vv. 4, 7, 28; Milgrom 794). MT ‫“ שׂער שׁחר‬black hair” comes as a surprise, since a common symptom of infestation is hair turned white (vv. 3) or thinning (v. 30). Growing black

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

173

hair is a sign of health (v. 37), so maybe its absence is cause for concern (so Sifra). Therefore, many commentators defend MT (Wevers 184; Hartley 176; Milgrom 794-95), but that reading does not parallel the sequence of symptoms in the other cases (vv. 4, 21, 26). LXX reads “yellow hair” as in MT vv. 30 and 32, which parallels the structure of the other cases. LXX has the more likely reading. 13:32-33 The priest must look at the affliction on the seventh day. If the eczema has not spread and there is no yellowed hair in it and the eczema does not appear deeper than the skin, they (ms) must shave themselves, but they must not shave the eczema. The priest must quarantine the eczema (sufferer) for another seven days. The area of the eczema is not shaved to see what colour hair grows in it (v. 37). Many Hebrew manuscripts begin v. 33 with a large gimel, ‫ג‬, to mark the middle verse of the Pentateuch (b. Qidd. 30a), though MT locates it at 8:8 (see discussion there). 13:34 The priest must look at the eczema on the seventh day. If the eczema has not spread in the skin and if it does not appear deeper than the skin, the priest must declare them (ms) pure. They must wash their clothes and they are pure. The three cases that require two-week quarantine periods to determine purity also require that the clothes be washed (cf. vv. 6, 56), which most interpreters assume includes bathing. Milgrom (787) suggested that washing one’s clothes represents one’s purity and that one is exempt from the purification ritual required of those declared polluted by infestation who then recover (14:20-32). He also argued that the command to wash clothes indicates that the person with eczema did contract a minor form of impurity, like the person who carries an animal carcass (11:25, 28, 40; Milgrom 782, 797). Being in quarantine for two weeks carried a presumption of temporary impurity (similarly Hieke 485-86). Milgrom (796) noted that the diagnosis of all three cases requires observing whether discolouration appears or fades (vv. 6, 32, 54). This verse, however, does not raise the issue of hair colour again. 13:35 But if the eczema actually spreads in the skin after he has declared them (ms) pure, Verses 35-37 presuppose a situation in which eczema flares up again after a declaration of purity.

174

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

13:36-37 the priest must look at it. If the eczema has spread in the skin, the priest does not need to look for yellowed hair. They are polluted. But if in his opinion the eczema is arrested and there is black hair growing in it, they (ms) are cured of eczema. They are pure, and the priest must declare them pure. The temporal relationship between vv. 36 and 37 is not clear. Since vv. 35 and 37 describe opposite conditions, Milgrom (798-799) plausibly concluded that v. 37 occurs some time after the person has been declared impure and isolated again (v. 36). Blotchy Skin (13:38-39) These two verses about blotchy skin are very short in comparison with the other cases in this chapter. Whitened skin by itself is never enough to diagnose infestation (vv. 13, 17, 23) and a faded white colour is even less suspicious (vv. 6, 28). So an initial observation of “dull white” skin blotches is enough to warrant declaring them pure. 13:38 When a man or a woman has spots on the skin of their flesh, white spots, For “a man or a woman,” see discussion of v. 29 above. For the vocabulary of ‫“ בעור־בשׂרם בהרת בהרת לבנת‬spots on the skin of their flesh, white spots,” see on v. 2 above. 13:39 the priest must look. If the spots on the skin of their flesh are dull white, it is just a blotch blossoming in the skin. They (ms) are pure. In v. 21, I translated ‫ כהה‬as “faded,” so here ‫ כהת לבנת‬means “dull white.” ‫“ בהק‬blotch” appears only here in the HB. It is often translated “rash” (HAL, NRSV, NIV, CEB), but that word usually indicates a reddening of the skin. “Lesion” (DCH) sounds more severe than what is described here. Diagnostic medical terms (“tetter” Milgrom 799; “vitiligo” Hieke 486) indicate unwarranted precision. The dull white look of the spot indicates some kind of discolouration, like ‫( שׂאת‬v. 2) which by itself is innocuous (v. 28), as is ‫בהק‬ “a blotch.” Baldness (13:40-44) The seventh and last case of possible skin infestation involves baldness which, by itself, is innocuous but which can become infested.

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

175

13:40 When a man’s head becomes bare, he is just bald. He is pure. The contrast in the next verse shows that baldness on top of the head is in view here. The prophet Elishah was jeered for being ‫“ קרח‬bald” (2 Kgs. 2:23). 13:41 When a man’s head becomes bare beside his face, he has receding hair. He is pure. ‫גבחת‬/‫ גבח‬describes bareness due to lack of hair ‫“ מפאת פניו‬beside his face,” i.e. on his forehead or temples, and also a bare spot on cloth (v. 55). A receding hair-line is the subject here. 13:42 But if there is a pink affliction in the baldness or receding hair-line, it is a blossoming infestation of his bald condition or his receding hair-line. ‫“ לבן אדמדם‬pink” is literally “reddish white.” See on v. 19 above. Milgrom (801) thought that the nominal construction of ‫( קרחת‬in contrast to ‫ קרח‬in v. 40) and ‫( גבחת‬in contrast to ‫ גבח‬in v. 41) “connotes disease” because their formation resembles the diseases listed in Deut. 28:22, though neither term appears in that verse. In English, this can be conveyed by translating “his bald condition.” I have done so here only once to avoid overloading the translation with too many words. 13:43 The priest must look at it. If there is pink discolouration of the affliction in the baldness or receding hair-line, like the appearance of infested skin of the flesh, The verse seems to repeat v. 42, but here it is the priest’s judgment that the discolouration is pink like cases of infested boils and burns (vv. 19, 24). For more about this syntax, see Milgrom (801). 13:44 the man is infested. He is polluted. The priest must certainly declare him polluted because of the affliction on his head. In vv. 44-45, ‫ צרע‬appears in a participial rather than nominal form to designate the person who is infested. Cf. ‫ מצרע‬in 14:2ff. The emphatic three-fold repetition of ‫“ טמא‬pollute” in ‫טמא הוא טמא‬ ‫“ יטמאנו הכהן‬he is polluted, the priest must certainly declare him polluted” is probably due to its rhetorical position at the end of the last example of infestation, rather than to some distinction between infested baldness and other kinds of infestation (contra Milgrom 802). In fact, vv. 44-46 each repeat the root ‫ טמא‬two or three times in quick succession, creating a rhetorical crescendo emphasizing pollution:

176

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis V. 44: ‫“ טמא הוא טמא יטמאנו‬he is polluted, he must certainly declare him polluted” V. 45: ‫“ וטמא טמא יקרא‬he must call out, Polluted! Polluted!” V. 46: ‫“ יטמא טמא הוא‬he will be polluted, he is polluted!”

The repetition would be especially obvious when listening to the chapter read aloud (see Introduction §2.2.1 in Leviticus 1-10). This seven-fold repetition of the root ‫ טמא‬draws attention to these verses as the rhetorical climax of the chapter, and to ‫“ צרעת‬infestation” as one of the most dreadful kinds of bodily pollution. Isolating Infested People (13:45-46) This brief description of how infested people must live and behave in isolation from the rest of the community has echoed in the cultural memory of so-called “leprosy” more deeply than anything else in chaps. 13-14. It resonates with biblical descriptions of infested individuals from Miriam (Num. 12:10-16) to Uzziah (2 Chr. 26:19-23), and from the infested group who discovered the abandoned Assyrian camp (2 Kgs. 7:3) to the infested group healed by Jesus (Luke 17:12-13). In medieval and modern societies, people with symptoms of contagious skin diseases were isolated in leprosaria and leper colonies, often on small islands. Leper colonies were a feature of European and American societies and their overseas colonial empires well into the twentieth century (Edmond 2006). These two verses have, therefore, promoted the stigmatization of people suffering from skin diseases and deformed features from biblical to modern times. This biblical mandate for avoiding and forcibly isolating them promoted social prejudice over medical knowledge, often in conflict with the best medical science of the day (see Exposition). It conflicts with prohibitions on cruel treatment of disabled people in Leviticus itself (19:14). The stigma of leprosy has warped the lives and fortunes of millions of people, and been extended to those suffering from other wasting or contagious diseases. The immoral consequences of these verses justify striking them through to mark them as contrary to the ethical teachings of Judaism and Christianity, which have instead honoured those who care for the ill at the risk to their own health. (See the similar evaluation from an Indian Dalit perspective by I. J. M. Razu, quoted in Introduction to Leviticus 11-20 above. For an explanation of the practice of striking through immoral verses, see the Author’s Preface to this volume.) 13:45 Infested people (ms) who have the affliction: their clothes must be torn, their heads must be disheveled, they must cover their upper lip, and they must call out “Polluted! Polluted!” The redundant designation, ‫“ והצרוע אשׁר־בו הנגע‬infested people (ms) who have the affliction,” sets off vv. 45-46 from the preceding seven cases in this

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

177

chapter and makes it clear that these regulations apply to people with any kind of infestation. See Milgrom (802) for other possible implications of this designation. Torn clothes and disheveled hair are typical signs of mourning (see Exegesis to 10:6). Olyan (2004, 104-110) identified the common element as the self-debasement expected of mourners and of people afflicted with infestation. But he noted that infested people must isolate themselves indefinitely, unlike mourners who receive social support during their limited mourning period. Covering lips also represents mourning (2 Sam. 19:25; Ezek. 24:17, 22; Mic. 3:7). The noun, ‫שׂפם‬, appears only in these expressions and is usually translated “moustache” or “upper lip.” Then as now, covering the mouth probably aimed to avoid the inhalation (Elliger 185; Noth) or exhalation of contaminants (Ibn Ezra; see further speculations in Milgrom 803). ‫“ טמא טמא יקרא‬they (ms) must call out ‘Polluted! Polluted!’” is reversed in Lam. 4:15, where people chase away the polluted person with the cry “Away! Polluted!” Perhaps the cry “Polluted!” was required to distinguish infested people from other mourners (so Wessely 1846 in Milgrom 805). A Qumran text interpreted the phrase as meaning “polluted to the polluted.” It required infested people to separate themselves from other polluted people, as did the ancient rabbis (4Q274 1.3; b. Pes. 67a; Harrington 2004, 89). It is strange that chaps. 13-14 never explicitly state that skin infestations are contagious, only ‫ צרעת‬infestations of houses (14:46-47). Nevertheless, this cry of “Polluted!” to ward others away, together with quarantine and isolation outside the camp, all indicate a powerful fear of contagious infestation. 13:46 They (ms) will be polluted as long as they have the affliction. They are polluted! They must live apart. Their residence must be outside the camp. For the repetition “they are polluted!” see on v. 44 above. ‫“ בדד‬alone” means apart from the rest of society, since those suffering from infestation could band together (2 Kgs. 7:3). People suffering from infestation must live ‫“ מחוץ למחנה‬outside the camp” (also Num. 12:13-14). So that is where the priest’s examination and quarantine take place (Lev. 14:3). Corpses are buried outside the camp (Lev. 10:4), executions take place there (Lev. 24:14, 23; Num. 15:35-36), and mouldinfested building material must be disposed of “outside the city” (Lev. 14:40). Numbers 5:3-4 banishes everyone suffering from infestation, corpse pollution (also 31:19), and genital discharges (also Deut. 23:11 Eng. 23:10) from the camp. The purification rituals for people and buildings therefore begin outside the camp or city (Lev. 14:3, 7, 53). However, ashes and the left-over carcasses of offerings are also taken “outside the camp” to the “dump of fatty ashes”

178

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

which is nevertheless considered “pure” (Lev. 4:11-12; 6:4 Eng. 6:11). The ashes mixed into water for purifying corpse pollution are also produced and stored outside the camp in a pure place (Num. 19:3, 9). So there are both pure and polluted places outside the camp. The later history of leprosy (see Exposition) has reinforced the impression that banishing infested people “outside the camp” led to their social isolation indefinitely from the rest of Israel. Social isolation is commonly presupposed in Christian preaching and commentary about Jesus healing infested people (Matt. 8:1-4; Mark 1:40-45; Luke 5:12-14; 17:14). That assumption was challenged by Myrick Shinall (2018) who argued that it reinforces anti-Jewish readings of the Gospels. Only Luke 17:12, where the lepers meet Jesus at a town gate, hints at their location outside settled areas. Matthew 8:1 sets the encounter in a crowd and Luke 5:12 in a city. Matthew 26:6 and Mark 14:3 depict Jesus visiting the house of an infested disciple, Simon, in Bethany. (Associating this individual with Lazarus of Bethany in John 11:1 led to leper communities being called lazaria in the Middle Ages.) Like the Second Temple period, the medieval context shows infested people sometimes being shunned and excluded, but in other times and places mixing freely within the larger population (Brody 1974, 93-100). We therefore do not know how readily normative rules like this verse were adopted and enforced in ancient times. We do know that in the eleventh-twelfth centuries and again in the nineteenth-twentieth centuries, this biblical mandate led to large numbers of so-called “lepers” being isolated and institutionalized. Infestations of Cloth and Leather (13:47-58) Leviticus conceives of ‫ צרעת‬also infesting cloth and leather (vv. 47-58), and masonry (14:34-53). Its procedures for diagnosis parallel those for skin infestations in so far as possible for such different materials (Nihan 2007, 273). Cloth and leather may be washed to facilitate the diagnosis (13:54-58), but this chapter provides no purification ritual like those in chap. 14 for skin and building infestations. Instead, infested fabric must be burned (vv. 52, 55, 57). 13:47 When fabric has an infested affliction in it, whether in wool fabric or in linen fabric ‫“ בגד‬fabric” refers to clothing and fabrics of any material. 13:48 or in the warp or woof of linen or wool, or in skin or in skin products, ‫“ בשׂתי או בערב‬in the warp or woof” refers to the vertical and horizontal threads of woven materials. These terms occur in the HB only in this chapter,

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

179

but LXX and rabbinic sources confirm their meaning (Milgrom 809-10). As Milgrom pointed out, the warp and woof could differ from each other in thickness, dye, and spin. They may be listed separately from the finished cloth (v. 47) to refer here to threads on the loom. ‫“ עור‬skin” of clothing or fabric would normally be translated in English by “leather.” That translation, however, obscures chap. 13’s constant concern with “skin,” whether the skin of living human bodies (33 times in vv. 5-43; see above on v. 2) or animal skins worn or utilized by humans. 13:49 and there is greenish or reddish affliction in the fabric or in the skin or in the warp or in the woof or in any skin vessel, it is an infested affliction. It must be shown to the priest. For ‫“ אדמדם‬redish” and ‫“ ירקרק‬greenish,” see on v. 19 above. 13:50 The priest must look at the affliction. Then he must quarantine the affliction for seven days. Diagnosis of every case of infestation in cloth or leather requires a quarantine period, unlike some skin infestations which can be diagnosed instantly (vv. 3, 11). The requirement here that priests must first look at the discolouration suggests, however, that they could declare it pure immediately (v. 13). 13:51 He must look at the affliction on the seventh day. If the affliction has spread in the fabric or in the warp or in the woof or in the skin whatever function the skin serves, the affliction is an obstinate infestation. It is polluted. Compare the similar rules for skin infestations in vv. 7, 27, 35-36. “Whatever function the skin serves” is Milgrom’s translation (771; also CEB) of the convoluted ‫לכל אשׁר־יעשׂה העור למלאכה‬, literally “for whatever purpose the skin was made for” (cf. the much clearer ‫“ או בכל־מלאכת עור‬or anything made of skin” v. 48). Other translations include “or in any work that is made of skin” (KJV), “whatever be its use” (NAB, NRSV), and “for whatever purpose the leather has been worked” (Hartley 173). MT ‫ממארת‬, a hiphil participle from ‫מאר‬, describes infestations of cloth and of houses (13:51, 52; 14:44), but not of people. Otherwise, it appears only in Ezek. 28:24 to describe thorns and briers. The translations “painful, malignant” (HAL, DCH) would be more appropriate if the term also described human infestations. Other modern suggestions include “spreading” (NRSV) and “destructive” (NIV). Milgrom (812) pointed out that the position of this word in the diagnostic procedure parallels ‫“ נושׁרת‬chronic” in the diagnosis of human infestations (v. 11). A similar meaning is supported by SP,

180

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

which inverts two letters to present all three occurrences in chaps. 13-14 as a participle, ‫“ ממראת‬obstinate” from ‫ מרא‬I (not the noun from the root ‫ראה‬ meaning “from appearance,” contra Hartley 177). SP is supported by LXX ἔμμονος “persistent” (Wevers 193), Vg perseverans, and TgPsJ ‫מחלטא‬ “permanent.” This textual tradition fits the context best (Wenham). 13:52 He must burn the fabric or the warp or the woof in wool or in linen or any skin vessel that has the affliction in it, because it is an obstinate infestation. It must be burned with fire. Humans afflicted with infestation must be isolated (vv. 45-46), but infested materials must be destroyed. Burning is appropriate for cloth and leather materials, while walls must be demolished and dumped outside the city (14:40, 45). 13:53 But if, when the priest looks, the affliction has not spread in the fabric or in the warp or in the woof or in any skin vessel, ‫“ בכל־כלי־עור‬in any skin vessel” (also in v. 52) replaces and clarifies the convoluted phrasing of v. 51. 13:54 the priest must command them to wash what has the affliction in it. Then he must quarantine it again for seven days. Compare the similar rule for bodily infestations in vv. 5 and 33. 13:55 The priest must look at the affliction after it has been washed. If in his opinion the affliction has not changed even though the affliction has not spread, it is polluted. You (sg) must burn it with fire, whether the patch is on its back or on its front. Follow SP ‫“ עיניו‬his opinion” (as in MT vv. 5, 37) rather than MT ‫“ עינו‬its appearance.” The qualification, ‫“ והנגע לא־פשׂה‬even though the affliction has not spread,” expresses a different criterion from that used for bodily infestations. In vv. 2-8 and 29-37, the failure of a discolouration to spread is an indication that it is not infestation (Nihan 2007, 273). ‫“ פחתת‬patch” appears only here in the HB. The related word, ‫פחת‬, describes a pit or a ravine (HAL). LXX translates here with a verb, ἐστήρικται “it has been firmly set,” but Wevers (195) observed that “neither ancients nor moderns know the word.” Vocabulary from the case of infestation in baldness reappears here, such as ‫“ בקרחתו או בגבחתו‬on its back or on its front” which I translated “in the baldness or receding hair-line” in vv. 42-43.

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

181

The sudden appearance of a second person singular command here and in v. 57-58 is surprising (Milgrom 813-14; Hieke 473). The first command to burn the cloth or leather article in v. 52 is third masculine singular and the second is passive. That weighs against Stewart’s suggestion to read the verbs here as third feminine singular because women usually did the weaving and stitching.11 LXX translates passive here. Leviticus regularly uses second person when focusing on activities required of lay people, such as commodity offerings (Lev. 2) and observing food purity (Lev. 11). It is reasonable that priests might require their owners to destroy infested clothing and leather items under the priests’ supervision, just as priests must recruit others to destroy infested walls and houses (14:42-45, all in third person, but note the shift back and forth between third plural and third singular). P’s persuasive rhetoric often shifts person and number to emphasize the audience’s responsibility. The fact that these instructions are addressed to Moses and Aaron alone (v. 1) does not diminish the fact that Leviticus overall is meant for lay audiences (Introduction §3 in Leviticus 1-10), who hear themselves addressed and given responsibility for doing their part in purifying pollution. 13:56 But if when the priest looks, the affliction is colourless after being washed, he must cut it from the fabric or from the skin or from the warp or from the woof. Compare the similar vocabulary for bodily infestations in v. 6. 13:57 If it appears again in fabric or in warp or in woof or in any vessel made of skin, it is blossoming. You (sg) must burn the affliction that is in it with fire. These instructions parallel those for bodily infestations in vv. 7-8 and 35-57. ‫“ פרחת הוא‬it is blossoming” appears already in v. 42. For the second person verb, see discussion of v. 55. 13:58 The fabric or the warp or the woof or any skin vessel that you (sg) washed and the affliction abated in it, you must wash again. Then it is pure. On the second person verbs, see on v. 55 above.

11 David Tabb Stewart, “Does the Priestly Purity Code Domesticate Women?” in Schwartz et al. (2008), 70.

182

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

13:59 This is the law for an infested affliction in fabric of wool or linen, or in the warp or the woof, or in any skin vessel, to declare it pure or to declare it polluted. ‫“ זאת תורת‬this is the law of” is the standard concluding formula for regulations for mitigating sin (chaps. 6-7) and for mitigating pollution (11:46-47; 12:7b; 13:59; 14:32, 54-57; 15:32-33). Many prefer to translate ‫ תורה‬in these cases as “instruction” (NIV; Hartley 54; CEB) or “procedure” (NJPS; Milgrom 771) or “ritual” (NRSV) on the grounds that this material is not really legal, in the modern sense of that term. In the ancient world, however, ritual texts were normative earlier and more widely than legal codes, and collections of written laws gained normative status in the last few centuries B.C.E. on analogy to normative ritual texts (see Introduction §3.2 in Leviticus 1-10, and Exegesis to 6:2b). Written law therefore carried connotations of ritual text, as did the Greek word used to translate these formulas, νόμος “law.” The limitation of this torah formula to infestations of fabrics highlights the absence of any concluding torah formula in this chapter for the diagnosis of skin infestations. Neither do the purification rituals for skin infestation conclude with a torah formula (14:20), though those for a poor person’s purification do (14:32). These irregularities are signs of the redactional growth of these chapters, as many commentators have observed, though modern interpreters tend to overestimate their ability to reconstruct the stages of the text’s growth. The verbal forms in the phrase, ‫“ לטהרו או לטמאו‬to declare it pure or to declare it polluted,” make explicit what has been implicit in the verdicts throughout the chapter, ‫ טהר‬or ‫“ טהור הוא‬it is pure” (vv. 6, 13, 17, 34, 37, 39, 40, 58) and ‫“ טמא הוא‬it is polluted” (vv. 11, 36, 44, 51): the priest’s verbal statement of the verdict is decisive. See Exposition: Structure and Exegesis to v. 3 above. Headings to the Purification Rituals for Cured Skin Infestations (14:1-2a) Purification rituals for infestations occupy most of chap. 14, but torah formulas at the beginning and end mark off the instructions for conducting purification rituals for healed bodily infestation (vv. 3-32) from the instructions for the diagnosis and purification of houses (vv. 33-53). The rituals for purification after skin infestation has been healed take place in several different places across more than one week (see Exposition). They require priests to make animal offerings at both the beginning (vv. 4-7) and end (vv. 10-13, 21-25) of the process.

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis 14:1

183

YHWH spoke to Moses:

Aaron is omitted from this divine speech formula, in contrast to 13:1 and 15:1, but he appears again already in 14:33. The command to repeat this to the Israelites is also omitted, as in 13:1 and 14:33. See further on 13:1. 14:2a This is the law for the infested, when they (ms) have been purified. ‫ זאת תהיה תורת‬adds a verb ‫“ היה‬is” to the usual nominal formula, ‫זאת תורת‬ “this is the law” (see Exegesis to 6:2b, 13:59). Only here in all of MT chaps. 11-15 does the formula stand at the beginning of instructions, as it does regularly in chaps. 6-7, but LXX preserves its introductory role also in 15:3. It is otherwise used in concluding summaries (11:46; 12:7; 13:59; 14:32, 54, 57; 15:32). The qal verb in ‫“ ביום טהרתו‬when they have been purified” indicates the person’s purification, not the priest’s declaration of purity in the piel (13:6; cf. 13:3). They are already pure because they have already been cured of infestation and so can be called ‫“ המטהר‬the purified (person)” (14:4, 7, 8; see on v. 4 below). The Purification Ritual Outside the Camp (14:2b-7) Because infested people must live outside the camp or city (13:46), people who have recovered from this affliction must be inspected there (14:3) and their purification rituals must begin there. This passage is therefore one of only three extraordinary rituals in priestly texts that must take place outside the Tabernacle and outside the camp. The others are the release of the scapegoat in the Day of Mitigations ritual (16:20-22) and the creation of purifying water from the ashes of a red heifer (Num. 19:1-10). Each of these rites deviates fundamentally from the standard offering rituals of Leviticus 1-7. They also resemble each other in certain ways, such as the use of crimson threads, cedar, and hyssop in Lev. 14:4 and Num. 19:6, and the release of an offering animal alive into the wild in Lev. 14:6 and 16:21-22. These similarities indicate that the writers associated legitimate rituals outside the camp with certain distinctive ritual procedures. (Contrast their vague references to illegitimate rituals outside the camp in 17:5, 7.) 14:2b-3 They must be brought to the priest. The priest must go outside the camp, where the priest must look at it. If it appears that the affliction of infestation has been cured in the infested person, ‫ וראה הכהן‬... ‫“ והובא אל־הכהן‬they must be brought to the priest ... the priest must look at it” echoes 13:49-50, which shows that all of the examinations

184

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

of possible infestations described in chap. 13 must take place outside the camp. Milgrom’s (831) rejection of the translation “brought to the priest” in favour of “reported to the priest” makes the sequence of action between vv. 2-3 too linear. Verse 2 instead states the general situation, while v. 3 begins to describe the specific actions necessary in these circumstances (Hieke 496). “Outside the camp” is where infested people must live (13:46). The passive verb, ‫“ נרפא‬has been cured,” emphasizes that the priest does not heal or even provide access to divine healing, but only certifies whether or not healing has already taken place. The evidence for making that determination has been detailed in chap. 13. 14:4

the priest must command them (ms) to take for the purified person two birds – living pure ones – and a cedar stick and crimson threads and hyssop.

MT’s singular verbs here, ‫“ ולקח‬and he must take,” and in v. 5, ‫ושׁהט‬ “and he must slaughter,” are plural in SP LXX and Syr, like MT in 14:36, 40 (Hartley 177). Either way, some unspecified person/s must bring these materials and slaughter the birds “for the purified person,” maybe because cured infested people should not handle them before their purification is complete. Milgrom (832) and Hieke (500) thought LXX’s plural was intended to avoid the impression that the priest must supply these materials. The hitpael participle, ‫למטהר‬, can be translated as either “the purified person” or “the person being purified.” These instructions do not need to clarify whether the ritual itself purifies them or whether it certifies that healing has already purified them since both things must occur for the person to be accepted back into the community and the sanctuary (see Exposition: ... Purification Rituals for Infestation above). ‫“ שׁני־צפרים חיות טהרות‬two birds – living pure ones” excludes inedible (11:13-20) and domesticated birds (1:14), which are called ‫“ עוף‬flyers.” The word, ‫“ צפר‬bird,” in the HB usually describes wild birds. The birds must be wild because one of them must fly away into the wild (14:7) and not return to human settlements (Milgrom 832-33). The instructions do not name the species. The ancient rabbis thought sparrows most likely (m. Neg. 14:1, 5), though nothing here excludes wild birds frequently caught for food, such as pigeons, partridges, ducks, and geese (see the archeozoological evidence summarized by Altmann and Spiciarich 2020). The adjective ‫“ חי‬living” appears five times in four verses to designate wild birds (v. 4), fresh water (vv. 5-6), and the surviving bird (vv. 6-7). Hieke (500) concluded that this leitmotif emphasizes the ritual restoration of life from the threat of death represented by infestation (similarly Gorman 1990, 168; Hartley 195; Milgrom 819; and many others). Because touching animal

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

185

carcasses (11:8, 24-28) and human corpses (Num. 5:2; 19:11-16) conveys pollution, interpreters often argue that infestation, blood, and semen were regarded as polluting because their appearance prompted fears of death (e.g. Milgrom 1002-1003; Hartley 145). However, Leviticus 12-15 does not support that conclusion, which must therefore rely on other biblical sources (e.g. Num. 12:12; Job 18:13) and ancient interpreters instead. Leviticus 13-14 never uses the vocabulary of life or death to describe people or things suffering from infestation. On the contrary, the root ‫ חי‬describes “raw” flesh that is a decisive sign of infestation (13:10, 14, 24). See further in Introduction to Leviticus 11-20 above. ‫“ ארז‬cedar” was a valuable building material (1 Kgs. 5:13; Ezek. 27:5) used in the construction of Solomon’s palace and temple (1 Kgs. 6:9-20). Since the cedar gets dipped in blood along with the other materials, ‫עץ ארז‬ seems to designate a stick or chip of cedar wood. ‫“ שׁני תולעת‬crimson threads” appear prominently in the instructions for constructing the priest’s clothing and the Tabernacle (Exod. 25:4; 26:1, etc.; Num. 4:8). However, the ritual of the red heifer resembles this ritual more by using crimson threads together with cedar wood and hyssop (Num. 19:6). Both of these rituals also take place outside the Tabernacle and outside the camp. Crimson threads (and perhaps cedar) may be used in these extraordinary settings to establish a material link to holy space (so especially Hieke 500). ‫“ אזב‬hyssop” is a plant that grows freely from cracks in walls. It was commonly used for brushing or sprinkling blood to ward off evil (Exod. 12:22), and so is associated with purification (Ps. 51:9). Later interpreters were fascinated by the possible symbolism of these materials. A midrash blamed leprosy on slanderous speech and so interpreted the birds and cedar as symbols of slander and arrogance (Tanḥ. 5:8; also Rashi). Hyssop, which is used in Christian sprinkling rituals, reminded Cassiodorus and others of the salvific blood of Christ (Lienhard 182). 14:5

The priest must command them to slaughter one of the birds over a ceramic basin of fresh water.

The emphasis in vv. 4-5 on the priest commanding others’ actions is unusual in chaps. 13-14. It appears otherwise only in 13:54 in the instructions for diagnosing infestation of cloth and in 14:36, 40, about diagnosing an infested house. In a house’s purification ritual, however, the parallel verses cast the priest as “taking” these materials and slaughtering the birds rather than ordering others to do so (14:49-50). This variation in describing different versions of the same ritual suggests that the language of command here is not very significant.

186

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

Milgrom (836) argued that the command to ‫“ שׁחט‬slaughter” the bird rather than pinch off its head as in 1:14 shows that “it was not treated as a sacrifice.” Hartley (195) denied that this ritual is “expiatory.” Eberhart (2013, 92) therefore followed many others in distinguishing “ein kultisches Opfer” in a temple from “Eliminationsrituale” that could take place anywhere. These claims are weakened by the multivalence of the English word “sacrifice” (and German Opfer) which defies precise definition (see Introduction § 2.3.5 in Leviticus 1-10, and at greater length in Watts 2007, 173-192). Milgrom used the word to reflect the rabbinic distinction between rituals that must be conducted in the sanctuary, which fell into abeyance after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 C.E., and rituals that could still be performed after that time (t. Neg. 8:2). The English word “sacrifice,” however, carries overtones of cultic significance far beyond this distinction. The Hebrew word ‫“ שׁחט‬slaughter,” on the other hand, seems to be a general term for killing (see Exegesis to 1:5 and DCH). Rituals that involve the use of water (also 14:50 and Num. 5:17) require ceramic bowls, perhaps so they can be smashed and thrown away afterwards (Milgrom 1990, 39). See Exegesis to 11:33 above. ‫“ מים חיים‬fresh water” is literally “living water” (see on v. 4 above). 14:6

But as for the living bird, he must take it and the cedar stick and the crimson threads and the hyssop and dip them and the living bird in the blood of the slaughtered bird on the fresh water.

The redundant syntax that uses ‫“ צפר החיה‬living bird” twice and the pronoun for it once more draws pronounced attention to this bird among all the other ritual objects. SP omits the definite articles in the phrase “fresh water,” apparently in imitation of v. 5. The Samaritan oral reading tradition follows suit by vocalizing every mention of water in chaps. 14-15 without a definite article (SPCEM), and is supported by LXX. 14:7

He must sprinkle the person purified of infestation seven times, and declare them pure. Then he must send away the living bird into the open field.

‫ וְ ִט ֲהרוֹ‬piel “and declare them pure” refers in ritual contexts to the priest’s formal declaration of purity (see above on 13:3 and 6; cf. 14:2). Milgrom (839) rejects this usual translation here, because the ritual is not yet complete. But “purity” in P is more ambiguous than his distinctions allow (see further on v. 8 below). LXX καί καθαρὸς ἔσται “and he will be pure” makes purity a consequence of the preceding ritual action, just as it translates ‫וטהר‬

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

187

in vv. 8 and 9 (Wevers 200). But that conventional translation of ‫ וטהר‬is not clearly justified, either (see below). Ritual sprinkling is commonly repeated seven times to be thorough and complete (4:6, 17; 8:11; 16:14-19; see Exegesis to 4:6.). In other rituals, priests sprinkle with their fingers, but here presumably with the hyssop branch, though the instructions do not specify. The living bird must be released ‫“ על־פני השׂדה‬into the open field” where wild birds can be expected to fly away. This phrase in P otherwise describes where Israelites make illegitimate offerings apart from the sanctuary (17:5) and where one might incur pollution accidentally from human corpses (Num. 19:16). In the similar ritual of the Day of Mitigations, however, the living goat for Azazel must be taken ‫“ מדברה‬to the desert” (Lev. 16:21) to ensure that it does not return. The rabbis (m. Neg. 14:2; Sifra) thought that designating a field instead of the desert constituted a test: if the bird returned, it indicated that the infestation had not been cured after all (Schwartz 2000, 221). For the symbolism of releasing a bird, see Exposition: ... Purification Rituals for Infestation. Seven Days of Personal Purification (14:8-9) The cured person must participate actively in their purification rituals. They must launder their clothes, shave completely, and bathe to enact their own purification. Then they can enter the camp but must remain outdoors. They stay in this liminal state for seven days between the rituals outside the camp and the rituals at the Tabernacle. The stages of this ritual transition are a classic rite of passage, as first described by van Gennep (1909) and recognized by most commentators since. 14:8

The purified person must wash their (ms) clothes, shave off all their hair, and bathe in water. They are pure. Afterwards, they may enter the camp, but they must live outside their tent for seven days.

For ‫“ המטהר‬the purified person,” see on v. 4 above. Neither here nor elsewhere does Leviticus specify how one should ‫רחץ‬ “bathe” oneself. The widespread appearance of pools for bathing in Judea in the archeological remains of the late Second Temple period (see Exposition) highlight the absence of such pools in earlier remains. Here, then, “bathing” probably originally meant pouring water over oneself (Katz 2012). ‫“ וטהר‬and they (ms) are pure” here and in v. 9 is usually understood to be the result of the preceding action, “then they are pure” (KJV, NRSV) or “they will be pure” (NJPS, Hartley, Milgrom, CEB, Hieke). NIV tried to

188

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

distinguish kinds of purity by translating here, “then he will be ceremonially clean.” But the priest declared them pure already in v. 4 and the text will declare them so again at the very end of the ritual process in v. 20. These statements that “they are pure” demarcate the three stages of the ritual (Milgrom 859; Hieke 498, 504). The ambiguous meaning of these statements derives from the fact that healing is a precondition for ritual purification (v. 3), not a product of it. Therefore, the infested person must already be seen to be clean of infestation before purification can start (v. 4). However, full integration into Israel’s social and religious life can only take place after a multi-stage rite of passage is complete (v. 20). Both the initial state of being healed and every stage in the purification ritual are described as ‫טהר‬ “becoming pure.” The goal of the ritual is to ensure that this is true at every stage. Erbele-Küster (2017, 146-48) observed that “purity” in the HB and in P refers to three things: “the process of purification, the declaration of purity, and the state of purity.” Translation should therefore try to preserve the Hebrew text’s ambiguity. On the seven day transition bracketed by purification rituals at the beginning and end, see above in Exposition: ... Purification Rituals for Infestation. Both ancient and modern interpreters have supposed from the restriction, “they must live outside their tents,” that even at this stage people cured of infestation might still pollute food (4QMMT B 66-68; Milgrom 993; Harrington 2004, 91). 14:9

On the seventh day, they (ms) must shave off all their hair – their head, their beard, their eyebrows – all their hair they must shave off. They must wash their clothes and bathe their flesh in water. They are pure.

Shaving was often added to washing in ancient purification rituals. A shaved face was standard grooming in ancient Egypt, as biblical writers knew (Gen. 41:14). Shaved heads distinguished pure (wab) Egyptian priests starting in the late second millennium B.C.E. (Quack 2013, 120). Shaving was also required to enter Hittite temples (Taggar-Cohen 2006, 61). The priestly literature of the Hebrew Bible, however, often prohibits shaving. Israel’s priests must not shave their heads or beards (Lev. 21:5; Ezek. 44:20). Nazirites must not shave, except at their dedication and if they accidentally suffer corpse pollution (Num. 6:5, 9, 18). This exception for Nazirites reinforces this chapter’s implication that, in Israel, shaving bald was reserved for people undergoing purification from the most extreme pollutions (cf. Deut. 21:12). Sifra interpreted the redundancy of saying “all their hair” twice in addition to listing head, beard, and eyebrows as intending to exclude pubic hair. Milgrom (843) argued the opposite, that the repetition indicates shaving the

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

189

whole body. The redundancy is explained better by the literary relationship between the phrases. The command to shave takes a chiastic arch structure with the verb ‫“ יגלח‬they (ms) must shave” bracketing “all their hair” which in turn brackets the three varieties of hair – head, beard, and eyebrows – at the centre (Paran 1983, 33; Hartley 178; Milgrom 843). The literary chiasms here and in the following section reproduce in the experience of listening and reading audiences the form of the experience, if not the contents, of people underoing purification through this ritual sequence, which also takes a chiastic arch structure: seven days of waiting in a liminal state is marked off at each end by shaving and bathing, while the entire sequence begins and ends with animal offerings. By adding the word ‫“ בשׂר‬flesh” to the command to bathe (cf. v. 8), this verse alludes to the prominence of “flesh” in the diagnostic instructions for infestation in chap. 13, where the word appears thirteen times. The Purification Ritual at the Tabernacle (14:10-20) Only after priestly purification rituals outside the camp (vv. 3-7) and seven days of self-purification inside the camp (vv. 8-9) can persons cured of skin infestation approach the Tabernacle for the final stage of their purification ritual. Here priests mitigate for them with animal offerings at the altar in the Tabernacle plaza. Most interpreters recognize that vv. 11-20 fall into a chiastic arch bracketed by key words: ‫“ טהר‬purify” in vv. 11 and 20; ‫“ שׁמן‬oil,” ‫“ חטאת‬sin offering,” ‫“ עלה‬rising offering,” and ‫“ לפני יהוה‬before YHWH” in vv. 12-13 and 18-19; ‫“ דם האשׁם‬blood of the guilt offering” in vv. 14 and 17; ‫יתן‬/‫נתן‬ ‫“ הכהן על־תנוך אזן המטהר הימנית ועל־בהן ידו הימנית ועל־בהן רגלו הימנית‬the priest must smear it on the purified person’s right ear lobe and on the thumb of their (ms) right hand and on the big toe of their right foot,” in vv. 14 and 17; ‫“ שׁמן‬oil” in vv. 15 and 17. These brackets leave v. 16’s description of sprinkling oil before YHWH at the centre of the arch (for translations structured in the form of this arch, see Milgrom 847; Hieke 505). When read aloud, however, the effect of such large-scale literary arches does not emphasize the central verse (which can only be identified in retrospect) so much as promote recognition of repetition in the second half of the structure (see Introduction §1.3 in Leviticus 1-10). In chap. 14, that effect is intensified by the repetition of the entire arch in vv. 21-32. In addition to these paragraph-long chiasms, almost every verse in these two paragraphs repeats vocabulary two, and sometimes three, times. The repetition is most obvious in v. 14, which is repeated in v. 17, but extends to most verses of these paragraphs. This repetition within verses and between parts of the duplicated arch structure gives 14:10-32 a sing-song effect when

190

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

the Hebrew is read aloud. The Torah is, of course, usually chanted when read aloud in synagogue services, as are biblical texts in the liturgical traditions of many churches (see further in Watts 2017, 141-143). A medieval, possibly older, tradition of cantilation is recorded in MT’s accentuation system. Observations here about small- and large-scale repetitions suggest that the contents of this chapter, at least, may have encouraged this tendency to sing the scriptures. 14:10 On the eighth day, they (ms) must take two perfect sheep and one perfect yearling ewe and a commodity (offering) of three-tenths of semolina mixed with oil and one log of oil. For translating ‫ תמים‬as “perfect,” see Exegesis to 1:3. For ‫“ כבשׂ‬sheep,” see on 1:10. The sex of the first two sheep is not specified, though the description of the yearling as female, an “ewe,” and their use for different offerings support the assumption that the other two sheep are male (so SP and LXX). The three sheep get used for a guilt offering (v. 12), a sin offering (v. 19), and a rising offering (vv. 19-20). Guilt and rising offerings require males (1:10; 5:14) while sin offerings require females (4:32). The offering rules in Lev. 1-7 do not specify the sheep’s age, but purification after giving birth in 12:6 also concludes by offering a yearling, though in that case as a rising offering. For semolina commodity offerings, see Exegesis to 2:1, where the amount of semolina is not specified. Here, ‫“ שׁלשׁה עשׂרנים סלת‬three-tenths of semolina” fails to name the unit of dry measure, which is most likely an ephah. The wet volume unit is a ‫ לג‬log, a word which appears only in this chapter in the HB, but also once in Ugaritic as a measure of oil (KTU 1.148.21). Estimates of the amounts required by this verse range from 3 to 6 litres of semolina and a 1/4 to 1/2 litre of olive oil.12 The Mishnah reports the additional requirement that people newly purified of infestation bathe at the entrance to the temple (m. Neg. 14:8). A Qumran document (4Q 394-99) further restricted them from eating any holy meat from an amity slaughter offering until nightfall. Milgrom (848-49) observed that both restrictions “reflects a sensitivity of the Temple authorities, which was amplified by the rabbis, to prevent the pollution of the sanctuary at all costs.” Justin Martyr interpreted the infested person’s semolina offering as foreshadowing the bread of the Christian Eucharist (Lienhard 182).

12 Cf. Marvin A. Powell, “Weights and Measures,” ABD 6:897-908; and Susan Rattray in Milgrom 890-901.

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

191

14:11 The priest who declared purity must station the purified person with these things before YHWH in the entrance of the meeting tent. After the week-long purification rituals outside and inside the camp (vv. 1-9), the person cured of infestation may now enter the outer court of the sanctuary, “the entrance of the meeting tent” (see Exegesis to 1:3). Only vocalization differentiates the piel participle in ‫“ הכהן המטהר‬the priest who declared purity,” referring to v. 7 (cf. Exegesis to 13:6, 14:2), from the hiphil participle in ‫“ האישׁ המטהר‬the purified person,” which refers to vv. 8-9. 14:12 The priest must take one sheep and incinerate it as a guilt (offering) with the log of oil. He must raise them as a raised (offering) before YHWH. This is the only offering ritual in the HB in which a guilt offering precedes the sin offering (v. 19). Smearing its blood on the healed person (v. 14) apparently renders them fit to participate in the other offerings (so the ancient rabbis and Milgrom 851). Guilt offerings are usually required to mitigate for sacrilege (5:15). Milgrom (856) observed that sacrilege caused King Uzziah’s infestation (2 Chr. 26:16-19) and concluded that the guilt offering is required here just in case the infestation was punishment for sacrilege (also Hieke 507). Other commentators have speculated that the guilt offering compensates God for the loss of labour while the person was infested (Snaith 75), or for the loss of their offerings (Wenham 210), or for the fact that the image of God in the person was marred by their infestation (Hartley 197). Levine (1974, 111) thought that the blood of the guilt offering here was meant to serve a prophylactic function to immunize the person against reinfestation.13 Carmichael (2006, 22-23) found here an allusion to the Philistine’s guilt offering in 1 Sam. 6:8, though that takes a very different form. Leviticus, as usual, does not explain the meaning of the ritual’s details, which were likely interpreted in various ways by the priests who conducted them and by the people who experienced them (see Introduction §2.3.6 in Leviticus 1-10). For the ‫“ תנופה‬raised offering,” see Exegesis to 7:30. The raised offering is usually one piece of an amity slaughter offering (7:30, 8:27; 9:21; 10:15; 23:20; Num. 6:20). Only here and in v. 24 is it a guilt offering and consists of the whole animal. Since it would be difficult to raise an entire sheep, t. Neg. 8:9 describes the priest (see v. 24) raising its hoof instead (Milgrom 852). 13 Also Christophe Lemardelé, “Une solution pour le ᾿āšām du lépreux,” VT 54 (2004), 208-15.

192

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

14:13 They must slaughter the sheep in the place where they slaughter the sin (offering) and the rising (offering), in the holy place, because like the sin (offering), the guilt (offering) is the priest’s. It is most holy. MT’s singular “he must slaughter” is plural in LXX and SP, as in LXX 1:5, 6, 11, so the verb’s number reflects MT’s and LXX’s usual formulation rather than the specific context of this ritual. Here, as in chap. 1, the texts seem unconcerned to specify exactly who must kill and butcher the animal (see Exegesis to 1:5), so I translate with the plural subject which is vaguer in English. The “holy place” where offerings were slaughtered lay to the north of the courtyard altar (1:11; 4:24). Leviticus 7:7 has already established that the meat of sin and guilt offerings belongs to the priests. Offerings that only priests may eat are labelled “most holy” (see Exegesis to 6:10). 14:14 The priest must take some of the blood of the guilt (offering) and the priest must smear it on the purified person’s right ear lobe and on the thumb of their (ms) right hand and on the big toe of their right foot. This exact phrase about anointing the right ear lobe, right thumb, and right big toe appeared two times in 8:23-24 to describe the ordination of the high priest and the other priests with oil. It is repeated in vv. 17, 25, 28 below. Here and in v. 25, it describes smearing offering blood on persons, while the rest of these phrases describe smearing oil. 14:15 The priest must take some of the log of oil and pour it into the priest’s left palm. ‫“ הכחן‬the priest” is repeated a second time here and in v. 26, perhaps because the second phrase initiates a four-fold sequence of variations on the phrase that focuses attention on the oil in the priest’s palm: “in the priest’s left palm” (vv. 15, 26), “in his left palm” (vv. 16, 27), “in his palm” (vv. 17, 28), “in the priest’s palm” (vv. 18, 29). Despite the extraordinary things happening to the purified person in these verses, the repetition emphasizes the priest’s hands as the agents of the action. 14:16 The priest must dip his right finger into the oil in his left palm and sprinkle some of the oil with his finger seven times before YHWH. On ‫הזה‬, hiphil from ‫נזה‬, “to sprinkle,” see Exegesis to 4:6. Seven-fold sprinkling of oil is reminiscent of the sanctification of the Tabernacle (8:11). Since the priest is standing in the Tabernacle plaza (v. 13) and so already ‫“ לפני יהוה‬before YHWH” (see Exegesis to 1:3), this phrase here may or may not indicate in the direction of the Tabernacle tent.

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

193

14:17 The priest must smear some of the remaining oil in his palm on the purified person’s right ear lobe and on the thumb of their (ms) right hand and on the big toe of their right foot on top of the blood of the guilt (offering). Cf. v. 14 above. Smearing oil on the right ear lobe, right thumb, and right big toe is reminiscent of the sanctification of priests (8:23-24) in the same chapter where the Tabernacle is sanctified with oil. Thus 14:16-17 evokes strong parallels with the rituals for sanctifying both priests and Tabernacle. 14:18 The priest must smear the rest of the oil in his palm on the head of the purified person. So the priest mitigates for them (ms) before YHWH. The priest’s action with the oil is described by the generic verb ‫נתן‬, which I translate here consistently with vv. 14 and 17 as “smear.” When anointing priests, oil is ‫“ יצק‬poured” on the high priest’s head (8:12) and “sprinkled” on the other priests (8:30; see Exegesis to 8:12). So the action here is not an anointing (the verb ‫ משׁח‬does not appear), but is more about disposing of the rest of the oil in the priest’s hand. Milgrom (854-55) described rituals from Egypt and Ugarit in which smearing oil on a person’s head also indicated an elevation in their status. For the mitigation (‫ )כפר‬formula, see Exegesis to 4:20. It is usually followed by the statement, ‫“ וטהר‬and they (ms) are pure,” and the combination appears in its usual position at the end of the ritual (14:20). Verse 19 also mentions the priest’s mitigation with the sin offering, so together these verses produce a three-fold emphasis on priestly mitigation at the end of this ritual. Since the complicated sequence of rituals for persons purified of infestation extends over more than one week and in three different locations (outside the camp, outside the person’s tent, and in the plaza of the Tabernacle) and they have already been declared pure (14:8-9), the triple mention of mitigation at the very end of the sequence emphasizes that only now is the process of purification finally complete. 14:19 The priest must make the sin (offering) and mitigate the purified person from their (ms) pollutions. Then they (ms) must slaughter the rising (offering), Mitigation (‫ )כפר‬is the usual function of sin offerings (Lev. 4:20, 26, 31). Instead of ‫“ מטמאתו‬from their (ms) pollutions,” LXX has ἀπὸ τὴς ἁμαρτίας “from their (ms) sins.” LXX thereby makes infestation explicitly a punishment for sin, unlike MT (Wevers 206). See Exposition: The Rhetoric of Sinful Disease for discussion of this common interpretation.

194

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

14:20 and the priest must raise the rising (offering) and the commodity (offering) on the altar. So the priest mitigates for them and they are pure. The use of its cognate verb, “to raise,” with the noun, ‫“ עלה‬rising offering,” is rare in Leviticus (otherwise only at 17:8) but common elsewhere in the HB (see Exegesis to 1:3). Therefore, ‫“ העלה‬he raised” here does not describe the priest’s physical motion but rather the ritual action of presenting a rising offering and the semolina commodity offering (cf. v. 12 using a different verb). Semolina mixed with oil conventionally accompanied rising offerings (Num. 15:3-4). As usual, the conventional mitigation formula followed by its effect, “they are pure,” summarizes all of the priests’ ritual activities at the altar that have been described in the preceding verses (see Exegesis to 4:20 and Janowski 1982, 232, 259; Rendtorff 177; Eberhart 2002, 136), not just the effects of the sin offering as Milgrom (857) maintained. The Poor Person’s Purification Ritual at the Tabernacle (14:21-32) This paragraph reproduces the previous ritual with modifications for the purified person’s poverty (14:21, 22, 30, 32; see Exegesis before 14:10 above). But instead of simply making provision for cheaper sin, rising, and commodity offerings, it reproduces the entire ritual which emphasizes the unchanged manipulation of the blood of the ram guilt offering (vv. 24-29). So this paragraph repeats the language and chiastic arch of the previous paragraph (Milgrom 859-60), including verbatim repetition of the application of blood and oil to the purified person’s ear, finger, and toe (vv. 25, 28; cf. vv. 14, 17). The four-fold repetition of this vivid ritual image would have ingrained it in the memory of a listening audience (see Exegesis: Structure above). 14:21 But if they (ms) are poor and do not have enough at hand, they must take one sheep guilt (offering) as a raised offering to mitigate for them, and one-tenth of semolina mixed with oil as a commodity (offering), and a log of oil, ‫“ אין ידו משׂגת‬do not have enough at hand” (cf. the related idiom in 5:7 and 12:8) means they cannot afford such expensive offerings. According to the offering instructions of Leviticus 1-5, the same kind of offering can be more or less expensive so even poor people can present them. The exception is the guilt offerings which always consists of a ram (5:18) as it does here, though 5:15 allows the priests to assess a monetized equivalent. However, the equivalent in silver would not provide the guilt offering’s blood that is

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

195

needed for this ritual (v. 25). So this rule requires just one sheep instead of the three sheep in v. 10, and one-third of the semolina required before. 14:22 and two landfowl or two of any kind of pigeon that they (ms) have at hand, one for a sin (offering) and one for a rising (offering). For the translation, “have at hand,” see on v. 21. Two birds replace the more expensive two sheep of v. 10, just as they do for the new mother who cannot afford much for her purification offerings (12:8; cf. also 1:14; 5:7). For the translation “landfowl or any kind of pigeon,” see Translating Animal Names in Exposition to Leviticus 11. To ‫“ אחד‬one,” LXX adds the definite article, as in MT 14:31. Milgrom (862) defended MT because the priest’s choice of the first bird is undetermined, while the second is determined by his first choice. 14:23 They (ms) must bring them on the eighth day to the one who declared them pure, to the priest in the entrance of the meeting tent before YHWH. See on 14:10-11. 14:24 The priest must take the guilt (offering) sheep and the log of oil and the priest must raise them as a raised offering before YHWH. This verse abbreviates 14:12. 14:25 The priest must slaughter the sheep for the guilt (offering). The priest must take some of the blood of the guilt (offering) and the priest must smear it on the purified person’s right ear lobe and on the thumb of their (ms) right hand and on the big toe of their right foot. The first phrase abbreviates parts of 14:12-13. The instructions for smearing blood on the purified person reproduce 14:14 verbatim. 14:26 The priest must pour some of the oil into the priest’s left palm. See on 14:15. 14:27 The priest must sprinkle with his right finger some of the oil in his left palm seven times before YHWH. This verse rearranges the phrases in 14:16.

196

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

14:28 The priest must smear some of the oil that is in his palm on the purified person’s right ear lobe and on the thumb of their (ms) right hand and on the big toe of their right foot on the spots of blood of the guilt (offering). See on 14:17. This verse adds ‫“ מקום‬place of, spot” which is also added to 14:17 by LXX, Syr, and TgPsJ. 14:29 He must smear some of the oil in the priest’s palm on the head of the purified person to mitigate for them (ms) before YHWH. ‫“ מן־השׁמן‬some of the oil” as in v. 26-28 replaces ‫“ חנותר בשׁמן‬the rest of the oil” in the parallel verse (v. 18), but the latter phrase makes more sense for describing the final ritual act with oil. The reading here is probably a memory variant (see Introduction §2.3.1 in Leviticus 1-10, 45). 14:30-31 From the landfowl or pigeons that they (ms) have at hand, he must make one a sin (offering) and one a rising (offering) with the commodity (offering) upon the altar. So the priest mitigates for the purified person before YHWH. Compare v. 30 with v. 22. ‫“ אחד‬one” appears three times in these two verses. The first is redundant. The phrase, ‫“ את אשׁר־תשׂיג ידו‬that they have at hand,” at the beginning of v. 31 is missing in LXX, Pesh, and Vg. It is obvious dittography for the end of v. 30 (BHS, BHQ 99), and so is omitted here. With the repetitions of ‫אחד‬ “one,” vv. 30-31 provide evidence of an unusual degree of textual disruption for Leviticus (see Introduction §1.2 in Leviticus 1-10). 14:32 This is the law for someone who was afflicted by infestation and who does not have enough at hand when they are purified. See on 14:2 and 14:21. LXX has a conjunction “and” between the two relative clauses. Milgrom (863) supported this reading because it explains why the infested person is described with a relative clause instead of as ‫חמצרה‬ “the infested (person)” as in 14:2. Infestations of Houses (14:33-53) Like clothing (13:47-58), houses may also become infested. Here, ‫צרעת‬ “infestation” must refer to mould. Heller, Heller, and Sasson (2003) suggested Stachybotrys mould spores that cause green-black growths in houses

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

197

as well as rashes and respiratory problems for their inhabitants. Milgrom (864-65) summarized references to mould infestations in Mesopotamian omen literature and in Hurrian and Hittite apotropaic rituals.14 He observed that, in contrast to these cultures, Leviticus neither interprets the mould as an ominous omen nor suggests that infested houses could infect their inhabitants.15 Feder (2014, 12-14) observed that these parallels show that P’s idea of pollution resembles and draws from traditions about contagion that Israel shared with other ancient cultures. The position of this paragraph seems like a secondary appendix after the rituals of purification in 14:1-32. Koch (1959, 87) and Milgrom (863) observed, however, that the purification ritual for houses is modelled on that for people and is integrated with the description of house infestation, so the paragraph follows naturally from what precedes it. 14:33 YHWH spoke to Moses and to Aaron: On the omission of the usual command (e.g. in 12:2) to repeat these regulations to the Israelites, see above on 13:1. 14:34 When you enter the land of Canaan which I am giving you as property, and I put an affliction of infestation in a house on the land of your property, YHWH’s first-person speech claiming to cause infestations sets a very different tone than the impersonal descriptions of pollutions up to this point in Leviticus (Nihan 2007, 276; Hieke 515). It may have been prompted by anticipating a situation involving stone houses after the conquest of Canaan (tents infested by mould would be covered by the instructions for purifying cloth in 13:47-58) which leads to repeating the divine promise of the land of Canaan (cf. Deut. 32:39). YHWH, however, gives no indication as to why someone’s house might suffer a mould infestation (see Exposition above). Much interpretive effort has been devoted to distinguishing ‫“ אחזה‬property” as usage rights to land granted conditionally by a sovereign or by another transaction from ‫ נחלה‬as inherited inalianable property (see Milgrom 866-67, 2171-73 and Exegesis to 25:25 below). However, the distinction is diluted by Milgrom’s observation that Leviticus uses ‫ אחזה‬while Deuteronomy uses ‫נחלה‬ exclusively (but note the verbal use of ‫“ נחל‬bequeath” in Lev. 25:46), while the terms are conflated in Num. 27:7; 32:35; 35:2. The Jubilee legislation 14 See also Gernot Wilhelm, “Reinheit und Heiligkeit: Zur Vorstellung altanatolischer Ritualistik,” in Fabry-Jüngling (1999), 197-217. 15 Following Samuel A. Meier, “House Fungus: Mesopotamia and Israel (Lev 14:33-53),” RB 96/2 (1989), 184-92.

198

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

uses ‫ אחזה‬for inherited land that cannot be sold permanently, but also for enslaved foreign chattel whose distinctive characteristic is that they can be bought and sold permanently (Lev. 25:10, 24, 34, 41, 45-46). Both first-person address and this terminology lead many to identify the compositional hand of H in this verse (Elliger 176; Knohl 1995, 95; Milgrom 867). However, Nihan (2007, 276) defended P here as the editor of older rules, because P uses similar language in Exod. 6:8. 14:35 the person whose house it is must come and inform the priest, “(Something) like an affliction has appeared inside my house.” The ‫ ב‬preposition on ‫“ בבית‬in my house” surely means “inside,” since the arid climate inhibits mould growth on outside walls. 14:36 The priest must command that they (pl) clear the house before the priest comes to look at the affliction, so that everything in the house is not polluted. After that, the priest must come to look at the house. This verse allows the homeowner to remove furnishings and other possessions from the house to avoid having them shut up along with the house during its quarantine (v. 38). Nevertheless, people and their possessions in a house during its quarantine period only suffer mild pollution that can be purified by time and washing (vv. 46-47). Of course, if a mould infestation appeared on cloth or leather, then the rules of 13:47-58 would apply to them. This provision for rescuing the house’s contents shows no concern that the house might already have infected its furnishings. That is because, unlike modern beliefs in bacterial diseases carried by invisibly small creatures, the priestly writers regard infestation as very visible. All the diagnostic procedures of chaps. 13-14 presuppose that this pollution is present only where it can be seen, as are the other polluting substances described in Leviticus 11-15. 14:37 The priest must look at the affliction. If the affliction in the walls of the house is greenish or reddish dents that appear deeper than the (surface of the) walls, The syntax follows that for diagnosing infestations of human skin (13:3). ‫“ שׁקערורה‬dent” appears only here in the HB. Possible etymological connections with ‫“ קערה‬a bowl” or ‫“ שׁקע‬to sink” support the ancient versions, which translated “depression, cavity” (HAL; DCH; Hartley 179). Plaster walls (vv. 40-43) are susceptible to denting. For ‫“ אדמדם‬redish” and ‫“ ירקרק‬greenish,” see on 13:19 above. Compare “deeper than the (surface of the) walls” to “deeper than the skin” in 13:20 and 13:3.

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

199

14:38 the priest must exit the house into the courtyard of the house and he must quarantine the house for seven days. For ‫“ הסגיר‬quarantine,” see above on 13:4. 14:39 The priest must return on the seventh day and look. If the affliction has spread on the walls of the house, Cf. 13:5. 14:40 the priest must command that they (pl) pull out the infested stones and throw them away in a polluted place outside the city. The indeterminate plural subject of “pull out” and “throw away” allows also for translating passive with Milgrom (871). Priests would not be expected to do this manual labour themselves. ‫“ מחוץ לעיר‬outside the city” replaces the usual “outside the camp” because these regulations apply to stone buildings after Israel’s settlement in Canaan (v. 34). The phrase, ‫“ מקום טמא‬a polluted place,” to refer to a specific spot outside the city, appears only here and v. 45, though other references suggest that many spaces outside the camp or city were regarded as polluted (13:46; 16:22, 26). On the other hand, the instructions for some sin offerings refer to a pure place outside the camp or city for dumping offering carcasses (4:11-12, 21; 6:4 Eng. 6:11). 14:41 They (pl) must scrape the inside of the house all around, and pour out the dust which they scraped in a polluted place outside the city. ‫ יקצע‬is translated plural, “they must scrape,” by SP and all the ancient translations and in conformity with the surrounding verbs. ‫ מבית‬means “inside,” frequently in contrast to ‫“ מחוץ‬outside” (Ezek. 7:15; 1 Kgs 7:9; 2 Kgs. 6:30; DCH 2:163) ‫ הקצו‬here and in v. 43 appears to be hiphil from ‫“ קצה‬cut off, break off” (DCH; Hartley 179; Milgrom 873, who pointed to its use with this meaning in 2 Kgs. 10:32) or possibly ‫קוץ‬. BHS and HAL argue that the forms should be corrected following LXX and the targums to ‫ הקצעו‬and ‫ הקציע‬from ‫ קצע‬hiphil “to scrape,” which appears earlier in this verse. But ‫ קצע‬is itself a rare form, occurring with this meaning only here, though the noun ‫מקצעה‬, also a hapax, clearly refers to some kind of knife in Isa. 44:13 (Rashi; Milgrom 872-73). Either root supports translating “scrape” in this context. Milgrom (873) plausibly suggested that the scraping is diagnostic, “to ascertain whether the fungus has penetrated the stone.”

200

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

14:42 They (pl) must take other stones to replace the stones, and take (ms) other dust to plaster the house. See Milgrom (873) for rabbinic reflections on the change from plural to singular verbs in the middle of this verse. SP, LXX, and Pesh read plural verbs throughout. 14:43 If the affliction returns and blossoms in the house after pulling out the stones and after scraping the house and after plastering it, For ‫“ פרח‬blossoms,” see on 13:12 above. 14:44 the priest must come and look. If the affliction has spread in the house, there is an obstinate infestation in the house. It is polluted. For MT ‫“ פשׂה‬it has spread,” SP reads ‫“ פרח‬it has blossomed” (also in v. 48). Milgrom (877) observed that “blossomed” is a better description since the original mould has been removed and therefore cannot “spread,” but ‫פשׂה‬ “spread” is likely the original reading because it draws an analogy with spreading skin infestation (13:5, 6, 7, etc.) while ‫“ פרח‬blossom” describes a pure state in 13:12-13. On reading SP ‫“ ממראת‬obstinate” instead of MT ‫ממארת‬, see on 13:51 above. 14:45 They (ms) must tear down the house – its stones, its timbers, and all of the house’s (plaster) dust. They (ms) must take (it) away to a polluted place outside the city. Many commentators plausibly regard the verbs (singular in MT, plural in SP and the ancient translations) as virtual passives. For the location “outside the city,” see on 14:40 above. 14:46 Anyone who enters the house while it is quarantined becomes polluted until evening. The polluting effects of entering an infested house are like those for coming into contact with genital discharges (15:5-11, 16-18, 21-24, 27). They are not as severe as entering a house that contains a human corpse, which requires seven days of purification (Num. 19:14). 14:47 Anyone who sleeps in the house must wash their (ms) clothes. Anyone who eats in the house must wash their clothes. The ancient rabbis (m. Neg. 13:9-10; Sifra) understood v. 47 as describing more severe pollution than v. 46, because only sleeping and eating in the

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

201

house requires washing clothes, but entering it does not. Milgrom (876-77) tested their various explanations to decide that the verse distinguishes between shorter and longer periods of time spent in the infested house. Both ancient and modern interpretations presuppose that Leviticus’s prose is technical and precise. This commentary has challenged that presupposition because of the many – apparently intentional – ambiguities and word plays in Leviticus (see Exegesis to 4:3; 5:6, 15, 19; 10:3; and Watts 2007, 85-96). Many verses have been composed more for rhetorical effect than for legal precision. The composition of this chapter reflects such rhetorical goals by its sing-song repetition within and between the two nearly identical versions of instructions for Tabernacle purification rituals in 14:10-20 and 14:21-32. The parallel syntax of 14:46-47 also looks like it is intended for rhetorical effect. ‫והבא על־הבית‬ ‫כל ימי הסגיר אתו‬ ‫יטמא עד־הערב‬ ‫והשׁכב בבית‬ ‫יכבס את־בגדיו‬ ‫והאכל בבית‬ ‫יכבס את־בגדיו‬

Anyone who enters the house  while it is quarantined   becomes polluted until evening. Anyone who sleeps in the house   must wash their clothes. Anyone who eats in the house   must wash their clothes.

This parallel construction is familiar from Hebrew poetry. The extra middle line in v. 46, “while it is quarantined,” describes a condition that is presupposed in both couplets of the following verse, as all interpreters recognize. The point is that anyone who enters and carries on any activity in the house suffers a mild case of pollution. The parallel construction of the other lines indicate that the different outcomes, “polluted until evening” and “wash their clothes,” describe different aspects of the same set of actions (and perhaps assume others, such as bathing; see on 13:34; 14:8), which are required to cleanse the pollution of those who enter an infested house. 14:48 But if the priest comes and looks, and the affliction has not spread in the house after the house has been plastered, the priest must declare the house pure, because the affliction has been cured. See on 14:3. This verse expresses the alternative to the conditions described in v. 43. 14:49 To sin-offer the house, he must take two birds and a cedar stick and crimson threads and hyssop. The parallel in 14:4 has ‫“ למטהר‬for the purified (person),” which leads one to expect ‫ לבית מטהר‬or ‫“ למטהר הבית‬for the purified house” here. Instead, this verse reads ‫“ לחטא את־הבית‬to sin-offer the house.”

202

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

The verb ‫ חטא‬piel has, to this point in Leviticus, always meant to offer a sin offering (see Exegesis to 8:15; also 6:19; 9:15). Most translators, starting with LXX, translate ‫ חטא‬piel here and in v. 52 as “to cleanse, purify, purge,” a privative contrast to ‫ חטא‬qal “to sin,” because the ritual with the birds is not labelled a sin offering and does not conform to the instructions for bird sin offerings in 5:7-9. ‫ חטא‬in the piel and hitpael, however, appears only in ritual contexts that also explicitly describe ‫ חטאת‬sin offerings. Translating the verb as “purify” obscures why it is used rather than ‫“ טהר‬purify” or even ‫“ כפר‬mitigate,” which also appear in these contexts. Among the very few exceptions to this ancient and modern tradition of translation are Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, who used a neologism, περιαμαρτίσαι, which takes ‫ חטא‬as meaning “sin” (Wevers 220). Kiuchi (2003, 107-118) argued that ‫ חטא‬piel means “to uncover,” a privative contrast to his novel translation of the qal verb as “to hide oneself.” His criticisms of the usual translations are well taken, but his alternatives are not improvements (see the review by Reinhard Achenbach, RBL 1 [2006], and Exegesis to 4:3 above). Feder (2011, 100-105) maintained that the verb ‫ חטא‬in the piel and hitpael is instead a denominative verb derived from ‫“ חטאת‬sin offering” (rather than privative from the qal verb or denominative from the synonymous noun meaning “sin,” as in GKC §52.h). He argued that ‫ חטא‬piel and hitpael refer “not to the effects of the act” but sometimes to the whole sequence of making a sin offering and at other times to the specific ritual actions of sprinkling or daubing that are performed with a sin offering. Feder (2011, 103) concluded that “this semantic nuance is impossible to capture in translation, so that we have no recourse but to use verbs such as ‘cleanse’ or ‘purify’.” He suggested that its meaning developed over time from “to perform a sin offering” in earlier texts to “perform a purification rite” in somewhat later ones. Kiuchi and Feder presented important critiques of the dominant translation tradition of the verb ‫ חטא‬in the piel and hitpael. Feder’s alternative translation is particularly worth considering. I discuss the larger implications of this change for the interpretation of purity and purification in Exposition: History and Interpretation of Purification Rituals for Infestation above. Here, I develop Feder’s analysis for the translation of this verb. Aside from the traditional translation of ‫ חטא‬as “purify” in vv. 49 and 52, Leviticus 14 does not describe rituals as actively “purifying” (either with ‫חטא‬ or ‫ )טהר‬people or things. Its instructions rather guide ritual enactments of the priest’s declaration of purity after the pollution has already been alleviated. That is explicitly clear from the fact that assertions of the cured person’s or thing’s purity invariably precede rituals they must yet perform (14:7, 8, 9, 20, 48). This conflict has led some interpreters to theorize about various degrees of purity in order to suggest that the person or object was only

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

203

partially purified after the priest’s declaration and completely purified only at the conclusion of the ritual (e.g. Gersonides; Milgrom 842; Gilders 2004, 131; Gane 2005, 176; cf. the nuanced discussion of Kiuchi 1987, 60, with my statement on v. 8 above). ‫ חטא‬piel with the same meaning also describes using the ashes of the red heifer to purify death pollution (Num. 19:19). Since the ashes can be applied to oneself, ‫ חטא‬hitpael with the same meaning but reflexive, “to sin-offer oneself,” appears more commonly in that chapter (19:12 twice, 13, 20, and elsewhere in Numbers; cf. Frevel 2013, 376, 392). The ritual of the red heifer resembles the rituals of Leviticus 14:3-7, 48-53 by (1) its location outside the Tabernacle, (2) the ritual manipulation of cedar, crimson threads, and hyssop, and (3) the sprinkling of previously polluted people or things with water mixed with either the blood (Lev. 14) or the ashes (Num. 19) from an animal offering. To this list we must add the use of ‫ חטא‬piel to describe the sprinkling of previously infested houses (but not people) and of people who have purified themselves of death pollution. The piel stem of the verb ‫ חטא‬undoubtedly means to make a sin offering in Lev. 6:19, 9:15, and 2 Chr. 29:24, and probably in Exod. 29:36 as well. Other uses of it that are usually translated “to purify” can just as easily be translated “to sin-offer” (contra, among others, Milgrom 253; Kiuchi 2003, 108; Gilders 2004, 30-31; Feder 2011, 102-3; Frevel 2013, 376). The piel verb appears in Ezek. 43:20, 22-23 and 45:18 to describe the effects of a ‫“ חטאת‬sin offering.” Psalm 51:9 uses the piel verb to plead for forgiveness, which according to Leviticus 4 is another outcome from a sin offering. (In fact, Ps. 51:9’s reference to hyssop indicates an allusion to the ritual described by Lev. 14:3-7.) So in these cases, the meaning “sin-offer” alludes to the expected outcomes from a sin offering. These outcomes, however, could be connotations associated with the sin offering rather than being the denotative meaning of ‫ חטא‬piel itself. The use of the verb in the explicit contexts of sin offerings shows that its meaning was related to that offering. Even Num. 19:9 and 17 label the red heifer burned outside the camp as a ‫“ חטאת‬sin offering,” though many do not translate that way (KJV, NIV, NJPS). Others argue that this description stems from an earlier ritual stage of Israel’s religion (Milgrom 1990, 438-43) or from a later editorial layer,16 more than the regulations for the sin offering in Leviticus 4. Rather than denying the significance of the offering name, its appearance in the same literary context as the cognate piel and hitpael verbs should indicate their meaning in Num. 19:12-13, 20; 31:19-23. They describe how people polluted by contact with corpses use the ashes of the 16 Christian Frevel, “Struggling with the Vitality of Corpses: Understanding the Rationale of the Ritual in Numbers 19,” in Frevel-Pola-Schart (2012), 205.

204

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

red heifer to “sin-offer” themselves and their belongings. That is surprising language, because only a priest can offer a ‫“ חטאת‬sin offering.” However, a priest does manipulate the blood and supervise the burning of the red heifer (19:3-7). So lay people’s use of the ashes from that priestly sin offering also falls within the semantic range of “to make or use a sin-offering.” Levites similarly “sin-offer” themselves (‫ חטא‬hitpael) after the priests offer a conventional sin offering on their behalf (Num. 8:8, 12, 21). Feder (2011, 100-105) suggested that these uses of the verb refer specifically to the action of sprinkling blood or ashes from a sin offering. He postulated a gradual broadening of the term’s meaning, which is plausible but not demonstrable from the small number of piel and hitpael occurrences in the HB. The more obvious conclusion is that ‫ חטא‬means “to sin-offer” in the piel and “to sin-offer oneself” in the hitpael in HB texts. They use these verbal forms to describe making or using sin offerings. This observation means that ‫ חטא‬is not synonymous with ‫“ כפר‬mitigate,” which only describes priestly ritual action, any more than it is with ‫טהר‬ “purify” (contra Milgrom 255, and also Sklar 2005, 109-116, who considered ‫ חטא‬and ‫ טהר‬synonymous but distinguished ‫ כפר‬slightly). ‫ חטא‬in the piel and hitpael means to make or utilize a sin offering. ‫ טהר‬means “to purify.” ‫כפר‬ “to mitigate” describes the sum total of a priest’s ritual actions with offerings on behalf of someone or something (see Exegesis to 4:20). Because they are used to describe the same rituals, these verbs evoke each other’s connotations. However, because they denote different things, they cannot simply be substituted for each other. Doing so turns verses like Num. 8:21, which uses all three verbs in quick succession to distinguish the actions of different characters, instead into a vague equation of the actions of priests, worshippers, and the deity. By contrast with the appearance of the verb ‫ חטא‬almost everywhere else, Leviticus 14 does not label the purification rituals for infestation with the noun ‫“ חטאת‬sin offering.” Leviticus 14 is therefore the crucial context in the HB (so already b. Nid. 31b, quoted by Milgrom 881) for deciding whether the verb ‫ חטא‬piel can also mean “to purify” rather than just “to sin-offer” in all cases. Interpreters much therefore choose between two oddities. Either Leviticus 14 is treating these anomalous rituals which must take place outside the Tabernacle as sin offerings, or it is suddenly using the verb ‫ הטא‬piel as synonymous with ‫“ טהר‬purify” which also appears throughout this chapter. The second option is more popular, but the first option is more likely. The rituals of Lev. 14:4-7, 14:49-52, and Num. 19:1-22 are anomalous because, for different reasons, they cannot take place in the Tabernacle. However, they do resemble sin offerings in other ways. Sin offerings have a distinctive blood rite (Milgrom 271-72) that involves smearing blood on the

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

205

altar’s horns or sprinkling bull blood inside the Tabernacle (4:6-7; 4:25). The bird sin offering involves both sprinkling and expressing its blood on the altar (5:9). Purification of infested people and houses and of people polluted by death must take place outside the sanctuary, so there can be no altar rite. However, like Tabernacle sin offerings, these purification rituals involve sprinkling the remains of offerings: in one case, offering blood mixed with water (Lev. 14:7, 52) and, in the other, ashes of an offering animal mixed with water (Num. 19:9). These sprinkling rituals resemble sin offerings and, like sin offerings, they mitigate pollution so as to make purity possible (14:20, 53). It is therefore quite plausible that P considered the purification rituals for infested people and houses to be sin offerings just like the red heifer ritual. In that case, the verb ‫ חטא‬piel has the same meaning, “to sin-offer,” in Lev. 14:49-52 as everywhere else. I do not mean to deny that P depicted sin offerings as certifying purification – of course they do throughout chaps. 12-16 and elsewhere. But that connotation is not evidence that ‫ חטא‬carried the denotative meaning “to purify.” The rest of the verse follows 14:4. 14:50 He must slaughter one of the birds over a ceramic basin of fresh water. Cf. 14:5. 14:51 He must take the cedar stick and the hyssop and the crimson threads and the living bird and dip them in the blood of the slaughtered bird and in the fresh water and sprinkle the house seven times. Unlike the parallel in 14:6-7 about purification from skin infestations, vv. 51-52 are structured in a chiasm centred around the seven-fold sprinkling, like the larger chiasms centred around sprinkling in 14:16 and 14:27 (Milgrom 880). 14:52 So he must sin-offer the house with bird blood, with fresh water, with the living bird, with a cedar stick, with hyssop, and with crimson threads. For translating ‫ חטא‬piel as “sin-offer,” see on v. 49 above. There is no equivalent to this verse in 14:3-7. Instead it reproduces with modifications v. 49 to announce the conclusion of the ritual inside the house, in contrast to the rituals for healed people that continue for another week inside the camp and conclude in the Tabernacle (14:8-20).

206

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

14:53 Then he must send away the living bird outside the city into the open field. So he mitigates for the house and it is pure. Cf. 14:7, 20. This verse adds to the language from v. 7 the phrase “outside the city” because, unlike skin infestations, house infestations presuppose permanent settlements in the land. Concluding Torah Formula (14:54-57) The four verses begin and end with torah formulas (vv. 54a, 57b). Most translations render the terms in between as a list of some of the kinds of infestation and their symptoms (vv. 54b-56; so NRSV, NJPS, CEB). The purpose of the instructions then is summarized as “to teach when it is polluted and when it is pure” (v. 57a). Milgrom (883-85) argued that the list of kinds of infestations is limited to four categories in vv. 54b-55. Verse 56, by contrast, repeats three symptoms from 13:2 to create a literary bracket around these chapters. He concluded that v. 56 is an editor’s addition to create this “artful” inclusio (so also Nihan 2007, 271 and Hieke). However, v. 56 does more than that. Chapters 13-14 describe not just infestation and its purification. Unlike the surrounding chapters, they are also concerned with describing symptoms of infestation to show how to diagnose it and also to avoid false diagnoses. The sequence of phrases in vv. 54b-56 therefore summarizes these chapters with words for four kinds of infestation and three kinds of symptoms. The conclusion (v. 57) then cites the mandate to priests in 10:1011 to emphasize one more time the priests’ responsibility and power to diagnose the pollutions that have devastating consequences for those afflicted by them, namely, infestations. 14:54 This is the law for any affliction of infestation, for eczema, On torah formulas, see Exegesis to 6:2b. For the translation of ‫ נתק‬as “eczema,” see on 13:30 above. Milgrom (883-84) argued that ‫“ כל־נגע הצרעת‬any affliction of infestation” encompasses all the skin afflictions of the first four cases described in 13:1-28. The term, ‫“ נתק‬eczema,” first appears in 13:30 to describe infestations on the head or in the beard (v. 29), so here it summarizes the three cases in 13:29-44. In that case, “affliction of infestation ... eczema ... clothing ... house” are listed here in the same sequence as they are described in chaps. 13-14 and cover all the different forms of infestation treated in these chapters. 14:55 for an infestation of clothing or a house, For infestations of clothing, see 13:47-58. For infestations of houses, see 14:33-53.

Leviticus 13-14 Exegesis

207

14:56 for discolouration or flaking or a spot, These terms are repeated from 13:2, and so form a bracket around chaps. 13-14 (Milgrom 883). They describe symptoms that arouse suspicion of possible skin infestation, but upon further diagnosis they may also prove benign (13:6, 13, 23). 14:57 to teach when it is polluted and when it is pure – this is the law of infestation. Milgrom (885) suggested that this vocabulary echoes 14:2, thus creating a bracket around the chapter. But the infinitive verb, ‫“ להורת‬to teach,” next to ‫“ הטמא‬the polluted” and ‫“ הטהר‬the pure,” more vividly echoes YHWH’s key mandates to priests in 10:10-11: “to separate polluted from pure and to teach the children of Israel.” The reversal of the word sequence here indicates an explicit citation according to Seidel’s Law. The priests fulfil this job requirement most thoroughly by diagnosing infestations and by supervising their containment and the purification of those cured of infestation, as detailed in chaps. 13-14. Thus chap. 14, like chap. 11, ends by evoking the priestly mandate in 10:10-11, but to opposite effect: while chap. 11 extends the responsibility for distinguishing pure from polluted animals to all Israelites, chap. 14 emphasizes the exclusive power of priests to diagnose infestation in people and in their property.

LEVITICUS 15:1-33

PURIFICATION FROM GENITAL EMISSIONS

1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11

12 13

14

15 16

YHWH spoke to Moses and to Aaron: Speak to the children of Israel. You must say to them: Everyone who has an emission, a bodily emission – they (ms) are polluted. This is the law for his emission’s pollution: whether his body oozes his emission or his body is obstructed from emitting, he is polluted as long as his body emits or his body is blocked from emitting. This is his pollution. Every bed on which the emitter lies becomes polluted, and everything that he sits on becomes polluted. Anyone who touches his bed must wash their (ms) clothes and bathe in water and be polluted until evening. Those who sit on anything the emitter sat on must wash their clothes and bathe in water and be polluted until evening. Those who touch the emitter’s body must wash their clothes and bathe in water and be polluted until evening. If the emitter spits on pure people, they must wash their clothes and bathe in water and be polluted until evening. Every saddle on which the emitter rides becomes polluted. Everyone who touches anything that was under him becomes polluted until evening. Those that carry them must wash their clothes and bathe in water and be polluted until evening. Everyone whom the emitter touches without having rinsed his hands, they must wash their clothes and bathe in water and be polluted until evening. Any ceramic pot that the emitter touches must be broken, and any wooden bowl must be rinsed in water. When the emitter is purified of his emission, he must count to himself seven days for his purification. He must wash his clothes and bathe his body in fresh water. Then he will be pure. On the eighth day, he must take for himself two landfowl or two of any kind of pigeon and come before YHWH at the entrance of the meeting tent and give them to the priest. The priest must make one a sin (offering) and the other one a rising (offering). So the priest mitigates for him before YHWH for his emission. Anyone who lets out a layer of semen must bathe his whole body in water and be polluted until evening.

Leviticus 15 Translation 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24

25

26

27 28 29

30

31

32 33

209

Any cloth and any skin that has a layer of semen on it must be washed in water and be polluted until evening. As to a woman with whom a man lays a layer of semen: they (both) must bathe in water and be polluted until evening. Any woman who has a bloody emission, which is her bodily emission, will be on her menstrual period for seven days. Everyone who touches her will be polluted until evening. Everything she lies on during her menstrual period will be polluted, and everything she sits on will be polluted. Everyone who touches her bed must wash their clothes and bathe in water and be polluted until evening. Everyone who touches any furniture that she sat on must wash their clothes and bathe in water and be polluted until evening. Whether it is upon the bed or upon the furniture on which she sat, when they (ms) touch it, they become polluted until evening. If a man nevertheless lies with her, he gets her menstrual period and becomes polluted for seven days. Every bed that he lies on becomes polluted. Any woman whose bloody emission emits for many days not during the time of her menstrual period or she emits beyond her menstrual period – all the days of her polluted emission will be like her menstrual period. She is polluted. Any bed that she lies on while emitting is like her bed during her menstrual period, and any furniture that she sits on is polluted like the pollution of her menstrual period. Anyone who touches them is polluted. They (ms) must wash their clothes and bathe in water and be polluted until evening. When she is purified from her emission, she must count off seven days, after which she will be pure. On the eighth day, she must take for herself two landfowl or two of any kind of pigeon and bring them to the priest at the entrance of the meeting tent. The priest must make one a sin (offering) and the other one a rising (offering). So the priest mitigates for her before YHWH for her polluted emission. You (pl) must warn the Israelites away from their pollution, so they don’t die from their pollution by polluting my Tabernacle which is among them. This is the law of the emitter: for one who lets out a layer of semen to pollute her and the uneasy one on her menstrual period and the continuous emitter, male and female, and a man who lies with a polluted woman.

210

Leviticus 15 Essentials ESSENTIALS

Contents Leviticus 15 gives purification instructions for people who come into contact with polluted genital emissions: semen, mucus, and blood. Men’s genital emissions pollute, whether the oozing of gonorrheal mucus (vv. 3-15) or common ejaculations of semen (vv. 16-18). Therefore, sexual intercourse is a polluting act for both partners (v. 18). Women’s common genital emission, menstrual bleeding, is polluting for seven days (vv. 19-24). Women’s uncommon genital bleeding for longer than seven days pollutes for as long as they suffer from it (vv. 25-30). Purification from common genital emissions requires only waiting one day for semen or seven days for menstruation and, apparently, laundering clothes and bathing (vv. 16-22). Purification from uncommon genital emissions also requires offerings in the Tabernacle (vv. 14-15, 29-30). The four sections of the chapter fall clearly into an arch structure (A-BB-A), with uncommon emissions (A) surrounding common ones (B). This structure treats women and men equally with two examples on each leg of the arch. Each sex has one common and one uncommon form of polluting genital emission. Rules about sexual intercourse appear at the end of both sections on common emissions (vv. 18, 24). Most of the chapter’s verses, however, focus on other people avoiding pollution from contact with a person with a genital emission or the things they have touched, especially the things they sat upon. Repetitive commands to bathe, launder, and wait until evening emphasize the danger of contagious pollutions from genital emissions. But this theme disappears in the section on ejaculating semen (vv. 16-18), which is also the shortest of the four parts of the chapter. Here, the focus is only on a man and the woman who is his sexual partner. The chapter concludes with an exhortation to protect the Tabernacle from pollution (v. 31) and a torah formula (vv. 32-33). The formula summarizes the contents of the chapter, but also makes an allusion to chap. 12, the regulations for purifying new mothers that are explicitly modelled on the regulations here for menstruation. It also depicts menstrual pollution as the paradigmatic genital pollution, a theme hinted at earlier in the chapter. This concluding emphasis on women’s pollutions, as well as the short shrift given to the polluting effects of semen, show that the chapter is less even-handed in its treatment of the two sexes than it appears from its structure. Contexts The concluding exhortation (v. 31) alludes to the wider literary context in Leviticus by mentioning the deadly consequences of polluting the Tabernacle. This theme will be raised again just four verses later at the beginning of the

Leviticus 15 Essentials

211

Day of Mitigations instructions (16:2). It was also a theme of chap. 10, where priests were killed for malpractice in the Tabernacle. Verse 31 thus positions the pollution regulations of chaps. 11-15 within the context of the Tabernacle instructions and stories that surround them. The paradigmatic place of menstrual pollution in vv. 32-33 anticipates the tendency for menstruation to become a synonym for pollution elsewhere in the HB. Jerusalem’s degradation after its destruction by the Babylonians is compared to the pollution of menstruation (Ezek. 7:19-20; Lam. 1:8, 17). Israel’s religious sins pollute the people like a menstrual period (Ezek. 36:17; Zech. 13:1; Ezra 9:11; 2 Chr. 29:5). Many Hebrew dictionaries, as a result, consider “pollution” to be another meaning of the Hebrew word ‫ נדה‬niddah “menstrual period” (see Exegesis to v. 19). It is more accurate to say that later biblical texts often use menstruation as the paradigmatic example of pollution and of stigmas and humiliations that feel polluting. That tendency continued in later Jewish and Christian cultures. The Talmud analyzed and codified especially menstrual blood to regulate sexual intercourse in marriage. The rabbis’ goal was to keep couples from infringing on the command to abstain during a woman’s menstrual period (v. 24; also 18:19; 20:18). Therefore, the obligation to immerse in a ritual bath fell mostly on women in rabbinic and later Jewish cultures. Christian communities throughout history have debated whether or not menstruation and postpartum bleeding (chap. 12) should restrict women from participating in church worship, and especially in the rituals of Communion and baptism. Though strong voices have argued since antiquity that Christians should not observe any of Leviticus’s pollution restrictions, continuing social stigma around menstruation has played a major role in reinforcing the exclusion of women from church leadership. Leviticus 15 is one source of that stigma. Rhetoric Like most of the ritual regulations in Leviticus 1-15, this chapter’s systematic formulation presents its regulations dispassionately. This rhetorical stance lays claim to expert authority and makes it more persuasive. Here it is deployed to address behaviour that is both very personal and also universal, in the sense that everyone can be expected to experience at least ejaculations or menstrual bleeding fairly frequently over many years. Like medical rhetoric, Leviticus 15 subjects human bodies to systematic categorization and description. Unlike medical rhetoric, however, Leviticus does not explain normal bodily functions, much less try to heal disease. Instead, this chapter mostly focuses on avoiding pollution from people with genital emissions. Despite the dispassionate tone, this focus on avoidance promotes stigma which here falls especially on women. The persuasive effects of Leviticus’s pollution regulations are already evident in later Second Temple period texts. The influence of Leviticus 15

212

Leviticus 15 Exposition

also appears in that period’s archeological remains in the form of 850 ritual baths found all over Judah and the Galilee. They seem designed to facilitate the bathing mandated by this chapter. They also illustrate that purification rituals were being practised far from the Jerusalem Temple, therefore for personal piety and not just to protect the sanctuary’s purity (v. 31). That religious impulse continues to motivate Jewish women today who go to ritual baths after menstruating or giving birth. Though these regulations on genital pollutions are systematic and structurally even-handed in their treatment of male and female bodies, they climax by focusing on women’s menstruation. That climax creates a frame around all the regulations about human bodily pollutions in terms of women’s genital flows (Lev. 12:2, 4-5; 15:19-30, 32-33), with menstruation as the unifying theme. Leviticus thus joins the tendency of other HB texts to treat menstruation and pollution as synonymous. Though it depicts infestation as the most severe bodily pollution (13:45-46), it presents menstruation as the most paradigmatic of human bodily pollutions and of the stigma of pollution. Therefore, the history of the ritual impact of Leviticus 12 and 15 has been different than that of other chapters of ritual regulations. The offering regulations of Leviticus 1-7 have been left with only rhetorical impact after their ritual practices fell into abeyance with the destruction of Jerusalem’s temple in 70 C.E. The infestation regulations of Leviticus 13-14 have influenced medical and civil practices of diagnosis, isolation, and quarantine more than Jewish and Christian ritual. Leviticus 15, however, is the source of the long history and continuing practice of Jewish women going to a ritual bath (a mikveh), and Leviticus 12 is the source of the long history well into the twentieth century of Christian women being “churched” after giving birth (see Exposition to Leviticus 12). Both chapters have reinforced the stigma around menstrual blood that has inhibited women’s leadership in Christian and Jewish congregations. Nevertheless, many women have also embraced these ritual practices as a distinctive way for women to perform and embody their Jewish and Christian identities. This history of ritual practice highlights Leviticus 12 and 15 as one source of ancient and modern cultural debates over whether both gendered and religious identities are innate, culturally imposed, and/or individually chosen.

EXPOSITION Additional Bibliography: ADLER, RACHEL. “In Your Blood, Live: Re-visions of a Theology of Purity.” Tikkun 8/1 (1993), 38-41. BOYARIN, DANIEL. Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. ELLENS, DEBORAH L. Women in the Sex Texts of Leviticus and Deuteronomy: A Comparative Conceptual Analysis.

Leviticus 15 Exposition

213

LHB/OTS 458. New York: T&T Clark, 2008. FANDER, MONIKA. “Reinheit/Unreinheit.” In Wörterbuch der Feministischen Theologie. Ed. E. Gössmann et al. Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1991. FONROBERT, CHARLOTTE E. Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. 471-76. GOLDSTEIN, ELIZABETH W. Impurity and Gender in the Hebrew Bible. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2015. KOHLSCHEIN, FRANZ. “Die Vorstellung von der kultische Unreinheit der Frau: Das weiterwirkende Motiv für eine zwiespältige Situation?” In Liturgie und Frauenfrage. Ed. T. Berger and A. Gerhards. St. Ottilien: EOS-Verlag, 1990. 269-88. KOREN, SHARON FAYE. Forsaken: the Menstruant in Medieval Jewish Mysticism. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2011. KORTE, ANNE-MARIE. “Female Blood Rituals: Cultural-Anthropological Findings and Feminist-Theological Reflections.” In De Troyer (2003), 165-88. MARIENBERG, EVYATAR. “Qui coierit cum muliere in fluxu menstruo ... interficientur ambo (Lev. 20:18): The Biblical Prohibition on Sexual Relations with a Menstruant in the Eyes of Some Medieval Christian Theologians.” In Shoshannat Yaakov: Jewish and Iranian Studies in Honor of Yaakov Elman. Ed. S. Sekunda and S. Fine. Leiden: Brill, 2012. 271-84. MEACHAM (LEBEIT YOREH), TIRZAH. “An Abbreviated History of the Development of the Jewish Menstrual Laws.” In Wasserfall (1999), 23-39, 255-61. MEENS, ROB. “‘A Relic of Superstition’: Bodily Impurity and the Church from Gregory the Great to the Twelfth Century Decretists.” In Poorthuis-Schwartz (2000), 281-93. O’GRADY, KATHLEEN. “The Semantics of Taboo: Menstrual Prohibitions in the Hebrew Bible.” In De Troyer (2003), 1-28. POLAK-SAHM, VARDA. The House of Secrets: The Hidden World of the Mikveh. Tr. A. H. Pace. Boston: Beacon, 2009. RAPP, URSULA. “The Heritage of Old Testament ImPurity Laws: Gender as a Question of How to Focus on Women.” In Gender and Religion: European Studies. Ed. Kari Elisabeth Børresen, Sara Cabibbo, and Edith Specht. Rome: Carocci, 2001. 29-40. RUANE, NICOLE J. “Bathing, Status and Gender in Priestly Ritual.” In A Question of Sex? Gender and Difference in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond. Ed. Deborah W. Rooke. Sheffield; Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2007. 66-81. SORGE, ELGA. Religion und Frau. 4th ed. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1987. TOOMAN, WILLIAM A. AND YAIR FURSTENBERG. “Genital Discharge.” EBR 9 (2014): 1199-1204. WASSERFALL, RAHEL R. “Menstruation and Identity: the Meaning of Niddah for Moroccan Women Immigrants to Israel.” In Eilberg-Schwartz (1992), 309-27. WASSERFALL, RAHEL R., ed. Women and Water: Menstruation in Jewish Life and Law. Hanover, MA: Brandeis University Press, 1999. WEGNER, JUDITH ROMNEY. “ ‘Coming Before the Lord’: The Exclusion of Women from the Public Domain of the Israelite Priestly Cult.” In Rendtorff-Kugler (2003), 451-65. WENHAM, GORDAN J. “Why does Sexual Intercourse Defile (Lev 15 18)?” ZAW 95 (1983), 432-34. WHITEKETTLE, RICHARD. “Leviticus 15.18 Reconsidered: Chiasm, Spatial Structure and the Body.” JSOT 49 (1991), 31-45. WOOLF, JEFFREY ROBERT. “Medieval Models of Purity and Sanctity: Ashkenazic Women in the Synagogue.” In Poorthuis-Schwartz (2000), 263-80. See also the relevant bibliography in Exposition to Leviticus 12 and in the Introduction to Leviticus 11-20.

Structure of Leviticus 15 Most interpreters have observed that the chapter falls neatly into four parts arranged chiastically: uncommon and common male genital emissions, then common and uncommon female genital emissions (e.g. Wenham 216; Levine 93). Many have isolated v. 18’s rule regarding pollution of both

214

Leviticus 15 Exposition

partners from sexual intercourse as the chapter’s centre within this chiasm (e.g. Whitekettle 1991, 35; Hartley 205; Milgrom 905; Kiuchi 272; Hieke 527). 1-2a Divine speech formula and topical heading 2b-15 Uncommon men’s genital emissions 16-17 Common ejaculations of semen 18 Pollution from sex 19-24 Common menstrual bleeding 25-30 Uncommon women’s genital bleeding 31-33 Concluding exhortation and torah formula

This pattern leads to highlighting v. 18 as the centre of the arch. The chiastic pattern also prompts commentary about the chapter’s surprising gender balance. This common structural analysis, however, does not take into account several of the chapter’s formal features or its rhetorical content. As to its formal structure, the chapter’s introductory formulas do not support v. 18’s isolation from vv. 16-17 (see Exegesis to v. 18). Deborah Ellens observed that both sections about common emissions (semen, menstrual bleeding) end by focusing on sexual intercourse (vv. 18, 24), though the syntactical structure is not exactly parallel. Ellens (2008, 47, 50) concluded that “Although the woman’s focalization [in chap. 15] is equal to the man’s, point-of-view reveals her marginalization in the text, and language-depicting-the-sex-act reveals her objectification.” Nevertheless, she emphasized the author’s structural attempt at gender neutrality (Ellens 2008, 60, 72). Dorothea Erbele-Küster (2017, 58-63) observed an unequal rhetorical emphasis. She pointed out that the chapter labels a menstruating women as well as both women and men suffering uncommon emissions as a ‫זבה‬/‫זב‬ “emitter,” but never uses that term for a man ejaculating semen. She also observed that the label ‫“ נדה‬menstrual period” appears in descriptions of women experiencing both common menstruation and uncommon bleeding, and so unites the descriptions of women’s genital emissions in contrast to men’s. She therefore outlined the chapter like this: 2b 3-15 16-18 19-24 25-31

Introduction about persons with an emission ( ‫)זב‬ A Instructions for a man with an emission (‫)זב‬ B Instructions concerning ejaculations Aʹ Instructions for a woman with an emission (‫)נדה ;זבה‬ Aʺ Instructions for a woman with emissions (‫ )זבה‬longer than a menstrual period (‫)נדה‬

Erbele-Küster’s outline illustrates thematic developments over the course of the chapter. Neither outline, however, accurately represents the fact that the chapter takes more time and space describing the threat of emitters spreading pollution

Leviticus 15 Exposition

215

while polluted and their purification rituals after that threat has passed than it does describing genital emissions. This is quite different from the preceding instructions for infestation that use most of chap. 13 to describe and diagnose the condition. The emphasis here in chap. 15 falls instead on how to avoid contracting pollution from emitters, and especially on how to purify yourself after having come into contact with emitters or things they have polluted. This emphasis is conveyed, for example, by the six-fold repetition in seven verses (vv. 5-11) of the tri-colon, ‫“ כבס בגדיו ורחץ במים וטמא עד־הערב‬they must wash their clothes and bathe in water and be polluted until evening,” which also appears four more times in vv. 17, 21, 22, and 27. Jonathan Lawrence (2006, 28) noted that the combination – laundering, bathing, waiting until evening – appears only in P. A rhetorical analysis that considers how the chapter sounds more than how it looks leads to emphasizing repeated vocabulary that stands out to listeners. The text of Leviticus has been shaped for expert readers too, but its persuasive force aims overtly at listening audiences (see Introduction §1.3 in Leviticus 1-10). A different kind of outline is needed to convey the chapter’s aural emphases graphically. In this outline, italics indicate introductory phrases, boldface marks repeated formulas, and underlining indicates a Hebrew leitmotif: OUTLINE 1-2a Divine speech formula 2b Everyone who has a bodily emission 3a Torah formula (following LXX; see Exegesis) about his emission’s pollution 3b Men’s uncommon bodily emissions: 3c This is his pollution 4-12 Pollution and purification from contact with men’s uncommon emissions 5 ... wash – bathe – polluted until evening 6 ... wash – bathe – polluted until evening 7 ... wash – bathe – polluted until evening 8 ... wash – bathe – polluted until evening 10 ... wash – bathe – polluted until evening 11 ... wash – bathe – polluted until evening 13-15 Tabernacle purification ritual for men’s uncommon emissions 13a ... count off to himself seven days 13b ... wash – bathe 13c ... he will be pure 15b The priest mitigates for him before YHWH for his emission. 16a Anyone who lets out a layer of semen 16b-18 Pollution and purification from contact with semen 16 ... bathe – polluted until evening 17 ... wash – polluted until evening 18 ... bathe – polluted until evening 19a Any woman who has common emissions 19b ... on her menstrual period for seven days

216

Leviticus 15 Exposition 19c-24 Pollution and purification from contact with her menstrual period 19c ... polluted until evening 21 ... wash – bathe – polluted until evening 22 ... wash – bathe – polluted until evening 25 Any woman who has uncommon menstrual-like emissions: 25b She is polluted 26-27 Pollution and purification from contact with uncommon menstrual emissions 27 ... wash – bathe – polluted until evening 28-30 Tabernacle purification ritual for women’s uncommon polluted emissions 28 ... count off seven days after which 28c she will be pure 30b The priest mitigates for her before YHWH for her polluted emission 31 Exhortation to protect the Tabernacle from pollution 32-33 Torah formula about emissions, layer of semen, and her menstrual pollution.

The chapter’s conclusion contains several distinctive elements. An exhortation to protect the Tabernacle from pollution appears only here in chaps. 11-15, but it anticipates a major concern of chap. 16. It threatens anyone who pollutes the Tabernacle with death, like 16:1-2 which also alludes to Nadab and Abihu’s fate in 10:1-2. Verse 31 thus prospectively links the pollution legislation to the ritual instructions for inaugurating the Tabernacle that preceded it and to the instructions for the Day of Mitigations that follow. By contrast, the concluding torah formula (vv. 32-33) is retrospective about this chapter, and also chap. 12. It reproduces key vocabulary from all the rules of this chapter, but not the chapter’s structure. Instead, it evokes 12:2 to cast women’s bodily pollutions as a frame around all the rules of human bodily pollutions in chaps. 12-15, and emphasizes it with its last word, ‫“ טמאה‬a polluted woman” (see Exegesis). Thus, a chapter whose structure seems like an even-handed treatment of the sexes instead uses repeated vocabulary and refrains to make women’s bodies the most memorable examples of human pollution. As in some preceding chapters (e.g. Lev. 1-3, 11), the systematic structure of Leviticus 15 hides a less-than-systematic presentation. The two cases dealing with women presuppose the first, more detailed case about men with uncommon emissions, but this pattern leaves questions about whether they are exactly the same or not (see Exegesis to vv. 10, 21, 26). The case of a man who ejaculates semen in the common way is the shortest and least detailed case, which leaves unclear whether it presupposes the preceding case at all (see on v. 17). As Erbele-Küster (2017, 68) pointed out, “The regulations challenge readers, both male and female, to an inter-textual interpretation .... The purity rules do not merely command physical actions: they also open up a space for interpretive activity,” as do the diet rules of chap. 11 (see above).

Leviticus 15 Exposition

217

The History of Sexual and Menstrual Pollution Historians of other ancient Near Eastern peoples have usually assumed that they feared pollution from menstrual blood like the Israelites. The evidence for such fears, however, is not very plentiful, as researchers have increasingly pointed out (Couto-Ferreira and Garcia-Ventura 2013, 519-22; Quack 2013, 142-143; Collins 2004, 505; Parker 1983, 100-102; Philip 2006, 6-8).1 Observing a period of sexual abstinence is more often mentioned as a precondition for entering temples (as in Exod. 19:15), and sexual pollution could in myths even force Mesopotamian gods from their own temples (Yoo-Watts 2021, 30-33, 40, 56). Nevertheless, such rules seem to have varied from time to time and place to place. There is also evidence that concern about pollution, including from sex and menstruation, increased in Greek cities in the Hellenistic period and also in Ptolemaic Egypt, just as it did at the same time in Second Temple Judaism (Frevel and Nihan 2013, 39-43). A notable parallel can be found in the Zoroastrian Vendidād, which is an Avestan text that is later than Leviticus but probably reflects old practices. Like Leviticus 15, it discusses menstruation and sex together with abnormal genital discharges and requires laundering and bathing to restore purity (Kazen 2015, 451-52). The most concrete evidence from the Second Temple period for the growing influence of Leviticus on how people observed Torah involves this chapter’s command to bathe to remove pollution (vv. 5-11, 17, 21-22, 27). Many texts attest to the belief that one should wash hands or even bathe before praying (Let. Aris. 304b-306; 4Q414 2.ii.5-6; 4Q512 42-44.ii; Josephus, Ant. Jud. 12.106; Test. Levi 2.3; Sib. Or. 4:165-68; Harrington 2004, 29; Lawrence 2006, 57). One Qumran scroll (4Q414) provides prayers and blessings to be recited before and after bathing (Harrington 2004, 64). The Temple Scroll asserts that menstruating women should not be allowed in Jerusalem because of the Temple (11QT xlviii, l.14-16). The prevalence of these beliefs is confirmed by a distinctive feature of the archeological remains of Jewish homes in Judea and the Galilee: 850 stepped pools carved into bedrock in the late Second Temple period, including many in Jerusalem and at Qumran. In some locales, they were used long after the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed (Miller 2015, 20-21). These pools are likely the precursors of the Orthodox mikveh today, which is designed for full immersion to fulfil the commands of this chapter. Their construction and continuing use throughout Late Antiquity show, in Stuart Miller’s words, 1 Also Paul John Frandsen, “The Menstrual ‘Taboo’ in Ancient Egypt,” JNES 66/2 (2007), 81-106.

218

Leviticus 15 Exposition

that “Without the temple, the home and the synagogue became the ritual and spiritual loci of common Judaism that was sufficiently rooted in the biblical sources to have continued meaning for other Jews besides priests and rabbis” (Miller 2015, 282). Of course, earlier generations of Israelites may have poured water over themselves to bathe, rather than immersing (Katz 2012). The pools nevertheless provide evidence for growing popular interest in purification practices that were not just for protecting the Temple’s purity (15:31) and did not immediately decrease once the Temple was destroyed (Miller 2015, 26-29). Archeologists have also found many large jars and smaller cups carved from solid stone during the late Second Temple period. Their construction ceased after the mid-second century C.E., probably because of disruptions to the stone mason industry during the Jewish revolts against Rome (Miller 2015, 180-82). Rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity reflected not only Leviticus’s views of menstruation, but were also influenced by the medical theories and pollution phobias of Hellenistic culture. In the fourth century B.C.E., Aristotle (Gen. an. 729a, 737a) described menstrual blood as the constituent material from which embryos form, to which semen contributes a soul. Menstrual bleeding then represents unsuccessful conception, essentially a corpse. Intercourse during menstruation would make fetuses develop abnormally. Aristotle’s view was echoed by later Roman (e.g. Pliny), Jewish (e.g. Lev. Rab. 14:9; Maimonides), and Christian (e.g. Jerome, Thomas Aquinas) thinkers (O’Grady 2003, 7-11), as well as in popular culture (Wasserfall 1992, 318). Jennifer Schultz (2003, 115) argued that these ancient medical ideas had more influence on Christian teaching about menstrual pollution than did Leviticus. On the other hand, Greek sources do not express concern over menstrual pollution’s threat to sanctuaries until the last centuries B.C.E., when purity concerns increased (Parker 1983, 100-103; Schultz 2003, 104), as they did among Jews. Susan Roll (2003, 118-19) pointed out that Origen’s sermons show that Leviticus 12-13 “remained a topic of discussion and apparently a source of ongoing norms” in early Christianity. Temporary pollution in Leviticus became in Christianity, according to Roll, “the very ontological condition of being born female” because of the influence of Greek ideas and Christian ascetic practices. Because Leviticus 15’s purity rules are motivated explicitly by worry about polluting the Tabernacle (v. 31), they lost force after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. Since synagogues are not holy like the Temple and Torah scrolls transmit pollution but cannot be polluted themselves (Woolf 2000, 266-67), some rabbis concluded: “Men and women with irregular genital emissions, menstruants, and parturients are permitted to read the Torah, and to study Mishnah, Midrash, laws and homilies, but men who have had a seminal emission may not” (t. Ber. 2:12; Fonrobert 2000,

Leviticus 15 Exposition

219

19, 225). The Babylonian Talmud, however, omitted women when repeating this ruling (b. Ber. 22a), not because of menstrual pollution (it says that men who have sex with menstruating women are allowed to read Torah), but to exclude women categorically from Torah study (Boyarin 1993, 180-81). By the Middle Ages, at least in Ashkenazi communities, concern for avoiding pollution from menstruating women far overshadowed any lingering concern for seminal pollution. In some Jewish communities, concern about pollution led to the total isolation of menstruating women. This concern may have been fuelled by the growing belief that synagogues are holy, like the long-gone Jerusalem Temple. But Jeffrey Woolf (2000, 268-80) observed that the consequent restrictions fell mostly on women rather than men. Since purity was originally connected to the genealogical concerns of the temple priests, the Temple’s loss decreased the importance of those issues (Eilberg-Schwartz 1990, 196, 207). Thus the rules about menstruation had to be justified by more general concerns (Maccoby 1999, 35). For example, one Mishnaic text (m. Shab. 2:6) warned women to take their niddah status seriously lest they die in childbirth. A midrash argued that women have the “religious duty involving menstruation” because Eve’s sin “spilled the first man’s blood” by bringing death into the world (Gen. Rab. 1, 17:7r; Midr. Tanh. 5:17).2 While the Mishnah (completed circa 200 C.E.) devoted one of its six sections to Taharot “purities,” the Babylonian Talmud (completed circa 600 C.E.) elaborated only one tractate in this section with further commentary, namely the tractate Niddah “the menstruant.” Charlotte Fonrobert (2000, 2) described tractate Niddah: Like few other cultures, rabbinic Judaism in this tractate transforms blood and bodies into language, analyzes the nature of blood and pads, of births and abortions or miscarriages. One detects no sense of embarrassment, shame, or disgust ... The texts in tractate Niddah might just as well be about zoology, astronomy, physics, or mathematics, judging by their tone. We learn about the fine distinctions of colors of blood. We learn about a whole hermeneutics of bloodstains. We learn about complicated temporal calculations of menstrual cycles that could try anybody’s patience. ... Already in the time of the editing of the earliest of rabbinic texts, the Mishnah, this discussion was theoretical.

The Talmud taught that the prohibition on sexual intercourse during a woman’s menstrual period (Lev. 18:19; 20:18) remained in force even without a Temple. R. Meir used to say, “Why did the Torah ordain that the uncleanness of menstruation should continue for seven days? Because being in constant contact with his wife [a husband might] develop a loathing towards her. The Torah, therefore, 2 For more examples of this motif, see Chava Weissler, “Mizvot Built into the Body: Tkhines for Niddah, Pregnancy and Childbirth,” in Eilberg-Schwartz (1992), 101-15 [103-106].

220

Leviticus 15 Exposition ordained: Let her be unclean for seven days in order that she shall be beloved by her husband as at the time of her first entry into the bridal chamber. (b. Nid. 31b; tr. W. Slotki in Neusner 1973, 84).

Fonrobert distinguished menstrual pollution from the menstrual sex taboo in Leviticus, and argued that only the latter applied after the Temple’s destruction. Therefore, the rabbinic emphasis on the menstrual sex taboo “had nothing to do with the woman’s supposed impurity. Rather, it is based on a definition and circumscription of the erotic during a period when sexual relations are prohibited” (Fonrobert 2000, 21; also 18-19). That same understanding informed the behaviour of Moroccan immigrants in late-twentiethcentury Israel: unlike in Ashkenazi Orthodox communities, menstruating Moroccan women would only avoid direct contact with their husbands so as not to elicit sexual desire, but did not avoid social interactions with other men (Wasserfall 1992, 318). The rabbinic rules empowered women to determine the start of their menstrual periods for themselves, and therefore to deny their husbands’ sexual advances during their periods (Fonrobert 2000, 128-59). The presupposition that ancient wives could otherwise not refuse their husbands troubles feminist interpreters (Ruane 2013, 167). In some modern communities, husbands often have a say about when a woman goes to the mikveh, but women retain some leverage (Wasserfall 1992, 314, 320-23). The rabbinic rules also increased the stringency of the biblical rules. While Lev. 15:19 sets a woman’s menstrual period arbitrarily at seven days long, the Talmud (b. Ber. 31a; b. Nid. 66a) requires a woman to observe when her blood flow ends. Then she remains polluted for a set period of “white days,” after which she must immerse herself before becoming pure. This ruling puts a woman during her menstrual period in the same status as a woman suffering from an uncommonly long blood flow in Lev. 15:25-30, essentially collapsing the distinction between common and uncommon female genital emissions (Meacham 1999, 29-32, 255-56; Woolf 2000, 265). Apart from couples’ sexual relations, purification for religious reasons was also advocated by some rabbinic texts. For example, the Talmud required men to bathe before Torah study (b. B. Qam. 82b). Eilberg-Schwartz (1990, 198) thought this reflected greater belief in individual control: “The more contamination is understood as being subject to human control, the more likely its source will be inside the body.” But that does not explain why pollution from the bodies of both sexes as described by Leviticus 15 was refocused in later practice primarily, if not exclusively, on the polluting effects of menstrual blood (Fonrobert 2000, 22-23, 44-47; Philip 2006, 44-45). Debates about whether or not synagogues are holy like the Temple led to conflicting rulings on the admission of menstruating women (Schearing 2003, 436-38). The growing popularity of mystical traditions (kabbalah) in late medieval

Leviticus 15 Exposition

221

and early modern Judaism focused attention again on the Temple as the model for the experience of the presence of God. The Temple’s model of a pure and all-male priesthood then excluded women from higher levels of mystical experience, unlike in contemporary Christianity and Islam (Koren 2011, 173). The current popularity of kabbalah led Sharon Faye Koren (2011, 175) to worry that restrictions on women because of menstrual pollution may be growing again. Thus Leviticus 12 and 15 made women’s bodies the subject of a discourse that was intensified by Tractate Niddah. In the following centuries, it easily become a vehicle for spreading misogyny (Fonrobert 2000, 35-36, 42). Menstrual laws also became a flash point for ethnic and sectarian divisions, which Tirzah Meacham (1999, 32-33) summarized: In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries another term became popular as the designation for menstrual laws: the Hebrew Taharat haMishpaḥa, which means “purity of the family” ... [which] seems to have derived from German through Yiddish: reinheit das familiens lebens. It was probably generated by the Neo-Orthodox movement as a response to the Reform movement’s rejection of some of the normative menstrual laws, particularly use of the miqveh. The Reform movement claimed that the law was instituted at a time when public bathing facilities were the norm but was no longer valid with the advent of home bathtubs and greater concern for personal hygiene. This argument had previously been made by the Karaites in Egypt and was uprooted by the vigorous objection of Maimonides in the twelfth century. In modern times an intense interchange with Orthodox rabbis on the topic erupted. As part of the neo-Orthodox response, a philosophy of the elevated state of modern womanhood emerged, along with the sanctity of her commandment to keep the family pure.

Leviticus 18 and 20’s association of purity rules with Israel’s separate identity also inaugurated a trend that continues today. Many women regard immersion in a mikveh after menstruating or childbirth as a consciously and distinctively feminine way to perform their Jewish identity (b. Meilah 17a; Wasserfall 1992, 310-12, 315-17; Fonrobert 2000, 39). Interviews with mikveh attendants and visitors in Israel led Varda Polak-Sahm (2009, 208) to summarize their views this way: The continuity of the Jewish people depends on the imperative of immersion. Despite its being a male halakhic imperative, immersion is perceived by the women as a female imperative that passes from generation to generation and bridges the worlds of the secular and religious women. The women in the mikveh feel themselves a part of a chain of powerful women, who set an example of independence within the male world. ... We are perpetuating the chain of Jewish women that began with Eve, the first woman, and continued through the four Matriarchs, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah.

The disruptions and uncertainties of the first century C.E. also left Christians unsure as to how menstruation should or should not affect women’s

222

Leviticus 15 Exposition

religious lives. The Synoptic Gospels tell a story about Jesus healing a woman suffering for years from a continuing flow of blood (Mark 5:24-34; Matt. 9:20-22; Luke 8:42-48). Many Christian preachers and scholars from antiquity to the present have employed this story to show that Jesus ignored the threat of menstrual pollution. In this story, however, neither the woman nor Jesus break the rules of Leviticus 15:19-27, which do not say that their touch conveys pollution. The rules prohibit touching a menstruating woman, but not one with an uncommonly long blood flow, and the Gospels do not portray Jesus touching the woman at all (on this blind spot in typical interpretations of the Gospels, see Fonrobert 2000, 186-98; Schultz 2003, 98). Christian texts of Late Antiquity have little to say about menstruation because they focused their interest in sexualized bodies on virginity instead. Like the rabbis’ elaboration of the prohibition against sex with a menstruating woman, Christians’ ideal of virginity provided women a degree of agency and control over their sexual lives. Vows of chastity allowed some women to aspire to other goals besides motherhood (Fonrobert 2000, 165; EilbergSchwartz 1990, 195-216). One early Christian text that did address menstruation was the anonymous Didascalia from the third century C.E. It tried to discourage Christian women from following Jewish menstrual practices by refraining “from prayer, and from Scripture, and from the eucharist” during their menstrual periods (Fonrobert 2000, 173). To contrast this attitude with Jewish practice generally is mistaken because, like the Didascalia, the rabbinic Tosefta allowed menstruating women to study scripture (t. Ber. 2:13). Therefore the distinction was not, as the Didascalia maintained, between Jewish and Christian practices per se. The Apostolic Constitutions in the fourth century followed the Didascalia’s dismissal of menstrual pollution of rituals, but reproduced Lev. 18:19’s prohibition on sexual intercourse during a woman’s menstrual period and extended it to pregnancy (Marienberg 2012, 275). Other male religious leaders, both Christian and Jewish, restricted the access of menstruants – or women generally – to holy places and things (e.g. b. Ber. 22a; Dionysius of Alexandria; see Fonrobert 2000, 196, 225; Schultz 2003, 10515). The texts of both rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity attest to conflicting views over the continuing applicability of the regulations regarding menstrual pollution, not only between elite rabbis and theologians but also between women and men in their various communities. Fonrobert (2000, 174) observed that “each of the two communities struggled, sharing the same textual reference in Scripture, to define the role and identity of women as part of establishing its own collective identity.” Many early Christians continued to wash hands before prayer and to bathe after sex (Tomson 2000, 75-77, citing Origen, Chrysostom, and the Apostolic Constitutions). The explanations were not consistent. Theodoret of Cyprus

Leviticus 15 Exposition

223

argued that sex is not polluting when reproducing, but becomes polluting when engaged for pleasure (Rouwhorst 2000, 193). More famous is Augustine’s explanation that sexual intercourse transmits original sin, “infecting the soul like a disease” (Burrus 2004, 513). Purity became increasingly tied to the ideals of chastity and virginity, so that sexual intercourse, and especially transgressive sex, became the ultimate form of pollution. Thus the second council of Tours in 567 C.E. labelled incest as the “carnal contagion that pollutes” and warned clerics to not be polluted by the proximity of women.3 Menstruation became a symbol of sin in many Christian commentaries well into the modern era (O’Grady 2003, 6). At least one ancient writer, Hypolitus, banned menstruants from baptism, probably out of fear of blood polluting the sacred baptismal waters (Schultz 2003, 107; Roll 2003, 119). Medieval church teachings treated menstruating women and new mothers like penitent sinners, banned from Communion until their purification has ended (Roll 2003, 121-22). However, purity teachings also reflected local cultural conditions. For example, the tendency of bishops and theologians in Rome and southern Gaul to spiritualize pollution from menstruation, childbirth, and sexual intercourse (Roll 2003, 121, 123-24) contrasted not only with Greek Orthodox teachings (O’Grady 2003, 12), but also with the practices of early medieval churches in Ireland and parts of England that required purification before participating in the Eucharist. Rob Meens (2000, 291) documented that contradictory rulings on this subject continued to be issued in Canterbury, England, into the thirteenth century. He suggested that, in many cases, the desire to spiritualize purity rules was an attempt to distinguish Christian practices from Jewish rituals (see also Schultz 2003, 98; Synek 2006, 117). Nevertheless, Christian authorities from Jerome and Augustine to Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin taught that the prohibition on intercourse with a menstruating woman should be observed literally (O’Grady 2003, 11-12). Cultures that were not so worried about “judaizing” felt free to follow the rules of Leviticus literally (Meens 2000, 292-93). That pattern is very evident in modern Christian attitudes: the tendency to dismiss ritual pollution as “superstitious” grew in the Christian West in tandem with antiSemitism, while ethnic churches in Africa and South Asia often revived many of the rules of personal purity from Leviticus (see Introduction §2.3.9 in Leviticus 1-10, 84). The rhetoric of purity also surrounded traditional justifications for limiting priesthood to men. Despite various theological rationales for this limitation, which has been canon law in Catholicism since 1139 C.E., a concern for 3 Giselle de Nie, “Contagium and Images of Self in Late Sixth-Century Gaul,” in PoorthuisSchwartz (2000), 247-61 [250].

224

Leviticus 15 Exposition

protecting the altar and Eucharistic host from pollution seems to lurk behind the continuing exclusion of women from priesthood, and is occasionally expressed (for examples, see Kohlschein 1990, 269-76; Korte 2000, 316; De Troyer 2003, x-xi; O’Grady 2003, 12-13; Schultz 2003, 98-99). Christian cultures have often emphasized the obligation of sexual chastity by using the rhetoric of purity. This trend can be observed in ancient ascetic practices, in monastic vows, in romantic celebrations of medieval knighthood, and in Victorian-era social expectations for young women. Though sexual chastity was touted as an ideal for both sexes, the social stigma of being sexually promiscuous fell mostly on women in every time period. The chastity ideal failed to stem the sexual double standard that has discriminated against women from antiquity to the present day (see Yoo-Watts 2021, 111-15). The menstrual taboo also continues to exert influence. Both Jewish and Christian traditions generated contradictory rulings about menstruation early in their history. And both traditions tended, over time, to tighten restrictions on menstruating women (and on new mothers after childbirth: see Exposition to Leviticus 12 above). Thus the history of ritual practices in both religions raises the question voiced by Anne-Marie Korte (2000, 314): “Why precisely has women’s cultic impurity had such a profound and long-lasting effect? There is no easy answer to this question” (similarly Schearing 2003, 450; Ruane 2013, 169). The Symbolism of Menstrual and Sexual Pollution Modern interpreters have often sought the symbolic meaning of menstrual and sexual pollution in broad patterns evident in other ancient cultures and in contemporary traditional cultures. Biblical commentators often cite Akkadian texts and refer to ethnographic studies of traditional cultures world-wide to show the prevalence of menstrual taboos in human societies (e.g. Milgrom 949-52; Gerstenberger 206-207; O’Grady 2003, 3-4). Modern ethnography, however, emphasizes that most social practices are culturally contingent and highly variable from one culture to another. That seems to have also been the case in ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean societies. A survey of textual evidence for ancient pollution practices points out frequent references to pollution from sexual intercourse, but rather less evidence for menstrual prohibitions than modern historians usually assume (Yoo-Watts 2021, 40, 56, 82). The clear references do not easily support theories of systematic cultural practices or clear religious symbolism. Symbolic interpretations have most frequently linked semen and menstrual blood with death. Jacob Milgrom (931-34, 948) quoted Ramban to maintain that the loss of semen symbolized loss of life. He gathered evidence from

Leviticus 15 Exposition

225

throughout the ancient world for bans on sex before cultic rituals. He also responded to Howard Eilberg-Schwartz’s critique of this thesis (Milgrom 1002-3; see also Ellens 2008, 67-70; Hieke 446, 536). Gordan Wenham (1983) also defended the old view that pollution and purity represent the fundamental dichotomy of death and life, and that the loss of “life-liquids,” blood and semen, represented death and were therefore regarded as polluting. Richard Whitekettle (1991) rightly countered that blood is associated with life explicitly only in 17:11-14 and that semen elsewhere in the HB represents a man’s reproductive vitality (though his own solution, that the penis pollutes because it emits both semen and urine, was speculative and unconvincing). Leigh Trevaskis argued that death itself represents a more fundamental theological concern that also lies behind biblical ideas of pollution, namely “exclusion from YHWH’s immediate presence” (Trevaskis 2011, 93-101). But there are reasons to doubt that either life-death symbolism or theology determined most of Israel’s purity practices (see Introduction to Leviticus 11-20 above). Mary Douglas maintained that purity and pollution represent the opposition between the normal and the abnormal. Abnormal mixings symbolize threats to social integrity (Douglas 1966, 124). Wenham (1983) criticized Douglas for failing to account for the impurity of sexual intercourse, surely a “normal” behaviour. Eilberg-Schwartz (1990, 182-194, 204) used lack of control to explain the different treatment of semen and menstruation: semen is less polluting than menstrual blood because it is more controllable (so also Frymer-Kensky 1983, 165). Deborah Ellens (2008, 64) criticized this theory for failing to account for Leviticus 15’s parallel treatment of the sexes, which does not revolve around control and lack of control. Furthermore, Eilberg-Schwartz (1990, 204) exaggerated when claiming “Since intercourse was the one voluntary act that contributed to the determination of status, it was the one willful act that produced contamination.” Not only masturbation (v. 16) but also eating and touching polluted animals (11:8, etc.) are voluntary acts that nevertheless pollute. Of the three oppositions that EilbergSchwartz (1990, 189) recognized in the purity rules (men/women, life/death, control/lack of control), only the dichotomy of men and women is explicit in Leviticus 15, which uses it to structure the chapter symmetrically. P’s regulations do not regard human bodily emissions in general as polluting (Frymer-Kensky 1983; Kazen 2017, 105). They require no purifications after urinating, defecating, or even bleeding from any part of the body except the vagina. By contrast, excrement was regarded as polluting in Ezek. 4:1213 and also at Qumran (4Q472a; 4Q265 6.2; 11QT 46:15; Harrington 2004, 64-65). P’s rules for emissions focus only on those emissions that differ between female and male bodies: menstrual blood, semen, and uncommon genital emissions similar to semen and menstrual blood, including vaginal

226

Leviticus 15 Exposition

bleeding during and after childbirth. Dorothea Erbele-Küster (2017, 144) therefore concluded that “it is notions of sex and gender which play the ultimate decisive role in the selection and evaluation of body execretions” in Leviticus (contra Douglas 1966, 51, 124). Tikva Frymer-Kensky (1983, 159) noted the social consequences of this categorization: “The biblical impurity/sacrificial system brings the private realm of sexuality into the public realm of the cult by monitoring the sexuality and reproductive status of its members.” Nicole Ruane (2013, 175) argued that pollution in Leviticus 15 serves to differentiate the sexes. “Its greater purpose is the creation and maintenance of basic gender difference.” She pointed out that P makes menstruation the paradigm for all forms of female genital pollution. Contact pollution with semen or menstrual blood then makes gender somewhat contagious, especially during sexual intercourse when each partner suffers the others’ pollution (15:18, 24; Ruane 2013, 178, 182). This mechanism of gender definition was summarized pithily by Erbele-Küster (2017, 153-56): “Leviticus 12 and 15 both describe and inscribe: they prescribe social relations and cultic connections and thereby standardize the body and its gender.” Frymer-Kensky (1983, 182) concluded that fear of gender confusion also prompted the severe penalties for sex with a menstruant in 20:18. She observed along with many others that “[women’s] sexuality and reproduction cause them to be treated differently and with less power than men, and yet outside of the reproductive realm the basic personhood of women is fundamental” (Frymer-Kensky 1983, 161-62). Leviticus, as usual, provides no symbolic interpretations of the bodily functions, fluids, and rituals that it describes in chap. 15. The search for such symbolic meanings participates in an activity that no doubt began with priests and lay people in ancient Israel. Then as now, it probably produced many different and contradictory interpretations (for examples, see the quotations below at the end of this Exposition collected by Polak-Sahm 2009 from visitors to an Israeli mikveh). Rituals, however, do not require agreement as to conceptual meaning in order to function effectively (see Introduction §2.3.6 in Leviticus 1-10). Nevertheless, they do exert social consequences by indexing the identity of various participants, which has real effects on their social status and power. Those effects have proven to be clearly discriminatory against women in the subsequent histories of Judaism and Christianity. The Rhetoric of Sexual and Menstrual Pollution Rhetorical analysis of Leviticus 15 shows two different tendencies at work simultaneously in its structure and wording (Ellens 2008, 71). On the one hand, the chapter treats men and women’s bodies equally by focusing only

Leviticus 15 Exposition

227

on their genital emissions and dividing those of each sex by whether they are common (ejaculated semen and menstrual bleeding) or uncommon. It provides the same purification procedures for both sexes after recovering from uncommon emissions (vv. 13-15, 28-30). On the other hand, its word choices show greater antipathy towards menstruation. Its overarching category of an “emission” (‫ ;זב‬v. 2) is not applied specifically to men’s common ejaculations of semen, but does label common and uncommon bleeding by women (vv. 19, 25). A woman’s common bleeding receives its own category, ‫ נדה‬niddah “menstrual period,” that lasts seven days regardless of her body’s actual behaviour. The label and time period indicated by ‫ נדה‬becomes the standard by which to describe women’s uncommon (v. 25) and postpartum (12:2) bleeding. And the torah formula that concludes the chapter (vv. 32-33) inverts a rare phrase that appears otherwise only in 12:2, ‫נדת‬ ‫“ דותה‬her menstrual period’s uneasiness,” to frame with menstruation all of the bodily pollutions described in chaps. 12-15. It then labels a menstruating woman with one word simply as ‫“ טמאה‬a polluted woman” (v. 33), thus summarizing the pollutions of chap. 15 and all of chaps. 12-15 with the image of a menstruating woman. There is no need to invoke editorial history to explain this divergence between equal treatment at the structural level and bias at the level of vocabulary. Thomas Kazen (2019, 90) categorized it as a difference between intention and effect, but even that distinction does not grapple with this fundamental and culturally widespread ambivalence. Our own modern culture provides many examples of attempts at academic and scientific objectivity that nevertheless entrench biases against women. For example, twentieth-century medicine tended to use male bodies to set standards for “normal” human biology, thus making all female bodies to some degree “abnormal.” Rhetorical analysis of Leviticus 15 reveals an early example of this common bias in objectivesounding rhetoric (Philip 2006, 47). Ambivalence in interpretation and ritual practice also affects how one views the practices described in Leviticus 15. For example, on the basis of ethnographic studies in Polynesia, Tarja Philip (2006, 11) observed that one should not assume that taboos are negative: “There is a possibility that the taboo may express prestige and not oppression of women, and thus it is important to check who is restricted by it, the woman herself, or those surrounding her?” As a matter of fact, Leviticus 15 does focus on restricting the activities, not of a menstruating woman or an emitting man, but of people who come into contact with them. Another example: Wilda Gafney deployed her “womanist midrash” of Leviticus 15 to positive and practical ends, specifically to prompt discussions of sexual ethics in Christian congregations. She argued that “this torah offers a number of key discussion points: (1) equality between partners, (2) consent to sexual intimacy, (3) hygenic

228

Leviticus 15 Exposition

(read: healthy, “safe”) sexual practices, and (4) intimacy as a constituent element of sexual activity” (Gafney 2017, 117). Since the influence of second-wave feminism began to be felt in biblical scholarship after 1970, interpretations of the menstruation rules in Leviticus 15 fall recognizably into two camps: those that emphasize the misogyny exhibited by P’s rules (Sorge 1987 and Fander 1991, quoted by Gerstenberger 157; Eilberg-Schwartz 1990; Jay 1992; Rapp 2001; Ruane 2013), and those that emphasize their relative moderation in comparison with the beliefs and practices of other ancient and traditional cultures, including other HB texts and later Jewish and Christian cultures (Gruber 1987; Milgrom 952-53; Klawans 2000, 38; O’Grady 2003, 26-28; Ellens 2008, 71-72; Goldstein 2015, 10, 44; Kamionkowski 148-51; Erbele-Küster 2017, 152). Most of these scholars also recognized that the rules can be both misogynistic and relatively mild, so this distinction really reflects the interpreter’s rhetorical emphasis (Fonrobert 2000, 209). These competing tendencies in scholarship reflect a wider debate in modern Jewish culture about whether the menstrual rules of Leviticus and of the talmudic tractate, Niddah, reflect the sexism of traditional Judaism or, conversely, provide affirmation for women by ritualizing women’s bodies and providing them agency over their own sexuality (Fonrobert 2000, 15, 27; Korte 2000, 323). Some women report a sense of spiritual renewal from bathing at the end of their menstrual periods (Korte 2000, 319). A new mikveh movement has repurposed bathing rituals to deal with the challenges and transitions experienced by modern women. Anne-Marie Korte (2000, 325-36) summarized the history of feminists repurposing traditional Jewish and Christian rituals: At first, many of the revised or new rituals served to rehabilitate the female body. This led to a complete reversal of negative associations surrounding women’s bodies and their sexuality. ... Later, the reinterpretation and rejuvenation of traditional feminine rituals called into question the religious meaning of purity. Now, women also use and create rituals of religious purification to wash themselves clean of events like rape, incest and sexual abuse. This makes the point that it is not the uncontrolled flowing of blood, but the uncontrollable abuse of power and violation of the body that create impurity and unholiness.

In a later article, however, Korte (2003, 165-74) reported on comparative research on women’s religions by Susan Starr Sered.4 Unlike modern feminist ritualizing, traditional women’s religions pay little attention to menstruation. They instead focus on women as mothers, grandmothers, and sisters, so on the social, rather than biological, aspects of being a woman. Not blood, but 4 Susan Starr Sered, Priestess—Mother—Sacred Sister: Religions Dominated by Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 139.

Leviticus 15 Exposition

229

food and food preparation tend to take central place in their rituals, which rarely include animal sacrifice and almost never involve bodily purification. Korte (2003, 178-88) contrasted Sered’s research with attempts to repurpose Jewish and Christian women-oriented rituals, where “the history and experiences of women within the dominant Western religions are kept present and accounted for” (188). Referring to contradictory positions among academic feminist interpreters as well as women practitioners, Fonrobert (2000, 209) observed, “In the end, the entire difference lies in what women choose to do with such traditions, what meaning they give to them, and how they view the significance of their embodiedness for their intellectual and religious life choices.” This commentary has emphasized that the meaning of any text is never more nor other than how real people have actually interpreted it (Leviticus 1-10, 87-88). I have also emphasized that the text’s rhetoric does not necessarily reflect the thoughts and feelings of people who participate in the rituals that it describes. In the case of Leviticus 12 and 15, the discrepancy between rhetoric and ritual interpretation is especially marked, because the preserved rhetoric (originally and up until recently) has been generated by men, while these rituals have applied (mostly in biblical times and almost entirely in more recent millennia) to women. “These laws deal with issues which are more likely to mute women than to prompt them to speak up,” observed Korte (2000, 218), who continued: One major hermeneutic problem intrinsic to the study of purity laws pertaining to women’s bodies is that we are dealing with a subject which generally invokes silence and concealment in women, while inciting men – particularly those in a position of authority – to elucidate, to define, and to embark on ‘fact-finding’ missions.

Therefore, the last thing anyone needs to hear is another man’s opinions about menstrual pollution. Fortunately, the development of feminism in successive waves of activism and theory over the past 150 years has ended women’s published silence about, among many other things, Leviticus 12 and 15. I therefore reserve the last words on this subject for a chronological sample of their voices that expresses their diverse interpretations and experiences with these rituals and texts. I encourage readers to go beyond my limited quotations by reading these statements in their entirety. Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1898, 91-92): “It is clearly shown that child-bearing among the Jews was not considered a sacred office and that offerings to the Lord were necessary for their purification, and that double the time was necessary after the birth of a daughter. ... In reading many of these chapters [of Leviticus] we wonder that an expurgated edition of these books was not issued long ago. We ... suggest to the next Revising Committee of gentlemen the propriety of omitting many texts that are gross and obscene, especially if the

230

Leviticus 15 Exposition Bible is to be read in our public schools. ... The virtue of cleanliness so sedulously taught cannot be too highly commended.” A Belgian Catholic woman (quoted by Roll 2003, 117): “My mother had ten children in the course of the 1920s and 30s, and after each of the first few births she went to have the rite of the blessing after childbirth done. Then at one point my father, who understood Latin, read the text of the rite and was outraged. He declared to her, ‘You’re not going to submit to that anymore’.” Rahel R. Wasserfall (1992, 317) summarizing the views of Morrocan women immigrants to Israel: “If blood turns a girl into a woman, the miqveh turns the woman into a Jew. Niddah then provides the link between personal identity (I am a woman) and collective identity (I am a Jew).” Rachel Adler (1993, 38-41; see discussion in Korte 2000, 320-21): “Menstrual impurity is constitutive of the religious selfhood of women in Orthodox Judaism. I undertook to justify this legislation by constructing around it a feminist theology of purity. ... I interpreted all these regulations as ritual expressions of a single theology of purity equally relevant to women and men. I see clearly now how this generalized reframing reflected my awareness of and hopefulness about egalitarianism as a value in secular society. ... The otherness and the instrumentality of women were foundational presumptions of the men who wrote about these laws. ... Socially, then, purity and impurity do not constitute a cycle through which all members of the society pass, as I argued in my essay. Instead, purity and impurity define a class system in which the most impure people are women. ... My theology claimed that impurity was universal. The social reality, since the rabbinic period at least, was that impurity was feminine. ... And yet women embraced this theology with great fervor and felt transformed by it. ... It became acutely painful to me to meet these women at lectures and conferences and have them thank me for a theology I had come to believe both intellectually and morally unjustifiable. ... When Jewish women who were not Orthodox appropriated my reframing of immersion in the mikveh to mark occurrences for which no ritual expression had existed, they taught me an important lesson about the possibility of salvage. ... for the feminist Jew, impurity seems to mean the violation of physical or sexual integrity, death by invasion. ... Human is not whole. Human is full of holes. Human bleeds. Human births its worlds in agonies of blood and bellyaches. Human owns no perfect, timeless texts because human inhabits no perfect, timeless contexts. Human knows that what it weds need not be perfect to be infinitely dear.” Hélène Cixous (1998, 109): “‘Birds, women, writing’ ... form a series of equivalencies. A very poetic chapter from Leviticus presents us with a long strange list of what is prohibited and what is allowed, you are sacred, you are defiled – oh, the interminable inventory of abominations.” Anne-Marie Korte (2000, 327): “It is astounding that the repeated waves of ‘democratization and laicization of holiness’ in Judaism, early Christianity and Protestantism were unable to resolve the discrepancy between the sacred and the female body. ... Female theologians from all three religious traditions agree on the most important issue on the agenda: the need to revise our perceptions of corporeality, sexuality and procreation in relation to holiness and God. Rather than the female body, it is our images of God that are preventing us from finding a link between women’s bodies and holiness.”

Leviticus 15 Exposition

231

Eva M. Synek (2006, 146), about her conversations with Eastern Orthodox Christian women: “Often, they would signal with winks that a ‘canonical’ justification for a ‘free Sunday’ would actually be very nice once in while (Manchmal mit Augenzwinkern signalisiert wird, ein ‘kanonischer’ Rechtfertigungsgrund für einen ‘freien Sonntag’ könne gelegentlich auch einmal ganz angenehm sein).” Miriam, an attendant at a mikveh in Israel (quoted by Polak-Sahm 2009, 37): “‘Do not touch the impurity of niddah’ – this is the most important warning of all. ... Touching this impurity is the greatest danger of all. Listen, the most important imperative without which the continuity of the Jewish people would not be possible, is the imperative to maintain family purity. With her body, the Jewish woman fulfills this vital duty. Therefore, when you do not maintain purity, you are niddah, and your body is defiled from the blood of niddah and your children are defiled and your entire household is defiled, and this is worse than the defilement of the dead. ... And it’s not only you who are impure – your impurity affects your offspring and their descendants for generations to come, and worst of all, with the blood of your niddah you defile all the people of Israel and bring the danger of karet [being cut off] upon the entire Jewish people.” Shlomit, an American modern Orthodox woman in an Israeli mikveh (quoted by Polak-Sahm 2009, 73): “In the past, women were hardly ever in a state of niddah. ... when they got pregnant, they nursed until the child was four or five, because this was the most important food, and they would become pregnant again while still nursing and continuing to nurse .... I’m that way, too. I have eight children, may they all be healthy, and altogether, I’ve immersed in the mikveh maybe ten times since the day I got married eleven years ago. Every time I immersed I returned to my natural primal state as a woman, a state of readiness for pregnancy. A state of fertility.” Doris, another mikveh attendant in Israel (quoted by Polak-Sahm 2009, 95-96): “As for ‘impurity’? Excuse me, but I think you’re overreacting to this term ‘impurity’. To me, the impurity of niddah is a part of the cyclicality of nature. Like the way a tree sheds its leaves before it blossoms, that’s how I view blood. I don’t see in my monthly change of seasons all this negativity you’re talking about. No humiliation and no discrimination and none of all that rubbish you say.” A “fortyish woman” in an Israeli mikveh (quoted by Polak-Sahm 2009, 97-98): “At first, I immersed just out of curiosity – I wanted to see whether I would really feel a transition from impurity to purity. And let me tell you – I was bowled over by the intensity of the transition that I felt in the mikveh. That’s why I decided to keep on following this mesmerizing fluctuation between impurity and purity.” Another woman in an Israeli mikveh (quoted by Polak-Sahm 2009, 99): “I identify menstruation with emotional pollution. When I’m impure, I’m cleansed of all the emotional garbage that’s excreted along with the blood. For me, it’s like sweating in the sauna.” A French woman in an Israeli mikveh (quoted by Polak-Sahm 2009, 101): “I just feel so blessed when I come to immerse after two weeks of impurity so severe it’s compared to the impurity of the dead. Not that I feel impure, oh no, I don’t go around with such thoughts. But when I bathe and immerse I feel pure. And blessed. My menstrual blood is a sign from my body that it’s ready to create new life. It’s part of my body language. It’s the power of life.”

232

Leviticus 15 Exegesis Orly, in an Israeli mikveh (quoted by Polak-Sahm 2009, 111): “I’m a marathon runner. I train on the Sabbath and eat treif [non-kosher food]. But I feel a connection to religion and I’ve chosen to observe the mitzvah of immersion because it’s the only one that seems truly important and relevant to me. All the others seem outdated.” Wilda C. Gafney (2017, 112): “As a womanist reader/hearer, I see deep, ancient sexist beliefs and practices in and behind this text. The belief that women are ‘less than’ men – less competent, less capable, less intelligent, less capable of contributing meaningfully to society, a lesser reflection of the image of God – finds good support in some parts of the Scripture. This is one such place. I name it and preserve it as Scripture, teaching that all of our human institutions and productions, including and especially religious ones, are flawed. Sexism is one of those ancient, enduring flaws.”

EXEGESIS Heading and Summary (15:1-2) 15:1-2a YHWH spoke to Moses and to Aaron: Speak to the children of Israel. You must say to them: Aaron is included in the address, as in 11:1, 13:1, and 14:33, despite being omitted in 12:1 and 14:1. This pattern in the introductory formulas of chaps. 11-15 does not seem to reflect the contents of the chapters. 15:2b Everyone who has an emission, a bodily emission – they (ms) are polluted. The repetition ‫ אישׁ אישׁ‬creates a distributive sense, “everyone” (GKC §123d; Waltke-O’Connor §7.2.3). It appears frequently in the subsequent legislation where it sometimes designates men specifically (15:18, 24; 18:6; 22:4) but more often includes any potential worshipper (17:8, 10, 13; 20:2, 22:18) or offender (20:9; 24:15). In this chapter, a gender-inclusive sense of ‫ אישׁ‬is required at least in vv. 5 and 33. This phrase here introduces the topic of the whole chapter. Therefore, despite the topic of male genitalia in the next verse, it deserves a gender-neutral translation (Elliger 193), like Leviticus’s other casuistic formulas that tend to be inclusive (see Exegesis to 1:2b and 2:1). ‫“ זוב‬emit, emission” appears in two set phrases in the HB: to describe water flowing from the rock struck by Moses (Isa. 48.21; Ps. 78:20; 105:41) and to describe a land flowing with milk and honey (Exod. 3:8; Lev. 20:24; etc.). But this chapter uses the verb and noun to describe male and female genital emissions of blood and mucus, though not ejaculations of semen. It uses the participle, ‫זב‬/‫זבה‬, both for emissions and for a person who experiences them (see Erbele-Küster 2017, 103-6). Apart from these specific applications,

Leviticus 15 Exegesis

233

the verb appears only in Jer. 49:4 to describe ebbing strength. This chapter’s application of the same term to female and male genital emissions, despite different anatomies and fluids, gives the impression, as Erbele-Küster observed, “that the conceptual field of ‫ זָ ב‬provides a symmetrical description independent of sex, even though sex-specific processes are involved.” Up to this point in Leviticus, ‫ בשׂר‬has meant “meat” (4:11) or “flesh” (13:2). The following verses and 12:3 support translating “penis” (Milgrom 907) but its use for women in v. 19 suggests a broader translation, at least “genitals” (Hartley), and v. 16 uses it explicitly for a man’s whole body. The Hebrew word “corresponds most closely with our concept of body or embodiment” (Erbele-Küster 2017, 89), so I translate “body, bodily” here. LXX translates ‫ בשׂר‬consistently with σῶμα, which means “body” but does not carry sexual connotations. In this and other ways, “the Greek translation thus attempts to employ gender-neutral language effecting the body while imparting a medicalphysiological character to the discussion” (Erbele-Küster 2017, 85). The construction, ‫“ זובו טמא הוא‬the emission – it is polluted,” specifies the emission rather than the person. Many interpreters wonder if the phrase is an insertion (Elliger 193). Milgrom (906-907) instead suggested modifying MT’s accentuation to read together ‫“ מבשׂרו זובו‬an emission from his body” as in the parallel description of a woman’s emission in v. 19. This plausible change allows the final phrase to carry its usual meaning, “they (ms) are polluted” (cf. 13:11, 36). LXX begins the next verse with a torah formula, which has the effect of turning v. 2b into a heading for the entire chapter. This interpretation is supported by the fact that verse 2’s terminology applies equally to men and to women. Men’s Uncommon Genital Emissions (15:3-15) The structure of the chapter brackets common male and female emissions with uncommon ones (see Exposition: Structure). So the first case involves a man whose penis emits mucus or is blocked by mucus. Unlike the regulations for infestation in chap. 13, however, this chapter shows no interest in diagnosing the problem. Instead, its instructions emphasize how to avoid contracting pollution from other people’s genital emissions. 15:3

This is the law for his emission’s pollution: whether his body oozes his emission or his body is obstructed from emitting, he is polluted; as long as his body emits or his body is blocked from emitting, this is his pollution.

LXX καὶ οὗτος ὁ νόμος τῆς ἀκαθαρσίας αὐτου “this is the law for his pollution” at the beginning of the verse suggests reading ‫“ תורה‬law” as in v. 32

234

Leviticus 15 Exegesis

instead of MT’s ‫“ תהיה‬will be.” Wevers (225) judged the confusion of ‫תורה‬ with ‫ תהיה‬unlikely, but Milgrom (908) preferred LXX because the imperfect verb ‫ תהיה‬seems strange in this context. The redundancy between the first and last phrases of this verse in MT also supports LXX’s phrasing, which my translation reproduces. Though torah formulas usually conclude regulations (11:46; 12:7; 13:59; 14:32, 54, 57; 15:32), they also introduce them in 14:2 and regularly in chaps. 6-7. The unique verb ‫ רר‬is most likely a denominative from the noun ‫ריר‬ “spittle, juice” (1 Sam. 21:14; Job 6:6), so “secrete” (HAL, DCH) or “ooze.” The chapter distinguishes on-going oozing from intermittent and voluntary ejaculations (vv. 16-18). LXX and SP include a longer reading that is missing from MT. SP adds ‫או‬ ‫“ חתום בשׂרו מזובו טמא הוא כל ימי זב בשׂרו‬or his body is obstructed from emitting, he is polluted as long as his body emits” (see SPCEM 126 and BHQ 101102; BHS misstates the beginning and end of the addition). MT’s omission can easily be explained as homoioteleuton: a copyist’s eye skipped from one appearance of ‫“ או‬or” to the next (Milgrom 909), though Wevers (225) dismissed the longer text as a doublet. The fragmentary 11QpaleoLev supports the longer text, specifically LXX’s version (Freedman and Mathews 1985, 32): its added temporal phrase [‫“ בו כל ימי ז]ב‬in him as long as emi[ts]” contains ‫= בו‬ LXX ἐν αὐτοῦ. The phrase, ‫“ כל ימי זוב‬as long as emits,” may derive from the parallel case in v. 25. All this evidence supports the conclusion that MT omitted material through homoioteleuton, so I translate SP’s longer version. The nearly unanimous verdict of ancient and modern interpreters is that this verse describes mucus secretions due to gonorrhea (LXX v. 4; t. Zav 2:5; Milgrom 907), though other diagnoses may also fit the symptoms (Hieke 529). However, the fact that we can recognize gonorrheal symptoms in this text should not obscure the fact that the priestly writers knew nothing about sexually transmitted diseases. So they did not restrict the emitter’s sexual activity, which remained only mildly polluting as sex usually did (v. 18). They thought contagious pollution from genital emissions was transmitted by touch and even spit (vv. 4-12), but not to the extent of transmitting the affliction itself. Mesopotamian omen lists also reflected disgust at uncommon male emissions: “When a man ejaculates repeatedly/uncontrollably, that man is unclean. He will bear his sin (and will certainly die)” (Šumma ālu CIV §27 [CT 39, 45:27]; Sallaberger 2011, 28). 15:4

Every bed on which the emitter lies becomes polluted, and everything that he sits on becomes polluted.

‫“ הזב‬the emitter” is translated by LXX as ὁ γονορρυής “the gonorrheic,” but Wevers (226) disputed its association with the sexually transmitted disease of that name. See on v. 3.

Leviticus 15 Exegesis

235

Milgrom (909-10, 952-53) observed that the imperfect verbs throughout this chapter for the emitter “sitting,” “lying,” or “riding” indicate that people polluted by genital emissions are not isolated nor expelled from the community, unlike in Num. 5:2-4 and Deut. 23:10-12. The emitter’s presence in the home explains this chapter’s concern with contagious pollution, unlike chaps. 13-14 that require the isolation of infested people away from the camp (13:46; 14:3, 8). 15:5

Anyone who touches his bed must wash their (ms) clothes and bathe in water and be polluted until evening.

The tri-colon, ‫“ כבס בגדיו ורחץ במים וטמא עד־הערב‬they must wash their clothes and bathe in water and be polluted until evening,” is repeated five times in the following six verses. The requirements to wash clothes and bathe, and the judgment that they remain polluted for the rest of the day, are not sequential. The person becomes polluted the moment they touch the polluted object. They remain so until sunset, during which time they must bathe and wash their clothes. If they do so, the become pure at nightfall. 15:6

Those who sit on anything the emitter sat on must wash their clothes and bathe in water and be polluted until evening.

The specification of things that emitters sit or lie on (vv. 5-6, 9-10, 20-23, 26) suggests that it is the emission itself which is polluting of things and people who touch it (so explicitly v. 17), not the person’s body as a whole (but see the next verse). 15:7

Those who touch the emitter’s body must wash their clothes and bathe in water and be polluted until evening.

The emitter’s body conveys pollution presumably because the emission has not been washed off (see v. 11). Feder (2013, 160-62) argued that ‫בשׂר‬ “body” must mean “penis” here (cf. on v. 2 above) because of the more extensive purification procedures than for touching a woman who is menstruating (v. 19). But embodied cognition is not systematically consistent, as Feder’s own review of this research showed (Feder 2013, 155, 166). Verse 16 requires that ‫ בשׂר‬there refer to a man’s whole body, so that is probably what it means here, too (Ibn Ezra; Milgrom 914). 15:8

If the emitter spits on pure people, they must wash their clothes and bathe in water and become polluted until evening.

The verb “to spit” (from ‫ ירק‬or ‫)רקק‬, appears three times in the HB. So does the noun ‫“ רק‬spit” (Isa. 50:6; Job 7:19; 30:10; HAL). There is no obvious

236

Leviticus 15 Exegesis

connection between saliva and genital emissions. Spitting on someone shamed them (Num. 12:14; Deut. 25:9), but that does not seem to be the point of this verse. The verse is introduced by ‫“ כי‬when, if,” which introduces new subjects in vv. 2, 13, 16, and 25. Spitting seems less of a change from touching (v. 7) and sitting (v. 6), subjects which return in vv. 9-10. Perhaps ‫ כי‬emphasizes this verse’s shift to the emitter himself as the subject who actively pollutes others by spitting, whether intentionally or accidentally (Milgrom 915; Hieke 531). 15:9

Every saddle on which the emitter rides becomes polluted.

This verse is redundant after v. 4. Milgrom (916) suggested that the saddle is added here because it does not require laundering (see on v. 10). LXX added “until evening.” 15:10 Everyone who touches anything that was under him becomes polluted until evening. Those that carry them must wash their clothes and bathe in water and be polluted until evening. The antecedent of ‫“ תחתיו‬under him/it” could be the saddle (Ibn Ezra, somewhat differently Sifra) or the emitter (LXX, Syr, TgNeof). The latter is more likely, in which case the specific example of v. 9 is generalized by v. 10 to apply to any kind of seat (Milgrom 917) . Milgrom (912) asked, “Why does touching the bedding of a zāb require laundering and bathing while touching his seat or saddle requires only bathing?” This question misstates the explicit statement of this verse that mentions only waiting until evening in the first instance. Milgrom assumed that “polluted until evening” always presupposes bathing even though this verse does not say so. Wright (1987, 185 n. 38) compared a series of P texts that describe similar situations to show that they presuppose bathing when they mention laundering or waiting a length of time before becoming pure. But why then does a requirement to bathe not also presuppose laundering clothes? The frequent mention together of laundering, bathing, and waiting in Leviticus 15:6-13 (7×) and Numbers 19:7, 8, 19 would lead a listening audience to hear an abbreviation of all three actions when only one or two are mentioned elsewhere in these same chapters (Lev. 15:10, 28; Num. 19:10). That is probably also the case in Leviticus 14: all three actions listed twice in 14:8-9 would lead one to assume bathing when one hears waiting and laundering in 14:45-47. The exception to this tendency is Leviticus 11, where the rules of polluted and inedible animals prescribe only waiting (11:24, 31,

Leviticus 15 Exegesis

237

39) or waiting and laundering (11:25, 28, 40) but never bathing for purification after coming into contact with the carcasses of polluted animals. Here in chap. 15, however, the rhetoric of vv. 5-11, 17, 21-22, 27 connects the time period “until evening” ten times with the requirements to bathe and launder clothes. In the memory of a listening audience, that repeated emphasis overrides the distinctiveness of vv. 10a, 13, 18, 19, 23, 28 that omit one or another element. Readers who insist on the significance of every irregularity in the pattern presuppose a kind of visual and legal interpretation that reflects the scriptural status achieved by this text in the later Second Temple and rabbinic periods (Kugel 1998, 14-20; Lawrence 2006, 188). The repetitive shaping of this chapter, like the rest of Leviticus, shows instead the writers’ interest in oral persuasion more than in legally consistent phrasing (see Introduction §3 in Leviticus 1-10). 15:11 Everyone whom the emitter touches without having rinsed his hands, they must wash their clothes and bathe in water and be polluted until evening. The fact that the emitter can touch someone with rinsed hands and not convey pollution suggests that it is the emission itself that is polluting, not the rest of the emitter’s body. This rule assumes that his hands have touched the emission unless they have recently been rinsed (Milgrom 911). Only this verse indicates that washing hands prevents them from conveying pollution. In the late Second Temple period, it was increasing read together with the food rules of Leviticus 11 to justify the need to wash hands before eating (Mark 7:1-4). 15:12 Any ceramic pot that the emitter touches must be broken, and any wooden bowl must be rinsed in water. See Exegesis to 6:21, where I argued that mandates for breaking ceramic bowls but washing bronze bowls indicated a concern that ceramic pottery might absorb some of the offering meat and blood. Here, however, the same distinction is made between ceramics and wooden bowls, even though wood seems the most porous material. Perhaps wooden bowls were too expensive to destroy like cheap pottery (so Milgrom 921; see Exegesis to 11:33). 15:13 When the emitter is purified of his emission, he must count to himself seven days for his purification. He must wash his clothes and bathe his body in fresh water. Then he will be pure. Many commentators understand ‫“ יטהר‬is purified” here to mean “is healed” instead because it refers to “his emission” (Milgrom 921; Gerstenberger

238

Leviticus 15 Exegesis

195-96; Hieke 533). Translating “healed” resolves the problem that the verse’s protasis states that the emitter is already purified, while the last phrase of the apodosis confers that state only at the end of seven days. But it requires that the same word, ‫טהר‬, have two distinct and clearly differentiated meanings in the same verse. The language instead points to a less differentiated understanding of purification that indicates both a physical state and a social state. It is the purification ritual that brings them into alignment with each other. For further discussion of this point, see History and Interpretation of Purification Rituals for Infestation in Exposition to Leviticus 13-14 above, and also Exegesis to 14:8. The Qumran Temple Scroll added ‫“ כל‬all” (11QT 45:16) to specify washing the man’s “whole body,” which confirms this translation of ‫ בשׂר‬in vv. 2 and 7 as well (see above). Only here does a purification ritual specify bathing in ‫“ מים חיים‬fresh water,” that is, spring or river water. The purification rituals for infested (14:5) and corpse-polluted (Num. 19:17) persons require drawing fresh water into basins, but the bathing that follows does not specify the kind of water (Lev. 14:8; Num. 19:19). Milgrom (923-24) argued that because these rituals require fresh water in the first instance, they imply bathing in fresh water too. Here in 15:13, however, LXX omits “fresh.” The textual uncertainty recommends not reading too much into this unique qualifier of bath water. 15:14 On the eighth day, he must take for himself two landfowl or two of any kind of pigeon and come before YHWH at the entrance of the meeting tent and give them to the priest. For the translation, “landfowl or any kind of pigeon,” see Translating Animal Names in Exposition to Leviticus 11. 15:15 The priest must make one a sin (offering) and the other one a rising (offering). So the priest mitigates for him before YHWH for his emission. ‫“ עשׂה אתם‬make them” means performing the entire offering ritual (cf. 14:30-31) as described in 1:14-17 and 5:8-9. MT’s definite article on the second ‫ אחד‬is omitted by almost all the ancient versions (BHS, BHQ). Elliger suggested that both should have the article, as in v. 30 and 14:31. But Ehrlich and Milgrom (928) defended MT as specifying “one ... and the other one,” which seems reasonable in apposition to the combined direct object, ‫“ אתם‬them.”

Leviticus 15 Exegesis

239

Men’s Common Ejaculations of Semen (15:16-18) This case is the shortest and least detailed in this chapter. Unlike the others, its discussion of semen pollution does not emphasize avoiding contact with a man who has ejaculated nor does it label him as ‫“ זב‬an emitter.” Instead, it focuses on his own experience of pollution and purification and the purification of any woman with whom he has sexual intercourse. Other ancient cultures often regarded sexual intercourse as polluting and required temporary abstinence before entering a temple. The HB regularly uses pollution rhetoric to describe illicit sex, and both pollution and sexual language to describe religious infidelity. See Introduction to Leviticus 11-20 above. Ancient interpreters debated whether or not semen is less polluting than other genital emissions: while the Qumran scrolls made semen just as defiling as other genital emissions (4Q274 2.i.8; 11QT 45.11-12), the rabbis insisted that semen pollutes only on direct contact (m. Zab. 5:11; b. Naz. 66a; Harrington 2004, 59). 15:16 Anyone who lets out a layer of semen must bathe his whole body in water and be polluted until evening. The sentence describes ‫“ שׁכבת־זרע‬a layer of semen” (also vv. 17, 18, 32; for more on this phrase, see on v. 18 below and Erbele-Küster 2017, 109-11) coming out of (‫ )תצא ממנו‬the man so as to include both intentional and unintentional acts (TgPsJ; Milgrom 927). This verse explicitly specifies bathing his whole (‫ )כל‬body (cf. vv. 5-11), because ‫“ בשׂר‬body, flesh” can be a euphemism for just the penis (see on v. 2). This rule is lenient by comparison with Exod. 19:15, where Moses requires the Israelites at Sinai to abstain from sex for two days and wash their clothes to prepare for the theophany on the third day. The Qumran Temple Scroll applied the Exodus rule to Jerusalem by requiring three days of abstinence and purification before entering the city (11QT 45:7-10). Other Qumran scrolls completely banned women from the temple city and the war camp, and prohibited sexual intercourse during pregnancy because it cannot lead to procreation (Harrington 2004, 103-106). Rabbinic rulings were less stringent. The rabbis prohibited men from studying Torah until purified of their seminal emissions (t. Ber. 2:12; b. Ber. 22a; see Milgrom 927), but required only one day of purification, as in this verse. They also allowed men to circulate freely during that day so long as they stayed away from the Temple (Harrington 2004, 206). For purification after sexual intercourse, see on v. 18 below.

240

Leviticus 15 Exegesis

15:17 Any cloth and any skin that has a layer of semen on it must be washed in water and be polluted until evening. On the translation of ‫ עור‬as “skin,” meaning leather, see Exegesis to 13:48 above. This rule for ejaculations of semen mentions only cloth and leather materials, while the other cases in this chapter focus on furnishings (vv. 4-6, 9-10, 20-23, 26) and even utensils (v. 12). 15:18 As to a woman with whom a man lays a layer of semen: they (both) must bathe in water and be polluted until evening. Many commentators isolate this verse about sexual intercourse as the centre of the chapter’s arch structure (see Exposition: Structure). MT’s petucha before v. 18 reads this verse with what follows. However, the opening formula ‫“ ואשׁה אשׁר‬any woman who” does not mark a major break in this chapter like ‫ואשׁה כי‬/‫“ ואישׁ‬when a man/woman” in vv. 16 and 19, but rather a change of subject within a connected series of examples, like ‫“ ואישׁ אשׁר‬anyone who” in v. 5 (see Ellens 2008, 56-60; contra Whitekettle 1991, 35; Milgrom 930-31 tried to have it both ways). MT’s pointing ‫ א ָֹתהּ‬seems to make “her” the direct object, but can only mean ‫“ ִא ָתּהּ‬with her” as recognized by LXX, the SP vocalization tradition (SPCEM), and modern commentators (e.g. Milgrom 931). This euphemism for sex more often uses ‫“ עם‬with” as in v. 33, but when it uses ‫את‬, MT always points it like the sign of the direct object (DCH 8:346). The phrase, ‫“ ישׁכב אישׁ אתה שׁכבת־זרע‬with whom a man lays a layer of semen,” utilizes ‫“ שׁכב‬to lay, lie down” euphemistically in two related ways: as a verb for sexual intercourse (like English “sleep with”) and as a noun referring to the “laying down” of semen, that is, an ejaculation (ErbeleKüster 2017, 109-11). Gafney (2017, 116) objected that “there is no reason for the text to be this awkward” and suggested that it reflects an embarrassed speaker stumbling over sexual euphemisms. This translation, “lays a layer of semen,” tries to reproduce some of that euphemistic clumsiness here and in its continuation in vv. 32-33. The first word changes the focus to a woman, but the apodosis contains plural verbs to describe both partners’ pollution. The woman does not become the subject of the sexual act, but remains objectified relative to the male actor as in the other references to sexual intercourse (vv. 24, 33; Ellens 2008, 49, 51-52). She also becomes liable to male purification practices because of coming into contact with male genital emissions. This is the only verse in Leviticus that explicitly requires a woman to bathe in order to be purified (Ruane 2007, 78), but see on v. 10 above.

Leviticus 15 Exegesis

241

The custom of bathing after sex was widely practiced by ancient Jews according to Philo (Laws 3.63) and Josephus (Ap. 2.202-203). Women’s Common Menstrual Emissions (15:19-24) Despite the structural parallel in this chapter between male and female genital emissions, the rhetorical focus remains on the implied male reader or listener who may come into contact with a menstruating woman, not on the woman herself. This paragraph never even says that a woman on her period is polluted – that was apparently too obvious to need stating explicitly (though comparisons with menstrual periods say so in 12:2 and 15:25). A man’s fear that a woman’s menstruation will pollute him becomes explicit in v. 24. There sex with a menstruating woman turns the man into a menstruant himself, polluted for seven days. Neither this paragraph nor any other HB text mentions women secluding themselves during their menstrual periods. Many interpreters have presupposed that social custom to the extent of translating ‫“ נדה‬menstrual period” as “separation.” The emphasis here falls instead on other people purifying themselves after direct or indirect contact with a woman who is on her menstrual period. The overt rhetoric focuses on warning others to keep their distance. The paragraph plays on the literal and euphemistic meanings of ‫“ שׁכב‬lie down, have sex” employed already in v. 18. Here, the woman’s body transmits pollution to the bed (‫ )משׁכב‬that she lies on (vv. 20-23) and anyone who touches it, and also to a man who lies with her, whose body then pollutes the bed he lies on (v. 24). 15:19 Any woman who has a bloody emission, which is her bodily emission, will be on her menstrual period for seven days. Everyone who touches her will be polluted until evening. ‫“ בשׂרה‬her body” is a euphemism for genitals, though only here in the HB for female genitals (Philip 2006, 48) influenced by v. 2’s description of a man’s emission. The fact that this verse reads ‫“ בבשׂרה‬in her body” while v. 2 reads ‫“ מבשׂרו‬from his body” indicates a woman’s interior bodily experience in contrast to the externality ascribed to a man’s experience (ErbeleKüster 2018, 65). It led the ancient rabbis to speculate about female internal anatomy in architectural terms (Sifra; m. Nid. 2:5; 5:1; b. Nid. 41b; Fonrobert 2000, 48-56). Leviticus, however, does not elaborate on this distinction. Claudia Rapp (2001, 34) observed that pollution is contagious here by “touching her” but in v. 7 by touching “his body” which she took to mean penis, to conclude that in Leviticus, polluted “women are untouchable as a

242

Leviticus 15 Exegesis

whole, man only partly.” In v. 7, however, ‫ בשׂר‬probably indicates a man’s whole body like it does in v. 16. The dictionaries of biblical Hebrew present two meanings for ‫ נדה‬niddah: “bleeding, menstruation” (HAL) and “flow of blood” (DCH) on the one hand, and “separation, abomination, defilement” (HAL) and “impurity” (DCH) on the other. The verbal root is either ‫“ נדד‬depart” or ‫“ נדה‬put aside,” both reinforcing the first meaning of an “expulsion” of blood (Levine 97; Milgrom 745).5 Leviticus 12, 15, and 18 use the noun twelve times in this first sense to refer to a woman’s ritual status when menstruating. In Mishnaic Hebrew, the meaning of niddah expanded from the condition of menstruating to become a label for a menstruating woman (Fonrobert 2000, 18). But elsewhere in the HB, ‫ נדה‬becomes a synonym for pollution (Ezek. 7:19-20; 36:17; Zech. 13:1; Lam. 1:8, 17; Ezra 9:11; 2 Chr. 29:5). Neither definition, however, works for the phrase ‫ מי נדה‬which describes the water containing ashes of a red heifer that is used to purify corpse contamination (Num. 19:9, 13, 20-21; 31:23). That phrase is usually translated functionally something like “purifying water” (cf. NRSV, NJPS, CEB). Milgrom (745, contra his earlier suggestion in 1990, 160) translated “water of expulsion (of impurity)” and pointed out the similar construction, ‫“ מי חטאת‬water of sin” in Num. 8:7, which he translated as “water of purification.” The latter phrase, however, works well within the semantic field of ‫ חטאת‬that means both “sin” and “sin offering.” The word ‫ נדה‬alone carries no similarly positive ritual significance (see Ruane 2013, 136-47). Milgrom (744-45) therefore added a third meaning for ‫נדה‬, “lustration,” while Levine (1993, 219, 463-64) observed that lustrating involves causing the water “to flow” or “sprinkling” it, like the verbal root ‫נדד‬. In Leviticus 15, however, the arbitrary seven-day period shows that ‫נדה‬ does not indicate a woman’s actual blood flow, the duration of which varies, but rather her ritual status due to menstruating (Ruane 2013, 137). This emphasis on periodization is confirmed by 12:2, 4 that compare a new mother’s seven days of pollution to her menstrual period (‫ )נדת דותה‬and to the following 33 days of ‫“ דמי טהרה‬blood purification,” which it also calls ‫ימי‬ ‫“ טהרה‬the days of her purification.” Menstrual or post-partum bleeding therefore starts the clock on pre-determined periods of pollution and purification. Translating with the common English phrase “menstrual period” (similarly German Periode, Hieke 442) evokes the durative sense of ‫נדה‬, though the Hebrew word refers to a fixed period while the English phrase does not. 5 See also Moshe Greenberg, “The Etymology of ‫(‘ נדה‬Menstrual) Impurity’,” in Solving Riddles and Untying Knots (ed. Z. Zevit et al.; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1995), 69-79.

Leviticus 15 Exegesis

243

Because of this arbitrary seven-day period and the fact that this paragraph never labels the blood itself as polluted, Erbele-Küster (2017, 118-24) argued that the Hebrew dictionaries have been too quick to make ‫ נדה‬synonymous with ‫“ טמא‬polluted,” rather than to regard this as a metaphorical association. It is these metaphors that show how “the female body as a body undergoing menstruation is used for ethnic, religious and cultic demarcation” (ErbeleKüster 2017, 127). Verse 25, however, does address the polluting effects of actual blood flows beyond the seven days of a woman’s menstrual period. Furthermore, the emphasis in vv. 19-24 falls on avoiding contracting pollution from a menstruating woman. It is therefore likely that these rules were motivated by broader fears of menstrual pollution, like those explicit in many other HB texts. Some stories can refer to a woman’s menstrual period in a matter-of-fact way (2 Sam. 11:4) and even humorously (Gen. 31:35), but these stories use euphemisms for menstruation, not ‫נדה‬. Milgrom (95253) pointed to v. 31 to claim that the consequences of menstrual pollution only prohibited a woman’s access to the sanctuary (for a contrary view, see Gerstenberger 208). The emotional connotations of ‫ נדה‬suggest instead that fears of contagious pollution from menstruation had become internalized in ancient Israel and were intensified by the avoidance rhetoric of Leviticus’s regulations. Milgrom (746, 934-35) argued that these instructions assume that a woman must bathe for purification after postpartum and menstrual bleeding, though they mention bathing only for those who come into contact with her, not for the woman herself. He followed David Wright (1987, 185 n. 38) in assuming that every mention of being “polluted until evening” presupposes bathing, but not laundering. Judith Romney Wegner (2003, 458-59) pointed out that bathing is consistently omitted in women’s purification from menstrual or postpartum bleeding (12:6-8). She took this as evidence that women were excluded from the sanctuary precincts and had to wait in the “entrance.” That conclusion does not accord well with P’s tendency to state ritual prescriptions in relatively gender-neutral terms (see further on vv. 2b, 29 and Ellens 2008, 61-62). Tarja Philip drew a different conclusion by observing that a man who has sex with a menstruating woman is also not required to bathe, but must rather wait seven days (v. 24). She concluded therefore that “Priestly writers held very distinctive views on the differences between men and women, and women’s impurity due to bleeding from the womb and the unique way of removing it are one of the expressions of these differences” (Philip 2006, 51, 71). Nicole Ruane argued that bathing indexed social status: the most elaborate bathing rituals are required of priests (Exod. 29:4; 30:18-21; Lev. 8:6-9; 16:24; 22:6), non-priestly men had to bathe for purification, but the requirement is dropped for women (Ruane 2007, 67-71). The purification rules after touching animal carcasses also specify only waiting

244

Leviticus 15 Exegesis

until evening (11:24, 31, 39) or waiting and laundering (11:25, 28, 40), but never bathing. The rules about touching animal carcasses differ from the rules for menstruating women only by the length of time they require. The fine distinctions drawn by Milgrom, Wright, Wegner, and Philip do not accord well with the rhetorical urgency of Leviticus’s instructions (see on v. 10 above). As Ruane (2007, 70) observed, “The contamination of men is the author’s primary concern. We do not know if the laws apply evenly to women, or if they do not, how they vary for women” (similarly Rapp 2001, 34-35). The repetitions from one case of pollution to another in, at least, chaps. 14-15 support the assumption of bathing and laundering even where they are not explicitly mentioned. That is, at least, how these regulations have been understood by many women and men from the late Second Temple period right up to today (see Exposition). Nevertheless, there is some evidence that this issue was the subject of controversy among women in Late Antiquity (Fonrobert 2000, 181). 15:20 Everything she lies on during her menstrual period will be polluted, and everything she sits on will be polluted. This verse repeats and slightly abbreviates v. 4 with feminine pronouns. Milgrom (937) drew the obvious conclusion that the woman’s bedding would need to be laundered, just as she would need to bathe after her period (2 Sam. 11:4). However, this paragraph’s failure to stipulate either bathing or laundering for the woman shows that its focus is on those who come into contact with her. 15:21-22 Everyone who touches her bed must wash their clothes and bathe in water and be polluted until evening. Everyone who touches any furniture that she sat on must wash their clothes and bathe in water and be polluted until evening. Unlike a male emitter who pollutes by touching with unwashed hands (v. 11), this paragraph does not describe a menstruating woman as polluting things by touching them. Verses 20-23 focus instead on things under her which might come into contact with her menstrual blood. Since her touch does not pollute, she can stay at home (Milgrom 937). Her presence in the home motivates the fear addressed here that other people will contract her pollution by touching her seat or bed. Touching a menstruating woman (v. 19) or something on her bed (v. 23) makes one polluted until evening, but touching her bed or chair requires laundering and bathing as well. Milgrom (935) argued that her bed and chair were more likely to come into contact with menstrual blood than her hands

Leviticus 15 Exegesis

245

(contrast the male emitter in vv. 7, 11) or other parts of her body, so the bed and chair were regarded as more contaminating. It is more likely that P here, as in many other places (see e.g. Exegesis to 1:10-13), shortened the repeated instructions and counted on listeners to supply the missing elements themselves (see further on vv. 10 and 19). 15:23 Whether it is upon the bed or upon the furniture on which she sat, when they (ms) touch it, they become polluted until evening. MT ‫“ הוא‬he, it” is ‫“ היא‬she” in SP and LXX. They therefore distinguish this verse about touching the chair or bedding of a woman on her menstrual period while she is sitting or lying on it from the preceding verses about things she previously sat on. Milgrom (938-39) reviewed other ways of reading the verse to eliminate its redundancy with vv. 21-22 and to explain why it prescribes no laundering or bathing. He thought that ‫“ הוא‬it” refers back to ‫“ כל־כלי‬any furniture or utensil” that may be on top of her chair or bedding. He concluded that such objects would be contaminated indirectly by her, resulting in lesser purification procedures. However, P often shortens formulas upon repetition, so perhaps “polluted until evening” presupposes washing, just as Milgrom argued that these rules presuppose the woman’s bathing and laundering (see above on vv. 10 and 19). 15:24 If a man nevertheless lies with her, he gets her menstrual period and becomes polluted for seven days. Every bed that he lies on becomes polluted. ‫ שׁכב ישׁכב‬duplicates the verb “lies” in infinite and finite forms for emphasis, so “proceeds to lie” (Milgrom) or “nevertheless lies.” As in v. 18, MT ‫א ָֹתהּ‬, the sign of the direct object with a feminine pronominal suffix, must be read ‫“ ִא ָתּהּ‬with her” with LXX and the SP vocalization tradition (SPCEM). ‫ ותהי נדתה עליו‬is usually translated as part of the protasis, something like “and her impurity falls on him” (NRSV). But Milgrom (940-41) pointed out that this phrase is introduced by the consequential form, ‫ותהי‬, so it describes a consequence of sexual intercourse with a menstruating woman, not an accidental accompaniment. Since ‫ נדה‬designates not menstrual blood itself but a period of menstrual impurity (see above on v. 19), I translate “he gets her menstrual period.” Magonet (1996, 150) suggested that P interpreted “one flesh” (Gen. 2:24) to mean that each sexual partner receives the other’s pollution. Ruane (2013, 182) concluded that in vv. 18 and 24, “The gender-specific impurities of ejaculation and menstruation thus become contagious ... so that gender itself can become contagious, if you will. ... [P’s purification rules allow] for gender

246

Leviticus 15 Exegesis

lines to be returned to normal” (similarly already Frymer-Kensky 1983, 182). Kamionkowski (151) objected that “there is no evidence that gender boundaries can be blurred during sexual intercourse.” This debate can be clarified by distinguishing this verse’s persuasive rhetoric from the psychology of sexual intercourse. P’s goal is not to describe the difference between the sexes, but to motivate their behaviour. This verse, like v. 18, prescribes the same purification procedures for both partners, but adds that “he gets her menstrual period.” Doing so threatens the man’s gender identity by prescribing his own menstrual period if he has sex with a menstruating woman. Rashi observed that the man does not just share whatever remains of his partner’s seven days of pollution. Instead, the seven day clock starts for him at the moment of intercourse – that is, he receives his own menstrual period. He is not required to bathe, a usual component of male purification rituals throughout this chapter, but rather to count off seven days like a woman (Ruane 2017, 78). So here, again, the fraught connotations around ‫“ נדה‬menstruation, menstrual period” break apart this chapter’s structural appearance of treating male and female emissions equally, in this case by concluding the regulations for common female emissions with a rule about sexual intercourse (as in v. 18; see further on vv. 19, 33 and in Exposition: Structure). Leviticus 20:18 threatens to ‫“ כרת‬cut off” both partners who engage in sex while the woman is menstruating. Since antiquity, interpreters have tried to reconcile this extreme penalty with the milder consequences here (for summaries, see Milgrom 940; O’Grady 2003, 10). For example, Ibn Ezra and Gerstenberger (204) suggested that, here in 15:24, the contact is inadvertent because the woman’s blood flow might begin during intercourse. Abravanel and Wenham (220) argued that this text is concerned only with pollution and its effects, not with divine penalties. Goldstein (2015, 41) denied that P in 15:24 prohibits sex during menstruation, in contrast to H in 20:18. Rhetorical analysis observes, instead, that the two verses share the same persuasive strategy: both issue threats to discourage men from having sex with menstruating women. While the threat in 20:18 is severe but vague (on ‫“ כרת‬cut off,” see Exegesis to 7:20), the threat in 15:24 is limited but specific. It plays upon male anxieties about their own gender identity by assigning a ‫“ נדה‬menstrual period” to offending men. Women’s Uncommon Genital Emissions (15:25-30) Modern medicine attributes prolonged or irregular vaginal bleeding to a variety of possible causes, but Leviticus shows no interest in causation or treatment. Just as with the man whose penis emits mucus (vv. 3-15), its concern

Leviticus 15 Exegesis

247

is preventing the pollution of other people (vv. 25-27) and that the woman be properly purified after recovering full health (vv. 28-30). 15:25 Any woman whose bloody emission emits for many days not during the time of her menstrual period or she emits beyond her menstrual period – all the days of her polluted emission will be like her menstrual period. She is polluted. This case involves bleeding beyond or apart from the seven-day menstrual period. See above on v. 19 for translating ‫ נדה‬as “menstrual period.” Here, then, ‫“ עד־נדתה‬the time of her menstrual period” is redundantly emphatic. By labelling the bloody emission simply as ‫“ טמאתה‬her pollution,” like the phrase, ‫“ טמאת נדתה‬the pollution of her menstrual period” in v. 26, this passage links menstruation and pollution tightly together and encourages their association by later interpreters (Erbele-Küster 2017, 67). The final phrase, ‫“ טמאה ִהוא‬she is polluted,” parallels the more genderinclusive conclusion of the chapter’s heading in 15:2. See Outline in Exposition: Structure above. 15:26 Any bed that she lies on while emitting is like her bed during her menstrual period, and any furniture that she sits on is polluted like the pollution of her menstrual period. ‫ כל‬... ‫“ כל‬any ... any” presupposes the more detailed instructions of the previous cases (vv. 4-6, 9-10, 20-23). ‫“ כטמאת נדתה‬like the pollution of her menstrual period” is reversed in 18:19 as “menstrual pollution.” Erbele-Küster (2018, 67) pointed out that only these two verses in Leviticus combine these terms to “construct female physiology in such a way that niddah is the reference point for various types of bleeding” and, in other HB texts, for various types of pollution. The last word of this chapter collapses the ideas of menstruation and pollution into simply ‫“ טמאה‬a polluted woman” (15:33). 15:27 Anyone who touches them is polluted. They (ms) must wash their clothes and bathe in water and be polluted until evening. Instead of MT ‫“ בם‬them” which evokes comparison with vv. 21-22, LXX and some Hebrew manuscripts read ‫“ בה‬her” as in v. 19 (similarly v. 7). Both readings make equally good sense and accord with precedents in this chapter (Hieke 525). This verse again sounds the refrain about washing, bathing, and waiting that echoes eleven times in this chapter (see Exposition: Structure).

248

Leviticus 15 Exegesis

15:28 When she is purified from her emission, she must count off seven days, after which she will be pure. ‫“ טהרה‬she is purified” is often translated “she is healed” (Milgrom 944) because this verse specifies that her purification is complete only after seven days and the following verse adds only after completing the Tabernacle offerings. It is more consistent with the usage of Leviticus to understand ‫טהר‬ “pure” as describing both a physical and a social status and the continuum between them. See above on v. 13, and also History and Interpretation of Purification Rituals for Infestation in Exposition to Leviticus 13-14 and Exegesis to 14:8. The ritual for a woman who has recovered from uncommon bleeding is the same as for a man who recovers from uncommon genital secretions (vv. 13-15). The purification instructions for a cured male emitter include washing his clothes and bathing in fresh water (v. 13). Their omission here probably depends on the audience’s assumption that this constant theme throughout the chapter applies to this woman as well. 15:29 On the eighth day, she must take for herself two landfowl or two of any kind of pigeon and bring them to the priest at the entrance of the meeting tent. See above on v. 14. “Bring them to the priest” reads like an abbreviated version of v. 14, “come before YHWH at the entrance of the meeting tent and give to the priest” (so Milgrom 944). Wegner (2003) argued that the difference in wording reflects exclusion of women from sacred space. She maintained that they are not permitted to appear “before YHWH” and must remain “(outside) the entrance.” The other P offering rule specifically directed at women also omits the phrase ‫“ לפני יהוה‬before YHWH” (12:6). But P identifies being in the Tabernacle’s entrance (actually, in its plaza or courtyard) with being “before YHWH” and the wording of the offering regulations seems to aim at gender inclusivity (see Exegesis on 1:2 and 2:1). Unlike the Herodian temple with it’s “women’s court” and many later synagogues, churches, and mosques, P makes no mention of segregating men and women in the Tabernacle plaza. Its gender discrimination in the Tabernacle instead follows from its class distinction between priests and laity, because only men (“the sons of Aaron”) can serve as priests (Lev. 8; see Philip 2006, 70). Kathleen O’Grady (2003, 20-21) called attention to the parallels with the ritual for purifying a Nazirite (Num. 6:9-12): seven days of purification followed by offering two birds. She concluded that a menstruating woman, like the Nazirite, is distinguished by her “sacred separation.” However, the parallel is not as strong as O’Grady suggested. The language of “separation”

Leviticus 15 Exegesis

249

in MT v. 31 is better read with SP as “warning” (see below). The Nazirite ritual concludes with a lamb guilt offering that does not appear here. And this ritual, after all, is not for common menstruation but for a woman who suffers an uncommonly long blood flow. A menstruating woman is not separated (see above on v. 21) and is not required to make any offering at all. 15:30 The priest must make one a sin (offering) and the other one a rising (offering). So the priest mitigates for her before YHWH for her polluted emission. See on v. 15 above. Whereas v. 15 ends with simply ‫“ מזובו‬for his emission,” this verse ends with ‫“ מזוב טמאתה‬for her polluted emission” (also in v. 25). This emphasis makes the woman’s emission sound worse than the man’s, even though the chapter labels both as polluted and prescribes the same ritual purification after recovering from them. This fraught vocabulary undermines the chapter’s formally parallel treatment of the two cases (see further in Exposition: Structure above). Concluding Exhortations and Refrains (15:31-33) Before the expected torah-refrain (vv. 32-33), v. 31 interposes an unusual command to “you,” presumably Moses and Aaron (v. 1) and, by extension, Israel’s priests, about mortal danger from pollution. Then the torah-refrain (vv. 32-33) mentions the major kinds of genital emissions covered in this chapter, but in a sequence and with vocabulary that recalls the beginning of the regulations about bodily pollutions in chap. 12. The tone of this summary casts menstrual pollution as paradigmatic for all the rest. 15:31 You (pl) must warn the Israelites away from their pollution, so they don’t die from their pollution by polluting my Tabernacle which is among them. The second-person plural command presumably addresses, besides Moses and Aaron (v. 1), other priests whose job includes teaching Torah to the Israelites (10:11). MT ‫ הזרתם‬is from ‫ נזר‬that elsewhere labels the consecration of a ‫נזיר‬ “Nazirite” (Num. 6). Milgrom (945) followed the ancient rabbis to translate “set apart, separate” as in 22:2 (but see Exegesis on that verse), though Leviticus usually uses ‫ בדל‬for separating pollution and people (10:10; 11:47; 20:24-26). O’Grady (2003, 13-15) thought the separation language of this verse encouraged the physical isolation of menstruating women in later Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism (citing Josephus, Ant. 3.11.3, as well as 11QT 48:14-17 and m. Nid. 7:4A).

250

Leviticus 15 Exegesis

Instead of ‫הזרתם‬, however, SP reads ‫“ הזהרתם‬you must warn” from ‫זהר‬, which is supported by LXX, Pesh, and TgNeof (so BHS, SPCEM, BHQ 103; but Wevers thought LXX εὐλαβεῖς ποιήσετε “you must make [the Israelites] be careful” translated MT). Milgrom (945) rejected SP’s reading, complaining that “warning” makes little sense when these states of pollution are unavoidable. The warning, however, is explicitly against polluting the Tabernacle, so SP makes good sense. The verse’s rhetoric of warning is enhanced by the three-fold repetition in quick succession of the root ‫“ טמא‬pollute, pollution” and the threat of dying from its effects. ‫“ משׁכן‬Tabernacle” appears here instead of ‫“ האחל מועד‬the meeting tent” probably because the latter term designates a ritual space in Leviticus, while “Tabernacle” designates the sanctuary as the object of consecrating or desecrating activity (see Exegesis to 8:10). It requires guarding. Priestly tradition assigned that responsibility to the Levites (Num. 1:53). The Chronicler reports that King Jehoida “stationed gatekeepers at the gates of the house of YHWH, so that people polluted in any way could not enter” (2 Chr. 23:19). Milgrom (257-61, 270, 524) found in Lev. 15:31 proof for his thesis that, according to P, the danger of pollution arises solely because it threatens the sanctity of the Tabernacle. However, this is the only verse in Leviticus 11-15 that explicitly mentions the threat of polluting the Tabernacle as a whole. Other verses only prohibit polluted people from coming into contact with sacred things (12:4-5; implicitly 13:46, 14:3, 40, 45). The verse’s formulation is not exclusive, so it can be understood as describing the most dangerous consequence of pollution without insisting that it is the only consequence (contra Milgrom). The Tabernacle becomes a major theme in the following chapter, so this verse foreshadows what is to come. 15:32 This is the law of the emitter: for one who lets out a layer of semen polluting her MT ‫ה־בהּ‬ ָ ‫“ ְל ָט ְמ ָא‬becoming polluted by it” seems redundant, since all the emissions pollute the emitter. Milgrom (947) suggested pointing the vowels instead as piel, ‫אַה־בהּ‬ ָ ‫“ ְל ַט ְמּ‬polluting her,” i.e. his partner during sexual intercourse (v. 18). His reading reveals a frame about sexual intercourse (vv. 32b, 33b) around the other emissions (v. 33a). For ‫“ שׁכבת־זרע‬a layer of semen,” see on vv. 16 and 18 above. 15:33 and the uneasy one on her menstrual period and the continuous emitter, male and female, and a man who lies with a polluted woman. ‫“ דוה‬uneasy” appears in close association with ‫“ נדה‬menstrual period” here and in 12:2, and with “her blood flow” in 20:18. Its appearance alone in

Leviticus 15 Exegesis

251

Isa. 30:22 is usually understood as a reference to a bloody rag used by menstruating women (HAL; DCH). The root seems to indicate generalized weakness, illness, or sadness elsewhere in the HB (Deut. 7:15; 28:60; Isa. 1:5; Jer. 8:18; Ps. 41:4; Lam. 1:13, 22; 5:17; Job 6:7) and in cognate languages (HAL; Milgrom 745-46). So ‫ הדוה בנדתה‬here was traditionally translated into English with phrases like “her menstrual infirmity” (KJV; NRSV; NJPS; Milgrom; Hartley). Many interpreters link P’s impurity ideas to death symbolism (see Introduction to Leviticus 11-20) in which genital emissions become associated with deadly illness (Milgrom 766-68; Ruane 2013, 164). However, a general association of pollution with illness, much less death, does not account for the fact that P uses ‫ דוה‬only for menstrual impurity. The obvious objection that menstruation is not an illness probably explains why many recent translations submerge ‫ דוה‬here into the meaning of the following word, ‫“ נדה‬menstrual period” (so NIV; CEB; Hieke; for the meaning of ‫נדה‬, see above on v. 19). Other interpreters have tried to find a translation for ‫ דוה‬more adequate to both the experience of menstruation and biblical usage. Kamionkowski (143) suggested that “our closest analogous terms might include cramping and bloating!” Erbele-Küster (2017, 127-33) observed that HB texts associate ‫ דוה‬with either menstruation or with lament, so it does not indicate illness so much as “the overall brokenness of body and spirit.” She argued that ‫ דוה‬means “destabilization” and was especially associated with women’s experience of physical and social destabilization. Her observations about the use of ‫ דוה‬in laments suggests that the word indicates an emotional state as much or more than a physical state (so already Nahmanides on 12:2). I therefore follow Erbele-Küster by translating ‫ דוה‬with “uneasy, uneasiness” to evoke both bodily sensation and emotion. The inverted phrases, ‫“ נדת דותה‬her menstrual period’s uneasiness” and ‫“ הדוה בנדתה‬the uneasy one on her menstrual period,” appear at the beginning and end (12:2; 15:33) of the rules for bodily pollution in Leviticus 12-15, and only here in the HB. Similarly, the words ‫“ זכר‬male” and ‫“ נקבה‬female” appear in chaps. 12-15 only in 12:2, 5 and here. See the chart below. The repetition of the root in the phrase, ‫הזב את־זובו‬, literally “the emitter of his emission,” indicates continual action, “the continuous emitter,” to summarize vv. 2-15 and 25-30. The chapter ends with the phrase, “a man who lies with a polluted woman,” which is formulated as an abbreviated version of v. 18a and also as a parallel in sound and vocabulary, though with a different referent, to the end of v. 32. It ends, however, with an innovative use of the adjective ‫ טמא‬as a substantive direct object with a feminine suffix. Thus “a polluted woman” without further qualification describes a menstruating woman – and is the last word of the rules not only for purification from genital emissions (chap. 15) but also of all the rules for purification from bodily pollutions (chaps. 12-15).

252

Leviticus 15 Exegesis

The contents of vv. 32-33 refer to the various regulations of chap. 15, but they do not follow the chapter’s sequence. Some commentators have therefore postulated several stages of editorial development (Elliger 192; Milgrom 947) while others have tried to make sense of the outline as it stands (Kiuchi 28586; Ellens 2008, 54; Hieke 547). However, we have already seen that the vocabulary of these verses refers further back than just to chap. 15. By themselves, vv. 32-33 begin and end with a parallel structure about mostly male emissions: “... the law of the emitter: for one who lays out a layer of semen to pollute her ...” “... the continuous emitter, male and female, and a man who lies with a polluted woman ...”

Nevertheless, both verses focus on pollution in relation to women, though the preceding chapter has made clear that men are polluted by genital emissions, too. In addition, the vocabulary in vv. 32-33 of ‫“ נדת דותה‬menstrual uneasiness,” ‫טמא‬/‫“ טמאה‬pollute/polluted woman,” and ‫“ זרע‬semen” in a woman builds a bracket with chap. 12, especially 12:2b, that emphasizes women. In this position at the beginning and end of the whole set of regulations about bodily pollutions in chaps. 12-15, this framing casts menstrual pollution as the paradigmatic bodily pollution: 12:2b ‫ אשׁה כי תזריע וילדה זכר‬12:2b When a pregnant (inseminated) woman ‫ וטמאה שׁבעת ימים‬gives birth to a MALE, ‫ כימו נדת דותה תטמא‬she is polluted for seven days just like she is polluted during her menstrual period’s uneasiness. 12:5a ‫ ואם־נקבה תלד‬12:5a If she gives birth to a FEMALE, ‫ וטמאה שׁבעים כנדתה‬she is polluted like her menstrual period for two weeks. 15:32-33 ‫זאת תורת הזב‬ ‫ואשׁר תצא ממנו שׁכבת־זרע לטמאה־בה‬ ‫והדוה בנדתה‬ ‫והזב את־זובו לזכר ולנקבה‬ ‫ולאישׁ אשׁר ישׁכב עם־טמאה‬

15:32-33 This is the law of the emitter: for one who lets out a layer of semen to pollute her and the uneasy one in her menstrual period and the continuous emitter, MALE and FEMALE, and a man who lies with a polluted woman.

This framing is extremely subtle. A listening audience would not notice the repetition and inversion of “menstrual uneasiness” four chapters apart. The concluding characterization of a menstruating woman as simply “a polluted woman” is more overt. But, to my knowledge, no ancient or modern scholar has noticed this framing and this chapter’s innovative conclusion. These inverted phrases then may simply indicate P’s failed attempt to unite the bodily pollutions under the category of menstrual uneasiness.

Leviticus 15 Exegesis

253

Or maybe its effects have been as subtle as its phrasing, shaping presuppositions without conscious interpretation. The cultural impact of biblical pollution rules has fallen disproportionately on women (see Exposition above), despite chap. 15’s structurally even-handed treatment of pollution from men’s and women’s genital emissions. The use of menstruation and women’s pollution to frame these chapters may have laid one basis for this development.

LEVITICUS 16:1-34

THE DAY OF MITIGATIONS

1 2

3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12

13

14

YHWH spoke to Moses after the death of Aaron’s two sons, when they presented themselves before YHWH and died. YHWH said to Moses: Tell Aaron your brother not to enter just any time into the Holy (Space) inside the veil in front of the mitigation centre that is on the chest so he doesn’t die when I appear in the cloud above the mitigation centre. This is how Aaron must enter the Holy (Space): with a bull herd animal for a sin (offering) and a ram for a rising (offering). A holy linen shirt he must put on and linen underpants he must wear next to his body. The linen sash he must tie on and the linen turban he must wrap. These are holy clothes! He must bathe his body in water before putting them on. From the community of the children of Israel he must take two billy goats for a sin (offering) and one ram for a rising (offering). Aaron must present the sin (offering) bull that is for himself and mitigate on his own behalf and on behalf of his house. He must take the two goats and station them before YHWH in the entrance of the meeting tent. Aaron must place lots on the two goats, one lot (saying) “for YHWH” and one lot (saying)“for Azazel.” Aaron must present the goat that carries the lot (saying) “for YHWH” and make it a sin (offering), but the goat that carries the lot (saying) “for Azazel” he must station alive before YHWH to mitigate over it and to send it to the desert for Azazel. Aaron must present the bull sin (offering) that is for himself and mitigate on his own behalf and on behalf of his house. He must slaughter the bull sin (offering) that is for himself. He must take a pan full of coals from the fire on the altar before YHWH and two handfuls of crushed spicy incense and bring (them) inside the veil. He must put the incense on the fire before YHWH, so that the cloud of incense covers the mitigation centre that is on the testimony, so he doesn’t die. He must take some of the bull’s blood and sprinkle it with his finger onto the east side of the mitigation centre, in front of the mitigation centre he must sprinkle some of the blood seven times with his finger.

Leviticus 16 Translation 15

16

17

18

19 20 21

22 23 24

25 26 27

28 29

255

He must slaughter the sin (offering) goat that is for the people. He must bring its blood inside the veil and do with its blood as he did with the bull’s blood: he must sprinkle it onto the mitigation centre in front of the mitigation centre. So he must mitigate the Holy (Space) from the pollutions of the children of Israel and from their transgressions, that is, all their sins. He must do likewise for the meeting tent that tabernacles with them in the midst of their pollutions. No one can be in the meeting tent when he enters it to mitigate in the sanctuary until he comes out of it. He must mitigate on his own behalf and on behalf of his house and on behalf of the whole congregation of Israel. He must come out to the altar which is before YHWH and mitigate for it. He must take some of the bull’s blood and some of the goat’s blood and smear it on the horns of the altar all around. He must sprinkle on it some of the blood seven times with his finger and purify it and consecrate it from the pollutions of the children of Israel. When he finishes mitigating the Holy (Space) and the meeting tent and the altar, he must present the living goat. Aaron must press both of his hands on the living goat’s head and confess over it all the liabilities of the children of Israel and all their transgressions, that is, all their sins, and put them on the goat’s head. He must send it with a ready man to the desert. The goat will carry upon itself all their liabilities to a cut-off land. He must send the goat into the desert. Then Aaron must enter the meeting tent. He must take off the linen clothes that he put on to enter the Holy (Space), and leave them there. He must bathe his body with water in a holy place. Then he must put on his clothes and go out. He must make his rising (offering) and the people’s rising (offering), and mitigate on his own behalf and on behalf of the people. But he must still incinerate the fat of the sin (offering) at the altar. The person who sent away the goat for Azazel must wash his clothes and must bathe his body with water. After that, he can re-enter the camp. The sin (offering) bull and the sin (offering) goat whose blood was brought to mitigate in the Holy (Space) must be taken outside the camp where their skin and their meat and their dung must be burned with fire. The person who burned them must wash his clothes and must bathe his body with water. After that, he can re-enter the camp. It will be a permanent mandate for you (pl): in the seventh month, on the tenth of the month, you must humble yourselves. You must not do any work, whether (you are) a native or an immigrant who has immigrated among you.

256 30 31 32

33

34

Leviticus 16 Essentials For on this day mitigation will purify you (pl) from all your sins, so that you will be pure before YHWH. It must be a very strict sabbath for you, and you must humble yourselves. (This is) a permanent mandate. The priest must mitigate who has been anointed and whose hand has been filled to serve as priest after his father, and he must wear the linen clothes, the holy clothes. He must mitigate the sanctuary of the Holy (Space) and the meeting tent and the altar he must mitigate for the priests and for all the people of the congregation he must mitigate. This will be a permanent mandate for you (pl): to mitigate the Israelites from all their sins once a year. He did just as YHWH commanded Moses.

ESSENTIALS Contents Leviticus 16 contains instructions for the rituals of the Day of Mitigations (though that name only appears in 23:27). This is one of the most elaborate temple rituals described by the HB. It consists of rising and sin offerings for both the priests (vv. 3, 24-25) and the community of Israel (vv. 5, 24-25). But the chapter does not try to describe them in detail, and omits other likely offerings that usually accompany rising and sin offerings, as well as all of the oral liturgy. Instead, it focuses on the rituals that are unique to the Day of Mitigations, when the high priest brings incense and blood into the inner sanctum of the Tabernacle (vv. 11-19) and when he confesses Israel’s sins over the goat for Azazel before releasing it into the desert (vv. 8-10, 20-22). The chapter concludes by emphasizing the role of the community in observing the Day of Mitigations by humbling themselves and by observing a strict sabbath rest. The chapter starts by YHWH warning Aaron of the mortal danger of entering the inner sanctum of the Tabernacle (vv. 1-2). The ritual instructions then begin with the selection of offerings (vv. 3, 5-10). They include the selection by lot from the community’s sin offerings of “a goat for Azazel,” a surprising label for the goat that will later be released alive into the desert (v. 22). The high priest must also prepare himself by donning special linen clothes to celebrate the unique rituals of this day (v. 4). These unique rituals begin with the high priest carrying burning incense into the innermost room of the Tabernacle. It creates a cloud of incense which protects him from the danger of being in YHWH’s presence (vv. 12-13). He then sprinkles blood from both sin offerings on the cover and front of the “chest of the testimony” to mitigate it from the pollutions and sins of the

Leviticus 16 Essentials

257

Israelites (vv. 14-16a). These are the only rituals permitted in the Tabernacle’s holiest, innermost sanctum. He must also sprinkle blood in its outer room (v. 16b) and then smear and sprinkle it on the courtyard altar to purify it (vv. 18-19). These blood rituals demarcate three distinct spaces in the Tabernacle. Before completing the sin offerings (vv. 24-25), however, the high priest must deal with the goat for Azazel. He stations if “before YHWH” in the Tabernacle courtyard and “confesses over it” all of Israel’s sins. Then he orders that it be taken to the desert and released (vv. 20-22). This ritual also demarcates ritual spaces by having the goat travel from the sanctuary in the middle of Israel’s camp to the uninhabited desert, which is reminiscent of where YHWH met the Israelites at Sinai and formed them into God’s covenant people. Then the high priest must bathe and change back into his high priestly vestments to conduct the remaining offerings (vv. 23-25). The people who lead away the goat for Azazel and who burn the remains of the sin offerings outside the camp must also bathe and launder their clothes before returning (vv. 26-28), again emphasizing ritual separations of space. The chapter concludes by exhorting the Israelites everywhere to observe the Day of Mitigations on the tenth day of the seventh month by humbling themselves. It is a strict sabbath day of rest (vv. 29-31). Unlike pilgrimage festivals that require them to travel to the sanctuary (23:9-21), they must observe the Day of Mitigations in their homes. Chapter 16 thus informs them that, while they humble themselves at home by not working and probably by fasting, their sins and pollutions are being mitigated by the high priest out of sight inside the Tabernacle and in the desert. YHWH’s instructions conclude by emphasizing that only a descendent of Aaron may succeed him to the high priesthood and perform these rituals (v. 32-34). Contexts These instructions for the Day of Mitigations bring the purification rituals of Leviticus 11-16 to a climax. Because the rituals also mitigate for Israel’s sins, they climax the earlier offering instructions as well. So chap. 16 brings together the ritual concerns of all of chaps. 1-15 in a climactic ritual conclusion. Leviticus 16 also pivots toward what follows in chaps. 17-27. It gives instructions for communal rituals, unlike the previous ritual instructions. The community will become the focus of the following chapters which include the Day of Mitigations as a climax to the annual ritual calendar (23:27). Chapter 16 also shares with chap. 17 a focus on the mitigating power of blood. Chapters 16 and 17 together therefore create a hinge between the two halves of the book of Leviticus.

258

Leviticus 16 Exposition

The HB does not mention the Day of Mitigations outside Leviticus and Numbers. However, concern to purify temples from pollution and the effects of sin was common in other ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures. Some of their ritual texts prescribing how to purify temples resemble Leviticus 16 in using blood as a detergent and in expelling live carriers of pollution from the community. The concerns and rituals of Leviticus 16, then, are more distinctive within the Bible than in comparison with the ritual texts of other ancient cultures. Leviticus 16 increasingly directed the observance of the Day of Mitigations in Jerusalem’s Second Temple. There is even more evidence that the chapter’s mandates of a strict sabbath and humbling oneself (vv. 29-31) were widely observed as annual fasts by Second-Temple-period Jews. That practice was codified in later Rabbinic Judaism. Today, the Day of Mitigations (Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur) remains the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. Early Christians, however, utilized Leviticus 16 theologically more than liturgically. Because of Jesus’ death around the time of Passover, the Christian liturgical calendar focuses on Good Friday and Easter in the spring. But Christian theologians and commentators, starting in the NT, utilized the themes of Leviticus 16 to explain how the death of Christ atoned for human sins. Rhetoric Chapter 16 is the climax of the priestly ritual legislation in Leviticus 1-16. The rituals for the Day of Mitigations express what the writers considered most important about ritual worship: the responsibility of Aaronide priests, the high priest in particular, to mitigate the people and the sanctuary from the effects of sin and pollution. The chapter’s climactic rhetoric therefore brings together concepts that P elsewhere distinguishes: purification and sanctification (v. 19), pollutions and sins (vv. 16, 30), accidental and rebellious sins (vv. 16, 21, 34). It is natural, therefore, that many interpreters since antiquity have understood the Day of Mitigations as a divinely-prescribed mechanism for human forgiveness, even though the chapter never mentions forgiveness. Neither Jews nor Christians practice temple offerings any more, but Leviticus 16 provides them a vivid model of God’s desire to effect mitigation of sins, if by alternative means. The chapter, however, also takes a step beyond anything anticipated in chaps. 1-15. It mandates that lay people participate at home in the Day of Mitigations rituals by humbling themselves and observing a strict sabbath rest (vv. 29-31). Its focus on rituals for and by the community anticipates what follows in the literary context of the book of Leviticus, and also what followed in the historical context of post-Second Temple Judaism and Christianity.

Leviticus 16 Exposition

259

Leviticus 16 played a major role in establishing mitigation (atonement) for sin as a central theme of both religions, even though they worked out its implications and applications in very different ways. The chapter also emphasizes the ritual importance of the high priest more than any other text in Leviticus. Only the duly anointed descendent of Aaron can perform these temple rituals (v. 32-33) that are vital to Israel’s covenant relationship with YHWH. On this point, however, later Judaism and Christianity parted company with the religion of Second Temple Judaism. In rabbinic synagogues, priests retained positions of honour but no hereditary authority. Christians displaced Aaronide priests with bishops in apostolic succession to Christ and, in some later polities, with the church community itself. Only the Samaritans preserved the leadership of an Aaronide high priest, even though he could no longer perform the Day of Mitigations rituals after their temple was destroyed.

EXPOSITION Additional Bibliography: BADEN, JOEL S. “The Purpose of Purification in Leviticus 16: A Proposition Pertaining to Priestly Prepositions.” VT 71 (2020), 19-26. BAUMGARTEN, JOSEPH M. “Yom Kippur in the Qumran Scrolls and Second Temple Sources.” DSD 6/2 (1999), 18491. BEGG, CHRISTOPHER T. “Yom Kippur in Josephus.” In Hieke-Nicklas (2012), 97-120. DOUGLAS, MARY. “The Go-Away Goat.” In Rendtorff-Kugler (2003), 12141. EBERHART, CHRISTIAN A. “To Atone or Not to Atone: Remarks on the Day of Atonement Rituals According to Leviticus 16 and the Meaning of Atonement.” In Wiley-Eberhart (2017), 197-231. EBERHART, CHRISTIAN, DANIEL STÖKL BEN EZRA, YECHIEL SHALOM GOLDBERG, and MICHAEL ZANK. “Atonement.” EBR 3 (2011), 25-51. FAUTH, WOLFGANG. “Auf den Spuren des biblischen ‘Azazel’ (Lev 16).” ZAW 110 (1998), 514-34. GILDERS, WILLIAM K. “The Day of Atonement in the Dead Sea Scrolls.” In Hieke-Niklas (2012), 63-73. GILDERS, WILLIAM K. “Is There an Incense Altar in This Ritual? A Question of Ritual-Textual Interpretive Commentary.” In Eberhart-Hieke (2019), 159-69. GILDERS, WILLIAM K. “ ‘And They Would Read Before Him the Order for the Day’: The Textuality of Leviticus 16 in Mishnah Yoma, Tosefta Kippurim, and Sifra Aḥare Mot.” In Nihan-Rhyder (2021), 312-25. GÖRG, M. “Beobachtungen zum sogenannten Azazel-Ritus.” BN 33 (1986), 10-16. GRABBE, LESTER L. “The Scapegoat Tradition: A Study in Early Jewish Interpretation.” JSJ 18:2 (1987), 152-67. GRÜNWALDT, KLAUS. “Amt und Gemeinde im Heiligkeitsgesetz.” In Textarbeit. FS Peter Weimar. Ed. K. Kiesow and T. Meurer. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2003. 227-44. HIEKE, THOMAS. “Participation and Abstraction in the Yom Kippur Ritual According to Leviticus 16.” In Eberhart-Hieke (2019), 151-58. JANOWSKI, BERND and GERNOT WILHELM. “Der Bock, der die Sünden hinausträgt: Zur Religionsgeschichte des Azazel-Ritus Lev 16,10.21f.” In Religionsgeschichtliche Beziehungen zwischen Kleinasien, Nordsyrien und dem Alten Testament. OBO 129. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993. 106-69. JANOWSKI, BERND. “Azazel.” DDD (1999), 128-31. JÜRGENS, BENEDIKT. Heiligkeit und Versöhnung:

260

Leviticus 16 Exposition

Levitikus 16 in seinem literarischen Kontext. Freiburg: Herder, 2001. KOCH, KLAUS. “Some Considerations on the Translation of kapporet in the Septuagint,” in Wrightַ ‫– ִכּ י ֶבּ ָענָ ן ֵא ָר ֶאה ַע‬ Freedman-Hurvitz (1995), 65-75. KÖRTING, CORINNA. “‫ל־ה ַכּפּ ֶֹרת‬ Gottes Gegenwart am Jom Kippur.” In Festtraditionen in Israel und im Alten Orient. VWGT 28. Ed. E. Blum and R. Lux. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2006. 221-46. LEMARDELÉ, CHRISTOPHE. “H, Ps et le bouc pour Azazel. De Wellhausen à Milgrom.” RB 113/4 (2006), 529-51. NIHAN, CHRISTOPHE. “The Templization of Israel in Leviticus: Some Remarks on Blood Disposal and Kipper in Leviticus 4.” In Wiley-Eberhart (2015), 94-130. ORLOV, ANDREI A. Divine Scapegoats: Demonic Mimesis in Early Jewish Mysticism. Albany: SUNY Press, 2015. PFEIFFER, HEINRIK. “Bemerkungen zur Ritualgeschichte von Lev 16.” In Kulturgeschichten: Altorientalische Studien für Volkert Haas. Ed. T. Richter, D. Prechel, and J. Klinger. Saarbrücken: SDV, 2001. 313-26. PINKER, ARON. “A Goat to Go to Azazel.” JHS 7/8 (2007), 1-25. RENDTORFF, ROLF. “Leviticus 16 als Mitte der Tora.” BibInt 11 (2003), 25258. ROO, JACQUELINE C. R. DE. “Was the Goat for Azazel Destined for the Wrath of God?” Bib 81 (2000), 233-42. ROOKE, DEBORAH W. “The Day of Atonement as a Ritual of Validation for the High Priest.” In Day (2007), 342-64. RUANE, NICOLE J. “Constructing Contagion on Yom Kippur: The Scapegoat as Ḥaṭṭā᾿t.” In EberhartHieke (2019), 139-50. SANDERS, SETH L. The Invention of Hebrew. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009. 59-66. SEIDL, THEODOR. “Levitikus 16 - ‘Schlußstein’ des priesterlichen Systems der Sündenvergebung.” In Fabry-Jüngling (1999), 21948. SIKER, JEFFREY S. “Yom Kippuring Passover: Recombinant Sacrifice in Early Christianity.” In Eberhart (2011), 65-82. STÖKL BEN EZRA, DANIEL. The Impact of Yom Kippur on Early Christianity: the Day of Atonement from Second Temple Judaism to the Fifth Century. WUNT 163. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003. SWARTZ, MICHAEL D. “The Topography of Blood in Mishnah Yoma.” In Jewish Blood: Reality and Metaphor in History, Religion, and Culture. New York: Routledge, 2009. 70-82. TAWIL, HAYIM. “῾Azazel the Prince of the Steepe: A Comparative Study.” ZAW 92 (1980), 43-59. WRIGHT, DAVID P. “Day of Atonement.” ABD (1992), 2:7276. ZATELLI, IDA. “The Origin of the Biblical Scapegoat Ritual: The Evidence of Two Eblaite Texts.” VT 48 (1998), 254-63. ZSENGELLÉR, JÓZSEF. “The Day of Atonement of the Samaritans.” In Hieke-Nicklas (2012), 139-61.

Structure of Leviticus 16 The description of the Day of Mitigations rituals in Leviticus 16 clearly presupposes the previous ritual instructions in Leviticus. For example, it simply mentions rising offerings without describing them (vv. 3, 5, 24; see Gane 2005, 222-29 for a reconstruction of all the ritual actions that the high priest must have performed). The chapter focuses on the parts of the ritual that are unique to this day, the blood of the sin offerings that the high priest takes into the Holiest Space (vv. 6-19) and the release of the goat for Azazel (vv. 20-22). For the rest, it depends on listeners’ and readers’ knowledge of the preceding chapters of Leviticus. The chapter strikes many interpreters as disorganized. Verses 3-7 alternate back and forth between the high priest’s offerings, a bull and a ram, and the community’s offerings, two billy goats and a ram. A similar back-and-forth

Leviticus 16 Exposition

261

between somewhat larger textual blocks typifies the rest of the chapter (Hartley 231-32). Chapter 16 also contains some unusual vocabulary and uses of vocabulary (similar lists appear in Noth 118; Hartley 225-26): • ‫“ טמאת‬pollutions” appears in the plural (vv. 16 twice, 19), elsewhere only in Ezek. 36:25, 29. • ‫“ הקדשׁ‬the Holy (Space)” refers here to the innermost room of the Tabernacle which is elsewhere called ‫“ קדשׁ הקדשׁים‬the Holiest Space” or “the Holy of Holies” (see Exegesis to v. 27). • The name ‫ עזאזל‬Azazel appears only in this chapter and apparently characterizes YHWH as “the fierce god” who receives “the goat for Azazel” that parallels a goat sin offering “for YHWH” in vv. 8-10 (see Exegesis to v. 8). • The Israelites are referred to in three different ways as the ‫“ עם‬people” (vv. 15, 24, 33), ‫“ עדה‬community” (v. 5), and ‫“ קהל‬congregation” (vv. 17, 33). • The verb, ‫“ כפר‬to mitigate,” is followed by three different prepositions (‫בעד‬, ‫את‬, and ‫ )על‬in different parts of the chapter. This inconsistent vocabulary and the appearance of disorganization has raised suspicions that chap. 16 is the product of a long history of editorial adaptations (Noth 118-20; Elliger 200-207; Hartley 225-26, 230-31; Milgrom 1063-65; Gerstenberger 214; Budd 223-24; see further below). However, the contradictory reconstructions put forward by redaction critics have led to more synchronic readings of the chapter in the last few decades. Seidl (1999, 227) and Nihan (2007, 364, 368) argued that 16:3-28 is a mostly unified composition with only minor supplements. It describes three connected rituals: the high priest’s admission to the Holiest Space (vv. 2-6, 12-13), the purification of the sanctuary (vv. 14-19), and the disposal of the community’s sins and pollutions with the goat for Azazel (v. 10, 20b-22). Nihan’s functional outline, however, does not account for the clear parallels between the two goat sin offerings of the community. The chapter repeatedly juxtaposes its descriptions of the rituals with the community’s two goats: the goat “for YHWH” whose blood is sprinkled and daubed in all three parts of the Tabernacle (vv. 5, 7-9, 15-19, 25, 27-28), and the goat “for Azazel” over whom Israel’s sins are confessed and which is released into the desert (vv. 5, 7-8, 10, 20-22, 26). This back-and-forth pattern contributes to interpreters’ sense of the chapter as disorganized. Switching between the two goats emphasizes, however, that it is by both goats together that the high priest’s “mitigation will purify you from all your sins” (v. 30). The apparent disorganization of chap. 16 in comparison with chaps. 1-7 arises from the fact that it does not try to describe any offering in its entirety

262

Leviticus 16 Exposition

(except possibly the goat for Azazel), much less all the offerings of the Day of Mitigations. The chapter focuses instead on the rituals that are unique to this day: sprinkling and daubing the blood of the sin offerings in all three parts of the Tabernacle complex and releasing the goat for Azazel into the desert. These rituals take up the centre of the chapter (vv. 11-22), while preparations for them (vv. 6-10) and cleaning up after them (vv. 23, 26, 28) occupy much of the rest. Other rituals (rising offerings, vv. 3, 5, 24) and even other parts of the sin offering rituals (vv. 25, 27) receive only perfunctory mention though, to spectators, it is these offerings at the courtyard altar that would have been most visible. Perhaps that is this chapter’s purpose: it shows listeners and readers what they could not see for themselves. It tells them about the priestly rituals behind the curtains inside the sanctuary’s inner rooms and about the release of a goat far from any human habitation. This chapter often structures its shifts between different rituals and subjects in short arch structures, as this outline shows. OUTLINE 1-2a Divine speech formulas 2b Warning to Aaron 3-5 Materials and preparations 3 Aaron’s offering animals 4 Clothing and bathing the high priest 5 The community’s offering animals 6-10 The sin offerings for the Day of Mitigations 6 Bull for Aaron’s sin offering for mitigating him and his family 7-8 Two goats stationed before YHWH, one for YHWH, one for Azazel 9 Goat for YHWH presented as a sin offering 10 Goat for Azazel stationed before YHWH for mitigating 11-22 Special rituals with the sin offerings for the Day of Mitigations 11 Aaron’s bull 12-13 Incense offering inside the meeting tent 14 The blood of Aaron’s bull inside the meeting tent 15 The community’s goat for YHWH 16 The mitigating effects of these sin offerings on the meeting tent 17 Everyone banned from the meeting tent during these rituals 18-19 Mitigating the altar with the sin offerings 20-22 The community’s goat for Azazel 23-28 Reintegration through washing and completing the offerings 23-24a Clothing and bathing the high priest (cf. v. 4). 24b Making the rising offerings 24c Mitigation formula 25 Incinerating the sin offering fat 26 Laundering and bathing the scapegoat’s guide 27 Burning the remainder of the sin offerings 28 Laundering and bathing the person who did the burning 29-31 Exhortations to lay people 29 Rest on the Day of Mitigations

Leviticus 16 Exposition

263

30 Mitigation of your sins 31 Sabbath on the Day of Mitigations 32-33 Summary of the high priests’ activities 34a Exhortation to mitigate for the people once each year 34b Narrative statement of compliance.

The Editorial History and Position of Leviticus 16 For a thorough summary of theories of the chapter’s history of composition, see Nihan (2007, 340-45), who noted that the history of this discussion “is remarkably complex, so much so that it is even difficult to summarize” (340) and that “there is hardly any consensus” (345). Recent commentators have therefore regarded reconstruction of the compositional stages of vv. 2-28 as impossible (Nihan 2007, 345, 354; Hieke 568-69), but some still attempt it (Pfeiffer 2001; Körting 2006; Feder 2011, 81-97). Many more continue to isolate the narrative framework (v. 1) that refers to the deaths of Nadab and Abihu in 10:1-2. Redaction critics observe that v. 1 describes the priest’s mistake as “presenting themselves before YHWH” but makes no mention of incense and “other fire” (10:1). Verse 1, however, is not summarizing the story of Nadab and Abihu for its own sake, but to introduce instructions for how to safely approach YHWH in the Holiest Space on the Day of Mitigations. It therefore mentions the part of the story most relevant to its purpose. Rhetoric rather than source or redaction criticism provides the most convincing explanation for this difference. Most interpreters also isolate the concluding exhortations in vv. 29-34 as a secondary addition. That decision separates this chapter’s distinctive rituals from the requirement that they be celebrated annually on a specific date (vv. 29, 34; also 23:27), which these interpreters associate with H. They suggest that an earlier version of these instructions could be performed as a ritual response to emergencies whenever needed (Nihan 2007, 350; Hieke 658, 594). This reconstruction, however, depends on an evaluation of the nature and dating of the H source which suffers from its own ambiguities. See my discussion of H in the Introduction to Leviticus 21-27. This historical-critical tendency to disassociate the narrative frameworks from lists of laws and instructions (for Leviticus 16, see von Rad 1934, 85-87, 223-24; Rendtorff 1954, 69-62; Koch 1959, 92-96; as well as the later commentaries listed above) does not accord well with the ancient Near Eastern tendency to introduce such lists with narratives (Watts 1999, 36-60, 147-50). Though the long history of legal traditions and ritual practices shows the influence of Mesopotamian Listenwissenschaft on Pentateuchal literature,1 1

Raymond Westbrook, “Biblical and Cuneiform Law Codes,” RB 92/2 (1985), 247-64.

264

Leviticus 16 Exposition

it is their hortatory and narrative introductions and frameworks that reveal what purpose these legal and ritual texts served. Naturally, narrative frameworks use different vocabulary and literary structures than the ritual instructions. That difference only reflects the fact that ancient authors, like their modern counterparts, were educated in a variety of texts and genres. Though they may well have used sources, such genre differences need not indicate more than one author behind their composition, any more than this commentary’s different sources, kinds of discussion (philological, rhetorical, comparative ancient religions, cultural history of reception, etc.) and, probably, its unintentional inconsistencies indicate more than one author. The absence of any explicit mention of the “altar of spicy incense” where one would expect it to play a role in these rituals (vv. 12, 16; cf. 4:7) is a major piece of evidence for diachronic reconstructions of the chapter. Many have concluded that the incense altar in the Holy Space was a later innovation, which makes chap. 4 later than chaps. 9 and 16 (so Wellhausen 1899, 138-47; Noth; Milgrom 581; Nihan 2007, 162; Gilders 2019). This chapter, however, depends on the descriptions in chaps. 1 and 4 of sin and rising offerings, which it does not bother to explain. Its expectation that listeners and readers know the regulations of chaps. 1-7, including how priests use the altar of spicy incense, allows it to focus on the distinctive blood rituals of the Day of Mitigations. Furthermore, the proper use of incense seems to have been a point of controversy during the centuries when biblical texts were composed, which led to contradictory positions being textualized in different parts of the HB (see Leviticus 1-10, 239-41, 493). Finally, vv. 12 and 16 can be read as implicitly presupposing the presence of the altar of spicy incense in the Holy Space (see Exegesis below). All in all, then, the absence of explicit mention of the altar of spicy incense proves to be a very weak argument from silence for theories of P’s compositional history. At the other end of the interpretive spectrum from reconstructions of the chapter’s compositional history are claims that the structural centre of Leviticus is chap. 16. Many synchronic outlines of the book take the form of chiastic arch structures with chap. 16 at the centre (a view defended most elaborately by Warning 1999, 38-41, 134, 178; and Luciani 2005, 279-97; see my summary and evaluation in Leviticus 1-10, 13-15). Jacques Vermeylen even argued that Ezra placed this chapter at the structural centre of the Pentateuch to parallel the expulsion of the scapegoat with his expulsion of foreign wives in Ezra 10.2 Thomas Hieke argued more plausibly on thematic grounds that Leviticus 16 was central for the composers of Leviticus and the Pentateuch: the Day of Mitigations involves everybody in Israel and covers all sorts of sins and pollutions. He concluded that “by means of abstraction, the ritual itself turns into a metaphor” (Hieke 2019, 151; see also Rendtorff 2003). 2

Jacques Vermeylen, “Les deux « pentateuques » d’Esdras,” VT 62 (2012), 248-75.

Leviticus 16 Exposition

265

The double introduction of the divine speech in vv. 1-2 led Erich Zenger (1999, 56-57) to compare it with 1:1 and to argue that double introductions mark the beginning and middle of the book of Leviticus. Unlike Warning and Luciani, however, he argued that chaps. 16-17 together form the centre of the Pentateuch. The two chapters are connected by the theme of blood and their focus on the community (Zenger 1999, 53-62; developed in more detail by Jürgens 2001, 180-86). Zenger argued that distinguishing a different source, H, for chaps. 17-26 should not obscure the compositionally central role of chaps. 16-17 as the centre of the book’s arch structure. Christophe Nihan (2007, 83, 86-89) criticized these reconstructions of arches with chap. 16 at their centre for being selective in their choice of themes and for ignoring the narrative context in favour of divisions between divine speeches. He faulted Zenger and Jürgens for ignoring divisions between chaps. 16 and 17, such as the compliance notice in v. 34 and the new divine speech formula in 17:1. Nihan argued, instead, that chap. 16 is the conclusion of Leviticus 1-16 and of the original P source (Nihan 2007, 372, 378-82). He pointed to features of the chapter that recall and complete earlier P themes, such as YHWH’s appearance in the cloud (vv. 2, 12-13; cf. Exod. 24:15-18; 40:34-35), entering the sanctuary and theophany (v. 2; cf. 9:23; Exod 40:35), and the divine presence over the mitigation centre (vv. 2, 13; cf. Exod. 25:22). He concluded that “the censer-incense rite performed by Aaron ... constitutes ... a ritual reenactment of the inaugural revelation of Yahweh to Israel at Mt. Sinai” (Nihan 2007, 378). The difficulty, however, with viewing chap. 16 as the climax and conclusion of P is that the work would then end with a set of instructions. The brief statement in v. 34 that “he did just as YHWH commanded Moses” hardly constitutes a narrative climax like Exodus 40 or Leviticus 9, especially since the narrative’s chronological context precludes celebrating the Day of Mitigations at that time and place (see Exegesis to v. 34). Exodus and Deuteronomy show that Israel’s scribes tended to follow the ancient convention of concluding lists of instructions with blessings and curses. Such a sanction list does appear in Leviticus 26, which is therefore the more likely conclusion of Leviticus. But critical scholarship has classified that chapter as from a separate source, H. The position and role of chap. 16 therefore depends on one’s evaluation of debates about H and its relationship to P. Those issues will be dealt with in the Introduction to Leviticus 21-27. History and Interpretation of the Day of Mitigations The Day of Mitigations and its distinctive rituals are not mentioned in the HB outside priestly texts. The Day of Mitigations appears in priestly festival calendars (Lev 23:26-32; Num. 29:7-11) that confirm the special offerings of this day, and especially the demand of 16:29-31 that the people observe

266

Leviticus 16 Exposition

a strict sabbath and humble themselves. Several scholars have traced a “cultic confession motif” in post-exilic penitential prayers like Ezra 9 and Nehemiah 9 back to Lev. 16:21.3 Thus Leviticus 16’s depiction of confessing the people’s sins along with the people humbling themselves may have influenced the public piety of early Second Temple Judaism. More explicit is the second-century B.C.E. book of Jubilees, which connects the date of the Day of Mitigations with Jacob’s mourning of Joseph (Jub. 34:18-19; cf. Gen. 37).4 We may wonder whether these traditions reflect the influence of the text of Leviticus or of ritual practices in the Second Temple era. Either way, the appearance in these texts of the motif of cultic confession is evidence that the Day of Mitigations had already begun its long career of shaping the liturgical and devotional self-representations of worshippers. Even the Qumran Temple Scroll, while summarizing the day’s offerings, focuses its attention not on the temple but on the offering’s role in mitigating for the people, explicitly for their forgiveness (11QT 26.10, 27.2; Gilders 2012, 68). It describes the people’s observance of this day’s strict sabbath as a ‫“ זכרון‬memorial” (11QT 27.9; cf. Lev. 23:24 though not about the Day of Mitigations). Another Qumran Text, the Habakkuk Pesher, remembers that their sectarian leader, the Teacher of Righteousness, was attacked by Jerusalem’s high priest while fasting and observing the sabbath of the Day of Mitigations, which fell on a different date in their solar calendar than in the Temple’s lunar calendar (1QpHab 11.2-8; Baumgarten 1999, 184; Gilders 2012, 63-65). More specific commentary on the spiritual significance of the Day of Mitigations rituals can be found in other Qumran texts, in 1 Enoch 10, 14, in the Apocalypse of Abraham, and in Philo (Leg All 2.52, 55-56; Laws 1.72, 186-88; 2.195). Daniel Stökl ben Ezra (2003, 329) identified three themes in how these texts used the Day of Mitigations: The temple ritual was widely interpreted and connected to several myths in the Jewish imaginaires of Yom Kippur, to the reservoirs of motifs, myths, concepts and sensual impressions regarding Yom Kippur in the various Jewish groups. Three main interpretations emerge. The entry of the high priest into the holy of holies was perceived as an encounter between a human being and God, and it was seen to mirror the heavenly journey of the apocalyptic (1 Enoch 14), and 3 Mark J. Boda, Praying the Tradition: The Origin and Use of Tradition in Nehemiah 9 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1999), 48-49; Daniel K. Falk, “Scriptural Inspiration for Penitential Prayer in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in Seeking the Favor of God Vol. 2: the Development of Penitential Prayer in Second Temple Judaism (ed. M. J. Boda et al.; Atlanta: SBL, 2007), 127-57; Richard J. Bautch, “The Formulary of Atonement (Lev 16:21) in Penitential Prayers of the Second Temple Period,” in Hieke-Nicklas (2012), 33-45. 4 Anke Dorman, “‘Commit Injustice and Shed Innocent Blood’: Motives behind the Institution of the Day of Atonement in the Book of Jubilees,” in Hieke-Nicklas (2012), 49-61 [56-57].

Leviticus 16 Exposition

267

the ascent of the mystic’s soul to God in Philo and in Hekhalot mysticism. In eschatologically oriented groups, a high-priestly redeemer was expected to conquer the lord of evil and to liberate his good prisoners on the eschatological Day of Atonement (11QMelchizedek, 1Enoch 10). Accordingly, the scapegoat was usually conceived of as the symbol or embodiment of evil – evil thoughts of men in Philo, even demonized as the leader of the evil forces in 1Enoch 10, in 4Q180 and 4Q181, in the Apocalypse of Abraham, and in some rabbinic statements.

Joseph Baumgarten (1999) distinguished the Qumran sect’s emphasis on penitence and mourning from the Pharisaic rabbis’ focus on fasting and moral purification. This distinction, however, is not obvious: Pseudo-Philo 13:6, for example, called the Day of Mitigations “a fast of mercy.” Other interpreters therefore find more continuity than difference in late Second Temple depictions of the Day of Mitigations as a day of fasting and rest (Stökl ben Ezra 2003, 99; Gilders 2012, 65-66). Mention of the Day of Mitigations in extant texts from the late Second Temple and Late Antique periods tended to focus on the unique temple rituals of this day, no doubt due to the growing influence of the Torah and therefore of Leviticus 16. Ben Sira’s celebration of the high priest, Simon the Just, may depict the rites of Yom Kippur by describing him “coming out of the house of the curtain” (Sir. 50:5; cf. Lev. 16:18) and then donning his “glorious robe” to ascend the courtyard altar (Sir. 50:10; cf. Lev. 16:24). Most commentators, however, regard these lines as describing the high priest’s role in daily rituals (Stökl ben Ezra 2003, 32). The Mishnah devoted a tractate, m. Yoma, to narrating the rituals of the Day of Mitigations, to which the Babylonian Talmud added a full Gemara. The Mishnah focused mostly on the temple rituals, which were obsolete by the time it was written. It elaborated on the high priests’ preparation and purification for the Day of Mitigations over a seven-day period (m. Yoma 1:1-3:2; Hieke 576). It described the high priest reading and following Leviticus 16’s instructions as written (m. Yoma 1:3, 5:7; Gilders 2021, 314). It plausibly depicted him interacting with other priests who support his ritual work, and less plausibly with the Pharisaic court that provides additional instructions for doing his job (Swartz 2009, 74-75). It gave only a little attention to the people’s fasting and observance of a sabbath rest on this day, which were the rituals of continuing relevance after the destruction of the Temple. Many interpreters have read the Mishnah as containing accurate memories of how the rituals were conducted prior to the Temple’s destruction in 70 C.E.5 However, its depiction of Sadducean high priests as subservient to 5 So Baumgarten 1999; Isaac Kalimi, “The Day of Atonement in the Late Second Temple Period: Sadducees’ High Priests, Pharisees’ Norms, and Qumranites’ Calendars,” in HiekeNicklas (2012), 75-96.

268

Leviticus 16 Exposition

Pharisaic rabbis is unrealistic. Texts from the end of the Second Temple period, such as the Qumran scrolls, Josephus, and the Gospels, portray the Temple’s high priests as powerful in their conflicts with sectarians, Pharisees, and Christians. The Mishnah’s tractate on Yom Kippur must therefore be sifted carefully to distinguish historical memories of temple rituals from the exegetical elaborations of later rabbis.6 Michael D. Swartz observed that the narrative form of m. Yoma is unusual in the Mishnah, and may already reflect the influence of synagogue liturgies for Yom Kippur. Then, in the fourth century, the mishnaic narrative was recast into a poetic liturgy, the Seder Avodah, for recitation on Yom Kippur (Swartz 2009, 73). Its recitation is reflected in the Babylonian Talmud (b. Yoma 36a, 56b) and continues in many synagogues today. Thus the ritual instructions of Leviticus 16, composed to be read aloud like the rest of the Pentateuch (Deut. 31; Watts 1999), were recast by the Mishnah as narrative and by the Avodah as liturgical poetry to keep the Temple rituals of the Day of Mitigations alive in Jewish religious experience. The liturgy coalesced in the Middle Ages to include singing penitential psalms (especially Ps. 130) and the popular but controversial Kol Nidre, a prayer for release from “all vows” of religious obligations.7 The performance of this liturgy, together with fasting and sabbath rest, preserved the focus on confession and repentance while imagining the high priest’s entrance in the Holiest Space on Yom Kippur as the devotional climax of the Jewish year. Baruch Levine (235) summarized these developments: Undoubtedly, the ascendance of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and of the ten-day period between them that characterizes later Judaism is attributable, in large part, to the continuing need for expiation and forgiveness, in the absence of the Temple and its “altar of expiation.” The New Moon of the seventh month became the New Year (Rosh Hashanah). The calendar had shifted to an autumnal inception of the year, and Yom Kippur became the major occasion for communal penitence. Leviticus 16 already gives evidence of a development in that direction in that the last part of the chapter (vv. 29-34) redirects emphasis from the Sanctuary to the people and speaks of self-denial and fasting. This need was sufficiently strong to make Yom Kippur the most solemn day of the year.

The Yom Kippur custom of Kapparot, which involves swinging a chicken as a substitute while praying for atonement (see Leviticus 1-10, 328; Stökl ben Ezra 2005, 65-67), retained an element of animal offering despite the Temple’s destruction. Otherwise, Torah replaced offerings just as home and 6 So Stökl ben Ezra 2003; Swartz 2009; Günter Stemberger, “Yom Kippur in Mishnah Yoma,” in Hieke-Nicklas (2012), 121-37. 7 Andreas Lehnardt, “‘Seder Yom ha-Kippurim Kakh Hu’ – Zur Entwicklung der synagogalen Liturgie des Versöhnungstages,” in Hieke-Nicklas (2012), 257-69.

Leviticus 16 Exposition

269

synagogue replaced the temple on Yom Kippur. In Sephardic synagogues, it is customary to open the doors of the Torah ark for the recitation of the Seder Avodah to re-enact the high priest’s entrance into the Holiest Space.8 The Torah’s replacement of the temple is also explicit among the Samaritans, who conclude their Yom Kippur liturgy with the solemn display of their oldest and most venerated Torah scrolls (Zsengellér 2012, 152-54, 157). By contrast, the influence of Leviticus 16 on Christian traditions has been theological rather than liturgical. The Gospels say that Jesus died at Passover. The Christian liturgical year therefore reaches its climax on Good Friday and Easter around Passover in March-April (though Jewish and Christian calculations of the date rarely coincide). That left no place for a separate Day of Mitigations in Christian liturgical calendars. However, Leviticus 16’s descriptions of the high priest carrying blood into the inner sanctum of the Tabernacle to mitigate for sins and confessing Israel’s sins over a goat that carries them into the desert have stimulated interpreter’s imaginations to explain the key Christian claim that Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection provide salvation from sin. The influence of Leviticus 16 on the New Testament is most explicit in Hebrews 6-10. Hebrews depicts Jesus as a high priest “after the order of Melchizedek” who displaces the Aaronide priests authorized by Leviticus 8, 10, and 16 (Heb. 4:15-5:6; 7:1-22; citing Gen. 14:17-20; Ps. 110:4). It describes the Tabernacle’s furnishings and inner room which the high priest entered annually to sprinkle offering blood (Heb. 9:1-7) to compare with Jesus who entered the heavenly Tabernacle to offer his own blood (9:11-14). In the interpretation of Hebrews, then, Jesus is both offering and high priest who now sits in heaven with God (10:12). The consequence of Jesus’ singular offering is “eternal redemption,” “sanctification,” and “purification” of “our conscience” (9:12-14) that now allows every believer to enter the heavenly “sanctuary by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh)” (10:19-20 NRSV). Hebrews also describes other HB rituals, including Moses’ ratification of the covenant with offering blood and his consecration of the Tabernacle with blood (Heb. 9:18-20 referring to Exod. 24:3-8, Lev. 8:15; 17:11), to conclude that “under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (9:22 NRSV). George Heyman charted the power dynamics of sacrificial discourse in Greco-Roman society as well as in Judaism to observe that Hebrews invokes “the paradoxical polarities that are constitutive of sacrificial rituals in general” (Heyman 2007, 108; also Eberhart 2013, 110). 8 Macy Nulman, The Encyclopedia of Jewish Prayer: The Ashkenazic and Sephardic Rites (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 372.

270

Leviticus 16 Exposition

Other NT texts use the HB’s descriptions of ritual blood purification and secular bloodshed separately. Just as Leviticus’s offering rituals do not focus on the death of the animal, but rather on using the blood and distributing the meat, most NT books use these rituals metaphorically to understand what Jesus’ death and resurrection accomplished: forgiveness, sanctification, and a new covenant. Thus Paul can refer to Jesus in one place as the Passover lamb (1 Cor. 5:7-8) and in another describe him with allusions to the goat for Azazel (2 Cor. 5:21). John mixes these models by labelling Jesus as “the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29; see Siker 2011). Eberhart (2013, 105-12) distinguished such ritual metaphors of sanctifying blood from other NT references to Jesus’ blood that evoke the HB tradition of the shed blood of innocent victims (Acts 20:28; Rom. 5:8-10; 8:31-39; Col. 1:19-20; Rev. 12:9-10). This distinction is obscured, however, already by Lev. 17:11 and 14, which interpret the ban on consuming animal blood as due to its ritual use. NT eucharistic texts employ ritual imagery explicitly when they describe Jesus making a new covenant “in my blood” (Mark 14:22-25; Matt. 26:26-29; Luke 22: 17-20; 1 Cor. 11:23-26) by alluding to Israel’s covenant at Mount Sinai when Moses sprinkled the Israelites with sacred offering blood (Exod. 24:3-8; also Isa. 53:12; Jer. 31:31; Zech. 9:11; see Eberhart 2013, 119-20). In accord with Lev. 17:11 and 14 that locate personal energy in blood, Eberhart (2013, 112, 117-29) observed that most NT uses of ritual imagery emphasize less Jesus’ death than contact with his blood, that is, with his sacred energy or life.9 Hebrews, however, combines the ritual and secular images of blood to interpret Jesus’ death as a singular self-sacrifice (7:27), a combination that Eberhart (2013, 141-43) characterized as both transcending and transforming traditional offering metaphors. Hebrews thereby also combined late-Second-Temple-period eschatological dreams of a high priestly redeemer with the previously separate idea of atoning self-sacrifice (Stökl ben Ezra 2003, 194-97, 330). Jesus as high priest carried his self-offered blood into the heavenly sanctuary to give his followers access to God in the inner sanctum of heaven. Nevertheless, Eberhart (2017, 229) observed that “overt references to the Day of Atonement are also rare in the New Testament.” Hebrews provided Christianity an elaborate ritual interpretation of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection while simultaneously superseding Jewish temple rituals. Interpreters debate whether supersession was the writer’s intention (denied by Stökl ben Ezra 2003, 330-31, because of evidence that some Christians continued to observe the Yom Kippur fast into the second century). Yet supersession was its long-term effect: after 70 C.E., Christians made no 9 So also David M. Moffitt, “Blood, Life, and Atonement: Reassessing Hebrews’ Christological Appropriation of Yom Kippur,” in Hieke-Nicklas (2012), 211-24.

Leviticus 16 Exposition

271

effort to re-establish temple rituals and, once they gained political power in the fourth century, became ardent persecutors of cults that killed animals as ritual offerings. Leviticus 16 was occasionally used as a model for consecrating churches (Elliott 159) and the recent Catholic innovation of a Lenten Sacrament of Reconciliation reproduces a kind of Day of Mitigations (Elliott 173). But Christian liturgies and calendars focused the theological ideas produced by this chapter and its interpretation in Hebrews onto Lent and Holy Week, scheduled in the spring with Passover. Early Christian theologians, on the other hand, invoked the ritual ideas of expiation (Origen) and propitiation (Eusebius, John Chrysostom) that Athanasius combined into “divine self-reconciliation” (Young 1979, 193). Later Christian unease with animal “sacrifice” is reflected in the various theories of Christ’s atonement promulgated by medieval and modern theologians that depend on legal and sociological models, rather than ritual. Anselm’s satisfaction theory utilized Roman private law as a model, Hugo Grotius invoked criminal law, while Peter Abelard and Faustus Socinus relied on sociological theories of moral influence, as did René Girard (see Eberhart et al. 2011). In Christian imagination, Hebrews established Leviticus 16’s depiction of the high priest as a typological trope for Christ to the point that crucifixes sometimes depict Jesus crucified in priestly clothing. In addition to the dominant themes of blood offerings and atonement, Christian interpreters mined every detail of the chapter for typological associations with Jesus: the high priest’s linen clothing represents Jesus’ purity, the veil before the Holiest Space is Jesus’ flesh (so already Heb. 10:20), Jesus is the man who leads the goat into the desert, and so on (see Elliott 157-60). Christian art and music have popularized NT images drawn from HB rituals. Christian art depicted Jesus as the “lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29) and as the “lamb which was slain” (Rev. 5:6-14) from at least the sixth century on. Church music gloried in the “blood shed for us” familiar from the Eucharistic liturgy. Such expressive ritualizations of themes in Leviticus 16 have preserved vivid images of the Day of Mitigations in Christian imaginations. Modern biblical scholarship has tried to reconstruct the meaning of the rituals of Leviticus 16 within its literary context (see above) and also in the history of Israel’s religion. Neither the Day of Mitigations nor its rituals are mentioned in festival calendars outside Leviticus and Numbers (cf. Exod. 23:14-17; Deut. 16:1-17), indicating the possibility that P added the Day of Mitigations to Israel’s festivals (Wright 1992). The fact that its annual observance is mentioned only at the end of the chapter in verses often recognized as H additions (vv. 29-34) and that the name, ‫“ יום הכפרים‬the Day of Mitigations,” appears for the first time only in 23:27-32, suggests that these

272

Leviticus 16 Exposition

rituals may have originally been emergency measures for use as needed, and only later developed into an annual event (see above). The chapter’s themes, however, appear frequently in older texts of other ancient Near Eastern cultures. The purification of shrines was a common concern of ancient priests, as reflected in ritual texts (Yoo-Watts 2021, 30-46). The blood of flock animals was used as a ritual detergent in several cultures. For example, Hittite temples were purified at their dedication by smearing sheep’s blood on the statue, walls, and utensils. The Babylonian shrine for Nabu was purified on the fifth day of the New Year’s festival by wiping its interior with a ram’s carcass.10 Israel’s rituals of mitigation for purification and forgiveness, then, reflected older and broader traditions even when they differed from those of their neighbours in some details (see Leviticus 1-10, 172-73, 317-18; for ancient parallels to releasing the goat, see below). The contrast between literary evidence for the later development and addition of the Day of Mitigations to Israel’s ritual calendar and the comparative evidence of its resonance with old and widespread ancient rituals suggests that models of linear ritual development are inappropriate for ancient Israel (Weinfeld 1983, 111-14), as they are for most cultures. Instead, an explanation for the absence of the Day of Mitigations in other HB traditions and its presence in P/H should be sought in each text’s rhetorical agenda. See The Rhetoric of Leviticus 16 in Historical and Literary Context, below. Many recent commentators continue to be interested in the theological implications of Leviticus 16. They often agree that the Day of Mitigations was designed as a ritual guarantee to preserve YHWH’s presence in Israel’s sanctuary (Levine 99; Hundley 2011, 159). It then served as a typological model for how later Jews and Christians can approach the divine presence. So Milgrom (1990, 162-67) saw P’s suppression of demonic explanations for pollution and its focus on mitigating the sins of the whole community in this chapter as a crucial step in the development of biblical monotheism. Kamionkowski (2018) took her cue from traditional themes of Jewish Yom Kippur observance to summarize that “the heart of the ritual of Leviticus 16 requires us to pay attention both inwardly to the relationship between God and ourselves, and outwardly, to our relationships with others.” Many Christian commentators continue to follow the line of interpretation established by Hebrews. Thus Wenham (237) described the Day of Atonement as no longer relevant to Christians, but still useful for learning about “the nature of sin, the necessity of atonement, and the superiority of Christ’s sacrifice.” Hartley (245) also channelled Hebrews and subsequent Christian 10 See Wright 1987, 36, 62-65; Wright 1991; Milgrom 1067-70; Gane 2005, 360-78; and Julye Bidmead, The Akitu Festival: Religious Continuity and Royal Legitimation in Mesopotamia (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2002), 70-76.

Leviticus 16 Exposition

273

commentary: “This dramatic shift of the blood rite from inside the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement to the cross planted on a hill outside Jerusalem is foundational to the radical shift in the way to God under the new covenant.” Radner (168-71) summarized and restated Christian theological traditions to depict the Day of Mitigations rituals as a model for the eternal cosmic significance of Christ’s sacrifice. Other Christian commentaries, more mindful of the bloody history of Christian supersessionism, prefer to summarize the chapter’s significance within Jewish and Christian traditions without adding further theological commentary (so Gerstenberger 230-33; Hieke 600-611). Gane built on both religious traditions to reconstruct the spiritual significance of humbling oneself (v. 29) “to express humble dependence upon God” through “an outward sign of inner repentance and desire for continuing moral rehabilitation” (Gane 2005, 313-15). In the end, the meaning of the text is simply what it has meant to different people in different times (see Leviticus 1-10, 87-88). So this commentary summarizes the rhetoric of Leviticus 16 by its various interpretations in verbal commentary and ritual practice. History and Interpretation of the Goat for Azazel Much commentary has focused on “the goat for Azazel” (vv. 7-10; for the meaning of “Azazel,” see Exegesis to v. 8). The high priest selects it by lot (v. 8), then confesses Israel’s sins over it and sends it to be released in the desert (vv. 20-22). This ritual is not mentioned elsewhere in the HB. However, ancient interpreters elaborated the significance of the goat and Azazel, which have remained the subject of fascination and speculation ever since. Azazel was cast as a fallen angel by apocalyptic literature. In adaptations of the story in Gen. 6:1-4, Azazel appears among the angels who mated with human women and who will be bound and punished at the end of time (1 En. 10:4-8; 4QEnGiantsa; 4Q180; 4Q181; see Grabbe 1987, 153-58; Stökl ben Ezra 2003, 85-90, 94-95). Some texts depict Azazel as the paradigmatic demon with secret knowledge (1 En. 8:1; 9:6; 69:2) who tempts humans and presides over their punishment in hell (Apoc. Ab. 13:7, 22:6; 23:5,9; see Orlov 2015, 75-102). Rabbinic literature shows awareness of some similar themes, which may reflect their roots in the ritual practices of the Second Temple. For example, like the Apocalypse of Abraham and the Epistle of Barnabas, the Mishnah describes a crimson thread tied to the horns of the goat for Azazel and people cursing the goat as it is led away (m. Yoma 4.2; 6.4; Grabbe 1987, 158). Lester Grabbe (1987, 161-62) pointed out that this demonological interpretation of Azazel was not picked up by early Christians. Instead, second and third-century Christian authors identified Christ with the goat for Azazel (also

274

Leviticus 16 Exposition

Roo 2000, 239-40; Orlov 2015, 103-110). The Epistle of Barnabas 7:6-11 depicted the goat, like Christ, as both reviled and worshipped. Justin Martyr (Dial. 40) thought Christ’s first coming is represented by the goat for Azazel while his future return is represented by the goat for YHWH. Tertulian (Marc. 1.191) suggested the two goats represent Christ’s two fates, reviled on earth but ministering in the heavenly temple. Variations on this view prevailed in much subsequent Christian commentary (Elliott 160-66). The Christian appropriation of the goat for Azazel as a type of Christ precipitated the tendency to think of the goat as an innocent victim of other’s sins and as a model of falsely accused victims generally. The ancient translation of “goat for Azazel” as the “sent-away goat” (LXX), that is, the “scapegoat” (Vg, KJV), has provided a common label for people who are falsely blamed and punished for others’ wrongdoing. Christian typology promoted Jesus Christ as the prototypical human (and divine) scapegoat. The history of Christian anti-Semitism, however, has also established persecution of Jews as the paradigmatic sociological example of scapegoating. In the study of religion, both the theological claim and the social history have been elevated to theoretical paradigms by two influential scholars, James Frazer and René Girard. In The Golden Bough, published from 1890 to 1915, Frazer developed a theory of religions based on the scapegoat.11 He thought that not just Christianity but ancient religions in general were founded on a myth of a dying and rising god. The myth was enacted by sacrificing the animal or human scapegoat who carries the community’s guilt. In the 1970s, Girard developed similar ideas into a general theory of human violence.12 When rivalry threatens to tear apart a community, sacrifice diverts aggression onto a victim who cannot retaliate, the “scapegoat,” thus ending the cycle of violence for the time being. Girard, however, admitted that his theory of cultural scapegoating has nothing to do with Leviticus 16 except the name.13 In fact, the label “scapegoat” is a bad translation of ‫השׂעיר לעזאזל‬, which is better rendered as “the goat for Azazel” (see Exegesis to v. 8). Mary Douglas (2003, 122-25), among others, observed that the substitutionary themes in these comparisons of cultural scapegoat rituals actually derive mostly from Greek sources, which undermines the attempts by Frazer and Girard to categorize Leviticus 16 under the same phenomenon. The Greek pharmakos was a socially marginalized person who was publicly humiliated, whipped, and expelled, sometimes killed, to expunge a community’s guilt 11

James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (New York: Avenel, 1981 [1890]), 189-217. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977 (French 1972). 13 René Girard, “Generative Scapegoating,” in Violent Origins (ed. R. G. Hamerton-Kelly; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 73-78. 12

Leviticus 16 Exposition

275

(Parker 1983, 257-70). Except for the theme of expelling guilt, these rituals “do not look remotely like the Bible instance” (Douglas 2003, 122). Ancient Near Eastern rituals of expiation often involved expelling animals and humans. Some of them resemble the goat for Azazel ritual. Many commentators therefore view it as an ancient cultural relic that was somehow preserved in the otherwise monotheistic biblical text. They think it dates back to Israel’s early history or derives from even older, non-Israelite ritual traditions (Noth; Gerstenberger; Budd; Milgrom). Bernd Janowski and Gernot Wilhelm (1993) helpfully categorized these modern reconstructions of the ritual’s origins as focusing either on nomadic rituals, Egyptian rituals, or southAnatolian/north-Syrian rituals. The origins of the Azazel goat in early Israelite nomadic rituals was a popular explanation among twentieth-century interpreters. Leonhard Rost, for example, argued that the rituals of the Passover sheep offering and the goat for Azazel marked the spring and fall migrations of early Israel’s nomadic herders to and from their summer pastures.14 This nomadic reconstruction, however, depended on reading Lev. 16:10, 22 as sending the goat into the desert “to Azazel,” but ‫ לעזאזל‬must mean “for Azazel” just like the parallel, ‫“ ליהוה‬for YHWH” (Janowski-Wilhelm 1993, 114; see Exegesis to v. 8). The Egyptian theory identified Azazel with the god, Seth, whom firstmillennium texts depicted as “the expelled culprit” who carries disease and pollution (Görg 1986). This explanation, however, conflates the goat with Azazel/Seth in contradiction to their differentiation in this chapter (JanowskiWilhelm 1993, 128). Janowski and Wilhelm advocated the third theory that traced the ritual’s origins back to ritual texts from southern Anatolia and northern Syria. Many Hittite and Eblite rituals of exorcism and healing include the release of live animals into the wild (Tawil 1980, 50-52; Janowski-Wilhelm 1993, 134-39; Zatelli 1998, 254-55). “Various animals, such as cattle, sheep, goats, donkeys or mice, can be the bearers of the pollution which is magically eliminated by means of a living substitute” (Janoswki 1999, 130). Manfred Hutter (2013, 167) observed that “Hittite rituals often document the concept that pollution must be deposited in a safe – and deserted – place, beyond the boundaries of human civilization” (see also Wright 1987, 45-72; Milgrom 1071-79). That is also the case in the purification ritual for healed lepers in Lev. 14:3-7. The goat for Azazel ritual looks similar, though it carries away Israel’s sins rather than pollutions (16:21), but that too finds parallels in some Hittite elimination rituals (Janowski-Wilhelm 1993, 137). 14 Leonhard Rost, “Weidewechsel und altisraelitischer Festkalender,” ZDPV 66 (1943), 205-216; see also August Strobel, “Das jerusalemische Sündenbock-Ritual: Topographische und landeskundliche Erwägungen zur Überlieferungsgeschichte von Lev. 16,10.2lf.,” ZDPV 103 (1987), 141-68.

276

Leviticus 16 Exposition

The Azazel goat ritual challenges Milgrom’s theory that P eliminated demonology from Israel’s rituals (see “Pollution as Symbolizing Death” in Introduction to Leviticus 11-20 above). He therefore insisted that the ritual and the name, Azazel, “is no longer a personality but just a name, designating the place to which impurities and sins are banished” (Milgrom 1021, 1079; also Wright 1987, 24).15 Others think the Azazel goat ritual is evidence that demonic exorcism continued to motivate Israel’s purification rituals (Levine 252; Feder 2013, 159-64; Cranz 2017). That was certainly the case in the literature and practices of later Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaisms and in early Christianity (Josephus, Ant. 8.45-49; Mark 1:25; 3:15; 6:13; Matt. 8:16; 12:28-29; Luke 8:2, 20; 9:17; 11:20-21; Acts 5:16; 19:13-16) that often featured Azazel as the name of an angel or demon (1 En. 8:1; 9:6; 69:2; Tob. 6:8, 17; Apoc. Ab. 13:7; 22:6; 23:5, 9; and many magical manuscripts in Aramaic, Greek, Syriac, and Coptic, for which see Fauth 1998). Contrary to this dominant tendency to look for the meaning of the Azazel goat ritual in earlier or later religious traditions, some interpreters have sought it in interpretive tendencies within Leviticus itself. Jacqueline de Roo (2000) argued that ‫עזאזל‬/‫ עזזאל‬means “(placating) God’s anger” (see further in Exegesis to v. 8). Calum Carmichael (2006) noted that Jubilees 34:12, 18-19 and some later Jewish sources associate Leviticus 16 and Genesis 37. He therefore argued that the priestly writers invented the Azazel goat ritual to mitigate for corporate sins like those committed by Jacob’s sons against their brother Joseph. On the basis of some thematic and verbal links between the texts (the goat, the wilderness, ‫“ פשׁע‬crimes” in Gen. 50:17 and Lev. 16:16, 21), he suggested that the ritual was intended to remind Israelites of “the first time ever in the nation’s history when forgiveness is sought and granted for an offense” (Carmichael 2006, 46; similarly Douglas 2003, 135-39). More broadly, Geoffrey Harper (2018, 166) described the Day of Mitigations ritual as evoking the preceding creation, flood, and exodus accounts. The links between Leviticus 16 and these Pentateuchal texts, however, are not very distinctive and do not help explain the ritual’s chief interpretive puzzles, namely, the name Azazel and why one goat is released alive. Cultural appropriation of ancient Hittite and Syrian rituals better accounts for Leviticus 16’s distinctive features than inner-biblical interpretation. The depiction of both goats as sin offerings (v. 5) – one to be killed and offered on the altar like a normal sin offering though with a distinctive blood sprinkling on the cover of the covenant chest (v. 15), the other to be released 15 Judit M. Blair, De-demonising the Old Testament: An Investigation of Azazel, Lilith, Deber, Qeteb and Reshef in the Hebrew Bible (FAT 2/37; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 55-62.

Leviticus 16 Exposition

277

alive in the desert carrying Israel’s sins (vv. 21-22) – might indicate that they accomplish two different things. Milgrom (1033-34, 1043-44, following m. Sebu. 1:6; Sifra) suggested that the altar offering served to purify pollution (v. 16) while the goat for Azazel removed moral sins (v. 22). Hieke (580) agreed, but warned that the function of both goat rituals are inextricably tied together. He concluded, more plausibly, that the juxtaposition of the two goats represents the entirety of the Day of Mitigations rituals that rectify the effects of both sin and pollution, as the chapter explicitly asserts (vv. 16, 30). The parallel that chap. 16 draws between the two goats shows that the writers of Leviticus were less concerned with distinguishing morality from purity than subsequent interpreters (see Introduction to Leviticus 11-20, above). Nicole Ruane (2019) observed that sin offerings always require dividing the offering into two parts, one of which is designated for disposal. She suggested, therefore, that the scapegoat serves here as the disposable portion. However, the disposable portion of the offered goat is burned outside the camp, as usual (v. 27). This creative suggestion also suffers from the fact that the disposable materials and the means of disposal vary so dramatically from one sin offering to another. It is difficult to regard meat and grain eaten by priests (Lev. 5:13; 6:26), carcasses burned outside the camp (4:11-12; 16:27; Num. 19:5), and birds and goats released alive into the wild (Lev. 14:7; 16:22) as all performing the same ritual function, though some have argued exactly that (Feder 2011, 68-77; Ruane 2019). Roy Gane (2005, 242-66) suggested that after the goat blood ritual in the Tabernacle removed moral pollution from the Tabernacle, the purpose of the Azazel goat ritual is to return moral pollution to its demonic source. Neither mitigates for the Israelite people themselves, according to Gane, because their pollutions and unintentional sins should have already been dealt with by the routine sin offerings described in Leviticus 4-5 and 12-15. Gane’s reconstruction depended on a single difference between the lists of faults resolved by the two goat offerings. While both goat offerings address ‫“ פשׁעים‬transgressions” and ‫“ חטאת‬sins,” the goat for YHWH mitigates for amoral ‫טמאת‬ “pollutions” (v. 16) while the goat for Azazel deals with ‫“ עונת‬liabilities” (v. 21) along with the other moral faults. However, the rhetorical impact of this chapter and of these verses does not encourage drawing such fine distinctions (unlike the rhetoric of chaps. 11 and 13; see above). Instead, the emphasis in these lists of faults falls on the word ‫“ כל‬all” – “that is, all their sins.” It reinforces this chapter’s rhetorical climax in depicting the Day of Mitigations rituals as resolving all of Israel’s pollutions and faults that threaten its covenant with YHWH. The chapter’s point is that the rituals of the Day of Mitigations can mitigate for everything (see Exegesis to v. 16).

278

Leviticus 16 Exposition

Interpreting Leviticus 16 with Ritual Theory Since the appearance of ritual theory as a distinguishable discipline in the 1980s (see Introduction §2.3.6 in Leviticus 1-10), most biblical interpreters who employ ritual theories have applied them to the rituals of the Day of Mitigations in Leviticus 16 as the Bible’s paradigmatic case (Pfeiffer 2001, 313, for example, called it the “core ritual” of priestly literature). Ritual theory has led biblical interpreters to look for meaning in the sequence of ritual actions, in the delimitation of ritual spaces, and in the way that both “index” ritual participants and observers. Of course, biblical interpreters attempted to categorize HB rituals long before ritual theory appeared. Already in 1837, Karl C. W. F. Bähr analyzed the priestly ritual texts under the categories of space, personnel, rites, and time.16 This schema was still used productively to structure studies of Israelite rituals in the late-twentieth century (Haran 1978, 2-5; Jenson 1993, 33-35). The annual Day of Mitigations is especially distinctive among Israel’s rituals for its use of all the sacred spaces in the Tabernacle, but only once a year. Philip Jenson (1993, 198-99, 209) pointed out that it is not a pilgrimage festival like the three annual festivals (Passover, Sukkot, Shavuot), but emphasizes purification much more than those festivals do. He therefore concluded that it was more important to the priests’ temporal practices than to the people’s. On the other hand, the Day of Mitigations imposes a stricter sabbath observance on the people than do the three festivals (see Exegesis to vv. 29, 31). It therefore extends priestly regulation of lay people into their homes and villages more than the annual festivals do (on temporal systemization as a tool of priestly regulation, see Rhyder 2019, 260-330). Many have interpreted the rituals of the Day of Mitigations as a rite of passage, which van Gennep (1909) defined by its three stages: separation, liminality, and reintegration. Leviticus 16 clearly marks off the liminal stage by requiring Aaron to change clothes and bathe (vv. 4, 24; Gorman 1990, 90; Douglas 2003, 129; Nihan 2007, 370; Rooke 2007, 350-55). The chapter’s introduction emphasizes the danger of entering the Holiest Space (vv. 1-2), which is also typical of descriptions of liminal ritual states (Douglas 1966, 119-20; Gorman 1990, 93). However, unlike many other rites of passage that signify an individual’s transition to a new status (e.g. the priest’s ordination in Leviticus 8), the purpose of the Day of Mitigations rituals is explicitly to purify the Tabernacle (vv. 14-19) and the people of Israel (vv. 20-22; contra Rooke 2007, 353-55, who interpreted the linen clothes as marking Aaron as no longer or not yet the high priest; see Exegesis to v. 4). So Frank Gorman called it “a community rite of passage” to restore a cosmic order that has 16

Karl C. W. F. Bähr, Symbolik des mosaischen Cultus, 2 vols., Heidelberg: Mohr, 1837.

Leviticus 16 Exposition

279

been disturbed by sin and pollution (Gorman 1990, 61-62, 101-102; cf. van Gennep 1960, 178-80). According to Christophe Nihan (2009, 378-79), the incense ritual in the Holiest Space also re-enacts the revelation at Mount Sinai. When Aaron’s incense cloud reproduces the effect of YHWH’s fire cloud descending on the mountain, “the initial theophany that accompanied the formation of Israel as a priestly nation in P (Ex 24; 40; Lev 9) has now become a permanent feature of Israel’s cult.” Gorman (1990, 67-75) analyzed the components of the Day of Mitigations rituals in terms of materials, roles, spaces, and temporal categories to distinguish three central elements: the mitigating blood rite (vv. 6, 11-19), the goat for Azazel (vv. 8, 10, 20-22), and burning the rising offerings (vv. 23-24). Jenson recognized that bringing blood into the Holiest Space and releasing the goat for Azazel employ the poles of ritual space at both extremes: “In the text the two goats begin by being indistinguishable ... But by the end of the day they have embraced the extreme reaches of significant space” (Jenson 1993, 202). Gorman’s categorization imagined this day’s rhythm of ritual performance in the Tabernacle, but Jenson observed that Leviticus 16 ignores that rhythm to focus on the most unique and extreme parts of the rituals. The Day of Mitigations rituals emphasize the unique and privileged role of the high priest, an obvious example of the thesis of William Gilders (2004) that Israel’s blood rituals index the relationships between participants (elaborated also by Nihan 2015, 120-27). Drawing on the ritual theories of anthropologist Roy Rappaport (1999) and the Peircian theory of indexical signs, Gilders (2004, 125) observed that Aaron’s manipulation of blood in the Holiest Space indexes both equality of status, because he manipulates blood from the people’s sin offering in the same way as his own, and hierarchy and privilege, because only he is allowed into this space to do so. The repetition of the blood manipulation in the three spaces of the Tabernacle requires variation because of the different implements (chest, curtain, courtyard altar, and the incense altar implicitly). As they reach the frequently used courtyard altar, Gilders (2004, 126) noted that elaborating the normal blood rituals by both smearing and sprinkling indexes the Day of Mitigations as special and distinct from other days in the Tabernacle. Michael Hundley employed the full range of ritual theories in order to describe “multiple levels of meaning” in the Day of Mitigations rituals. Following Modéus (2005, 128-35), he distinguished three levels of meaning (Hundley 2011, 35-37). The structural level of meaning involves relationships, how the ritual indexes people and places (à la Gilders 2004). Another level involves the explicit purpose for which the ritual is performed. The third level addresses the theological and ideological meanings of rituals, which are “implicit and non-verifiable” and expressed in rhetoric. In applying these theories to Leviticus 16, Hundley (2011, 159) observed that the rituals of the

280

Leviticus 16 Exposition

Day of Mitigations index relationships among a wider range of persons (YHWH, high priest, priests, Israelites, immigrants) and spaces (all parts of the Tabernacle as well as the camp and the desert) than any other Israelite ritual. The chapter explicitly names the purpose of these rituals fifteen times: mitigation of the sanctuary, the priests, and the people (Hundley 2011, 162). Mitigating the sanctuary and the priests also occurred at their inauguration (Leviticus 8-9), but Hundley (2011, 169) observed that the Day of Mitigations rituals are “more comprehensive and carefully directed” by focusing on each space within the Tabernacle and by expelling sins’ pollution as far away as possible into the desert. Yitzhaq Feder reviewed and contradicted the tendency of ritual theorists to describe rituals as multivalent and full of ambiguities. Because of the ancient Near Eastern use of rituals to achieve explicit purposes, such as healing, exorcism, or mitigation, he argued that they must be univalent in order to be effective (Feder 2011, 152-55). He thought that rituals develop to address certain problems, though their original purpose may be forgotten over time (Feder 2011, 164). In Leviticus 16, for example, Feder noted the placement of blood on the altar’s horns (v. 18) which, in other texts, provide refuge for people accused of shedding human blood (Exod. 21:13-14; 1 Kgs. 2:28-34), and the use elsewhere of the root ‫“ כפר‬mitigate” for expiating blood guilt (e.g. Exod. 21:30; Num. 35:33; Deut. 32:43; see Exegesis to 4:20). He concluded that “the sin offering blood rite has adopted the symbolism and terminology of murder compensation and transformed them into a cultic means of expiating sin” (Feder 2011, 192). In this way, Feder tried to revive an old tendency in the interpretation of biblical ritual, which is to reconstruct the original meaning of a rite and trace subsequent changes and even losses of meaning. Feder’s interpretation of blood rituals merits consideration, though he does not adequately explain the equation of human blood with animal blood. At the theoretical level, however, Feder exaggerated his differences with ritual theorists and other interpreters of biblical rituals. It has been widely recognized that the purpose or goal in performing many rituals is explicitly stated and agreed upon (e.g. modern rituals for graduation, inauguration, wedding, healing, funeral; so Bell 1992, 197; Modéus 2005, 35), though many other rituals are practised regularly without such broad agreement (see, for example, the interpretations of mikveh immersion by Israeli women quoted at the end of Exposition to Leviticus 15 above). Multivalence comes into play most often when someone tries to correlate the form of the ritual with its purpose to answer the question, “Why do we/they do it this way?” The point made by many ritual theorists since the 1980s has been that the ritual’s efficacy – its ability to achieve its purpose – does not depend on agreeing on any one answer to that question, but only on proper performance of the ritual as defined by community consensus and tradition.

Leviticus 16 Exposition

281

Isabel Cranz built on the theories of Grimes, Gorman, and Klingbeil to compare the ritual elements utilized by Assyro-Babylonian rituals and the P source. In Leviticus 16, this led her to focus particularly on the goat for Azazel ritual because of its similarities to other ancient rites (see above). She concluded that the ritual described in Leviticus reflects “the same premises as Assyro-Babylonian expiation” (Cranz 2017, 124). In recent decades, several biblical scholars have drawn inspiration from the indologist Fritz Staal (1979) to develop theories of ritual syntax analogous to linguistic forms. Staal argued that ritual rules follow their own intrinsic logic, like the rules of grammar. Ritual syntax does not convey semantic meaning by itself but only relationships between elements. Combining Staal’s ritual syntax with general systems theory, Roy Gane (2004) analyzed the ritual syntax of Leviticus 16 and compared it with the Babylonian New Year’s rituals and a ritual from Emar. Unlike Staal, however, he argued that these rituals involve semantic interpretations of purpose beyond ritual syntax and intrinsic activity (Gane 2004, 50-93). Gane selected for comparison rituals from three different cultures that all explicitly served purification purposes, yet differed in how they described the nature of the pollution, the objects to be purified, the forms of ritual activity, and the number of deities served (Gane 2004, 336-37). Gane’s subsequent research has focused on the semantic meanings carried by Israel’s rituals and their sequences of activities (Gane 2005, xxi, 235-40). Other biblical interpreters have also utilized Staal’s theory while emphasizing a ritual’s semantic meaning, but they have only cited Leviticus 16 piecemeal in their systematic descriptions of ritual syntax. Gerald Klingbeil (2007, 127) differentiated ritual morphology (individual elements), syntax (their interaction), semantics (their cumulative meaning), and pragmatics (their effects in cultural context). He distinguished the meaning of ritual performances from the meaning of ritual texts: while “the actions that constitute a ritual do not have inherent meanings” but are determined by “the context in which the ritual is enacted,” the fact that ancient rituals were written down shows that they possessed a “determinate meaning” for their writers (Klingbeil 2007, 55, 69). Leigh Trevaskis (2011, 9) adopted from cognitive linguistics the distinction between meanings that words always imply and meanings that listeners or readers associate with them based on their own experiences. He suggested that the symbolic meanings of rituals derive from such secondary linguistic domains. Naphtali Meshel (2014) was inspired by Staal to write a “grammar” of Israelite sacrifice. He found that changes in rule-bound forms of Israelite rituals accompanied changes in their function or meaning, but he also found disjunctions between ritual forms and meanings: an offering can be “a hatta’t in its praxemics, but an ‘ola or an asham in its desired effect, in what it symbolizes, or in the function it fulfills”

282

Leviticus 16 Exposition

(Meshel 2014, 203). Meshel carefully hedged his analogy between language and ritual with qualifications and questions about the nature of both. These studies of ritual syntax make some interesting points, but the overall yield seems small for the effort expended to make them. Perhaps that is because language and ritual are not so similar after all. Language and ritual resemble each other by being rule-bound and by the fact that their functions do not dictate their forms, which are arbitrary, conventional, and culturally contingent. Meaning, however, occupies a different place in ritual than in language. While a ritual’s purpose is often explicit and non-controversial, the meaning of its component actions is not essential to its function and can vary with every participant.17 Furthermore, the same ritual actions are often used for different purposes (Modéus 2005; Meshel 2014, 203; Nihan 2015, 127). In language, only performative speech-acts have a function analogous to rituals, and they usually take ritual form.18 Most other kinds of sentences function by communicating meaning that is compounded, at least partly, from the meaning of the phrases that they contain. Furthermore, verbal rhetoric depends on shared semantic meaning to influence people’s thoughts and behaviour. Ritual, on the other hand, influences people by indexing social relationships and not through rhetorical persuasion (contra Janzen 2004, 4-5, 9-35), except when it includes verbal preaching and liturgies that deploy semantic rhetoric. All of these studies of Israel’s offerings end up focusing, in one way or another, on the symbolism of the individual acts or of the ritual complex as a whole. Even studies of ritual syntax return to symbolism in order to explain the meaning of the Day of Mitigations rituals. But Leviticus does not explain the symbolism of its rituals, only their purpose (vv. 16, 22, 30), which leaves symbolic interpretations from antiquity to today without a firm basis in the text (so already Childs 1972, 538-39; also Nihan 2015, 95, 120-21). William Gilders avoided this problem by focusing only on the indexical function of blood rituals. This led him to notice an ambiguity in the portrayal of the high priest’s role. The priest mitigates first for himself and his family with blood from an expensive bull before mitigating for the community with the blood of a cheaper goat, which indexes the high priest’s hierarchical relationship to the people. However, both must be taken into the Holiest Space, which means “that the people’s relationship with Yahweh is as significant as is Aaron’s .... Thus, there is a tension between the ways in which the 17 Axel Michaels, “Ritual and Meaning,” in Theorizing Rituals (ed. J. Kreinath, J. Snoek, and M. Stausberg; Leiden: Brill, 2006), 147-61. 18 J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words: The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962.

Leviticus 16 Exposition

283

ritual acts index equality of status and the ways in which they index hierarchy and privilege” (Gilders 2004, 125). I would add that this tension seems to be intentional, since it expresses in ritual Leviticus’s rhetorical goal of depicting the priests as the essential mediators of Israel’s relationship with YHWH (Körting 2006, 242; see further below). For me, these applications of ritual theories to Leviticus 16 highlight two features of the Day of Mitigations rituals. The first is the marking function of these rituals (see, especially, Modéus 2005) to emphasize the importance of this day. They use sin offerings for their usual purpose, mitigation, but elaborate on them by taking the blood into the innermost parts of the sanctuary and by sending the other goat to the farthest part of the landscape. In other words, they make the typical sin offerings with typical offering animals more extreme to emphasize the importance of this day. The second is the indexical function of these rituals (see, especially, Gilders 2004) to reinforce the priestly hierarchy. More than any other Israelite ritual, the Day of Mitigations establishes the greatest distance between lay Israelites and the high priest and simultaneously connects them by their joint ritualization of this day, though in very different ways. The rituals index the importance of the high priest doing these rituals for every Israelite, and the importance of their participation to gain its benefits. Nihan (2015, 126) has called this effect “the templization of Israel” by indexing “the central role played by the sanctuary within the community’s constitution and self-representation.” Rooke (2007, 347-50) speculated that new high priests in the Second Temple period conducted the Day of Mitigations rituals as their first official acts. But according to the time line in the narrative framework of Leviticus, Aaron would have had to wait six months before doing so (see Exegesis to v. 34). These ritual effects, however, depend on the written text of Leviticus 16, as Nihan also noted. They would not be evident to a casual observer of the Tabernacle’s Day of Mitigations rituals, unless they heard running commentary from a priest or Levite or other scribe – that is, unless someone provided an oral equivalent of the text of Leviticus 16. The rituals of the Day of Mitigations communicate the importance of this day and the hierarchical connection between high priest and people because the text is very selective about what it reports. Leviticus 16 focuses on the unique rituals of this day that took place mostly out of sight inside the Tabernacle and out in the desert. It refers in very summary and non-sequential ways to the rest of the day’s rituals that are more routine, presupposing either their description elsewhere in the book or the audience’s cultural knowledge of such procedures. As usual in Leviticus, the chapter does not quote any part of the verbal liturgy, despite depicting the high priest’s confession on behalf of the community as a crucial rite in dealing with the goat for Azazel (v. 21). Leviticus 16 therefore aims to inform Israelites about rituals that lay people cannot participate in or even

284

Leviticus 16 Exposition

observe. It also provides alternative ways of participating by fasting and humbling oneself (vv. 29-31). This chapter’s description of the Day of Mitigations rituals is therefore partial and non-sequential, which makes it very difficult to reconstruct its ritual processes or effects apart from this textual representation or an oral equivalent. This difficulty is typical of ritual reconstructions based on ancient texts, because texts have their own rhetorical agendas that usually differ from the purposes that motivate rituals. Texts are not rituals and rituals are not texts (Watts 2007, 27-36; Nihan 2015, 128-30; Watts 2021). What is more evident from reading a ritual text is its rhetorical purpose and effects, so I turn now to the rhetoric of Leviticus 16. The Rhetoric of Leviticus 16 in Historical and Literary Context On the basis of the broader cultural evidence of ancient temple rituals, it is very likely that priests conducted rituals to purify Israel’s sanctuaries in every period of their existence (Hartley 218). There was, however, no rhetorical interest in writing down these rituals or, at least, preserving these ritual texts as scripture, until P decided to describe the Tabernacle’s rituals to encourage lay people’s support. The festival calendars of Exodus 23 and Deuteronomy 16 focus on lay people’s religious obligations to the sanctuary. They emphasize the mandate to appear there three times annually with offerings. Nowhere in the HB outside priestly texts is there any interest in describing the internal workings of YHWH’s Tabernacle or Temple. P’s interest in publishing information about the sanctuary’s internal rituals was probably motivated by the loss of royal support after the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah in 587 B.C.E. Without a royal patron, Jerusalem’s Second Temple and the Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim needed regular offerings from lay people more than three times each year (Rhyder 2019, 148-52). Priestly texts therefore describe in great detail the voluntary offerings and what they can achieve for lay people (chaps. 1-7, 12-15; see Leviticus 1-10, 313-16), while only listing the supplies needed for the temple’s regular rituals (Lev. 24:2, 5; Num. 28:1-15). This rhetorical agenda explains why Leviticus 16 describes the innermost purification rituals of the sanctuary: its goal lies in promising Israelites comprehensive purification from all their sins (vv. 16, 21-22, 30, 34). This may also explain why only in the Second Temple period did the Day of Mitigations become a fixed date in Israel’s calendar. Making it a predictable date on the annual calendar allowed the temple priests to engage lay people throughout Israel in the ritual process by humbling themselves and by observing strict sabbath rest (vv. 29, 31). Leviticus 16 tells them that they receive the benefits from the most esoteric rituals inside the Holiest Space and out in the desert, so long as they themselves participate

Leviticus 16 Exposition

285

at home. As Hundley (2011, 159-60) observed, “people and priests are more connected to YHWH than ever before,” but also the “ritual roles of the offerers are more polarized.” Seth Sanders (2009, 59-66) highlighted this inclusion of lay people in the emphasis on confessing their sins over the goat for Azazel. He argued that Leviticus 16 is an example of a West Semitic tendency to use expiation rituals to construct a people as a political entity. He cited the Ugaritic expiation ritual, KTU 1.40, in which the men and women of Ugarit are absolved separately and corporately of their misdeeds against various subordinate groups as well as against foreigners (see Pardee 2002, 77-83). Sanders concluded that “the people become a fundamental ritual actor in a ceremony of communal salvation” (2009, 62). This interpretation correctly observes the distinctive role of a corporate group, Israel, as YHWH’s covenant partner in Leviticus 16 as in the rest of the Pentateuch. Like many interpreters, however, Sanders ignored the hierarchical implications of the high priest’s role in this ritual. Julia Rhyder described how priestly rhetoric in Leviticus used the annual ritual calendar to influence community cohesion and also to govern lay people’s observance. She argued that standardizing ritual time centralizes authority (Rhyder 2019, 262-304). Establishing the timing of ritual practices brings peripheral communities under the central priesthood’s authority, even when they do not travel to the central temple. Rhyder focused her calendrical analysis mostly on Leviticus 23, but she argued cogently that adding an annual Day of Mitigations to the calendar (16:29-31; 23:27-32) brought all Israelites’ ritual observances directly under the purview of the sanctuary’s priests (Rhyder 2019, 313-14, 329-30). That claim is reinforced by Leviticus 16’s emphasis on Aaron’s unique and essential role in mitigating on behalf of the whole community. There is one ritual in Leviticus 16 that carries connotations of priestly privilege wherever it is mentioned in the HB: the incense ritual (vv. 12-13). The economic historian, Nicholas Purcell, noted that incense products “have repeatedly played a role in social calibrations of scarcity, value-formation, as well as of the domestic and the exotic; and have fulfilled that role above all through their use in religious observance.”19 In the HB, conflicts over the Aaronide’s monopoly of the priesthood always involve incense offerings (Num. 16:17-18; 17:4-5; Jer. 41:5; Ezek. 8:7-12; 2 Chr. 26:19). So this chapter’s depiction of Aaron lighting incense to protect himself in the Holiest Space (Lev. 16:12-13) evokes an established cultural trope to mark the high priest’s status and responsibilities (see Exegesis to v. 13; History and Interpretation 19 Nicholas Purcell, “Unnecessary Dependences: Illustrating Circulation in Pre-modern Large-scale History,” in The Prospect of Global History (ed. J. Belich et al.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 65-79 [69].

286

Leviticus 16 Exposition

of Incense in Leviticus 1-10, 238-44; and Watts, forthcoming). Leviticus 16’s emphasis on the high priest and modern scholarship’s peculiar treatment of Israelite priests warrants an excursus on priestly lineages. Excursus: Priestly Lineages in History and Rhetoric Leviticus 16 is steeped in dynastic priestly rhetoric. Verse 1 invokes the deaths of the priests Nadab and Abihu, the sons of the high priest, Aaron. Verse 2 emphasizes that Moses and Aaron are brothers. This chapter’s instructions for unique rituals permitted only to the high priest on the Day of Mitigations never refers to him by title, but only by personal name, Aaron (vv. 2, 3, 6, 8, 9, 11, 21, 23; cf. the title ‫“ הכהן המשׁיח‬the anointed priest” in 4:3, 5, 16; 6:15). When the chapter finally describes his successors, however, it gives the clearest endorsement of dynastic succession to the high priesthood in the HB: “the priest who has been anointed and whose hand has been filled to serve as priest after his father” (v. 32). This dynastic claim supported the rise to power of Aaronide high priests in the Second Temple period. They first achieved religious supremacy by controlling the temples in, at least, Jerusalem and Samaria. Then they became the political leaders of the Judean/Jewish people for 250 years in the Hellenistic period, until displaced by Rome’s proxy rulers. Aaronide priests remained in control of the Jerusalem Temple until its destruction in 70 C.E., but the Romans disrupted the dynastic succession of the high priest to retain power over his selection (see Introduction §3.4 in Leviticus 1-10). Ancient Near Eastern ritual rhetoric as preserved in inscriptions and historiographical documents gives little attention to priestly genealogy. It instead emphasizes the power of kings to establish cults and their personnel (Watts 2009, 39-66). When regimes changed, priests then fell victim to purges (e.g. 1 Kgs. 2:26-27; 4:2, 5; 2 Kgs. 10:11; Wellhausen 1885, 33-34, 139). Classical Greek cities honoured hereditary control of some cult sites and rituals while allotting others by lot or purchase, often annually. Expansion of civic and, later, imperial sponsorship of temples eroded the power of hereditary claims.20 Across the ancient world, priests of larger temples seem to have served at the pleasure of royalty, while the responsibility to officiate at smaller local shrines rotated among the leading members of the community just as often as it rested with a single family. 20 See the essays in Practitioners of the Divine: Greek Priests and Religious Officials from Homer to Heliodorus (ed. B. Dignas and K. Trampedach; Cambridge, MA: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2008), 20-22, 69-72, 75-76, 92-93, 100-103, 191-97; and Jan-Mathieu Carbon and Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge, “Priests and Cult Personnel in Three Hellenistic Families,” in Cities and Priests: Cult Personnel in Asia Minor and the Aegean Islands from the Hellenistic to the Imperial Period (ed. M. Horster and A. Klöckner; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 65-120 [74-75]

Leviticus 16 Exposition

287

In the Persian and Hellenistic periods, a few families did gain control over some larger Egyptian, Greek, and Mesopotamian temple complexes for as long as several centuries, just as the Oniads and the Hasmoneans controlled the Jerusalem temple during the same time periods. The rise of these priestly dynasties thus seems to have been the product of imperial politics. Ian Moyer observed that “Hereditary succession in the priesthood became well established relatively late in Egyptian history, in the Third Intermediate Period, and extended genealogies on non-royal stelae and statue inscriptions only became common at this time,” fueled especially by foreign (Libyan) rulers who emphasized tribal affiliations. “Lengthy and detailed genealogies became a means for elite Egyptian families to reassert their claims to positions in the priesthood.” The family line that served as priests of Ptah in Memphis can be reconstructed down to the Roman period.21 In Mesopotamia, hereditary priesthoods also became more common: for example, one family controlled the highest position at the Uruk temple through the Hellenistic period.22 Imperial politics then also led to the demise of hereditary priesthoods. The Romans and their client rulers, such as Herod, actively switched high priests and pitted priestly families against each other in Jerusalem, Egypt, and Anatolia to prevent concentrations of wealth and power that might be turned against the imperial overlords.23 In Israel’s literature, stories about the monarchic and earlier periods show a wide variety of people officiating at YHWH altars, sometimes with the title ‫“ כהן‬priest,” but frequently without it. The HB does provide indications of families controlling various shrines at different times: the descendants of Moses at Dan (Judg. 18:30), the descendants of Aaron at Bethel (Judg. 20:28), Eli and his sons at Shiloh (1 Sam. 1-4), Zadok and his son in Jerusalem under Solomon (1 Kgs 4:2), and Jeshua ben Jehozadak in Jerusalem at the time of the restoration (Zech 3, 6; Ezra 2:36). Second Temple literature tells us about the Oniad dynasty in Jerusalem in the following centuries and the Hasmoneans in the second and first century B.C.E. However, biblical and post-biblical literature records only Aaronide genealogical rhetoric, which eventually incorporated most of these families as well. 21 Ian S. Moyer, Egypt and the Limits of Hellenism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 68-69, 162-64. 22 John W. Wright, “ ‘Those Doing the Work for the Service in the House of the Lord’: 1 Chronicles 23:6-24:31 and the Sociohistorical Context of the Temple of Yahweh,” in LipschitsKnoppers-Albertz (2007), 361-384 [376]. 23 For the application of this Roman policy in various parts of the empire, see Richard Gordon, “Religion in the Roman Empire: the Civic Compromise and its Limits,” in Pagan Priests: Religion and Power in the Ancient World (ed. Mary Beard and John North; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 235-55 [240-45]. For Judea, see VanderKam 2004, 395, 423. For an Anatolian parallel to Roman interference in Judea’s high priestly dynasties, see Ulrich Gotter, “Priests – Dynasts – Kings: Temples and Secular Rule in Asia Minor,” in Practitioners of the Divine, 89-103 [100-103].

288

Leviticus 16 Exposition

Biblical scholars have tried to reconstruct the genealogical rhetoric of rival priestly families in ancient Israel. One theory focused on the descendents of Moses who served as priests at Dan. This “Mushite hypothesis” began with Julius Wellhausen and was developed by Frank Moore Cross. It has recently been revived again by Mark Leuchter.24 It postulates that the descendants of Moses wielded wider priestly influence in early Israel than the single mention in Judg. 18:30 of their service at Dan suggests. The Mushite hypothesis builds on scattered genealogical references to Moses’ descendants. Exodus 18:3-4 lists the sons of Moses and Zipporah as Gershom and Eliezar. The lists of clans in the tribe of Levi contains a “Mushite” clan (‫ )מושׁי‬among the descendants of Merari (Exod. 6:19; Num. 3:20, 33). The Aaronides descend instead from Merari’s brother, Kohath, through Amram whom the following verse in Exodus lists as the father of both Aaron and Moses (‫משׁה‬: Exod. 6:20). Chronicles strictly distinguishes the Merari Mushites from Moses’ descendants, but also distinguishes the latter from Aaronide priests (1 Chr. 23:13-23; 24:20, 30; 26:2425: “Shebuel son of Gershom son of Moses”). Except for Exodus 18, critical scholarship usually credits all this genealogical rhetoric to P or P-influence. However, a non-P story in Judges 17-18 tells about a priest who first officiated at a family shrine in Ephraim and then became priest of the temple in Dan, where his sons succeeded him in that office. This priest is identified as Jonathan, a Levite from Bethlehem “of the family of Judah” in 17:7, but as “son of Gershom son of Manasseh” in 18:30. Most interpreters, including ancient rabbis and the Masoretes, thought that the nun has been interpolated in the name ‫“ מנשׂה‬Manasseh,” so the phrase originally read “son of Moses.” The verse goes on to claim that “his sons were priests to the tribe of Dan until they went into exile,” that is, for around three centuries. Thus Wellhausen (1885, 142-43) found in this story an account of a Mosaic priestly family with roots in Judah and a long tenure at the Dan temple. Wellhausen maintained that, on the whole, the definition of priests as genealogical Levites is Deuteronomic or later, despite his reconstruction of a Mushite priestly line descended from Moses in early Israel, his suggestion that “Levite” was originally a name for Moses’ family so that the Levites identified with Moses, and his claim that Mosaic and Aaronide genealogies in P have been confused and that the Mosaic is older. The HB’s genealogical categorization of priests is post-exilic and reflects the circumstances of the Second Temple period. He argued that Israel’s priests originated in the remnants of the scattered tribe of Levi who found employment as officiants at 24 Mark Leuchter, “The Fightin’ Mushites,” VT 62 (2012) 479-500; idem, The Levites and the Boundaries of Israelite Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 59-92.

Leviticus 16 Exposition

289

local shrines, and then evolved into royal appointees under the Israelite and Judean monarchies. Deuteronomic centralization drove some of them to accept support positions in the Jerusalem temple. Ezekiel 44:5-14 seems to narrate a shift from foreign hierodules in the Jerusalem Temple to Levite assistants (Wellhausen 1885, 122-24). For Wellhausen, Levite claims to this role based on the legitimacy of their genealogy were a product of the rise of hierocracy in the Second Temple period. Cross’s discussion summarized these points, then quickly delved into genealogical definitions of rival priestly lines in the settlement and monarchic periods.25 He weaved various stories of priestly conflict in the primary history into an account of clashes between priestly houses. For Cross, once the affiliation of the various houses was correctly identified as Aaronide or Mushite/Midianite, the polemical attitudes of the authors of Exodus 32, Numbers 25, and 1 Samuel 2 became “obvious” as the products of “an ancient and prolonged strife between priestly houses: the Mushite priesthood which flourished at the sanctuaries of Shiloh and Dan and an allied Mushite-Kenite priesthood of the local shrines at ‘Arad and Kadesh opposed to the Aaronite priesthood of Bethel and Jerusalem” (Cross 1973, 206). Cross’s discussion obscured the fact that the texts do not make explicit claims for rival genealogies. Even within his reconstruction, it remains quite possible to conclude with Wellhausen that pre-exilic priesthoods justified their positions not by genealogical rhetoric, but by patronage from tribes and kings instead. There is an important difference between reconstructing implicit genealogies and reconstructing historical events. In the latter case, say of a battle or the succession of one king to another’s throne, the stories tell of an event. That event may or may not have happened, and may have happened differently than the story relates it, but at any rate there is an external referent to which both story and historical reconstruction refer. In the case of genealogical claims to legitimacy, there is no external referent behind either the text or its modern reconstruction. Genealogies are themselves interpretations, a form of rhetoric that serves to persuade others of the legitimate place of a person within a particular family. There are no genealogical facts short of DNA evidence. Even then, the prevalence of adoptions into families in antiquity and modernity mitigates the social relevance of DNA. In other words, genealogies are always normative claims about identity and legitimacy, not descriptive accounts of some material reality. That observation applies equally to the modern claims about the genealogies of Israel’s priests as to the claims of the ancient priests themselves. There is no ancient referent for a genealogical reconstruction except for ancient rhetoric about family identity. 25 Frank Moore Cross, Jr., Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 198.

290

Leviticus 16 Exposition

Of course, families in ancient times, like many modern families, tried to pass on property, careers, and incomes from one generation to the next. They also tried to inherit priestly posts and prebends, and often succeeded in doing so. These common economic concerns of households should be distinguished, however, from rhetoric that seeks to justify such generational transfers by genealogical claims. Biblical texts attest to genealogical arguments for inheriting property in ancient Israel, just like in most other cultures (e.g. Lev. 25:10, 13-17; 1 Kgs. 21:3). Also like other cultures, they attest to a dynastic principle governing changes in kingship, though they support only one legitimate line, that of David’s descendants (2 Sam. 7). Biblical texts also attest to genealogical justifications for holding priestly posts, but again for only one family, Aaron’s, and only in post-monarchic texts (Exod. 28:1; Lev. 8:12, 30; 16:32-34; Num. 35:2-8). In the case of royalty, it is plausible to think that a wider range of dynastic claims has been reduced only to the Davidic line by the ideology of the biblical writers. Historians can therefore be excused for thinking that a similar process reduced a wider range of priestly lineages to the single Aaronide line. However, older strata of biblical literature show only a few signs of households dominating some shrines. They contain no traces of priestly genealogical claims that can reliably be distinguished from that of the Aaronide line. So the alternative scenario described by Wellhausen remains likely, that biblical writers elevated the monopoly of the Aaronide lineage by divine grant on analogy with Davidic royal claims. Later, Ben Sira expressed this analogy explicitly: “Just as a covenant was established with David, son of Jesse of the tribe of Judah, that the king’s heritage passes only from son to son, so the heritage of Aaron is for his descendants alone” (Sir. 45:25 NRSV). The Pentateuch modeled priestly legitimacy on royal rhetoric and trumped it by placing Aaron’s appointment in the Torah from Sinai, long before the rise of David. This rhetorical development fits well the Second Temple period when high priests were emerging as the sole native representatives of the Jewish people, first sharing power with Persian governors, then by the Hellenistic period becoming the supreme leaders in Judea. Eventually the Hasmoneans claimed royal titles as well. In the religious politics of the Second Temple period, these Aaronide dynasties are the Mushite priesthood – that is, the priests who base their claims on the Torah of Moses. Priestly rights and responsibilities were originally dependent on royal authority, such as in stories about David’s and Solomon’s courts. Second Temple-period texts had to cope with the absence of kings and their royal grants to justify priestly authority. Ezekiel grounded priestly claims in the traditional rhetoric of royal patronage by using Zadok’s name to evoke loyalty to David (Ezek. 44:15). Ezekiel’s rhetoric does not explicitly justify the Zadokites’ claims by virtue of their genealogy, but rather uses Zadok’s

Leviticus 16 Exposition

291

name simply to identify a group who was justified by their faithfulness to David and to YHWH.26 Zechariah claimed direct oracular legitimation of the first post-exilic high priest, Jeshua ben Jehozadak (Zech. 3, 6). The priestly writers combined royal and oracular legitimation by grounding their claims in a grant to Aaron from the divine king through the archetypal prophet, Moses. Just as other ancient priestly claims rested on assertions of royal grants, the Aaronide’s claims rest on a grant from a divine king, recorded in Exodus 28 and Leviticus 8, 10, 16. Nowhere in the Bible is there any assertion that genealogy by itself grants privilege – there is no myth of priestly “pure” blood or something similar. No biblical text understood the grants to priests to be unconditional, as the stories of Nadab and Abihu (Lev. 10) and the Elide priesthood (1 Sam. 2-4) emphasize explicitly. Rather than mining these stories for suppressed priestly lineages, it would be more productive to take seriously their overt message that priests cannot depend on their legitimizing genealogy for protection. It is quite possible to read all the genealogical rhetoric about priesthood that does appear in the HB as defending the two-tier priestly model advocated in post-exilic texts. Anthropological research shows, as Jeremy Hutton observed, “that genealogies are essentially fungible records of a family’s descent, usually maintained by the members of the family and the society in which the family is located; adjustments in genealogical data are typically intended to represent new social relationships.”27 Wellhausen’s observation that Deuteronomic and, especially, priestly authors have imposed a genealogical grid on older stories in order to establish the genealogical legitimacy of a two-tier post-exilic priesthood fits these twentieth-century anthropological conclusions very well, ironically much better than many twentieth-century biblical scholars’ differentiations between pre-exilic priestly houses. The books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers utilize genealogical rhetoric explicitly to claim a divinely-ordained priesthood for Aaron and his sons. In the laws, God grants them a monopoly over Israel’s Tabernacle altar (Exod. 29:44; Num. 18:8), and the responsibility to determine and teach correct ritual practice (Lev. 10:10-11). The broader tribe of Levites receives rights to secondary positions in the sanctuary (Num. 18:21-32). In the stories, God reinforces the Aaronides’ monopoly by punishing Levites and lay people 26 Nathan MacDonald, Priestly Rule: Polemic and Biblical Interpretation in Ezekiel 44 (BZAW 476; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 52-53. 27 Jeremy Hutton, “All the King’s Men: The Families of the Priests in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” in Seitenblicke: Literarische und historische Studien zu Nebenfiguren im zweiten Samuelbuch (ed. W. Dietrich; OBO 259; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 133. So already Robert R. Wilson, Genealogy and History in the Biblical World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 200.

292

Leviticus 16 Exposition

who challenge them (Num. 16). But before the writing of this priestly literature shortly before or during the Persian period, it is not clear that genealogy played a role in establishing priestly legitimacy in Israel and Judah. This point can be illustrated by comparing Cross’s discussion of pre-exilic priestly houses, including the “Mushites,” with his analysis of the genealogies of the Oniad high priests of the Second Temple era. In an article published just two years after Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, Cross combined evidence from the recently discovered Samaritan Papyri with the account of Josephus and biblical genealogies to confirm the old hypothesis “that two generations are missing in the biblical genealogy of Jewish high priests” in the Second Temple period.28 Unlike his defence of the Mushite hypothesis that reconstructed a history of priestly houses out of stories about other subjects, his reconstruction of the Second Temple priesthood rests on genealogies which in Ezra-Nehemiah, Chronicles, and Josephus presuppose the claim that legitimate priesthood in Israel depends on descent from Aaron. Cross’s different approach was necessitated by the different nature of the evidence: fragmentary genealogies from the Second Temple period about its priests instead of narrative stories about earlier priests imbedded in larger histories devoted to other concerns. However, the difference in evidence also indicates a difference in rhetoric: the Second Temple genealogies are explicitly focused on making genealogical claims for priestly families, while the stories imbedded in historical narratives are not. We should pause to wonder why scholarship on priestly genealogies has pursued speculative reconstructions of Mushite or Levite lineages. It is not enough to claim that it simply seeks the historical facts. Every genealogy, even those constructed by Wellhausen and Cross, are “fungible records of family descent.” We therefore need to ask what “new social relationships” modern scholarly genealogical investigations advance. Is it possible that they reflect the continuing influence of rabbinic and early Christian polemics against Second Temple high priests so that, if we have to talk about priests, we would rather talk about Levites and Mushite priests rather than the Oniads and Hasmoneans? This is not a criticism of particular scholars so much as an observation that ancient rabbinic and Christian polemics may still shape histories of Israelite priesthood. Genealogies are not institutions or even families. Genealogies are components of rhetoric about families and, sometimes, about the institutions they lay claim to. At most, then, historical investigation of genealogical claims can hope to uncover older forms of normative genealogical claims. Doing 28 Frank Moore Cross, Jr., “A Reconstruction of the Judean Restoration,” JBL 94 (1975), 4-18 [5].

Leviticus 16 Exposition

293

so requires competing textual evidence, such as Cross used to estimate the validity of the Second-Temple era genealogies. There is, however, no underlying social “reality” waiting to be reconstructed: there were always and only priestly claims to be the legitimate officiants at this or that temple, or for this or that group of people. Priests likely justified their positions by using any and all arguments that might seem convincing to their audiences, and shifted their arguments as times and circumstances demanded. The control of cults by priestly families died with those cults in antiquity. But because the rhetoric of divinely-ordained dynastic priesthood appears in Jewish and Christian scriptures, the rhetoric survives long after the priestly families and their temples disappeared. It was repurposed by early Christian rhetoric (Letter to the Hebrews) to dispossess the Aaronides in favor of a newly ordained priesthood of Christ and his apostles and bishops. It was circumvented by rabbinic rhetoric of a scholarly lineage apart from priesthood that carried the Oral Torah from Moses to the present day (Pirqe ‘Avot). The modern historical search for the Mushite priesthood also seems to displace Aaronides with an older, maybe more authentic priesthood. For many modern historians, associating early priestly groups with Moses carries the possibility of finding a more textual, more scribal religious source (maybe the Levites? Leuchter 2017) than the ritually-saturated Aaronides. I think that opposing text and ritual in this way does not reflect ancient religious practice any time before the end of the Second Temple period. But I, too, think that priesthood and even priestly dynasties were connected to scripturalization. Theories about Mushite priests, however, look for this connection at the wrong end of Israel’s ancient history. The scripturalization of Torah, Tanak, Mishnah, and Gospels all seem to have been connected with the changing fortunes of “priestly” groups. We should pay more attention to the relationship between shifts in priestly power and changing directions in scripturalization: from the Oniad’s Torah to the Hasmonean’s Torah weNebi’im to the rabbis’ Tanak and Mishnah (eventually Talmud) and the Catholic bishops’ Gospels and Paul (eventually New and Old Testaments). The decisive changes that fueled the rising authority of each collection occurred when one lineage of religious authority – whether justifying descent from ancestors, from teachers, or from apostles – displaced its predecessors using the authority of a reformulated scripture (see further in Watts 2017, 251-67). Each group used genealogical rhetoric to claim a lineage back to a figure granted authority by God in scripture itself. So each lineage claimed to be the true heirs of Moses. The scholarly dream of a Mushite priesthood looks like a modern reincarnation of this ideal lineage.

294

Leviticus 16 Exegesis EXEGESIS

Divine Speech Formula (16:1-2) The usual formula for introducing divine speeches (e.g. 4:1-2a; 15:1-2a) is modified here by a temporal reference that places these instructions after the events of 10:1-3 (v. 1b) and by instructions for Moses to speak only to Aaron, starting with a warning (v. 2). The allusion to the deaths of Nadab and Abihu might suggest that the narrative is about to resume after the interlude of the pollution instructions (chaps. 11-15), but that is not the case. The rest of the chapter consists of divine speech, except for the assertion at the end that Aaron did as he was told (v. 34b). Leviticus 16 allows listeners and readers to overhear the instructions for the high priest’s most unique and esoteric ritual role. 16:1

YHWH spoke to Moses after the death of Aaron’s two sons, when they presented themselves before YHWH and died.

The verse dates these instructions after the events narrated in 10:1-3. This ominous reference to the deaths of Nadab and Abihu is reinforced by v. 2’s warning of deadly consequences for entering the Holiest Space any time. Corinna Körting (2006, 229) observed that it provides the Day of Mitigations with a legend of the festival’s founding because Nadab and Abihu’s incense offering not only offended YHWH, but their dead bodies also polluted the Tabernacle. Combined with the death threat just three verses earlier against anyone who pollutes the Tabernacle (15:31), P’s rhetoric about the danger of ritual malpractice here reaches a climax. The qal verb ‫“ בקרבתם‬when they presented themselves” is usually translated “when they approached” (NIV) or something similar. In the hiphil, the verb refers to “presenting” offerings (vv. 6, 11) and the nominal form of this root is a general term for offerings, ‫“ קרבן‬present.” I translate the qal here reflexively, “present themselves,” to preserve this echo in English (see Exegesis to 9:5). Some translations of ‫ בקרבתם‬provide more contextual nuance (Milgrom: “encroached,” NJPS: “drew too close”). LXX, Targums, Pesh, and Vg added “when they offered other fire” from 10:1, a phrase that echoes through the Aaronide genealogies (Num. 3:4; 26:61). The customary nature of that reference may have led the ancient versions to add it here. This addition and the contextual translations may also reflect unease at the fact that there was nothing wrong with Aaronide priests just approaching “before YHWH” because that was their job. This verse, however, presupposes knowledge of the story in chap. 10 and its allusion to the danger of close proximity to God will be made explicit by v. 2.

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

295

Verses 1-2 announce that the theme of chap. 16’s instructions is how to present oneself safely before YHWH. The chapter therefore begins by singling out this element in the story of Nadab and Abihu. The cross-reference to chap. 10 sets up the chapter’s time frame, but more importantly announces the ritual problem that its regulations will resolve. 16:2

YHWH said to Moses: Tell Aaron your brother not to enter just any time into the Holy (Space) inside the veil in front of the mitigation centre that is on the chest so he doesn’t die when I appear in the cloud above the mitigation centre.

This divine command for Moses to repeat instructions only to Aaron is unique. Previously in Leviticus, Moses has been commanded to repeat the instructions to the Israelites (1:2) or to “Aaron and his sons” (6:2). In 10:8, YHWH spoke directly to Aaron alone, and in the following chapters frequently to Moses and Aaron together (11:1; 13:1; 14:33; 15:1). The instructions of this chapter concern the high priest’s unique responsibilities on the Day of Mitigations, so it is appropriate that they are directed to him. Having them mediated by YHWH’s spokesman, Moses, characterizes the high priest as obedient to divine wishes as mediated by the inspired prophet. This was standard rhetoric of priestly piety in the ancient Near East. Priests cast themselves as the servants of gods and divinely appointed kings (see Introduction §3.1 in Leviticus 1-10). They regularly left it to prophets to tell kings of divine commands and complaints, though many of the prophets were on temple payrolls (e.g. a prophet of the temple of Adad in the Mari letters translated by Nissinen 2003, 18; see Watts 2009, 47-48). There were no kings to appoint high priests in either the literary context, Israel at Sinai, or the historical context, early Second Temple Judaism, so Leviticus shows the divine king doing so through his paradigmatic prophet, Moses. Aaron is here described as Moses’ brother (‫“ אחיך‬your brother”), the only such reference in Leviticus. P’s ritual instructions otherwise highlight their family relationship only in the instructions for clothing Aaron in vestments (Exod. 28:1, 2, 4, 41). Nihan (2007, 379) thought this focus on their family relationship anticipates Aaron replacing Moses as the mediator between Israel and YHWH. This introduction, however, does not emphasize institutional office so much as personal relationship. Coming immediately after v. 1’s reminder of the deaths of Aaron’s sons, this introduction steeps the following instructions for the Day of Mitigations in the intimacy of family relationships and trauma. The conclusion of the chapter will enunciate the most explicit warrant in the HB for an Aaronide dynasty of high priests (see on v. 32 below, and the Excursus in Exposition above). These reminders of the successes (Moses) and failures (Nadab and Abihu) of Aaron’s family

296

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

therefore appeal to listeners’ and readers’ feelings (pathos) to introduce the ritual that is his family’s greatest privilege and responsibility. Warning (1999, 39) distinguished this “YHWH said to Moses” from the speech formula in v. 1 to mark off vv. 2-34 as the central divine speech in the arch structure of thirty-seven speeches in the book. There is, however, no good reason to distinguish v. 1 as a separate speech or to think that the P writers were concerned with the exact number of speeches in the book. (For further discussion, see Introduction §1.3 in Leviticus 1-10.) ‫“ הקדשׁ‬the Holy (Space)” here and in vv. 3 and 16 refers to the inner sanctum, elsewhere called the ‫“ קדשׁ הקדשׁים‬the Holiest (Space),” as is made clear by what follows (see further on v. 27 below). By itself, the phrase ‫ הקדשׁ‬can refer to several differences places in the Tabernacle and its plaza (see Exegesis to 10:4). The phrase ‫ מבית ל־‬here and in v. 12 is a compound preposition meaning “inside, within” (HAL ‫ בית‬II; GKC §130c; also in Exod. 26:33; 2 Kgs. 11:15). ‫“ מבית לפרכת‬inside the veil” therefore specifies that this Holy Space is the innermost room of the tent. On the ‫“ פרכת‬veil,” see Exegesis to 4:6. The word ‫“ ארן‬chest” (CEB) appears only here in Leviticus. The traditional translation “ark” is an archaic English term for a box or chest. P calls this object ‫“ ארן העדה‬the chest of the testimony” (Exod. 25:22) while other HB sources call it ‫“ ארון הברית‬the chest of the covenant” (Num. 10:33; 14:44; Deut. 10:1, 5; Josh. 3:8; etc.). In these phrases, ‫“ עדה‬testimony” and ‫“ ברית‬covenant” both refer to the tablets of the commandments that God gave Moses on Mount Sinai. Deuteronomy and P agree that they were stored in the chest (Exod. 25:21; 40:20; Deut. 10:1-5). Deuteronomy describes a wooden chest while P describes it as wood covered inside and out in gold leaf (Exod. 25:10-16). In its dimensions and form, including mythical figures on its cover, this chest resembles Anubis chests found in many Egyptian royal tombs. They contained jars of embalming chemicals, wands, and ritual texts among other things, like the chest of the covenant that contained a jar of manna, Aaron’s rod, and the tablets of the covenant (Watts 2017, 110-13).29 This chest occupied the innermost room of the sanctuary, where cult statues stood in other ancient temples. Like a divine image in other cultures, the chest of the covenant represented the presence of YHWH in Israel, and functioned that way in stories of battle (Josh. 6:4, 12; 1 Sam. 4:3-11; cf. Num. 14:44) and of temple building (2 Sam. 6:2-15; 7:2-7; 1 Kgs. 8:3-9; 1 Chr. 22:19; 2 Chr. 5:4-10). Specifically, the invisible God of Israel was imagined as “enthroned above the cherubim” that adorned the chest’s cover 29 See also Harco Willems, The Coffin of Heqata: (Cairo JdE 36418): A Case Study of Egyptian Funerary Culture of the Early Middle Kingdom (OLA 70; Peeters Publishers, 1996), 142-45.

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

297

(1 Sam. 4:4; 2 Sam. 6:2; 1 Chr. 13:6). There YHWH promised to “meet with you” (Exod. 25:22; 30:6). That theophanic idea is expressed differently and uniquely here: ‫“ בענן אראה על־הכפרת‬I appear in the cloud above the mitigation centre.” The cover of the chest is called the ‫כפרת‬, which has been translated “mercy seat” (Tyndale, KJV, NRSV), “atonement cover” (HAL, NIV, Hartley), “propitiatory cover” (Wycliffe, Kiuchi following LXX), “purgationcover” (Fox), or simply “cover” (NJPS, CEB). The translation of the root, ‫כפר‬, to mean simply “cover” on the basis of an Arabic cognate has been rejected more recently (see Exegesis to 4:20). Milgrom (1014) deemed the word ‫“ כפרת‬untranslatable, so far” (also Hieke 563). LXX translated ‫ כפרת‬in Exod. 25:17 with two words, ἱλαστηρίον ἐπίθεμα “propitiatory cover,” reflecting both possible derivations of ‫כפר‬. After that first mention, however, LXX translated with only one word, the neologism ἱλαστηρίον “propitiatory,” thereby, as Koch (1995, 67) observed, “elevating the adjective to an independent noun as a special biblical term” for the cover of the chest. The Greek verb, ἱλᾶσκωμαι referred to appeasing or propitiating someone (LSJ). Paul’s use of this term in Rom. 3:25 to describe Christ’s death as an offering, ἱλαστήριον διὰ τὴς πίστεως ἔν τῷ αὐτοῦ αἵματι (Vg propitiationem per fidem in sanguine ipsius; KJV “as a propitiation in his blood by faith,” NRSV “a sacrifice of atonement by his blood effective through faith”) seems to employ this broader meaning while still evoking the Day of Mitigations ritual (Dunn 1988, 180; Siker 2011, 69-70), though some understand Paul as referring specifically to the chest’s cover (CEB “the place of sacrifice where mercy is found by means of his blood”; so Stökl ben Ezra 2003, 200; Eberhart 2013, 160-70).30 The word ‫ כפרת‬utilizes the root ‫“ כפר‬mitigate” that appears throughout Leviticus (especially in chaps. 4-5 and 12-16) to summarize priestly ritual actions that result in forgiveness and purification (16:33; see Leviticus 1-10, 322-28). Chapter 16 uses the verb fifteen times where mitigation has effects on the Tabernacle, its furnishings, the priests, and the people of Israel (Hundley 2011, 162). The rituals mandated by chap. 16 will lead to naming the day on which they are performed as ‫“ יום הכפרים‬the Day of Mitigations” (23:27-28; 25:9). Therefore, this verse’s double mention of the ark’s cover not only evokes a key ritual object (described previously in Exod. 25:17-21) that is used only on this day, it also sounds the theme of ‫“ כפר‬mitigation” that will dominate the chapter (16:6, 10, 11, 16, 17, 18, 20, 24, 27, 30, 32, 33 [3×], 34). To convey this resonance in English, I translate ‫ כפרת‬as “mitigation centre.” 30 Also Markus Tiwald, “Christ as Hilasterion (Rom 3:25): Pauline Theology on the Day of Atonement in the Mirror of Early Jewish Thought,” in Hieke-Nicklas 2012, 189-209.

298

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

According to the biblical narrative, YHWH gave instructions for building the chest of the covenant at Mount Sinai, where it was installed in the new tent sanctuary, the Tabernacle (Exod. 37: 1-9; 40:21). King Solomon installed it in a stone temple in Jerusalem, for which he provided new ritual furniture (1 Kgs. 8:15-50) except for the old chest at its centre. When the returned exiles rebuilt the Jerusalem temple and its furnishings, however, they apparently did not rebuild the chest of the covenant. The chest is not mentioned in Ezra and Nehemiah, and Jer. 3:16-17 predicted that it would not be rebuilt. Sources from the end of the Second Temple period insist that the Holy of Holies was empty (so explicitly Josephus, J.W. 5.5.5; Tacitus, Hist. 5.9; implicitly: 1 Macc. 4:49-51). One legend claimed that Jeremiah hid the chest along with the Tabernacle and its altar until the end of days (2 Macc. 2:1-8). In the Second Temple period and later, Torah scrolls took the place of the chest as the physical representation of God’s presence in Israel (Watts 2016). The chest was, after all, fundamentally a book box, defined by the tablets of the commandments inside. The Torah contains those same commandments and much else besides, including stories about the manna and Aaron’s flowering rod that were also preserved in the chest (Num. 16:34; 17:25 Eng. 17:10). Thus the literary reliquary of the Torah took over the chest’s role in preserving these testimonies to the covenant, now in the form of literary texts. But written texts are also physical objects, and distinctive Torah scrolls, copied by hand on parchment and venerated in synagogue services, continue to serve as the physical evidence of Israel’s covenant. In later Judaism, Torah scrolls received their own chests, also called ‫ארון‬, to preserve them and keep them at the centre of a synagogue’s architectural space and spiritual focus (Watts 2017, 77-80). The Tabernacle’s chest of the covenant, however, performed other ritual functions besides serving as the tablets’ reliquary. Leviticus 16 describes one of them: the chest’s cover must be sprinkled with the blood of sin offerings on the Day of Mitigations (vv. 14-15). That role could not be assumed by Torah scrolls in the Second Temple. According to the Mishnah (m. Yoma 5.2), the Oniad and Hasmonean high priests instead sprinkled this blood on exposed bedrock inside the Holiest Space of the Jerusalem temple. This ‫אבן השׁתייה‬ “foundation stone” was perhaps the same outcrop enshrined today in the Dome of the Rock. ‫“ בענן‬in the cloud” could refer to YHWH’s cloud that led the Israelites from Egypt and settled on the Tabernacle (Exod. 40:34; Num. 9:15-23; so TgPsJ, Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Rashbam) or to Aaron’s cloud of incense (v. 13; see b. Yoma 53a). The former was visible to all the Israelites, so Milgrom (1015) and Hieke (574) thought the incense cloud fits the interior of the Holiest Space better. However, the context of the book of Leviticus supports thinking of YHWH’s glory, since the promise, ‫“ אראה‬I appear,” is associated with

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

299

it in 9:4, 6, 23 (see Exegesis there), though without using the word ‫ענן‬ “cloud.” Levine (101) argued that only the cloud of glory explains why entry is restricted because of God’s presence in the Holiest Space. Compare Exod. 24:15-18 where only Moses can enter YHWH’s cloud, and Exod. 40:35 where the cloud of YHWH’s glory prevents even Moses from entering the Tabernacle (Nihan 2007, 365).31 However, this interpretation requires ‫ענן‬ “cloud” to have two different referents in the space of this one chapter since it clearly refers to incense in v. 13. Nihan suggested that the ambiguous meaning of ‫ ענן‬is intentional to associate YHWH’s cloud of glory in the exodus narratives with the high priest’s incense cloud in the temple, which therefore became “a ritual reenactment of the inaugural revelation of Yahweh to Israel at Mt. Sinai.” He observed that allusion to both clouds indexes the high priest as the mediator between YHWH and Israel, whose role in the cult replaces that of Moses in the narratives (Nihan 2007, 378-79). The syntactic relationship of ‫“ ולא ימות‬he will not die” to what precedes and follows it can be understood in two different ways. It could introduce what follows, “so he will not die when I appear in the cloud above the mitigation centre” (Vg; Hieke), or modify what precedes it, “do not enter just any time ... lest he die” (SP; LXX; NAB; NRSV; NJPS; CEB; Elliger; Noth; Gerstenberger; Milgrom; Kiuchi; Fox; Alter). The ambiguity in the Hebrew supports doing both, “do not enter ... so he doesn’t die when I appear ...” (KJV; NIV; Wenham; Körting 2006, 229). MT’s accentuation breaks the verse after “veil” instead of before or after “he doesn’t die.” Milgrom (1013) thought MT reflects either of two rabbinic opinions: “that entering the adytum (with the unlit censer) and proceeding to the Ark (with the lit censer) comprise two discrete actions (cf. v 13), or ... that the high priest must be careful upon entry into the adytum even when there is no Ark inside, as in the Second Temple” (see b. Yoma 19b, 53a; y. Yoma 39a; b. Menaḥ. 27b). Preparations for the Rituals (16:3-10) Verses 3-10 describe how the high priest must prepare for the rituals performed later in this chapter by bathing and clothing himself (v. 4), collecting the necessary animals (vv. 3, 5), and specifying which goat will serve for which sin offering (vv. 6-10). Though two verses sound like commands to make offerings (vv. 6, 9), they actually anticipate instructions later in the chapter for making these same offerings (vv. 11-15). Repeated phrases in vv. 6-10 connect the three animals that are labelled as sin offerings in 31 Contra the suggestion that ‫ כי‬here in v. 2 means “when,” so that the phrase specifies that the high priest can safely approach when God appears in the cloud (Volker Wagner, “Zwei Beobachtungen im Buch Leviticus,” BN 136 [2008], 5-16).

300

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

vv. 3 and 5. Aaron’s bull and the community’s “goat for YHWH” are again labelled sin offerings (vv. 6, 9), while Aaron’s bull and the community’s “goat for Azazel” are both declared to be for mitigating (vv. 6, 10). Both goats are “stationed before YHWH” to be differentiated by lot (v. 8), but the goat for Azazel is “stationed before YHWH” again (v. 10) in order to receive the confession of the community’s sins (v. 20). Rather than differentiating the functions of the animals, these verbal links identify all three animals as performing the same or similar ritual functions. 16:3

This is how Aaron must enter the Holy (Space): with a bull herd animal for a sin (offering) and a ram for a rising (offering).

‫ בזאת‬usually means “on account of this” (DCH), but this context requires a different meaning. Hartley (222) translated “with this” since the offering animals are also introduced with a ‫ ב‬preposition. More likely is an emphatic adverbial meaning, “this is how” (Milgrom 1015; Levine 101; Hieke 563), which ‫ בזאת‬also carries in Gen. 34:15, 22; 42:15, 33; Exod. 7:17; Num. 16:28. Despite the statement here that Aaron must enter ‫“ הקדשׁ‬the Holy (Space)” with a bull, only the bull’s blood is brought inside the tent (v. 14). The point of this verse is to say that Aaron must prepare himself for entering the Holiest Space (see on v. 2 above) by collecting a bull and a ram as well as making the preparations in the following verses (Nihan 2007, 367-68). The contrast between, on the one hand, this bull and ram that the high priest must bring and, on the other hand, the goats and ram collected from the community (v. 5) shows that the high priest must provide these two animals himself. On the phrase ‫“ פר בן־בקר‬bull herd animal” and the term, ‫חטאת‬ “sin offering,” see Exegesis to 4:3. On the sex of the animal and the term, ‫“ עלה‬rising offering,” see Exegesis to 1:3. 16:4

A holy linen shirt he must put on and linen underpants he must wear next to his body. The linen sash he must tie on and the linen turban he must wrap. These are holy clothes! He must bathe his body in water before putting them on.

With the exception of the last phrase, this whole verse has inverted syntax, emphatically naming the objects of clothing before the verbs. It also lists the clothing before mentioning the requirement to bathe which, of course, must be done first. The verse even begins abruptly in MT with ‫“ כתנת־בד קדשׁ‬a holy linen shirt,” but SP LXX and Pesh include the expected vav conjunction. Aaron must wear only linen clothes to enter the Holiest Space on the Day of Mitigations, rather than the richer vestments of the high priest (Exod. 28:539; Lev. 8:13). These linen clothes are similar to normal priestly vestments

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

301

(Exod. 28:40-42; Rashi; Hartley 235), though the priests’ usual sash wove coloured yarns into the linen (Exod. 39:29). The word ‫“ מצנפת‬turban,” however, describes the high priest’s distinctive headgear in contrast to the ‫מגבע‬ “skull-cap” of other priests (see Exegesis to 8:9). This verse does not mention the high priest’s other distinctive vestments, his robe, his skirt (ephod), and the pouch attached to it containing the ‫ ארים ותמים‬urim and tummim “luminaries and paragons” (see Exegesis to 8:7-8). If this verse’s description is comprehensive, then Aaron must wear the turban but replace his other vestments with linen clothes. Levine (101) suggested that these clothes were made especially for this occasion and “symbolized the abject state of the High Priest, the representative of the Israelite people, in seeking expiation of sin and making confession” (similarly y. Yoma 7:3; Gorman 1990, 91; Propp 2006, 452). However, the fact that regular priests wear mostly linen to officiate at the altar but not outside the sanctuary (Lev. 6:9) and that visions of angels frequently describe them as wearing linen (Ezek. 9:2-3, 11; 10:2, 6-7; Dan. 10:6; 12:6-7) suggest instead an indexical association between linen clothes and divine service (Haran 1978, 174). That seems to have been a widely recognized association: Sumerian texts of the third millennium B.C.E. already described “linen-clad priests”32 while an inscription on the Egyptian Esna temple of the late first millennium required entrants to dress in linen (Quack 2013, 120). Greek temple inscriptions often prohibited dyed or elaborately decorated clothing and preferred white garments.33 The high priest’s usual robe, skirt, and pouch index his unique status and authority over other priests and Israelites (see Exegesis to 8:9). These distinctive clothes are unnecessary in the Holiest Space where his exceptional access already marks him as unique. The turban and its flower medallion, however, mark the high priest’s role in representing the people before God, according to the description of the medallion in Exod. 28:38: It will be on Aaron’s forehead. Aaron will carry liability for the sacred donations that the people of Israel sanctify as their sacred donations. It must always be on his forehead to count in their favour before YHWH.

The turban therefore must be worn especially on the Day of Mitigations when the high priest represents all the people and their liabilities more obviously than at any other time. The high priest’s plain linen vestments indicate his priestly service while the inscription on the gold flower of his distinctive turban labels him explicitly as “holy to YHWH” and indexes him as the representative of the people of Israel before YHWH (Exod. 28:36-38; contra 32 Joan Goodnick Westenholz, “The Ministering Clergy,” in The Sumerian World (ed. Harriet Crawford; London: Taylor and Francis, 2013), 264. 33 Cecilie Brøns, Gods and Garments: Textiles in Greek Sanctuaries in the 7th-1st Centuries BC (Oxford: Oxbow, 2017), 237-319.

302

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

Rooke 2007, 352, who argued from silence that the medallion was removed from his turban on this day). ‫“ מכנסים‬underpants” are described in Exod. 28:42-43 but not mentioned in the description of Aaron’s vesting in Lev. 8:7 (but cf. 6:3). The phrase ‫“ בגדי־קדשׁ הם‬these are holy clothes!” takes an emphatic form familiar from the concluding refrains of the offering instructions (see e.g. 1:13; 2:6; 5:19). Together with the preceding emphatic syntax, it makes these instructions about clothing sound especially urgent. Moses anointed the priests’ clothes along with the priests and the Tabernacle at their consecration (Lev. 8:7-9, 30). In this way, the clothes became ‫“ קדשׁ‬holy,” that is, set apart for use only in the rituals of the sanctuary which is in YHWH’s divine realm that is characterized by holiness. Aaron’s privilege and responsibility to enter the Holiest Space index his high priestly status, as do his special vestments. Bathing and changing into them and then back out of them (vv. 4, 23-24) distinguishes the three unique rituals with sin offerings on the Day of Mitigations – sprinkling the blood of the high priest’s bull sin offering and of the people’s goat sin offering, and releasing the goat for Azazel – from the more routine rituals afterwards (vv. 24-25). They also highlight the high priest’s uniquely liminal role as mediator between YHWH and Israel (Gorman 1990, 90-95). For the high priest, like a regular priest (6:9), both vestments and location index his role. On priests bathing before officiating in the Tabernacle, see Exegesis to 8:6. The word ‫“ בשׂר‬flesh, body” echoed 28 times throughout the pollution and purity regulations of chaps. 11-15. The instructions to bathe at the beginning and end of this chapter (vv. 4, 24) emphasize, by contrast, the purified and sanctified body of the high priest. It is unlikely that this verse uses ‫ בשׂר‬in two different senses to mean first genitals, then body (contra Péter-Contesse 252; Kiuchi 296). The narrower meaning of this word does not even work well in chap. 15 where genital discharges are explicitly under discussion (see Exegesis to 15:2b). 16:5

From the community of the children of Israel he must take two billy goats for a sin (offering) and one ram for a rising (offering).

The community of lay people must provide two billy goats and a ram. Leviticus 4:14 requires a bull as the community’s sin offering, like the high priest’s (4:3; 16:3), but 9:3 and Num. 15:24 have a billy goat like this verse (for more about this difference, see Exegesis to 9:3). In 4:14, the community is described as ‫“ הקריב‬presenting” their own sin offerings for the priest to offer on the altar, but here the high priest “takes” them from the community (also v. 7). Milgrom (1018) thought this is because presumptuous sinners are barred from presenting offerings for forgiveness (Num. 15:30-31). It is also

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

303

possible that the different verb was motivated by a change in how the sin offerings are presented. A regular offering requires the owners to press their hands on its head to assert their ownership of the gift (see Exegesis to 1:4). Regular sin offerings of the community require the elders to press their hands on the bull (4:15). Hand pressing appears in chap. 16 only in describing the second sin offering of the community, the goat for Azazel. In this case, it is the high priest who presses both his hands on the goat’s head, which suggests a different function for this gesture (see below on v. 21). So, perhaps the goats are “taken” from the community rather than being “presented” by it because the hand pressing ritual has been repurposed. One of the two goats will be selected to be released alive into the wilderness “for Azazel” (vv. 10, 21). Only here in chap. 16 is this goat called a ‫חטאת‬ “sin offering.” Commentators complain that this cannot be an accurate description of the goat for Azazel since nothing in its ritual resembles the regulations for sin offerings in Leviticus 4-5 (so Snaith 112; Hartley 236; Milgrom 1018; Budd 227). Attempts to explain the use of “sin offering” here have included the idea that offering one goat on the altar and releasing the other comprise a single sin offering (Kiuchi 1987, 147-56; note MT’s singular pointing), or that both are included here because, at this point, either one could be chosen as the conventional sin offering (v. 8; Levine 101; Hieke 576). More likely is that this chapter regards both goats as sin offerings (Gane 2005, 25261). That is confirmed by the description of Day of Mitigations offerings in Num. 29:11 as including ‫“ שׂעיר־עזים אחד חטאת מלבד חטאת הכפרים‬one billy goat sin offering besides the mitigating sin offering.” P seems to have been less concerned than its modern interpreters with maintaining consistency between rituals and their names. Similar to this ritual involving two goats, the purification rituals of a healed leper in Lev. 14:7 involve killing one bird while releasing another alive, though that text does not name these offerings. But the unconventional ritual with a red heifer outside the camp to create purifying water is definitely called a sin offering in Num. 19:9. Gane (2005, 260-61) observed that the label, ‫“ הטאת‬sin offering,” applies to a wide variety of rituals that do not share any one ritual activity, but all aim for purification. On the basis of this verse, we should rather say that they all share a function, namely, ‫“ כפר‬mitigation” (see also Meshel 2014, 203). Or, as Eberhart (2017, 226) summarized the situation, “Atonement thus emerges as a complex and multifaceted process, necessitating the broadening of later, narrower definitions of atonement.” Conventional sin offerings for high priests or the community require burning the meat, bones, and offal outside the camp (4:11-12, 21), and this happens on the Day of Mitigations, too (16:27). A spatial dichotomy between the Tabernacle and areas outside the camp therefore seems characteristic of many sin offerings, some of which focus on one pole or the other, but nevertheless

304

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

include both (Ruane 2019). That observation lessons the surprise of the different treatments of the two goat sin offerings here. They are both presented in the Tabernacle (v. 5), where they are chosen for different roles (v. 8-10). One is butchered, its blood manipulated inside the Tabernacle and at the plaza altar (vv. 15-19) where its fat is burned (v. 25), while its remains are burned outside the camp (v. 27). The high priest presses his hands on the head of the other goat in the Tabernacle plaza, confesses Israel’s sins over it, and then sends it into the wilderness (vv. 20-22). Both rituals involve a spatial polarity between the sanctuary and spaces outside the camp, and between the high priest who conducts the special Day of Mitigations rituals in the Tabernacle and then must bathe and change clothes, and subordinates who take the carcasses or the living goat outside the camp and then must bathe and wash their clothes (vv. 26-28). These parallel actions justify regarding both goats as sin offerings that mitigate (v. 10) for the Israelites, like this verse says. However, the unusual rituals that take place inside the Holiest Space and in the wilderness draw the attention of listeners and readers in opposite directions and overshadow the more routine rituals at the plaza altar (Gorman 1990, 72-73). Here, the impact of hearing or reading the chapter is quite different than observing the rituals. Israelite observers in the temple courts saw none of the high priests’ actions inside the Tabernacle and would only have caught a glimpse, at most, of the goat for Azazel, whereas the high priest offering the sin and rising offerings on the plaza altar would have been visible to all. The ritual text takes its audience to places that they otherwise cannot go. For ‫“ עדה‬community,” see Exegesis to 4:13. For ‫“ שׁעירי עזים‬billy goats,” see on 4:22. 16:6

Aaron must present the sin (offering) bull that is for himself and mitigate on his own behalf and on behalf of his house.

On the high priest’s bull sin offering, see Exegesis to 4:3-12. This verse anticipates the rituals described in vv. 11-14, just as v. 9 anticipates those in vv. 15-19. These duplicate references to the same rituals have convinced many commentators that the chapter suffers from many editorial layers (see Exposition). The statement that Aaron ‫“ כפר בעדו‬must mitigate on his own behalf” (also v. 11) seems to counter the view that priests could not mitigate for themselves. In Exegesis to 4:12 and 4:20, I explained that the mitigation formula does not appear at the end of the instructions for the high priest’s sin offering in 4:3-12, unlike all the other sin and guilt offering instructions (4:26, 31, 35; 5:10, 13, 16, 18, 26), because mitigation involves priestly mediation on behalf of others. The fact that here the same sin offering mitigates for the high priest and also “on behalf of his house” may explain why

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

305

these verses ascribe mitigation to the high priest’s offering since it benefits others besides the officiating priest (similarly in 9:7; Baden 2020, 24). The ancient rabbis understood the high priest’s mitigation here and in v. 11 as referring to a verbal confession as in v. 21 rather than to blood offerings (m. Yoma 3:8, 4:2; Sifra; Gilders 2021, 318-19). ‫“ ביתו‬his house” refers to all the priests (Milgrom 1019; Hieke 577; see v. 33’s differentiation between priests and people), who by definition must be descendents of Aaron (Exod. 28:1) as the Qumran Temple Scroll specified with ‫“ בית אביהו‬his father’s house” (11QT 25:16). 16:7

He must take the two goats and station them before YHWH in the entrance of the meeting tent.

The phrase, ‫“ פתח אהל מועד‬the entrance of the meeting tent,” indicates someplace in the Tabernacle plaza (see Exegesis to 1:3). The fact that both goats appear ‫“ לפני יהוה‬before YHWH” has implications for understanding the goat for Azazel (see on v. 8). 16:8

Aaron must place lots on the two goats, one lot (saying) “for YHWH” and one lot (saying)“for Azazel.”

The HB does not provide a physical description of ‫“ גורלות‬lots.” Some think Isa. 57:6 describes them as smooth stones, but ‫“ חלקי־נחל חלקך‬smooth wadi (stones) are your portion” is a word play on ‫ חלק‬that means both “smooth” and “portion,” which undermines the usefulness of this reference. However, the HB does mention the use of lots frequently. Lots were used to apportion the land of Canaan among the Israelite tribes (Num 26:55-56; Josh. 14-19; Mic. 2:5; Obad. 1:11), to assign roles (Judg. 20:9; 1 Chr. 24:5-31; 26:1-16; Neh. 10:34-35), and to place blame (Jon. 1:7; cf. Josh. 7).34 The ‫ארים ותמים‬ urim and thummim “luminaries and paragons” in the high priest’s pouch were probably some kind of lots (see Exegesis to 8:8), but they are not mentioned here. Milgrom (1019-20) observed that this verse is unique in using the verb, ‫נתן‬ “give,” with ‫“ גורלות‬lots.” Following m. Yoma 3:9, 4:1, he concluded that this verse refers to placing the lots on the goats as labels with “for YHWH” and “for Azazel” written on them. This explanation also accounts for the phrasing of vv. 9-10 (see below). So these lots are not generic like the luminaries and paragons, but specifically constructed and inscribed for this ritual. Milgrom (1020) and Gane (2005, 249) suggested that the use of lots indicates 34 See Ndikho Mtshiselwa, “Lots I: Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and Ancient Near East,” EBR 16 (2018), 1242-45.

306

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

that YHWH chooses between goats. This verse, however, does not describe how the lots are chosen, but focuses on their labelling function instead. The name, ‫“ עזאזל‬Azazel,” has attracted a huge amount of attention from interpreters, because only here does the HB seem to authorize an offering to a being other than YHWH. Many therefore deny that Azazel is a proper name and that the scapegoat is an offering. Here, I will discuss the name while reserving analysis of the ritual for vv. 20-22 below. Most modern translations (NRSV, NAB, NJPS, Jerusalem, Fox, CEB) transliterate ‫ עזאזל‬as a proper name, “Azazel.” LXX, however, translated ‫ עזאזל‬not as a name but as a description, ἀποπομπαίος “the one sent away.” This may reflect the derivation of the Hebrew word from ‫“ עז‬goat” and ‫“ אזל‬disappear” (Janowski 1999, 128), which is certainly behind Vg caper emissarius and English “scapegoat” (Tyndale, KJV, NIV). Though still defended by some (Douglas 2003, 127-28), the translation “scapegoat” does not fit the syntax of the verse, which does not identify the goat as Azazel but rather “for Azazel.” The etymology of ‫ עזאזל‬has been sought in mid-firstmillennium B.C.E. descriptions of the Egyptian god, Seth, as “the expelled culprit” and a carrier of disease and pollution (Görg, 1986). This explanation, however, also conflates the goat with Azazel while vv. 8-10 indicates that the goat is “for Azazel” (Janowski-Wilhelm 1993, 128). The more likely philological explanation for the name Azazel is that the second zayin (‫ )ז‬and the aleph (‫ )א‬in ‫ עזאזל‬have been transposed from the original form, ‫עזזאל‬, a theophoric name consisting of ‫“ אל‬god” attached to a verb, ‫עזז‬. The base manuscript of SP reproduced in SPCEM, D1, reads ‫עזזאל‬ in vv. 8, 10, and 26, as does Pesh, though most SP manuscripts follow MT. ‫ עזזאל‬also appeared at Qumran in the Temple Scroll (11QT 26.13) and in a fragment of Enoch (4Q180 1.7-8). Janowski and Wilhelm made the case for this etymology of ‫“ עזאזל‬Azazel” in the transposition of ‫ א‬and ‫ עזז( ז‬+ ‫> אל‬ ‫ )עזאזל > עזזאל‬by pointing to the role of divine anger, ῾zz, already in HittiteHurrian elimination rituals of the mid-second millennium B.C.E. They concluded, however, that Leviticus 16 uses ‫“ עזאזל‬Azazel” not as an epithet, “the fierce/angry god,” but as the proper name of a demon (Janowski-Wilhelm 1993, 134-58, 162; Janowski 1999, 130). The verb ‫ עזז‬is unattested in biblical Hebrew, but the adjective ‫ עז‬means “strong, fierce.” An Akkadian verb, ῾zz “be angry, fierce,” suggests that ‫לעזזאל‬ could mean “for the fierce god” or “for (the elimination of) divine anger” (Tawil 1980, 57-59; Janowski-Wilhelm 1993, 134-58; Janowski 1999, 130; Roo 2000). That fierce God could be YHWH, as indicated by the equivalent theophoric name, ‫῾ עזזיהו‬Azazyahu “YHWH is fierce,” which appears in 1 Chr. 15:21 for one of the musicians in the Jerusalem temple. The theophoric names, Ab-di-a-zu-zi and ῾bd ῾azz “servant of the fierce one,” also appear in Neo-Assyrian and Phoenician/Punic inscriptions (Fauth 1998, 516-17).

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

307

The HB can describe God’s power with ‫( עז‬Ps. 66:3) as do Hittite texts (Janowski-Wilhelm 1993, 139-43, 159-61). YHWH’s ‫“ עז‬power, ferocity” is differentiated from YHWH’s ‫“ אף‬anger” in Ps. 90:11-13, Isa. 42:25, and Ezra 8:22, but these texts depict both as needing to be mollified (Roo 2000, 236; contra Pinker 2007, 11). Ugaritic texts use ῾z as an epithet of the god Ba῾al (KTU 1.102 27) and to describe both Ba῾al and Mot “death” (KTU 1.6 6.17-20).35 Hayim Tawil identified this “fierce god” in Lev. 16:8 as Mot, since the theophoric name ‫“ עזמות‬fierce death” appears multiple times in the HB (2 Sam. 23:31; 1 Chr. 8:36; 9:42; 11:33; 12:3; 27:25; Ezra 2:24; Neh. 7:28; 12:29; Tawil 1980, 58). Another common explanation for the name ‫ עזאזל‬is that it refers to a place of cliffs and hard rocks. Some ancient rabbis suggested this meaning (TgPsJ; Sifra; b. Yoma 67) because the Mishnah turned the biblical ritual of releasing the goat into a ritual killing of the goat by throwing it down a cliff (m. Yoma 6.4-6; Tawil 1980, 42-44). Medieval exegetes, Saadia and Ibn Jahaḥ, used Arabic philology to suggest that Azazel was a geographic name and G. R. Driver (1956) revived this view. However, ‫ עזאזל‬does not reappear in the description of the goat’s release in vv. 21-22, where location is indicated instead by “to the desert ” and “to a cut-off land.” The need to specify these locations indicates that the preposition ‫ ל‬on ‫ לעזאזל‬is not directional, “to,” but rather specifies the intended recipient, “for Azazel,” just as the parallel phrase ‫ ליהוה‬means “for YHWH.” The structure of this verse and of the ritual that places the goat “for Azazel” parallel to the goat “for YHWH” argues strongly for interpreting ‫עזאזל‬ in Leviticus 16 as a proper name, as most recent interpreters have realized. But to whom does the name refer? The derivation from the Akkadian root ῾zz produces the original form, ‫“ עזזאל‬fierce god,” which may have been a demon (Ibn Ezra; Nachmanides; HAL; Milgrom 1021; Schwartz 2004; Lemardelé 2006), perhaps like the goat demons of 17:7 (Levine 102, 251). Bronze-Age ivories found at Megiddo that depict a sphinx-like creature on top of a goat (see Keel 1997, 84) have been cited as showing a wilderness demon that consumes goats like Azazel. But sphinxes or griffins in combat with animals is a common artistic motif in the ancient Near East (JanowskiWilhelm 1993, 119-23). Later Aramaic, Greek, Syriac, and Coptic literature and magical rituals refer to angels and fallen angels with various theophoric names using the root ‫“ עזז‬strong, fierce,” such as ῾Aza(z), ῾Azaza, ῾Aza(z)el, ῾Azaziel, ῾Azi(za), ῾Azi(zi)el, ῾Uza, and ῾Uziel. That suggests locating Azazel, like Satan, originally among the ‫“ בני־אלהים‬supernatural beings” in YHWH’s court (Deut. 32:8-9; Ps. 82:1/2; Job 2:1; so Faust 1998, 517-33). In Second Temple Judaism, Azazel developed into a paradigmatic demon with secret 35

Umberto Cassuto, “Baal and Mot in the Ugaritic Texts,” IEJ 12 (1962), 83.

308

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

knowledge (1 En. 9:6; also 8:1; 69:2) who tempted Adam and Eve (Apoc. Ab. 23:5,9; also 13:7, 22:6). Since Leviticus 16 does nothing to explain ‫עזאזל‬/‫“ עזזאל‬Azazel,” we should expect that the name probably did convey angry, judgmental, and demonic connotations to its Israelite audiences, just as it did in later Judaism. Babylonian exorcism rituals sent demons to the underworld or the steppe wilderness, often by killing goats there (Tawil 1980, 50-52; similarly 1 En. 10). Therefore, many interpreters think that the Azazel goat ritual may be an old ritual preserved in the biblical text, though YHWH otherwise monopolizes all legitimate offerings (17:2-9; so Noth 125; Elliger 215; Gerstenberge 220; Milgrom 1071-79; Hieke 589-91). Many commentators avoid this problem by insisting that the goat for Azazel is not an offering (Wright 1987, 24; Gorman 1990, 97; Milgrom 1021; Gane 2005, 247, 251-52), though Nahmanides in the Middle Ages already pointed out that God is free to distribute offerings to subordinates or even opponents if God so wishes (Schwartz 2004). In chap. 17, prohibitions against making offerings to the goat demons do not emphasize the manner of offering so much as their location outside the Tabernacle (17:2-9), in contrast to this verse that specifies bringing the goat for Azazel into the Tabernacle “before YHWH” before releasing it. Furthermore, the goat’s destination in the desert is associated with the origins of both YHWH and Israel (see below on v. 22). It is therefore very likely that ancient Israelites could have understood ‫“ עזזאל‬the strong/fierce god” and its metathesized form ‫“ עזאזל‬Azazel” as YHWH or as a personified aspect of YHWH’s universal rule. This interpretation would have allowed Jerusalem’s priests and the priestly writers to use the term and the ritual without troubling their monolatrous consciences. Since this verse most likely refers to labelling the goats visually with lots marked “for YHWH” and “for Azazel,” understanding the latter would benefit from considering how the better-known label, ‫“ ליהוה‬for YHWH,” functions here. Many people and things appear ‫“ לפני יהוה‬before YHWH” in Leviticus, including the goat for Azazel (v. 10), but only offerings meant for presentation in the Tabernacle are labelled ‫“ ליהוה‬for YHWH” (Lev. 1:9, 13, 17; 2:2, 9, 16; 3:5, 11; 4:31; 6:8; 7:5; 8:21; Num. 15:3, 14). This phrase does not appear in purification rituals outside the camp (Lev. 14:1-7; Num. 19:1-21). ‫“ ליהוה‬for YHWH,” then, indicates an institutional claim more than a personal one, like the many stamp seals produced in eighthcentury Judea that labelled agricultural goods as taxes destined ‫“ למלך‬for the king,” i.e. for the royal administration.36 The parallel phrase, ‫“ לעזאזל‬for 36 Nadav Na’aman, “The lmlk Seal Impressions Reconsidered,” Tel Aviv 43:1 (2016), 111-125.

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

309

Azazel,” should therefore also describe institutional possession personified by a name. This institution is imagined to lie outside the Tabernacle, outside the camp, and outside cultivated land (vv. 21-22). However, the desert is the site of the revelation of Torah, including these instructions (Num. 1:1), so it does not lie outside YHWH’s sphere of administration, only outside human control (see below on v. 22). Milgrom (1021) was right that ‫לעזאזל‬/‫לעזזאל‬ “Azazel” is a “figure of speech,” but it is one that carried connotations of a divine and inhuman institution. 16:9

Aaron must present the goat that carries the lot (saying) “for YHWH” and make it a sin (offering),

This verse anticipates the sin offering ritual described in vv. 15-19. See above on v. 6. ‫“ השׁעיר אשׁר עלה עליו הגורל‬the goat that carries the lot” is literally, “the goat upon whom the lot is placed” (also v. 10), which could also be translated “... over whom the lot was raised,” perhaps referring to drawing lots up out of a bag. But the language of placing lots on the goats in v. 8 supports this translation instead (Milgrom 1022). 16:10 but the goat that carries the lot (saying) “for Azazel” he must station alive before YHWH to mitigate over it and to send it to the desert for Azazel. ‫“ יעמד־חי לפני יהוה‬station alive before YHWH” specifies that the goat for Azazel remains a YHWH offering, despite its label (Gerstenberger 219-20). It therefore supports understanding the name, ‫עזאזל‬/‫“ עזזאל‬Azazel,” as referring to aspects of YHWH’s rule and power associated with the ‫“ מדבר‬desert” (see on v. 8 above). ‫“ כפר‬to mitigate” summarizes priestly mediation of other people’s sin and guilt offerings leading to forgiveness and purification for the worshippers (see Exegesis to 4:20; see also 5:18, 14:20; 16:33; 19:22). This statement that the goat for Azazel “mitigates” therefore indicates that it still serves as a sin offering despite not being killed. Verses 9-10 distribute between the two goats the label “sin offering” and the function of “mitigating” which are combined in v. 6’s description of Aaron’s sin offering. That parallel shows that the two goats together function as the community’s equivalent to the high priest’s single bull. For further discussion, see on v. 5 above. By itself, ‫“ לכפר עליו‬to mitigate for him/it” sounds like most other mitigation formulas that summarize the priests’ actions as mitigating for the worshippers who brought the sin or guilt offerings (see discussion at 4:20), as in TgPsJ ‫“ לכפרא על סורחנות עמא בית ישׂראל‬to mitigate for the sins of the

310

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

people of the house of Israel.” However, the ‫“ עדת בני־ישׂראל‬community of the children of Israel” was last mentioned in v. 5. That antecedent is far away and would require either a feminine singular or masculine plural pronoun. A clue to the meaning of ‫ כפר עליו‬can be found in the description in v. 21 of the priest’s actual actions with the goat for Azazel: ‫“ התודה עליו‬he must confess over it” all of the Israelites’ sins. The parallel shows that, in this case, mitigation consists of the priest presenting the goat in the Tabernacle plaza, pressing his hands on it, confessing the community’s sins, and sending it away. Most interpreters therefore rightly take the masculine singular pronoun’s antecedent as the goat and translate “mitigate over/upon it” (KJV, NRSV, Milgrom, CEB), “mitigate for it” (Hieke), or “mitigate with it” (NJPS, Hartley). Milgrom (1023) found in ‫ כפר‬here “the more abstract notion” of expiation, while Hieke (579) described its meaning as very broad and translated “for obtaining” mitigation. Be that as it may, the chapter’s clear parallel with “the goat for YHWH” shows that the beneficiaries of mitigation with “the goat for Azazel” remain the Israelites who donated both goats (contra Gane 2005, 261; Baden 2020, 20-22 who judged this phrase to be a secondary addition). Exceptions to this consensus were voiced by Kiuchi and Grünwaldt who translated “for him.” Kiuchi (1987, 151; 2007, 297; followed by Sklar 2005, 97) proposed that the goat is the subject that mitigates for Aaron, as in 1:4 where the bull rising offering “mitigates for him.” My Exegesis to 1:4 explained its phrasing instead as a cryptic summary of all the offerings to follow, rather than a precise description of ritual mitigation. Grünwaldt (2003, 222) argued that “mitigate for him” refers to YHWH, who is mentioned in the preceding phrase. He thought that the goat sent to Azazel mitigates for YHWH’s killing of Aaron’s sons (v. 1), which is why the goat cannot be received by YHWH. However, mitigation in Leviticus always benefits those who provide the offering (as in 1:4), which in the case of these goats is not Aaron or YHWH but the community (16:5). Here, the phrase, ‫כפר עליו‬, is clearly a cryptic reference to the ritual described in vv. 20-22, so it means that Aaron must mitigate for the Israelites over the goat by confessing Israel’s sins and releasing it. Milgrom (1023) observed that the absence of a conjunctive vav before the infinitive, ‫“ לשׁלח‬send away,” makes it dependent on the preceding verb, ‫“ כפר‬to mitigate.” The goat’s removal is therefore an integral part of the sanctuary ritual. The relationship between the phrases has been taken as sequential (“and” KJV, NJPS), causative (“in order that” NRSV), or instrumental (“by” NAB, NIV, CEB; Sklar 2005, 97). ‫“ המדברה‬to the desert” is traditionally translated “to the wilderness” (KJV, NRSV, etc.). For the significance of this destination, see on v. 22 below.

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

311

Special Rituals for the Day of Mitigations (16:11-22) The ritual instructions for sprinkling blood and for releasing the goat for Azazel are different from all the other rituals of the Day of Mitigations, and from almost all the other ritual instructions in the Torah, because the high priest goes inside the Holiest Space to burn incense and sprinkle blood, and because the second goat is not killed but released into the desert. While the high priest’s manipulation of the sin offerings’ blood highlights the three different spaces of the Tabernacle (vv. 11-19), the release of the goat for Azazel highlights the spatial polarity between the sanctuary at the community’s centre and the desert at its periphery (vv. 20-22). However, the structure of Leviticus 16 repeatedly parallels the two goats, one for YHWH in the Tabernacle and one for Azazel in the desert. Both are called a ‫“ חטאת‬sin offering” (v. 5) and the high priest is said to ‫“ כפר‬mitigate” with both of them (vv. 10, 16, 18). The chapter places the goat for Azazel ritual immediately after the completion of the sin offering blood rites and before completing the burning of the sin offerings’ fat (v. 25). The literary structure therefore emphasizes that the sin offering blood rites and the goat for Azazel are connected rituals that are unique to the Day of Mitigations. Incense and blood are the only offering substances ever brought into the innermost sanctum, the Holiest Space, and only on the Day of Mitigations. The priest disperses them on or around the chest of the covenant, here called the ‫“ עדות‬testimony,” and its cover, the ‫ כפרת‬kaporet “mitigation centre.” The mitigation centre functions on the Day of Mitigations like the incense altar functions on other days (4:5-7, 16-18) to receive the blood and incense of the sin offerings of the high priest and of the community. Leviticus 16 therefore ignores the incense altar in the Holy Space because this day’s unique rituals replace it with the cover of the mitigation centre in the Holiest Space. This different ritual and rhetorical focus complicates attempts to reconstruct the chapter’s history of composition on the basis of its failure to mention the incense altar explicitly (such as by Wellhausen 1885, 64-67; Milgrom 581; Nihan 2007, 162; and many others; see Leviticus 1-10, 493). The altar mentioned in 16:12 could be the incense altar or the courtyard altar. Verses 11-14 surround the incense ritual (vv. 12-13) with the blood rite (vv. 11, 14). Here the bull’s blood “mitigates” for the high priest while the incense protects his life “so he doesn’t die.” Both incense and blood seem to carry apotropaic power in the priests’ hands, but the description in these verses distinguishes their effects. Blood mitigates the effects of previous sins and pollutions while incense protects the priest from harm when he enters a dangerous (holy) space. Numbers 17:11 also describes Aaron’s incense offering providing protection from an immediate danger, plague, rather than

312

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

from the lingering effects of sin or pollution. There, the incense offering is explicitly said to “mitigate” for the Israelites. When read aloud, vv. 12-15 echo with the similar sounds and rhythms of three repeated words that emphasize the distinctiveness of this ritual: 5× ‫כפרת‬ kapporet “mitigation centre,” 3× ‫ קטרת‬qetoret “incense,” and 2× ‫פרכת‬ paroket “veil.” 16:11 Aaron must present the bull sin (offering) that is for himself and mitigate on his own behalf and on behalf of his house. He must slaughter the bull sin (offering) that is for himself. This verse is internally repetitive, and redundant with v. 6 which Milgrom (1024) understood as resumptive repetition “after the digression on the goats.” But the description of the ritual with the bull’s blood in v. 14 is also internally redundant. Perhaps redundancy serves to indicate that Aaron performs all the normal parts of the sin offering ritual as mandated by chap. 4, including the hand-pressing gesture (4:4), as well as the additional rites described in what follows here that are only for the Day of Mitigations. 16:12 He must take a pan full of coals from the fire on the altar before YHWH and two handfuls of crushed spicy incense and bring (them) inside the veil. The high priest has the twice-daily responsibility of offering incense on the altar of spicy incense in the Holy Space before the veil, according to Exod. 30:7-8. The high priest also places frankincense along with bread weekly on the table in the Holy Space, according to Lev. 24:7. Thus burning incense and presents of incense epitomize the rituals of the Tabernacle interior and index the distinctive ritual role of the high priest on a daily basis. But only on the Day of Mitigations is incense brought inside the veil before the chest of the covenant. This incense ritual highlights again the high priests’ unique role and also the danger of his job (vv. 1, 13), which raises his prestige even more. The incense protects the high priest when he must enter the Holiest Space (v. 13) and can also be used to protect the people (Num. 17:11-13). This regular use of an expensive, imported commodity, frankincense, indexes the priest’s unique status and privilege within Israel. Lay people must also present frankincense along with their commodity offerings (Lev. 2:2, 16; Isa. 1:13; Jer. 41:5; Ps. 141:2). Unlike the grain in a commodity offering, all of the frankincense must be burned up on the courtyard altar. There is no prohibition on secular uses of frankincense in Israelites homes, but the specific mix of spicy incense that is burned inside the Tabernacle cannot be used elsewhere (Exod. 30:37-38). Thus frankincense and the mix of spicy

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

313

incense provided an expensive reminder that priests must mediate Israel’s ritual interactions with YHWH (also outside P in Deut. 33:10; 1 Sam. 2:28; see Haran 1978, 238-39). Biblical stories emphasize incense’s role in marking priestly status: every story about challenging the Aaronides’ monopoly over the priesthood focuses on incense offerings (Num. 16:17-18; 17:4-5; Jer. 41:5; Ezek. 8:7-12; 2 Chr. 26:19). Unlike all other materials presented on the sanctuary altars in biblical legislation, frankincense is not food and was not produced locally. It was a luxury commodity imported from the southern Arabian peninsula and the horn of Africa, modern-day Yemen and Somalia. So the consequence of this legislation, if and when it was put into effect, was that both priests and worshippers were required to buy frankincense for use in temple worship. Biblical and post-biblical texts remember the Second Temple priests as diplomats who built close ties with neighbouring peoples and imperial overlords. Pentateuchal rules that made priests customers of the incense trade may have been one factor encouraging their international economic and political engagements. For a full discussion of incense in priestly ritual and rhetoric, see Leviticus 1-10, 238-44, and Watts, forthcoming. The ‫“ מחתה‬pan” is a long-handled metal pan for coals and incense (see Exegesis to 10:1). Many examples have been found in late Second-Temple Jewish, as well as Greco-Roman, archeological sites.37 Its prominent use in the Jerusalem temple, especially in this ritual on the Day of Mitigations, led to the incense pan becoming a common religious symbol in the decorations of Late Antique synagogues.38 ‫“ גחלי־אשׁ‬coals of the fire” is charcoal produced by previous wood fires (see 6:5 Eng. 6:12). On ‫“ קטרת סמים‬spicy incense,” see Exod. 30:34-38 and Exegesis to Lev. 4:7. ‫ דקה‬means “fine,” thus powdered or crushed incense (HAL, NRSV). The addition of this adjective here suggests that the incense for the ritual in the Holiest Space was prepared in a special way to distinguish it from the daily “spicy incense” in the Holy Space, which was already distinguished by its mix of spices from the pure frankincense burned on the courtyard altar (Milgrom 1026). The kind of incense indexes gradations of holy space. ‫“ חפן‬hollow hand, handful” (HAL) here means explicitly the latter, with the adjective ‫“ מלא‬full.” Both hands are indicated by the dual form, ‫הפניו‬ “his two hands,” which led Milgrom to ask how Aaron could hold the shovel and two handfuls of incense simultaneously. The Mishnah suggested that the 37 For a survey of the finds, see Richard S. Freund, Digging Through the Bible: Modern Archaeology and the Ancient Bible (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 232-40. 38 Rachel Hachlili, Ancient Synagogues – Archaeology and Art: New Discoveries and Current Research (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 328, 330.

314

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

high priest emptied his handfuls into an incense ladle (m. Yoma 5:1). Ladles shaped like hands are visible in Egyptian art of incense rituals and were found in Israelite sites as well (Milgrom 1025), though none are mentioned among the Tabernacle’s implements (Exod. 27:3; 38:3). ‫“ מעל המזבח מלפני יהוה‬from the altar, from before YHWH” may indicate the golden altar of spicy incense in the Holy Space, which plays a role in the Day of Mitigations rituals according to Exod. 30:10 (also in Lev. 4:7). The phrase “spicy incense” appears otherwise in Leviticus only here, so in this literary context it evokes the golden altar. Most interpreters, however, understand this altar to be the courtyard altar which is referenced by nearly the same phrase in 16:18, ‫“ המזבח אשׁר לפני־יהוה‬the altar which is before YHWH” and is sometimes also called “the altar of the rising offering” (4:18). Reasons for preferring the courtyard alter include the claim that only there was a perpetual fire burning (6:5-6; so Milgrom 1025). But the morning incense rite (Exod. 30:7) would already have produced coals on the incense altar, so a perpetual fire is unnecessary. Many historians have taken the failure of this chapter to mention the altar of spicy incense explicitly as evidence for the editorial history of these chapters (see Exposition). ‫“ לפני יהוה‬before YHWH,” however, can indicate locations in both the courtyard and the Tabernacle interior as the usage in 4:7 and 16:1 shows. The requirement that Aaron use ‫“ קטרת סמים‬spicy incense” supports the inner altar because this mix of incense could only be used there (Exod. 30:34-38; Haran 1978, 242-45). Such use of incense altars has now been confirmed archeologically by the discovery of frankincense residue on the larger of two cuboid altars on the steps to the inner sanctum of the Arad Temple.39 The fact that frankincense was burned on incense altars in Iron Age Judean temples undermines the suggestion that P’s description of an altar of spicy incense in the Holy Space was an innovation and a secondary addition in Exodus (see Leviticus 1-10, 240-41). It also reinforces the argument that Leviticus 16 presupposes such an altar here. 16:13 He must put the incense on the fire before YHWH, so that the cloud of incense covers the mitigation centre that is on the testimony, so he doesn’t die. For ‫“ כפרת‬mitigation centre,” see on v. 2 above. There it is described as “on the chest,” here as “on the testimony,” each reflecting one part of P’s usual name for this object, ‫“ ארון העדות‬the chest of the testimony.” ‫עדות‬ 39 Eran Arie, Baruch Rosen and Dvory Namdar, “Cannabis and Frankincense at the Judahite Shrine of Arad,” Tel Aviv 47/1 (2020), 5-28. The smaller cuboid altar was used for burning cannabis, which in ancient Judea was also an imported, dried commodity (hashish).

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

315

“testimony” refers to the fact that the chest is a reliquary for holding the stone tablets of the commandments written by God (Exod. 25:21; 31:18; 40:20; see further in Watts 2017, 108-113). The chest gains its significance from the “testimony” that lies within it. The stone tablets are called “testimony” because they were the physical evidence for the covenant between YHWH and Israel. That covenant makes it possible for YHWH to dwell among the Israelites (Exod. 19:5-6) in the Tabernacle, which is sometimes called “the tent of the testimony” (Exod. 28:21; Num. 9:15) because it shelters the tablets of the commandments. That covenant is preserved by mitigating Israel’s sins and pollutions in the Tabernacle (Lev. 15:31) on the mitigation centre once each year (16:30, 33-34). By manipulating incense and blood on the mitigation centre that sits on the chest containing the physical evidence of the covenant, the Day of Mitigations ritually identifies covenant and temple cult, just as the Pentateuch identifies them in literature by preserving the lengthy ritual instructions of Leviticus at the centre of the Torah. Translators usually render the second and third consecutive perfect verbs, ‫“ וכסה‬and it covers” and ‫“ ולא ימות‬and he does not die,” as consequences of the priest’s actions, “so that.” The cloud of incense is depicted here as shielding the high priest. The ancient rabbis understood “cover the mitigation centre” to mean that the incense cloud should shield the chest from the priest’s view. This idea then prompted an intense argument between Pharisees and Sadducees over whether the high priest must light the incense before entering the Holiest Place or, as the sequential verbs in vv. 12-13 suggest, only after he steps behind the veil (m. Yoma 5.1; t. Yoma 1:8; b. Yoma 53a; Sifra). Commentators regularly repeat the idea that it was dangerous to see the chest (Haran 1978, 178; Milgrom 1028-31; Gerstenberger 214; Kiuchi 298; and others). In non-priestly texts, however, the danger came from touching the chest of the covenant (2 Sam. 6:6-7) or otherwise misappropriating it (1 Sam. 5), not from seeing it. When P describes how the Tabernacle should be moved, the priests must wrap cloth and leather coverings not only around the chest but also around all of the sanctuary’s furnishings, including the courtyard altar which was otherwise in open view of the congregation (Num. 4:5-14). The motivation is explicitly to guard those who carry the furnishings from the deadly danger of touching them: ‫לא־יגעו אל־הקדשׁ ומתו‬ “so they do not touch holy things and die” (Num. 4:15). A subsequent verse adds a prohibition on seeing them (Num. 4:20), but Numbers 4 explicitly exempts Aaronide priests from these dangers, since they must see and touch the furnishings to wrap them for travel, including the chest of the covenant. Nevertheless, this verse indicates that close proximity to the chest when sprinkling its cover and front with blood endangers the high priest on the Day of Mitigations. The incense cloud provides the shield to protect him. Note that in Num. 16:46-50, Aaron uses incense outside the Tabernacle to shield

316

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

Israelites from plague. That story also emphasizes location, in that Aaron “stood between the dead and the living” with the incense, but this can hardly mean to block them from seeing the corpses. The point, then, of covering the chest with a cloud of incense was to protect the high priest from the danger of being in close proximity to the chest. The incense cloud may also have prompted visions of YHWH who “appears” in the cloud above the chest (v. 2). The two verses have been taken as contradictory (Körting 2006, 231), but that is only the case if one insists that the cloud shielded the chest from Aaron’s view. Together, vv. 2 and 13 suggest instead that Aaron could experience a theophany in the cloud. Grünwaldt (2003, 224) observed that “it is very likely that the smoke created many figurative shapes.” Later mystical texts described elaborate visions on the basis of the high priest’s encounter with God in the Holiest Space (see Exposition above). ‫“ ולא ימות‬so he doesn’t die” evokes again the motivation behind all these rules (vv. 1-2), to protect Aaron from the same fate as his sons, Nadab and Abihu (10:1-3). Though the distinctive rituals of this day focus on mitigating sanctuary and people with the blood of sin offerings and with the living goat for Azazel, incense offerings provide the rationale in this chapter’s rhetoric for giving the instructions: it was burning incense that led to Nadab and Abihu’s deaths and it is burning incense that will save the high priest’s life. These connected accounts use incense offerings to highlight the high priest’s job as both dangerous and prestigious – dangerous because priests can die if they perform the incense ritual in the wrong way, but prestigious because they must use incense in order to be able to mitigate for the entire people of Israel. A rare and expensive imported commodity, frankincense, was the distinctive ingredient in the spicy incense that indexed the uniquely privileged status and role of Aaronide priests in general and of the high priest in particular (Watts, forthcoming). 16:14 He must take some of the bull’s blood and sprinkle it with his finger onto the east side of the mitigation centre, in front of the mitigation centre he must sprinkle some of the blood seven times with his finger. This verse is internally very redundant because of its arch structure around the double mention of the mitigation centre (Paran 1983, 31): ‫ולקח מדם הפר והזה באצבעו‬

He must take some of the bull’s blood and sprinkle (it) with his finger onto the east side of the mitigation centre, ‫על־פני הכפרת קדמה‬ in front of the mitigation centre ‫ולפני הכפרת‬ ‫ יזה שׁבע־פעמים מן־הדם באצבעו‬he must sprinkle seven times some of the blood with his finger.

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

317

This arch structure suggests that the two parts of the sentence do not indicate two different actions, but are rather parallel descriptions of the same action (Koch 1995, 70). Understanding them as two separate actions generated a long debate, from Josephus to today, over whether the seven sprinklings applied to both actions or just the second (Josephus, Ant. 3.243; m. Yoma 5.3, 4; Milgrom 1032; Gilders 2003, 123-24). The whole debate is misguided, because the poetic parallelism shows that “in front of the mitigation centre” is a contraction of the previous line, “onto the east side of the mitigation centre,” while “he must sprinkle with his finger” has been elaborated in the last line by inserting between the two words, “some of the blood seven times.” The priest is required to sprinkle the blood seven times onto the east side and in front of the mitigation centre. ‫“ על־פני הכפרת קדמה‬onto the east side of the mitigation centre” is literally, “upon the face of the mitigation centre eastward.” The Tabernacle was pitched facing east (Exod. 27:13-16) so the priest walked west to enter it. To sprinkle the blood ‫“ קדמה‬eastward” would require the priest to walk around the chest, turn around, and gesture towards the curtain and the Tabernacle entrance (Wevers, Hartley). However, ‫ קדמה‬is better understood as an adjective modifying ‫“ פני הכפרת‬face/side of the mitigation centre” (Noth; Milgrom 1033; Gilders 2004, 219; Hieke 564), that is, the east-facing front side of the mitigation centre and of the chest that it covers, which would have confronted the priest immediately upon entering the Holiest Space. Since the next phrase specifies ‫“ לפני הכפרת‬before the mitigation centre,” the sprinkling takes place onto the front side and in front of the mitigation centre. Commentators have also associated ‫“ קדמה‬eastward” with the Garden of Eden’s entrance that, like the chest, was guarded by cherubim (Gen. 3:24; Kiuchi 299). Since the Second Temple contained no chest or mitigation centre (Watts 2016), the high priest sprinkled upward and downward (Josephus, Ant. 3.243a; m. Yoma 5.3; Begg 2012, 118). Sprinkling usually occurs “seven times” in Leviticus (see Lev. 4:6; 8:11; 14:7, 16, 27, 51; Num. 19:4). The number seven is a round number in the HB and here probably signifies no more than a thorough performance of the sprinkling action. The Mishnah, however, maintained that the high priest sprinkled the mitigation centre only once, then seven times in front of it, and in the same way outside the veil in the Holy Space (m. Yoma 5:3-4; anticipated by a Qumran Targum to Leviticus, 4Q156). This interpretation allowed Milgrom (1038) to find a numerological pattern in the high priests’ sprinklings that adds up to the number 49. Gorman understood the two phrases to describe two different sprinklings, the first to purify the chest’s cover, the second as like pouring blood at the altar base (4:7, etc.). “Thus, the top of the ‫ כפרת‬is functionally equivalent to the horns of the altar and the area before the ‫ כפרת‬is functionally equivalent to the base of the altar”

318

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

(Gorman 1990, 89). However, 4:6 ‫“ לפני יהוה את־פני פרכת‬before YHWH before the veil” uses ‫ פני‬with two different prepositions to describe the same sprinkling action, so ‫“ על־פני הכפרת קדמה ולפני הכפרת‬onto the front of the mitigation centre, in front of the mitigation centre” should be understood the same way here. Since blood sprinkled by hand would likely land on both the cover, the side of the chest, and the floor, it makes sense that the two phrases describe the same seven-fold action, as Josephus (Ant. 3.243) and Karaite tradition maintained (Milgrom 1032). 16:15 He must slaughter the sin (offering) goat that is for the people. He must bring its blood inside the veil and do with its blood as he did with the bull’s blood: he must sprinkle it onto the mitigation centre in front of the mitigation centre. Since the verse specifies that the ritual action is identical to that in v. 14, it abbreviates the description. That means that the phrases ‫על הכפרת ולפני‬ ‫ הכפרת‬are not sequential but parallel “onto the mitigation centre in front of the mitigation,” as in v. 14. It also means either that the incense ritual must be performed again before sprinkling the goat blood, or that the incense pan must be left burning in the Holiest Space while the high priest fetches the goat’s blood. The sin offering for the people consists of a billy goat here, as well as in 9:3, 15, and in Num. 15:24, but 4:14 requires a bull. Chapter 4 works to make the rituals for the high priest and community identical to index his unique status as the community’s representative (see Exegesis to 4:14 and 9:3). This entire Day of Mitigations ritual emphasizes the high priest’s representative role and also his privileged status, so the community’s sin offering can remain the usual billy goat. 16:16 So he must mitigate the Holy (Space) from the pollutions of the children of Israel and from their transgressions, that is, all their sins. He must do likewise for the meeting tent that tabernacles with them in the midst of their pollutions. This verse mixes together the mitigation formulas that echo throughout chaps. 4-5 and 12-15 by combining mitigation for sins and pollutions that those chapters treat separately. It then adds to the mitigation formula an explanation for why the Tabernacle needs to be mitigated. The relationship in this verse between the terms ‫“ טמאות‬pollutions,” ‫“ פשׁעים‬transgressions,” and ‫“ חטאות‬sins” has huge implications for interpreters’ theories of how P thought mitigation works. On the meaning of ‫טמא‬ “pollution,” see Exegesis to 5:2 and 10:10. For ‫“ חטאת‬sin,” see Exegesis to 4:3 (also Gane 2005, 285-302; Hieke 584).

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

319

‫ פשׁע‬appears in Leviticus only here and in v. 21. The verb ‫ פשׁע‬can describe military rebellions in historical accounts (e.g. 1 Kgs. 12:19; 2 Kgs. 8:20). In prophetic poetry, it describes the rebellions of the Israelites against YHWH (e.g. Isa. 1:2; 43:27; Ezek. 2:3) and against Torah (Hos. 8:1). The noun ‫ פשׁע‬often appears like here in comprehensive lists of offences (Exod. 34:7; Num. 14:18), though it can also describe specific criminal offences such as theft and kidnapping (Gen. 31:36; 50:17; Exod. 22:8). The dictionaries suggest translating ‫ פשׁעים‬with “sins, transgressions” (DCH) or “crimes” (HAL). The widespread use of ‫ פשׁע‬in biblical Hebrew outside P suggests that the priestly writer’s chose to use it here to evoke its resonances in historical, prophetic, and other pentateuchal materials.40 The context of Israel’s covenant relationship with YHWH recommends translating “rebellions” (Hartley) as in historical and prophetic texts, but the parallel with “pollutions” and “sins” suggests “transgressions” (Milgrom, NJPS) or “crimes” (Seebass) as in other legal traditions. In the Pentateuch’s literary context, mentioning ‫ פשׁעים‬in a list of all of Israel’s offences against YHWH mitigated by the high priest echoes the self-description of a forgiving God in Exod. 34:7 (see on v. 21 below). By using this word, either an independent P chose to echo Israel’s prophetic and legal traditions or the P redactor of the Pentateuch chose to tie the Day of Mitigations to YHWH’s self-revelation. These resonances of ‫ פשׁעים‬are best translated by a general term such as “transgressions.” Milgrom (1034) claimed that “according to the Priestly scheme, it is this sin [‫ ]פשׁע‬that generates impurity that not only attacks the sanctuary but penetrates into the adytum and pollutes the kappōret, the very seat of the godhead .... It should also be noted that this term occurs nowhere in P except here.” The weakness and circularity of his first claim is revealed by the second sentence: the meaning of P’s unique use of ‫ פשׁע‬depends entirely on the context here in chap. 16, where it appears only in parallel with other terms for sin, guilt, and pollution (vv. 16, 21) and therefore does not indicate a more polluting kind of offence. Gane observed that God may forgive ‫ פשׁעים‬directly (Exod. 34:7; Num. 14:18) even though they are not elsewhere the object of ritual mitigation. He concluded that ‫ פשׁע‬refers to rebellious sins that are beyond the reach of ritual mitigation, unlike accidental or unknowing ‫ חטאת‬sins. But Gane’s reading flies in the face of the repeated assertions by this chapter (vv. 16, 21, 30, 34) that these rituals mitigate for all of Israel’s offences, including ‫פשׁעים‬. These difficulties stem from interpreters’ assumption that P describes a consistent and rational ritual system (see Leviticus 1-10, 50-54). This 40 According to the very thorough summary and analysis of the word’s meaning by Horst Seebass, “‫פשׁע‬,” TWAT 6:791-810 = TDOT 12:133-52.

320

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

commentary has instead shown that Leviticus employs a rhetoric of sin and mitigation that builds gradually over sixteen chapters to reach its climax here. It acclimates listeners and readers to priestly mediation of Israel’s voluntary offerings (chaps. 1-3) before describing their necessary mitigation of sin and guilt offerings for unintentional offences (chaps. 4-7). The priests’ consecration and conduct of the regular sanctuary offerings (chaps. 8-9) emphasizes their essential role in preserving God’s presence in the Tabernacle, and the risks they run in doing so (chap. 10). The priests’ mitigation of unavoidable pollutions (chaps. 12-15) extends their authority over Israelite bodies, homes, and possessions. Now in chap. 16, these instructions for the Day of Mitigations climax this rhetoric of essential priestly mitigation by emphasizing that the high priest’s dangerous ministry inside the Holiest Place will mitigate for all of Israel’s offences, including pollutions and sins of all kinds (Hundley 2011, 165-66). The rhetorical progression of Leviticus 1-16 has naturalized the idea of priestly mitigation to make this conclusion seem appropriate and desirable, and to obscure any contradictions with Israel’s history with YHWH. (For more about this rhetorical strategy, see Leviticus 1-10, 309-16.) The preposition ‫ ל‬in ‫ לכל־חטאתם‬and the absence of a conjunctive vav places the phrase in apposition to both of the previous phrases, so I translate “that is, for all their sins” (Walke-O’Connor §11.2.10.h; Hieke 561, 564, 584; KJV; NRSV; the same construction appears in Lev. 5:3; 11:42; Jer. 1:18). This syntax bothers some interpreters because it classifies pollution as a kind of sin. So they avoid a translation that would include pollution, instead suggesting “whatever their sins” (NJPS, NIV), “including all their sins” (Milgrom), or “as well as their sins” (Gane 2005, 289-91; followed by Nihan 2007, 189; CEB). Gane cited 11:46 as precedent, but there the prefixed vav, ‫ולכל‬, indicates an additional category rather than a summary of the previous ones like here. This chapter repeatedly makes sweeping statements about the mitigation of “all” of Israel’s offences (vv. 16, 21, 30, 34) in a rhetoric that discourages drawing ritual distinctions between them (Hundley 2011, 165-67). On the three different prepositions, ‫על‬, ‫מין‬, and ‫ל‬, governed here by ‫כפר‬ “mitigate,” see Exegesis to 4:20 (cf. Baden 2020 who used them to defend Milgrom’s theory that only the Tabernacle is being “purified” – see below). ‫ כן‬here can be translated “thus (as has just been told)” or “likewise” (HAL). If translated “thus,” it introduces a sentence summarizing what went before (so Hartley). But if ‫ כן‬is translated “likewise,” it introduces a sentence describing a second set of rites that duplicate the first, except now applied to the altar of spicy incense and the veil in the Holy Space, just as the high priest does in sin offerings for himself and the community on other occasions (Exod. 30:10; Lev. 4:5-7, 16-18; so Elliger, Wenham, Milgrom 1034, Hieke, and most translations). In that case, the high priest must reproduce the previous ritual with

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

321

some modifications for the different implements, sprinkling the curtain but smearing blood on the altar horns (Gilders 2004, 125; cf. vv. 18-19). Verses 20 and 33 confirm that the high priest mitigates three spaces: ‫את־)מקדשׁ( הקדשׁ‬ ‫(“ ואת־אהל מועד ואת־המזבח‬the sanctuary of) the Holy (Space), the meeting tent, and the altar.” The fact that Leviticus 16 never explicitly mentions the altar of spicy incense has served since the nineteenth century as a major piece of evidence for the relative dating of the composition of Leviticus 16, 4, 8 and Exodus 30 (see Exposition above). Nevertheless, the usual translation of ‫ כן‬as “likewise” suggests that the altar of spicy incense is implied here since the Holy Space and its furnishings constitute the rest of the “meeting tent” apart from the Holiest Space containing the mitigation centre (Kiuchi 1987, 128; Milgrom 1034-35; Gane 2005, 225-28). The golden altar of spicy incense is mentioned explicitly in descriptions of these Yom Kippur rituals by Josephus, Ant. 3.243a and m. Yoma 5.5-6 (Begg 2012, 119). The common redaction-critical claim, that the writers would certainly have mentioned the altar of spicy incense here if they had known about it, is a weak argument not only because it is an argument from silence but also because it ignores the clear tendency of chap. 16 to focus on the unique rituals of the Day of Mitigations while presupposing rituals previously described in Leviticus. Exodus 30:10 is not the only text that recommends finding the altar of spicy incense here (contra Gilders 2019, 168). Sin offerings for the high priest and community explicitly require the application of blood to the altar of spicy incense (4:5-7, 16-18). Verse 16b presupposes knowledge of these rituals, just as vv. 11 and 15 presuppose the other instructions for presenting sin offerings in Leviticus 4 and v. 24 presupposes the instructions for rising offerings in Leviticus 1. The second half of this verse provides a very rare explanation so far in Leviticus for why a ritual is needed: “He must do likewise for the meeting tent that tabernacles with them in the midst of their pollutions.” The verb ‫“ שׁכן‬dwell, camp” juxtaposed with ‫“ אהל מועד‬meeting tent” recalls this tent’s other name, ‫“ המשׁכן‬the Tabernacle,” that appears only four times in Leviticus (8:10; 15:31; 17:4; 26:11) but more commonly elsewhere in P. So I revive the English use of “tabernacle” as a verb to convey this allusion. Usually, P describes YHWH as the one who ‫“ שׁכן‬dwells, tabernacles” among the Israelites (Exod. 25:8; 19:45-46; Num. 5:3; 35:34). However, since the meeting tent is the object of ritual mitigation, P adapts this usual claim to provide a metonymic explanation of this ritual’s function (also 15:31). Metonymy and metaphor are the primary means by which rituals can be understood and interpreted (Watts 2019c, §§19-32). This verse explains that YHWH, represented by the metonymy of the meeting tent, can live among the Israelites only because the high priest offers the community’s sin offering on the Day of Mitigations to mitigate the meeting tent from the effects of

322

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

the community’s pollutions. The unstated premise behind this explanation is that pollution can drive away the divine presence from the sanctuary (see Milgrom 258). This idea was common throughout the ancient world and motivated purification rituals in temples for at least three thousand years, from the earliest Sumerian and Egyptian ritual texts until the Christianization of the Roman Empire (Frevel-Nihan 2013; Yoo-Watts 2021, 33-46). All these rituals enacted the cosmological belief that crossing from the human to the divine realms generates pollution, as does wrong-doing in the human realm (see “Cosmology and Pollution” in Introduction to Leviticus 11-20 above). That is the obvious meaning of this verse. The question that has roiled debate among interpreters is whether this verse’s meaning is restrictive, so that the sin offering only mitigates for the sanctuary, or that it mitigates the sanctuary in addition to bringing purification and forgiveness to the Israelites. The problem is that Leviticus 16 nowhere mentions forgiveness explicitly. Jacob Milgrom (254-58) therefore argued that the rituals of the Day of Mitigations purify only the sanctuary and its contents. In his understanding of P’s ritual system, the personal effects of unintentional sins can be handled by forgiveness and restitution (Lev. 4:5), but the polluting effects of sins on the sanctuary must be handled by mitigation even when forgiveness is impossible. In this way, Milgrom harmonized this verse’s claim to mitigate all of Israel’s sins and pollutions with the assertion in Num. 15:26-31 that brazen sins cannot be mitigated, which is also implied by the focus on mistakes rather than intentional sins in Leviticus 4 (see discussion in Leviticus 1-10, 311-312, 321, 329-330, 332). This chapter, however, claims that the mitigating rituals of the Day of Mitigations also purify the people (16:30, 33-34). Milgrom (1062) dismissed these verses as later additions from H, but most subsequent commentators have realized that source-critical distinctions do not resolve this contradiction. Leviticus 4-5 and 12-15, after all, do not mention mitigating the sanctuary at all. They instead describe priests mitigating individuals of their sins and pollutions with the result that they are forgiven and purified. P must therefore have regarded mitigation as affecting people, so its effects were not restricted to just the Tabernacle (so Schwartz 1995, 17-18; Eberhart 2002, 240-43; Gane 2005, 106-43, 273-74; Sklar 2005, 153-59; Nihan 2007, 178-79; Hundley 2011, 137-40, 168-70; Feder 2011, 112-13). Interpreters have been more sympathetic to Milgrom’s theory that P conceived of sin as generating an air-born polluting miasma that penetrated the Tabernacle to varying degrees, depending on the severity of the offence (Milgrom 256-58; see above, “Polluting the Holy Sanctuary” in Introduction to Leviticus 11-20). Kiuchi and Gane distinguished the sin offerings at the plaza altar that purify worshippers (Lev. 4-5, 12-15) from purification of the Tabernacle on the Day of Mitigations. The latter was necessary not because

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

323

of a miasma generated by all pollutions, but specifically because of the people’s sins (Kiuchi 1987, 61-62; Gane 2005, 154-55, 231-35, 274-84). Nihan (2007, 187-92) and Feder (2011, 109-11) judged Milgrom’s reconstruction more viable than Gane’s, because the rituals of Leviticus 4 and 16 reflect a comprehensive ritual system of sin offerings that engage all three parts of the Tabernacle, rather than separate rituals aimed at mitigating different problems. Contra almost all other commentators, I must point out that the spatial gradations of purification rituals in the Tabernacle need not correspond to kinds or levels of pollutions. It is a common feature of customs for cleaning any space that regular cleaning be augmented occasionally by more thorough cleaning (e.g. annual “spring cleaning”) that reaches spaces not often cleaned. It is also common that visits by important people (in this case, the high priest representing the whole community) prompt more thorough cleaning. This explanation is simpler and fits the logic of purification just as well as postulating different levels or kinds of pollution. My point is not to claim that P thought of cleaning the Tabernacle one way rather than the other. Leviticus does not explain the spatial gradations of these rituals. My point is that two plausible, but very different, explanations for the gradations of space in Tabernacle sin offerings fit these rituals equally well. It is likely that both explanations, and probably others, occurred to ancient ritual participants. Rhetoric about the effectiveness of rituals does not usually emphasize the need for participants to understand them the same way, only that they conduct them properly to achieve the desired results. The interpretive need to settle on only one explanation for how the rituals work was instead produced by their textualization, and especially their scripturalization, rather than by the performance of the rituals themselves. People who participate in rituals tend to be most concerned with their proper performance and effects. It is readers who no longer perform these rituals who obsess over explanations for how they worked or were believed to work (see Introduction §2.3.6 in Leviticus 1-10; Watts 2007, 27-36, 180-83; Watts 2021b). 16:17 No one can be in the meeting tent when he enters it to mitigate in the sanctuary until he comes out of it. He must mitigate on his own behalf and on behalf of his house and on behalf of the whole congregation of Israel. The meaning of “no one” (‫ )כל־אדם לא־‬is comprehensive and typical of P’s style (see Exegesis to 1:2b), though only priests had access to any part of the meeting tent (Num. 4:5-15). Other priests could enter the tent’s outer room at other times to help tend the lamps, lay out the bread, and burn incense on the golden altar. On the Day of Mitigations, the high priest’s penetration

324

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

into the Holiest Space seems to have elevated the danger (v. 2) too much to allow assistants to accompany him (Milgrom 1035-36). It is not clear whether the second half of the verse, introduced by ‫וכפר‬ “and he mitigates,” refers to what precedes it or what follows it, or represents a separate series of ritual actions. Many read it as a summary purpose clause like v. 16, “so he must mitigate” (KJV; NRSV; Milgrom 1036). Others take it as a temporal clause: “when he has mitigated” (NJPS, Hartley). This ambiguity has prompted speculation that v. 17 is a later addition, since the surrounding verses refer to mitigating the Tabernacle (vv. 16, 20), not to mitigating for people (Nihan 2007, 360-61; Hieke 585). However, this is not the only verse in chap. 16 that mixes the objects of mitigation (cf. vv. 11, 15-16, 33), despite interpreters’ attempts to distinguish them. Translations do well to preserve the ambiguity (so Wenham, CEB, Hieke). ‫“ קהל‬congregation” is one of three terms that this chapter uses for the Israelites (also in v. 33; cf. ‫“ עדה‬community” in v. 5 and ‫“ עם‬people” in vv. 15, 24, 33). P most likely used different vocabulary to provide some literary variation in its many references to the Israelites in this chapter (see Exegesis to 4:13), just as Leviticus routinely varies many formulas when repeating them (see Exposition to Leviticus 4-5). 16:18 He must come out to the altar which is before YHWH and mitigate for it. He must take some of the bull’s blood and some of the goat’s blood and smear it on the horns of the altar all around. Because Aaron has moved from the courtyard altar (v. 11, 15a) to the innermost room of the Tabernacle (vv. 12-14, 15b), then to its outer room (v. 16b), he must now ‫“ יצא‬come out” to the altar in the courtyard, which is nevertheless still ‫“ לפני־יהוה‬before YHWH” (see on v. 12 above). Exodus 30:10 describes smearing the horns of the altar of spicy incense. That action seems to be presupposed obliquely in v. 16 (so Kiuchi 1987, 128; Gane 2005, 22728), but the ancient rabbis (m. Yoma 5:5; Sifra; followed by Rashi) concluded that this verse must describe the altar of spicy incense, in which case Aaron “comes out” from behind the veil into the Holy Space (also Levine 105; Meyers 1996, 42-43). However, vv. 20 and 33 confirm that the high priest moves outward through three spaces, “the Holy (Space) and the meeting tent and the altar,” which supports identifying the courtyard altar here, as Ibn Ezra and most commentators since have realized (Gilders 2019, 160-61). Aaron must use “some of the bull’s blood and some of the goat’s blood,” which shows that, at least at this point in the ritual, the sin offerings of the priests and of the people perform the same mitigating function on the altar. ‫“ נתן על־קרנות המזבח‬smear it on the horns of the altar” conforms to the vocabulary of chap. 4, where this phrase describes smearing the blood on

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

325

both the altar of spicy incense (4:7, 18) and the courtyard altar (4:25, 30, 34). However, the next word, ‫“ סביב‬all around,” usually describes splashing the blood of rising and commodity offerings, but not sin offerings, on the sides of the courtyard altar (1:5; 3:2; etc.). Leviticus 8:15 reproduces exactly this phrase about a sin offering to show that Moses fulfilled all his instructions when consecrating Aaron (see Exegesis there). Using “all around” to modify “smearing” blood on the horns may echo Moses’ action or may indicate a particularly thorough smearing (see Kiuchi 1987, 128-29). 16:19 He must sprinkle on it some of the blood seven times with his finger and purify it and consecrate it from the pollutions of the children of Israel. On ‫“ הזה‬he must sprinkle,” see v. 14 above and Exegesis to 4:6 and 5:9. While smearing blood on the altar horns (v. 18) is typical of quadruped sin offering rituals, sprinkling blood on the courtyard altar occurs otherwise only in bird sin offerings (5:9). But like the sin offering in the consecration ritual (8:15), this passage states that the altar is thereby purified and consecrated. Milgrom (1037-39) understood smearing to purify while sprinkling consecrates (so also Gilders 2004, 131; Hieke 586). He pointed to the consecration of priests as a parallel, when their ears, fingers and toes are smeared with blood (8:24) and their clothing is sprinkled with blood (8:30). However, neither Leviticus 8 nor Exodus 29 say that smearing purifies while sprinkling consecrates. This distinction depends on this verse only, where it is not explicitly clear. Instead of such intricate interpretations, it is easier to understand Leviticus 16 as describing the most thorough mitigations in all of Israel’s ritual experience (see on v. 16 above; also Kiuchi 1987, 128-29). In this context, sprinkling as well as smearing blood emphasizes an exceptionally thorough mitigation of the most frequently used ritual implement, the courtyard altar. The parallels with consecration rituals in Exodus 29 and Leviticus 8 underscore what this verse states explicitly, that these rituals re-consecrate the altar. By metonymic implication, the Day of Mitigations rituals also re-consecrate the Tabernacle and, perhaps, even its priests. Zevit (1995, 37) assumed that all of the blood is sprinkled in this sevenfold gesture, since nothing is said about pouring the rest on the altar base as in other sin offerings (4:7). He therefore argued that this chapter preserves early instructions before altars with bases (‫ )יסוד‬became common in Israel. But P’s regulations are not comprehensive and often presuppose knowledge of instructions given previously, and this chapter clearly does so (see above on v. 16). Listeners and readers would probably assume that the rest of the blood must be poured on the base, as did the ancient rabbis (m. Yoma 5:6).

326

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

‫“ וטהרו וקדשׁו מטמאת‬and purify it and consecrate it from the pollutions of ...” seems to equate purification with consecration. The two verbs appear in parallel also in Isa. 66:17, and ‫“ קדשׁ‬consecrate” is frequently used as a synonym for “purify” outside of P (e.g. Exod. 19:10, 14, 22; 1 Sam. 16:5; 1 Chr. 15:12; Job 1:5), but in P only here. Schwartz (2000) argued for two distinct roots of ‫ קדשׁ‬meaning “consecrate” and “purge” respectively, with this verse using the latter. However, the conceptual overlap between holiness and purity led Hundley (2011, 77-78) to suggest instead that they form a continuum represented by the verb, ‫קדשׁ‬. This is one more example of how the rhetoric of this climactic chapter of P’s ritual legislation brings together concepts that P elsewhere uses separately (so also in vv. 16, 21, 30, 34). As Hundley (2011, 78), put it, “we may forgive the priests for an occasional, and rhetorically meaningful, indiscretion, which communicates that every element is interconnected and contributes to the efficacy of the whole.” The mention here of only ‫“ טמאת‬pollutions” has encouraged interpreters from the Mishnah (m. Šebu. 1.6) and Sifra to Milgrom (1034) and Nihan (2007, 192) to distinguish the purifying effects of the butchered goat from the goat for Azazel that mitigates for Israel’s sins (vv. 22-23). However, v. 16 has already described the mitigating effects of the butchered goat’s blood for pollutions and transgressions, “that is, all their sins.” Therefore, this verse’s mention of “pollutions” only can be taken as an abbreviated reference to the whole list at the beginning of this paragraph. According to the explicit statements of vv. 10, 16 and 21, both goats mitigate for the community’s sins as well as their pollutions. 16:20 When he finishes mitigating the Holy (Space) and the meeting tent and the altar, he must present the living goat. ‫“ וכלה מכפר‬when he finishes mitigating” requires that the high priest deal with the goat for Azazel after finishing the blood rites of the sin offerings (vv. 11-19), but before burning those offerings (v. 25). Thus the goat for Azazel, which was paired with “the goat for YHWH” in vv. 5, 7-10, continues to be paired with it in vv. 15-22. Here, Aaron’s ritual action in ‫הקריב‬ “presenting” it in the Tabernacle is clearly parallel to the way he presented the goat (v. 9) whose blood he carried into the Holiest Space (contra Gane 2005, 242). However, the label “the goat for Azazel” does not reappear in vv. 20-22. Here it is simply called ‫“ השׂעיר החי‬the living goat” in contrast to the slaughtered goat. This verse summarizes the spatial organization of the sin offerings’ blood rites by naming the three parts of the Tabernacle complex in which they take place (also in vv. 16, 18, 33). Now the goat for Azazel ritual will add a new axis to the spatial dimensions of the Day of Mitigations rituals, when the

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

327

goat travels from one pole, the Tabernacle where Aaron presents it before YHWH (v. 10), to the other in the desert. 16:21 Aaron must press both of his hands on the living goat’s head and confess over it all the liabilities of the children of Israel and all their transgressions, that is, all their sins, and put them on the goat’s head. He must send it with a ready man to the desert. The high priest’s role in this ritual is quite different from his role in any other ritual described by P. He must press his hands on the goat’s head, confess Israel’s sins over it, and have someone else take it away to the desert. Hand pressing expresses ownership in other offering instructions (e.g. 1:4). This verse is unique among offering rituals in requiring that both hands be pressed on the head of an animal, a gesture that is otherwise used for transferring authority to human successors (Num. 27:18, 23; Deut. 34:9). PéterContesse therefore argued convincingly that this gesture belongs in the latter category as well, but in this case it transfers guilt (see further in Exegesis to 1:4; similarly Milgrom; Hieke). Gane (2005, 264-65) pointed to the requirement to press two hands on the head of blasphemers before executing them (Lev. 24:14) as evidence that Aaron’s confession is really an accusation against the demon Azazel for instigating wrong-doing. Though many ancient texts interpreted Azazel as a demon (see on v. 8 above), there is reason to suggest that the name and the desert location represent YHWH’s power and control (see on v. 22 below). Hittite elimination rituals could also require pressing hands on the heads of animals before releasing them. A healing ritual for King Mursili II’s aphasia stated: “A cow is adorned as a substitute, and the king presses his hand on it. Then it is sent way into the land of Kummabi” (Janowski-Wilhelm 1993, 144). This verse is more explicit, explaining that by hand pressing and confessing Israel’s sins, “he puts them on the goat’s head.” For ‫“ התודה‬he must confess,” see Exegesis to 5:5. For ‫“ עון‬liability,” see on 5:1. For ‫“ פשׁע‬transgression,” see on v. 16 above. The preposition ‫ ל‬makes “all their sins” a comprehensive category including “liabilities” and “crimes” (see above on v. 16). The high priest’s role is to represent the Israelites before YHWH in the Tabernacle (Exod. 28:9-12, 21, 29-30, 38). By confessing the people’s sins on the Day of Mitigations, he performs an illocutionary speech act.41 The high priest confessing their sins is tantamount to the Israelites confessing their sins. The people, of course, must participate by humbling themselves 41 Jay C. Hogewood, “The Speech Act of Confession: Priestly Performative Utterance in Leviticus 16 and Ezra 9-10,” in Seeking the Favor of God Vol. 1: The Origins of Penitential Prayer in Second Temple Judaism (ed. M. J. Boda et al.; Atlanta: SBL, 2006), 69-83.

328

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

(vv. 29, 31). Then, offences normally beyond the reach of cultic mitigation can be mitigated just like accidental offences (see Leviticus 1-10, 311-12, following Milgrom 373-78). If this interpretation is correct, then the high priest’s confession is key to this chapter’s claim that the rituals of the Day of Mitigations can mitigate for “all” of Israel’s sins and pollutions (vv. 16, 21, 30, 34). In listing the faults to be mitigated, along with “transgression” and “sin” this verse mentions ‫“ עון‬liability” where v. 16 mentioned ‫“ טמאה‬pollution.” Hundley (2011, 168) suggested that manipulating the blood of sin offerings completely eradicated pollutions, but the polluting effects of sin lingered and so had to also be banished. YHWH’s self-description in Exod. 34:7 declares this exact list of offences, ‫“ עון ופשׁע וחטאה‬liability and transgression and sin,” as potentially subject to God’s gracious forgiveness. The high priests’ words of confession in the midst of the Day of Mitigations offerings provide a ritual expression of this theology (Hieke 588). As usual, however, the priestly writers do not provide the words used in the liturgy (the sole exception is the priestly blessing in Num. 6:24-26). That is not because the priests conducted the rituals in silence, but because the priestly writers followed the genre conventions of SyroPalestinian ritual texts that reported ritual actions but not words (see further in Exegesis to 9:22). The Mishnah filled the gap by reporting the words that high priests used to recite before the Temple was destroyed (m. Yoma 6:2; quoted by Milgrom 1043 and Hieke 587). It added that the other priests and the people responded with bows and blessings upon hearing the high priest pronounce the divine name in the confession. ‫“ שׁלח ביד־אישׁ עתי המדברה‬he must send it with a ready man to the desert” contains the only occurrence of ‫“ עתי‬ready” in the HB. HAL suggested translating “timely” on the basis of the common root, ‫“ עת‬time,” so ‫אישׁ עתי‬ would refer to someone readily at hand, e.g. LXX ἀνθρώπου ἑτοίμου, Vg per hominem paratum, Milgrom “man in waiting” (similarly Hartley), Fox “man for the occasion,” Alter “man for the hour.” Others take “timely” to mean someone “designated” (NRSV, NIV, NJPS, CEB, Wenham, Kiuchi) or “fit” (KJV) to do the job. But Raymond Westbrook and Theodore J. Lewis suggested that ‫ אישׁ עתי‬designates a criminal, on the basis of Syriac ῾ett(ā᾿) “deceit, knavery, villainy, depravity.” They interpreted the final yod as a gentilic yod for a kind of people (Waltke-O’Conner §5.7c), and pointed to Hittite and Greek rituals that employ criminals to carry away pollution and sin from the community.42 Unlike these parallels, however, the goatherd is allowed to return to the camp after laundering and bathing (v. 26). Westbrook 42 Raymond Westbrook and Theodore J. Lewis, “Who Led the Scapegoat in Leviticus 16:21?” JBL 127 (2008), 417-22.

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

329

and Lewis explained this discrepancy as due to the ritual mitigating his sins as well, but the difference is more fundamental. In the Hittite and Greek rituals that they cite, the criminals carry away the pollutions and sins themselves, sometimes along with some goats. In this verse, the sins are confessed over the goat alone. The person who leads the goat is simply a “ready” goatherd, nothing more. (For a summary and evaluation of the various cultural parallels, see Exposition: History and Interpretation of the Goat for Azazel above.) Among the Hittites, pollutants expelled with living animals often constituted the left-over detritus from purification rituals. Is it possible that Israel’s ritual also regarded the goat for Azazel as carrying away left-over pollution after the other sin offerings were complete? Its ritual position supports such a meaning, but nothing in the HB indicates that the remains of a sin offering are polluting. Instead, its blood is sanctifying (8:15) and purifying (16:18) and its meat is sacred and eaten by priests (6:29, 22-23 Eng. 6:26, 29-30). When the remains of sin offerings must be disposed of outside the camp, they must be burned in a pure place (4:12). The priest does not load pollution onto the goat, but rather Israel’s sins, which Zatelli (1998, 262) regarded as an Israelite innovation on ancient Near Eastern traditions of using live animals to take away pollution. The living goat must be taken ‫“ מדברה‬to the desert,” rather than just “into the open field” like the living bird in the purification ritual for healed infestation (14:7). Domestic goats can be expected to return to town more readily than wild birds, so they must be taken further away. The Mishnah indicates that the goat was killed by being pushed off a cliff in the desert in order to ensure that it never returned (m. Yoma 6.6), but sources from the late Second Temple period reflect this verse’s account of its release alive (Philo, Laws 1.188c; Josephus, Ant. 3.241; see Begg 2012, 118). 16:22 The goat will carry upon itself all their liabilities to a cut-off land. He must send the goat into the desert. This verse can be interpreted as a symbolic interpretation of the ritual, something that P rarely provides. But rhetorically, it sounds like a refrain or response that repeats and abbreviates the major clauses of v. 21, like parallelism in Hebrew poetry. ‫ ונתן אתם על־ראשׁ השׂעיר‬... ‫את־כל־עונת‬ ‫ושׁלח ביד־אישׁ עתי המדברה‬ ‫ונשׂא השׂעיר עליו את־כל־עונתם‬ ‫ושׁלח את־השׂעיר במדבר‬

All the liabilities ... and put them on the goat’s head.      He must send it with ready man to the desert. The goat will carry upon itself all their liabilities ...      He must send the goat into the desert.

This parallelism casts light on the ambiguous relationship between the two clauses in v. 22 and those in v. 21. Most translations juxtapose the two

330

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

verses, but some indicate a causal (“since, because” NAB) or consequential (“thus” NJPS) connection to v. 21. Milgrom (1046) suggested that v. 22b functions as the protasis for v. 23, translating “when the goat is sent,” meaning the high priest must wait to proceed until being informed that the goat has reached the desert (so m. Yoma 6.8). However, v. 23 and the paragraph that follows emphasize reintegrating those who played a role in the special Day of Mitigations rituals, and give short shrift to the rest of the day’s rituals. The indefinite subject of the second clause of this verse, “he must send,” could be the goat’s guide, so Kiuchi (304) suggested that v. 21 depicts Aaron’s point of view, while v. 22 shows the perspective of the goatherd. However, the parallel with v. 21b indicates that Aaron is the subject of the second clauses of both verses. The parallelism between the two verses supports the decision of most translations to reproduce the ambiguous relationship between the Hebrew phrases. Its repetitiveness emphasizes how the goat carries Israel’s liabilities into the desert. This parallelism provides the rhetorical climax to the chapter’s focus on the special rituals of the Day of Mitigations. What follows in vv. 23-28 is clearly denouement. ‫“ נשׂא עון‬bear liability” can describe either sins’ consequences for wrongdoers (5:1, 17) or the removal of those consequences, as here (see Exegesis to 5:1). Gary Anderson (2009, 22) suggested that the goat carrying away the weight of Israel’s sin into the desert is a ritual enactment of this common metaphor. The phrase, ‫“ ארץ גזרה‬a cut-off land,” appears only here in the HB. It parallels ‫“ מדבר‬desert, wilderness,” which was already specified as the goat’s destination in vv. 10 and 21.The root ‫ גזר‬means “to separate, cut off,” which TgO interpreted as ‫“ ארץ לא יתבא‬an uninhabited land” and TgPsJ as ‫אחד‬ ‫“ צדיא‬a desolate place.” Hayim Tawil noted that the Targums reflect old Near Eastern traditions of exorcism, such as in this Akkadian text: O evil demon go forth to distant places O evil alu demon go unto the ruins Your post is a cut off (secluded) place (ašru parsu) A ruined desolated house is your home (CT 16, 29.94-100, translated by Tawil 1980, 55).

Many commentators think that this destination symbolizes chaos and the underworld: the goat carries Israel’s sins away to the place of ultimate disposal (Hartley 241; Milgrom 1021, 1045-46, 1072).43 Like this Akkadian text, however, the HB associates desolate spaces inhabited by demons with the abandoned ruins of human habitations (Isa. 34:9-15) more than with the ‫“ מדבר‬desert.” 43

Also Dominic Rudman, “A Note on the Azazel-Goat Ritual,” ZAW 116 (2004), 396-401.

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

331

Another problem with this interpretation is that, in the immediate literary context, Israel is itself in the desert (Exod. 19:1; Num. 1:1). There is nothing in Leviticus 16 that anticipates settlement in Canaan, in contrast to the purification ritual in 14:7 that releases a bird into “the open field” and the illegitimate goat offerings “in an open field” in 17:5. The overall story emphasizes the ambiguity of the desert as the location of both rescue and judgment, of revelation and of punishment. The desert of Sinai is the setting for making the covenant with YHWH and the revelation of Torah. Though this generation will die in the desert (Num. 14:29), epic poems characterize YHWH as “from Sinai” and “from Seir,” locations in the southern and eastern deserts (Deut. 33:2; Judg. 5:4; Pinker 2007, 22-25). Moses urged Pharaoh to send (‫ )שׁלח‬the Israelites into the desert (‫ ;במדבר‬Exod. 5:1, etc.) to worship YHWH there, the same verb and location used here for sending the Azazel goat away (Douglas 2003, 133). In the desert, Israel became YHWH’s people. Deuteronomy 32, in a context about dividing humans among the ‫“ אלהים‬gods” (v. 8), describes the desert context of Israel’s origins: For YHWH’s portion is his people, Jacob is his allotted share. He strengthened (SP) him in a desert land, in an empty howling steppe he protected him, he cared for him, he watched over him like the apple of his eye. ... YHWH alone led them, no strange god was with them. (Deut. 32:9-10, 12)

As the last clause emphasizes, the HB does not associate the desert with other gods or demons. Instead, the desert is a dangerous place, but it is also YHWH’s home and the place where Israel was constituted as YHWH’s people. The Tabernacle is, of course, also YHWH’s home. Therefore, the Day of Mitigations rituals use two goats, as Pinker (2007, 20) noted, “one for each of God’s possible abodes on earth.” A mitigation formula for the Azazel goat ritual does not appear here, but previously in v. 10, where it serves to draw a parallel between the goat for Azazel and Aaron’s bull sin offering (see above on vv. 3-10). Mitigation formulas summarize the unique ritual activities of Aaronide priests (see on 1:4; 16:30), which on the Day of Mitigations include the ritual transfer of the goat to Azazel, the “fierce god” who is YHWH (see on v. 8). Reintegration through Bathing and Completing the Offerings (16:23-28) These six verses instruct how to reintegrate into their normal spaces the personnel whom the extraordinary rituals of the Day of Mitigations have taken into extreme spaces. After finishing the sin offering blood rite in the Holiest Space and around the plaza altar (vv. 11-19) and after sending away the goat for Azazel (vv. 20-22), the high priest must change his clothes and wash himself before dealing with the rising offerings and the remainder of the sin offerings in the normal way (vv. 23-25). After leading the goat for

332

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

Azazel into the desert and after burning the carcasses of the other sin offerings outside the camp, the people responsible for these tasks must wash themselves and their clothes before re-entering the camp (vv. 26-28). The repetition of the phrase, “he must bathe his skin with water,” three times about three different people (vv. 24, 26, 28) emphasizes the importance of washing for reintegrating people into normal life after their extraordinary time in liminal space. Such reintegration rituals are typical of rites of passage (van Gennep 1909; Gorman 1990, 90-95). 16:23 Then Aaron must enter the meeting tent. He must take off the linen clothes that he put on to enter the Holy (Space), and leave them there. In order to bathe and change clothes, the high priest must ‫ אל־אהל מועד‬... ‫ובא‬ “enter the meeting tent,” which means returning to the outer room of the tent that he exited in v. 18. P elsewhere distinguishes this outer room as ‫“ הקדשׁ‬the Holy (Space)” from the innermost room, ‫“ קדשׁ הקדשׁים‬the Holiest (Space)” (Exod. 26:33-34; Lev. 6:23 Eng. 6:30), but this chapter uses ‫ הקדשׁ‬for the inner sanctum (vv. 2, 16, 23). That leaves no other term for the outer room other than the general ‫“ אהל מועד‬meeting tent” (so also v. 16). The idea that the priest would re-enter the Tabernacle to bathe and change clothes has struck interpreters since antiquity as unlikely. The Qumran Temple Scroll rearranged the sequence to depict the high priest as finishing the burnt and sin offerings at the courtyard altar (vv. 24b-25), then bathing his hands and feet before dealing with the goat for Azazel (11QT 26:5-13). The ancient rabbis repositioned the actions of v. 23 after v. 25 so that polluted clothes would not be left inside the Tabernacle, and maintained that the high priest bathed five different times on the Day of Mitigations (b. Yoma 32a, 71a; Rashi; Nachmanides; summarized by Milgrom 1046-48). Commentators have defended the present verse by suggesting that the clothes must be left inside because they are especially holy (v. 4; so Sforno; Milgrom 1048; Hartley 241). However, the rabbis’ objections were motivated mostly by the fact that the sequence of vv. 18-24 would have the high priest bathing naked inside the holy tent (Levine 107), whereas priests are required to wear underwear to avoid exposing themselves in the Tabernacle and even at the courtyard altar (Exod. 20:26; 28:42-43). Many interpreters have imagined temporary or permanent screens set up in the courtyard for the high priest’s bath (11QT 31-33; m. Yoma 3:3; Ibn Ezra; Levine 108; Hartley 242; Milgrom 1049). Levine therefore translated ‫“ ובא אהרן‬Aaron must enter” as “Aaron must approach.” However, vv. 23-24 state explicitly that the high priest both enters the meeting tent to bathe and change clothes and that he then leaves it: ‫ובא אהרן אל־אהל‬ ‫ולבשׂ את־בגדיו ויצא‬... ‫“ מועד‬Aaron must enter the meeting tent. ... Then he must put on his clothes and go out.” It fits these verses better to imagine a

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

333

screen set up inside the tent to avoid offending the divine presence when Aaron disrobes. On Aaron’s special clothes for the Day of Mitigations, see on v. 4 above. 16:24 He must bathe his body with water in a holy place. Then he must put on his clothes and go out. He must make his rising (offering) and the people’s rising (offering), and mitigate on his own behalf and on behalf of the people. ‫“ ורחץ את־בשׂרו במים‬he must bathe his body with water” is repeated in vv. 26 and 28, each time with a different implied subject: the high priest, the goatherd, and the person who incinerates the remainder of the sin offerings outside the camp. Why do the others have to launder their clothes, while Aaron just has to leave his clothes inside the Tabernacle? Perhaps because Aaron has no time to wash his clothes since he needs to officiate at the altar (and, anyway, someone else would launder a high priest’s clothes). Milgrom (1048) noted that only this verse requires a priest to bathe after officiating over offerings and only here is bathing his entire body required. However, washing hands and feet is required before making offerings (Exod. 30:18-21) and this bathing also immediately precedes the incineration of the rising offerings, which dilutes Milgrom’s observation. The deeper question is what the high priest must wash off at precisely this point in the day’s ceremonies. Usually, bathing one’s whole body removes pollution (see Exposition to Leviticus 13-14 and Leviticus 15), but nowhere does the HB suggest that priests are polluted by their mitigating activities (contra Feder 2011, 68-77). Some have suggested that the high priest must wash off holiness after being in the Holiest Space (Milgrom 1048; Hartley 242; Gerstenberger 223; Hieke 591). By contrast, Kiuchi (305) suggested that the high priest must in fact purify pollution because of his “movement from a higher degree of holiness to a lower degree of holiness.” Gorman (1990, 93-95) argued that both are true because Aaron contracted holiness in the inner sanctum and also touched sin by confessing over the goat for Azazel. The plausibility and compatibility of these suggestions is supported by the observation that moving between cosmological realms, in this case between levels of the divine realm, generates pollution in many cultures (see “Cosmology and Pollution” in Introduction to Leviticus 11-20 above, and Yoo-Watts 2021, 30-46, 77-93). However, like all the other rationales for why the rituals are performed in a certain way, commentators’ suggestions simply join the variety of interpretations that were probably already conceived in ancient Israel. The multivalence of rituals is one of their most persistent qualities, and Leviticus does very little to specify the meaning of its rituals’ details. Without a definite article, ‫“ במקום קדושׁ‬a holy place” can refer to any sanctified space in the Tabernacle complex (Ibn Ezra; see Exegesis to 10:4).

334

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

Here, inside the Tabernacle (see on v. 23), it must refer to the outer room containing the altar of spicy incense and the lamp stand. ‫“ בגדיו‬his clothes” must mean other clothes, since v. 23 requires him to leave behind the clothes he wore inside. Now he can resume wearing the high priest’s usual vestments, including his one-of-a-kind robe, skirt, and pouch (Exod. 28:4-39). 16:25 But he must still incinerate the fat of the sin (offering) at the altar. The disjunctive Hebrew syntax that places first the direct object, ‫ואת חלב חטאת‬ “the fat of the sin offering,” reflects the syntax of the instructions for the sin offerings in 4:8, 19, 26, 31, 35 (also 9:10 and 16:27). They do not specify who must remove the fat, only that the priest must burn it on the altar (see Exegesis to 4:7). This verse abbreviates this well-understood action, leaving the priest as the only subject in the sentence. Nevertheless, disjunctive syntax continues to mark the sentences of vv. 26-28 as well, all of which describe actions that need to happen as a consequence of the sin offering rituals. So a pattern inherited from the sin offering instructions in chap. 4 distinguishes the sound of this summary paragraph from the detailed descriptions that precede it of Aaron’s unique actions on the Day of Mitigations. The disjunctive syntax also opens the possibility of reading vv. 25-28 as not in chronological sequence with what precedes them, as 11QT in fact did (see on v. 23 above and Milgrom 1064). ‫“ החטאת‬the sin offering,” pointed singular by MT, must include both the bull sin offering for Aaron and his family (v. 11) and the goat sin offering for the community (v. 15), just as both goats are called “a sin offering” in v. 5. 16:26 The person who sent away the goat for Azazel must wash his clothes and must bathe his body with water. After that, he can re-enter the camp. This verse picks up after vv. 21-22. ‫“ יכבס בגדיו ורחץ את־בשׂרו במים‬wash his clothes and bathe his body with water” echoes a formula that is repeated ten times in chaps. 14-15 (see Exegesis to 15:10), only adding “his body” here and in v. 28 (also v. 24, except without the laundering requirement). This echo provides an aural inclusio that incorporates chap. 16 into the purification regulations of chaps. 11-15. Unlike people with bodily pollutions, however, the participants in the unique rituals of the Day of Mitigations are not required to wait until evening. This chapter’s parallel bathing requirements for the high priest, goatherd, and the person who burns the remainder of the sin offerings (vv. 24, 26, 28) have generated much discussion about their pollution’s sources and relative levels (Wright 1987, 18-20; Gorman 1990, 100-101; Milgrom 1050-52;

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

335

Gane 2005, 240, 279-80; Feder 2011, 68; Hieke 592-93). The observation that crossing between the divine and human cosmological realms generates pollution in many cultures (Yoo-Watts 2021, 30-46) provides a framework for understanding why this chapter singles out these three people for purification in the same way. All three carried parts of the sin offerings for the Day of Mitigations across cosmological boundaries: from the Tabernacle courtyard into the Holiest Space, out to the desert, and outside the camp (see further on v. 24 above). 16:27 The sin (offering) bull and the sin (offering) goat whose blood was brought to mitigate in the Holy (Space) must be taken outside the camp where their skin and their meat and their dung must be burned with fire. This verse repeats from 4:11-12, 21 the normal procedure for disposing of the carcass of sin offerings for the high priest and community. As in those verses, disjunctive syntax indicates an indefinite subject best translated with passive verbs (see Exegesis to 4:11-12). This chapter has not repeated but presupposed most of instructions for rising and sin offerings from chapters 1 and 4, but repeats this one because of the special purification requirements it imposes in v. 28 on the person who burns the carcasses of the sin offerings outside the camp. Rendtorff (2003, 257) found here an allusion to the disposal of Nadab and Abihu’s bodies in 10:4-5 and the debate over eating the sin offering in 10:16-20, thus providing an inclusio with 16:1 that explicitly cites the deaths of Aaron’s sons. Verse 34, however, provides a clearer inclusio (see below). ‫“ אשׁר הובא את־דמם לכפר הקדשׁ‬whose blood was brought to mitigate the Holy Space” repeats a phrase from 6:23 (Eng. 6:30) where ‫ הקדשׁ‬refers to the Tabernacle’s outer room, like in chap. 4, rather than the inner shrine as it does in this chapter (Milgrom 1052). Perhaps this chapter’s unusual use of this term derives from its dependence on the regular sin offering instructions of 4:1-21 to describe the unique rituals of the Day of Mitigations. ‫ בשׂר‬here must mean “meat, muscle” in contrast to ‫“ עור‬skin” as in other descriptions of animal carcasses (e.g. 4:11; 6:20 Eng. 6:27). But in vv. 24, 26, and 28 where ‫ בשׂר‬describes what people wash when they bathe themselves, it must be translated into English as “body” (cf. also Exegesis to 13:2). 16:28 The person who burned them must wash his clothes and must bathe his body with water. After that, he can re-enter the camp. Except for the first two words, the rest of v. 28 is identical with v. 26b, emphasizing the parallel regulations for personnel who handle the sin offerings of the Day of Mitigations.

336

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

Exhortations and Summaries (16:29-34) The chapter ends with exhortations to the people (vv. 29-31) and to the high priest (vv. 32-34a), followed by a narrative statement that he complied with these instructions (v. 34b). The exhortations to the people fall into an arch structure shaped by repeated thematic phrases (vv. 29, 31; see Wright in Milgrom 1057): ‫“ חקת עלם‬a permanent mandate” ‫“ תענו את־נפשׁתיכם‬you must humble yourselves” ‫“ וכל־מלאכה לא תעשׂו‬you must not do any work” ‫“ שׁבת שׁבתון היא לכם‬it must be a special sabbath for you” ‫“ ועניתם את־נפשׁתיכם‬and you must humble yourselves” ‫“ חקת עולם‬a permanent mandate”

This arch surrounds and emphasizes the summary statement at its centre (v. 30) that the Day of Mitigations rituals will purify “you” (pl) from all your sins (Hieke 594; an expanded version of this same thematic arch appears in 23:2732). With this exhortation, the chapter’s singular focus on the high priest’s ritual activity broadens into a devotional ritual practice for Israelites everywhere on this date. It lays the basis for continuing to observe the Day of Mitigations far from the Temple and after it ceased to function (Hieke 598). However, only priests can mitigate, so in its last three verses the chapter returns the focus to the unique status and responsibilities of the high priest, and concludes by asserting that Aaron complied with these instructions. 16:29 It will be a permanent mandate for you (pl): in the seventh month, on the tenth of the month, you must humble yourselves. You must not do any work, whether (you are) a native or an immigrant who has immigrated among you. In v. 2, God’s instructions about the Day of Mitigations were addressed to Moses to be repeated to Aaron, a uniquely private address for Leviticus. Now, the divine rhetoric turns to address its usual audience, the Israelites, who have been its intended recipients throughout the book (1:2; 4:2; 11:2; 12:2; 15:2). They are directly addressed by second person pronouns throughout chaps. 2 and 11, as well as in shorter exhortations scattered in other chapters. Contrary to the widespread claim that this change of address shows that vv. 29-34 were added later (e.g. Milgrom 1054; Nihan 2007, 347-48; see Exposition), it actually conforms this chapter to a style typical of some of the chapters and shorter passages throughout Leviticus 1-15. Other rules described as a ‫“ חקת עולם‬permanent mandate” include the prohibition on eating fat and blood (3:17), the grant of commodity offerings to the priests to eat (6:11 Eng. 6:18), the requirement that the high priest offer a perpetual commodity offering (6:15 Eng. 6:22), all the grants of

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

337

offering incomes to priests (7:34, 36), and the commission of priests as the Torah’s teachers and interpreters (10:9). “Throughout your generations” appears in all of these contexts (3:17, 6:11; 10:9; 7:36 has “their generations”) except here and in vv. 31 and 34. This verse for the first time specifies that the rituals described in chap. 16 must be performed annually (also v. 34) on the tenth day of the seventh month (also 23:27-32 where it is named for the first time, ‫“ יום הכפרים‬the Day of Mitigations”). This date presupposes P’s usual calendar, shared with many other HB books, that designates months by number beginning in the spring. The seventh month, then, would fall in September or October of the Gregorian calendar. Later Judaism celebrates the New Year (Rosh haShanah) on the first day of Tishri, the seventh month, because of 23:23-25 though that text does not call it the New Year. Leviticus 25:8-9 mandates that Jubilee Years start on the tenth of the seventh month, the Day of Mitigations. Yet both texts continue to count the months starting in the spring (for more about biblical calendars, see VanderKam, ABD 1:814-19, and Exposition to Leviticus 23). The requirement, ‫“ תענו את־נפשׁתיכם‬you must humble yourselves,” addresses all Israelites regardless of age or gender since ‫ נפשׁ‬regularly means “someone” or “anyone” in Leviticus (see Exegesis to 2:1). ‫ ענה‬II in the piel stem means “to oppress, afflict, humiliate” (HAL) and priestly texts use it reflexively also in Lev. 16:31, 23:27, 32, Num. 29:7, 30:14. The reflexive use is elsewhere associated with fasting (Isa. 58:3, 5; Ps. 35:13), but Milgrom (1054) denied that fasting is necessarily implied by the reflexive use of ‫ ענה‬since abstention from bathing and fine clothing are also mentioned in these texts. ‫ ענה‬in Exod. 19:15 and, perhaps, Num. 30:14 (Eng. 30:13) included sexual abstinence as well (Gane 2005, 312). Fasting on Yom Kippur has been traditional since late Second Temple times (Josephus, Ant. 3.240; m. Yoma 8:1; TgPsJ; Ibn Ezra), to the point that the day was also called “the (day of) the fast” (‫ יום צום‬in 1QpHab 11.7; ἡ νηστεία in Acts 27:9) or “the day of self-humbling” (‫ יום התענית‬in CD 6.18-19). Samaritans observe Yom Kippur as their only annual fast (Zsengellér 2012, 151). The end of the verse inverts normal word order for emphasis. It starts with the direct object “any work,” then the second person command “you must not do,” before defining who is included in “you” – “whether a native or an immigrant.” The absolute prohibition of ‫“ כל־מלאכה‬any work” applies only to weekly sabbaths (Exod. 20:9-10; Lev. 23:3; Deut. 5:13-14) and the Day of Mitigations (23:28; Num. 29:7). Festival regulations prohibit the less-restrictive ‫“ כל־מלאכת עבדה‬any service work” or “any laborious work” (23:7, 8, etc.; Num. 28:18, 25, etc.; Milgrom 1054-55). ‫“ אזרח‬native” appears mostly in legislative contexts like this one in parallel with ‫“ גר‬immigrant” to define the scope of this rule as including

338

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

both (Exod. 12:49; Lev. 17:15; 18:26; 19:34; 24:16, 22; Num. 15:29-30; Ezek. 47:22; cf. Josh. 8:33). For translating ‫ גר‬as “immigrant,” see Exegesis to 17:8 below. The Decalogue’s command to observe weekly sabbaths also includes immigrants (Exod. 20:10; Deut. 5:14), though P’s previous sabbath commands do not, but focus on Israel’s identity instead (Exod. 31:13-17; 35:2-3; see further on v. 31 below). Ibn Ezra thought that this verse requires immigrants to observe only the prohibition on working, but they are not required to humble themselves. Milgrom (1055-56) justified this opinion in dialogue with rabbinic sources through an elaborate analysis of the different effects of positive and prohibitive commandments. However, the effect of this paragraph’s rhetoric on listening audiences and most readers is unlikely to lead to such scholastic distinctions, but rather to hearing immigrants included among those addressed throughout vv. 29-31 (so Wenham). Mark G. Brett suggested that this equation of natives and immigrants was added to counter Nehemiah’s more exclusive policies.44 16:30 For on this day mitigation will purify you (pl) from all your sins, so that you will be pure before YHWH. This sentence justifies abstention from work and humbling oneself on this day (vv. 29, 31), because this should be one’s attitude while the high priest is confessing “all your sins” and mitigating with the community’s sin offering goats (vv. 5, 7-10, 15-22). This verse explicitly connects the priest’s hidden ritual activities inside the Tabernacle to the spiritual condition of all Israelites and immigrants wherever they may be. The Mishnah remembered this verse as concluding the high priest’s verbal confessions three different times during the Yom Kippur rituals (m. Yoma 3.8, 4.2, 6.2). The phrase, ‫“ יכפר עליכם לטהר אתכם מכל חטאתיכם‬mitigation will purify you (pl) from all your sins,” is surprising for several reasons. The verse contains no subject for ‫“ יכפר‬he will mitigate.” In Leviticus, ‫“ כפר‬mitigate” always takes priests as its subject if a subject is stated at all, since mitigation always takes place through priestly mediation (see Leviticus 1-10, 311-316, 344-346; contra Milgrom 1056 who denied that the priest is the subject here). BHS, following Pesh and Vg, suggested that the verb should be pointed passive, but BHQ judged that reading to be an interpretive gloss. I paraphrase MT ‫יכפר עליכם לטהר אתכם‬, which is literally “he will mitigate for you to purify you,” as “mitigation will purify you” to convey in English that the 44 Mark G. Brett, “Natives and Immigrants in the Social Imagination of the Holiness School,” in Imagining the Other and Constructing Israelite Identity in the Early Second Temple Period (ed. E. Ben Zvi and D. B. Edelman; LHB/OTS London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 99-100.

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

339

priestly subject remains mostly implicit here. This passage focuses first on the Israelites and so delays mentioning the high priest overtly until v. 32. The claim that “mitigation ... will purify ... sins” is also unusual. In chaps. 4-5, ritual mitigation leads to forgiveness of sins, while in chaps. 12-15, ritual mitigation leads to purification of pollutions. Unlike chaps. 4-5, neither Leviticus 16 nor other HB references to the Day of Mitigations (Lev. 23:2632; Num. 29:7-11) mention forgiveness. That led Roy Gane (2005, 233-35) to argue that only normal sin and guilt offerings offer forgiveness (Lev. 4-5) while the rituals of the Day of Mitigations provide only purification (also Kiuchi 308). The phrase, “purify you from all your sins,” however, combines the mitigation formulas from chaps. 4-5 that result in forgiveness from sins and those from chaps. 12-15 that result in purifying pollution. The Qumran Temple Scroll recognized the link by making forgiveness the explicit outcome of the Day of Mitigations rituals (11QT 26.10, 27.2; Gilders 2012, 68). This chapter’s emphasis on confession, mitigation, and purification of sins (16:16, 21, 30, 34) vindicates a long tradition of interpreting these rituals as setting the stage for divine forgiveness (besides 11QT, also m. Yoma 8:8-9; t. Yoma 86a; Levine 100; Hieke 595-96). This verse personalizes the mitigation formula with direct second person address to produce, literally, “he will mitigate you to purify you from all your sins.” The triple repetition of second person plural pronouns emphatically connects temple rituals to every Israelite. The phrase also makes the special rituals for the Day of Mitigations sound like a natural culmination of regular sin and guilt offerings throughout the year. But the phrase, ‫“ כל חטאתיכם‬all your sins” (see also vv. 20-22), actually claims much broader efficacy for the Day of Mitigations ritual than did the instructions for sin and guilt offerings in chaps. 4-5 that emphasize unintentional offences (5:1-5, 20-26). And the claim that offerings can purify people from their sins never appears in chaps. 11-15 (see Morality and Pollution in Introduction to Leviticus 11-20). Here priestly rhetoric makes its most sweeping claims by combining priestly mitigation on behalf of all of Israel’s offences together with the people’s own ritual practices on the same day (vv. 29, 31). The rhetoric is, as Hundley (2011, 170) noted, both imprecise and purposeful. The history of its interpretation (see Exposition) shows that it has also been very powerful. 16:31 It must be a very strict sabbath for you, and you must humble yourselves. (This is) a permanent mandate. For the history and meaning of ‫“ שׁבת‬sabbath,” see Exegesis to 23:3 and Hieke (894-95). The phrase, ‫“ שׁבת שׁבתון‬a very strict sabbath,” can designate particular days (Exod. 31:15; 35:2; Lev. 23:3, 32; cf. ‫ שׁבתון‬by itself in Exod. 16:23; Lev. 23:24, 39) and also whole years (Lev. 25:4, 5). The form,

340

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

‫שׁבתון‬, has been understood as an amplification of ‫“ שׁבת‬rest, sabbath” into “sabbath of complete rest” (so KBL, NRSV, NJPS, Wenham, Hartley; Fox “Sabbath of Sabbath-Ceasing”; Alter “sabbath of sabbaths”). But current dictionaries prefer instead to understand ‫“ שׁבתון‬as signifying one individual and particular ‫שׁבת‬, such as one that is to be observed in a particularly strict way, or one observed as a special celebration” (HAL on the basis of the Akk. suffix -ān, -ānum; also DCH, CEB). In that case, the emphatic double form, ‫שׁבת שׁבתון‬, indicates very strict observance of the command to avoid doing any work (v. 29). Since ‫ שׁבת‬has long since been transliterated as an English word, “sabbath,” the emphatic phrase ‫ שׁבת שׁבתון‬can be rendered as “a very strict sabbath.” The use of ‫ שׁבתון‬for special days and years indicates that the basic meaning of ‫ שׁבת‬was “day of rest, holiday.” It only secondarily came to refer to the seventh day of the week (Ernst Haag, “‫שׁבת‬,” TWAT 7:1047-57 = TDOT 14:381-86). For “you must humble yourselves,” see above on v. 29. It is not clear whether the phrase, ‫“ חקת עולם‬permanent mandate,” applies to what precedes it, what follows it, or both (see Exegesis to 6:11 for the same problem there). The phrase appears here three times in close proximity to provide a bracket around vv. 29-31 and to introduce v. 34. This verse, except for the last phrase, is repeated verbatim in 23:32 (for the two verses displayed in parallel, see Nihan 2007, 348). 16:32 The priest must mitigate who has been anointed and whose hand has been filled to serve as priest after his father, and he must wear the linen clothes, the holy clothes. As if to compensate for leaving mitigation without a subject in v. 30, this verse explicitly describes the identity of the priestly mitigator in terms of his ordination, his ancestry, and the holy clothing that he wears to conduct the special rituals on the Day of Mitigations. Unlike the rest of chap. 16, which has focused on Aaron and his family relationships (see on vv. 1-2 above), this verse focuses on his successors. In MT of this verse, the verbs ‫“ ימשׁח‬anoint” and ‫“ ימלא‬fill” are active and take the high priest as direct object, but leave the subject unspecified. Pesh, Vg, and most modern translations translate with passive verbs. Moses anointed Aaron at his ordination (8:12), but even there the subject of ‫ימלא‬ was left indefinite (8:33). Indefinite subjects in Hebrew ritual texts are best rendered with passive verbs in English (see on v. 27 above). On the ordination formula, ‫“ ימלא את־ידו‬whose hand has been filled,” see Exegesis to 8:33. Characterizations of the high priest in chaps. 4-6 focused on his anointing, ‫“ הכהן המשׁיח‬the anointed priest” (4:3, 5, 16; 6:15; see Exegesis to 4:3). This broader description in terms of anointing, “filling his hand,” and vestments

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

341

reappears in 21:10, but draws on the instructions and descriptions for his ordination in Exodus 28 and Leviticus 8. It therefore cannot be used to distinguish H’s hand here (contra Milgrom 1058). On the infinitive verb, ‫“ לכהן‬to serve as priest,” see Exegesis to 7:35. ‫“ לכהן תחת אביו‬to serve as priest after his father” is one of the clearest statements in the HB of a principle of dynastic succession to the high priesthood (though cf. Exod. 29:29; Num. 25:11-13). Aaron was succeeded by his son, Eleazar (Num. 20:25-28), and his grandson, Phineas (Judg. 20:28), but the HB does not trace the high priestly line further. Modern scholarship has tried to fill in this gap with reconstructions of rival priestly houses (see in Exposition: Excursus on Priestly Lineages in History and Rhetoric above). In the Second Temple period, two Aaronide dynasties used their control of the high priesthood to make themselves leaders of the Jewish polity (VanderKam 2004, 84-85). The descendents of Joshua ben Jehozadak, who oversaw the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple after the exile (Ezra 5:2), seem to have succeeded him to the high priesthood in unbroken succession from 515 to 172 B.C.E. After the Maccabean Revolt, this Oniad family was replaced by the Hasmoneans, another family of Aaronide priests. Sometimes one Oniad or Hasmonean brother succeeded another to the high priesthood (see VanderKam 2004, 203, 281, 285). But each was the son of a high priest, as this verse requires. The Romans and their client rulers broke the principle of dynastic succession by replacing Jewish high priests at will with others from different Aaronide families. This verse’s assertion of the principle of dynastic succession to the high priesthood is further evidence that P’s rhetoric belongs to the early Second Temple period (see Introduction §3.5 in Leviticus 1-10). It is not surprising that this claim to dynastic succession should appear in Leviticus 16, which emphasizes the high priest’s unique responsibility to mitigate the sanctuary on behalf of every Israelite. For ‫“ בגדי הבד בגדי הקדשׁ‬the linen clothes, the holy clothes,” see on v. 4 above. 16:33 He must mitigate the sanctuary of the Holy (Space) and the meeting tent and the altar he must mitigate for the priests and for all the people of the congregation he must mitigate. This verse succinctly summarizes the overlapping categories by which chap. 16 has arranged the high priest’s mitigating activities on the Day of Mitigations by the three demarcated ritual spaces in which they take place – the Tabernacle’s inner sanctum (vv. 11-16a), its outer room (indicated in this chapter by “the meeting tent,” v. 16b), and the courtyard altar (vv. 1819) – and by the two social classes which they serve, the priests (vv. 3, 6, 11-14) and the people (vv. 5, 7-10, 15-22).

342

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

The verse uses the verb ‫“ כפר‬mitigate” three times at its beginning, middle, and end. The second occurrence appears between the two kinds of objects of mitigation: spaces and people. ‫“ וכפר‬he must mitigate” ‫“ את־מקדשׁ הקדשׁ‬the sanctuary of the Holy Space” ‫“ ואת־אהל מעד‬and the meeting tent” ‫“ ואת־המזבח‬and the altar” ‫“ יכפר‬he must mitigate” ‫(“ )ו(על הכהנים‬and) for the priests” ‫“ ועל־כל־עם הקהל‬and for all the people of the congregation” ‫“ יכפר‬he must mitigate”

This triple use of the verb complicates translation, which must decide which phrases are governed by which occurrence of ‫“ כפר‬mitigate.” MT’s accentuation makes “the sanctuary of the Holy Space” the object of the first verb, while the second governs the meeting tent and altar, and the third applies to the priests and the people (so NRSV). Many MT manuscripts reinforce this division by recording a vav to separate the preceding verb from ‫על הכהנים‬ “the priests.” That conjunction is missing in a few LXX manuscripts, in most SP manuscripts (SPCEM), and in manuscripts of the ben Naphtali tradition (BHS). This is a plausible reading since Leviticus uses similar syntax elsewhere: the lists of animal fats to be incinerated for commodity and sin offerings start and end with transitive verbs (see Exegesis to 3:3-4; this list is repeated five times verbatim, but on the sixth occurrence without any verbs at all, see Exegesis to 9:19). Here in 16:33, the same transitive verb, ‫כפר‬, brackets the list at each end and also in the middle to distinguish two different kinds of objects of mitigation. The Hebrew makes good sense and is reproduced by my translation, even though it makes for clumsy English. The phrase, ‫“ מקדשׁ הקדשׁ‬sanctuary of the Holy Space,” occurs only here in the HB. The hierarchy of three Tabernacle spaces described by this verse matches that of this chapter and of other P texts. So the phrase clearly refers to the innermost room of the Tabernacle, which is called ‫“ קדשׁ הקדשׁים‬the Holiest Space” in Exod. 26:33-34, but in this chapter simply ‫“ הקדשׁ‬the Holy Space” (see above on vv. 2, 27). The HB uses ‫“ מקדשׁ‬sanctuary” frequently for holy spaces, and P applies it to the Tabernacle precincts including the tent and its courtyard (Exod. 25:8; Lev. 12:4; Milgrom 754-55). The combination of the terms ‫ הקדשׁ‬and ‫ מקדשׁ‬here has defied explanation, which led some to suggest repointing the term as ‫“ ִמ ְק ֵדּשׁ‬holiest (part) of” (DCH). The phrase, ‫“ מקדשׁ הקדשׁ‬sanctuary of the Holy Space,” is more likely an attempt to emphasize the rhetorical climax of this chapter

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

343

by duplicating nearly synonymous terms, which is a very common rhetorical device (Rhet. Her. 4.28.38; Quintilian, Inst. 8.4.3, 8.4.26-27).45 Another combination of nearly synonymous terms for emphasis appears in ‫“ עם הקהל‬people of the congregation,” which juxtaposes two of the three terms that this chapter uses for the Israelites (see above on v. 17; on the meaning of ‫“ קחל‬congregation,” see Exegesis to 4:13). The fact that these two redundant phrases, “sanctuary of the Holy Space” and “people of the congregation,” appear parallel to each other in the structure of the verse confirms the rhetorical emphasis conveyed by using near synonyms in both cases. 16:34 This will be a permanent mandate for you (pl): to mitigate the Israelites from all their sins once a year. He did just as YHWH commanded Moses. The first part of this verse echoes v. 29 almost exactly, which probably accounts for using ‫“ לכם‬for you (pl)” in a verse otherwise about the high priest. Rhetorically, it preserves the address of vv. 29, 31 to the whole congregation, though the high priest alone has the responsibility to mitigate on the Day of Mitigations. Naming “the Israelites” as the object of mitigation also suggests that the address has shifted to the high priest, who must be the subject of the last sentence despite the second plural pronoun at the beginning of this verse. Of course, the rhetorical impact of including the high priest and the people in the mandate to observe the Day of Mitigations works very well as a conclusion and summary of this chapter, whose stipulations have addressed and engaged both. The declaration of a ‫“ חקת עולם‬permanent mandate” here introduces the contents of that mandate with an infinitive construct, ‫“ לכפר‬to mitigate,” just like the summary of priestly responsibilities in 10:10 (see Exegesis there). The formula, “he did just as YHWH commanded Moses,” provides the only narrative action in the chapter (marked by changing to a consecutive imperfect verb, ‫“ ויעשׂ‬and he did”). It echoes the compliance formula that dominates the stories of chaps. 8-10 (see Leviticus 1-10, 430-35), and so provides an inclusio with v. 1 that explicitly evokes chap. 10. These connections show clearly that the third person masculine pronoun, “he,” refers to Aaron, to whom YHWH directed Moses to speak in v. 2. The larger narrative, however, would not have permitted Aaron to implement these instructions immediately. According to the story of Israel at 45 See Gideon O. Burton, “Synonymia” and “Congeries” in Silva Rhetoricae at http:// rhetoric.byu.edu.

344

Leviticus 16 Exegesis

Mount Sinai, the Tabernacle was erected on the first day of the first month (Exod. 40:17) and the Israelites departed Sinai on the twentieth day of the second month of that year (Num. 10:11). The ritual instructions of God “from the meeting tent” (Lev. 1:1) are placed between these events, implicitly spoken during this month when the Israelites were camped around the Tabernacle at Mount Sinai. But v. 29 insists that the Day of Mitigations must be observed later, on the tenth day of the seventh month, long after the Israelites left Mount Sinai. Perhaps that is why LXX changed the syntax so that the second half of the verse no longer asserts Aaron’s compliance, but continues the divine command: ἅπαξ τοῦ ἐνιαυτοῦ ποιηθήσεται “it must be done once a year” (Wevers 259).

LEVITICUS 17:1-16

PROHIBITIONS ON MISUSING BLOOD

1 2 3 4

5

6 7

8

9 10

11

12

13

YHWH spoke to Moses: Speak to Aaron and to his sons and to all the children of Israel and say to them: This is what YHWH commanded: Anyone from the house of Israel who slaughters an ox or a sheep or a goat in the camp or who slaughters outside the camp and does not bring (it) to the entrance of the meeting tent to present as a present for YHWH before YHWH’s Tabernacle, blood will be credited to that one: they (ms) have poured out blood and that one will be cut off from their people. So that the children of Israel will bring their slaughter (offerings) which they slaughter in the open field and bring them for YHWH to the priest at the entrance of the meeting tent, they must slaughter them as amity slaughter (offerings) for YHWH. The priest must splash the blood on YHWH’s altar in the entrance of the meeting tent and incinerate the fat for a soothing scent for YHWH. They must not slaughter any more their slaughter (offerings) to billy goats whom they lust for. This will be a permanent mandate for them throughout their generations. Say to them: Anyone from the house of Israel or any immigrant who has immigrated among you (pl) who raises a rising (offering) or a slaughter (offering) and does not bring it to the entrance of the meeting tent to make it for YHWH, that one will be cut off from their (ms) people. Anyone from the house of Israel or any immigrant who has immigrated among you (pl) who eats any blood, I will face the person who eats blood and I will cut them (ms) off from their people, because the meat’s personal energy is in the blood. I myself put it on the altar for you (pl) to mitigate for your personal energy, because it is the blood that mitigates by means of personal energy. Therefore, I say to the children of Israel: No person among you (pl) may eat blood nor may the immigrant who has immigrated among you eat blood. Anyone from the children of Israel or from the immigrants who have immigrated among you (pl) who hunts living game or flyers for food must pour out its blood and cover it with dirt,

346 14

15

16

Leviticus 17 Essentials because every meat’s personal energy is its blood. I said to the children of Israel: You (pl) must not eat any meat’s blood, because every meat’s personal energy is its blood. Anyone who eats it will be cut off. Every person whether native or immigrant who eats a carcass or mauled prey must wash their (ms) clothes, bathe in water, and be polluted until evening. Then they will be pure. If they (ms) do not wash and bathe their body, they bear their liability.

ESSENTIALS Contents Leviticus 17 is thematically unified by the prohibition of eating blood that appears at its centre (vv. 10-12). God requires Israelites and immigrants in Israel to drain the blood from animal offerings and food to avoid consuming blood with the meat. YHWH emphasizes four times how serious this issue is by threatening vaguely but ominously to “cut off” offenders (vv. 4, 9, 10, 14). The chapter begins by requiring that Israel’s amity slaughter offerings, those that worshippers may partly eat, be offered only by priests at the Tabernacle altar (vv. 3-7). This paragraph is widely misunderstood as requiring that all domesticated animals must be slaughtered at the Tabernacle, thus prohibiting secular slaughter elsewhere for meat. This interpretation is ruled out, however, by close attention to Leviticus’s offering rules for these animals, together with the recent discovery that Israelites trapped wild birds for food and offerings rather than domesticated ones. Leviticus 17:3-7 does not ban secular slaughter for meat. It only prohibits making amity slaughter offerings outside the sanctuary. The second paragraph (vv. 8-9) adds rising offerings to the prohibition on making offerings outside the sanctuary. Some interpreters understand this to mean that all animal offerings must be presented in the Tabernacle, but priestly writers elsewhere require priests to conduct ritual slaughter outside the camp (Lev. 14:4-7; Num. 19:2-6). This chapter focuses on the ritual behaviour of lay worshippers rather than priests. It requires lay Israelites and immigrant worshippers to present their offerings only in the Tabernacle. The third paragraph explains the reasons for the blood prohibition (vv. 10-12). It repeats common Israelite wisdom that “the meat’s personal energy is in the blood.” Then it explains that the blood of offerings on the altar mitigates for worshippers’ sins and pollutions. This paragraph plays on the various meanings of “person” and “personal energy” to emphasize what animals and humans have in common.

Leviticus 17 Essentials

347

The fourth paragraph (vv. 13-14) allows hunters to kill and eat game so long as they pour the blood on the ground and cover it. Its mention of eating trapped birds which may, but need not, be presented as offerings (1:14; 5:7; 12:8) implies that other offering animals may also be slaughtered for food without serving as offerings. The last paragraph (vv. 15-16) mandates basic purification procedures – bathing, laundering, and waiting until evening – for people who eat animals that die of natural causes, because their carcasses contain congealed blood. These verses explain how to purify oneself if one breaks the rule against eating blood. Contexts The blood prohibition first appears early in Genesis in the story of Noah after the flood. There God gave permission for humans to eat meat so long as they drain the blood first (Gen. 9:3-4) even though, according to P, God had originally provided only vegetarian foods (Gen. 1:29-30). The blood prohibition has been stated twice already in Leviticus (3:17; 7:26-27) and will be again (19:26). It also appears in Deuteronomy using very similar language to its phrasing here (Deut. 12:16, 23; 15:23). These seven repetitions in the Pentateuch emphasize the importance of not eating blood for Israel’s culture and religion. The urgency of this issue is also reflected in the story of King Saul’s improvised arrangements to drain blood from slaughtered animals to feed his soldiers on the battlefield (1 Sam. 14:32-35). The blood prohibition is the most basic and universal of the diet rules (others appear in Lev. 11) that became expressions of Jewish identity in the Second Temple and later periods. Eating blood was then, in Jewish perspective, a characteristic sin of gentiles (non-Jews) that causes their pollution. This blood prohibition became a major topic of early Christian debate, because Jesus said that all food is pure (Mark 7:19). The Christian apostles relieved gentile converts from observing many Torah rules, but continued to require them to avoid blood and meat that is strangled (Acts 15:29). The ancient Jewish rabbis did not give the blood prohibition as much attention as other diet laws, perhaps because it was not as distinctive in comparison to Christian practices. By the Middle Ages, however, most Christian cultures were no longer observing the blood prohibition. This break with clear mandates in both HB and NT has prompted minority Christian communities to embrace the blood prohibition again to distinguish themselves as more biblical than other denominations and sects. Verse 11’s identification of the mitigating (atoning) power of blood as personal energy, more usually translated “life,” has wielded tremendous influence over Christian theologies of atonement. The NT book of Hebrews,

348

Leviticus 17 Essentials

like the Talmud, concluded that forgiveness requires bloodshed (Heb. 9:22). Early Christians embraced this explanation that Jesus’s death on a cross was necessary because it served as a sacrifice in Christ’s blood to atone for human sins (Matt. 26:28). This observation became the theological basis for the central story of the Christian faith from the end of the first century up to and including much modern Christian preaching. Rhetoric The persuasive intent of Leviticus 17 is quite overt: to discourage people from eating blood in meat. YHWH here speaks not only through Moses (vv. 1-2, 8) but also directly to the Israelite audience (vv. 12, 14), and personally threatens to cut them off if they disobey (v. 10; similarly vv. 4, 9, 14). That said, the chapter concludes by mandating relatively mild purification rituals for those who eat carrion and, by implication, blood in other meat (vv. 15-16). The chapter’s rhetoric thus presents the blood prohibition as a vital concern while nevertheless prescribing simple rectification rituals when blood is eaten. This pattern conforms to Leviticus’s previous rhetoric about common pollutions and their purification. Like other diet rules and the purification procedures after sex, menstruation, and giving birth (chaps. 11-12, 15), the prohibition on eating blood extends priestly regulations into Israelites’ private lives. It also encourages them to bring amity slaughter offerings to the sanctuary (vv. 3-7), where the priests dispose of the blood properly and take their cut before returning the rest of the meat for the worshippers to eat. Later interpreters have been more interested in this chapter’s explanations for the blood prohibition than in its rhetoric about observing the prohibition. Its statement that the animal’s “personal energy,” often translated “life” or “soul,” is in its blood (v. 11a) has generated much speculation about animal and human nature. Its observation that animal blood “mitigates on the altar” (v. 11b-c) laid the basis for theories of how sacrifice works. It especially encouraged Christian speculation about how Christ’s death on a cross achieved atonement for believers. This chapter’s rationales for the blood prohibition became in subsequent interpretation a basis for explanations of human nature, of worship, of sacrificial substitution, and of divine grace. The Hebrew word ‫נפשׁ‬, traditionally translated “life” or “soul,” appears five times in vv. 10-12 to describe both humans and an attribute of blood in animal meat. To convey this word play in English that most versions obscure, I translate “persons” and “personal energy” (see Exegesis to v. 11). This wordplay highlights the fact that the whole discussion of eating blood in meat focuses attention on features that people and animals share. By eating meat, human bodies both utilize and imitate some animal bodies. The diet rules of chap. 11 already trained listeners and readers to draw distinctions among

Leviticus 17 Exposition

349

animals species rather than lumping them together as simply inhuman. Now they are exhorted to recognize and acknowledge by draining the blood what they have in common with the animals they eat. Atonement theology has attached meanings to Lev. 17:11 that will continue to accompany this text for the foreseeable future. As I have stated many times in these pages, texts mean what readers say they mean (see Introduction §3 in Leviticus 1-10). My argument that translating “person/personal energy” makes better sense of the form of vv. 10-12 does not deny such dominant traditions of interpretation. But like every other interpreter, I take my turn trying to provide persuasive interpretations for my readers. If my arguments in this case prove convincing, they open up other possibilities within Jewish and Christian scriptures for conceiving how the bodies and eating habits of animals and humans connect and intersect, which might lead to a wider variety of theological analogies as well.

EXPOSITION Additional Bibliography: ACHENBACH, REINHARD. “gêr – nåkhri – tôshav – zâr: Legal and Sacral Distinctions regarding Foreigners in the Pentateuch.” In Achenbach-Albertz-Wöhrle (2011), 29-51. ALBERTZ, RAINER. “From Aliens to Proselytes: Non-Priestly and Priestly Legislation Concerning Strangers.” In Achenbach-Albertz-Wöhrle (2011), 53-69. ARNOLD, MATTHIEU, GILBERT DAHAN, and ANNIE NOBLESSE-ROCHER. Lévitique 17, 10-12: Le sang et la vie. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2017. BRITT, BRIAN and PATRICK CREEHAN. “Chiasmus in Leviticus 16,29-17,11.” ZAW 112 (2000), 398-400. BYNUM, CAROLINE WALKER. Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. DAVIS, ELLEN F. “Identity and Eating: A Christian Reading of Leviticus.” Studies in Christian Ethics 30 (2017), 3-14. DULAEY, MARTINE. “Lévitique 17, 10-12: Chez les auteurs chrétiens des premiers siècles.” In Matthieu-Dahan-Noblesse-Rocher (2017), 33-75. HANNEKEN, TODD R. “The Sin of the Gentiles: The Prohibition of Eating Blood in the Book of Jubilees.” JSJ 46 (2015), 1-27. MARX, ALFRED. “Lévitique 17, 10-12: Un court text aux enjeux théologiques majeurs.” In Arnold-Dahan-NoblesseRocher (2017), 15-31. NAIWELD, RON. “Se distinguer par le sang: Lévitique 17, 10-12 dans les sources rabbinique classiques.” In Arnold-Dahan-Noblesse-Rocher (2017), 77-103. NIHAN, CHRISTOPHE. “Resident Aliens and Natives in the Holiness Legislation.” In Achenbach-Albertz-Wöhrle (2011b), 111-34. NOBLESSE-ROCHER, ANNIE. “Violence et rédemption: Lévitique 17, 10-12 dans quelques commentaires médiévaux.” In Arnold-Dahan-Noblesse-Rocher (2017), 105-121. RENDTORFF, ROLF. “Another Prolegomena to Leviticus 17:11.” In Wright-Freedman-Hurwitz (1995), 23-28. RHYDER, JULIA. “Ritual Text and Ritual Practice: Some Remarks on ExtraSanctuary Slaughter in Leviticus.” In Rites aux Portes. Ed. P. M. Michel. Bern: Peter Lang, 2018. 13-21. ROTHSTEIN, DAVID. “Leviticus 17,3-4, Deuteronomy 12,20-21: Exegesis and Intertextuality as Reflected in the Ancient Witnesses and Second Temple Sources.” SJOT 24 (2010), 193-207. SANTING, CATRIEN. “ ‘For the Life of a

350

Leviticus 17 Exposition

Creature is in the Blood’ (Leviticus 17:11): Some Considerations on Blood as the Source of Life in Sixteenth-Century Religion and Medicine and their Interconnections.” In Blood, Sweat, and Tears: The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Antiquity into Early Modern Europe. Ed. M. Horstmanshoff, H. King, C. Zittel. Leiden: Brill. 2012. 415-41. SCHENKER, ADRIAN. “Das Zeichen des Blutes und die Gewißheit der Vergebung im Alten Testament: Die sühnende Funktion des Blutes auf dem Altar nach Lev 17.10-12.” In Text und Sinn im Alten Testament. Ed. A. Schenker. OBO 103. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991. 167-85. SCHWARTZ, BARUCH J. “Prohibitions Concerning the ‘Eating’ of Blood in Leviticus 17.” In AndersonOlyan (1991), 34-66. SCHWARTZ, BARUCH J. “‘Profane’ Slaughter and the Integrity of the Priestly Code.” HUCA 67 (1996), 15-42. VERVENNE, M. “ ‘The Blood is the Life and the Life is the Blood’: Blood as Symbol of Life and Death in Biblical Tradition (Gen. 9,4).” In Quaegebeur (1993), 451-70. WERMAN, CANA. “The Rules of Consuming and Covering the Blood in Priestly and Rabbinic Law.” RevQ 16/4 (1995), 621-36. WHITEKETTLE, RICHARD. “A Study in Scarlet: Physiology and Treatment of Blood, Breath, and Fish in Ancient Israel.” JBL 135 (2016), 685-704.

Structure of Leviticus 17 YHWH’s speeches, which run almost without interruption from chap. 11 through chap. 27, shift focus starting with chap. 17. Whereas chapters 1214, 16 have concentrated on activities in and around the Tabernacle, YHWH in chaps. 17-22 gives instructions and laws about how Israelites should behave in the more secular spaces of the camp, their villages, and, in this chapter, in the open fields. However, this chapter links secular and sacred spaces by requiring that Israelites think about their relationship to the Tabernacle even when far from it (Feldman 2020, 183). The chapter conveys urgency by repeating the command to Moses to speak to the Israelites (vv. 2, 8). The divine speech formulas raise the rhetorical intensity of these commands. The second command to Moses to speak introduces a new paragraph, but not a major division in the chapter (contra Hartley 264).YHWH then assumes the role of speaking directly to the Israelites (“I say to the children of Israel” vv. 12, 14), rhetorically cutting out the middle-man, Moses, to emphasize the importance of the blood prohibition. The urgency of this divine address is underscored by threatening four times to ‫“ כרת‬cut off” offenders (vv. 4, 9, 10, 14). The chapter is structured in five paragraphs. The first paragraph addresses amity slaughter offerings, the second adds rising offerings, while the third addresses any animal blood (Rendtorff 169; Kiuchi 1987, 109; Feldman 2020, 186). The fourth paragraph focuses on blood disposal when hunting game animals, while the fifth mandates simple self-purification for people who eat carcasses or mauled prey. The literary form of these paragraphs is creative, paralleled elsewhere best by Ezek. 14:1-11 (Nihan 2007, 405). The whole chapter can be outlined as follows (similarly Hieke 619):

Leviticus 17 Exposition

351

OUTLINE 1-2 Divine speech formula 3-7 Prohibition on amity slaughter offerings outside the Tabernacle 5-7 Rationale for sacred monopoly on slaughter offerings 8a Speech command 8b-9 Prohibition on all slaughter offerings elsewhere 10-12 Prohibition on eating blood 11 Rationales for blood prohibition 13-14 Prohibition on eating the blood of game 14a Rationale for blood prohibition 15-16 Purification from eating animal carcasses

Baruch Schwartz (1991, 37-38; also 1999, 37-41) observed that Leviticus 17 has been carefully composed. Its five paragraphs each contain just “one compound sentence, containing two clauses.” The first clause announces to whom the law applies, which is ‫“ אישׁ אישׁ מבית ישׂראל‬anyone from the house of Israel” (vv. 3, 8, 10, 13) in the first four paragraphs while the last begins ‫“ כל־נפשׁ‬every person” (v. 15). The introductory formulas for four of the five paragraphs include immigrants as well (vv. 8, 10, 13, 15). A relative clause with imperfect verbs then describes the situation. The second main clause uses converted perfects to state the rule itself. Schwartz summarized that the first three paragraphs contain three prohibitions, arranged in ascending order of severity. The last of these three ... draws in its wake two positive commands ... arranged in descending order of severity. The five paragraphs thus make up an inverted ‘V’, at the zenith of which stands the absolute prohibition of partaking of blood and its rationale. (Schwartz 1991, 42)

Verses 10-12, the central paragraph, take the form of a chiastic arch: two prohibitions on any ‫“ נפשׁ‬person” who eats blood bracket two statements that ‫“ נפשׁ‬personal energy” (see Exegesis to v. 11) is in the blood, which surround the claim that this ‫“ נפשׁ‬personal energy” mitigates on the altar (Luciani 2005, 83). The outer frame and centre of the arch are united by first-person perfect verbs that emphasize YHWH’s personal role in issuing these commands. Together, the five steps of this arch provide a poetic meditation on the ‫נפשׁ‬ “person, personal energy” of humans and animals that links them through priestly mitigation at the Tabernacle altar. Many interpreters therefore outline the entire chapter like Schwartz in an arch structure centred here (Schenker 1991, 198; Milgrom 1449; Marx 2017, 22). However, rationales for mandated or prohibited practices complicate the chapter’s structure. In Leviticus, which rarely explains the rituals it describes, chap. 17 stands out for containing three different explanations for its ritual mandates. The first paragraph is extended by the explanation that banning amity slaughter offerings in the fields supports the central sanctuary (vv. 5-7). The third and fourth paragraphs (vv. 10-14) repeat three times that the reason for prohibiting blood consumption is because blood is the meat’s ‫נפשׁ‬

352

Leviticus 17 Exposition

“personal energy.” And v. 11 states that YHWH designated blood’s personal energy to provide ritual mitigation for persons. The three-fold repetition of the second rationale points to the close connections between the third and fourth paragraphs (vv. 10-14; Cholewiński 1976, 19-20; Nihan 2007, 418, 424; Rhyder 2019, 201). They are formulated in an A-B-Aʹ-C pattern of parallels. Introductory and concluding formulas match A and Aʹ sections, with the second adding that wild game is included in the blood prohibition. The B and C sections are united by parallel introductory formulas that emphasize YHWH’s personal role in commanding the Israelites (“I have given it to you (pl) ... So I say to the children of Israel ... I said to the children of Israel” vv. 11, 12, 14). The first-person statements in vv. 12 and 14 could mark resumption of the address to the Israelites after YHWH explains the rationales to Moses (so Schwartz 1996, 17-18; 1999, 40), but there is no clear indication of that. Their rhetorical effect more obviously re-emphasizes that YHWH is addressing the Israelites throughout. The other lines of section C present an abbreviation of the chiasm in vv. 10-12 in reverse order, starting with the prohibition on eating “any meat’s blood” from v. 12 and ending with the threat of being “cut off” from v. 10. (The arch proposed by Paran 1983, 117, see Milgrom 1480, omitted v. 13, while this A-B-Aʹ-C pattern incorporates all of vv. 10-14.) The following chart overlays this A-B-Aʹ-C pattern of vv. 10-14 onto the arch of vv. 10-12. Because the writer’s goal was not to produce clear visual designs, but rather to generate provocative and memorable aural patterns by repeating and modulating key words, I mark the Hebrew vocabulary and English translations of ‫“ נפשׁ‬person, personal energy” with underline, ‫אכל דם‬ “eating blood” with italics, and the opening and concluding threats to ‫“ כרת‬cut off” offenders with boldface. ‫ ואישׁ אישׁ מבית ישׂראל ומן־הגר הגר‬A ‫ בתוכם אשׁר יאכל כל־דם‬10‫ ונתתי פני בנפשׁ האכלת את־הדם והכרתי‬11a ‫אתה מקרב עמה‬ ‫כי נפשׁ הבשׂר בדם הוא‬ ‫ואני נתתיו לכם על־המזבח לכפר‬ ‫על־נפשׁתיכם‬ ‫כי־הדם הוא בנפשׁ יכפר‬ ‫על־כן אמרתי לבני ישׂראל כל־נפשׁ מכם‬ ‫לא־תאכל דם והגר הגר בתוככם לא־יאכל‬ ‫דם‬

B 11b12

Anyone from the house of Israel or any immigrant who has immigrated among you who eats any blood, I set my face against the person who eats blood and I cut them off from their people, because the meat’s personal energy is in the blood. I myself put if for you on the altar to mitigate for your personal energy, because it is the blood that mitigates by means of personal energy. So I say to the children of Israel: No person among you may eat blood nor may the immigrant who has immigrated among you eat blood.

Leviticus 17 Exposition ‫ ואישׁ אישׁ מבני ישׂראל‬Aʹ ‫ ומין־הגר הגר בתוככם‬13‫ אשׁר יצוד ציד חיה או־עוף אשׁר יאכל‬14a ‫ושׁפך את־דמו וכסהו בעפר‬ ‫כי־נפשׁ כל־בשׂר דמו הוא‬

353 Anyone from the children of Israel or from the immigrants who have immigrated among you who hunts living game or flyers for food must pour out its blood and cover it with dirt, because every meat’s personal energy is its blood.

‫ ואמר לבני ישׂראל‬C I said to the children of Israel: ‫ דם כל־בשׂר לא תאכלו‬14b- You must not eat any meat’s blood (// v. 12), ‫ כי נפשׁ כל־בשׂר דמו הוא‬14c because every meat’s personal energy is in the blood (// v. 11, 14a). ‫כל־אכליו יכרת‬ Anyone who eats it will be cut off (// v. 10).

The effect is rhetorically persuasive, as Schwartz (1991, 63) emphasized: “the lawgiver ... employs every possible means, from persuasion to preventive enactments, to keep the Israelites from ingesting blood and incurring ‫כרת‬.” Attempts to reconstruct compositional layers within chap. 17 (e.g. Elliger 219-25; Cholewiński 1976, 16-31; Gerstenberger 235-36) have now been largely abandoned (Schwartz 1991, 42-43; Grünwaldt 1999, 24-34; Ruwe 1999, 135-59; Milgrom 1448-49; Nihan 2007, 403; Hieke 620). It remains conventional for biblical scholars to distinguish Leviticus 17-27 on stylistic grounds from P (Lev. 1-16 and preceding) and to label it H, the Holiness Code (see Introduction to Leviticus 21-27). However, chap. 17 seems closely connected both to what precedes it and to the material that follows it, which makes it difficult to determine its place and role within and between such separate sources. On the one hand, chap. 17 continues the themes of ritual and cult of the preceding chapters. Verses 3-7 are infused with references to the narrative framework’s setting of Israel encamped around the Tabernacle in the Sinai desert (Nihan 2007, 399, 416). Its first paragraph is full of ritual vocabulary typical of P (Cholewiński 1976, 24; Hartley 266). In v. 7 is a rare mention of ‫“ שׂעירים‬goats” which play a key role in the rituals of chap. 16. Its statement about the function of the blood of offerings (v. 11) focuses on ‫“ כפר‬mitigation,” a major theme of chaps. 4-16 (Rhyder 2019, 238-44) which Leviticus mentions only twice after this and in passing (19:22; 23:18). Some scholars therefore place chap. 17 with the P materials that precede it (Feucht 1964, 63-64; Douglas 1999, 192-93). On the other hand, it employs some of H’s typical rhetorical tropes (Milgrom 1450), such as rationales for its rules and penalties to motivate compliance (vv. 4-5, 7, 9-12, 14, 16) and attacks on illicit ritual practices (vv. 7-9). Chapter 17 begins to pivot towards issues of Israelite life and daily practice by

354

Leviticus 17 Exposition

addressing the issue of eating blood in meat (Hieke 620). These observations lead most contemporary interpreters to place chap. 17 with the H materials that follow it. A growing number of commentators think chap. 17 was shaped to link H to P. Brian Britt and Patrick Creehan (2000) pointed out a chiastic arch of keywords that links chaps. 16-17. Most of their keywords are common in both P and H, but it is interesting that 16:33 and 17:4 both emphasize the two-part structure of the sanctuary/meeting tent. The wording of chap. 17 may have been chosen to link with the end of chap. 16 (Britt and Creehan 2000, 399; also Milgrom 1451; Schwartz 1999, 17-24; Schwartz 2009, 6-7; Nihan 2007, 417; Hieke 570-71). Erich Zenger (1999, 71-72) therefore described chaps. 16-17 together as a hinge between the two parts of Leviticus.1 Interpreters have also focused on Leviticus 17 as a key text for understanding the relationship between the different pentateuchal legal collections. For example, Nihan (2007, 429) described Leviticus 17 as “a complex but nevertheless outstanding case of inner-biblical exegesis which presupposes and reinterprets earlier legislation on sacrifices in P, D, and even the CC.” This conclusion depends on understanding vv. 3-7 with most other contemporary commentators as prohibiting the secular slaughter that is permitted by D and even P. That interpretation of these verses, however, cannot be sustained. History of Interpretations of Slaughter Outside the Tabernacle Leviticus 17:3-7 requires that all amity slaughter offerings, which are the offerings that provide meat for worshippers to eat, must be brought to the Tabernacle and slaughtered there, so that the priests can apply their blood to the altar. This meaning is plain from the offering name, ‫“ זבח שׁלמים‬amity slaughter offering,” in v. 5 and the restricted list of animals appropriate for such offerings in v. 3, which matches those permitted by the offering rules in Leviticus 3. This interpretation of the verses’ meaning was advocated in antiquity by Rabbi Akiva (m. Zebaḥ 13-14; Sifra; b. Ḥul. 16a; Lev. Rab. 22:7; followed by Rashi and Ibn Ezra; see Schwartz 1996, 18-20; Milgrom 1452) and continues to be championed by some interpreters today (e.g. Levine 11213; Hartley 269-71; Gorman 1990, 185; Grünwaldt 1999, 25-27). They see no contradiction between secular slaughter for meat (vv. 13-14; Deut. 12:15-27) and this rule requiring that amity slaughter offerings (vv. 8-9 adds rising offerings) be conducted only in the sanctuary.

1 Erich Zenger, “Das Buch Levitikus als Teiltext der Tora/des Pentateuch,” in FabryJüngling (1999), 47-83 [71-72].

Leviticus 17 Exposition

355

A second interpretation maintains that “inside or outside the camp” (v. 3) prohibits secular slaughter only in the local vicinity of the Tabernacle. This reading is also consistent with Deut. 12:21’s permission for secular slaughter “far away” from the sanctuary (so 11QT lii, 13-15; perhaps 4QMMT B 27-35; Nachmanides; see Rothstein 2010).2 However, a third interpretation dominates biblical scholarship today. Many commentators, both ancient and modern, understood Lev. 17:3-4 as requiring that all meat of domestic animals must be slaughtered at the sanctuary as an offering to YHWH (e.g. b. Ḥul. 16a-17a; Wellhausen 1899, 150; Feucht 1964, 30; Cholewiński 1976, 165; Blum 1990, 338; Otto 1999b, 142-43; Milgrom 1452-54; Nihan 2007, 412-13; Kiuchi 316; Hieke 624). This interpretation puts Leviticus 17 in direct conflict with Deuteronomy 12’s permission for meat to be slaughtered in towns and villages so long as blood is drained from the carcasses. Scholars have therefore exerted much effort trying to explain how this contradiction came about. Today, this third interpretation of these verse is so well known that many surveys of the Pentateuch’s altar laws and slaughter rules simply assume that Leviticus 17 prohibits secular slaughter. As a result, many contemporary scholars wonder at the impracticality of the requirement that meat only be slaughtered at a single sanctuary (e.g. Hieke 620-22). Jacob Milgrom (1503-14) thought that Leviticus 17 reflects the multiple sanctuaries in Assyrian-period Israel and Judea, so one would always be close by. But Second Temple Judaism also featured multiple YHWH sanctuaries: we know of temples in Samaria, Jerusalem, Elephantine, and Leontopolis, and there may have been others. Leviticus, however, describes only the single Tabernacle. Its position in the centre of the Israelite’s camp would make it easy to slaughter all animals there. Some interpreters therefore maintained that the Tabernacle represented an imagined past that did not correspond exactly to any later temple or sanctuary in monarchic and later periods (so Ruwe 1999, 141; Rhyder 2018, 17). Milgrom (1504-14) argued that P permitted secular slaughter but H outlawed it to centralize slaughter in multiple pre-exilic YHWH sanctuaries. Schwartz (1996) thought that the entire priestly tradition, both P and H, idealistically prohibited slaughter of domestic animals everywhere except in the sanctuary precincts without much concern for the practical effects of this rule. Julia Rhyder cited the ritual theory of Jonathan Z. Smith (1982, 63), who observed that rituals reflect “the way things ought to be in conscious tension to the way things are,” to deny that Leviticus 17 should therefore be classified as “fiction” (contra Schwartz 1996, 40-41). She argued that ritual participants often regard idealized instructions as normative even when they must adapt 2 Also J. Aloni, “The Place of Worship and the Place of Slaughter According to Leviticus 17:3-9,” Shnaton 8/8 (1984), 21-49 [34-35, Hebrew].

356

Leviticus 17 Exposition

them in practice (Rhyder 2018, 18-19). This normative ritual text therefore reinforced the authority of the centralized sanctuary and priesthood especially when it reminded people of their failure to fulfil its provisions. However, I find Rabbi Akiva’s interpretation – that vv. 3-9 bans only ritual slaughter offerings outside the sanctuary – more credible on the basis of the verses’ vocabulary, syntax, rhetorical structure, and their context in Leviticus 17. This interpretation has encountered several objections, but they can all be overcome. It has been criticized on syntactical grounds (Schwartz 1996, 19; Milgrom 1452), but this argument failed to take into account Leviticus’s frequent rearrangements of normal syntax for the sake of rhetorical emphasis or other purposes that can no longer be recognized. As Marc Vervenne (1993, 467) observed with only slight exaggeration, “the Priestly redactors use the stylistic technique of joining words or expressions and they do that for effect. They do not really care about grammar” (citing McEvenue 1971, 185). By that standard, vv. 3-5’s ban on making amity slaughter offerings outside YHWH’s sanctuary is very clearly expressed. It is true that a narrow definition of the meaning of ‫ שׁחט‬as “ritual slaughter” in P and H cannot bear the weight of defending this interpretation, since the term clearly has a broader meaning elsewhere (e.g. Gen. 37:31; Num. 11:22; see Nihan 2007, 410; Rhyder 2019, 204). Construing ‫ שׁחט‬as only ritual slaughter also renders redundant vv. 8-9 that prohibit making offerings outside the sanctuary. A modification of this interpretation suggests that the specification of “an ox or a sheep or a goat” (v. 3) bans only the secular slaughter of animals that may serve as offerings (Noth 130; Elliger 226-27). But this does not explain why birds, which may also be offered (1:14; 5:7), are not included in this prohibition (v. 13). Frank Gorman (1990, 185) narrowed the rule further by noting that vv. 3-4 addresses just animals that can be offered as an ‫“ זבח שׁלמים‬amity slaughter offering” (v. 5) that worshippers then eat, which does not include birds (Lev. 3; but see v. 13 below). This narrow focus on edible offerings fits the concern in vv. 10-16 with eating blood in meat: slaughter in the Tabernacle supervised by priests guarantees that the blood will be drained and disposed of properly on the altar. Verses 8-9 expand this initial prohibition by explicitly including ‫“ עלות‬rising offerings” as well, even though they are not eaten (Hartley 265). There are, however, decisive reasons why Leviticus 17 should be read as only banning certain kinds of offerings outside the sanctuary, not all slaughter of the same animal species for food. John Hartley (271) pointed out that Leviticus, both P and H, restricts offering animals to “perfect” specimens (1:3, 10; 3:1, 6; 22:18-25) which implicitly allows imperfect flock and herd animals to be killed and eaten apart from sanctuary offerings (so explicitly Deut. 15:21-23). Nowhere does the HB ban the eating of “imperfect” cows, sheep, and goats. The Qumran Temple Scroll concluded that blemished animals must be eaten far away from the Temple (11QT lii 17-18).

Leviticus 17 Exposition

357

Hartley’s important point can now be reinforced by another argument. Verse 13 explicitly allows the secular slaughter of trapped birds as well as other game. Commentators since the ancient rabbis have all assumed that this refers to different species of animals than vv. 3-9 because only domestic animals could be offered in the Temple. That assumption has now been undermined. Peter Altmann and Abra Spiciarich (2020) recently assembled the evidence that pigeons and landfowl intended for the temple altar were more likely trapped wild than raised domestically (see Translating Animal Names in Exposition to Leviticus 11 above). In the case of birds, therefore, the categories of wild game and offering animals overlap. Some of these wild bird species can serve as legitimate rising and sin offerings in which their blood is expunged on the altar for mitigation (1:4; 5:7; 12:8; 15:14, 29), at least in the case of sin offerings (but note 1:4). This new information completely undermines one presupposition behind previous interpretations of these slaughter rules, namely that legitimate animal offerings must consist of domestic animals (this is usually assumed implicitly, but was stated explicitly by Milgrom 1480; Nihan 2007, 406-408; Rhyder 2019, 223). Dropping this assumption of domesticity reveals that Leviticus 17 explicitly allows the secular slaughter of some species of snared birds that may also be offered as legitimate temple offerings. The chapter can therefore no longer be understood as implicitly prohibiting the secular slaughter of any species of offering animals. The contents of vv. 3-9 within the context of Leviticus 17 and the book as a whole are therefore best understood as conveying a ban on lay people presenting amity slaughter and rising offerings outside the sanctuary. Note that priests are required to make animal offerings outside the sanctuary by Lev. 14:4-7 and Num. 19:2-6. Many interpreters deny that these are “offerings” to accommodate 17:3-9. However, location was less important to priestly writers than that offerings be made only by Aaronide priests, whose mediation was essential to legitimate offerings wherever they took place. This ban on lay people making these offerings in other places aims to use Aaronide supervision (vv. 5-6) to control their blood disposal, which is the theme of the whole chapter. This interpretation fits the literary context and is more plausible within ancient Israel’s society since it does not prohibit secular slaughter for meat. This conclusion renders meaningless the entire debate about contradictions between Leviticus 17 and Deuteronomy 12 (as already noted by Grünwaldt 1999, 26). It therefore undercuts one major piece of evidence used by many source and redaction critics to reconstruct the historical relationship and relative dating of H, D, and P (see further in the Introduction to Leviticus 21-27). The assumption that Leviticus 17 bans secular slaughter created the basis for arguing either that this old rule requiring that all meat be slaughtered as offerings at local shrines was changed by D due to centralizing the cult in only one place (Milgrom 1452-54; Kiuchi 316), or that H reasserted old

358

Leviticus 17 Exposition

rules against D’s liberalization (Otto 1999b, 142-43; Nihan 2007, 412-13, 429; Rhyder 2019, 223-49; and many others). This assumption also fuelled speculation about when in Israel’s history it would have been possible to require that all meat be offered at the sanctuary: early, when there were many small shrines, or after the exile when the Judean community was very small. The collapse of the theory that vv. 3-9 ban secular slaughter undermines all this historical speculation and renders chap. 17 less useful as evidence for the relative or absolute dating of Pentateuchal sources (for a similar conclusion based on different reasons, see Meyer 2015, 366-67). History of the Prohibition on Eating Blood The prohibition on “eating blood” (vv. 10, 12, 14; also Gen. 9:4; Lev. 3:17; 7:26-27; 19:26; Deut. 12:16, 23; 15:23; 1 Sam. 14:32-35) has influenced culinary practices in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities. It is the most basic and universal of the dietary rules that already distinguished Jews in the late Second Temple period. Second Temple literature depicted eating blood as typical of humanity’s sinfulness (Jub. 6:10-14; 11:2; Enoch 7:46; CD 3.47; see Vervenne 1993, 455-56; Naiweld 2017, 89-96). Jubilees insisted that Noah and his family swore an oath that obliges all their descendents to not eat blood (Jub. 6:10-14; Hanneken 2015, 12). It read Gen. 9:4-6 through the perspective of Lev. 17:11 by insisting that everyone must not only avoid eating any blood, they must also put it on the altar just like Israelites do (Jub. 7:28-33; 21:6-18; Werman 1995, 622). This interpretation turned the blood prohibition into the paradigmatic sin of gentiles that justifies God’s violent destruction of entire nations (Jub. 7:29; Hanneken 2015, 3). The role of the blood prohibition in Christian tradition has been shaped decisively by Acts 15, which narrates a debate among the apostles over whether to require gentile converts to obey Torah. They decided to require gentiles only to “abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from fornication” (Acts 15:29 NRSV; also v. 20). These prohibitions follow the sequence of laws in Lev. 17:7, 10, 13, and chap. 18. They may be the usual list of expectations of gentiles living in Jewish territory in the first century.3 However, separate mention of blood and “what is strangled” left room for interpreting blood as murder.4 In fact, some ancient manuscripts and authorities replaced “strangled” with the Golden Rule, thus turning these ritual rules into a list of monotheistic moral prescriptions. 3

Hans Conzelmann, Acts of the Apostles, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987),

118. 4

James D. G. Dunn, The Acts of the Apostles, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996.

Leviticus 17 Exposition

359

While little direct commentary on Lev. 17:11 has survived in ancient Christian sources, the blood prohibition’s repetition by the apostles in Acts 15:20, 29 was discussed by almost everyone (e.g. Irenaeus, Haer. 3.12.14; Tertullian, Apol. 9.13-14; Origen, Comm. Rom. 2.9.17; Origen, Cels. 8.29-30; Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.1.26; Apos. Const. 8.43.63; Jerome, Comm. Ezech. 13.44.22-41; see Dulaey 2017, 35-42). These references indicate that many early Christians avoided eating blood. However, by the end of the fourth century, the idea had became widespread that the blood prohibition only condemns murder. Many interpreters took Jesus’ proclamation that “all food is pure” (Mark 7:19; Matt. 15:10-20) as overruling the apostles’ acquiescence to the HB’s blood prohibition in Acts 15 (e.g. Augustine, Faust. 32.13; Spec. 29; see Dulaey 2017, 49-52). Like the rules for polluted animals (Lev. 11), medieval Christian commentary on the blood prohibition in chap. 17 became an occasion for moralizing, for allegorizing about Christ’s crucifixion, and for speculating about the mortality of animal souls in contrast to immortal human souls (e.g. Chrysostom quoted by Lienhard 186; see the surveys of Elliott 176-81; Dulaey 2017, 56-70; Noblesse-Rocher 2017, 111-19). But as late as 692 C.E., the Council of Trullo still threatened excommunication for eating food containing blood (Dulaey 2017, 55). The prohibition on consuming any blood was transmitted to Muslims (Qur’an 2:174, 5:4, 6:146; 16:116), among whom it became the basis of rules for halal slaughter. Rabbinic elaborations of rules for kashrut slaughter (m. Hullin) reinforced it for Jewish cultures (see History of Interpretation and Practice of Biblical Diet Rules in Exposition to Leviticus 11 above). The rabbis, however, loosened the blood prohibition’s application to gentiles by limiting it to not drinking the blood of a living animal (t. Av. Zer. 8:6; b. Av. Zar. 64b; b. Sanh. 56b). Overall, the prohibition on consuming blood is not as prominent in rabbinic thought as other biblical dietary rules and did not have as much symbolic importance as in many Second-Temple Jewish and early Christian texts. Cara Werman (1995, 630-33) suggested that the contrast between the P and D renditions of the blood prohibition was reproduced between Qumran and rabbinic texts respectively. Ron Naiweld (2017, 77-78) thought the rabbis de-emphasized the blood prohibition because it was shared by many Christians and therefore did not function as a distinguishing marker of Jewish identity like other kashrut rules. The rabbis may also have been reacting to the Christian use of the Second-Temple priestly tradition that spiritualized the power and threat of spilt blood. Medieval Jewish interpreters explained the prohibition on eating blood as a preventative measure against worshipping other gods (so Maimonides, Guide 3:46; Sforno) or as due to God’s claim on the personal energy of all living beings (in Ezek. 18:4 ‫ ;כל־הנפשׁות לי‬so Nahmanides; see Milgrom 1469).

360

Leviticus 17 Exposition

Many Christian cultures today ignore the prohibition on eating blood. However, avoiding blood consumption in obedience to the biblical commandment continues to serve as an identity marker for some minority Christian and post-Christian communities (e.g. the Seventh-Day Adventists, African Zionists, the Hindu Christian Church, Rastafarians).5 Jehovah’s Witnesses extend the blood prohibition to refusing medical transfusions of human blood.6 History of Interpretations of Blood in Mitigation/Atonement Regardless of whether they observe this diet restriction or not, Christian interpreters and theologians have been fascinated by the theological implications of its motivation in v. 11: “I myself put [blood] on the altar for you to mitigate for your personal energy, because it is the blood that mitigates by means of personal energy.” This statement linking blood and mitigation/atonement has generated a huge amount of commentary and theological explication about the idea of atonement (which is the traditional English translation of ‫“ כפר‬mitigate”; see Exegesis to 4:20 and History and Interpretation of ‫כפר‬ “Mitigation/Atonement” in Exposition to Leviticus 4). Most of it revolves around the relationship between killing and life, in the mistaken belief that ‫ נפשׁ‬here means “life” (see Exegesis to v. 11). Most interpreters have recognized that the blood prohibition’s appearance in Gen. 9:4 suggests that it can be explained by the role of food in P’s creation and flood stories. At their creation, God offers both humans and animals only vegetarian food (1:29-30). But after the flood, and apparently in a concession to the violent appetites of humans and animals (“all flesh” in 6:12-13), God permits humans to slaughter animals for food so long as they drain the blood (9:3-4). The prohibition on eating blood commemorates this divine concession to the human desire to eat meat. However, Leviticus 17 does not evoke this creation story to explain the blood prohibition. Instead, it refers to this book’s own descriptions (chaps. 1, 3-7, 11-12, 14-16) of Tabernacle rituals that require expunging blood on the altar, especially the sin and guilt offerings that ‫“ כפר‬mitigate” for the Israelites’ personal energy (17:11; Rhyder 2019, 238-49). The notion that mortality or life is “(in) the blood” has generated a great deal of discussion among interpreters. Verse 11 provided the most important 5 See van Zyl 1995, 429-34; Sugirtharajah 2005, 175-89; Jenkins 2006, 50; Savishinsky 1998, 139; Roy Gane, Leviticus, forthcoming; and Marzia Coltri, “Postcolonial Interpretation: The Bible in Rastafari,” Black Theology 18/3 (2020), 246-62 [255-57]. 6 See the tract by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, “How Can Blood Save Your Life?” JW.org at https://www.jw.org/en/library/books/How-Can-Blood-Save-Your-Life/Blood-Vital-for-Life/ (accessed May 11, 2021), and Andrew Holden, Jehovah’s Witnesses: Portrait of a Contemporary Religious Movement (London: Routledge, 2002), 28-29.

Leviticus 17 Exposition

361

key for Christian typological interpretations of Christ’s death as an atoning sacrifice (Marx 2017, 16-17). The NT already focused attention specifically on the atoning power of Jesus’ blood (e.g. Rom. 3:24-25; Matt. 26:28; 1 Pet. 1:18-19; Rev. 7:14). The Letter to the Hebrews generalized Lev. 17:11 as a general principle: “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (Heb. 9:22 NRSV). The Babylonian Talmud also concluded repeatedly that “there is no mitigation except through blood” (b. Yoma 5a; b. Zebah. 6a; b. Menaḥ. 93b). The Christian focus on Christ’s blood led to making this verse about animal blood refer also to human blood. Medieval Latin interpretation of Lev. 17:11 was shaped by Augustine (Questiones Levitici, lvii.1), who reasoned in light of Heb. 10:4 that “it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.” Therefore only Christ’s innocent blood can atone for a life. This conclusion was repeated in the Glossa ordinaria, whose authors then identified “the altar” of v. 11 as the Cross (Noblesse-Rocher 2017, 108-9). According to Anselm’s satisfaction theory of Christ’s atonement, which still has much influence today (see Marx 2017, 17),7 Jesus’ body takes the place of animal offerings to atone for human sin through his sacrificial death. Obsession with the power of Christ’s blood in late medieval and early modern Europe drew attention to human blood generally (see Leviticus 1-10, 320). Every scholar of the subject quoted the Vulgate translation of Lev. 17:11, anima carnis in sanguine est “the soul/life of the flesh is in the blood.” Though philosophers and physiologists distinguished blood as just one component of a human body from the life that infuses all of it, this verse from Leviticus led theorists of sacrifice to equate blood with soul/life. Eucharistic theologians regularly identified the dual elements, bread and wine/blood, with Christ’s body and soul respectively (Bynum 2007, 42, 157, 161-62, 189, 195). Devotional literature depicted Christ’s blood as the means of salvation and the essence of life itself. For example, Peter Dorlandus explained in his popular tract, Viola animae (1499): For just as the life of all ensouled creatures is in the blood, so the life of the just person comes through the blood of Christ, which he therefore in compassionate generosity pours out from his body so that you can drink it with your mouth and slake your thirst from it in your heart. (tr. Bynum 2007, 163)

Caroline Walker Bynum (2007, 163) commented that “blood is here quite literally a transfusion: a gift of life itself.” Early modern research on human physiology had difficulty escaping this pervasive spiritualization of blood (Santing 2012). This long tradition of exploring the symbolism of sacrifice 7 And Christian Eberhart, “Introduction: Constituents and Critique of Sacrifice, Cult, and Atonement in Early Judaism and Christianity,” in Eberhart-Wiley (2017), 12-24.

362

Leviticus 17 Exposition

and blood overdetermines Leviticus’s curt explanations, which do not readily lend themselves to symbolism (see Introduction §2.3.3-4 in Leviticus 1-10). The problem addressed by Leviticus 17 is not killing but blood disposal. Ethnographic descriptions of the careful disposal of blood in many cultures have reinforced the tendency to view this verse as reflecting a common “blood taboo” (Vervenne 1993, 452-54, 456). But Howard Eilberg-Schwartz (1990, 179) cautioned that “the familiar Israelite idea that ‘life is in the blood’ appears only in contexts related to the slaughter of animals or murder, that is, acts in which a living being dies. Some blood is symbolic of life; other kinds of blood are not.” Christian Eberhart (2013) argued that secular situations in which human blood represents violent deaths should be strictly distinguished from rituals in which animal blood represents personal energy that sanctifies and purifies. Some other interpreters regard 17:11 as instead a unique speculation about how offerings work, which is unusual in priestly or even Israelite texts. Brichto (1976, 28), Levine (115), and Milgrom (1474) maintained that ‫ כפר‬in v. 11 means “ransom” in contrast to its use in the offering rules of Leviticus 1-16 where blood serves as a purifying agent. Therefore, Baruch Schwartz (1991, 59-60) argued that v. 11 portrays blood as a means “of redeeming oneself from extreme culpability before God: redeeming one’s life.” He concluded that “the point [of 17:11a] is simply that when blood is gone, there is no life,” but he identified 17:11b’s claim about blood mitigating on the altar as “a new and unique theory of what sacrificial ‘atonement’ is and how it works” (Schwartz 1991, 49, 59). William Gilders (2004, 173) thought that the verse combines the notion of “ransoming life” from Exod. 30:11-16 with the focus in Leviticus’s ritual rules on ‫ כפר‬meaning “to effect removal.” Both emphasized the “midrashic” creativity of the verse’s formulation (similarly Nihan 2007, 423). The argument, however, that ‫ כפר‬has two distinct meanings in Leviticus is not convincing (Hieke 636; see Exegesis to 4:20). It undermines v. 11 as a rationale for blood disposal on the altar, a role which the verse claims explicitly for itself and which the literary structure of chap. 17 emphasizes. More generally, this commentary has found Milgrom’s translation of ‫כפר‬ as “purge, purify” unpersuasive and has argued for a broader meaning of ‫ כפר‬as “mitigation” (see Exegesis to 4:20 and 16:16 and Polluting the Holy Sanctuary in Introduction to Leviticus 11-20). Instead of showing the unique perspective of this passage, the combined evidence of Lev. 17:10-12, Deut. 12.23, and Gen. 9:4 indicates that the blood that humans and animals have in common led Israelite culture to identify in blood their ‫“ נפשׁ‬personal energy.” The observation that animal blood and mitigation are prominent characteristics of altar rituals does not limit offerings to just those that mitigate or involve blood (Lev. 2; Ezek. 45:15-17). It does mean that one

Leviticus 17 Exposition

363

must drain the blood before eating meat to avoid infringing on sacred rituals and, perhaps, mitigating for oneself (Zevit 2001, 284). Leviticus 17:11 unites these observations and conclusions by describing ‫“ נפשׁ‬personal energy” as both the agent (in the animal blood) and the recipient (in the human worshipper) of ‫“ כפר‬mitigation.” Neither in its literary nor ancient cultural contexts does v. 11 clearly say that blood on the altar inevitably and only performs a mitigating function (contra the Talmud and New Testament). The verse instead points out the potential power of blood to mitigate when making offerings (Hartley 274; Feldman 2020, 186), which is an obvious conclusion after reading or hearing Leviticus 1-16. The common claim that v. 11’s rationale is theologically profound is therefore open to question, as Liane Feldman (2020, 189) observed: “There is no major theological innovation in 17:11. There is only a clear and concise statement about the nature of blood: it has the capability to purify on the altar on behalf of the Israelites.” Emphasizing this conclusion explicitly serves the same purpose as the rest of the chapter: to persuade Israelites to avoid eating meat with blood in it. Modern interpreters have been concerned to identify which offerings are meant when v. 11 says that blood on the altar mitigates. Chapter 17 focuses on eating blood, and v. 5 explicitly mentions ‫“ זבח שׁלמים‬amity slaughter offerings” that the worshippers eat. But the rules for amity slaughter offerings (Lev. 3, 7) do not attribute ‫“ כפר‬mitigation” to amity slaughter offerings. Verse 8 adds ‫“ עולת‬rising offerings” which are said to mitigate only once (1:4). On the basis of Leviticus 1-17, therefore, the blood of many offerings do not actually seem to mitigate on the altar. The offerings that regularly mitigate are the ‫“ חטאת‬sin offering” and ‫“ אשׁם‬guilt offering” that only priests eat (Lev. 4-7), which makes them a poor fit for v. 11’s rationale for the prohibition on eating blood (contra Janowski 1982; Rendtorff 1995). Therefore, Milgrom (1474-78) argued that H differs from P here by extending mitigation to amity slaughter offerings. The sin that they mitigate, according to Milgrom, is the sin of killing the animal itself. However, Milgrom’s contention that vv. 10-12 address only amity slaughter offerings has failed to convince other interpreters (Kiuchi 1987, 102-3; Hartley 275; Hieke 634-35; Rhyder 2019, 215-18). Furthermore, there is no evidence anywhere in the HB that killing pure animals for food was considered sinful, at least after the divine concession to Noah (Gen. 9:3-4). Nor was priestly thought about mitigation very consistent. Ezekiel lists rising, commodity, and amity offerings as “mitigating” for the Israelites, then two verses later adds sin offerings to the list (Ezek. 45:15, 17). The translation of ‫ נפשׁ‬as “life” continues to stimulate many meditations on the symbolic connections between blood and the life of animals and humans, and on the substitution of one life for another through “sacrificial” offerings (see summaries by Hartley 276-77; Schenker 1991, 199-204;

364

Leviticus 17 Exposition

Marx 2017, 27-28). Adrian Schenker (1991, 206) argued that Christ’s death functions as a symbol of forgiveness like altar blood does in Leviticus. Thomas Hieke (632-33) thought that blood here functions symbolically as an index for life. He described God’s claim, “I myself put blood for you on the altar” (v. 11) as “a theology of pure grace.” Christian Eberhart has written monographs (2002, 2013) on sacrifice in the HB and on the NT’s use of sacrificial metaphors. He argued that in interpreting both sets of scriptures, theology and biblical scholarship have overemphasized the death of the sacrificial victim to the exclusion of other themes that are more significant in each section of the Christian Bible. P gives more attention to the burning and distribution of the meat than to slaughtering the animal (Eberhart 2002). Both P and the NT give even more attention to manipulating offering blood in order to consecrate, purify, and achieve forgiveness (Eberhart 2013). Other rituals do not involve killing, such as the goat for Azazel that is released alive (16:20-22). Instead of killing, Eberhart insisted that the claim that the blood contains the animal’s ‫( נפשׁ‬17:11, 14), which he translated “life, mortality,” is key to understanding the ritual power of an animal’s death or, in the NT, of Christ’s death. The rhetorical play on the ‫ נפשׁ‬of animals and humans in vv. 10-12 (see Exegesis to v. 11) provides a basis in the text for thinking that one substitutes for the other. But the subject here is neither life nor death, but rather blood and mitigation. Hieke (634-35) therefore rightly criticized theological interpretations of this passage (e.g. Janowski 1982, 247; Levine 115) that emphasize killing one life as a substitute for another. His solution, however, that the life of the animal offered to God sanctifies and purifies human life to commune with the living God (Hieke 636), also theorizes “life/living” beyond the semantic meaning of ‫ נפשׁ‬in this chapter. Closer to the multiple meanings of this term in Leviticus 17 is David Seidenberg’s summary: The “ideal is simply that if humans are to use the lives of other animals to sustain ourselves, we can and must do it in a manner that honors the full ethical and spiritual value, the ‫נפשׁ‬, of the lives we take” (in Kamionkowski 174). The juxtaposition in v. 11 of blood with ‫“ נפשׁ‬personal energy,” which is usually translated “life,” has led very many interpreters to find an allusion to murder in the condemnation on “pouring out blood” (v. 4; see Exegesis). Yitzhaq Feder recognized that ‫ נפשׁ‬does not mean life, but still maintained that references to blood everywhere in the HB carry overtones of “bloodguilt” (Feder 2011, 167-94). He argued that Israelite ideas about ritual manipulation of animal blood derived from moral opposition to human violence, especially murder. There is, however, no hint of any association between animal offerings and murder or violence in Leviticus. Animal blood carries positive connotations in the rules for offerings, as does the notion of

Leviticus 17 Exposition

365

crediting those offerings to worshippers (see Exegesis to vv. 3 and 11, and also 4:20; 7:18). Though HB poets might occasionally associate violence with meat-eating (e.g. Isa. 34:5-7), there is little reason to think that ancient Israelites associated slaughtering meat with murder any more often than modern Western people – such views remain rare but are growing today due to vegetarian and vegan rhetoric and the animal rights movement (see on Lev. 25:7 below). These debates should pay closer attention to v. 11’s role within its immediate literary context. The Exegesis makes two observations that can simplify the interpretive issues around blood, mitigation, and personal energy. First, the association of blood with personal energy, not only in v. 11 but also in Deut. 12:23 in an arch structure resembling vv. 10-12, suggests that these ideas were already associated in Israelite culture in gnomic sayings prohibiting the consumption of blood. Both Deuteronomy 12 and Leviticus 17 were probably quoting and modifying traditional knowledge. They were trying to motivate compliance with a traditional prohibition on blood consumption by linking it to mitigation. Second, vv. 10-12 play extensively and poetically on the multiple meanings of ‫“ נפשׁ‬person/personal energy” which humans and animals have in common. They also have blood in common, but that observation is left to the intuition of listeners and readers, since all the references to ‫“ דם‬blood” in chap. 17 are to animal blood. The chapter’s conceptual innovation, then, involves connecting blood and personal energy with mitigation on the sanctuary altar. The overt purpose for making this connection is to motivate compliance with the prohibition on eating blood, as the contents of all of chap. 17 emphasize and the arch structure of v. 11 re-emphasizes. As a rationale for obeying the prohibition, the mitigating power of blood need not describe all blood applied to the altar. The simple fact that it can sometimes be used for mitigation is enough to justify never eating it. Arguments about how mitigation works in different offerings overdetermine v. 11’s logic as a persuasive rationale for obeying the prohibition. Similarly, its wordplay on multiple referents for “person/personal energy” intensify a traditional rationale for the blood prohibition by linking it to mitigation for you, that is “your personal energy” which is like the personal energy of the animals from whom the blood is taken. Interpreters are right to find here incipient notions of identification between animal and human, and even substitution (Gilders 2004, 175-76). But they remain incipient (Rendtorff 170) because the goal of Leviticus 17 is behavioural motivation rather than theological explanation. Leviticus 17:11 stands out in the book and in the history of its interpretation because it provides a rationale for a ritual prohibition, something that

366

Leviticus 17 Exposition

the priestly writers rarely provided. Rationales are more common in the following chapters (cf. 18:7-18) and perhaps reflect the inclinations of a writer different from the one who composed chaps. 1-16 (see Introduction to Leviticus 21-27). But the rhetorical goals remain the same, which are to motivate knowledge of and compliance with priestly teachings. Speculative theorizing about animal and human nature was not among them. Human and Animal Embodiment in Leviticus 17:11 Though interpreters have focused on the mitigating power of ‫“ דם‬blood” and been tantalized by the spiritual meanings they can impute to ‫“ נפשׁ‬personal energy,” especially when translated “life,” equally important for the thought of Leviticus is ‫בשׂר‬, which means “meat, flesh, skin, body, close relative.” This term for the bodily nature of both animals and humans has repeatedly drawn this commentary’s attention because of its multivalent possibilities (see Exegesis to 4:11; 7:18; 11:8; 13:2; 15:2; 16:4; 17:11; 18:6). It describes the offering material that can be shared between God, priests, and people (3:1-17; 7:11-36) and whose misuse counts among the gravest ritual offences (7:18-21; 10:16-18). It names the part of a person susceptible to pollution (13:2-43; 15:2, 7, 19) which must be bathed for purification (14:9; 15:13). Human ‫ בשׂר‬must carry the mandatory mark of God’s covenant (12:3; Gen. 17:10-14), but must otherwise be protected from mutilation (Lev. 19:28; 21:5). It names physical family relationships that constrain sexual desire (18:6) and impose economic obligations (25:49). Because ‫ בשׂר‬names what animals and humans have in common, its consumption is both a divinely-granted privilege (Gen. 9:6) and a horrible divine threat (Lev. 26:29). These related meanings of ‫“ בשׂר‬body” and their significant role throughout the book demonstrate that religious thought in Leviticus is embodied thought. That is nowhere clearer than in 17:11, which emphasizes that the ‫“ נפשׁ‬personal energy” is connected to the ‫“ דם‬blood” only in the ‫“ בשׂר‬meat, flesh, body.” Draining the blood is therefore necessary to avoid eating personal energy when one eats meat. Another way to paraphrase this chapter’s blood prohibition, therefore, is that one must not eat ‫“ נפשׁ‬a person/animal” which is composed of ‫“ בשׂר‬flesh” and ‫“ דם‬blood,” but only animal ‫בשׂר‬ “meat” after it has been depersonalized by draining its blood. Ellen Davis (2017, 9-11) observed that three of the five injunctions to “be holy” in Leviticus refer specifically to eating only pure meat (11:44, 45; 20:26), which she identified as the book’s theme of “embodied holiness.” Despite the fascination with blood in theories of atonement (see above), traditional Christian Eucharistic language and ritual always emphasizes both

Leviticus 17 Exposition

367

Christ’s body and blood and the worshipper’s body and soul (Davis 2017, 13). Stressing the embodied incarnation of Christ as σαρχ “flesh” became a touchstone of proto-Catholic ecumenical traditions (John 1:14; 1 John 4:2; 2 John 1:17). The body of God then became the subject of mystical speculation in medieval Christianity and Judaism. Today, God’s body is the subject of renewed interest from biblical scholars who apply comparisons from ancient Near Eastern texts and art and contemporary theories of embodiment to the anthropomorphism of biblical imagery.8 The combination of ‫“ בשׂר‬body, flesh,” ‫“ דם‬blood,” and ‫“ נפשׁ‬personal energy” is also the focus of 17:11, though in animals and humans rather than gods. Embodiment in Leviticus should therefore draw interpreters’ attention to animal studies in the contemporary humanities. Animal studies query our tendency to lump together all “animals” in a dichotomous contrast to humans. They point to the fact that biblical Hebrew instead either draws distinctions between kinds of animals or lumps animals and humans together (Gen. 1:29-30; 6:12; Stone 2018, 72-83). More than religious thought in many subsequent periods, Leviticus gives sustained attention to how human and animal bodies interact. It is famous for its prescriptions about eating animals (Lev. 11, 17) and offering animals (Lev. 1, 3-10, 16), but it also shows compassion for animals’ need to eat, even to the extent of granting animals a right to eat (Lev. 25:7; Stone 2018, 109-15). This chapter’s explanation for its prohibition on eating blood points to what animal and human bodies have in common: ‫“ דם‬blood,” ‫“ בשׂר‬flesh, body,” and ‫“ נפשׁ‬personal energy.” Our similar bodies are here the basis for moral thought about how we use our bodies and their bodies. That led Tamar Kamionkowski (175-76) to think of the industrial measures we take to kill animals and dispose of their blood in modern meat packing plants (slaughterhouses): “an entire subfield of waste management is now focused on blood and fat disposal.” She therefore wondered at modern people’s typical antipathy for the bloody details that preoccupy Leviticus: Perhaps our disgust with so much of Leviticus stems from an underlying guilt; Leviticus does not allow us to forget that while we eat meat purchased at the market, a spilling of blood lies behind the packaging. How many of us are willing to face this head on as the priestly writers do?

8 See Benjamin D. Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009; Michael B. Hundley, “Divine Fluidity? The Priestly Texts in their Ancient Near Eastern Contexts,” in Trevaskis-Landy-Bibb (2015), 16-40; Andreas Wagner, God’s Body: The Anthropomorphic God in the Old Testament, tr. M. Salzmann, New York: Bloomsbury, 2017 (German 2010).

368

Leviticus 17 Exegesis EXEGESIS

Divine Speech Formulas (17:1-2) 17:1-2 YHWH spoke to Moses: Speak to Aaron and to his sons and to all the children of Israel and say to them: This is what YHWH commanded: On divine speech formulas, see Exegesis to 1:1-2. Specifying the audience as “Aaron and his sons and all the children of Israel” (also in 22:18 and as a concluding compliance formula in 21:24, which may form a bracket around chaps. 17-22 according to Marx 2015, 329) and beginning the address with ‫“ זה הדבר אשׁר־צוה יהוה‬this is what YHWH commanded” (also in 8:5; 9:6) adds more redundancy to the formula than usual. This chapter repeats the command to speak to the Israelites (vv. 8a) and twice depicts YHWH describing the divine speech as a direct address to the Israelites (vv. 12, 14). Specific mention of both priests and people transitions from 16:2 that addresses only Aaron. The complete list of addressees here led Nihan (2007, 417) to think that it marks the H composition that follows as a supplement to P. The effect of this list, however, is to re-emphasize what has been true throughout Leviticus, that all Israelites are addressed and expected to hear these rules, even those about the inner operations of the Tabernacle (see Exegesis to 1:2a, 6:1-2a; 16:2, 29). Prohibition of Amity Slaughter Offerings Outside the Tabernacle (17:3-7) Animal offerings must be slaughtered at YHWH’s sanctuary so that the priests can drain the blood properly and apply it to the Tabernacle altar. Contrary to a prominent line of interpretation from antiquity to today, this paragraph does not clearly ban secular slaughter for meat. It instead focuses on centralizing animal offerings under priestly supervision and discouraging illicit offerings in the fields. 17:3

Anyone from the house of Israel who slaughters an ox or a sheep or a goat in the camp or who slaughters outside the camp

‫“ שׁחט‬slaughter” is the usual term for killing animals in Leviticus (but not, as Milgrom 1453 maintained, just to cutting their throats; see Exegesis to 1:5). The view that this rule applies to the slaughter of every flock and herd animal for food (so already b. Ḥul. 16a-17a) provides the basis for many critical theories about how H revised Israel’s offering rules as described in Deut. 12:15-27, which allows secular slaughter, and also in P which contains no such restriction (see Exposition above). Yet a strict rule against any secular slaughter

Leviticus 17 Exegesis

369

for food strikes many other interpreters as impractical (e.g. Grünwaldt 1999, 25-26; Hieke 624). It also leads to drawing every-finer distinctions between official “sacrifices” and other ritual killings that must take place outside the sanctuary, such as in 14:5 (e.g. Milgrom 1454). Many other interpreters, starting with Rabbi Akiva, argued that ‫ שׁחט‬here describes only killing offerings (the explicit subject of vv. 5-9), which would exclude secular slaughter for food from this prohibition on slaughter outside the sanctuary (e.g. Sifra; b. Zeb. 106a; Rashi; Levine 112-13; Hartley 26971; Grünwaldt 1999, 26). In that case, this rule and Deut. 12:15-27 are compatible. For arguments in favour of this interpretation, see Exposition: History of Interpretations of Slaughter Outside the Tabernacle above. For ‫“ אישׁ אישׁ‬everyone, anyone” (also in vv. 8, 10, 13), see Exegesis to 15:2 above. Though men usually slaughtered animals and made offerings in ancient Israel, women were not excluded from the sanctuaries and were sometimes required to make offerings (Lev. 12:6; see Exegesis to 1:2b). So ‫“ אישׁ‬man” in this chapter does not necessarily exclude women from these rules and should be translated generically. In Leviticus, ‫“ בית ישׂראל‬house of Israel” appears four times as part of this formula (17:3, 8, 10; 22:18) and only one other time (10:6). LXX reads “children” or “congregation” in every occurrence of the formula (cf. MT of v. 13 below) and “house” only in 10:6. Both “house of Israel” and the usual ‫בני‬ ‫“ ישׂראל‬sons/children of Israel” are gender inclusive (see Milgrom 1465-66). 17:4

and does not bring (it) to the entrance of the meeting tent to present as a present for YHWH before YHWH’s Tabernacle, blood will be credited to that one: they (ms) have poured out blood and that one will be cut off from their people.

‫“ משׁכן‬Tabernacle” is one of only four appearances of this name for the tent sanctuary in Leviticus (see 8:10; 15:31; 26:11). Only this verse juxtaposes it with the ‫“ אהל מועד‬meeting tent,” apparently to distinguish its plaza, “the entrance of the meeting tent” which is in front of the tent structure, “before the Tabernacle” (cf. 16:33 ‫“ מקדשׁ הקדשׁ ואת־אהל מועד‬the sanctuary of the Holy (Space) and the meeting tent”). On the meaning of the two terms, see Exegesis to 1:1. The accounting metaphor, ‫“ חשׁב ל־‬be credited to” (cf. 25:31; Num. 18:27, 30), can refer to the positive effects of proper offerings (7:18) as well as to the negative effects of improper slaughter. Therefore, it does not necessarily raise connotations of murder and ‫“ דם‬blood” need not mean “bloodguilt,” despite the long tradition of interpreting and translating it that way (Rashi; Rashbam; NRSV; NJPS; Schwartz 1996, 21; Milgrom 1457; Nihan 2007, 412; Feder 2011, 167-207; Kiuchi 318; Hieke 625). The concept of bloodguilt

370

Leviticus 17 Exegesis

for human killing is usually conveyed by ‫“ דמיהם בהם‬their blood on them” as in 20:11-13, 16 or ‫“ לו דם‬blood to him” (Num. 35:27; similarly ‫דמו בראשׁו‬ “his blood on his head” in Josh. 2:19; Ezek. 33:5), but Lev. 24:17, 21 can refer to manslaughter and murder without mentioning blood. Here, ‫חשׁב ל־‬ “credit to” along with ‫“ נשׂא עון‬bear liability” in v. 16 bracket this chapter in accounting metaphors rather than analogies to murder. Instead of gaining positive credit for the offering (7:18), improper offerings earn negative credit for misusing animal blood (17:4), just as eating meat with its blood earns liability (17:16). These metaphors derive from economic transactions rather than criminal law. Liane Feldman (2020, 176-77) therefore suggested translating ‫“ השׁב ל־‬credit to” as “bailed to,” like a temporary transfer of property. Nor does ‫“ שׁפך דם‬pour out blood” raise murderous connotations (contra most interpreters). Previous references to ‫“ שׁפך‬pouring” blood in Leviticus refer to proper sin offerings in which the remaining blood gets poured on the base of the altar (4:7, 18, 25, 30, 34, 41; Exod. 29:12). Verse 13 requires hunters to “pour out” the blood of the game they kill before eating it. Therefore, unlike the murderous overtones of the English idiom, “shed/spill blood” (KJV, NAB, NRSV, NRSV), the Hebrew ‫“ שׁפך דם‬pour blood” usually has positive connotations, unless it refers to human blood (Gen. 9:6; Num. 35:33). However, only priests may handle the blood of domestic animals offered in the sanctuary. Offering them privately outside the sanctuary would, according to this rule, result in improper blood manipulation of Israel’s offerings. The penalty, “be cut off from their people” (also v. 9 below), sounds ambiguously dire, which strengthens its rhetorical effect (on the penalty of being ‫“ כרת‬cut off,” see Exegesis to 7:20). Some interpreters think the “cutting off” penalty applies only to misappropriating divine things (as in Exod. 30:33; Lev. 7:20, 25; 19:8; Milgrom 457-60, Feldman 2020, 178), but this meaning does not work for its application to sexual offences (Lev. 18:29; 20:18). It is therefore better to understand ‫“ כרת‬cut off” as an ominous but nonspecific threat. After ‫“ לא הביאו‬they do not bring,” 4QLevd, SP, and LXX add ‫לעשׂות אתו‬ ‫עלה או שׁלמים ליהוה לרצונכם לריח ניחח וישׁחטהו בחוץ ואל פתח אוהל מועד לוא‬ ‫“ יביאנו‬to make it a rising (offering) or an amity (offering) to YHWH for your (pl) favour for soothing scent, and he slaughters it outside and does not bring it to the entrance of the meeting tent.” MT’s shorter version is supported by 4QPaleoLev. There are good arguments in support of both readings (Metso 2008, 510).9 On the one hand, the omission of the phrase can be explained as parablepsis due to homoioteleuton when a scribe’s eye skipped from one 9 Eugene Ulrich, “The Evolutionary Growth of the Pentateuch in the Second Temple Period,” in Pentateuchal Traditions in the Late Second Temple Period (ed. A. Moriya and G. Hata; Leiden: Brill, 2012), 39-56 [44-45].

Leviticus 17 Exegesis

371

to another occurrence of ‫ הביאו‬/ ‫“ יביאו‬bring” in this verse. On the other hand, the addition of the phrase may be an attempt to harmonize a ban on secular slaughter (vv. 3-4) with the ban on making offerings outside the sanctuary (vv. 8-9) by turning the former into a ban on outside offerings as well (Milgrom 1456; Rothstein 2010), though the addition can also be read as intensifying MT’s ban.10 If it were original, one would expect the second offering to be called ‫“ זבח‬a slaughter offering” like in v. 8. The second person of ‫“ רצונכם‬your favour” does not fit the third-person context. All these observations suggest that the longer reading is a secondary addition, as most commentators have concluded (BHQ 106). 17:5

So that the children of Israel will bring their slaughter (offerings) which they slaughter in the open field and bring them for YHWH to the priest at the entrance of the meeting tent, they must slaughter them as amity slaughter (offerings) for YHWH.

‫ למען אשׁר‬followed by an imperfect means “so that” (HAL). Schwartz (1996, 17-18; also Milgrom 1464-65) took ‫ למען‬as introducing an aside to Moses alone, as in Num. 36:8b. In most of its appearances, however, ‫ למען‬does not introduce an aside or change of address (e.g. Gen. 18:19: Deut. 20:18; also Num. 15:40 without ‫)אשׁר‬. Even Num. 36:8b is not obviously an aside. This verse continues to mandate the Israelites’ behaviour, which does not seem intended just for Moses’ ears (similarly Nihan 2007, 408-409; Feldman 2020, 170). This verse requires the Israelites to conform their animal offerings to the rules set forth in Leviticus 1-7, specifically chap. 3. The verse is therefore full of nouns familiar from those chapters: ‫“ פתח אהל מועד‬entrance of the meeting tent,” ‫“ הכהן‬the priest,” ‫“ זבח שׁלמים‬amity slaughter offering.” This vocabulary together with the inclusion of Aaron and his sons among the addressees (v. 2) places these regulations firmly within the standard prescriptions of the central cult (Rhyder 2019, 213). However, it deviates from these precedents in its use of verbs. Whereas Leviticus 1-16 usually uses the verb ‫ שׁחט‬for slaughtering animal offerings, chaps. 17-27 use it only once (17:3), preferring the synonym ‫ זבח‬here and in two other verses. This verse plays on ‫“ זבח‬slaughter,” using it twice as a noun and twice as a verb (cf. 19:5; 22:29). Other uses of the verb ‫ זבח‬in Leviticus also play on its nominal and verbal forms (see Exegesis to 9:4, 19:5, and 22:29). The verb ‫ שׁחט‬did not offer the possibility for such word plays with offering names.

10 Julia Rhyder, “The Prohibition of Local Butchery in Leviticus 17:3-4: The Evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Sem 62 (2020), 307-27.

372

Leviticus 17 Exegesis

Schwartz (1996, 23) and Milgrom (1459) argued that, in the context of the exodus story, this legislation is changing previous practice: now that the Tabernacle has been built, Israelites must go there to present as an offering any domestic meat they slaughter, though previously they did not have to do so. This explanation for the change in synonymous vocabulary seems forced, however, since ‫ שׁחט‬has to this point consistently been used for slaughter in the Tabernacle precincts. Furthermore, P has avoided depicting the Israelites or their ancestors making any animal offerings prior to building the Tabernacle, unlike the not-P portions of Genesis. Rather than drawing a historical or theological distinction, the writer seems to have switched from ‫ שׁחט‬to its synonym ‫ זבח‬to play on the offering names that use the latter’s root. ‫“ על־פני השׂדה‬in the open field” is not consistently prohibited for YHWH’s rituals. That is the location where the living bird from the infestation purification ritual must be released (14:7; cf. ‫“ המדבר‬the desert” in 16:21). It is unlikely, therefore, that this location inherently raised sinister associations with chthonic deities, as suggested by Milgrom (1460, 1490-93) and Rhyder (2019, 205-214). Nevertheless, this locale is further afield than v. 3’s “in the camp or outside the camp.” See also on v. 7. For the ‫“ זבח שׁלמים‬amity slaughter offering,” see Exposition to Leviticus 3. 17:6

The priest must splash the blood on YHWH’s altar in the entrance of the meeting tent and incinerate the fat for a soothing scent for YHWH.

This verse summarizes the instructions for amity slaughter offerings in chap. 3 and echoes its terminology. Therefore, ‫“ זרק את־הדם‬splash the blood” is not a pointed contrast to ‫“ דם שׁפך‬pour blood” in v. 4 (contra Schwartz 1996, 25), since that phrase too describes appropriate disposal of offering blood, only from a sin offering (4:17). The fact that the priests and worshippers eat the remainder (7:15-18, 31-36) is omitted here as it is in chap. 3, which undercuts Milgrom’s (1461) attempt to read vv. 10-17’s emphasis on eating meat without blood into this paragraph. Levine (114) saw in ‫“ מזבח יהוה‬YHWH’s altar” an emphasis on a single, centralized altar as reflected in Deut. 12:27, 16:21, etc. Of course, in the wilderness setting of this story, there is only one Tabernacle altar in the centre of the camp. This text, however, does not explain how ancient readers and hearers should extrapolate from this idealized setting to their own situations when settled far away from the Tabernacle or from Israelite temples. The centralizing emphasis of vv. 5-6 falls as much on personnel as on location, that is, on the requirement that only ‫“ הכהן‬the priest” can handle offering blood – a consistent emphasis throughout Leviticus and P (see Introduction §3.3 in Leviticus 1-10).

Leviticus 17 Exegesis 17:7

373

They must not slaughter any more their slaughter (offerings) to billy goats whom they lust for. This will be a permanent mandate for them throughout their generations.

This verse introduces a new issue into Leviticus’s rules on offerings by raising the prospect that some Israelites make offerings ‫“ לשׂעירים‬to billy goats.” In P’s rules, appropriate goat offerings use the more generic species name, ‫“ עז‬goat” (Lev. 1:10; 3:12; 22:19) or juxtapose the two terms (see Exegesis to 4:23; but cf. 16:8). The HB contains a few references to cultic centres devoted to ‫( שׂערים‬2 Kgs. 22:8; 2 Chr. 11:15) and prophetic rhetoric associates them with deserted ruins and demons (Isa. 13:21; 34:14). Winged goat sphinxes appear on scarabs and seals from Iron-Age Israel and Philistia.11 Goats were associated with chthonic deities and rituals in some ancient cultures, including at Ebla (Zatelli 1998, 258). Here ‫ שׂערים‬is usually translated “goat demons,” and HAL even lists it as a separate word from ‫“ שׂער‬goat.” It is, however, typical of biblical polemics to conflate ritual images with the deities they represent (2 Kgs. 28-30; Isa. 44:10, 15, 17). “Billy goats whom they lust for” sounds sarcastic and belittling (Blair 2009, 82, 90). Therefore, the term should be translated as a common animal, “billy goats,” just like Jereboam’s statues are “calves” (1 Kgs. 12:28), in order to leave the interpretive possibilities open. Literary context provides an obvious association with the recently mentioned ‫“ השׂעיר לעזאזל‬the billy goat for Azazel” in 16:8-10, 20-22. Those hearing or reading Leviticus in sequence would likely notice these mentions in rapid succession of unusual rituals using ‫“ שׂעירים‬billy goats” in the country-side. So, lest taking a goat outside the camp on the Day of Mitigations be taken as affirming their role in rural cults, Leviticus now tightly constrains goat rituals. It bans the worship of goats and the deities they represent, and prohibits slaughter offerings to any deity outside the sanctuary. Instead, chap. 16 requires the use of a billy goat to send not offerings but Israel’s sins and pollutions “to Azazel” (see on Leviticus 16, Exposition: History and Interpretation of the Goat for Azazel). The mention of billy goats here is evidence that Leviticus 17, or at least this verse, was written for its position immediately following Leviticus 16. ‫“ אשׁר הם זנים‬whom they lust for” denigrates illicit ritual worship in sexual terms, which is typical of biblical polemics (e.g. Lev. 20:5-6; Exod. 34:15-16; Ezek 16:15-17, 26-28; Hos. 1:2; 2:2). The covenant between YHWH and Israel is conceived like a marriage, so worship of other gods is condemned like promiscuous sex. Therefore, the appearance here of ‫“ זנה‬lust” cannot 11 Maciej Münnich, “What did the Biblical Goat-Demons Look Like?” UF 38 (2006), 52333. See also Bernd Janowski, “Satyrs ‫שׁעירים‬,” DDD (1999), 732-33.

374

Leviticus 17 Exegesis

be taken as evidence that worshipping billy goats actually involved sexual activities (contra Hartley; see further in Exegesis to 19:29). Sexual polemic was at home in priestly texts like Leviticus and Ezekiel as much as in Deuteronomistic traditions, so its appearance here does not mean it was criticizing Deuteronomy’s permission for secular slaughter (contra Nihan 2007, 411). Nevertheless, this verse’s association of illicit sex with illicit worship of goat demons has shaped Western imaginations of “devilish” temptations. The combination of biblical polemics with Greek stories and images of sexually-promiscuous satyrs (half goat, half man) led to the emergence of a horned and seductive devil. By the fifteenth century, these goats had turned into incubi and succubi in the imaginations of some interpreters (e.g. Alonso Tostado/Abulensis; see Elliott 175). For “a permanent mandate throughout your generations,” see Exegesis to 3:17 and 6:11. This statement is a problem for interpreters who think vv. 3-7 is an old ban on all secular slaughter contradicted later by Deuteronomy 12 because of cultic centralization. Hieke (627) tried to find unity beyond this contradiction by observing that Leviticus 17 and Deuteronomy 12 agree on banning lay people’s slaughter offerings outside the Tabernacle: either animals get slaughtered as offerings at YHWH’s altar or they get slaughtered only as food without religious connotations of any sort. In fact, that is the likely meaning of Lev. 17:3-7 even apart from Deuteronomy (see Exposition: History of Interpretations of Slaughter Outside the Tabernacle). But note that priests must still slaughter some animals for legitimate rituals outside the camp (Lev. 14:2-5; Num. 19:3). Rabbinic rulings followed the clear permission of Deuteronomy 12 for secular slaughter so long as the blood is properly drained. The Mishnah allowed anyone to slaughter who can do so properly (m. Ḥul. 1.1), but the Gemarah required rabbinic supervision of butchers (b. Ḥul. 17b-18b). That laid the basis for the custom of licensing rabbinically-approved butchers (‫ )שׁוחטים‬to process meats for Jewish communities. Christian interpreters, who opposed ritual offerings in temples, considered all these rules as lapsed (Elliott 174). Prohibition of Rising and Slaughter Offerings Elsewhere (17:8-9) Verses 8-9 expand the previous rule to include ‫“ עלות‬rising offerings” and turn attention from the offering blood to the worshippers. Immigrants residing in Israelite territory must not only observe the blood prohibition (v. 10), they must also bring their slaughter offerings to YHWH’s sanctuary (vv. 5-6). Nevertheless, the writers of Leviticus did not imagine foreigners and immigrants as potential religious proselytes in the way that later Jews and Christians did.

Leviticus 17 Exegesis 17:8

375

Say to them: Anyone from the house of Israel or any immigrant who has immigrated among you (pl) who raises a rising (offering) or a slaughter (offering)

‫“ ואלה תאמר‬say to them” places the addressees, “them,” first for emphasis. Schwartz (1996, 17; also Milgrom 1464-65) thought this indicated that the previous explanation in vv. 5-7 is intended for Moses’ ears alone. He defended this view by observing the shift from third singular in vv. 3-4 to third plural in vv. 5-7, and to second plural here. However, shifts between second and third person and between singular and plural are common in the instructions of Leviticus to convey emphasis and tone (see also ‫“ על־כן אמרתי‬so I say” in v. 12), rather than changes in addressees, since the Israelites are addressed by all the contents of the book (17:2; 1:2; 4:2; and Exegesis to 6:1-2a). Nevertheless, the book contains clear changes of addressee that occur without speech formulas (cf. 16:29 with 16:2). But the repetition of divine address formulas, whether in the voice of YHWH, Moses, or the narrator (e.g. 5:14; 7:22; 8:5; 10:3; 20:24; see Leviticus 1-10, 301), emphasizes the importance and urgency of the commandments they introduce more obviously than structural divisions or changes of addressee. The phrasing here therefore emphasizes the urgency of conveying all the contents of this chapter to the Israelites. ‫“ הגר אשׁר־יגור בתוכם‬the immigrant who has immigrated among you” emphasizes with nominal and verbal forms of ‫ גר‬a foreigner who is residing in Israel, not simply travelling through. The ‫גר‬, who appears first in Leviticus in 16:29, is a favourite topic in Leviticus 17-25 where the word appears in various formulations seventeen times (17:8, 10, 12, 13, 15; 18:26; 19:10, 33, 34; 20:2; 22:18; 23:22; 24:16, 22; 25:23, 35, 47). It shares this concern with the Pentateuch’s other legal collections (Exod. 20:10; 22:21; 23:9; Deut. 5:14; 10:18-19; 14:21, 29; 16:11, 14; 23:8; 24:14, 17, 19; 26:11, 12, 13; 27:19; 29:10 [Eng. 29:11]; 31:12) as well as Ezekiel (14:7; 22:7; 47:22; see Hieke 596). However, whereas other Pentateuchal texts depict immigrants as poor dependents on Israelite charity, Leviticus portrays them as potential participants in economic transactions. Immigrants may be wealthy enough to enslave Israelite debtors (25:47). They have the opportunity to present personal offerings to YHWH if they wish (Lev. 17:8; 22:18; Num. 15:13-14). As to religious obligations, the priestly literature requires immigrants to rest on the Day of Mitigations (16:29) like on the Sabbath (Exod. 20:10), but omits them from the requirement to celebrate Sukkot/ Booths (Lev. 23:42; contra Deut. 16:14). Elsewhere, immigrants are included in the covenant rededications of Deut. 29:9 and Josh. 8:33. This range of attitudes to the ‫“ גר‬immigrant” has led to attempts to chart the changes through Judah’s pre- and post-exilic history (Achenbach 2011; Albertz 2011).

376

Leviticus 17 Exegesis

This broad emphasis on partly incorporating the ‫ גר‬into Israel’s religious as well as legal system suggests translating ‫ גרים‬to reflect their recognized status within the community, so “immigrants” (CEB) rather than “strangers” (KJV, NJPS, ESV), “foreigners” (NLT), or “aliens” (NRSV, NIV). Immigrants’ higher status in Leviticus can probably be attributed to the social situation in Persian-period Yehud and Samaria, where Judean returnees and peasants mixed with immigrant farmers, Persian soldiers and administrators, and foreign merchants (Neh. 13:16; so Albertz 2011, 58-59; Nihan 2011b, 131-32; for a more elaborate and speculative reconstruction of fifth-century conflicts over the place of immigrants, see Achenbach 2011, 39-43). The attention to immigrants in Leviticus 17-25 was probably motivated by priestly concern that they might pollute the land of Israel and Israelite worship (Exod. 12:19; Lev. 16:29-31; 18:26; 20:2-3, 22-23; 24:16; Num. 15:14-16, 29-31; so Weinfeld 1972, 227-32; Milgrom 1417-19; Albertz 2011, 60; Nihan 2011b, 125-27). But Milgrom’s further contention that immigrants were bound only by negative, not positive, commands (Milgrom 1055, 1417, 1496) cannot account for all the rules that explicitly mention them (Nihan 2011b, 127-28). Deuteronomy contains provisions for ‫“ גרים‬immigrants” to be included in the covenant community (Deut. 23:8-9; 29:9-10; 31:12; Achenbach 2011, 35-36). LXX translated ‫ גר‬with προσήλυτος, which transliterated became the English word “proselyte,” that is, a convert. The Greek word described converts to Judaism by at least the first century C.E. (Philo, Laws 1.51; Matt. 23:15; Acts 2:10) and inscriptions suggest that it described converts to other religious movements as well (BAG). It is not clear, however, that the LXX already used it with such religious connotations. As for MT, though some interpreters emphasize statements of legal equality (Lev. 24:22; 25:6; Num. 9:14; 15:16) as showing that later pentateuchal authors and editors fully integrated immigrants into Israel’s religious community (Achenbach 2011, 41-42), others argue that immigrants remained second class because they could not own inherited land and could be reduced to chattel slavery (Lev. 25:44-46; so Milgrom 1420; Albertz 2011, 60-62; Nihan 2011b, 132). The idea of proselytes as religious converts was likely a later innovation of the Hellenistic period. ‫“ יעלה עלה‬raises a rising offering” is one of only two times that Leviticus uses the cognate verb with this offering name (cf. 14:20; for the name of the rising offering, see Exegesis to 1:3). It provides a poetic match to ‫זבח זבהים‬ “slaughter slaughter offerings” in vv. 5 and 7. The cognate noun ‫“ עלה‬rising offering” and verb ‫“ עלה‬raise” appear together more often in other books of the HB. This conventional usage probably accounts for the unique conjunction here of ‫ זבח‬... ‫“ יעלה‬raise ... a slaughter offering” (but see similar phrasing with other offerings in Josh. 22:23; Judg. 20:26; Milgrom 1467). The oddity

Leviticus 17 Exegesis

377

of this combination may nevertheless explain why SP and LXX read the verb as ‫“ יעשׂה‬make” instead, as in MT v. 9. The phrase, ‫“ עלה או־זבח‬a rising offering or slaughter offering,” probably aims to include all slaughter offerings (as in Num. 15:3, 5; so Hartley 273; Milgrom 1467; Nihan 2007, 415; Rhyder 2019, 217): the rising offerings whose meat is burned on the altar (Lev. 1) and the amity slaughter, sin, and guilt offerings whose meat feeds priests and, in the case of amity slaughter offerings, worshippers (Lev. 3-7). The argument that sin and guilt offerings are omitted because they served only to purify temple sanctuaries or compensate for sacrilege (Schwartz 1999, 99; see Milgrom 1468) fails because Leviticus portrays these offerings as also serving the needs of lay people for forgiveness and purification (see Leviticus 1-10, 321). These are goals that the writers could expect many devoted lay people living far from the sanctuaries to share. Therefore they needed to emphasize that worshippers must present slaughter offerings of all kinds only in YHWH’s sanctuary for them to count as valid. Priests, however, must occasionally conduct ritual slaughter outside the camp (Lev. 14:4-7; Num. 19:2-6). 17:9

and does not bring it to the entrance of the meeting tent to make it for YHWH, that one will be cut off from their (ms) people.

This chapter excludes from consideration the possibility that offerings in the field could also be “for YHWH.” ‫“ עשׂה‬make” is an abbreviation for the entire ritual of presenting an offering also in 14:19, 30; 15:15, 30; 16:9. On ‫“ נכרת מעמיו‬cut off from their people,” see Exegesis to 7:20. This penalty already appeared in v. 4, but here it is also applied to immigrants (v. 8). So ‫“ עמיו‬their people” does not refer just to Israelites. Prohibition on Eating Blood and its Rationale (17:10-12) The prohibition on eating blood has already been stated forcefully in Leviticus (3:17; 7:26-27) and will again (19:26). This paragraph stands out from these others, however, by offering an explanation for this prohibition: the meat’s “personal energy” is in the blood (v. 11). Rationales for ritual rules are very rare in Leviticus. This one has therefore attracted attention since antiquity as the basis for explaining the significance of sacrifice and atonement in Jewish and Christian theology (see Exposition: History of Interpretations of Blood in Mitigation/Atonement). The paragraph takes the form of a chiastic arch in which vv. 10 and 12 about the penalty for eating blood bracket the three-part arch in v. 11 that explains it (Milgrom 1469; see Exposition above). Vocabulary ties the arch together: ‫“ דם‬blood” appears twice in each of the three verses, while ‫נפשׁ‬

378

Leviticus 17 Exegesis

“personal energy” appears once in each of the five steps of the arch (Schenker 1991, 197). The outer brackets are also connected to the centre of the arch by YHWH’s emphatic self-references in all three verses: ‫“ נתתי פני‬I will face,” ‫“ הכרתי‬I will cut off,” ‫“ אני נתתי‬I myself put,” and ‫“ אמרתי‬I say.” 17:10 Anyone from the house of Israel or any immigrant who has immigrated among you (pl) who eats any blood, I will face the person who eats blood and I will cut them (ms) off from their people, For ‫“ גר‬immigrant,” see on v. 8 above. Immigrants are not included in the prohibitions on eating polluted meats in chap. 11 (see especially 11:45), which disproves Milgrom’s (1470) claim that they are subject to all the prohibitive, but not the positive, commandments. The blood prohibition may be motivated by concern for polluting the land (20:22-26) which would therefore apply to everyone living in the land of Israel (Milgrom 1497). Another likely explanation for immigrants’ inclusion in the blood prohibition is that God prohibited Noah from ingesting blood (Gen. 9:4), which may therefore apply to all of Noah’s descendents, that is, all humans (Milgrom 1470). However, none of these motives are cited here. Instead, v. 11 points to blood’s role in providing mitigation through altar offerings, which immigrants may offer but are not required to do so (Lev. 22:18; Num. 15:14). ‫“ אכל את־דם‬eat blood,” which occurs twice in this verse, refers to eating meat with blood in it (also in the parallel prohibitions in Gen. 9:4; Lev. 3:17; 7:26-27; 19:26; Deut. 12:16, 23-25). Biblical Hebrew uses “drinking blood” as a metaphor for violent bloodshed (Num. 23:24; Deut. 32:42; Jer. 46:10; Ezek. 39:17-19), but it does not envision people literally draining blood and then drinking it (Schwartz 1991, 43-44) as some cultures do. Its focus is rather on draining the blood before eating meat, hence the phrasing of this prohibition as “eating blood.” Unlike the restriction of the offering rules to animals from flock and herd (v. 3), this prohibition applies to ‫“ כל־דם‬any blood.” Leviticus 7:26 has already made clear that the blood prohibition applies to every “bird or quadruped,” and v. 13 repeats that emphasis. The Qumran community included fish in the blood prohibition (1QS 12:1314), but the rabbis did not require fish blood to be drained before eating (m. Ker. 5.1; b. Ker. 21b). Leviticus 17 may have omitted fish (cf. 11:9-13) because they do not contain much blood (Milgrom 1971). Richard Whitekettle (2016) argued that fish are omitted here because they seem to lack breath, which is one way to translate ‫ נפשׁ‬in v. 11’s rationale. However, Gen. 1:20-21 explicitly labels sea creatures as ‫“ נפשׁ חיה‬living animals,” and the syntax of the phrase ‫“ אשׁר בו נפשׁ חיה‬that have living ‫ נפשׁ‬in them” in Gen. 1:30 describes only land swarmers, not the quadrupeds and flyers mentioned earlier in the verse. So we cannot know if the writers would have described fish this way. As Whitekettle himself noted, air-breathing animals are more

Leviticus 17 Exegesis

379

explicitly described as having ‫“ רוח חיים‬living breath” (Gen. 6:17; 7:14-15, 22-23) which explicitly distinguishes them from marine animals (Whitekettle 2016, 692-93). This suggests that the P writers distinguished ‫“ רוח‬breath” in animals from their ‫“ נפשׁ‬personal energy” (see on v. 11 below), which leaves the omission of fish from Leviticus 17 unexplained. ‫“ נתתי פני בנפשׁ‬I will face the person” appears as a threat also in Lev. 20:3, 6; 26:17; Ezek. 14:8; 15:7 in response to sins of Molek worship and idolatry. Feldman (2020, 184) concluded from these parallels that eating blood is categorized “as a crime of the highest order.” This threat is the opposite of “lifting one’s face” to show favour, as YHWH is depicted doing in the priestly blessing (Num. 6:26).12 The phrase is usually translated “I will set my face against them” (NRSV, NJPS), but the English idiom, “I will face them,” captures better the antagonism conveyed by God’s concentrated attention. As Sifra paraphrased it, “I will turn from all my other affairs and occupy myself (solely) with him,” reading ‫“ פני‬my face” as the verb ‫“ פנה‬turn” instead (also Rashi; see Milgrom 1733). TgOnk interpreted the threat explicitly as ‫“ רוגזי‬my anger” (see Drazin 1994, 159). With ‫“ והכריתי‬I will cut off,” YHWH threatens to carry out a punishment personally that has previously been left indefinite. The intensive hiphil form, ‫“ הכריתי‬I will cut off” here and in 20:3, 5, 6 also makes the threat seem more violent than the passive niphal form in vv. 4 and 9 (Kamionkowski 170). The ‫“ כרת‬cut off” threat already accompanied the prohibition on eating blood and fat in 7:23-27. 17:11 because the meat’s personal energy is in the blood. I myself put it on the altar for you (pl) to mitigate for your personal energy, because it is the blood that mitigates by means of personal energy. This verse is the centre of a three-verse chiasm (vv. 10-12) that forms the central section of the chapter’s five sections. The three phrases in this verse have also been arranged chiastically, with the first and third mirroring each other: ‫כי נפשׁ הבשׂר בדם הוא‬ ‫ואני נתתיו לכם על־המזבח לכפר על־נפשׁתיכם‬ ‫כי הדם הוא בנפשׁ יכפר‬

Deuteronomy prohibits consumption of blood using an abbreviated form of the same language and arch structure that shapes all three verses of Lev. 17:10-12. Deuteronomy 12:23 reads: 12 See Simeon Chavel, “The Face of God and the Etiquette of Eye-Contact: Visitation, Pilgrimage, and Prophetic Vision in Ancient Israelite and Early Jewish Imagination,” JSQ 19 (2012), 1-55 [18-19].

380

Leviticus 17 Exegesis ‫רק חזק לבלתי אכל הדם‬ ‫כי הדם הוא הנפשׁ‬ ‫ולא־תאכל הנפשׁ עם־הבשׂר‬ Only be sure not to eat the blood,  because it is the blood that is the personal energy, you must not eat the personal energy with the flesh

Both passages connect animal ‫“ דם‬blood” in ‫“ בשׂר‬flesh” with ‫“ נפשׁ‬personal energy,” as does Gen. 9:4. The parallel terminology, syntax (‫כי הדם הוא‬ “because it is the blood”), and similar arch formats may indicate that both structure and vocabulary derive from traditional oral sayings prohibiting blood consumption in Israelite culture. The likely prevalence of the blood prohibition in ancient Israel (see Exposition: History of the Prohibition on Eating Blood above) means that this possibility should be taken seriously before judging one text directly dependent on the other (e.g. Nihan 2007, 425). Unlike Deuteronomy 12, however, Lev. 17:11 includes the idea of ‫“ כפר‬mitigation” on the Tabernacle altar. Adding an emphasis on altar rituals to the traditional blood prohibition ties this chapter’s blood prohibition tightly to the preceding ritual regulations in Leviticus 1-16 (Nihan 2007, 87 n. 82, 423). The phrase ‫“ נפשׁ הבשׂר‬the meat’s personal energy” is key to the meaning of this verse. Up to this point in Leviticus, ‫ נפשׁ‬has simply referred to a “person” as in the previous and following verses (or “someone” or “anyone”; see Exegesis to 2:1). ‫ בשׂר‬means “meat” (e.g. 4:11; 7:18; 11:8) or “flesh” (13:2) or “body” (15:2). They are combined here to describe some essential feature of the flesh and blood (see Exposition: Human and Animal Embodiment in Leviticus 17:11). The phrase, ‫“ נפשׁ הבשׂר בדם‬the meat’s personal energy is in the blood” reverses the first two words of the phrase in Gen. 9:4, ‫“ בשׂר בנפשׁו דמו‬meat with its personal energy, its blood,” which Marx (2017, 22-23) thought indicates an intentional citation. The syntax of this verse, however, is clearer than Gen. 9:4. Many interpreters have understood this verse to mean that slaughter offerings provide mitigation for the sin of pouring out animal blood, which they believe v. 4 and Gen. 9:4-5 equate with murder (so Levine 113; Schwartz 1991, 58-60; Gerstenberger 242; Milgrom 1456; Nihan 2007, 422; Kiuchi 322). But this interpretation of v. 4 is unlikely (see above) and Gen. 9:5 speaks of animals who kill humans as subject to being punished for murder, not humans who slaughter animals. ‫ נפשׁ‬appears three times in this verse to describe a common characteristic of both humans (v. 11b) and animals (v. 11c), as it does also in Gen. 9:4-5 and Deut. 12:20-25 (Rendtorff 167). The Hebrew word has a wide range of applications in the Hebrew Bible, ranging from “throat, neck” through “breath” and “hunger, desire” to “soul, heart, mind” as “the seat of desire, will, feelings and emotions, also of intellect” (DCH). Here it appears close to ‫“ אכל‬eat” (vv. 10, 12, 15) which might suggest translating “hunger, desire”

Leviticus 17 Exegesis

381

(“Bedürftigkeit” according to Erbele-Küster 2017, 352) or “throat, appetite” (Milgrom 1471-72). The absence of fish from this passage led Whitekettle (2016, 720) to translate “breath” and suggest that the verse prohibits eating the meat’s breath (i.e. air) carried in the blood. Traditional translations, however, understood ‫ נפשׁ‬here to mean “life” (LXX ψυχή, Vg anima, KJV, NRSV, NJPS, NIV). On the basis of this verse, Philo (Det. 79-84, 91-92) described animals and humans as sharing blood which is life (ψυχή) though only humans have spirit (πνεῦμα), while Josephus (Ant. 3.260) identified blood with spirit as well as life (Eberhart 2013, 98). The view that a body’s soul or spirit is in its blood also appeared in non-Jewish Roman texts (e.g. Seneca, Nat. 7,25,2; see Dulaey 2017, 56). Priestly texts, however, do not equate ‫ נפשׁ‬with ‫“ חי‬life” (Feder 2011, 196). Genesis 1:30 instead defines living creatures as those ‫אשׁר־בו נפשׁ חיה‬ “that have ‫ נפשׁ‬of life (‫ )חי‬in them” where ‫ נפשׁ‬is usually translated “breath” (but see on v. 10 above) and could also mean “energy.” Priestly writers also use ‫ נפשׁ‬to refer to dead bodies in contexts referring to corpse impurity (‫ נפשׁת מת‬in Lev. 21:11; ‫ נפשׁ אדם‬in Num. 5:2; 9:6-7, also modified by ‫ מת‬in Num. 19:11, 13, where one can translate “dead human body”). ‫נפשׁ‬ can also mean to kill someone as in the lex talionis formula, ‫נפשׁ תחת נפשׁ‬ (Lev. 24:18; ‫ נפשׁ בנפשׁ‬in Deut. 19:21), usually translated “a life for a life” but more plausibly “a body for a body” or “a person for a person.” Priestly writers use the phrase ‫“ לכפר על־נפשׁתיכם‬to mitigate for your ‫ ”נפשׁ‬twice elsewhere to describe mitigating donations of gold and silver: the half-shekel poll tax in Exod. 30:15-16 and war booty in Num. 31:50. The long and continuing interpretive tradition of translating ‫ נפשׁ‬as life draws its persuasive power from God’s promise to avenge manslaughter or murder by animals and humans alike in Gen. 9:5, which is usually translated “for your own lifeblood (‫ )דמכם לנפשׁתיכם‬I will surely require a reckoning ... I will require a reckoning for human life (‫( ”)נפשׁ האדם‬so NRSV). The proof, however, that ‫ נפשׁ‬does not mean specifically “life” lies in the fact that this verse can be translated, “for your (dead) body’s blood I will require a reckoning, ... I will require a reckoning for a human (dead) body,” which conveys exactly the same promise to avenge the killing of humans (see Vervenne 1993, 469). Like Lev. 17:11, Gen. 9:5 and Deut. 12:23 associate ‫ נפשׁ‬with blood and agree that the association becomes problematic exactly when the ‫“ נפשׁ‬person/animal” is dead. Leviticus 17 uses ‫ נפשׁ‬to refer alternately to humans who present offerings and eat meat (vv. 10, 11, 12, 15) and to the animals that they present as offerings and that they eat (vv. 11, 14). This alternation of referents from one sentence to the next indicates an intentional play on the multiple meanings of ‫ נפשׁ‬that establishes some kind of identity between humans and animals (Rendtorff 1995, 26). Recognition of animal-human commonality appears

382

Leviticus 17 Exegesis

explicitly also in Gen 9:10-12, where God makes a covenant with ‫כל־נפשׁ‬ ‫“ חיה‬every living ‫נפשׁ‬,” and in Lev. 24:17-18 that compare penalties for killing ‫“ נפשׁ אדם‬a human person” and ‫“ נפשׁ בהמה‬a quadruped person.” Translating ‫ נפשׁ‬differently for humans than for animals in this verse (e.g. “person” vs. “life” in NRSV, NJPS, NIV) fails to convey the Hebrew word play. Such translations also fuel the interpretive tendency to focus on “life” as a separate category. Biblical Hebrew speaks rather of ‫ חיה‬as an attribute (“living”) of an animal or human person (‫נפשׁ חיה‬, Gen. 2:7; Lev. 11:10) who may instead be ‫“ מת‬dead” (Lev. 21:11; Num. 19:11). This cryptic formula about blood and ‫ נפשׁ‬plays on the semantic range of ‫ נפשׁ‬that clearly exceeds that of any one English word. To indicate the Hebrew word play with ‫ נפשׁ‬in vv. 10-15 that evokes both animal “energy” and human “persons,” I translate ‫ נפשׁ‬here and in v. 14 as “personal energy” (similarly: “life-force” Schwartz 1991, 49; “animating soul/spirit” Feder 2011, 204). Note that the verb ‫ נפשׁ‬can mean “to refresh, re-energize” (Exod. 23:12; 31:17; 2 Sam. 16:14). The mistaken impression that ‫ נפשׁ‬means “life” has distorted translations of the preposition on ‫( בנפשׁ‬also in v. 14c). LXX αἷμα αὐτοῦ “its blood” omits the preposition on ‫ נפשׁ‬to harmonize with v. 14c. ‫ כפר ב־‬usually indicates the location of mitigation, “in” (6:23; 16:17, 27), or the means of mitigation, “with” or “by means of” (5:16; 7:7; 19:22), but neither works very well with ‫ נפשׁ‬meaning “person” or “life” (though that did not stop Wenham, Hartley 274-76, Milgrom 1478, Schwartz 1991, and CEB). The preposition has therefore been rendered “for” (KJV; NAB; NIV) or “as” (NRSV; NJPS). My translation of ‫ נפשׁ‬as “personal energy” allows the preposition to have its more natural meaning in the phrase, ‫“ בנפשׁ יכפר‬mitigates by means of personal energy.” ‫“ נתתיו‬I give it” can also be translated “I put it.” The syntax of ‫אני נתתיו‬ ‫ לכם על־המזבח לכפר‬is usually rearranged to read “I have given it to you to mitigate ... on the altar,” but Schwartz (1991, 50) insisted that the Hebrew word sequence means that God puts the blood on the altar: The blood is prohibited because God has ‘given’ it to humanity by ‘placing’ it, that is, ordering it to be placed on his altar. ... What our clause does, in its unique, metaphorically graphic way, is to take a set phrase, the ‘placing’ of the blood on the altar, and to reverse the conceptual direction of the action: ‘It is not you who are placing the blood on the altar for me, for my benefit, but rather the opposite: it is I who have placed it there for you – for your benefit’.

In ritual practice, of course, it is the priest who puts the blood on the altar as stated just five verses earlier (v. 6; also e.g. 1:5; 3:2; 4:30), but from the worshippers’ perspective, the priest represents YHWH. This statement makes God not the ritual’s recipient, but a ritual participant who offers the blood (Marx 2017, 30). This idea is far from being a radical innovation: the ritual

Leviticus 17 Exegesis

383

texts and art of many cultures depict gods participating in rituals by making offerings.13 Following Schwartz, then, I translate, “I myself put it for you on the altar to mitigate.” For the translation of ‫ כפר‬with “mitigate,” see Exegesis to 4:20 (including discussion of the theory that the word carries a different meaning, “ransom,” in 17:11 than in the rest of Leviticus; so Brichto 1976, 28; Levine 115; Milgrom 1474). Its association here with blood has generated many theories that blood offerings were essential to P’s idea of mitigation. As Rendtorff (169) pointed out, Moses links blood, meat, and mitigation in 10:17 to explain his complaint about the failure of Aaron’s sons to eat the community’s sin offering: “that is what you have been given to carry the community’s liability to mitigate for them ... See, its blood was not brought inside.” That combination of themes makes perfect sense about sin offerings and their distinctive altar rites of blood manipulation (4:16-18, 30), but sin offerings that are eaten only by priests do not fit this chapter’s emphasis on prohibiting lay Israelites from eating blood. Blood is not usually depicted as a means of ‫“ כפר‬mitigation,” which elsewhere describes entire rituals rather than just their component parts (Brichto 1976, 30-34). See further discussion in Exposition: History of Interpretations of Blood in Mitigation/Atonement above. 17:12 Therefore, I say to the children of Israel: No person among you (pl) may eat blood nor may the immigrant who has immigrated among you eat blood. This verse repeats the prohibition in v. 10 with the explanation ‫“ על־כן‬so, therefore,” which introduces a repetition of a ruling after its rationale also in Num. 18:23-24, Deut. 15:10-11, and 19:6-7 (Milgrom 1469, 1479). According to Schwartz (1991, 45), this structure and phrasing, “this is why I say to the Israelites,” emphasizes the rationale in v. 11 more than the law that follows it (cf. also Deut. 5:15). The phrasing of vv. 11-12, ‫ על־כן אמרתי לבני ישׂראל‬... ‫ אני נתתיו לכם‬feels past tense, but the perfect verbs are the same as in v. 10, which are clearly future threats. So it is probably best to translate present tense here referring to the command currently being given in vv. 10-12 (so Schwartz 1991, 46; contra Paran 1989, 170). The blood prohibition includes immigrants, so “I say to the children of Israel” (also v. 14) refers to the intended audience of the revelation (as in v. 2), not to some distinction in the law’s application to Israelites and 13 Kimberley C. Patton, Religion of the Gods: Ritual, Paradox, and Reflexivity, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

384

Leviticus 17 Exegesis

immigrants (contra Milgrom 1479). The Israelites who hear or read YHWH’s commandments are implicitly expected to tell immigrants how to apply them. Prohibition on Eating the Blood of Game and its Rationale (17:13-14) This paragraph addresses the obvious question arising from the previous prohibitions on eating the blood of animals suitable for offerings: what about eating wild animals? The practical provision of pouring out and covering the blood of game animals (v. 13) matches the Deuteronomic rule (Deut. 12:2224). So does the rationale (v. 14), which makes clear that the identification of personal energy with blood applies to all animal meat, whether it mitigates on the altar (v. 11) or not. For the structure of this paragraph and its links to vv. 10-12, see Exposition: Structure above. 17:13 Anyone from the children of Israel or from the immigrants who have immigrated among you (pl) who hunts living game or flyers for food must pour out its blood and cover it with dirt, Here, in association with ‫“ הגר הגר‬the immigrants who have immigrated,” the subject reverts to the distributive ‫“ אישׁ אישׁ‬anyone” (cf. vv. 3, 8, 10; for its gender-neutral translation, see on v. 3 above) instead of ‫“ כל־נפשׁ‬every person” as in vv. 11-12, 14-15. MT reads ‫“ בני ישׂראל‬children of Israel” here instead of “house of Israel” in every other occurrence of this formula in the chapter (vv. 3, 8, 10). Some other Hebrew manuscripts join SP and TgPsJ in reading “house” here too, while LXX reads “children” in all four repetitions of the formula. MT may be the product of memory variants, which the ancient versions corrected for consistency. MT ‫“ בתוכם‬among them” should be second person plural, ‫“ בתוככם‬among you,” as SP manuscripts and almost all the ancient versions attest. ‫“ חיה‬animal” may appear here to emphasize its root, ‫“ חי‬living,” which distinguishes this rule from the one on scavenging carcasses that follows (v. 15). ‫ יצוד ציד חיה‬uses noun and verb of the same root ‫ צוד‬to emphasize hunting, so in English “hunt living game.” Deuteronomy 14:5 contains a list of wild deer and goats that Israelites may eat. Though most of the names cannot be identified with precision, they almost certainly included roe deer, fallow deer, gazelles, and perhaps the ibex (Borowski 1998, 186-90). ‫אשׁר‬ ‫“ יֵ ָא ֵכ ל‬for food” is literally “which will be eaten.” Neither Leviticus nor the rest of the HB envisions hunting for sport (Milgrom 1481), despite its popularity among ancient kings as evidenced by their art.

Leviticus 17 Exegesis

385

On the identity of ‫“ עוף‬flyers,” see Translating Animal Names in Exposition to Leviticus 11, which modifies my conclusions in Exegesis to 1:14. Trapping birds for food and offerings was common in ancient cultures. Egyptian art contains many scenes of snaring birds with nets. Species included wild or feral pigeons and landfowl (partridges and chickens) permitted by Leviticus as altar offerings (1:14; 5:7; 12:8; 15:14, 29). Zooarcheological remains from ancient Israel and Judah show that the population also ate turtledoves, geese, and ducks (Altmann and Spiciarich 2020, 8-12). Recognizing that this verse includes wild birds eligible for altar offerings among animals that can be slaughtered and eaten far away from the sanctuary makes it difficult to read vv. 3-7 as banning the secular slaughter of some offering species, as many interpreters do (see Exposition: History of Interpretations of Slaughter Outside the Tabernacle above). For ‫“ שׁפך את־דמו‬pour out its blood,” see on v. 4 above. The action of pouring blood on the ground has been interpreted as a ritual rendering of the animal’s life or vital force back to God. However, Schwartz (1991, 62) observed that the chapter gives no hint of such symbolism, but depicts it as simply a pragmatic means of disposal so that blood will not be consumed. Interpreters have imagined various reasons why the blood must also be ‫“ כסהו בעפר‬covered with dirt.” See the list of possibilities in Milgrom (1482-83), who thought that burying in dirt prevented the use of blood in chthonic rituals (Milgrom 1490-93). This provision is missing from the rule in Deut. 12:16, 24, which instead compares pouring out blood to spilling water. 17:14 because every meat’s personal energy is its blood. I said to the children of Israel: You (pl) must not eat any meat’s blood, because every meat’s personal energy is its blood. Anyone who eats it will be cut off. For the translation of ‫ נפשׁ‬as “personal energy,” see on v. 11 above. MT begins this verse redundantly: ‫“ כי־נפשׁ כל־בשׂר דמו בנפשׁו הוא‬for every meat’s personal energy is its blood, it is in its personal energy.” Vervenne (1993, 467) defended MT’s construction, which he translated “the life of all flesh: the blood is its life” reading the ‫ ב־‬preposition as a beth-essentiae indicating the predicate (so also NRSV, NJPS, CEB). Noting ‫ בנפשׁו‬also in the parallel in Gen. 9:4, Milgrom (1483) translated “with its life-blood” and Whitekettle (2016, 702) translated “its blood with its breath,” but both left the emphatic ‫ הוא‬unaccounted for. LXX, Syr, and Vg omit ‫“ בנפשׁו‬in its personal energy,” leaving ‫“ כי־נפשׁ כל־בשׂר דמו הוא‬because every meat’s personal energy is its blood” like the parallel phrase in this verse. That makes better sense and is translated here (so also Hartley 263; Gerstenberger 239).

386

Leviticus 17 Exegesis

The triple repetition of ‫“ כל־בשׂר‬any/every meat” emphasizes v. 13’s inclusion of wild game with domestic animals in the blood prohibition. This repetitious verse intensifies the rhetoric about blood (‫ )דם‬and personal energy (‫ )נפשׁ‬by dropping the preposition “in” and simply equating them (Schwartz 1991, 63). Repetitions in Leviticus frequently abbreviate previous statements while presupposing their details (see Exegesis to 1:12; 3:7; 4:29; 6:22; 14:23-27; 15:26, 28), so there is no significance in this verse’s failure to mention immigrants (vv. 10, 12) and the offering rationale (v. 11b) which is irrelevant for dead game. If the implicit rationale for the prohibition on eating blood is fear of polluting the land (see on v. 10), everyone in the land of Israel is obliged to observe these regulations regardless of what kinds of animals they slaughter (contra Milgrom 1484). ‫“ כל בשׂר‬every meat” includes domestic and wild animals. The first-person consecutive imperfect, ‫“ וָ א ַֹמר‬I said,” is also used in 20:24 to refer back to YHWH’s previous statements. Milgrom (1484) thought it refers here to v. 10, but in literary context it can refer to any and all of the previous prohibitions of eating blood in the Torah (Gen. 9:4; Lev. 3:17; 7:26-27; 17:10-12). Purification from Eating Animal Carcasses (17:15-16) YHWH has threatened four times in this chapter to ‫“ כרת‬cut off” anyone who eats blood (vv. 4, 9, 10, 14), but now requires only minor rites of personal purification (v. 15) like those for touching other pollutants (chap. 15). Only those who fail to purify themselves will “bear their liability” (v. 16). This change of tone resembles the contrast between the mild purification required after sexual intercourse during menstruation in 15:24 and the ominous ‫ כרת‬threat for doing so in 20:18. 17:15 Every person whether native or immigrant who eats a carcass or mauled prey must wash their (ms) clothes, bathe in water, and be polluted until evening. Then they will be pure. Rather than starting like the previous paragraphs with ‫“ אישׁ אישׁ‬anyone” (vv. 3, 8, 10, 13), this final paragraph climaxes the sequence by beginning ‫“ כל־נפשׁ‬every person” (cf. v. 12 and in 7:27, another blood prohibition) to recall the theme of “person/personal energy” that dominates vv. 10-12 (Kiuchi 324). It also reasserts the application of the blood prohibition on all inhabitants of the land of Israel, “whether native or immigrant” (so already vv. 8, 10, 12; on ‫“ אזרח‬native,” see Exegesis to 16:29). Therefore, vv. 15-16 are commonly interpreted as extending the blood prohibition to the carcasses of animals that die of natural causes (so Wenham

Leviticus 17 Exegesis

387

246; Hartley 277-78; Nihan 2007, 426; Marx 56). The omission of an explicit prohibition on eating blood, however, led Gerstenberger (239) and Kamionkowski (175) to read vv. 15-16 as only concerned with touching carcasses, like 11:39-40. Milgrom (1486-87) disagreed with both interpretations and read this paragraph instead as “permitting” the consumption of carcasses so long as one purifies oneself afterwards. This argument has been confused by the moral connotations of the English words “prohibition” and “permission” in regards to activities that Leviticus regards as polluting. Providing procedures for purification does not permit polluting behaviour any more than mitigating forgiveness permits sinful behaviour. Providing ritual means of rectification leaves the priestly ideals intact while making provision for the reality of human behaviour (see Morality and Pollution in Introduction to Leviticus 11-20 above). On ‫“ נבלה וטרפה‬carcass or mauled prey,” see Exegesis to 7:24. Exodus 22:30 prohibits Israelites from eating carcasses and mauled prey, which Lev. 22:8 repeats for priests. Deuteronomy 14:21 also repeats that prohibition but allows immigrants to buy and eat them. Leviticus 7:24 forbids consumption of fat in a context that also contains the blood prohibition (7:26-27). This verse presupposes these other prohibitions by requiring purification of both Israelites and immigrants who eat the carcass of any animal, but its provision for purification also acknowledges that such polluting behaviour can be expected to take place. These comparisons do not support more exact diachronic judgments, such as Nihan’s that vv. 15-16 “eases the previous legal traditions since consumption of carrion is no longer prohibited as in CC and D, but only rendered temporarily impure” (Nihan 2007, 427). It is typical of priestly texts to provide instructions for purification, while neither Exodus nor Deuteronomy show any interest in such rituals. However, the cultures that produced these codes certainly had purification rituals. One cannot draw any diachronic conclusions from the fact that they appear only here. The prohibitions on eating carrion in Exod. 22:30 and Deut. 14:21 both attach appeals for Israel to consecrate itself. This verse instead omits the theme of Israel’s holiness and includes immigrants under the prohibition. Attempts to explain this change (see Otto 2015, 173; Nihan 2007, 428) are complicated by the fact that the carrion prohibition in 7:23 omits any mention of either holiness or immigrants while 20:24-26 ties the diet rules tightly to Israel’s holy identity. Hieke (638) saw in this prohibition an extension of concern for preserving Israel’s holiness, but that does not explain its application to immigrants. A concern for the land’s purity is the more likely motivation (Milgrom 1485). This text, then, is not completely consistent with either P or H. It is likely that priestly concern for the possibility of polluting the land led to including immigrants in the blood and carrion prohibitions

388

Leviticus 17 Exegesis

and also to providing everyone the means to purify themselves. This motive does not contradict these other priestly texts. It is plausible to read vv. 15-16 with the majority of interpreters as discouraging eating carcasses and mauled prey because blood has congealed in the meat and cannot easily be drained. The paragraph acknowledges that this behaviour will likely occur and so mandates purification procedures. It follows from this interpretation that these same procedures can also be used to purify people that break the blood prohibition by eating bloody meat of any kind. This requirement for personal purification adds bathing to the laundering and waiting already required after touching an animal carcass by 11:39-40. On this regular refrain for laundering, bathing, and waiting until evening so that ‫“ וטהר‬then they will be pure,” see Exposition: Structure to Leviticus 15. 17:16 If they (ms) do not wash and bathe their body, they bear their liability. Here ‫ בשׂר‬refers, not to animal meat as it does in vv. 11, 14, and chaps. 1-7, but to a human body as it does frequently in chaps. 11, 13, 15, 16, and also in 18:6, 19:28, and 21:5. This common term for human and animal bodies emphasizes Leviticus’ concern for the proper disposition and use of all kinds of bodies. See Exposition: Human and Animal Embodiment above. This is the first verse in Leviticus to announce a penalty for failing to purify oneself. That penalty, ‫“ נשׂא עונו‬they bear their (ms) liability,” sounds threatening, but its source and nature remains vague (see Exegesis to 5:1). Gershon Brin suggested that this verse invokes such a severe threat because it was difficult to monitor compliance with the requirement to bathe.14

14 Gershon Brin, “The Problem of Sanctions in Biblical Law,” in Wright-Freedman-Hurvitz (1995), 341-62 [347].

LEVITICUS 18:1-30

PROHIBITIONS OF ILLICIT SEX

1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

YHWH spoke to Moses: Speak to the children of Israel and say to them: I am YHWH your (pl) God! What is done in the land of Egypt where you (pl) lived you must not do, and what is done in the land of Canaan into which I am bringing you you must not do, and their mandates you must not follow. It is my regulations that you (pl) must do and my mandates that you must observe to follow them – I am YHWH your God! You (pl) must observe my mandates and my regulations. The one who does them will live by them – I am YHWH! Everyone must avoid approaching anyone of their (ms) bodily flesh to expose nudity – I am YHWH! The nudity of your (sg) father and the nudity of your mother you must not expose. She is your mother, you must not expose her nudity. The nudity of your (sg) father’s woman you must not expose. She is your father’s nudity. The nudity of your (sg) sister, your father’s daughter or your mother’s daughter born in the household or born outside it, you must not expose her nudity. The nudity of your (sg) son’s daughter or your daughter’s daughter, you must not expose their nudity, because they are your nudity. The nudity of your (sg) father’s woman’s daughter born of your father, she is your sister. You must not expose her nudity. The nudity of your (sg) father’s sister you must not expose. She is your father’s flesh. The nudity of your (sg) mother’s sister you must not expose, because she is your mother’s flesh. The nudity of your (sg) father’s brother you must not expose. You must not approach his woman. She is your aunt. The nudity of your (sg) daughter-in-law you must not expose. She is your son’s woman. You must not expose her nudity. The nudity of your (sg) brother’s woman you must not expose. She is your brother’s nudity. The nudity of a woman and her daughter you (sg) must not expose. You must not take the daughter of her son or the daughter of her daughter to expose her nudity. They are her flesh. It is depravity!

390 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26

27 28 29 30

Leviticus 18 Essentials You (sg) must not take a woman as her sister’s rival beside her to expose her nudity in her lifetime. You (sg) must not approach a woman in her menstrual period’s pollution to expose her nudity. You (sg) must not give your layer of semen to your associate’s woman to become polluted with her. You (sg) must not give your semen to pass over to Molek. You must not defile the name of your God – I am YHWH! With a male you (sg) must not lie the layings of a woman. That is disgusting! With any quadruped, you (sg) must not give your layer of semen to become polluted with it. A woman must not stand before a quadruped to mate with her. It is perversion! Do not pollute yourselves by all of these, because the nations that I am expelling before you (pl) were polluted by all of these so that the land was polluted. For that, I accounted it liable, so that the land vomited out its inhabitants. You (pl), however, must observe my mandates and my regulations and not do any of these disgusting things, both the native and the immigrant who immigrated among you. Because all these disgusting things were done by the men of the land who were before you (pl), and the land was polluted, so that the land does not vomit you (pl) out when you pollute it, like it vomited out the nation before you. For everyone who does any of these disgusting things – anyone doing them will be cut off from their people. You (pl) must observe my observances to avoid doing any of the disgusting mandates that were done before you. You must not pollute yourselves with them – I am YHWH your God!

ESSENTIALS Contents Leviticus 18 presents a long list of prohibited sexual relationships, all phrased as apodictic commands: “you must not” (vv. 6-23). The list mostly prohibits incestuous relationships within a family, which it characterizes as “your flesh” (v. 6). The chapter refers to sexual intercourse as “exposing nudity.” It addresses male heads-of-household (patriarchs) who must restrain themselves from taking sexual advantage of people in their own households. The end of the list extends to adulterous intercourse (v. 20), to male-with-male

Leviticus 18 Essentials

391

intercourse (v. 22), and to sex with animals (v. 23), but also includes a prohibition of the ritual devotion of children to Molek, which it condemns in sexual terms (v. 21). Around this list appear exhortations to obey YHWH’s “mandates and regulations,” which are explicitly contrasted with those of the Egyptians and Canaanites (vv. 3-5, 26, 30). The chapter’s conclusion asserts that YHWH is expelling the Canaanites from their land because they polluted themselves by committing the acts listed in this chapter (vv. 24, 27). As a result, the land has become polluted so much that it will “vomit” them out (vv. 25, 28). YHWH threatens to “cut off” anyone who does these things (v. 29). Contexts Most of chap. 18’s sexual prohibitions reappear as casuistic regulations in chap. 20, where many earn the death penalty. These two lists stand out in the HB, and among extant texts from other ancient cultures, as exceptionally long and detailed lists of incest prohibitions. Some of these restrictions appear elsewhere in the HB, such as the prohibition of adultery (18:20; 20:10; cf. 19:20; Exod. 20:14; Deut. 5:18; 22:22; Ezek. 18:6, 15; 22:11) and of sexual intercourse with one’s father’s women (18:8; 20:11; cf. Deut. 23:1 Eng. 22:30; 27:20; Ezek. 22:10), with one’s sister (18:9; cf. Deut. 27:22; Ezek. 22:11), with a mother and her daughter (18:17; 20:14; cf. Deut. 27:23; Amos 2:7), and with a menstruating woman (18:19; 20:18; cf. Ezek.18:6; 22:10). Other sexual prohibitions appear in the HB only here and in chap. 20. These unique rules include many of the incest restrictions (18:10-14, 16, 18; 20:12-13, 17, 19-21) and also prohibitions of male-with-male intercourse and bestiality (18:22-23; 20:13, 15-16). The stories of the HB and especially of the Pentateuch are notable for chronicling numerous offences against these incest regulations. Some are depicted as illicit, such as Lot’s intercourse with his daughters (cf. v. 17 with Gen. 19:30-38) and Judah’s intercourse with his daughter-in-law Tamar (cf. v. 15 with Gen. 38:13-26). Others, however, pass without any suggestion that these behaviours are wrong, such as Abraham’s marriage to his sister Sarah (cf. vv. 9, 11 with Gen. 20:12-16), Jacob’s marriage to the sisters Rachel and Leah (cf. v. 18 with Gen. 29:16-30), and Amram’s marriage to his aunt, Jochebed, to become the parents of Aaron, Miriam, and Moses (cf. v. 14 with Exod. 6:20). In their biblical context, then, chaps. 18 and 20 appear to advocate unusually strict sexual mores. These chapters have nevertheless played a decisive role in shaping incest rules and other laws governing sexual behaviour in later Jewish and Christian cultures. Debates have continued throughout the histories of each tradition over extending the incest rules by analogy or restricting them for

392

Leviticus 18 Essentials

pragmatic reasons. Leviticus’s incest rules have had a more direct and longer influence over modern laws than any other topic in biblical law. Today, they continue to be cited in legal and political debates by opponents of legal recognition and protection for people with non-heteronormative sexual orientations and gender identities. The exhortations before and after the sexual prohibitions ground them firmly in Israel’s story of receiving the land of Canaan from YHWH. Israel must not follow local practices, but only YHWH’s regulations (vv. 3-5, 26, 30). Chapters 18 and 20 are unique in the Pentateuch and Deuteronomistic History for blaming the Canaanites’ expulsion from their land on their own moral failures (vv. 24-27, echoed in Ezra 9:11), though sexually lurid stories in Genesis lay an implicit basis for this charge (Gen. 9:18-20; 19:30-38). By asserting their blame right after the list of incest prohibitions, this chapter characterizes their sins as mostly sexual in nature. Blaming the Canaanites’ sexual immorality for their own defeat has provided a rhetorical model for denigrating enemies ever since, though it is hardly the only cultural prompt for sexually offensive polemics. Leviticus’s polemic has been quoted to justify the Crusades, the wars of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and innumerable colonial conquests and nationalistic rebellions (see Exegesis to v. 25). All this despite the fact that incest prohibitions are among the most common rules in every human culture, even if they differ as to specifics. Rhetoric Apodictic commands, “you must/must not,” are inherently emphatic. This chapter increases their intensity by starting the first eleven prohibitions with the titillating phrase, “the nudity of” (vv. 7-17). Their personal and provocative contents ward off the tedium of listening to a long list. The list invites listeners and readers to identify their own family members in its categories, and to speculate about those not mentioned. Commentators have responded by drawing elaborate charts of family relationships, both bodily (consanguinous) and by marriage (affiliate). Legal codes have repeatedly elaborated this chapter’s distinctions and filled its gaps over the long history of Jewish and Christian cultures. Leviticus 18 and 20 distinguish different kinds of illicit sexual behaviour to a much greater degree than any comparable ancient literatures. This attention to categorization resembles how chaps. 1-7, 11, and 13-14 address different kinds of offerings, meats, and skin diseases. Mesopotamian literature is famous for its collections of very long lists of omens, laws, cures, and rituals, but it did not isolate lists of illicit sexual relationships like these chapters. That observation, together with the duplication of many of these

Leviticus 18 Exposition

393

prohibitions in chap. 20, raises questions about the writer’s rhetorical goal in composing these lists. These questions are answered clearly by the opening and concluding exhortations of both chapters. The lists reinforce exhortations for Israelites not to conform to local customs (v. 3), but rather to conform their behaviour to YHWH’s mandates and regulations (vv. 4-5, 26) as illustrated by the list of prohibited sexual activities (vv. 6-23). Doing these things pollutes the land which may then vomit out the Israelites just like the Canaanites (vv. 24-28). YHWH also threatens to cut off offenders (v. 29). The list of illicit sexual activities brings sexual intercourse firmly inside the rhetoric of pollution that Leviticus uses to motivate compliance throughout and especially in chaps. 11-20. This same emphatic rhetoric about polluting sex and ritual unifies chap. 20, which repeats most of these prohibitions and adds draconian penalties to make them even more memorable. Modern commentators have obscured this rhetorical agenda by abstracting “original” lists of incest prohibitions from their rhetorical contexts in these chapters. Though human cultures routinely limit sex among close relatives, there is no historical evidence for the existence of such elaborate lists previously in Israel’s culture or among its ancient Near Eastern neighbours. Instead, the evidence of Leviticus 18 and 20 indicates that the lists were written for their role in this context to support pollution rhetoric and motivate ethnic and ritual separation from other nations.

EXPOSITION Additional Bibliography AITKEN, TOM, AUSTIN BUSCH, JOSEPH E. DAVID, RHIANNON GRAYBILL, YISHAI KIEL, YONAH KLEM, GÖRAN LARSSON, WILLIAM LOADER, INES WEBER. “Incest.” EBR 12 (2016), 1075-94. ANGENENDT, A. “Die Kreuzzüge.” In Krieg und Christentum. Ed. A. Holzem. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2009. 341-67. BAILEY, RANDALL C. “They’re Nothing but Incestuous Bastards: The Polemical Use of Sex and Sexuality in Hebrew Canon Narratives.” In Reading from this Place, Volume One: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in the United States. Ed. Fernando F. Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994. 121-38. BERKOWITZ, BETH A. Defining Jewish Difference From Antiquity to the Present. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. BRENNER, ATHALYA. The Intercourse of Knowledge: On Gendering Desire and ‘Sexuality’ in the Hebrew Bible. Leiden: Brill, 1997. CAVE, ALFRED A. “Canaanites in a Promised Land: The American Indian and the Providential Theory of Empire.” American Indian Quarterly 12 (1988), 277-97. COLE, PENNY J. “ ‘O God, the heathen have come into your inheritance’ (Ps 78.1): The Theme of Religious Pollution in Crusade Documents, 1099-1188.” In Crusaders and Muslims in 12th c. Syria. Ed. M. Shatzmiller. Leiden: Brill, 1993. 84-111. DERSHOWITZ, IDAN. “Revealing Nakedness and Concealing Homosexual Intercourse: Legal and Lexical Evolution

394

Leviticus 18 Exposition

in Leviticus 18.” HeBAI 6/4 (2017), 510-26. FEINSTEIN, EVE LEVAVI. Sexual Pollution in the Hebrew Bible. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. GOODY, JACK. The Development of the the Family and Marriage in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. HALBE, JÖRN. “Die Reihe der Inzestverbote Lev 18,7-18: Entstehung und Gestaltungsstufen.” ZAW 92/1 (1980), 60-88. HARTLEY, JOHN E. and TIMOTHY DWYER. “An Investigation Into the Location of the Laws on Offering to Molek in the Book of Leviticus.” In“Go to the Land I Will Show You.” Ed. J. E. Coleson and V. H. Matthews. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1996. 81-93. HIEKE, THOMAS. “Kennt und verurteilt das Alte Testament Homosexualität?” In Stephan Goertz, “Wer bin ich, ihn zu verurteilen?” Homosexualität und katholische Kirche. Freiburg: Herder, 2015. 19-52. HORTON, FRED L. “Form and Structure in Laws Relating to Women: Lev. 18:6-18.” SBL Seminar Papers 1 (1973), 30-33. KNUST, JENNIFER WRIGHT. Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. LINGS, K. RENATO. “The ‘Lyings’ of a Woman: Male-Male Incest in Leviticus 18:22?” Theology & Sexuality 15 (2009), 231-50. LIPKA, HILARY. “Profaning the Body: ‫ חלל‬and the Conception of Loss of Personal Holiness in H.” In Bodies, Embodiment, and Theology in the Hebrew Bible. Ed. S. Tamar Kamionkowski and Wonil Kim. LHB/OTS 465. New York: T&T Clark, 2010. 90-113. MCCLENNEY-SADLER, MADELINE GAY. Recovering the Daughter’s Nakedness: A Formal Analysis of Israelite Kinship Terminology and the Internal Logic of Leviticus 18. LHB/OTS 476. London: T. & T. Clark, 2007. MILLER, JAMES E. “Notes on Leviticus 18.” ZAW 112 (2000), 401-403. MOHRMANN, DOUG C. “Making Sense of Sex: A Study of Leviticus 18.” JSOT 29 (2004), 57-79. NEWCOMB, STEVEN T. Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery. Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2008. NISSINEN, MARTTI. Homoeroticism in the Biblical World: A Historical Perspective. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998. OLYAN, SAUL M. “‘And with a Male You Shall Not Lie the Lying Down of a Woman’: On the Meaning and Significance of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5 (1994), 179-206. PRIOR, MICHAEL. The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997. RAINEY, BRIAN. Religion, Ethnicity and Xenophobia in the Bible. New York: Routledge, 2019. RATTRAY, SUSAN. “Marriage Rules, Kinship Terms and Family Structure in the Bible.” SBL Seminar Papers 26 (1987), 537-44. RÖMER, THOMAS. Homosexualité dans le Proche-Orient ancien et la Bible. 2nd ed. Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2005. ROOKE, DEBORAH W. “The Bare Facts: Gender and Nakedness in Leviticus 18.” In A Question of Sex? Gender and Difference in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond. Ed. Deborah W. Rooke. Sheffield; Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2007. 20-38. SCHENKER, ADRIAN. “What Connects the Incest Prohibitions with the Other Prohibitions Listed in Leviticus 18 and 20.” In RendtorffKugler (2003), 162-85. SCURLOCK, JOANN, DENNIS T. OLSON, ERIC LAWEE, ROLAND T. BOER, and DAVID THOMAS. “Bestiality.” EBR 3 (2011), 235-43. SHEEHAN, MICHAEL. “The European Family and Canon Law.” In Marriage, Family, and Law in Medieval Europe. Ed. J. K. Farge. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996 [1991]. 347-61. SPRINKLE, PRESTON M. Law and Life: The Interpretation of Leviticus 18:5 in Early Judaism and in Paul. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008. STAUBLI, THOMAS. “Antikanaanismus: Ein biblisches Reinheitskonzept mit globalen Folgen.” In Reinheit. Ed. P. Burschel and C. Marx. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2011. 349-87. STEVENS, PAUL. “ ‘Leviticus Thinking’ and the Rhetoric of Early Modern Colonialism.” Criticism 35/3 (1993), 441-61. STEWART, DAVID TABB. “Categories of Sexuality Indigenous to Biblical Legal Materials.” In Lipka-Wells (2020), 20-47. STIEBERT, JOHANNA. First-Degree Incest and the Hebrew Bible: Sex in the City. LHB/OTS 596. London: Bloomsbury,

Leviticus 18 Exposition

395

2016. TOSATO, ANGELO. “The Law of Leviticus 18:18: A Reexamination.” CBQ 46/2 (1984), 199-214. WELLS, BRUCE. “On the Beds of a Woman: The Leviticus Texts on Same-Sex Relations Reconsidered.” In Lipka-Wells (2020), 123-58. ZISKIND, JONATHAN R. “The Missing Daughter in Leviticus Xviii.” VT 46 (1996), 125-30.

Structure of Leviticus 18 Leviticus 18 consists of lists of prohibitions (vv. 6-23) surrounded by exhortations to obedience (vv. 1-5, 24-30). The opening and concluding exhortations use the vocabulary of ‫“ חק‬mandate” and ‫“ משׁפט‬regulation” (vv. 3-5, 26, 30) to encourage obedience. They cite the negative example of the Canaanites to threaten disobedient Israelites with expulsion from the land (vv. 3, 24-30; see Staubli 2011, 361-63). Thomas Hieke (664) connected the exhortations at the beginning and end of the chapter (18:2-5, 26-30) with similar passages to suggest that they form a thematic framework around chaps. 18-26. Chapters 18 and 20 contain nearly identical lists of prohibited sexual relationships, but chap. 18 states apodictic prohibitions while chap. 20 presents casuistic cases with draconian penalties. Like this chapter, chap. 20 surrounds its list with exhortations to holiness and ritual fidelity. This parallel pattern is widely recognized and the repetition strikes many readers as redundant (in addition to the commentaries, see Feinstein 2014, 167-69). However, Leviticus elsewhere presents chapter-length instructions for sanctification rituals followed by a narrative of their execution (chaps. 8-9) or diagnostic criteria for infestation followed by instructions for dealing with healed cases (chaps. 13-14). This duplication of lists of prohibitions and punishments for incest and other illicit sexual activities differs more for being separated by chap. 19’s disparate collection of rules. Even this pattern is typical in Leviticus, which uses chapters of similar rules to bracket different ones (in addition to 18-20, chaps. 1-3, 12-15, 23-25; see Leviticus 1-10, 19-20). The frameworks of chaps. 18 and 20 remind many interpreters of Deuteronomy’s rhetoric warning Israelites not to imitate the Canaanites by worshipping Molek and consulting mediums (Deut. 12:29-31; 18:9-14), which some think is imitated here (Cholewiński 1974, 253-58; Otto 1999b, 172-76). The exhortations go further than Deuteronomy in distinguishing Israel morally from other nations. They insist that YHWH will drive the Canaanites out of the land because of their moral failings (18:3, 24-25, 27-28, 30; 20:23), which the lists of incest prohibitions suggest were sexual in nature. The nearly universal appearance of incest prohibitions in human cultures makes them poorly suited for drawing ethnic distinctions (Levine 118; Mohrmann 2004, 65). Nevertheless, accusations of incest appear commonly in ethnic polemics. The focus on ethnic boundary maintenance in this chapter’s

396

Leviticus 18 Exposition

opening and concluding verses may therefore motivate the lengthy focus on sexual prohibitions as well. Following Mary Douglas’s model of applying structural anthropology to ritual distinctions, Doug Mohrmann (2004, 66) observed that “sex, like eating, deals with the entries and exits of bodily boundaries and as such becomes another, apt analogy for social, cultural and theological intercourse,” a connection explicitly supported by 20:25. He argued that incest (18:7-17) crosses a family’s internal boundaries, marked by the label “the nudity of ...,” while the acts prohibited by vv. 18-20 invoke pollution to threaten broader social cohesion, and the prohibitions of Molek worship, male-with-male sex, and bestiality in vv. 21-23 identify these sexual acts as transgressing the community’s external boundaries (Mohrmann 2004, 68-73). Verses 20-23, however, share the vocabulary of “laying semen,” for which Mohrmann did not account. The incest prohibitions are united by rhetoric about ‫“ ערוה‬nudity” (for this translation, see Exegesis to v. 6). This chapter’s euphemism for sexual intercourse is “to expose someone’s nudity.” It then usually specifies a woman’s nudity as belonging either to herself (vv. 9, 11, 15, 18, 19) or to someone else: the male addressee (regarding his granddaughters, v. 10), his father (v. 8), or his brother (v. 16). The chapter thus nods three times to the ancient convention of defining sex crimes as offences against other male landowners (such as in Deut. 22:13-30). But the weight of its nudity rhetoric falls five times on offences against the woman whose own nudity is exposed. Though chap. 18 does not recognize women’s sexual agency with men (only with animals in v. 23), its nudity rhetoric more often recognizes women’s concern for the sexual vulnerability of their own bodies than any man’s claim to govern their sexual behaviour. The list of incest prohibitions can be understood as a general rule (v. 6) followed by specific rules prohibiting consanguineous (vv. 7-13) and affinal (vv. 14-18) relationships, though an affinal relationship is already prohibited by v. 8 (and maybe v. 11). Verse 7 can be read as a second heading to all of the following prohibitions as offending against the flesh of either one’s father or one’s mother (Horton 1973; Hartley 287; Milgrom 1529). Verse 17 can be read as a hinge between two lists of prohibitions (Luciani 2005, 94, 98). Madeline Gay McClenney-Sadler (2007, 87) argued that the incest prohibitions are arranged in decreasing intensity of kinship to the male addressee, from his closest kin (vv. 6-11) to women who are close kin to each other (vv. 17-18; similarly Milgrom 1526). Christophe Nihan generalized this pattern to the whole chapter, seeing in the prohibitions a movement outward from relationships within family (vv. 6-16) to within clan (vv. 17-18) to within a nation (vv. 19-23), while the introductory and concluding exhortations (vv. 2-5, 24-30) mark off Israel from other nations (Nihan 2007, 441). However, the national context is not obvious in vv. 19-23 in contrast to its dominance in the framework’s rhetoric.

Leviticus 18 Exposition

397

Nor does the Hebrew text support the consanguineous/affinal distinction very well. Instead, it focuses on ‫“ ערוה‬nudity” and ‫“ בשׂר‬flesh.” The list’s conclusion in vv. 17-18 emphasizes a mother’s “fleshly” link to her daughters, granddaughters, and sisters, rather than those of the man or his father (v. 6). Therefore, each parents’ “bodily flesh” (see also vv. 12-13) seems to determine the arrangement of this list more than the consanguineous and affinal kin of the male addressee. Beyond these patterns, the rationale for the sequence of individual prohibitions is not clear. After demonstrating the problems with older suggestions, Jörn Halbe (1980, 80-85) reconstructed the other verses to match the chiastic formulation of vv. 7 and 15 on the one hand and vv. 8 and 16 on the other, to suggest that two different sequences of incest prohibitions have been combined editorially. However, this commentary has repeatedly observed that the priestly writers frequently varied formulas and phrases rather than always repeating them verbatim (see Exegesis to 4:13; 12:7; 16:16-17, 30; 20:3; 25:39 and Exposition to Leviticus 4-5). There is no reason to think that whatever sources they used were more consistent. Calum Carmichael (1997, 14-61) argued that the laws’ contents and sequence depends on stories of sexual unions in Israel’s historiographical literature. However, this chapter’s prohibitions do not follow the sequence of biblical stories very well: according to Carmichael, vv. 6-18 are based respectively on Gen. 9:20-27; 35:22; 12:10-20; 19:31; 20:12; Exod. 6:20; Gen. 24:15; 38:1-30; 30:1-24; 31:35; 20:2-18; 22:1-19; 19:1-11; 34:1-31. Some of these texts obviously narrate practices that break the prohibitions of Leviticus 18 and 20. Other cases force Carmichael into suggesting ingenious and unlikely equivalences, such as between Lot’s intercourse with his daughters and 18:10’s prohibition of granddaughters, or that Abraham’s marriage to his half-sister Sarah made her both Isaac’s mother and his aunt which prompted 18:12’s prohibition of aunts. The fact that the prohibitions appear in a different sequence in chap. 20 requires a different set of speculative reconstructions (Carmichael 1997, 147-88), which further undermines the theory’s plausibility. Much more likely is that each list of prohibitions was shaped for rhetorical effect on a listening audience, as the emotional vocabulary and hortatory framing (18:1-5, 24-30; 20:1-8, 22-27) indicate. In such hortatory rhetoric, the sequence of prohibitions is less important than their cumulative impact. Verses 19-23 turn to sexual intercourse outside the family. These verses are not about “unnatural” behaviour (contra Hartley 289; Milgrom 1526), but about the identity and status of prohibited sexual partners: a menstruating woman, an associate’s woman, a male, a quadruped. They therefore fit well after incest laws that detail prohibited sexual partners. Even the anomalous attack on Molek worship (v. 21) matches this emphasis on prohibited partners, in this case a deity, and uses sexual language for children as “seed/semen” to fit into its context.

398

Leviticus 18 Exposition

Commentaries often include a chart of family relationships to detail graphically the permitted and prohibited sexual unions according to Leviticus 18 (e.g. Rattray 1987, 544, followed by Hartley 288, Milgrom 1531, and Hieke 657; somewhat differently Levine 255; McClenney-Sadler 2007, 75; Feinstein 2014, 106). The practice of graphically charting prohibited family unions originated in medieval manuscripts (e.g. in texts by Isidore of Seville; see images in Goody 1983, 140, 143, 275). However, the medieval concern for inheritance rights and marital legitimacy does not appear in Leviticus 18 and 20. In fact, these chapters do not focus on any of the financial concerns typical in arranging marriages in most cultures, including ancient Israel (Gen. 24:23, 34-36, 53; 34:8-12; Num. 36:1-12). Instead, their rhetoric of “flesh” and “nudity” focuses narrowly on bodies in sexual intercourse. Their formulation of the rules suggests less an attempt to define exactly who counts as “flesh” (contra McClenney-Sadler 2007, 78) than to motivate compliance with their sexual restrictions. Their goal of shaming offenders becomes clear in the judgmental vocabulary of the end of chap. 18 (“depravity” in 18:17, also 20:14; “polluting” repeated nine times in 18:19-20, 23-25, 27-28, 30; “disgusting” in 18:22, 26, 27, 29-30, also 20:13; “vomit” in 18:25, 28; cf. the climactic repetition of pollution language also in 11:41-43; 13:44-46; 15:31). At the same time, the frameworks of both chap. 18 and 20 mix the ritual offences of Molek worship and necromancy into this sexual rhetoric, showing that the later tendency to use charges of incest for religious polemics was already common in ancient Israel. Graphic charts of family relationships elide the rhetorical force of these incest prohibitions, which aims for emotional impact. That rhetoric is most effective when hearing the chapters read aloud. Charts instead express the nervous effect of hearing this rhetoric, which motivates attentive audiences to imagine their own families and to figure out exactly which relationships are prohibited. Chapter 18’s drumbeat on the word ‫“ ערות‬nudity of” in prohibitions addressed individually in the second person singular builds discomfort before climaxing in the shaming vocabulary of disgust and pollution. Outlines can represent such rhetorical effects textually if they focus attention on the repetitive vocabulary as much as on the unique contents of each verse and section. This outline quotes repetitious phrases using different typography (italics, underlining, and boldface) to call attention to vocabulary repeated for emphasis. OUTLINE 1-5 Exhortations to comply with YHWH’s mandates 1 Divine speech formula 2 “I am YHWH your God” 3 “Do not do as Egyptians and Canaanites do ... or follow their mandates” 4 “You must do my regulations and my mandates” “I am YHWH your God”

Leviticus 18 Exposition

399

5

“You must observe my mandates and my regulations ... to live by them” “I am YHWH” 6-18 Rules against “exposing the nudity” of one’s “flesh” 6 General principle: “avoid approaching ... bodily flesh to expose nudity” “I am YHWH” You must not expose 7 “the nudity of your father and the nudity of your mother ... her nudity” 8 “the nudity of your father’s woman ... your father’s nudity” 9 “the nudity of your sister ... her nudity” 10 “the nudity of your son’s daughter or of your daughter’s daughter ... their nudity ... your nudity” 11 “the nudity of your father’s woman’s daughter ... her nudity” 12 “the nudity of your father’s sister ... your father’s flesh” 13 “the nudity of your mother’s sister ... your mother’s flesh" 14 “the nudity of your father’s brother ... she is your aunt” 15 “the nudity of your daughter-in-law ... her nudity” 16 “the nudity of your brother’s woman ... your brother’s nudity” 17 “the nudity of a woman and her daughter ... her nudity ... her flesh ... depravity 18 “you must not take a woman as her sister’s rival ... her nudity” 19-24 Pollution from illicit behaviour 19 “you must not approach a woman in her menstrual pollution ... her nudity” 20 “your layer of semen to your associate’s woman to become polluted with her” 21 “your semen to ... Molek ... defile the name of YHWH” “I am YHWH” 22 “with a male ... the laying of a woman ... disgusting” 23 “with any quadruped ... your layer of semen to become polluted with it ... perversion” 24-30 How the Canaanites polluted the land 24 “Do not pollute yourselves ... the nations ... are polluted” 25 “the land is polluted ... liable ... the land will vomit” 26 “observe my mandates and my regulations and do not do any of these disgusting things” 27 “these disgusting things were done ... and the land was polluted” 28 “so the land does not vomit ... when you pollute it, like it vomited out the nations” 29 “any of these disgusting things” 30 “any of these disgusting mandates ... pollute yourselves” “I am YHWH your God”

Verse 19 uses the vocabulary of vv. 6-17 (“approach ... nudity”) to transition from the list of incest rules in vv. 6-18 to the broader prohibitions of vv. 19-23. Commentators therefore disagree over where to divide the lists: Gestenberger (251) divided them before v. 18, while Milgrom (1523) and Schenker (2003, 163-65) placed v. 18 with what precedes it. The chapter’s rhetoric builds in intensity from the relatively objective sound of “mandates” and “regulations” in vv. 3-5 through the uncomfortable vocabulary of “flesh” and “nudity” in vv. 6-19. Derogatory vocabulary (“depravity,” “disgusting,”

400

Leviticus 18 Exposition

“perversion”) first appears in v. 17 and becomes associated with the language of “pollution” in vv. 19-23, suggesting that vv. 17-18 have been shaped as transitional (Nihan 2007, 439-41). Finally, the land is depicted as nauseous and vomiting from disgust in vv. 24-30. This steadily intensifying rhetoric shows that an objective delineation of prohibited family affiliations is far from being the chapter’s primary rhetorical goal. Nevertheless, the differences in vocabulary and theme between the lists of prohibited behaviours (vv. 6-23) and the exhortations that frame them (vv. 1-5, 24-30) have led many commentators to suppose that H incorporated an older list of incest rules (e.g. Elliger 234; Gerstenberger 247; Brenner 1997, 110; Milgrom 1516; Nihan 2007, 441-46). However, independent lists of incest prohibitions are not attested in other ancient cultures. Incest prohibitions instead appear in the context of a broader rhetoric of group boundaries and distinctions (Douglas 1966, 164-65), usually of family and class but here of ethnicity and ritual legitimacy. Distinguishing lists as separate compositions on the basis of their genre is an old, but discredited, tendency in biblical studies (see Leviticus 1-10, 139-54). The many efforts to identify in this chapter an older list consisting only of prohibitions lack any basis in textual or comparative evidence. (On redactional theories of the relationship between chaps. 18 and 20, see Exposition to Leviticus 20 below.) Compositional theories rarely take into account Leviticus’s prominent tendencies (a) to repeat itself, (b) to both abbreviate and supplement rules upon repetition, (c) to switch between different forms of address and kinds of rhetorical appeals, and (d) to frame some material within large-scale repetitive structures (chaps. 1-3, 12-15, 18-20, 23-25). All of these tendencies point to compositional intentionality in both repetition and variation. The same rhetorical agendas shape both the lists and their frameworks. These compositional tendencies pose grave impediments to convincing reconstructions of the text’s compositional stages. History of Interpretations of the Incest Prohibitions Chapters 18 and 20 are the longest and most comprehensive lists of incestuous relationships in extant ancient literature older than the late Roman Empire. This chapter addresses male heads-of-households, that is, patriarchs who might presume to have sexual access to everyone in their households, with a rhetoric of shame and disgust to motivate self-imposed compliance with its restrictions. Patriarchs usually escaped any externally enforced penalties, so this chapter exhorts them to behave themselves instead. Chapter 20, by contrast, raises the threat of capital punishment by the community, though it leaves the precise means of enforcement vague.

Leviticus 18 Exposition

401

The phrase ‫“ שׁאר בשׂרו‬his bodily flesh” in the heading (v. 6) describes the nuclear family which 21:2-3 defines as consisting of mother, father, son, daughter, brother, and unmarried sister (Rattray 1987, 542). This chapter prohibits sexual intercourse with “your” mothers, sisters, and daughters explicitly (vv. 7, 9, 17). Fathers, sons, and brothers are included in its prohibition of male-with-male intercourse (v. 22). John Hartley (287) plausibly suggested that the first rule’s repetitious mention of “your father’s nudity and your mother’s nudity” (v. 7) serves as a heading that prohibits any intercourse that infringes on the rights and responsibilities of either parent (similarly Mohrmann 2004, 70; see further in Exegesis to 20:9). Some of these sexual prohibitions reappear in Deut. 27:20-23 (curses for incest with sisters, mothers-in-law, and your father’s women, and for bestiality) and Ezek. 22:10-11 (condemnations for incest with your father’s women, daughters-in-law, sisters, other men’s wives, and menstruating women). These lists appear within longer lists of illicit behaviour that include fraud, extortion, murder, and ritual offences, just like incest prohibitions appear as small parts of some other ancient Near Eastern law codes. Hammurabi’s Laws (§§154-158) prohibit sexual intercourse with the daughter, daughter-in-law, mother, step-mother, step-daughter, and two sisters in the same location. The Hittite Laws (§§187-199) prohibit intercourse with the mother, daughter, son, and sister-in-law, prescribing the death penalty, but they also allow many prohibited couplings after the death of a former partner (Ziskind 1996, 125-26; Rooke 2007, 21-22). Plato described the Greeks’ avoidance of incest as an “unwritten law” (Laws 8.838a-b). By comparison with the laws of other ancient cultures as well as other mentions of incest in the HB, then, Leviticus 18 and 20 stand out for (a) their double form as a list of apodictic prohibitions and a separate list of casuistic penalties, (b) their length and apparent comprehensiveness, (c) their emphasis on ethnic distinctiveness while ignoring class or marriage status, and (d) their singular focus on illicit sexual behaviour, with only the addition of Molek worship (18:21; 20:2-5) and necromancy (20:6, 27). Of course, in Leviticus as a whole they appear in the context of many other prohibitions and regulations, which more closely resembles how incest prohibitions appear in other ancient texts. Ironically, stories about breaking these incest rules abound in the HB. Some clearly evoke disapprobation: the story of Lot’s intercourse with his daughters takes the form of ethnic ridicule of Moabites and Ammonites (Gen. 19:30-38, cf. Lev. 18:17 and 20:14 which include daughters, contra many interpreters – see Exegesis to v. 17), and Judah’s intercourse with his daughter-in-law is depicted as worthy of capital punishment (Gen. 38:24-26; cf. Lev. 18:15 and 20:12) as is Amnon’s rape of his half-sister Tamar (though she suggests that their union could be approved as a marriage; 2 Sam. 14:1-29; cf. Lev. 18:11 and 20:17). However, other incestuous marriages pass without

402

Leviticus 18 Exposition

critical comment, such as Abraham’s marriage to Sarah, his half-sister (Gen. 20:12, 16), Jacob’s marriage to the sisters, Leah and Rachel (Gen. 29, contra Lev. 18:18), and the marriage of Moses’ father to his own aunt (Exod. 6:20; cf. Lev. 18:14; 20:19). Interpreters have suggested that the Torah’s incest rules did not apply retroactively (Milgrom 1542; cf. Hieke 671), but that does not explain the disapprobation in Genesis aimed at some of these unions but not others. Literary ambiguity about incest appears also in many classical and modern texts (Stiebert 2016, 3-6, 9-12, 34). Carmichael’s attempt to correlate every rule in chaps. 18-20 with HB narratives is unconvincing (see above). But other interpreters concur that at least some of the incest rules in Leviticus 18 and 20 may have been formulated against prevailing Israelite marriage practices, such as levirate marriages (Deut. 25:5; cf. Lev. 18:16; 20:21), marrying one’s sister, polygamous marriages with two sisters (Milgrom 1536; Wells 2020, 154), and possibly against polygamy and divorce (Tosato 1984). To this list should be added these chapters’ remarkable break with ancient cultural conventions in ignoring economic issues or even a woman’s status as wife or concubine, as a legitimate or illegitimate daughter, and as an enslaved or free woman (see Exegesis to 18:9, 11, 17). These observations undermine the relevance of comparative ethnographic studies of traditional kinship systems (summarized by McClenney-Sadler 2007) for understanding Leviticus 18 and 20, since reformist agendas are, by definition, unlikely to conform to traditional patterns. Some other HB books adapted and extended Leviticus 18 and 20’s sexual polemics. The book of Ezekiel, like Leviticus 18 and 20, blames moral and sexual pollution of the land for Israel’s exile (see Feinstein 2014, 13241). The prophet explicitly condemns Judeans for adultery and intercourse with menstruating women (Ezek. 18:6, 11, 15, 19; 33:26). It denigrates the polluted land as ‫“ כטמאת הנדה‬like a polluted menstruating woman” (Ezek. 36:17). It describes foreign conquest of Jerusalem as “exposing her nudity” (Ezek. 22:10). It looks, as Feinstein (2014, 139) observed, like “Ezekiel was influenced by Leviticus 18 to apply the language of sexual pollution more broadly than was otherwise common.” The book of Ezra also broadens the idea in Lev. 18:24-30 and 20:22-26 that the Canaanites polluted the land with illicit sexual intercourse into a general condemnation of intermarriage with non-Israelites (Ezra 9:11-12; Feinstein 2014, 141-57). It defines Israelites strictly to exclude “the people of the land” who may well have been descended from pre-exilic Judeans (cf. Lev. 20:4 which equates “the people of the land” with Israelites). “Whereas Leviticus 18 invoked foreign peoples in order to stigmatize particular behaviors, Ezra 9 invokes a general category of rejected behaviors in order to stigmatize particular people” (Feinstein 2014, 152). As a result, Leviticus’s concern for the sexual

Leviticus 18 Exposition

403

purity of the high priest’s wife (Lev. 21:14), which Ezekiel extended to the wives of all priests (Ezek. 44:22), was extended by Ezra to all Israelite women (Feinstein 2014, 154).1 Later Second Temple Judaism added intermarriage to Leviticus’s lists of prohibited sexual unions by interpreting the prohibition on Molek worship (18:21; 20:2-5) as a ban on intermarriage (Jub. 30:10; Philo, Laws 3.29; also b. Meg. 25a; TgPsJ on 18:21; see Milgrom 1584-86). Later interpreters noticed irregularities in the incest prohibitions, which stimulated considerable debate over whether the prohibitions are limited to just what is written here or should be extended by analogy (Goody 1983, 176). Marriage between first cousins is permitted, which Mohrmann (2004, 74) thought represents a clear preference for endogamy as reflected elsewhere in the Pentateuch. The high priest is required to marry an Aaronide woman (Lev. 21:14) which, at the level of the story world, requires Aaron’s grandsons to marry first cousins. Isaac and Jacob married their cousins (Leah and Rachel; Gen. 29:10) or second cousin (Rebekah; Gen. 24:15). Zelophad’s daughters married cousins to keep their inherited land within their lineage (Num. 36:11). Leviticus’s prohibitions on incest therefore set limits on taking endogamy too far. Later Jewish interpreters noticed that, though a man cannot marry his parent’s sisters (vv. 12-13), he is not prohibited from marrying his niece. By drawing an analogy with vv. 12-13, the Qumran sectarians prohibited marrying a niece (CD 5:8; 11QT 66:16-17), but the rabbis recommending marrying a sister’s daughter (b. Yeb. 62b). In a cultural context in which contemporary Roman and Christian legal theorists were universalizing their incest rules, ancient Palestinian rabbis classified Leviticus’s incest rules as Noahic laws that apply to all people. The Babylonian Talmud, on the other hand, treated them as unique to Jewish people in contrast to rather different Zoroastrian marriage ideals.2 Maimonides and Sephardic communities limited using analogies to add more prohibited relationships, while Joseph Caro and Ashkenazi communities used them to elaborate longer lists of prohibitions. Kairite jurisprudence originally regarded all of the wife’s relatives as exactly analogous to her husband’s, which extended the list of prohibited relationship even more until it was reversed by reforms in the eleventh century C.E.3 Chapter 18’s importance has been emphasized by its prominent position 1 Following Christine Hayes, Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities: Intermarriage and Conversion from the Bible to the Talmud (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 28-31. 2 Yishai Kiel, “Noahide Law and the Inclusiveness of Sexual Ethics: Between Roman Palestine and Sasanian Babylonia,” Jewish Law Annual 21 (2015), 59-109. 3 Emil G. Hirsch, Immanuel Benzinger, Solomon Schechter, Judah David Eisenstein, Joseph Jacobs, Isaac Broydé, “Incest,” Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1901-1906), 6:572-74.

404

Leviticus 18 Exposition

in synagogue liturgies which often read this chapter on the afternoon of Yom Kippur (Schwartz 2004, 249). Both Jewish and Christian writers embraced Leviticus’s use of sexual ethics to distinguish themselves from Greco-Roman mores that tolerated men’s sexual intercourse with non-elite women and other men (Knust 2005, 54-64; Harper 2011, 369-80). Paul criticized the Corinthian church for permitting a man to marry his father’s widow (1 Cor. 5:1; cf. Lev. 18:8). The fourth-century Apostolic Constitutions incorporated the sexual prohibitions of Leviticus 18 and 20 as one of four kinds of biblical laws that Christians must observe (Hieke 641). In the same century, the Christian Roman emperor, Theodosius, banned first-cousin marriages except by imperial dispensation, as did Pope Gregory I in the sixth century, citing Leviticus 18 as “sacred law” (Goody 1983, 36). Michael Shehan (1996, 255) observed that subsequent Christian legislation was largely motivated by the principle enunciated in 18:6 to avoid intercourse with one’s “bodily flesh.” The medieval Western Church broadened the incest restrictions in order to control aristocratic marriages. By the eleventh century, it had extended the prohibitions as far as relationships of the seventh degree, resulting in an almost impossible mandate to trace blood relationships among all 128 seventh-generation ancestors (so the Council of Rome in 1063 C.E.; also Gratian’s Decretum in ca. 1140; see Sheehan 1996, 253-54).4 However, debates over calculating the degrees continued and enforcement was irregular and frequently circumvented by clerical dispensations (Goody 1983, 134-46; Shehan 1996, 255). The Church, whose clerics drew up wills, heard death-bed donations, and wrote the legal manuals, had an interest in limiting the scope of family inheritance claims that could compete with testamentary donations to churches and monasteries. This focus on inheritance also led to distinguishing sharply between legitimate heirs and illegitimate offspring as determined by the Church’s sacrament of marriage, introduced in the twelfth century (Goody 1983, 146; concerns for legitimacy also preoccupied Greco-Roman marriage law: see Harper 2007, 366-69). Conflicts over these policies made the charge of “incest” a frequent part of polemics against secular rulers and sectarian movements alike (Goody 1983, 161-62). Prohibiting marriages within seven degrees of consanguineity, however, proved impossibly difficult, especially in rural communities, so Roman Catholic Church councils reduced the restrictions to the fourth degree in 1215 (Shehan 1996, 254) and to the second degree (first cousins) in early modernity (Goody 1983, 144). Protestant Reformers challenged marital prohibitions beyond those mandated by Leviticus, as they did much of the rest of canon law, but disagreed over whether the prohibitions should be extended by analogy to unmentioned 4 See also Karl Ubl, Inzestverbot und Gesetzgebung: Die Konstruktion eines Verbrechens (300-1100), Berlin: De Gruyter 2008.

Leviticus 18 Exposition

405

relationships that resemble those listed in chaps. 18 and 20 (Goody 1983, 176-77). In 1540, King Henry VIII instituted Lev. 18 and 20 as the marital laws of England to legitimize first cousin marriages, including his own (Goody 1983, 172).5 Sixteenth-century confusion over marriage law then led to including in the 1572 Bishop’s Bible two “useful Tables ... of Degrees of Kindred, which let Matrimony” (Goody 1983, 176). After 1603, they appeared in the Book of Common Prayer and were also displayed in parish churches (Goody 1983, 178). The Church of England followed Leviticus in allowing cousin marriages to the point that, as Jill Durey pointed out, nineteenth-century novels depicted them as “a common-place practice.”6 In America, England’s southern colonies followed the Church of England in outlawing only marriages prohibited by the “levitical degrees,” while the anti-monarchical Puritans in New England banned first-cousin unions (Goody 1983, 173). Conflicts over marriage between cousins drove incest laws in many American states, and can still raise concern in modern families (for an example, see Leviticus 1-10, 85). This history justifies Carmichael’s (1997, 1) observation that “the incest rules of the Bible – in particular those found in the two chapters of Leviticus 18 and 20 – have had greater effect on Western law than any comparable body of biblical rules.” Such debates, however, are not limited to cultures that venerate the Bible. For example, first-cousin marriages are common in many Muslim cultures (e.g. Pakistan), but are banned by Hindu legal traditions as well as by the laws of the People’s Republic of China (Stiebert 2016, 2-3). Modern interpreters, influenced by ethnographic studies of marriage practices in different cultures, have often focused on using comparative categories to classify the Israelite system of prohibited consanguineous and affinal marriages. Israel’s kinship system seems to have followed the so-called Hawaiian model of bilateral descent and nuclear families residing separately in a ‫“ בית אב‬father’s house” (see especially McClenney-Sadler 2007, 73-75). Cousin marriages were preferred, but marriage outside the clan or nation was not banned by Leviticus or other Pentateuchal sources (except for a few enemy nations: Deut. 23:3). Jews and Samaritans in the later Second Temple period, however, turned increasingly against exogamous marriages. It is clear that Leviticus bans sexual intercourse among family members from the generation of one’s parents to one’s grandchildren and treats consanguineous and affinal relations fairly equally (Rattray 1987, 543). As Milgrom (1527) observed, “the declaration of Gen. 2:24 that husband and wife are of one flesh must be taken literally.” This chapter’s focus, however, is not on marriage (as Milgrom 1532 admitted) but specifically on sexual intercourse, 5

See also Ben Wiebracht, “First-cousin Marriage in Tudor and Stuart England: 1540-1688,” Journal of Family History 40/1 (2015), 24-38. 6 Jill Durey, “The Church, Consanguinity and Trollope,” Churchman 122/2 (2008), 12546 [125].

406

Leviticus 18 Exposition

described graphically throughout the chapter as ‫“ גלות ערוה‬exposing nudity” (Brenner 1997, 91, 110). Explanations for this emphasis have ranged from reserving sexual intercourse for procreation and stable family formation (so many commentators, including Milgrom 1530-31, 1567-68; Schenker 2003, 166-71; Nihan 2007, 437; Hieke 667) to endorsing relationships of the proper distance while prohibiting those too close (incestuous, male-with-male) and too far (adultery, bestiality; so Marx 69). But neither procreation nor relational distance are mentioned by the text itself. The text’s explicit rationale is fear of polluting the land to the point of being forced (“vomited”) out of it (18:23-24). This fear clearly evokes Israel’s and Judah’s experiences of exile. Chapters 18 and 20 include illicit sexual intercourse firmly among the causes of this national catastrophe. It is therefore the unifying ideology of much of the HB, which explains the Babylonian Exile as divine punishment for breaking YHWH’s covenant, that here generates the most comprehensive list of incest rules and other sexual prohibitions in extant ancient literature. Sex and Power in Leviticus 18 and 20 Interpreters typically note but do not focus on the male addressee of these chapters. They instead read the sexual prohibitions in the second masculine singular (vv. 6-23) as rules for society at large, as indicated by the plural address to all Israelites at the beginning and end (vv. 2-5; 24-30; also chap. 20). However, unlike modern Western sexual ethics that prioritizes individuals’ agency and responsibility for how they use their own bodies, patriarchal cultures in ancient Israel and elsewhere tend to emphasize a man’s sexual control over and responsibility for women’s bodies. Leviticus 18 therefore addresses male heads of households. This address reflects the fact that all of the sexual relationships it mentions reflect asymmetrical power relationships. It presumes that male heads of household have the freedom to choose sexual intercourse but that women do not, except in the case of bestiality (v. 23) which is the only time that the chapter ascribes sexual agency to women. (Leviticus does not mention sexual encounters between women.) In this chapter, then, the prohibition of male-with-male intercourse (v. 22) most likely also presupposes an asymmetrical power relationship between the male householder and, probably, an enslaved man or a young boy. In contrast to Deut. 22:23-27, this chapter draws no distinction between consent or lack of consent. Modern sexual morality that requires the consent of both partners might therefore classify every encounter described in this chapter as potentially rape. That conclusion may sound shocking, because the old tradition of male sexual privilege remains strong in modern religious communities as well as

Leviticus 18 Exposition

407

in wider culture. Evidence of it continues to appear prominently in twentyfirst-century scandals about some priests, ministers, rabbis, and scholars who perpetrate child abuse, marital infidelity, and sexual harassment. Some biblical scholars cited in this commentary have been publicly exposed as sexual predators by belated institutional investigations (of John Howard Yoder and Helmut Koester for sexual harassment) or by criminal convictions (of Robert Hayward and Jan Joosten for child pornography).7 Thus contemporary as well as historical circumstances place a moral burden on biblical interpreters to combat sexual abuse through their scholarship as well as by other means. The Israelite male addressee, like male heads-of-household in many cultures, might have regarded themselves as free to behave sexually however they wanted in their own homes, despite chap. 20’s call for community enforcement (20:14-16). Nowhere does Leviticus refer to any human means, whether by rulers or by law courts, for investigating charges of incest or other sexual offences. The HB depicts a society in which patriarchs rule their households in fear only of divine punishment, if that (note the sexual behaviour of Abraham, Jacob, and Judah in Gen. 16, 30, 38; also of David and his sons in 2 Sam. 11, 13, 16). Jonathan Ziskind (1996, 127-28) argued that the rhetoric of chap. 18 takes a personal and apodictic form “to impress upon the men to whom these laws were addressed a moral priority that went beyond an exhortation to stay away from these female relatives because they are the possessions of his close male relatives” (similarly Milgrom 1536; Rooke 2007, 30-33; Stiebert 2016, 86). The two chapters use slightly different persuasive strategies: Leviticus 18 emphasizes the rhetoric of disgust while chap. 20 adds violent threats. These laws therefore reflect, as Deborah Rooke (2007, 24) observed, “a construction of masculine sexuality, in that breaching them results in forfeiting one’s identity as part of the community that is promulgating them.” Despite this male addressee, the incest rules do recognize women’s rights if not their sexual agency. The repeated phrase, “(it is) her nudity,” depicts women as the injured party more often than any man when their “nudity” is illicitly exposed. A man’s sexual behaviour is also restricted by family relationships between women (Wells 2020, 145-46), specifically between sisters (18:13, 18; 20:19) and between mothers and their daughters and granddaughters (18:17; 20:14). Deborah Ellens therefore distinguished the purity concerns that motivate P texts about sex from the property issues that motivate Deuteronomic sex laws. Though both texts are aware that sexual intercourse involves both 7 Michelle Sokol, “Mennonite Seminary Apologizes to Victims of Famed Theologian,” National Catholic Reporter 51/3, April 9, 2015; Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story (New York: Ecco, 2018), 24-26; Bruce Unwin, “Theology professor escapes prison sentence,” Northern Echo, March 22, 2016; Archie Bland and Jon Henley,“Oxford professor sentenced to jail in France over child abuse images,” The Guardian, June 22, 2020.

408

Leviticus 18 Exposition

purity and property law, she observed that P and D differ in their interests (Ellens 2008, 3-16). Ellens concluded about Leviticus 18: While the point-of-view seems to indicate that the man is the guardian of sexual propriety, subtle contraindications demonstrate an implicit expectation concerning the woman’s responsibilities for such propriety as well. ... not only is the woman not focalized as property, but, like her male counterpart, she is an agent responsible, however implicitly, for maintaining the purity of the socialsexual system to which she belongs. (Ellens 2008, 74)

While women’s sexual agency with men remains only implicit in chap. 18, one verse in chap. 20 describes a woman seeing a man’s nudity (20:17). Eve Levavi Feinstein (2014, 99) argued that Leviticus 18 modified and extended common Isrealite beliefs about women’s sexual pollution to apply them to men and to connect them to the preservation of the land. She suggested that P’s focus on priesthood led it to treat lay men and women more equally while H’s emphasis on the holiness of all Israel distinguished women from men more categorically (123; followed by Wells 2020, 152). Feinstein detailed contradictions between Leviticus 18 and 20 on the one hand and HB narratives on the other to show that the chapters advocated controversial tightening of Israel’s common incest taboos (121). Social theorists distinguish between the human practice of avoiding incest and the cultural promulgation of incest taboos. While many have suspected that incestuous desire is common, sociological and anthropological studies increasingly support the conclusion that “incest is biologically deleterious, rare among sexually mature adults, and generally inhibited by early association.”8 That psychological inhibition explains expressions of disgust at the idea of incest, but makes it harder to explain the origins and social function of long lists of incest taboos like Lev. 18:6-18. Verses 19-26 extend the sexual rules beyond family relationships to sexual intercourse with a menstruating woman (v. 19), an associate’s woman (v. 20), another male (v. 22), a quadruped (v. 23), and even to worshipping Molek (v. 21). Bans on homosexual sex and sex while menstruating appear elsewhere in ancient Near Eastern literature only in a Zoroastrian text, the Vendidād, which shares Leviticus’s concern for pollution and purity (Kazen 2015, 452; Dershowitz 2017, 18-19).9 Leviticus 18 extends the effects of sexual pollution to the land (vv. 24-30), which is so disgusted that it vomits. 8 Arthur P. Wolf, “Incest Prohibition, Origin and Evolution of,” in the International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (2nd ed.; ed. J. D. Wright; Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2015), 730-31, citing the classic study by Edward Westermarck, The History of Human Marriage (vol. 2; 5th ed.; New York: Allerton, 1922), 82-239. 9 Vendidād 8:32, 15:7; see J. Darmesteter, The Zend-Avesta: Pt. I, The Vendîdâd (2nd ed.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895), 104, 177. The Vendidad’s date is uncertain; it could be later than Leviticus.

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

409

Because of the blame for illicit sexual behaviour cast by these chapters, many interpreters have tried to gather evidence that Canaanites and Egyptians regularly practised incest, male-with-male intercourse, and bestiality (Wenham 251-52; Kiuchi 330), or that such sexual practices were part of their religious rituals (Hartley 293). Recent interpreters are more likely to conclude that blaming the Egyptians and Canaanites is polemical exaggeration aimed at ethnic rivals (Gerstenberger 256-57; Schwartz 2004, 250; Hieke 664; Milgrom 1520, but cf. 1518-19). Nevertheless, Feinstein, who recognized this rhetoric as perjorative, cited comparative evidence that Leviticus 18’s derogatory comparison to Egyptian and Canaanite practice may not be fictional. She noted Egyptian and Mesopotamian evidence for full sibling marriages and the lack of prohibitions on homosexual sex or sex with a menstruant. She concluded that “H’s Characterization of Egypt and especially Canaan is thus best viewed as a caricature which, like most caricatures, may well contain a kernel of truth” (Feinstein 2014, 128). However, the long history of using charges of incest to slander ethnic enemies shows that it is dangerous to assume any truth to such charges. Ethnic slanders of incest began in the Pentateuch (Gen. 19:30-38; Lev. 18:25; 20:24) as well as in contemporary Hellenistic literature (Herodotus, His. 3.31.1-6; Stiebert 2016, 3; for broader Greco-Roman culture, see Knust 2006, 15-50). They continue to be a prominent feature of modern imperial rhetoric of colonialism and racism (see Exegesis to 18:25 and 20:24). The subsequent influence of Leviticus 18 and 20 is obvious, as we have seen. Joseph Marchal summarized its effects well: To understand the function of the biblical, one must recognize how it draws upon and partakes of its historical home in our antiquity, slides comfortably in modern periods pre and post, and persists in a range of contemporary effects and affects, religious and otherwise, where the biblical frequently works to compare, prioritize, reinforce, or, in short, normalize specific concepts and practices of gender, sexuality, and embodiment.10

EXEGESIS Exhortations to Comply with YHWH’s Mandates (18:1-5) These opening exhortations contrast YHWH’s regulations and mandates, which are compulsory for Israel, with the practices and mandates of Canaanites and Egyptians, which Israelites must avoid. It therefore recasts fairly typical prohibitions of incest and other illicit sexual behaviours in vv. 6-23 as marking ethnic and religious boundaries instead. 10 Joseph A. Marchal, “‘Making History’ Queerly: Touches across Time through a Biblical Behind,” Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 373-95 [376].

410

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

The clear parallelism between vv. 3, 4, and 5a leads some interpreters to analyze vv. 2-5 as an arch structure (B. Berkowitz 2012, 28), but vv. 2 and 5 have only YHWH’s self-declaration formula in common. More compelling is Beth Berkowitz’s (2012, 30) observation that this paragraph is “not only about boundaries but also made up of boundaries” between the Israelites on the one hand (vv. 4-5a) and the Canaanites and Egyptians on the other (v. 3). 18:1-2 YHWH spoke to Moses: Speak to the children of Israel and say to them: I am YHWH your (pl) God! The refrain (‫“ אני יהוה )אלהיכם‬I am YHWH (your God)” echoes five more times in this chapter and a total of 47 times throughout chaps. 18-26, where it appears after a law or a group of laws (see Introduction to Leviticus 21-27 and Hartley 291-93). Only here in Leviticus does it appear as an introduction to the following rules, like its position at the beginning of the Decalogue (Exod. 20:2; Deut. 5:6). It also introduces P’s account of the revelation of the divine name to Moses (Exod. 6:2, 6). The phrase appears especially frequently in Isaiah 40-55 and Ezekiel, but only in scattered verses of the other prophets and Pentateuchal sources. In Leviticus, Elliger (238) tried to distinguish the longer version with ‫“ אלהיכם‬your God,” which often appears in contexts emphasizing God’s benevolence towards Israel, from the shorter version that evokes threats of divine punishment, but this distinction does not work in every case (e.g. Lev. 22:33; 26:45; Exod. 6:6-8). The close juxtaposition of formulas with and without “your God” shows instead that the short form abbreviates the longer formula and carries the same impact (most obviously in 18:4-6; 19:10-12, 25-37; see Schwartz 1999, 146-48, 221). As it does in introducing the Decalogue, YHWH’s repeated self-naming here emphasizes that a personal relationship motivates the obligation to observe all of YHWH’s regulations and mandates (Exod. 20:2; Deut. 5:6; so Sifra, Ahare Mot 134.ii.1;11 see further in Introduction to Leviticus 21-27: Structure). Leviticus frequently links this self-identification formula to Israel’s rescue from Egypt (11:45; 19:34, 36; 22:33; 23:43; 25:38, 55; 26:13, 45; Hieke 660) and so explicitly evokes the theme of YHWH’s self-revelation in those stories (Exod. 6:7; 7:5, 17; 8:6, 18; 9:14; 10:2; 14:4, 18; 16:6, 12; see further on v. 5 below). It also uses the formula five times to buttress demands that Israelites be holy like God (19:2; 20:7; 21:12, 15, 23). Here in chap. 18, however, the formula adds emphasis to demands for obedience (vv. 4, 5) and to commands to not defile God’s name (v. 21; also 19:12; 22:2, 32) and not pollute oneself (v. 30; also 20:24-26; 22:3, 8, 9, 15-16, 30). 11 See Gerhard Bodendorfer, “‫ ;אני יהוה‬God’s Self-Introductory Formula in Leviticus in Midrash Sifra,” in Rendtorff-Kugler (2003), 403-28 [412].

Leviticus 18 Exegesis 18:3

411

What is done in the land of Egypt where you (pl) lived, you must not do, and what is done in the land of Canaan into which I am bringing you, you must not do, and their mandates you must not follow.

This verse emphasizes the locations of Egypt and Canaan by postponing the negated verbs to the end of each phrase. Biblical texts frequently reproduce a standardized list of the ethnic groups living in the land of Canaan before Israel’s arrival, one of which were called the Canaanites (e.g. Exod. 3:8; Deut. 20:17; Judg. 3:5; etc.). However, the word, ‫“ כנען‬Canaan,” appears widely in ancient Near Eastern texts of the second-millennium B.C.E. to describe the territory of the southern Levant, rather than a particular ethnic group in it (Staubli 2011, 350-51). That is how the word is used here. The call to avoid Canaanite religious practices appears in all of the Pentateuch’s legal collections (cf. Exod. 23:23-24, 32-33; Deut. 12:29-32; 18:9-14), but only Leviticus 18 and 20 extend Israel’s distinctiveness to sexual morality (B. Berkowitz 2012, 17). This verse clearly evokes the narrative frame story of the Israelites camped at Mount Sinai by mentioning Egyptian practices from their past as well as Canaanite practices that they will encounter in the future. Interpreters therefore follow the text’s lead when they examine biblical stories for any hints of licentious behaviour by Egyptians (Gen. 12:11-20; 39:7-18) and Canaanites (Gen. 9:20-26; 19:4-8, 20-38; 20:2-18; 26:7-11; 34:2-4; so already Lev. Rabbah – see B. Berkowitz 2012, 117-39). They reinforce its rhetoric with examples from other historical sources, in which Egyptian sibling marriages feature prominently (Milgrom 1518-20; Feinstein 2014, 126-29), but may also include mythical and historical references to bestiality (Hartley 29798; Milgrom 1570). Such comparisons obscure the fact that Israelites are also depicted as behaving contrary to these sexual rules (Feinstein 2014, 128), sometimes without moral condemnation in the immediate literary context (Gen. 11:29; 38:12-26; Judg. 19:22). This verse clearly employs polemical ethnic stereotyping to motivate the Israelites to comply with its sexual rules (Milgrom 1520; Hieke 664). Subsequent cultures that venerate the Bible have sometimes violently imposed these biblical stereotypes on their own ethnic rivals, with catastrophic consequences for some communities and entire civilizations (see below on v. 25). Though ‫“ מעשׂה‬what is done” is singular, its meaning is collective as the plural “mandates” shows (Milgrom 1518). ‫“ חקות‬mandates” usually refers to YHWH’s commands, but here and in v. 30 (also 20:23) it refers to the mandates of the Canaanites. Together, the two terms “what is done” and “mandates” name a culture’s laws and customs. MT’s athnak dividing the verse after the first ‫“ תעשׂו‬you must do” limits “their mandates” to the Canaanites, but the verse’s parallelism suggests placing the major division after the

412

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

second ‫ תעשׂו‬so that the third phrase covers both Egyptian and Canaanite laws (so Milgrom 1520). Verses 3-4 emphasize that YHWH is the only legitimate law-giver, which means that only Israel’s laws are right (Hieke 661). Beth Berkowitz traced the interpretation of 18:3 in Jewish culture. She observed that the verse’s phrasing suggests avoiding foreign customs because they are foreign, while its position before the incest rules suggests avoiding foreign customs that fail a universal standard of sexual morality (B. Berkowitz 2012, 12, 30-34). Ancient texts and authors as diverse as the Letter of Aristeas (152), Philo (Congr. 85-88), and Sifra (Aharei Mot 9:8) used this verse and chapter to cast more or less subtle aspersions on Egyptian or Greco-Roman sexual practices (B. Berkowitz 2012, 44-59, 71-89). Jewish debates about the status of gentile laws used ‫“ חקתיהם‬their mandates” in this verse as a proof text as early as the Tosefta (T. Sanh. 9:11; b. Sanh. 52b) through the Middle Ages, and continue to do so today (B. Berkowitz 2012, 140-235). In Christian and post-Christian contexts, the question of whether or not to follow international legal norms has also been controversial in some nations, such as the United States (B. Berkowitz 2012, 1-4). 18:4

It is my regulations that you (pl) must do and my mandates that you must observe to follow them – I am YHWH your God!

The inverted word order, like in v. 3, emphasizes the nouns ‫“ משׁפטי‬my regulations” and ‫“ חקתי‬my mandates.” Milgrom (1521) translated “my rules alone” to convey this emphasis in English. For the translation of ‫ חקות‬as “mandates,” see Exegesis to 6:11. ‫“ משׁפטים‬regulations” often refers to preceding written regulations (Exod. 21:31; Lev. 5:10; 9:16; Num. 15:24; 29:18, 21, 24, 27, 30, 37). In this chapter, it appears with ‫“ חקות‬mandates” three times (Lev 18:4, 5, 26; also 19:37; 20:22; 25:18) to refer to all of these rules, thus forming a hendiadys that elides any distinction in their meaning here. This verse uses all the usual Hebrew terms for obedience to YHWH’s rules: ‫ תשׁמרו ללכת‬... ‫“ תעשׂו‬you must do ... you must observe to follow.” Milgrom (1521) tried to distinguish ‫“ עשׂה‬doing” positive commandments from ‫שׁמר‬ “observing” prohibitions, but admitted that their application is not consistent. This verse instead employs three nearly synonymous verbs to emphasize a single idea, obedience (as does Ezek. 11:12 negatively). 18:5

You (pl) must observe my mandates and my regulations. The one who does them will live by them – I am YHWH!

The first phrase reproduces “mandates” and “regulations” and their accompanying verbs from v. 4 in reverse order (Schwartz 1999, 151). LXX added

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

413

“all” before both words (similarly in 4:27; 8:26, 30; 25:18) as well as “and do them” to match v. 4 (Wevers 274). On the generic translation of ‫ האדם‬with “the one,” see Exegesis to Lev. 1:2b. Gender inclusive and ethnically inclusive readings of this word find support in v. 26’s application of these rules also to immigrants (Milgrom 1522; Hieke 663), but clash with the paragraph’s emphasis on YHWH giving correct mandates only to Israel as well as the chapter’s focus on the sexual behaviour of male landowners. The switch to impersonal third person singular here therefore suggests not so much an intention to be inclusive as it does the universality, as well as the consonance, of a proverbial saying: ‫יעשׂה אתם‬ ‫“ האדם וחי בהם‬the one who does them will live by them.” This saying echoes in Gen 42:18; Deut. 4:1; Prov 4:4; Amos 5:4, 6; Isa. 55:3; Ezek. 20:11, 13, 21, 25; Neh. 9:29; Luke 10:28. ‫“ חי‬live” here means “to stay alive” by obeying. It implicitly threatens death for disobedience (Noth 134; Levine 119; cf. “choose life!” Deut. 30:19), a threat that becomes very explicit in chap. 20. Those threats undermine broader interpretations of “living” in economic, social, or theological terms (contra Wenham 253; Hartley 293; Mohrmann 2004, 77).12 The syntax of ‫“ אשׁר יעשׂה אתם האדם וחי בהם‬the one who does them will live by them” can be analyzed either conditionally (Milgrom 1515: “which if one does them, he shall live by them,” so most translations starting with LXX’s aorist participle, ποιήσας “doing”) or as parallel phrases (NJPS “by the pursuit of which man shall live”; so Levine 119; Schwartz 2004, 250). Translations do well to preserve the ambiguity for readers to resolve. The former interpretation, together with Deut. 30:19, echoed in Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaisms as a promise of ultimate rewards for Torah observance (Neh. 9:29; Pss. Sol. 14:2-3; CD iii.16; Philo, Congr. 86-87; PseudoPhilo, L.A.B. 23:10; see Sprinkle 2008, 16-19, 53-130). This promise was even extended to non-Israelites by Sifra (Aḥare 13:12), which proclaimed that “the non-Jew who observes the Torah is equivalent to the high priest.” The Psalms of Solomon, TgPsJ, and TgOnq interpreted ‫“ חיה‬life” here as eternal life, which became the conventional understanding in medieval Judaism (e.g. Rashi; Ibn Ezra; Nahmanides) and some later interpreters (e.g. Kiuchi 332). By contrast, Paul quoted this verse twice (Rom. 10:5; Gal. 3:12), apparently to establish a conditional connection between law and human deeds in contrast to God’s grace and Christian faith (but his precise intentions have been roundly debated in recent decades; see Sprinkle 2008, 1-14, 131-90). Paul’s influence led most subsequent Christian interpreters to use Lev. 18:5 12 Merwyn S. Johnson, “The Idiom of Scripture, Leviticus 18:5, and Theology – at a Time of Paradigm Shift,” BTB 47 (2017), 155-170.

414

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

as an example of a theology of salvation through obedient works in contrast to a theology of divine grace. Nevertheless, some Christian interpreters still cited it approvingly, such as Clement of Alexandria who paraphrased the verse as meaning “disciplined practice and progress means life for them and for us” (Str. 2.10.47; B. Berkowitz 2012, 63; for a modern accommodation of Paul’s theology to Lev. 18:5, see Hieke 696). ‫“ אני יהוה‬I am YHWH” appears many times in this and following chapters. It is also frequently followed by “your God” (see on v. 2 above). By this point in the Pentateuch’s story, the name YHWH has become richly evocative of the layers of characterization provided by preceding texts: the God of the fathers and the saviour of Israel from Egypt in narratives and YHWH’s autobiographical references; the fair and merciful law-giver from YHWH’s commandments; the exacting cult-founder from YHWH’s religious laws; the protective overlord from the use of the formal conventions of imperial treaties; the holy God from YHWH’s explicit self-descriptions. Because the name YHWH evokes all of these connotations, demands for Israel’s obedience can be justified by asserting the divine name alone. Prohibitions of Incest (18:6-18) Verses 6-18 list prohibitions of sexual intercourse between close family members. Most of these incest rules use a euphemism for intercourse, “to expose the nudity” of close relatives, which extends to v. 19. Verses 19-24, however, list prohibitions on illicit sexual behaviour other than incest. The opening verses of both sections parallel each other with the phrase, ‫לא תקרב)ו( לגלות‬ ‫“ ערו)ת(ה‬you must not approach to expose (her) nudity” (Halbe 1980, 64). Verses 7-17 all begin abruptly with the noun, ‫“ ערות‬the nudity of,” and without the usual vav copulative. MT places a setumah divider before each verse in vv. 6-17 to distinguish twelve distinct rules. Such unusually frequent use of the setumah appears also in the second table of the Decalogue (Exod. 20:12-17; Deut. 5:16-22). Samaritan manuscripts, however, present vv. 1-23 as a single paragraph without sub-divisions (SPCEM 3:150-55; BHQ 19). The list that follows the heading in v. 6 has been analyzed as three sets of two laws alternating with two sets of three laws (vv. 7-8, 9-11, 12-13, 14-16, and 17-18; so Ruwe 1999, 164-68; Nihan 2007, 433), but the pairs are more obvious than what connects the sets of three verses. 18:6

Everyone must avoid approaching anyone of their (ms) bodily flesh to expose nudity – I am YHWH!

Verse 6 enunciates a general prohibition against incest. It serves as a heading for all the prohibitions on sexual intercourse with specific family members in vv. 7-18. While all the following prohibitions prohibit a singular male

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

415

addressee from exposing a particular relative’s “nudity,” this heading addresses the community in the plural (like vv. 2-5) and the word ‫ערוה‬ “nudity” is absolute (Milgrom 1532-33). The plural address and divine selfnaming connect it with the opening exhortation, while the phrase “bodily flesh to expose nudity” anticipates what follows (Halbe 1980, 63). For ‫“ אישׁ אישׁ‬everyone, anyone,” see Exegesis to 15:2 above. Despite this inclusive phrase, the contents of this chapter explicitly address only men, especially male heads-of-households who might presume to do as they please in their own homes. The phrase, ‫“ שׁאר בשׂרו‬their (ms) bodily flesh,” consists of two nearly synonymous words. ‫ בשׂר‬appears frequently in Leviticus to refer to animal “meat” (4:11; 11:8; 17:11), or to human “flesh” (13:2) or “skin” (16:4) or “bodies” (15:2; see Exegesis ad loc and “Human and Animal Embodiment” in Exposition to Leviticus 17). ‫ שׁאר‬can also designate meat for eating (Exod. 21:10; Ps. 78:20) or human bodies (with ‫ בשׂר‬also in Mic. 3:3; Prov. 5:11), but Leviticus uses ‫ שׁאר‬only to designate the physical relationship between close relatives (18:6, 12, 13, 17; 20:19; 21:2; 25:49; also Num. 21:11). The English and German idiom for such relationships is “blood relative” (e.g. Luther Bibel, CEB), but this medieval concept carries racist overtones about blood heritage,13 and should therefore be avoided in biblical translations (though in commentary, there is no good English alternative to the Latinate adjective, “consanguineous”). The Hebrew idiom conceives of physical relationships within a family in terms of flesh rather than blood. Leviticus 21:2-3 defines ‫“ שׁארו הקרב אליו‬his flesh closest to him” as a man’s mother, father, son, daughter, brother, and unmarried sister. Chapter 18 mentions each of these female relatives specifically (vv. 7-9, 11, 17) and covers the male relatives with the general prohibition of male-with-male sexual intercourse (v. 22). This verse introduces into the HB’s dimorphous conception of gender as male and female (Gen. 1:27) a third category, “bodily flesh,” which consists of people who are like the male addressee despite many being females (thus an “intersex” according to Rooke 2007, 31). Many translators render the phrase ‫ שׁאר בשׂרו‬as “their own flesh” and ‫שׁאר‬ in v. 12-13 as “flesh” (NJPS, Milgrom, Alter), or as “close relative” here and “relative” in vv. 12-13 (KJV, NRSV, NIV; Hartley), or they mix them (NRSV, Fox). By translating “their (ms) bodily flesh” here, I reproduce the redundancy and ambiguity of the Hebrew phrase. The following verses clarify the ambiguity by specifying that sexual intercourse with close family members is prohibited. Only the sisters of a man’s father (v. 12) and mother (v. 13) are specifically designated in this chapter as the man’s ‫“ שׁאר‬flesh,” while a woman’s daughters and granddaughters are labelled “her flesh” 13 Gil Anidjar, Blood: A Critique of Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 56-78.

416

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

(v. 17). Perhaps these three verses use this label to supplement the list of closest relatives in 21:2-3. Despite this rhetoric of “bodily flesh,” however, the following prohibitions include many affinal relationships by marriage (vv. 8, 15-18). The common verb, ‫“ קרב‬approach” (also in vv. 14, 19; 20:16), describes sexual intercourse also in Gen. 20:4; Deut. 22:14; Isa. 8:3; Ezek. 18:6 (see further in Milgrom 1534). ‫“ גלה ערוה‬expose nudity” is a euphemism referring to sexual intercourse seventeen times in this chapter and seven times in chap. 20. These sexual connotations are better conveyed in English by translating ‫ ערוה‬with “nudity” rather than “nakedness.”14 In Hebrew, even ‫“ ראה‬seeing” someone’s ‫“ ערוה‬nudity” can imply unspecified sexual interaction (e.g. between Ham and Noah in Gen. 9:22; also Lev. 20:17; Ezek. 8:37; contrast Adam and Eve ‫“ ידע‬knowing, recognizing” that they are naked in Gen. 3:7), so that even the sight of genitals is offensive (Exod. 28:42; Gilders 2018, 34). William Gilders concluded that the idiom of “uncovering nakedness” is employed as a euphemism for the sexual act without losing its literal sense as referring to the exposure of the genitals. This fact explains why it can be used to refer to both the sexual act with a woman and the offense against the man to whom she licitly belongs. In the former usage, “uncovering nakedness” indicates the sexual act; in the latter, it refers to a violation of cultural norms of modesty and propriety. (Gilders 2018, 42)

To ‫“ גלה‬expose” nudity emphasizes illicit sexual intentions, since the HB never uses this phrase to describe permitted sex (Gilders 2018, 36). Therefore, as Ziskind (1996, 127-28) observed, the phrase makes “these prohibitions to be absolute, to transcend the laws of rape, seduction or adultery and to be lifelong.” The prominence of the phrase, “expose nudity,” in this chapter gave it the distinctive meaning, “commit incest,” in post-biblical Hebrew (Schwartz 2004, 250). This chapter specifies a woman’s nudity as belonging either to herself (vv. 9, 11, 15, 18, 19) or to a male relative: the addressee (regarding his granddaughters, v. 10), his father (v. 8), or his brother (v. 16). It is notable that this chapter’s nudity rhetoric emphasizes offences against the woman whose own nudity is exposed more often than against a male relative who has some claim over her. 18:7

The nudity of your (sg) father and the nudity of your mother you must not expose. She is your mother, you must not expose her nudity.

The double subject of the protasis, “the nudity of your father and the nudity of your mother,” is unique in this chapter. Its significance is not clear. The mother is not mentioned in the parallel incest prohibitions of chap. 20. The 14

As classically described by John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), 53-57.

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

417

father’s nudity is widely understood to be his wife (Rashi). Some interpreters take “the nudity of your mother” here as a gloss on the previous phrase to specify that the father’s nudity is actually “the nudity of your mother” (NJPS; Levine 120; Hieke 668). Conversely, Elliger (231) and Halbe (1980, 69) thought that “the nudity of your father” has been added secondarily to an otherwise perfect five-part chiastic arch centred on “she is your mother,” such as also appears in v. 15. Rattray (1987, 542) argued that the mother’s nudity is included to begin the list emphatically with the most abhorrent example. McClenney-Sadler (2007, 80, 110), following a frequent suggestion made already by some ancient rabbis (b. Sanh. 54a), argued that the verse prohibits sexual intercourse with one’s father because it offends the sexual rights of one’s mother. She concluded that the position of this rule at the head of the list elevates the mother’s rights even ahead of the father’s. Dershowitz (2017, 8) thought the second clause was added to reserve reference to male-with-male intercourse to the blanket prohibition in v. 22. However, vv. 12-13 use the claims of “father’s flesh” and “mother’s flesh” in parallel to prohibit sexual intercourse with one’s paternal and maternal aunts. That supports the notion that the nudity of one’s father and mother can also be cited as parallels, rather than just defining one as the equivalent of the other. Horton (1973), Hartley (287), and Milgrom (1529) thought this double subject serves as a heading that defines all the subsequent examples as violating the rights of either one’s father or one’s mother The list of punishments in chap. 20 does not reproduce this prohibition. Instead, it begins by threatening capital punishment against anyone who “dishonours their father and their mother” (20:9). Mandates to honour father and mother stand at the head of chap. 19’s regulations (19:3) and of the second table of the Decalogue (Exod. 20:12; Deut. 5:16). Proverbs begins its list of aphorism by contrasting the effects of a child’s wisdom or folly on their father and mother (Prov. 10:1). This pattern of beginning lists of moral injunctions by invoking one’s parents suggests that, in Israel’s culture, “honouring father and mother” served as a cipher for the most basic moral standards (see further on 20:9). In that case, “the nudity of your father and the nudity of your mother” covers all of the following prohibitions. In fact, the organization of this list can best be understood not by the principles of consanguinity and affinity (contra Rattray 1987, 542; Milgrom 1537) but on the basis of the father’s (vv. 8-16) and mother’s “flesh” (vv. 17-18; see further on v. 17 below and Exposition: Structure). 18:8

The nudity of your (sg) father’s woman you must not expose. She is your father’s nudity.

This verse takes the form of a three-part chiastic arch, like v. 16 (Halbe 1980, 70). It prohibits a man’s access to his father’s sexual partners besides his

418

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

own mother (already covered by v. 7). It brings the death penalty in 20:11, and appears also in Deut. 23:1 Eng. 22:30; 27:20; Ezek. 22:10. ‫“ אשׁה‬woman” also means “wife,” as in the English idiom, “his woman.” This prohibition covers step-mothers married after the mother’s death and multiple wives in polygamous marriages. In ancient patriarchal societies including Israel, however, men were permitted sexual access to more women than they were married to, especially to concubines and enslaved women (often concubines were enslaved: e.g. Bilhah and Zilpah who are named as the mothers of four of Jacob’s twelve sons in Gen. 30:3-13). So, this verse may prohibit the son having sex with any women with whom his father had intercourse (e.g. Reuben with Bilhah in Gen. 35:22; Absalom with David’s concubines in 2 Sam. 16:21-22; Adonijah’s request for Abishag in 1 Kgs. 2:13-22). This ambiguity about the woman’s status is best preserved by translating ‫אשׁה‬ throughout this chapter as “woman” rather than “wife.” Other ancient law collections differed on this issue: the Hittite Laws (§190) allowed marrying one’s widowed step-mother, but Hammurabi’s (§158) required disinheriting a man who does so. Later Jewish texts support the plain meaning of this prohibition as absolute (Jub. 33:10-15; Philo, Laws 3.14; m. Sanh. 7:4). The specific qualifier, “in her lifetime,” in v. 18 indicates that all the other incest prohibitions are unaffected by the death of a spouse or sibling (Milgrom 1539). ‫“ ערות אביך הוא‬she is your father’s nudity” sounds strange in English, which recognizes the possessive force of “her/his nudity” only as reflexive, that is, as applying to one’s own body. This chapter uses it reflexively to describe women’s sexual activity, as in ‫“ ערותה‬her nudity” (vv. 7, 9-11). The patriarchal conception of this chapter, however, uses the phrase “your father’s/uncle’s/brother’s nudity” or “your nudity” to describe either someone to whom a male head-of-household has sexual access (as in this verse and vv. 12, 16) or someone for whose sexual behaviour he might be considered responsible (e.g. v. 10). The Apostle Paul criticized a member of the Corinthian church for breaking this rule (1 Cor. 5:1). 18:9

The nudity of your (sg) sister, your father’s daughter or your mother’s daughter born in the household or born outside it, you must not expose her nudity.

This prohibition also appears in 20:17 where it earns the penalty of being “cut off,” and in Deut. 27:22; Ezek. 22:11. Many interpreters (e.g. Rattray 1987, 586-87; Hartley 287) take this verse as applying only to half-sisters because ‫“ אחותך‬your sister” is explained as the daughter of “your father or your mother.” However, Hebrew ‫“ או‬or”

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

419

can describe alternative possibilities without being mutually exclusive (e.g. Exod. 21:28, 31). Ziskind (1996, 129) pointed out that this chapter regularly describes one’s connection to a relative in terms of a third relative “whose sexual integrity a man was also expected to respect.” Describing one’s sister as the daughter of one’s father or mother does not preclude her being both parents’ daughter and therefore one’s full sister (McClenney-Sadler 2007, 81; Gilders 2018, 36). Specifying these distinctions may have been necessary because ancient law allowed women to negotiate for control of their offspring’s inheritance upon entering new marriages (McClenney-Sadler 2007, 82, citing the laws of Lipit-Ishtar §20b; Hammurabi §150). The distinction indicated by ‫“ מולדת בית או מולדת חוץ‬born in the household or born outside it” has been understood as referring to legitimate or illegitimate births (b. Yeb. 23a; Ramban; Noth 136), to Jewish or non-Jewish housholds (Ibn Ezra), or to being inside or outside the inheriting lineage (Rashi; Milgrom 1540; McClenney-Sadler 2007, 83). It most likely refers to children raised together in the same household or raised apart (Ibn Ezra; NEB; Wenham 255-56; Hieke 670; see below on v. 11). It emphasizes that the mother’s or daughter’s status and location does not affect what counts as incest, only their close family relationship to the male addressee, whether affinal or consanguineous (see further on v. 17 below). Instead of L’s ‫“ ערותן‬their (fem pl) nudity,” SP, LXX, Pesh, and some MT manuscripts read ‫“ ערותה‬her nudity” in agreement with the singular antecedent, as in v. 7, which is the superior reading here (Milgrom 1540; BHQ). 18:10 The nudity of your (sg) son’s daughter or your daughter’s daughter, you must not expose their nudity, because they are your nudity. Sexual intercourse with grand-daughters earns the death penalty according to 20:12. The statement ‫“ כי ערותך הנה‬because they are your nudity” prohibits sexual access to grand-daughters because grandfathers may be responsible for defending and allocating their sexual behaviour by arranging marriages for them. Fathers rather than grandfathers usually negotiated their daughters’ marriages (e.g. Gen. 34:6), which led Gilders (2018, 36-37) to deny that “they are your nudity” refers to such responsibilities. But in the absence of her father, Rebekah’s brother, Laban, conducted her marriage negotiations along with her mother (Gen. 24:29, 53, 55; her father Bethuel appears only in v. 50, which looks like an addition), which suggests that the responsibility fell to whichever man was currently head of the household. That might well be a young woman’s grandfather (Milgrom 1541; Wells 2020, 152).

420

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

The same rationale obviously applies to a man’s daughter, whom many readers find missing in chaps. 18 and 20. But his daughter is included implicitly in the prohibition on exposing the nudity of “his bodily flesh” (v. 6; Rattray 1987) and explicitly in prohibiting sex with a woman and her daughter (v. 17; Ibn Ezra). This verse’s three-fold repetition of ‫“ ערות‬nudity of” emphasizes “that copulation, not marriage, is intended” (Milgrom 1541). 18:11 The nudity of your (sg) father’s woman’s daughter born of your father, she is your sister. You must not expose her nudity. The circuitous phrasing, “your father’s woman’s daughter,” is another example of this chapter’s tendency to define family relationships in terms of a third family member (see on v. 9 above). ‫“ אשׁת אביך‬your father’s woman” is not the man’s mother, whose daughter – his full sister – is already prohibited by v. 9. This verse counts half-sisters and step-sisters as sexually offlimits like full sisters by classifying both as ‫“ אחותך‬your sister.” ‫“ מולדת אביך‬born of your father” (LXX ὁμοπατρία “same father”) has divided interpreters, because its simple meaning as a participle from ‫ילד‬ “bear, give birth to” would make this rule identical with v. 9. The usual interpretation, “half-sister,” depends on adding to “born of your father” the implication, “but not your mother.” The word ‫מולדת‬, however, appears frequently as a noun meaning “descendants” (Gen. 48:6 ‫מולדתך אשׁר הולדת‬ “your descendents born to you”) or “relatives” (Gen. 12:1; Num. 10:3). Therefore, Milgrom (1541-42) and Feinstein (2014, 236 n. 22) took the phrase as referring to the father’s larger clan, but that meaning seems too broad for these incest prohibitions. The word refers specifically to place and manner of birth in Ezek. 16:3-4, which seems more appropriate to this context. This phrase here most likely refers to household of origin, like ‫“ מולדת בית‬born in the household” in v. 9 (Levine 120). It prohibits sexual intercourse with all daughters of his father’s sexual partners in a man’s own household (Wenham 256; Hartley 295; Hieke 670; Gilders 2018, 38). Regardless of paternity or legitimacy, “she is your sister.” Abraham and Sarah were half-siblings, according to Gen. 20:12, so their marriage broke this rule. 18:12-13 The nudity of your (sg) father’s sister you must not expose. She is your father’s flesh. The nudity of your (sg) mother’s sister you must not expose, because she is your mother’s flesh. Sexual intercourse with a parent’s sister earns the penalty of “bearing liability” in 20:19.

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

421

Verses 12 and 13 are phrased in parallel (v. 13 only adds ‫“ כי‬because”). Each takes the form of a three-part arch that parallels a parent’s sister with their “flesh” (Halbe 1980, 71). Verses 12-13, like v. 7, therefore set the claims of one’s mother’s flesh on the same level as one’s father’s flesh. The casuistic rule in 20:19 combines them in one sentence, placing the mother’s claims first. The father’s sister is called ‫“ דדה‬aunt” in Exod. 6:20 (cf. Num. 26:58-59), but this chapter reserves that title for the uncle’s wife (v. 14). For ‫“ שׁאר‬flesh,” see on v. 6 above. Gilders (2018, 38) explained the reappearance of “flesh” here as meaning that a man is prohibited from sexual relationships with the same women that are prohibited to his father. It is also possible that ‫ שׂאר‬appears here and in v. 17 to extend the list of closest relatives in 21:2-3. The Qumran community argued that the same relationships forbidden to men are forbidden to women. Therefore, a man cannot have sexual intercourse with his niece, because to her, he is the brother of one of her parents (CD 5:8; 11QT 66:16-17). The ancient rabbis, on the other hand, recommended marrying a sister’s daughter (b. Yeb. 62b). 18:14 The nudity of your (sg) father’s brother you must not expose. You must not approach his woman. She is your aunt. Sexual intercourse with an uncle’s woman earns the penalty of childlessness in 20:20. The incest prohibitions of chap. 18 conclude with five rules (vv. 14-18) that explicitly prohibit affinal relationships, as do already vv. 8 and 11. The wording of this verse follows v. 7. It reserves the label ‫“ דדה‬aunt” for one’s uncle’s wife, so an affinal relation, not a consanguineous one as in v. 13. Milgrom (1544) thought this reflected the importance of the paternal uncle (‫ )דוד‬in Israel’s kinship system, like in similar cultures. The incest rules of chaps. 18 and 20, however, give no other evidence for the uncle’s importance, and the very next verse includes another technical term for a relative, the ‫כלה‬ “daughter-in-law.” It is therefore more likely that the list employs these labels to help specify some affinal relations. The patriarchal sense of sexual possession expressed by the concept of someone’s nudity appears clearly here in that “the brother’s nudity” does not refer to his body, but to his nephew’s sexual intercourse with his wife or another woman under his sexual control (see also v. 16 and on v. 8 above). 18:15 The nudity of your (sg) daughter-in-law you must not expose. She is your son’s woman. You must not expose her nudity. Sexual intercourse with a daughter-in-law earns the death penalty in 20:12. A prohibition on the ‫“ כלה‬daughter-in-law” as a sexual partner also appears

422

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

in Ezek. 22:11. Since ‫ כלה‬can also mean “bride,” this verse specifies “your son’s woman.” Gilders (2018, 39) explained that the absence of any reference to the son’s nudity or flesh is due to the hierarchical nature of shame culture: “there was no cultural norm against a father seeing his son’s genitals.” This verse’s Hebrew phrases form a five-part chiastic arch (Halbe 1980, 70). The laws of Hammurabi (§§155-56) also prohibited sexual access to daughters-in-law. Illicit sexual intercourse between a man and his daughterin-law is a key component of the plot of the story of Tamar and Judah in Genesis 28 (see also Jub. 41:23). 18:16 The nudity of your (sg) brother’s woman you must not expose. She is your brother’s nudity. Sexual intercourse with a sister-in-law earns the penalty of childlessness in 20:21. Here, this verse takes the form of a three-step chiastic arch, just like v. 8 (Halbe 1980, 70). The argument that Leviticus 18 and 20 were written to reform at least some aspects of the Israelite kinship system (see Exposition) finds its strongest evidence here, because the Pentateuch endorses a major exception to this prohibition. According to Deut. 25:5, among brothers who live together, if a man dies without an heir, his brother is obliged to have intercourse with the widow in order to raise an heir to the dead man. This arrangement is traditionally called levirate marriage. The levir’s obligation is presupposed in the stories of Tamar (Gen. 38:6-11, 26) and of Ruth (Ruth 3:12; 4:5-12). The ancient rabbis considered the levirate rule an explicit exception to this prohibition on intercourse with a brother’s woman (Sifre; b. Qid. 75b-76a; Wenham 257; Schwartz 2004, 251). Many modern interpreters think this prohibition in Lev. 18:16 applies only when the brother is living, and so is compatible with Deut. 25:5 (Noth 136; Snaith 124; Budd 257; Hieke 67374). However, v. 18’s explicit “in her lifetime” suggests that the other prohibitions in this list are not limited in that way. It is therefore likely that this verse intentionally contradicts the Deuteronomic obligation of levirate marriage (so Ziskind 1996, 128). Philo (Laws, 3.27) omitted this rule, perhaps because of the contradiction with Deut. 25:5 (Milgrom 1545). The early Christian tradition maintained that John the Baptist was arrested and murdered for criticizing King Herod Antipas for marrying his brother’s wife during his brother’s lifetime (Mark 6:17-29; Matt. 14:1-12). This verse and its companion (20:21) became key issues in conflicts between the English monarch and the Roman Church. King Henry VIII wished to divorce Catherine of Aragon, who had been married to his brother

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

423

until he died. Henry’s court used these verses to claim that Henry’s marriage to her was invalid. Catherine’s advisors argued that Deut. 25:5 requires levirate marriage by the surviving brother. This conflict led Henry to take the first step towards schism between the Anglican and Roman Churches in the sixteenth-century.15 18:17 The nudity of a woman and her daughter you (sg) must not expose. You must not take the daughter of her son or the daughter of her daughter to expose her nudity. They are her flesh. It is depravity! Sexual intercourse with “a woman and her mother” earns a death penalty by burning in 20:14 (cf. also Deut. 27:23; Amos 2:7). For ‫“ שׁאר‬flesh,” see on v. 6 above. MT ‫ שׁארה‬lacks the expected mappiq to mark a third feminine singular pronoun, “her flesh.” NJPS therefore understood this word as a feminine abstract noun and translated “kindred.” Supplying the mappiq to conform to the word’s meaning, “flesh,” in vv. 6, 12-13 makes better sense (so Vg, BHS, Levine 122, BHQ 107). LXX reads second singular, “your flesh,” followed by NRSV, but this reading reinforces patriarchy even more than the Hebrew text, as McClenney-Sadler (2007, 86) observed: “the Greek obscures the structural unity of the Hebrew by emphasizing the rights of the wife in relation to her husband, when in fact the focus of this verse is on the rights of the wife in relation to her daughters and grand-daughters.” Her point is also crucial for understanding the place of a man’s daughter in these incest prohibitions. A few interpreters (Ibn Ezra; Schenker 2003, 164-65; McClenney-Sadler 2007, 79; Feinstein 2014, 104, 170, 173; Hieke 675-76) have realized that this verse prohibits sexual intercourse between a man and his own daughters, who are necessarily also the daughters of his woman/wife. The daughter is therefore not missing from this chapter after all. Many interpreters since antiquity have limited v. 17 to prohibiting sexual intercourse with step-daughters and mothers-in-law, not with a man’s own daughters (e.g. Rashi; Rattray 1987, 538; Hartley 287; Milgrom 1546). Their reason for excluding daughters here is that ‫“ בתך‬your daughter” or any other formula of relation to the male addressee is missing. The chapter otherwise pays explicit attention to different relationships, such as by mentioning half-sisters, step-sisters, daughters-in-law, and grand-daughters (vv. 9-11, 15). Some interpreters who think daughters do not appear in v. 17 nevertheless argued that they are already covered by v. 6’s ‫“ שׁאר בשׂרו‬his bodily flesh” (Rattray 1987, 542; Milgrom; Hieke).

15 Richard Rex, “Humanism and Reformation in England and Scotland,” in Saebø 2008, 2:523.

424

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

Most interpreters have failed to see the man’s daughter in this verse because they have been misled by thinking of fathers and daughters as among the closest consanguineous relationships. The fact that the list starts with close consanguineous relatives (vv. 6-13) before listing affinal relatives (vv. 14-16) highlights the omission of daughters among the former. However, Ziskind (1996, 129) observed that this chapter usually describes a man’s connection to a relative in terms of a third relative “whose sexual integrity a man was also expected to respect.” So v. 9 describes both full and half-sisters as a “father’s daughter or mother’s daughter.” This verse and 20:14 also describe the relationship of mother with daughter rather than either’s relationship to the male addressee to prohibit incestuous sexual intercourse with daughters as well as mothers (contra Ziskind who, like many others, read this verse as applying only to step-daughters). By avoiding ‫“ בתך‬your daughter,” this prohibition also precludes distinguishing daughters based on their legitimacy. Prohibiting sexual access to both “a woman and her daughter” is a comprehensive ban, unlimited by either woman’s marital or economic status, including slavery. According to McClenney-Sadler (2007, 86), this explains the position of this prohibition on sexual intercourse with daughters at the end of the incest rules, which first prohibit consanguineous relations before affinal relations. In the rationale of this list that defines a man’s family relationships through a third relative, daughters count as affinal because it prioritizes their mothers’ relationship to them. The penalty for breaking this rule (20:14) also emphasizes the relationship between the women rather then with the man. This verse mentions ‫“ אשׁה ובתה‬a woman and her daughter” while 20:14 lists ‫את־אשׁה‬ ‫“ ואת־אמה‬with a woman and with her mother.” Therefore, vv. 17-18 do not, in fact, move the discussion away from consanguineous relationships (contra McLenney-Sadler 2007, 86; Milgrom 1546; Nihan 2007, 439-41; Hieke 675; and others). Instead, vv. 17-18 prioritize a woman’s consanguineous relationships (‫“ שׁארה הנה‬they are her flesh”) with her daughters, grand-daughters, and sisters over her man’s relationship to any of them. Another consequence of this observation about daughters is that ‫לקח‬ “take” here and in v. 18 does not necessarily indicate marriage (so also in Gen. 20:2; 24:48; see Milgrom 1547; Schenker 2003, 183; Schwartz 2004, 251; contra Rashi; Hartley 289; and many others) as it usually does, since the other prohibitions in this chapter make it very unlikely that this verse wishes to permit intercourse with a mother and daughter outside of marriage. The focus here as throughout this chapter is on sexual intercourse per se (see comments above, especially on vv. 6 and 11). The ancient rabbis debated whether this prohibition applies only when both mother and daughter are alive (Sifra Kedoshim 9:18; see Milgrom 1546). The absence of the restriction “in her lifetime” as in the following verse suggests

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

425

that the prohibition is absolute, as one would expect when one realizes that this prohibition covers a man’s own daughters as well as step-daughters. For the first time, this verse includes an expression of revulsion at incestuous behaviour. Leviticus limits the broadly negative connotations of ‫“ זמה‬depravity” (so NRSV and NJPS; cf. HAL “infamy,” Fox “insidiousness,” CEB “shameful”) to sexual acts here and in 19:20, 20:14 twice (also Ezek. 22:11; 23:35), specifically to sexual intercourse with a mother and her daughter here and in 20:14. Interpreters have tried to treat this as technical language defining a legal or moral distinction involving this particular combination of people (e.g. Milgrom 1751; Hieke 675; Feinstein 2014, 110). However, this kind of rhetoric becomes increasingly prominent in the remainder of the chapter (see vv. 22, 23, 26, 29, 30, and the pollution language throughout vv. 19-30). This verbal pattern in chap. 18 indicates, not legal or moral distinctions, but rather a rhetorical strategy that climaxes the sexual prohibitions by emphasizing the pathos of shame. This verse’s vocabulary that echoes what precedes it and anticipates what follows, as well as its long and complicated syntax, led Luciani (2005, 94, 98) to identify v. 17 as a central hinge between two sets of prohibitions (vv. 6-16, 18-23). 18:18 You (sg) must not take a woman as her sister’s rival beside her to expose her nudity in her lifetime. This prohibition does not reappear in Leviticus 20. Unlike all the previous prohibitions since v. 6, it does not begin with ‫“ ערות‬nudity of” but with a more conventional vav. There is, however, no reason to think that this verse breaks from the pattern of vv. 6-17 of addressing sexual intercourse among close family members, even though its structure does not follow their pattern (contra Tosato 1984; Milgrom 1548). This syntax does not mark the beginning of a new section but rather the close association of this prohibition with the preceding one. The variation in phrasing should draw attention to the parallel emphasis in vv. 17-18 on protecting the rights of a wife: ... ‫ערות אשׁה ובתה‬ ‫“ ואשׁה אל־אחתה‬the nudity of a woman and her daughter ... and a woman to her sister” (McClenney-Sadler 2007, 87). Just as a woman’s daughters and grand-daughters are off limits to her sexual partner (v. 17), so are her sisters (v. 18). In addition, ‫“ לגלות ערותה‬to expose her nudity” may be delayed to nearly the end of the verse to mark it as the last prohibition in the sequence from v. 6. Kairite traditions understood ‫“ אחתה‬her sister” as meaning any other Jewish woman. They read the verse as requiring a man to give all his wives their conjugal rights to sexual intercourse (Milgrom 1548). Following the lead of polygamy’s prohibition at Qumran (CD 4:20-21; 11QT 57:17-19) and

426

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

Malachi’s opposition to divorce (Mal. 2:10-16), Angelo Tosato (1984) also read ‫“ אחתה‬her sister” in the broad sense as “female citizen,” which turns this rule into a prohibition of polygamy and divorce. The plain meaning of this verse, however, is to prohibit sexual intercourse with two sisters while both are alive, as recognized already by Philo, Laws 3.27, the Mishnah (m. Qid. 2:7), and most commentators. ‫“ לצרר‬as a rival” is a unique usage. HAL listed three meanings for ‫צרר‬: I “to tie up, harass,” II “be hostile, attack,” and III “to be a concubine/second wife” which it finds only here. The noun ‫ צרה‬describes Hannah’s co-wife, Penninah, in 1 Sam. 1:6, where HAL takes it to mean “co-wife.” But most translate “a rival (wife)” based on the verb’s second meaning (NRSV; NJPS; Milgrom 1549; CEB). When referring to wives, ‫“ עליה‬over her” means “in addition to her, beside her” (Levine 122, citing Gen. 28:9; 31:50). Jacob’s marriages to Leah and Rachel obviously offend against this prohibition (Gen. 29:16-30). Medieval Jewish interpreters exonerated Jacob on the grounds of place (not in Canaan) or time (before the giving of the Torah to Moses; see Milgrom 1549). Prohibitions of Pollution from Illicit Behaviour (18:19-23) Verses 19-23 begin with a parallel to v. 6, the heading of the previous section (“do not approach to expose her nudity”). They also introduce a new theme, ‫“ טמאה‬pollution” (vv. 19, 20, 23; also ‫“ חלל‬defile” in v. 21), that connects the sexual prohibitions to the concluding exhortations and shapes the meaning of the whole chapter (see Halbe 1980, 65). Hartley and Dwyer (1996, 82) suggested that the paragraph’s denunciation of these acts as “polluting ... defiling ... disgusting ... perverted” are in ascending degree of pollution, but the uncertain meaning of ‫“ תבל‬perversion” (see on v. 23) makes that claim hard to sustain. Verses 20-23 are linked by the vocabulary of ‫“ זרע‬seed, semen” (vv. 21-23) and (‫“ )מ(שׁכב)ת‬lay, layer” (vv. 20, 22-23). The prominent use of ‫“ זרע‬seed, semen” in this paragraph (twice in MT, three times in LXX and Pesh – see on v. 23) have led interpreters to claim that the unifying concern here is with the waste of this vital fluid for non-procreative uses (Philo, Laws 3.32.34.39; Milgrom 934, 1000-1004). But James Miller (2000, 401-2) observed that, in Leviticus, “controlled or forbidden materials have legislation concerning contact and disposal, not waste.” He concluded that all the rules of vv. 19-24 prohibit not the waste but the improper placement or use of semen: in contact with menstrual blood (v. 19), in another man’s woman (v. 20), for Molek (v. 21), in another semen producer (v. 22), in an animal or by allowing an animal to deposit semen in a woman (v. 23). But ‫ זרע‬does not appear in

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

427

every prohibition. Instead, ‫“ זרע‬semen” and ‫“ שׁכב‬layer” together provide the vocabulary links between unrelated prohibitions, which are often phrased oddly in order to establish these links. Like vv. 6-18, these rules emphasize the status and identity of prohibited sexual partners: a menstruating woman (v. 19), an associate’s woman (v. 20), a male (v. 22), a quadruped (v. 23). The attack on Molek worship (v. 21) also focuses on a prohibited partner, in this case a deity (Lings 2009, 245-46), and employs sexual vocabulary for children as “seed/semen” to match the sexual context. Verses 19-23 thus expand the list of prohibited sexual partners in vv. 6-18 and deepen the chapter’s shame rhetoric by emphasizing sexual pollution, which v. 21 extends to some illicit ritual practices. 18:19 You (sg) must not approach a woman in her menstrual period’s pollution to expose her nudity. Sexual intercourse with a menstruating woman results in seven days of pollution in 15:24, but in the penalty of being “cut off” in 20:18 (cf. also Ezek. 18:6; 22:10). For ‫“ נדה‬menstrual period,” see Exegesis to 15:19 above. The combination here, ‫“ בנדת טמאתה‬in her menstrual period’s pollution,” is unique (Halbe 1980, 65) and reverses the phrase, ‫“ כטמאת נדתה‬like the pollution of her menstrual period,” in 15:26 (Milgrom 1549). However, chaps. 12 and 15 have already established menstruation as paradigmatic for bodily pollution. The rules for purifying both male and female bodily pollutions conclude in 15:32-33 with a references to “the uneasy one in her menstrual period” and “a polluted woman” (see Exegesis to 15:33), with the result that any shame for pollution falls disproportionately on women (see Exposition to chap. 15). There is only sporadic evidence for menstrual taboos in texts from other ancient Near Eastern cultures (see Exposition to chap. 15, The History of Sexual and Menstrual Pollution). Eilberg-Schwartz (1990, 183, but cf. 186) explained the prohibition here as motivated by an attempt to validate only procreative sex, since a menstruating woman is unlikely to conceive. However, the understanding that menstruation interferes with conception is not widely attested in ancient sources. Hellenistic and later writers instead feared that menstrual sex would produce diseased or deformed offspring. This fear frequently led Christian authorities since antiquity to condemn sexual intercourse during menstruation. Thomas Aquinas (Super Sententiarum, book 4, d.32, q.1, a.2, s.2) therefore counted this prohibition of menstrual sex as a moral rule like the incest prohibitions and binding on Christians, unlike Leviticus’s other purity regulations (Marienberg 2012, 282-83). Among Jews, the Mishnah warned that menstrual intercourse leads to women dying in childbirth (m. Shab. 2:6), whereas the Talmud explained the prohibition on menstrual

428

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

intercourse as a means to discipline a husband’s sexual desires (see further in Exposition to chap. 15). The inclusion of this prohibition here is better explained by the HB’s tendency to cast menstruation as the paradigmatic pollution (Lev. 15:33; cf. the many texts that make ‫“ נדה‬menstrual period” and pollution synonymous: e.g. Ezek. 7:19-20; 36:17; Zech. 13:1; Lam. 1:8, 17; Ezra 9:11; 2 Chr. 29:5), and the fear that polluting the land can lead to the people’s exile (Lev. 15:31; 18:25-28). In this way, the chapter blames the sexual behaviour of couples for the fate of the whole people. 18:20 You (sg) must not give your layer of semen to your associate’s woman to become polluted with her. Prohibitions of adultery appear also in Lev. 19:20; 20:10 where it earns the death penalty; Exod. 20:14; Deut. 5:18; 22:22 also with the death penalty; and Ezek. 18:6, 15; 22:11. For ‫“ עמית‬associate,” see Exegesis to 5:21. The parallel rule in 20:10 uses ‫“ רעה‬neighbour.” The usual term for sexual intercourse with a married woman is ‫נאף‬ “adultery,” which appears in most such biblical prohibitions, including this verse’s parallel in Lev. 20:10. This verse instead uses the strange phrase, ‫“ תתן שׁכבתך לזרע‬you give your layer of semen,” from 15:16’s ‫תצא ממנו‬ ‫“ שׁכבת־זרע‬let out a layer of semen” (also in 15:17, 18, 32; 19:20; Num. 5:20; see Exegesis to 15:18). Explanations for this usage include the claim that the noun ‫ שׁכבת‬means “penis” (Milgrom 1550).16 But translating this noun so specifically obscures how vv. 20 and 22-23 play with the verb and two nouns (‫ שׁכבת‬and ‫ )משׁכב‬from the root ‫“ שׁכב‬lay.” More helpful in this context is Miller’s (2000, 402) observation that this language unites vv. 20-23 in a common concern about depositing (“laying”) semen in the wrong places. Adultery causes conflicts between and within families and muddles lines of patrilineal descent. However, by avoiding the term ‫“ נאף‬adultery,” this verse generalizes this prohibition like the rest of this chapter to any sexual partner of “your associate,” not just those to whom he is married (see above on vv. 7, 17). That is made explicitly clear by 19:20-22, which assigns guilt for sexual intercourse with a betrothed woman enslaved by another man. ‫“ לטמאה־בה‬to become polluted with her” evokes chap. 15, which established that any ejaculation of semen is polluting and that sexual intercourse therefore pollutes both partners (15:18). However, it mandated only bathing and waiting until evening to restore their purity. The pollution threatened by 16 Also, in more detail, Roy E. Gane, “Innovation in the Suspected Adultress Ritual (Num 5:11-31),” in MacDonald (2016), 120 n. 23.

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

429

this prohibition feels much more ominous because this chapter’s framework connects pollution with exile, and 20:10 mandates the death penalty for adultery. These very different consequences of sexual pollution lead many interpreters to distinguish ritual pollution due to contacting semen from moral pollution due to illicit sexual intercourse, among other things, and to insist that there was no ritual rectification for moral pollution (see above, Introduction to Leviticus 11-20: Morality and Pollution). However, Leviticus’s rhetoric has aimed to persuade listeners that, despite the failure of Israel’s and Judah’s rituals to forestall divine punishment in exile, its offering rituals can mitigate for moral offences when accompanied by confession (5:5), remorse (16:31), and appropriate compensation (5:6, 16, 18, 23-24). The climax of this argument appears in chap. 16 when the instructions for the Day of Mitigations rituals insist that they can mitigate for “all” of Israel’s sins and pollutions (16:16, 30). A strict demarcation of ritual from moral pollution therefore does not work even for P in Leviticus 1-16, much less for Leviticus 17-27 and the rest of the HB that freely mixes pollution rhetoric into moral condemnations. Christian Frevel and Christophe Nihan were right to conclude about pollution in Israel as well as in other ancient cultures, that “sometimes the moral aspect is strengthened explicitly, and sometimes the physical, but they are never totally detached from each other” (Frevel-Nihan 2013, 20). The interaction of morality and ritual pollution can be understood through the interaction of a culture’s conception of cosmological realms, where morality is the requisite condition of the human realm while purity is required to interact with the divine realm. Israel’s covenant with YHWH redefined Israel as part of the divine realm, which connected immorality closely with pollution (though these concepts interact in most cultures; see Yoo-Watts 2021, 47-54, 123-24, 136). Adultery and other illicit behaviours, therefore, threaten not only family relationships but also Israel’s relationship with YHWH, as vv. 26 and 30 say explicitly. 18:21 You (sg) must not give your semen to pass over to Molek. You must not defile the name of your God – I am YHWH! For a summary of the many theories about the meaning of ‫“ מ ֶֹלְך‬Molek” and the rituals referenced here, see Exegesis to 20:2 below. Worship of Molek earns in 20:2-3 both the death penalty by stoning and the “cutting off” penalty. Each of the prohibitions in this verse resembles rules in 20:2 and 19:12 more than anything in this chapter, which raises the question of why they appear here in the context of sexual prohibitions. This thematic contrast caused some interpreters to consider this verse a later addition (Elliger 233, 235; Halbe 1980, 66). That judgment, however, still

430

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

does not explain its presence here. The vocabulary of “giving semen/seed” shared with v. 20 suggests that the link is sexual reproduction and children (Eilberg-Schwartz 1990, 183; Mohrmann 2004, 72). But adultery (v. 20) is not unreproductive like these other acts. More plausible is that this verse helps to shape the sexual prohibitions, which are not very distinctive to Israel, for use in the rhetoric of ethnic and ritual differentiation that dominates the frameworks of chaps. 18 and 20 (see further in Exegesis to 20:2 below). Later interpreters expounded on this theme by reinterpreting the prohibition on Molek worship to mean a ban on intermarriage (Jub. 30:10; Philo, Laws 3.29; b. Meg. 25a; TgPsJ; see Milgrom 1584-86). ‫ זרע‬means “semen” in the previous verse, but refers to children here and in 20:2-4. Miller (2000, 403) thought ‫ זרע‬evokes a fertility vow like that in 1 Sam. 1:11, so Molek worship involved a vow dedicating unborn children to the deity. In the HB, however, only Lev. 18:21 and 20:2-4 use ‫“ זרע‬seed/ semen” for children in the context of Molek worship, which suggests that the language has been adopted here to fit these prohibitions into the literary context of sexual prohibitions (Halbe 1980, 65; Gilders 2018, 41). This explanation is confirmed by these verses’ employment of ‫“ נתן‬give” like vv. 20 and 23 about semen. MT of this verse (but not 20:2-4) then adds ‫“ העביר‬pass, transfer” which was the conventional verb for offering children: see Ezek. 16:21; 23:37; Jer. 32:35; Deut. 18:30; and 2 Kgs. 23:10 which specifies that they “pass over/through fire to Molek.” SP’s reading, ‫“ העביד‬cause to serve,” is supported by LXX λατρεύειν, but most likely reflects an non-sacrificial interpretation of Molek rituals (see on 20:2 below), as does Vg consecretur. MT is more typical of descriptions of Molek rituals and more likely here, since ‫עבד‬ “serve” is not usually followed by ‫“ ל־‬to” (BHQ 107). ‫“ חלל‬defile” appears sixteen times in Leviticus 18-22, which makes it a distinguishing characteristic of H’s vocabulary, since P uses ‫“ מעל‬sacrilege” instead for the same kinds of offences (5:15, 21; Milgrom 1560; but note the appearance of ‫ מעל‬also in 26:40). In Leviticus, ‫“ חלל‬to defile” typically takes sacred things or people as objects: YHWH’s name (18:21; 19:12; 20:3; 21:6; 22:2, 32), priests (21:4, 9, 15), offerings (22:15), and the sanctuary (21:12, 23; 22:9). That pattern suggests translating “profane” (NRSV, NJPS, DCH) or “desecrate” to reflect a loss of holiness (Milgrom 1560, 1800; and especially Lipka 2010). However, the rhetoric of the frameworks of chaps. 18 and 20 focuses on the threat of polluting holy things, people, and land rather than desecrating them. Despite the wide acceptance of Milgrom’s (732) argument that pollution was believed to threaten the sanctuary’s sacred status, there is no clear statement to that effect in the HB (see Introduction to Leviticus 11-20: Polluting the Holy Sanctuary). Defiling god’s ‫“ שׁם‬name” can refer to invoking it in false oaths (see further in Exegesis to 19:12), but also

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

431

to damaging YHWH’s reputation (Feinstein 2014, 194 n. 40). The quality of holiness can be conferred on people and objects by ritual (chaps. 8-9), but Leviticus also calls on the Israelites to sanctify themselves by observing YHWH’s torah, because YHWH is holy (11:44; 20:7-8, 26). Unlike Deuteronomy (Deut. 7:6; 14:2; 26:19), it does not depict the people as intrinsically holy, not even the priests (contra Milgrom 1740; Lipka 2010, 97, 104, but see Exegesis to 21:15). The parallelism of Lev. 20:3 equates ‫ חלל‬of the divine name with ‫טמא‬ “polluting” the sanctuary. That recommends translating ‫ חלל‬as “to defile” (KJV, CEB) which in English combines connotations of pollution and desecration. This semantic range is reinforced by the verb’s application to women defiled (‫ )חלל‬by sexual intercourse (21:7, 9, 14) in the same context as its application to priests and YHWH’s name (21:1, 4, 6, 9, 15). These women are not consecrated like the male priests (chap. 8), as the explicit contrast in 21:7-8 makes clear (for the debated translation of ‫ חלל‬there, see Exegesis to 21:7). The sexual behaviour of a priest’s daughter (21:9) can also simultaneously defile herself (not consecrated) and her father (consecrated). While many rituals offer purification from pollution, the HB does not contain any rituals for resanctifying priests who have lost their holiness. Their holiness, then, does not seem to be threatened so much as their purity. ‫“ אני יהוה‬I am YHWH” is the first reappearance of this refrain since v. 6 (see Exegesis to v. 5). It does not mark just divinely enforced prohibitions (contra Milgrom 1565) since 20:4-5 clearly expects the Israelites to suppress Molek worship even as it promises divine punishment if they do not. 18:22 With a male you (sg) must not lie the layings of a woman. That is disgusting! Condemnation of homosexual intercourse appears in the HB otherwise only in 20:13, which mandates the death penalty for male-with-male sexual intercourse. Both verses employ the the strange phrase, ‫“ תשׁכב משׁכבי אשׁה‬you lay the laying of a woman.” Here it echoes ‫“ שׁכבה זרע‬layer of semen” in vv. 20 and 23. No general prohibitions of male-with-male sex have been discovered in Mesopotamian laws. Penalties appear in Hittite laws (§189) and Middle Assyrian Laws (A §20) for same-sex incest and rape (Olyan 1994, 192-93; Römer 2005, 21), but ancient texts also attest to homo-erotic stories and omens (Nissinnen 1998, 19-36; Römer 2005, 14-20, 24-34; Hieke 2015, 22-34). Only the later Zoroastrian Vendidād contains a divine condemnation of males sharing semen with other males.17 Greek and Roman cultures defined 17 Vendidād 8:32; see Darmesteter, 1895, 104; Dershowitz 2017, 18-19. If this attitude was already prevalent in the Persian period, perhaps Persian influence led to the prohibition

432

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

masculinity by the sexually insertive role, so they tolerated pederasty and rape of enslaved men but not intercourse between free adult males (Olyan 1994, 191; so also the Middle Assyrian Laws). Saul Olyan explained the lack of status distinctions in Lev. 18:22 and 20:13 as due to H’s egalitarian rhetoric and its concern with polluting the land (Olyan 1994, 196). None of these cultures show any concern for female-with-female sexual relationships. Older commentators often connected the position of this verse after the condemnation of Molek worship (v. 21) with the prohibition on “sacred” male prostitutes in Deut. 23:18-19. They imagined that this verse prohibits ritual practices involving homoerotic sex. That interpretation has now been clearly disproven in Deuteronomy and therefore should not shape the interpretation of these verses in Leviticus (for a summary and analysis, see Nissinnen 1998, 39-41). In recent decades, the contrast between Lev. 18:22 and 20:13, on the one hand, and other ancient cultures as well as the rest of the HB, on the other, has prompted many alternative readings of these verses informed by contemporary theories of sexuality and gender identity and modern social conflicts over protecting the legal rights of non-heteronormative people. Regarding ‫משׁכבי אשׁה‬, literally “the layings of a woman,” Olyan (1994, 184-86) compared it to ‫“ משׁכב זכר‬the laying of a male” used in Num. 31:17-18, 35 and Judg. 21:11-12 to describe the sexual experiences of women. He suggested that ‫ משׁכבי אשׁה‬refers to the experience of a man in sexual intercourse. Therefore, this phrase preceded by ‫“ ואת־זכר לא תשׁכב‬with a male you must not lie” prohibits a man from penetrating another in anal intercourse. Jerome Walsh interpreted the phrase as a cognate accusative meaning “who lies the lying down of a woman,” that is, the receptive partner in anal intercourse.18 David Tabb Stewart argued that the phrase prohibits only male-with-male incest within a family.19 Renato Lings concurred and pointed especially to the appearance of 20:13 among incest prohibitions to suggest that ‫משׁכבי‬ “layings” is plural to refer to all the examples of heterosexual incest listed in both chapters (Lings 2009, 245-47, followed by Kamionkowski 197). Similarly, Bruce Wells maintained that the word is an abstract adverbial accusative of location. So women’s ‫“ משׁכבים‬beds” refers to their sexual domains over their husbands and minor sons which makes these males, but not foreigner travellers or enslaved men, sexually off-limits to other males on male-with-male sexual intercourse in Leviticus (Römer 2005, 45). The uncertain dating of the Vendidād traditions, however, makes this difficult to prove. 18 Jerome T. Walsh, “Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13: Who Is Doing What to Whom?” JBL 120 (2001), 201–209; also Römer 2016, 43. 19 David Tabb Stewart, “LGBT/Queer Hermeneutics and the Hebrew Bible,” CurBR 15.3 (2017), 289-314 [297-98], who found a similar case in Gen. 49:4; see also Milgrom 1569.

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

433

in the community (Wells 2020, 140, 147-51, 156). Even more broadly, John Boswell argued that 18:22 and 20:13 apply only to straight men engaging in male-on-male sex.20 Some interpreters have postulated redactional developments in the prohibition: Olyan (1994, 204) thought 18:22 and 20:13 originally blamed only the insertive partner but were later expanded to include the receptive partner (see the critique of Milgrom 1567), while Idan Dershowitz (2017) interpreted v. 7a as a prohibition on male incest like in the Hittite laws to which an editor later added v. 22 to create a blanket prohibition on male-with-male sex. Some have denied that 18:22 and 20:13 describe male-with-male intercourse at all: Joanna Töyräänvuori suggested that they prohibit two men from sharing one woman sexually.21 Traditional commentators have been confident that the verse speaks of homosexual activity. The ancient rabbis understood here a reference to malewith-male sexual intercourse, arguing only about whether Leviticus condemns the insertive partner, the receptive partner, or both (Sifra, Qod. 9.14; b. San. 54b; see Olyan 1994, 181). Homosexual behaviour was not a common theme in early Christian texts, but they did exhibit hostility toward it (Rom. 1:26-27, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Testament of Naphtali, the Apostolic Constitutions, Clement of Alexandria, Minucius Felix, etc.). Elliott (2012, 221) estimated that 5-10% of the delicts in medieval penitentials addressed homosexual acts and desires, and they often cited Lev. 18:23 and 20:13 explicitly. In reviewing the entire history of interpretation, however, Elliott (2012, 195) observed “how so many commentators throughout simply skip verse 22 (on homosexual intercourse) as though it were unnecessary to comment, or is just one of a list. Part of the near silence has to do with the discomfort on the theme as something very close to home in certain monastic circles.” However, Elliott’s assessment of the exegetical literature omitted Christian legal traditions that codified anti-gay measures from Roman law up to today (see Exegesis to 20:13 below). Though this verse’s strange phrasing provides the basis for alternative interpretations, it has been understood throughout Jewish and Christian interpretive history until very recently as prohibiting male-with-male sexual intercourse. Neither 18:22 nor 20:13 provide any explanations for this ban. Traditional interpreters pointed to the “natural” sexual roles of the active male and passive female: so Ibn Ezra (see Olyan 1994, 189) and Thomas Aquinas (Summa IIa-IIae, q 143, art 12). Modern interpreters frequently suggest that 20 John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1981), 109 21 Joanna Töyräänvuori, “Homosexuality, the Holiness Code, and Ritual Pollution: A Case of Mistaken Identity,” JSOT 45 (2020), 236-67.

434

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

Leviticus depicts male-with-male sex as wasting semen, a vital fluid, and as offending against the command to procreate (Gen. 1:28; so already Clement of Alexandria, Paed. ii.10; Nahmanides; among moderns: Eilberg-Schwartz 1990, 183; Milgrom 1567; Hieke 2015, 35-36). In Leviticus, however, other ejaculations of semen (15:16-18) incur fear of pollution, but no prohibitions. The frameworks of both chaps. 18 and 20 emphasize fear of pollution from illegitimate mixtures, which remains the most likely explanation for the introduction of this ban on male-with-male sexual intercourse (Olyan 1994, 18990; Feinstein 2014, 176), whether the ban is understood as limited to family members or as intended more generally. Many commentators point out the contradiction in modern congregations advocating this prohibition on samesex intercourse when they do not fear communal consequences for ritual pollution, as the writers of Leviticus explicitly did (e.g. Gerstenberger 299; Milgrom 1568-69; Hieke 689-90). For the translation of ‫“ תועבה הוא‬that is disgusting!” see Exegesis to 11:10. ‫ תועבה‬appears in Leviticus only in chaps. 18 and 20 where it denounces male-with-male intercourse (18:22; 20:13) and more generally the sexual behaviour of the Canaanites (18:26-30). It is a very common description of pollution in Deuteronomy, Ezekiel, and Proverbs. Though its application ranges from ritual misdeeds to moral outrage, these biblical texts all express concern for delineating and protecting boundaries, frequently ethnic boundaries, and they provoke feelings of disgust in order to do so (Rainey 2019, 178-81).22 The word’s appearance here suggests that Leviticus’s novel legislation against male-with-male sexual intercourse was motivated by its rhetoric of ethnic vilification. This motive reinforces my judgment that the history of citing 18:22 and 20:13 to motivate violence and discrimination (see Exegesis to 20:13 below) recommends striking through these verses, so that their typography marks their failure to support the most basic principles of Jewish and Christian ethics (see the Author’s Preface above). The violent history of closely associating 18:22 with 20:13’s death penalty shows the need to strike through both verses. 18:23 With any quadruped, you (sg) must not give your layer of semen to become polluted with it. A woman must not stand before a quadruped to mate with her. It is perversion! In 20:15-16, sex with animals (bestiality) earns the death penalty. The curse on bestiality in Deut. 27:21 also appears in the context of incest. In 22 Also Carly. L. Crouch, “What Makes a Thing Abominable? Observations on the Language of Boundaries and Identity Formation from a Social Scientific Perspective,” VT 65 (2015), 516-41.

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

435

Exodus 22:18 (Eng. 22:19), the prohibition on bestiality is bracketed by condemnations of sorcery and illicit offerings, which may indicate that bestiality carried connotations of illicit ritual practices (Olson in Scurlock et al. 2011, 938). Prohibitions on bestiality in general are not mentioned in extant Mesopotamian legal collections. The Hittite Laws (§§187-88, 199, 200a) prohibited sexual intercourse with cows, sheep, pigs, and dogs on pain of death, but permitted it with horses and mules though disparaging such activities as polluting. Milgrom (1570) identified the pollution caused by bestiality in this verse as moral rather than ritual. However, that medieval distinction is not supported by this prohibition, whether read in isolation or in its context in chaps. 18 and 20 or in Leviticus as a whole (see above on v. 20 and Introduction to Leviticus 11-20: Morality and Pollution). The prohibition on bestiality (also 20:16) is the only one in this chapter to mention women’s sexual agency, but only in the third person. The addressee “you” is male as throughout this chapter. On ‫“ בהמה‬quadruped,” see Exegesis to 1:2. ‫“ לא־תתן שׁכבתך לטמאה־בה‬do not give your layer to become polluted with her/it” is repeated from v. 21, omitting only ‫“ זרע‬seed/semen.” That word is reflected here in LXX and Pesh, which suggests that haplography led to its omission in MT (Miller 2000, 401). I therefore include it. The Aramaic loan word, ‫“ לרבעה‬to mate with her” (also in 20:16; so Milgrom 1571; HAL “copulate”) is used for breeding animals in 19:19. LXX does not reproduce the feminine pronoun (BHQ 108) . ‫“ תבל‬perversion” appears only here and in 20:12 regarding incest with a daughter-in-law. An old explanation traces it to the root ‫“ בלל‬mix,” so perhaps a “confusion” of different semens (Rashi; Elliger 241; Hartley 298; Levine 123). Most translate more generally as “perversion” (NRSV; Milgrom; NJPS; CEB). No one has successfully explained why this label differentiates these two offences from all the other sexual offences in chaps. 18 and 20. This chapter’s pattern of using more disparaging rhetoric at the end (see Exposition: Structure) probably accounts better for its appearance in this last prohibition than do the contents of the prohibition itself. The ancient rabbis reproduced this prohibition on bestiality (m. Sanh. 7:4; b. Sanh. 58a). They also reproduced its association with foreigners (m. ῾Abod. Zar. 2:1), like in the frameworks of chaps. 18 and 20. The medieval commentator, Nahmanides, explained it as a ban on non-reproductive sexual intercourse. Rabbinic speculation on Gen. 2:18, 23, that Adam mated with animals until finding sexual satisfaction with Eve (b. Yev. 63a; similarly b. San. 105a-b on Num. 22:30), prompted anti-Semitic ridicule from medieval and early modern Christian writers (Lawee in Scurlock et al. 2011, 940). Among Christians, the appearance here together of prohibitions on male-with-male

436

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

intercourse and bestiality (vv. 22-23) led the Council of Ancyra (314 CE) to combine them in one set of penances, which led to their combination in later definitions of “sodomy.” Medieval and modern laws against sodomy therefore often included bestiality as well (Boer in Scurlock et al. 2011, 941). Thomas Aquinas cited Leviticus to rank bestiality as the worst of all the sexual sins (Summa 2a q 153 a12 ad3; see Elliott 221). The recent repeal of many sodomy laws in U.S. states has contributed to a tendency to criminalize bestiality separately, which the American Humane Society supports to combat cruelty against animals.23 These opposite modern trends are motivated by a common emphasis on consent and the capacity for consent as the governing criteria for distinguishing coercive from noncoercive sex. How the Canaanites Polluted the Land (18:24-30) The chapter concludes with exhortations that weave together the themes and vocabulary of the opening exhortation (vv. 1-5) with those of the sexual rules (vv. 6-23). Derogatory rhetoric that began in vv. 17 and 19-23 gets applied to the Canaanites who are blamed for polluting the land with illicit sexual and ritual behaviour. In this way, the chapter’s rhetoric concludes with emotional appeals (pathos) to instil in its listeners and readers feelings of disgust. The long and violent history of quoting this rhetoric against ethnic enemies to justify conquest, colonialism, and genocide (see below on v. 25) justifies striking through vv. 24-25 and 27 for failing basic standards of Jewish and Christian ethics (see Author’s Preface above). 18:24 Do not pollute yourselves by all of these, because the nations that I am expelling before you (pl) were polluted by all of these Feinstein (2014, 206 n. 6) suggested that niphal and hitpael forms of ‫טמא‬ “pollute” in vv. 24-30 reflect the same paradigm of reflexive action by which the subject pollutes himself. For problems with the argument that ‫“ טמא‬polluted” here implies moral rather than ritual pollution (e.g. Milgrom 1572-75, 1578), see Introduction to Leviticus 11-20: Morality and Pollution.

23 For example, see Humane Society Legislative Fund, “U.S. Senate unanimously passes bill to prohibit animal cruelty, bestiality,” December 14, 2017 (http://www.humanesociety.org/ news/press_releases/2017/12/PACT-passes-Senate-12142017.html; accessed May 28, 2018); also Rebecca F. Wisch, “Table of State Animal Sexual Assault Laws,” Michigan State University College of Law, 2017, online at https://www.animallaw.info/topic/table-state-animalsexual-assault-laws (accessed Sep. 17, 2021).

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

437

‫“ אני משׁלח‬I am expelling” contrasts with the depiction of the Israelites invading Canaan in Joshua, which is presupposed elsewhere in P (Numbers 1, 26, 31, 33). This difference has led some interpreters to speculate about different conquest traditions in biblical texts (Milgrom 1578-79). This language is better understood as drawing an equivalence between the actions of YHWH and Israel’s actions. That is, certainly, how later conquerors employed this rhetoric of divine conquest to justify their own violence (see on v. 25). 18:25 so that the land was polluted. For that, I accounted it liable, so that the land vomited out its inhabitants. The HB theme of the land polluted by human sin (Isa. 24:5) most often refers to violence and murder (Gen. 4:10-11; 6:11; Num. 35:33-34). Aside from this chapter, the land suffers “guilt” due to illicit sex also in Deut. 24:4, but sexual imagery is elsewhere used for land polluted by religious apostasy (Jer. 3:1-2; Ezek. 36:17). While substituting sexual for religious sins is clearly metaphorical, it is not clear that describing the land as polluted by sexual sins is more metaphorical than describing people as polluted by sexual sins (contra Milgrom 1579; on the difficulty of applying the metaphoricalliteral distinction to pollution language, see Yoo-Watts 2021, 133-37). For ‫“ עון‬liability,” see Exegesis to 5:1. One expects a plural pronoun for the people, but ‫“ ואפקד עונה עליה‬I accounted it liable for it” holds the land accountable because it is polluted. God’s judgment of the land’s liability for the people’s pollution precedes and motivates the land in vomiting them out. The land therefore does not vomit automatically (contra Milgrom 1577; Schwartz 2004, 252), but in response to YHWH’s judgment (Rainey 2019, 176, 187). The verb sequence depicts Israel’s replacement of the Canaanites as an accomplished fact, which is anachronistic in Leviticus’s narrative setting in the camp at Mount Sinai (1:1; 25:1; Milgrom 1580). The theme of the land ‫“ קאה‬vomiting, spiting up” its Canaanite inhabitants appears prominently in the conclusions of chaps. 18 and 20 as a threat that the Israelites could suffer the same fate (18:25, 28 twice, 20:22), but not in 26:31, 43 which predict their exile. Here in the conclusions of chaps. 18 and 20, this “vomit” language deepens the visceral effect of pollution language like “disgusting” (v. 22) and “nauseating” (Exegesis to 11:10) and connects it to the illicit sexual intercourse detailed in this chapter (Rooke 2007, 24-26). Today, the image of the land vomiting out its inhabitants can evoke fear of the human catastrophe caused by a warming planet.24 Historically, however, 24

Brent A. Strawn, “On Vomiting: Leviticus, Jonah, Ea(a)rth,” CBQ 74 (2012), 445-64.

438

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

this imagery has served as a justification for imperialism and colonialism. Here the biblical text provides an explicit justification for displacing the Canaanites from their land: they have polluted it by behaving in ways prohibited by YHWH’s laws (18:24-28, echoed by Ezra 9:11). The intention to dispossess the Canaanites of their lands appears already in the promises to the ancestors in Genesis (15:18-21; 17:8) and motivates the stories of the exodus from Egypt (Exod. 3:8; 6:4, 8) and the conquest of the land (Num. 33:51-53; Deut. 7:1-3; Josh. 11:23), but without this judgment. Some stories about common ancestors in Genesis, however, lay the basis for accusing the Canaanites of sexual perversion in order to justify their expulsion (e.g. Gen. 9:18-20; 19:30-38; see especially Bailey 1994). Later nations have used the same rhetoric. Europe’s crusades to conquer “the holy land” were justified by accusations that Muslims polluted sacred sites (Cole 1993; Angenendt 2009). The crusading knights were promised that they would be sanctified by their violent slaughter of Muslims (Megivern 1997, 64-70). In the sixteenth century, Protestant Reformers like Martin Luther depicted themselves as “purifying” churches of “Canaanite” pollution introduced by Roman Catholics (Staubli 2011, 374; Elliott 2012, 194). In the seventeenth century, the English poet, John Milton, denounced Catholic bishops as “the Canaanites and Philistines to this Kingdom” and castigated Irish rebels as sexually polluted, while Oliver Cromwell, who dethroned the British monarchs, claimed for himself the zeal of Phineas (Num. 25:6-15) in keeping Israel clean (Stevens 1993, 455-457). Catholics in the Counter-Reformation quoted the description of Israel’s pollutions in Ezekiel to attack Jews (Staubli 2011, 375). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, South African Boers compared their eviction from Cape Town to the Exodus and used Deuteronomy, Ezra, and Nehemiah to justify the separation of races in the system of apartheid (Prior 1997, 71-105; Staubli 2011, 378).25 Arab legends identified the Berbers negatively with the Canaanites (Staubli 2011, 378), though the rise of the modern state of Israel has led many Muslims to celebrate the Canaanites as predecessors of the Palestinians, both suffering from Israelite/Israeli conquest (Staubli 2011, 379). Jewish Zionists initially preferred to use the stories of Israel’s heroes in Joshua and the Maccabees rather than biblical law for their cause, but that has changed with the increasing influence in Israel of Orthodox Zionists in the later twentieth-century (Prior 1997, 106-169). The biblical condemnation of the Canaanites continues to echo in the twenty-first-century rhetoric of Israeli settlers and Christian Zionists who cite the biblical conquest 25 And especially, Masiiwa Ragies Gunda, “Understanding the Role of the Exodus in the Institutionalization and Dismantling of Apartheid: Considering the Paradox of Justice and Injustice in the Exodus,” Religions 12/605 (2021), online at https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12080605.

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

439

story.26 Apart from Middle Eastern politics, it also continues to be cited in condemnations of atheism and same-sex intercourse (e.g. in the 2005 papal encyclical, Deus caritas est, s. 31, quoted by Elliott 2012, 212). The cultures of the American continents have been especially influenced by the Bible’s rhetoric of separation from the Canaanites and other peoples. During the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the Americas, the rights of native peoples were hotly debated on both sides of the Atlantic (Prior 1997, 48-70; Newcomb 2008, 43-50; Staubli 2011, 375). In 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued a papal bull, “Inter Caetera,” creating the “Doctrine of Christian Discovery” that granted non-Christians’ lands in the Americas to the Spaniards so they could convert the inhabitants to Christianity. The depredations of the conquistadores over the next fifty years led to impassioned defences of Indian rights by some Spaniards who witnessed them. Most notably, Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote a critical history of the conquest and defended the Indians before a royal commission in 1550. Other defenders of Native Americans used biblical language to identify themselves as “in Babylon,” i.e. in exile, and “in Ninevah” like the prophet Jonah in preaching to the Spanish conquerors. They compared the Indians’ fate to that of the Israelites in Egypt (Prior 1997, 59-62). However, defenders of the Spanish and Portuguese conquests used the biblical narratives with greater effect. Fray Toribio de Motolinia blamed the depopulation of Indian communities on diseases and plagues in punishment for their sins (Prior 1997, 61). Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1545) cited Leviticus and Deuteronomy to justify conquest of the Americas because of the Indian’s crimes and unbelief (Prior 1997, 56, 68). Pedro de Santander in 1557 urged King Philip II of Spain to treat Florida like Canaan: This is the Land of Promise, possessed by idolaters, the Amorite, Amelekite, Moabite, Canaanite. This is the land promised by the Eternal Father to the Faithful, since we are commanded by God in the Holy Scriptures to take it from them, being idolators, and, by reason of their idolatry and sin, to put them all to the knife, leaving no living thing save maidens and children, their cities robbed and sacked, their walls and houses leveled to the earth.27

In 1557, Francisco de Vitoria wrote a treatise that denied the application of the Doctrine of Christian Discovery to the Americas, since the land was 26 Peter Richardson and Stephen Pihlaja, “Killing in the Name: Contemporary Evangelical Christian Interpretations of the Jericho Massacre in the Context of Anti-Immigration and Anti-Muslim Trends,” Postscripts 9/1 (2018 [2013]), 27-49, https://doi.org/10.1558/36984. 27 Marqués de Pital and Miguel Salvá, eds., “Carta del Doctor Pedro de Santander á S. M. fecha en Sevilla á 15 de julio de 1557,” in Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de España (ed. M. Fernandez Navarrete et al. in 112 vols.; Madrid, 1842-95), 26:240-65; Francis Parkman, Pioneers of France in the New World (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 18; Newcomb 2008, 50.

440

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

already occupied: “the barbarians were the true owners, both from the public and from the private standpoint” (Newcomb 2008, 163).28 Many people continued, however, to claim that conquest of inferior and immoral native peoples established rights to land and dominion in the Americas.29 The biblical model of the conquest of Canaan motivated many English settlers of North America (Staubli 2011, 376-77). In 1583, Sir George Peckham justified accepting a large grant of lands in New England by referring to God’s grant of Canaan to Israel (Cave 1988, 282). Seventeenth-century preachers compared the Native Americans to the Canaanites and also to the builders of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11) and to the descendants of Ham suffering Canaan’s curse (Gen. 9:25). They argued that the Indians’ idolatry condemned them to death under biblical law (Cave 1988, 283-86; e.g. Lev. 20:2, 4; Deut. 17:2-7). In Virginia, warfare with Native Americans was interpreted by Samuel Purchas through the language of Leviticus, as Paul Stevens pointed out: The Algonquian uprising of 1622, led by Pocahontas’s uncle, Opecancanough, is read by Purchas through the mediating glass of Leviticus 18, and the Indian rebellion is represented as sexual transgression: “When Virginia was violently ravished by her owne ruder Natives, yea her virgin cheekes dyed with the bloud of three colonies . . . Temperance could not temper her selfe, yea the stupid Earth seems distempered with such bloudy potions and cries that shee is ready to spue out her inhabitants.” (Stevens 1993, 455)

As was the case among Spaniards, many sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury English voices denied that Europeans had any divine grant to American lands (Cave 1988, 280-81, 286-87, 289-90). The Puritans also did not think that Christians should dispossess Native Americans, but they argued that God had already emptied the land of eastern Massachusetts by plague before they arrived (Cave 1988, 290). Nevertheless, the belief in the providential right to take Indian land remained popular among English colonists, to the extent that Roger Williams was expelled from Massachusetts over his disagreement about this and other matters. In 1689, the influential minister, Cotton Mather, charged the colonies’ soldiers to think of themselves as Israel in the wilderness battling Amalek: “pure Israel was obliged to ‘cast out [the Indians] as dirt in the streets’, and eliminate and exterminate them” (Prior 1997, 263). 28 David E. Wilkens (“Deconstructing the Doctrine of Discovery,” Indian Country Today, October 24, 2014) has argued that Vitoria’s point of view governed most legal interactions with Native Americans in the following centuries, which therefore took the form of treaties between recognized nations, but Newcomb disputed the influence of Vitoria’s intervention (Steven Newcomb, “Toward Disestablishing the Doctrine of Christian Domination,” Indian Country Today, September 12, 2018). 29 See Silvio Torres-Saillant, “Latina/os and Race,” in The Oxford Handbook of Latino Studies (ed. Ilan Stavans; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 12-61.

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

441

Some colonized peoples, however, embraced the Hebrew Bible’s purity rules and conquest story as a means to criticize their colonizers based on their own scriptures. In nineteenth-century South India, for example, A. N. Suttampillai founded the Hindu Christian Church and, quoting Leviticus 18, “warned the British that if they did not reform their ways, they would be ousted, as had once happened to the nations of Palestine: ‘Reform at once (Eph. 5.1-12). “That the land spue not you out also, as is spued out the nations that” were once in Palestine (Lev. 18.28)’.”30 Today, biblical ideas about land and conquest continue to influence American politics and legal decisions. In 1823, the U.S. Supreme Court in Johnson v. McIntosh revived the Doctrine of Christian Discovery as an element in U.S. law. This decision recognized that Indians originally occupied and possessed American lands but argued that property rights now depend upon the precedents established by European nations’ right of conquest (Newcomb 2008, 73-104). This precedent echoes the biblical conquest story and continues to influence legal decisions about Native American land claims in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as cultural battles over how to tell and memorialize American history.31 (See further on 20:24 below.) 18:26 You (pl), however, must observe my mandates and my regulations and not do any of these disgusting things, both the native and the immigrant who immigrated among you. The first statement repeats the beginning of v. 5. It adds the emphatic pronoun, ‫“ אתם‬you (pl),” to distinguish the Israelites from the Canaanites (Milgrom 1581), so “but you” (NRSV; NJPS) or “you, however.” Then it also adds immigrants to those who must observe the chapter’s sexual rules to avoid polluting the land. For ‫“ התועבות האלה‬these disgusting things” here and in vv. 27, 29-30, see on v. 22 above and also on 11:10. The four-fold repetition of the word ‫תועבה‬ “disgusting thing” in this paragraph evokes feelings of disgust to drive home the message that Israel should distinguish itself from other nations by its ritual and sexual purity. For ‫“ האזרח והגר‬the native and the immigrant,” see Exegesis to 16:29 and 17:8. The inclusion of immigrants here should caution against reducing the sexual rules to just a means of social boundary maintenance (see Introduction to Leviticus 11-20: Pollution and Social Hierarchy). They clearly do that, as 30 Sugirtharajah 2005, 185, quoting A. N. Suttampillai, A Brief Sketch of the Hindu Christian Dogmas (Palamcottah: Shanmuga Vilasam Press, 1890), 30. 31 Sandra L. Bigtree and Philip P. Arnold, “Why Removing Columbus Matters: From Foundational Narratives of Domination to Inclusivity,” APRIL (March 10, 2021), at https://www. aprilonline.org/why-removing-columbus-matters/.

442

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

this paragraph’s explicit vilification of the Canaanites shows. However, they also involve bodily practices that shape the imagination to distinguish different cosmological realms (see Introduction to Leviticus 11-20: Cosmology and Pollution). Leviticus places the land of Israel within the divine realm (25:23). Therefore, concern for polluting the land (vv. 24-25, 27-28) leads to imposing these prohibitions on immigrants because they, too, inhabit YHWH’s land. 18:27 Because all these disgusting things were done by the men of the land who were before you (pl), and the land was polluted, This verse reemphasizes the claims of v. 25, and its effects (see above). For MT’s ‫האל‬, SP, 4Q365, and 11QpaleoLeva read the more likely ‫האלה‬ “these.” The unique phrase, ‫“ אנשׁי־הארץ‬men of the land,” appears here instead of the usual ‫“ עם־הארץ‬people of the land” (4:27; 20:2, 4), perhaps to reserve the latter phrase for Israelites (Milgrom 1581; Hieke 651). Or it may have been chosen to match this chapter’s almost exclusive focus on men’s illicit sexual behaviour (exception: v. 23b). 18:28 so that the land does not vomit you (pl) out when you pollute it, like it vomited out the nation before you. This verse emphasizes the visceral effects of pollution on the land’s reaction, whereas v. 25 inserted YHWH’s judgment between its polluting cause and its nauseating effect on the land. MT’s accent on ‫“ ָק ָאה‬vomiting” indicates a participle like ‫“ משׁלח‬expelling” in v. 24, but a perfect verb “it vomited” is more likely (Elliger 230; HAL; Milgrom 1582). ‫“ הגוי‬the nation” is also singular in SP, Vg, and TgPsJ, but plural like v. 24 in LXX, Pesh, and TgNeof. The same disagreement appears in 20:23. 18:29 For everyone who does any of these disgusting things – anyone doing them will be cut off from their people. Disgust at the perpetrators is emphasized by repeating the subject on each side of the passive verb ‫“ ונכרתו‬will be cut off” (for which, see on 7:20). For translating ‫ נפשׁ‬as “anyone,” see Exegesis to 2:1 and 17:11. Commentators often see a distinction here between the actual perpetrators who will be “cut off” and the people as a whole who will be vomited out of the land (vv. 25, 28; so Hartley, Milgrom, Hieke). The overall rhetoric of this chapter’s conclusion as well as the summative ‫“ כי‬for” indicates instead

Leviticus 18 Exegesis

443

that the land’s liability and nauseous reaction is part and parcel of God’s judgment, which is not differentiated here as it is in chap. 20. 18:30 You (pl) must observe my observances to avoid doing any of the disgusting mandates that were done before you. You must not pollute yourselves with them – I am YHWH your God! On ‫“ שׁמרתם את־משׁמרתי‬you must observe my observances,” see Exegesis to 8:35. For ‫“ תועבה‬disgusting,” see Exegesis to 11:10. For the ‫“ חקים‬mandates” of other peoples, see on v. 3 above. This reference does more than create a bracket around this chapter. ‫“ חקות התועבת‬disgusting mandates” also unites in one phrase the legal language of the opening exhortations with the sexual laws’ rhetoric of disgust that builds, first implicitly then explicitly, throughout the centre and conclusion of the chapter (B. Berkowitz 2012, 30 n. 17). The divine self-declaration, “I am YHWH your God,” emphasizes the thematic bracket around the chapter (see on v. 2 above).

LEVITICUS 19:1-37

SAMPLES OF VARIOUS KINDS OF RULES

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10

11 12 13 14 15

16 17

YHWH spoke to Moses: Speak to the whole community of the children of Israel and say to them: You (pl) must be holy because I, YHWH your God, am holy. You (pl) must each revere your (3ms) mother and father, and my Sabbaths you must observe – I am YHWH your God! You (pl) must not turn to puny gods and moulded gods you must not make for yourselves – I am YHWH your God! When you (pl) slaughter an amity slaughter (offering) to YHWH, in your favour you slaughter it, it must be eaten on the day you (pl) slaughter it or on the following day. Whatever remains on the third day must be burned in a fire. If nevertheless eaten on the third day, (because) it is putrid it will not count in (your) favour. Those (pl) who eat it are liable, because they (ms) defile YHWH’s holiness. That person will be cut off from their (fs) people! When you (pl) harvest the harvest of your land, you (sg) must not harvest completely to the edge of your field. The gleanings of your field you must not glean. Your (sg) vineyard you must not pick clean and your vineyard’s fallen grapes you must not harvest. You must leave them for the poor and the immigrant – I am YHWH your God! You (pl) must not steal from or lie to or betray, each his associate. You (pl) must not swear falsely in my name, lest you (sg) defile the name of your God – I am YHWH! You (sg) must not withhold from your neighbour, you must not rip (them) off, you must not keep for yourself your employee’s wages until morning. You (sg) must not dishonour a deaf person or put an obstacle in front of a blind person. You must revere your God – I am YHWH! You (pl) must not judge dishonestly. You (sg) must not privilege poor people and you must not defer to important people. You must judge your associate with righteousness. You (sg) must not spread slander among your people. You must not stand on the blood of your neighbour – I am YHWH! You (sg) must not hate your brother in your heart. You must openly rebuke your associate, but you must not bear sin because of them (ms).

Leviticus 19 Translation 18 19

20

21 22

23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35

445

You (sg) must not take revenge and you must not resent one of your own people. You must love your neighbour like you – I am YHWH! My mandates you (pl) must observe. You (sg) must not breed two different kinds of your quadrupeds, you must not seed your field with two different kinds, you must not wear clothing blended of two different kinds. When a man lays a layer of semen with a woman who is an enslaved woman engaged to a man but not yet fully released or given her freedom, there must be consequences but they must not die, because she has not been freed. He must bring his guilt (offering or payment) for YHWH to the entrance of the meeting tent, a ram guilt (offering). The priest mitigates on his behalf with the ram of the guilt (offering) before YHWH for his sin that he sinned and he is forgiven for the sin that he sinned. When you (pl) come to the land and you plant any edible tree and you foreskin its foreskin with its fruit, for three years it must be foreskinned for you. It must not be eaten. In the fourth year, all its fruit will be (for) a holy celebration for YHWH! In the fifth year, you (pl) may eat its fruit to increase its produce for you – I am YHWH your God! You (pl) must not eat with the blood. You must not seek omens and you must not tell fortunes. You (pl) must not cut the edge of your head and you must not slash the edge of your beard. You (pl) must not put a gash in your flesh for a (dead) person or inscribe marks on yourself – I am YHWH! You (sg) must not defile your daughter for lusting (for) her so that the land does not lust and fill with depravity. You (pl) must observe my Sabbaths and revere my sanctuary – I am YHWH! You (pl) must not turn to ghosts and knowing spirits and you must not try to be polluted by them – I am YHWH your God! You (sg) must rise before the elderly and you must defer to the old. You must revere your God – I am YHWH! When immigrants immigrate into your (pl) land with you (sg), you (pl) must not oppress them. Immigrants who immigrate with you (pl) are like natives among you. You (sg) must love them like you, because you (pl) were immigrants in the land of Egypt – I am YHWH your God! You (pl) must not judge dishonestly amount, weight, or volume.

446 36

37

Leviticus 19 Essentials You must have honest scales, honest stones, an honest ephah, and an honest hin. I am YHWH your God who brought you from the land of Egypt! You (pl) must observe all my mandates and all my regulations and you must do them – I am YHWH! ESSENTIALS

Contents Leviticus 19 lists samples of rules from all kinds of Israelite normative traditions. The chapter is famous for its moral exhortations to impartial justice (vv. 15-16), charity for the poor (vv. 9-10), and honest business dealings (vv. 11-12, 35-36). They climax in the commands to love neighbours and immigrants “like you” (vv. 18, 34). The chapter also contains mandates about eating the meat of amity slaughter offerings (vv. 5-8), bringing a guilt offering for raping an engaged enslaved woman (vv. 20-22), and offering the first crop of young fruit trees (vv. 23-25). It prohibits mixing crops, clothing, and breeds of animals (v. 19). It requires listeners and readers to observe the Sabbath (vv. 3, 30). It prohibits them from worshipping “puny” or “moulded” gods (v. 4), from eating blood (v. 26), from mutilating their bodies in grief (vv. 27-28), and from necromancy (vv. 28, 31). It demands reverence for one’s parents (v. 3) and deference towards other elderly people (v. 32). Chapter 19 defies topical organization, even this rough grouping of similar regulations. Its presents two lists of rules (vv. 3-18, 19-36) that echo each other while mixing examples of all kinds of norms. The chapter introduces them by requiring that its audiences be holy like God: “you must be holy because I, YHWH your God, am holy” (v. 2). It concludes them by insisting on their obedience: “you must observe all my mandates and all my regulations and you must do them – I am YHWH” (v. 37). God has incorporated Israel into the divine realm by rescuing the people from Egypt (v. 36). They must now meet the divine realm’s requisite condition of holiness by obeying all the different kinds of YHWH’s “mandates” and “regulations.” Contexts The various rules of chap. 19 reflect many different Israelite ritual, legal, and moral traditions. Their different forms as well as contents seem designed to spark recognition of that fact in their audiences. Readers today readily recognize six of the Ten Commandments in vv. 2-4 and 11-12. The chapter also repeats or augments some laws from the Covenant Code (Exod. 20-23) and the Deuteronomic Code (Deut. 12-26). It elaborates on a few of the priestly offering rules in Leviticus 7 and 23. It reflects prophetic preaching and

Leviticus 19 Essentials

447

wisdom teachings in its exhortations to act justly, honestly, charitably, and respectfully. All these different kinds of normative traditions are sampled here to provide examples of what obedience to “all my mandates and all my regulations” (v. 37) requires in order to be holy (v. 2). In many ancient and traditional cultures, holiness is an attribute of the divine realm and of the people, places, and things that belong to it. For practical purposes, holiness was usually limited to temples, their personnel, and their possessions. The HB, however, portrays YHWH claiming possession of the Israelites and their land (Exod 19:5-6; Lev. 25:23, 42, 55). YHWH is therefore both Israel’s god and king, and issues rules and regulations in both roles. The Pentateuch therefore mixes ritual rules with criminal and civil laws and moral exhortations (see further in Introduction to Leviticus 11-20: The Torah as Divine Rhetoric above). By providing examples of the whole range of divine mandates, chap. 19 mixes these different kinds of rules together as well. As a result, the chapter’s impact on later Jewish and Christian traditions has been exerted almost entirely by individual verses rather than by their context in this chapter and in Leviticus. Its insistence on honesty (vv. 11-13, 35-36) has been reflected in every Jewish and Christian moral code since antiquity. Its ideal of impartial justice (v. 15) has directed legal thought and courtroom procedures. Its mandate to provide food to the poor (vv. 9-10) shaped early modern agricultural customs and twentieth-century political theology. The commands to love neighbours and immigrants (vv. 18, 34) have always been central pillars of Jewish and Christian ethics and have become even more influential in modern centuries. On the other hand, this chapter’s juxtaposition of profound moral insights (e.g. v. 18) with apparently trivial and irrational prohibitions (e.g. v. 19) has fuelled modern criticisms of all legal or moral appeals to biblical authority. Rhetoric This chapter’s rhetorical frame that emphasizes holiness (v. 2) and obedience (vv. 19a, 37) connects it with themes that shape Leviticus and, especially, chaps. 18 and 20. Despite those chapters’ almost exclusive focus on illicit sexual intercourse, their framing rhetoric explains that holy obedience (18:4-5; 20:7-8) involves avoiding the laws and practices of other nations, especially of the Egyptians and the Canaanites (18:3, 24-30; 20:22-23, 26). A listening audience would experience chap. 19’s rules and exhortations as examples of the whole range of Israelite normative traditions that should distinguish them from other nations. The chapter’s high ideals therefore come wrapped in the rhetoric of ethnic, national, or religious exceptionalism, depending on the political proclivities of its audience.

448

Leviticus 19 Exposition

I can therefore only laud and recommend the interpretive tradition of citing out of context its ideals of charity, honesty, justice, and love. That tendency is encouraged by the miscellaneous character of the chapter’s lists of norms. It is necessitated by its inclusion of impractical and malicious regulations (vv. 19-22) and the draconian penalties for illicit sex in its immediate context (chap. 20). Chapter 19 therefore confronts modern biblical scholars with a profound moral challenge to their disciplinary dedication to interpreting texts in their literary and original historical contexts.

EXPOSITION Additional Bibliography: AKIYAMA, KENGO. The Love of Neighbour in Ancient Judaism: The Reception of Leviticus 19:18 in the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Jubilees, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the New Testament. Leiden: Brill, 2018. AKIYAMA, KENGO. “How Can Love Be Commanded? On Not Reading Lev 19,17-18 as Law.” Biblica 98 (2017), 1-9. ANDERSON, JOHN E., ALAN J. AVERY-PECK, STEPHEN R. BURGE, RHONDA BURNETTEBLETSCH, GEORGE D. CHRYSSIDES, DALLAS DENERY, WILLIAM MANN, RICHARD NEWHAUSER, ANTONY PERROT, GARY ALLEN STEPHENS, HEINRICH ASSEL, CHRISTOPHER TOLLEFSEN. “Lie, Lying.” EBR 16 (2018), 502-18. ANGELINI, ANNA, CHRISTOPHE NIHAN, NAOMI KOLTUN-FROMM, GEROLD NECKER, JOSEPH DAVIS, BARRY DOV WALFISH, PETER GEMEINHARDT, GEORGE FERZOCO, ESPEN DAHL, GEORGE D. CHRYSSIDES, CHARLES TIESZEN, SCOTT LANGSTON, NILS HOLGER PETERSEN. “Holiness.” EBR 12 (2013), 34-77. BURGE, STEPHEN, GEORGE D. CHRYSSIDES, JOSEPH DAVIS, MICHAEL B. DICK, SVEN RUNE HAVSTEEN, KONRAD HUBER, JAAKKO HÄMEEN-ANTTILA, ERIC F. MASON, GEROLD NECKER, GAYE W. ORTIZ, SVEN PETRY, YONI POMERANZ, ANTHONY SWINDELL. “Idol, Idolatry.” EBR 12 (2013), 806-37. COLLINS, JOHN J. “The Neighbor and the Alien in Leviticus 19.” In With the Loyal You Show Yourself Loyal: Essays on Relationships in the Hebrew Bible in Honor of Saul M. Olyan. Ed. T. M. Lemos and Karen B. Stern. Atlanta: SBL, 2021. 185-98. ERBELE-KÜSTER, DOROTHEA. “Zur Anthropology der Ethik der (Liebes)Gebote.” In Individualität und Selbstreflexion in den Literaturen des Alten Testaments. VWGTh 48. Eds. Andreas Wagner and Jürgen van Oorschot. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2017. 341-47. FLEISHMAN, JOSEPH. Father-Daughter Relations in Biblical Law. Bethesda, MD: CDL, 2011. FONTAINE, CAROLE R. “Golden Do’s and Don’ts: Leviticus 19:10-17 from a HumanRights-Based Approach (HRBA).” In Brenner-Lee (2013), 97-118. GOLDSTONE, MATTHEW S. The Dangerous Duty of Rebuke: Leviticus 19:17 in Early Jewish and Christian Interpretation. Leiden: Brill, 2018. HUEHNERGARD, JOHN and HAROLD LIEBOWITZ. “The Biblical Prohibition Against Tattooing.” VT 63 (2013), 59-77. JOHNSON, LUKE TIMOTHY. “The Use of Leviticus 19 in the Letter of James.” JBL 101 (1982), 391-401. KLINE, MOSHE. “The Editor Was Nodding: A Reading of Leviticus 19 in Memory of Mary Douglas.” JHS 8/17 (2008), 2-59. KRIGER, DIANE. Sex Rewarded, Sex Punished: A Study of the Status “Female Slave” in Early Jewish Law. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011. KUGEL, JAMES. “On Hidden Hatred and Open Reproach: Early Exegesis of Leviticus 19:17.” HTR 80 (1987), 43-61. MAGONET, JONATHAN. “The Structure and Meaning of Leviticus 19.” Hebrew Annual Review 7 (1983), 151-67.

Leviticus 19 Exposition

449

MATHYS, HANS-PETER. Liebe deinen Nächsten wie dich selbst: Untersuchungen zum alttestamentlichen Gebot der Nächstenliebe (Lev. 19,18). OBO 71. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986. MENDES-FLOHR, PAUL. Love, Accusative and Dative: Reflections on Leviticus 19:18. B. G. Rudolph Lectures in Judaic Studies 4. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007. SCHÜLE, ANDREAS. “‘Denn er ist wie Du’: Zur Übersetzung und Verständnis des alttestamentlichen Liebesgebots Lev 19,18.” ZAW 113 (2001), 515-34. SCHWARTZ, BARUCH J. “Leviticus 19 and the Decalogue: A Reconsideration.” SBL Seminar Papers 37 (1998), 1-20. SCHWARTZ, BARUCH J. “Israel’s Holiness: the Torah Traditions.” In Poorthuis-Schwartz (2000), 47-59. STEWART, DAVID TABB. “Leviticus 19 as Mini-Torah.” In Gane-Taggar-Cohen (2015), 299-323. VICKERS, JASON E. “Holiness and Mediation: Pneumatology in Pietist Perspective.” International Journal of Systematic Theology 16/2 (2014), 192-206.

Structure of Leviticus 19 Casual readers of Leviticus 19 often express consternation at its juxtaposition of deep ethical exhortations (e.g. “love your neighbour/the immigrant like you” vv. 18, 34) with basic courtesy (“rise before the elderly” v. 32) and trivial or counter-intuitive prohibitions (“you must not wear blended clothing” v. 19, “you must not slash your beard” v. 27). Scholars are confounded by the fact that, as Milgrom (1596) pointed out, “Chapter 19 differs from all other priestly pericopes (in both P and H)” for lacking a “unified theme” and consisting of “a miscellany of laws (ritual and ethical, apodictic and casuistic, directed to the individual and to the collective).” The arrangement of this chapter’s rules in their existing order has defied explanation. Most commentators try to establish more ingenious patterns and connections than their predecessors to explain the contents of these rules and their sequence in this chapter (e.g. Radday 1981, 89; Otto 1994, 246-48; Schwartz 1999, 241-49; Ruwe 1999, 187-220; Luciani 2005, 392-93; Nihan 2007, 462-67; Stewart 2015; for several different outlines in one place, see Milgrom 1596-99). They have failed to convince others, however, to the point that a number of interpreters judge the chapter’s arrangement to be nearly random (Wenham 264; Magonet 1983, 151). This conclusion should not be so surprising. As Brevard Childs observed about the Decalogue and its parallels, “the lack of a rigorous order is a consistent feature” of biblical legal collections (Childs 1974, 395; similarly Hieke 704). In this regard, it is the rest of Leviticus that is surprisingly well organized in comparison to other biblical collections of regulations and instructions. Commentators have also been puzzled by changing forms of address in chap. 19, especially between the second person singular (vv. 9-10, 12-14, 15b-18, 19b, 29, 32, 33, 33b, 34b) and plural (vv. 2-6, 8-9, 11-12, 15a, 19a, 23, 25-28, 30-31, 33a, 33c-34a, 34c-37), which sometimes changes even within a single sentence (vv. 9, 12, 33, 34). Such changes appear elsewhere in Leviticus, but not with such frequency. Gerstenberger (262) observed that the singular predominates in the first half of the chapter while the plural

450

Leviticus 19 Exposition

predominates in the second, which he thought signals a change of setting from individual to communal instruction. While I agree that Leviticus was composed for reading aloud to assembled groups (Introduction §3 in Leviticus 1-10; also Watts 1999), public speakers can nevertheless use singular address to emphasize individual accountability (Hartley 310; Hieke 709). That rhetorical strategy best accounts for the changing forms of address in this chapter and throughout Leviticus. Readers notice that the chapter contains commandments made famous by the Decalogue. Leviticus 19 begins by commanding Israel to imitate YHWH’s holiness (v. 2). Then it paraphrases four commandments from the Decalogue in reverse order – revere parents, observe the Sabbath, do not worship “puny gods” or make “moulded gods” (vv. 3-4) – before repeating from Leviticus 7 rules about eating amity slaughter offerings, adding the motivation to not defile YHWH’s holiness (vv. 5-8). The chapter also echoes the Decalogue closely with “do not steal” (v. 11) and “do not swear falsely” in YHWH’s name (v. 12). Many interpreters have tried to identify all ten of the Decalogue’s commandments in this chapter (e.g. Lev. Rab. 24:5; Wenham 264; Hartley 310). Interpreters have debated whether chap. 19 drew its provisions from Deuteronomy’s Decalogue or Exodus’s (Stewart 2015, 308; Kilchör 2015) or both (Cholewinski 1976, 259-96). Some have tried to reconstruct older decalogues or dodecalogues in this chapter (e.g. Elliger 254; see the incisive critique of this search by Schwartz 1998, 14 and notes 30-31). On the other hand, Schwartz (1998, 20) denied that the provisions of this chapter are literarily dependent on the Decalogue because of their creative combination. However, rhetorical creativity is often built upon literary allusions, and vv. 3-4 and 11-12 remind most readers immediately of the Decalogue (Milgrom 1601) while embellishing or clarifying the commandments (Nihan 2007, 467; Kilchör 2015, 53-56). Nevertheless, chap. 19 also quotes or alludes to many other Pentateuchal texts (see Exegesis and the exhaustive list in Hieke 707-8), as well as other traditions (cf. especially Ezek. 22:6-12; Levine 125). Quotation and allusion to the Decalogue in combination with references to a variety of other rules therefore seems to call for obedience to the whole range of YHWH’s commandments (v. 37) as necessary requirements for Israel to “be holy, for I, YHWH your God, am holy” (v. 2). Because of the difficulty in discovering thematic organization in the chapter, others have focused on formal structures. Andreas Ruwe (1999, 187-220) organized the chapter into alternating sets of casuistic (vv. 5-10, 20-25) and apodictic (vv. 11-18, 26-32) rules surrounded by paranesis (vv. 2, 19, 36b37), introduction (vv. 3-4), and conclusion (vv. 33-36a). Calling the first set “casuistic,” however, obscures the fact that only two rules actually contain penalties for wrong-doing (vv. 5-8, 20-22). The others use temporal clauses to introduce apodictic prohibitions (e.g. v. 23 “when you plant any edible

Leviticus 19 Exposition

451

tree, ... it must be foreskinned for you”). That is quite different from the long list of explicitly casuistic penalties in the next chapter (20:9-21). Others have also pointed to the parallelism between vv. 5-10 and 20-25: each set begins with three verses about making offerings (eating amity slaughter offerings in vv. 5-8 and presenting guilt offerings for raping an enslaved woman engaged to be married in vv. 20-22) before harvesting rules (leaving gleanings for the poor in vv. 9-10 and leaving newly planted fruit trees “foreskinned” until the fourth year in vv. 23-24; so Otto 1994, 246; Nihan 2007, 462). However, this formal parallel does not help make sense of the sequence of the chapter’s contents. Many have tried to organize the chapter, and even Leviticus as a whole, into a chiastic arch centred on the love commandment in v. 18 (Radday 1981, 89; Douglas 1993b, 10-12; Douglas 1995, 253; Milgrom 2004, 7). Other have pointed to v. 19 as the centre (Ruwe 1999; Luciani 2005, 392-93). However, the reappearance of the love commandment in v. 34 undermines a singular centre in vv. 18. The parallel offering mandates, harvesting rules, and love commandments and the new heading at the beginning of v. 19, “my mandates you (pl) must observe” which is elaborated in the chapter’s conclusion (v. 37), suggest instead viewing the chapter as consisting of two somewhat parallel lists consisting of vv. 2-18 and vv. 19-37 (so Otto 1994, 245-46; Nihan 2007, 461-62; Stewart 2015, 313; Hieke 705-6) The failure to find other consistent large-scale structures leads some interpreters to focus on the repetition of contents and, especially, of formulas to organize the chapter. Magonet (1983, 165-66) divided it into three parts marked off by four uses of ‫“ שׁמר‬observe” (vv. 3, 19, 30, 37), but this division does not help understand the arrangement of the contents (see the outline on this basis by Hartley 308). Wenham (263-64), Gerstenberger (261), and Kline (2008) suggested that divine self-declarations, “I am YHWH,” mark the ends of the chapter’s smaller paragraphs. Stewart (2015, 311-13) used these selfdeclarations to divide the chapter’s two halves into seven paragraphs each. His outline, however, exposes the fact that YHWH’s self-declarations increase in frequency within each half of the chapter. In the first part of each half chapter, provisions addressing very different subjects appear grouped together before a divine self-declaration intervenes: vv. 5-10 cover amity slaughter offerings and the poor’s right to glean after a harvest; vv. 19-25 include prohibitions on cross-breeding and planting, rules for restitution of a man who rapes an engaged and enslaved woman, and the prohibition of eating fruit from newly planted trees until the fifth year. This pattern suggests that the divine self-declaration formulas are not used as dividing marks in this chapter, but rather for increasing emphasis (Kamionkowski 200). Other chapters of Leviticus 18-26 also use these formulas emphatically in this way, though not so concentrated as here (see Structure in Introduction to Leviticus 11-20

452

Leviticus 19 Exposition

above). This commentary has observed that Leviticus even deploys the divine speech formulas that introduce most chapters not just to divide large blocks of texts but with greater frequency to draw emphasis (Leviticus 1-10, 17). Likewise, both halves of this chapter repeat “I am YHWH” more frequently as they approach their climaxes. Repetitions of divine self-declarations provide more emphasis in aural listening than in visual reading, because listeners cannot skip over repetitions like readers can. There is other evidence that this chapter has been shaped for aural reception. Magonet (1983, 151) observed that “the attentive reader or listener hears phrases reappearing in the latter part of the chapter that have occurred earlier on” (similarly Wenham 264). This pattern has been analyzed by Luciani (2005, 101, 103) as consisting of three strict repetitions of regulations: observing the Sabbath (vv. 3, 30), revering God (vv. 14, 32), and not judging dishonestly (vv. 15, 35). It also contains looser repetitions of distinctive vocabulary applied to different subjects: “revering” parents and sanctuary (vv. 3, 30), “turning” to idols and ghosts (vv. 4, 31), “loving” neighbours and immigrants (vv. 18, 34), cutting “edges” of fields and beards (vv. 9, 27). These pairs of repetitions each occur between the two parts of the chapter. He also observed the thematic parallel between the rules for eating amity slaughter offerings (vv. 5-8) and eating the fruit from newly planted trees (vv. 23-25): both regulations are concerned with the timing of eating different kinds of food that must first be presented as offerings (Luciani 2005, 102). The second half of the chapter therefore echoes the first half, sometimes repeating provisions, sometimes expanding on them, but using YHWH’s selfdeclarations to create a sense of climax. Does this observation about the chapter’s rhetorical form help us understand (a) its diverse contents and (b) its allusions to other Pentateuchal traditions and texts? Some interpreters treat Leviticus 19 separately from the rest of the book because of its miscellaneous contents and YHWH’s emphatic moral exhortations (e.g. Gerstenberger 261). However, the chapter’s contents make better rhetorical sense within a larger frame of reference, especially at the centre of the A-B-A’ arch that structures chaps. 18-20. The exhortations in chaps. 18, 19, and 20 make strong claims tying Israel’s identity to observing YHWH’s commandments (18:4-5; 19:19, 37; 20:22) by avoiding pollution (18:24-30; 20:3, 25) and by imitating YHWH’s holiness (19:2b; 20:7-8, 26). But chaps. 18 and 20’s commandments focus mostly on sexual prohibitions (18:6-24; 20:9-21) with just a few ritual prohibitions mixed in about Molek worship, necromancy, and eating polluted meat (18:21; 20:2-6, 27). Chapters 18 and 20 use sexual polemic to sharpen disgust at ethnic rivals (see Exposition to Leviticus 18 above). As a result, their rules seem peculiarly narrow to serve as a basis for these chapter’s imitatio dei rhetoric. Leviticus 19 resolves this problem by listing samples of commandments drawn from all kinds of

Leviticus 19 Exposition

453

Israelite normative traditions to show that YHWH’s rules govern every aspect of Israelite life, including rituals, agriculture, business, food, sex, and other human relationships. Within the context of chaps. 18-20, chap. 19 illustrates the wide range of commandments that Israel must observe to be holy like YHWH (similarly Otto 1994, 245; Schwartz 1998, 16; Milgrom 1596; Nihan 2007, 466; Hieke 703-4, 708; Kamionkowski 200-201). Chapter 19’s insistent repetition of “I am YHWH,” which increases in frequency as each half of the chapter progresses, emphatically reminds listeners of the three-fold repetition of “I am YHWH” in 18:2-5. These verses insisted that listeners must only do what YHWH commands and not imitate the Canaanites who will lose their land because of their sins (18:24-29). Chapter 19 begins by further specifying Israel’s separation from other nations by imitating YHWH’s holiness (19:2). This claim reaches its fullest expressions in 20:7-8, “You must make yourselves holy and be holy, for I am YHWH your God. You must observe my mandates and do them. I am YHWH who makes you holy,” and 20:26, “You are holy to me because I, YHWH, am holy. I have separated you from the peoples to be mine.” Chapter 19’s repetition of “I am YHWH” fifteen times thus ties it closely to chaps. 18 and 20, and to the wider Pentateuchal narrative which its conclusion explicitly invokes: “I am YHWH your God who brought you from the land of Egypt” (v. 36). Chapter 19’s quotations and allusions to many different kinds and traditions of laws make rhetorical sense in this context. The chapter quotes a representative sample of laws of different kinds to evoke the range and scope of YHWH’s commandments that Israel must observe to be holy like YHWH. Most critical scholars assume that Leviticus 17-26 (H) was the last of the major biblical collection of laws. They therefore understand this chapter as citing parts of the Decalogue (vv. 3-4, 11-12), the Covenant Code (vv. 13, 15-16, 33), P’s ritual rules (vv. 5-7), and Deuteronomy’s rules (vv. 10, 13, 19, 27, 29, 34-36), as well as agricultural customs known from narrative texts (v. 9; so e.g. Cholewiński 1976, 252; Nihan 2007, 466). Stewart (2015, 316-20) made the interesting observation that Leviticus 19 tends to quote rules from the middle of other collections to evoke their entire contents. Because the chapter’s small units of comparison make it very difficult to determine compositional layers and directions of dependence convincingly, scholars usually apply to it theories of composition and dating that they developed on other Pentateuchal texts and parts of Leviticus. This chapter’s pattern of citing recognizable samples of different collections suggests that its unparalleled rules were also drawn from elsewhere, from texts or oral traditions no longer known to us. They include prohibiting the mistreatment of deaf and blind people (v. 14), the command to rebuke rather than hate (v. 17), and the command to love one’s neighbour (v. 18).

454

Leviticus 19 Exposition

Nothing in this chapter suggests any intention to innovate by promulgating these rules (unlike the sexual prohibitions of chaps. 18 and 20, some of which do seem to innovate; e.g. 18:10-14, 16, 18, 22-23). An exception in chap. 19. might be the rule against mixtures (v. 19), which nevertheless joins with parallels from the Covenant Code and Deuteronomy to try to outlaw some common Israelite practices. Therefore, chap. 19’s unparalleled rules likely reflect traditional Israelite law and morality, too. The writers probably expected listeners to recognize them just as they should recognize the quotations and allusions to other Pentateuchal texts in this chapter. All these quotations and allusions are gathered here to emphasize the message repeated throughout chaps. 18-20, that Israel must observe all of YHWH’s commandments (18:4-5; 19:19, 37; 20:22) to avoid pollution (18:24-30; 20:3, 25) and be holy (19:2b; 20:7-8, 26) in order to remain in the land (18:24-30; 20:22-24). This “magnificent melange” (Fontaine 2013, 108) of commandments is designed to function as “a catechism” (Gerstenberger 265) that provides examples of the range of rules that one most observe to maintain holiness (Hieke 703, 760-61). This conclusion does not depend on the quoted Pentateuchal texts having been fixed in their present form at the time this chapter was written. Because Leviticus 19 makes no attempt to be comprehensive, we cannot tell what form it found these traditions in. The grab-bag quality of its quotations and allusions to, apparently, the whole range of Israel’s normative traditions does not presuppose that it found them in any particular form as written literature or oral tradition. All we can recognize is its attempt to evoke the whole constellation of Israelite cultural norms, Israel’s “common stock” (Schwartz 1998, 20), by quoting and alluding to a representative sample. Therefore, little is gained by outlining the chapter in more detail than noting the framework around its two tables of legal quotations and allusions. It is characteristic of lists of cited examples that their sequence does not matter much. It is rather their allusive ability to prompt recognition in listeners and readers that conveys powerful emphasis. The diverse forms of this chapter’s rules should help listeners and readers recognize the variety of their sources. Leviticus 19 instead creates a unifying feeling of increasing emphasis through fifteen repetitions of the divine self-identification formula, “I am YHWH.” OUTLINE 1-2a Divine speech formula 2b Exhortation to imitate YHWH’s holiness 3-18 First collection of samples of traditional norms 19a Exhortation to obey YHWH’s mandates 19b-36a Second collection of samples of traditional norms 36b-37 Exhortations to obey because YHWH saved Israel from Egypt

Leviticus 19 Exposition

455

History of Interpretations The miscellaneous collection of norms in Leviticus 19 led most traditional interpreters to address them individually, without much thought to the chapter as a whole or in its larger context. However, the heading calling for imitation of YHWH’s holiness stimulated thinking about how observing these laws makes one holy. Leviticus Rabbah 24:6, for example, reported the opinion of some ancient rabbis that sexual regulations form a fence around holiness. This interpretation uses the literary structure of chaps. 18-20 to suggest that observing the incest regulations encourages observing God’s other commandments in chap. 19 as well. Leviticus 19’s repetition of rules from the Decalogue and from other parts of Pentateuchal law has had a mixed reception among subsequent interpreters. Around the first century C.E., Pseudo-Phocylides depended heavily on Leviticus 19 to gloss the LXX Decalogue (Johnson 1982, 391-93). However, the ancient rabbis played down the repetition because, as pointed out by Baruch Schwartz (1998), they believed that “the same meaning is not to be learned from two passages” (b. Sanh. 34b), a tradition followed by Rashi and Rashbam. For fifteenth-century Christian readers, Denys approved the rabbinic view that “these are new commands, over and above the Decalogue” because “in the Decalogue it was not made explicit how to keep these commandments, or how to cultivate the interior disposition so that they might will to fulfil them” (Elliott 197). Ibn Ezra, on the other hand, thought chap. 19 includes the whole Decalogue to show that breaking these rules falls under the threats of expulsion from the land that surround this chapter in 18:24-30 and 20:22-24. Christian interpreters have felt little need to explain or embellish most of this chapter’s exhortations to do justice and charity. They have usually repeated them nearly verbatim as moral requirements for their own audiences (Kugel 1998, 752-59, 766-73; Lienhard 188-89; Elliott 196-209). Thus the NT letter of James interpreted the love commandment of v. 18 within the context of vv. 12-18 (Jas. 2:1, 8, 9; 4:11; 5:4, 9, 12; Johnson 1982). Like Jewish interpreters, early Christians expounded the love commandment particularly in the context of the immediately preceding mandate to rebuke rather than hate (Matt. 18:15-16; Luke 17:3; Did. 2:7; Didascalia Apostolorum 11; Kugel 1998, 754-55; see Exegesis to v. 17). Jewish and Christian traditions of liturgical reading differ in how much attention they focus on this chapter. By dividing the Torah into 52 parashot for weekly synagogue readings, Leviticus 19 is read with chap. 20, and sometimes with chaps. 16-18 as well. Today, in Reform and some Conservative synagogues, the chapter’s moral commandments receive heightened attention

456

Leviticus 19 Exposition

by being read on Yom Kippur.1 Christians do not read from Leviticus liturgically, except perhaps the love commandment (v. 18) and the verses preceding it. The Roman Catholic Tridentine Lectionary of 1570, followed by the Anglican Book of Prayer, the New Common Lectionary, and the current Roman Catholic lectionary, prescribed reading vv. 1-2, 9-18 on the Wednesday prior to Holy Week. This seems to be an innovation of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, since there is no earlier evidence of Christian liturgical readings from this chapter. Older lectionaries promulgated the love commandment through its NT quotations, such as Matt. 5:43-44 and Rom. 13:19, but many omitted it entirely.2 The liturgical prominence of the love commandment has increased in modern centuries. Modern interpreters have been nearly obsessed with whether Leviticus 19’s rules, and especially 19:18, 34, should count as “law” or not (e.g. recently, Erbele-Küster 2017, 350; Akiyama 2017; see Introduction to Leviticus 11-20: The Torah as Divine Rhetoric above). This debate remains trapped in the medieval distinction between moral, legal, and ritual rules. Though anticipated in earlier Christian discussions of biblical law starting with Paul, this distinction was most successfully adumbrated by Thomas Aquinas (ST 2a.99.4-5) to explain why Christians ignore some Pentateuchal laws but insist on observing others. This question would have been incomprehensible in ancient Near Eastern cultures where all written legal collections functioned to model behaviour, but never to dictate legal actions. However, they expected ritual rules to be performed as written (see Introduction §2.2.2 in Leviticus 1-10). The Pentateuch’s rules differ from Mesopotamian texts by mixing admonitions that other cultures placed in different kinds of lists: wisdom admonitions, laws, ritual instructions. They do that because they credit all of them to YHWH, who combines the traditional roles of royal lawgiver, divine cult founder, and wisdom instructor. This combination of roles results in juxtaposing rules in different literary forms (apodictic, casuistic, aphoristic), but it does not differentiate their application. Leviticus and the Pentateuch depict them all as binding and as enforceable because YHWH can monitor and punish what human rulers and courts cannot, even the inner dispositions of the human mind (vv. 17-18, 34; also Exod. 20:17; Deut. 5:21). Therefore, the arguments over whether a particular provision counts as law do not involve their function in the context of the Pentateuch, but rather how they should be used by later congregations, courts, and governments. Emphasizing their force as 1 Mahzor for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, ed. Jules Harlow, United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, 1972; Gates of Repentance: The New Union Prayerbook for the Days of Awe (ed. Chaim Stern; rev. ed.; New York: Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1996), 452-55. 2 See Kevin Edgecomb, “Biblicalia,” at http://www.bombaxo.com, accessed Jan. 27, 2022.

Leviticus 19 Exposition

457

“law” or “morality,” with all the accumulated meanings these words have gained over three millennia, still has normative impact today. Carole Fontaine (2013), for example, offered a passionate defence of using Leviticus 19 for establishing and legally defending modern human rights. On the other hand, Andreas Schüle (2001, 530-31) emphasized the moral power of the love commandments in recognizing that other people are just like you. The fact that their claims are neither contradictory nor mutually exclusive exposes the fallacious anachronism behind efforts to distinguish law from morality, and both from ritual, in Leviticus 18-20. Many recent commentators devote their general comments about Leviticus 19 entirely to the theme announced in its heading (v. 2), Israel’s holiness, which they connect to the themes of some specific provisions, such as love, justice, and truth telling (Hartley 322-25; Gerstenberger 281-83; Milgrom 1711-26; Hieke 760-63). However, the chapter’s collection of samples of Israelite normative traditions suggests that holiness does not define the specific provisions so much as the other way around: the chapter alludes to all of Israel’s normative traditions to define the nature of Israel’s holiness. Leviticus 19 qualifies the imitatio dei mandate (v. 2) by listing its explicit requirements: obedience to all of these different kinds of rules (vv. 3-36). Being holy like YHWH does not involve imitating YHWH so much as doing what YHWH commands (Erbele-Küster 2017, 354). Israel has been made like YHWH by being incorporated into the divine realm, but only on condition of obeying Torah (Yoo-Watts 2021, 110-11). In Leviticus 19, holiness becomes an all-encompassing label for Israel’s way of life under its covenant with YHWH. The Love Commandments in History and Ethics The roots of Christian ethics lie in the NT tradition that Jesus identified Lev. 19:18 “love your neighbour like you,” together with Deut. 6:5 “love YHWH your God,” as the greatest commandments (Matt. 22:35-40). The tradition of identifying this verse as the heart or essence of the law can be traced further back in the Second Temple period to Jubilees (20:2; 36:3-4), Philo (Laws 2:63), and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (Dan 5:3; Issachar 7:5; Joseph 11:1; Zebulon 5:1; see Kugel 1997, 758-59). Ancient interpreters already focused on interpretive issues in these verses that have been debated ever since, especially the meanings of ‫“ אהב‬love,” ‫“ רע‬neighbour,” ‫“ גר‬immigrant,” and ‫“ כמוך‬like you.” These references and allusions to the love commandments in Second Temple Jewish and New Testament literature show that their application gradually broadened. Later Second Temple interpreters emphasized the adverbial meanings of ‫“ כמוך‬like you.” The Septuagint’s ὡς σεαυτόν is more

458

Leviticus 19 Exposition

explicitly reflexive than the Hebrew (Schüle 2001, 515), but can still be interpreted either adjectively or adverbially (Akiyama 2018, 73-78). Jubilees uses the love commandment thematically as well as quoting it explicitly when Rebecca asks that Esau and Jacob “love one another as themselves” (Jub. 36:4). Jubilees thus interprets the commandment as mandating brotherly love within the family (Akiyama 2018, 79-93). Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Damascus Document (CD) quotes Lev. 19:18 while the Community Rule, Serekh, uses it thematically. Kengo Akiyama (2018, 109-111) argued that CD 6:20-21 also uses the commandment structurally as a summary in conscious imitation of its role in Leviticus 19. The New Testament frequently invokes the theme of brotherly love, which may allude to Lev. 19:18. It also quotes the verse explicitly eight times (Mark 12:31; Matt. 5:43-44; 22:39; Luke 6:27-35; 10:27; Rom. 13:9; Gal. 5:14; Jas. 2:8), more than all other HB verses quoted in the NT except for Pss. 110:1 and 2:7. In the NT, “like you” clearly has an adverbial meaning (Akiyama 2018, 57, 126). The Synoptic Gospels reinforce that meaning by pairing the love of neighbour with the command to love God from Deut. 6:5, which is explicitly modified adverbially, ‫ בכל לבבך ובכל נפשׁך ובכל‬... ‫אהב‬ ‫“ מאדך‬love with all your heart/mind, personal energy, and strength.” Nevertheless, each NT author also applies the commandment somewhat differently. Matthew and Luke universalize the love commandment to its broadest possible application by explicitly including enemies (Matt. 5:44; Luke 6:27, 35; Akiyama 2018, 207). In the second century, The Letter of Barnabas 19:5 required loving the neighbour more than one’s own life. Around the same time, Rabbi Akiba called the love commandment “the great general principle of the Torah” according to Sifra Qedoshim 4. The same observation was credited by the Talmud (b. Shab. 31a) earlier to Hillel. The adverbial interpretation of “like you” in Lev. 19:18 led some late Second Temple Jewish as well as rabbinic and Christian writers to associate the love command with the Golden Rule (“Treat/do not treat others like you want/ do not want to be treated,” e.g. in TgPsJ), which was therefore also celebrated as the essence of Torah (Let. Aris. 207; Philo, Hypo. 7:6; Matt. 7:12; b. Shab. 31a; see Kugel 1998, 769-70). Its association with the Golden Rule cemented the place of the love commandment at the heart of Christian ethical reasoning. Almost every priest and minister preaches about it, and almost every theologian has written about it. Paul’s celebration of love as the greatest virtue (1 Cor. 13) encouraged the idea that love is not just a command to be obeyed but a virtue to be cultivated. As a result, the love commandment also became a basic component of philosophical ethics. It continues to be invoked regularly in debates about whether moral action should be based on ethical reasoning about consequences (utilitarianiasm), duties (deontology), or virtues (character

Leviticus 19 Exposition

459

ethics).3 It has encouraged positive assessments of self-love and self-interest as the yardsticks by which to judge how to treat others (Schüle 2001, 519). The love commandments have also played a central role in Jewish ethics and in Hasidic devotion.4 The Ashekenazi synagogue liturgy encourages a universalizing interpretation of “neighbour” and “immigrant” by accompanying Lev. 19 with a haftorah reading that includes Amos 9:7, “Aren’t you Israelites like the Ethiopians to me? Oracle of YHWH. Didn’t I bring Israel up out of Egypt and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir?” (Mendes-Flohr 2007, 16). Several modern Jewish commentators challenged the adverbial interpretation of ‫“ כמוך‬like you” by denying that the command presupposes some kind of self-love (Mathys 1986, 6-7). Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber especially deepened and universalized the alternative, adjectival meaning as a divine statement of existential fact: your neighbour and the immigrant is like you but is not you. Therefore, you must love the other who confronts you.5 Their exposition was anticipated by Nahmanides among others and has fuelled the trend in recent biblical scholarship to concur that the adjectival meaning of ‫ כמוך‬fits Hebrew philology best (Schüle 2001, 528-30; Akiyama 2018, 63; see Exegesis to v. 18). That has led several recent interpreters to conclude that chap. 19 commands love only for fellow Israelites and their resident immigrants. Buber and Rosenzweig, however, denied that the adjectival meaning limits more universal applications of the command. Several English translations have followed them to render the line, “you shall love your neighbour as a man like yourself” (NEB, but abandoned by REB) and “be-loving to your neighbor (as one) like yourself” (Fox). Therefore, a reflexive and universal meaning may also be conveyed by reading ‫ כמוך‬adjectively (Erbele-Küster 2017, 348). The ethical difference between the adverbial and adjectival meanings of ‫“ כמוך‬like you” has been minimized by this intense history of interpretation. The remaining differences involve, not the moral consequences of the command, but whether the source of moral motivation requires self-love or not. Hans-Peter Mathys (1986, 12-19), for example, argued that the friendship between David and Jonathan, whose affection for David is described as 3 For samples of theological and philosophical perspectives on the love commandments, see the essays in The Love Commandments: Essays in Christian Ethics and Moral Philosophy (ed. Edmund N. Santurri and William Werpehowski; Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1992), and in Love and Christian Ethics: Tradition, Theory, and Society (ed. Frederick V. Simmons and Brian C. Sorrells; Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2016). 4 Mendes-Flohr 2007; see also Reinhard Neudecker, “ ‘And You Shall Love Your Neighbor as Yourself — I Am the Lord’ (Lev 19,18) in Jewish Interpretation,” Bib 73/4 (1992), 496-517. 5 Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption (tr. W. Hallo; New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973 [German 1921]), 205, 239-40; Martin Buber, Zwei Glaubensweisen (Zürich: Manesse Verlag, 1950), 69; see Schüle 2001, 516-18; Mendes-Flohr 2007, 8-10.

460

Leviticus 19 Exposition

‫“ יאהבהו כנפשׁו‬loving him like his own person,” shows that Israel portrayed self-love at the core of solidarity relationships. An adjectival reading of “like you,” however, denies the role of self-love and emphasizes recognition of equivalence between oneself and others as the moral key to right human relationships (see above). The love commandments are paradigmatic examples of how biblical verses often take on new meanings and more profound implications that wield greater influence in later cultures than their likely original meanings. The Bible is a famous and controversial source of such layers of cultural meanings, though hardly the only one. This same tendency appears in the history of law and other normative traditions. The very attempt to follow written instructions leads, inevitably, to changing their meaning when they are applied to new circumstances and cultures (Mathys 1986, 39; Schüle 2001, 532). The ingrained practice of modern biblical scholarship to emphasize these verses’ meaning in literary context and in their original historical setting works explicitly against the accumulated traditions and “misrepresentations” of later cultures (e.g. most recently Akiyama 2018). When it comes to ethics, however, this disciplinary commitment often undermines the moral power of biblically-derived traditions (see further discussion in Exposition to Leviticus 25). Biblical studies in general and biblical reception history in particular need more capacious methodologies. It is, after all, a common phenomenon that legal documents expound principles whose full implications get worked out only over centuries or millennia, such as gender equality from “there is ... no longer male and female ... in Christ” in Gal. 3:28 (NRSV) and ethnic and gender equality from “All men are created equal” in the U.S. Declaration of Independence. To describe and evaluate such changes, exegesis must engage hermeneutics and ethics more generally in order to provide translations that are morally, not just philologically, well-grounded. The Bible’s reception history must influence the exegesis of biblical texts because the Bible continues to exert significant influence on the moral decisions of billions of people today. Rhetoric provides a theory and practice for bringing reception history and exegesis together (see Leviticus 1-10, §3). In the case of the love commandments, rhetorical analysis observes that (1) The meaning of the love commandments is and always has been independent of their literary context. Chapter 19’s grab-back of samples from Israelite normative traditions does not provide any basis for interpretation in literary context, but rather counts on its audience to recognize its citations and allusions to pre-existing norms from many different sources and contexts. (2) The meaning of the love commandments has always depended on who its hearers and readers are. It is a basic observation of rhetorical theory that meaning is a transaction between speakers/writers and listeners/readers. To

Leviticus 19 Exposition

461

be more precise, the meaning of a statement always depends on who the audience identifies as the speaker/writer for them. Though speakers and writers try to shape a persuasive ethos, in the end it is the audience that decides. In the case of the Bible, deciding whether this text speaks authoritatively to me in my situation is decisive. Many recent studies in contextual hermeneutics have been exploring the implications for biblical studies of including a broader variety of interpreters (see further in Exposition to Leviticus 25). (3) The commandment about loving neighbours explicitly evokes the context of conflict among close associates. The commandment about loving immigrants refers to the Exodus story and, perhaps, to Israel’s social situation. Subsequent interpretation has extended the immigrant commandment to more and more categories of people, including enemies (Matt. 5:44) by capitalizing on the neighbour commandment’s more universal setting of inter-personal conflict. The many extensions of these commandments therefore represent tendencies implicit already in their formulation in Lev. 19:18, 34. With this observation, rhetorical analysis and reception history merge into ethical reflection, as they should and frequently do. (4) However, the Jewish and Christian traditions of ethics are misrepresented by the modern publishing practice of printing all biblical verses the same way, often without any commentary to distinguish central from peripheral concerns. This typographical distortion of the ethical traditions is very evident in the printed pages of Leviticus 18-20. In chap. 19, the highest ideals of human justice (19:12, 15-16), honesty (19:11, 13, 35-36), and compassion (19:9-10, 17-18, 33-34) alternate with rules denying enslaved people protection from sexual abuse unless they are engaged to be married (19:20-22). They are bracketed by prohibitions that identify illicit sexual practices with ritual offences against YHWH (chap. 18) and mandate killing or cutting off their perpetrators (chap. 20). These chapters motivate obedience to many rules to avoid polluting the land. Pollution rhetoric is intensified by evoking disgust (pathos) at sexual deviance to motivate compliance with all of YHWH’s commandments (18:17, 21-30; 19:7-8, 29, 31; 20:3, 5, 12-14, 17, 23). For thousands of years, scribes and printers have used fonts, colour, and typefaces to direct readers attention. A recent example can be found in the modern illuminated manuscript, the Saint John’s Bible. Its only illuminated art for Leviticus, aside from chapter initials, are panel illuminations of the words of 19:2, 18, and 34.6 Similarly but less elaborately, this commentary highlights in boldface the most influential moral ideals and strikes through rules whose history of interpretation and application fails the most basic moral 6 Pentateuch: the Saint Johns Bible, Handwritten and Illuminated by Donald S. Jackson, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2006.

462

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

standards of Jewish and Christian ethical traditions. My hope is that massmarket bibles will follow these examples of using script, art, and typography as a means to guide individual and communal reading, ethical interpretation, and moral application (see further in the Author’s Preface above). EXEGESIS 19:1-2 YHWH spoke to Moses: Speak to the whole community of the children of Israel and say to them: You (pl) must be holy because I, YHWH your God, am holy. For ‫“ עדה‬community,” see Exegesis to 4:13. Though the ‫“ בני ישׂראל‬children of Israel” are addressed throughout Leviticus (e.g. 1:2, 18:2, etc.) and the Israelite ‫“ עדה‬community” can be the subject of regulations (4:13, 15; 8:3-5; 9:5; 10:6; Num. 1:2, 18; 26:2), only here are they addressed as ‫כל־עדת בני‬ ‫“ ישׂראל‬the whole community of the children of Israel.” Compare Exod. 35:1 in which Moses gathered “the whole community” to hear him repeat YHWH’s instructions for building the Tabernacle (cf. also Exod. 13:3). When YHWH spoke the Decalogue from the mountain, the divine voice was heard by “all the people” (Exod. 20:18). Moses’ recounted the Decalogue later to “all Israel” (Deut. 5:1). Leviticus Rabbah 24:5 took the phrase here to mean that the chapter was proclaimed to “a full assembly” and that it contains all of the Ten Commandments (Schwartz 1998). “The whole community” at least evokes again the narrative setting of law-giving at Mount Sinai and emphasizes the centrality of the following rules to Israel’s relationship to YHWH. For the meaning of ‫“ קדושׁ‬holy,” see Exegesis to 2:3 and 10:10. Many interpreters understand “separation” to be its basic meaning in Leviticus, since YHWH separated Israel to be holy and calls on the Israelites to separate themselves from pollution (20:24-26; e.g. Schwartz 2000, 48; Milgrom 1603-1604). However, Michael Hundley (2011, 71-73) correctly observed that Leviticus and P never qualify YHWH’s holiness: it is not relative or conditional, but an absolute and unvarying quality of YHWH and of the divine realm. Despite the different cosmologies and vocabularies of various ancient and traditional cultures, they frequently name an intrinsic condition of the divine realm that we translate into English as “holiness” (Yoo-Watts 2021, 18, 66-67, 72 n. 1, 92-96, 108-109, 121-22). YHWH requires Israel to sanctify itself not just by drawing distinctions and separating itself, but also through obedience (20:7-8, 22). Chapter 20 maintains that obedience will distinguish Israel from other nations, but it is not clear whether separation is its motivation or its consequence (for this debate, see Exegesis to 20:24). The command, ‫“ קדשׁים תהיו כי קדושׁ אני יהוה אלהיכם‬you must be holy because I, YHWH your God, am holy,” appears elsewhere around purity

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

463

regulations (11:44-45; 20:7, 26). Though the position of this verse at the beginning of chap. 19’s miscellany of laws and moral exhortations might seem to be an exception, its position immediately after chap. 18 indicates that sexual prohibitions and purity continue to be vital concerns (Rashi). The appearance of this command to be holy right after that sexualized polemic against Canaanites practices implies a contrast that will be stated explicitly in 20:26: holiness requires separation from other nations (on holiness and separation, see Exegesis to 20:26). In this way, ethnic differences are grounded in a cosmological distinction between the human and divine realms: YHWH has incorporated Israel into the holy divine realm (Milgrom 1606; Hieke 712). The Israelites must therefore separate from the nations of the human realm and observe the requisite conditions of both realms, that is, holiness and morality. Pollution results from failing to do so or from allowing the human realm to infringe on the divine realm (Yoo-Watts 2021, 110-11, 121-25). While chaps. 18 and 20 emphasize the need for Israelites to maintain the holiness of the divine realm in their family lives, chap. 19 emphasizes that they must also behave morally in the human realm of economic and legal relationships. The ancient rabbis understood the mandate to be holy to mean ethnic separation (Sifra Shemini 12:3; Num. Rab. 10:1; Lev. Rab. 24:6; see Milgrom 1603-1604). They also realized that the Israelites must be holy because they have been incorporated into the divine realm: “It is comparable to the court of a king. What is the court’s duty? To imitate the king” (Sifra Qedoshim 1:1; Milgrom 1604). Holiness therefore requires obedience to all of YHWH’s commandments which, as chaps. 18-20 clearly show, includes maintaining purity and justice as well as behaving with charity towards others. “Sanctification through commandment” became the rabbinic means for preserving the holiness of Israel in the diaspora (Koltun-Fromm in Angelini et al. 2013, 46). The HB includes statements of YHWH’s incomparable holiness (1 Sam. 2:2; Isa. 40:25) that appear in tension with this command to imitate YHWH’s holiness. Discomfort at the potential idolatry of telling humans they are holy like God probably accounts for MT’s tendency to write “holy” plene (‫קדשׁ‬ without the vav) when it describes humans, but fully (‫ קדושׁ‬with the vav) when it describes God (so here and 11:44-45; 20:26; 21:7-8; Milgrom 1606). This spelling differentiates the kinds of holiness attributable to God and humans. Contemporary biblical scholars are divided over whether the imitation of God can function as a fundamental principle of ethics. While many HB texts have been cited in support of it, Baruch Schwartz (2000, 56-57) denied that imitation is intended even in Leviticus 19, since it is Israel, not YHWH, who must obey commandments like “revere your mother and father” and “slaughter amity slaughter offerings” (vv. 3, 5). Nor should YHWH’s

464

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

actions necessarily be taken as a model for imitation: Esias Meyer observed that Leviticus 25 depicts God as a conqueror, a plantation owner, and an enslaver, models that have been very destructive in modern history.7 Christian traditions also echoed the command to imitate God (imitatio dei; e.g. Matt. 5:48) but focused it especially on imitating Christ (“follow me” in the Gospels; 1 Cor. 11:1). The exhortation to be holy like God and a holy nation like Israel became an exhortation to “honourable” behaviour “in all your conduct” (1 Pet. 1:15-16 quoting Leviticus; 1 Pet. 2:9 citing Exod. 19:6). The call to holiness through separation (Lev. 20:24, 26) may be reflected in how Paul addressed his followers as “saints, holy ones” (1 Cor. 1:2; Rom. 1:7, etc.; Koltun-Fromm in Angelini et al. 2013, 42). The early Christians, however, denied that holiness draws distinctions on ethnic or other grounds (Gal. 3:28). Though they soon developed devotion to apostles and martyrs as special “saints,” Christians have idealized themselves since the end of the fourth century as a unified “communion of the saints” (Apostles Creed) regardless of ethnic differences. The command to imitate God’s holiness became a popular subject of mystical speculation in both Jewish and Christian traditions. Jewish Kabbalistic and Hasidic texts described holiness as the place of God and the source of divine light and blessing (Necker in Angelini et al. 2013, 48-49). The biblical prompt to imitate God’s holiness led especially Eastern Orthodox Christians to advocate sacramental union with God in the Eucharist. Many Western Christians, inspired by monastic movements, pursued holiness with vows of chastity and poverty to imitate the life of Jesus (Ferzoco in Angelini et al. 2013, 61-62). These ideas spread beyond intellectual mystics to inspire popular religious movements. Celebration and imitation of holiness characterizes many such movements from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, including the Waldensians and Lollards (15th c.), Lutheran Pietists (17th-18th c.), the Wesleyan Holiness movements (19th c.), and contemporary Pentecostals (Vickers 2014). Holiness groups, for example, read the HB typologically as a map of a person’s spiritual progress towards a state of sanctification in “Beulah land” (i.e. Israel; Isa. 62:4).8 This explicitly bible-based “deep desire for God’s holiness” (Vickers 2014) continues to motivate millions of Christians today, especially in Pentecostal movements around the world. The early Lutheran and Calvinist Reformers, however, focused more on justification and faith than sanctification. They argued that God sanctifies 7 Compare Esias E. Meyer, “The Dark Side of the Imitatio Dei: Why Imitating the God of the Holiness Code is not Always a Good Thing,” OTE 22/2 (2009), 373-83; with Michael Leo Sekuras, “Imitation of God,” EBR 12 (2013), 960-61. 8 William Kostlevy, “Holiness Churches,” EBR 12 (2013), 77-79.

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

465

those who have faith in Christ (Dahl in Angelini et al. 2013, 63). This position was shaped by their polemic against Roman Catholic advocates of sanctification through personal effort. For example, early Protestants complained bitterly about papal teachings that used the command to be holy like God as an exhortation to celibacy (e.g. Johannes Brenz; see Elliott 197). Modern debates over holiness have wielded deep influence both within and beyond Jewish and Christian traditions. Liberal thinkers have cited especially Leviticus 19 to identify holiness with morality (e.g. Immanuel Kant, Herman Cohen, Martin Buber, Dorothy Day). Rudolph Otto (1917), however, emphasized the meaning of holiness as “separation” and applied it to God, whom he described as “wholly other.” He defined holiness as a fundamentally “numinous” experience that prompts a response of “awe” (as in Isaiah 6). Otto’s definition was very influential on the study of comparative religions (e.g. Émile Durkheim, Mircea Eliade) as well as on much twentieth-century Jewish and Christian thought (e.g. Karl Barth, Emmanuel Levinas, Abraham Joshua Heshel, Paul Tillich; see Davis and Dahl in Angelini et al. 2013, 52, 64-66). Some biblical scholars have also suggested that Leviticus depicts holiness as a dynamic force emanating from YHWH that Israel must absorb by obedience to YHWH’s commandments (Milgrom 730-31; Schwartz 2000, 57). Leviticus 19:2, together with Exod. 19:6 and Isa. 6:3, placed holiness at the foundation of Jewish and Christian spirituality and ethics, where it remains today. The modern emphasis on numinosity, however, fails to account very well for Leviticus’s emphasis on obedience to divine commands. Neither does the liberal ethical tradition cope very well with this book’s concern for separation and purity. A different explanation points to how ritual and cosmology combine beliefs about holiness with purification practices (see Introduction to Leviticus 11-20: Pollution and Cosmology above, and Yoo-Watts 2021). Like many traditional cultures, the HB draws a cosmological distinction between the divine and human realms and defines each realm’s requisite conditions as holiness and morality respectively. Its incorporation of Israel into the divine realm therefore explains the mix of moral, legal, and ritual rules that this verse introduces with the mandate, “be holy because I, YHWH your God, am holy.” 19:3

You (pl) must each revere your (3ms) mother and father, and my Sabbaths you must observe – I am YHWH your God!

This verse reproduces the two central commandments of the Decalogue – the last of the first table and the first of the second table – but in reverse order. The fact that “mother” precedes “father” may signal a citation of the Decalogue (Stewart 2015, 303-304; Milgrom 1609). Invoking parents at the beginning

466

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

of lists of rules claims for these rules the status of basic moral teachings. By combining commandments about parents and Sabbaths, this verse anticipates the miscellaneous collection that follows by requiring obedience to all kinds of laws, including moral precepts and ritual regulations (Schwartz 1998, 17). This verse commands Israelites to ‫“ ירא‬fear, respect” their parents, whereas the Decalogue speaks of ‫“ כבד‬honouring” parents (Exod. 20:12; Deut. 5:16) and the list of incest prohibitions in Lev. 20:9 speaks of ‫“ קלל‬dishonouring” them (also Exod. 21:17; Deut. 27:16). Elsewhere in Leviticus, ‫“ ירא‬fear, respect” is directed exclusively towards God (19:14, 32; 25:17, 36, 43) or the sanctuary (19:30, 26:2). The command to revere God is even more common in Deuteronomy. Some commentators take the verb as acknowledging authority, that “parents are in the place of God” (Wenham 265; Hartley 313). However, the invocation of parents at the beginning of many of the HB’s legal and wisdom collections suggests instead that parents represent fundamental social mores (see Exegesis to 20:9). Reverence for one’s parents represents commitment to the most basic moral teachings. Directing ‫ירא‬ “reverence” towards parents here at the beginning of this chapter’s mandates shows that more than filial duty is being commanded. The English translation, “revere” (NRSV, NJPS), lies in the middle of the semantic range of ‫ ירא‬between “fear” (KJV) and “respect” (CEB; see further on v. 14 below). ‫“ ואת־שׁבתתו תשׁמרו‬my Sabbaths you must observe” (repeated in v. 30 and 26:2) reproduces the verb from Exod. 31:13-16; Deut. 5:12. The Sabbath command in Exod. 20:8 uses ‫“ זכר‬remember,” while other Sabbath laws just command “rest” (Exod. 23:12; 34:21; 35:2; Lev. 23:3). ‫“ שׁמר‬observe” had been used in this context just three verses earlier to command obedience to all of YHWH’s “observances” rather than imitating the practices of the Canaanites (18:30). YHWH “sanctified” the Sabbath in P’s creation story (Gen. 2:3), so the Sabbath command carries connotations of holiness in concert with v. 2. Unlike the full statement of the Sabbath commandment in 23:3, this brief command presupposes the audiences’ familiarity with their Sabbath obligations, either from oral tradition or from the command’s twelve-fold repetition in Pentateuchal texts. See further in Exegesis to 23:3. ‫“ אני יהוה‬I am YHWH” appears eight times in this chapter, and eight more times with “your God” added. It is not limited only to divinely enforced prohibitions (see Exegesis to 18:21, contra Milgrom 1565), but rather serves to unify thematically the miscellaneous rules of this chapter under the call to imitate YHWH’s holiness (v. 2; Milgrom 1607). The declaration, “I am YHWH,” not only reasserts God’s authorship over these rules, but also emphasizes that the deity is addressing every listener and reader through them (Milgrom 1517-18; see further in Exegesis to 18:2, 5 above).

Leviticus 19 Exegesis 19:4

467

You (pl) must not turn to puny gods and moulded gods you must not make for yourselves – I am YHWH your God!

On the parallel use of the negatives ‫ אל‬and ‫ לא‬here and in vv. 29 and 31, see Exegesis to 11:43. This prohibition evokes the Decalogue commandment against making ‫“ פסל וכל־תמונה‬an image or likeness” in order to worship it (Exod. 20:4; Deut. 5:8), but uses vocabulary more like that in the ritual decalogue (Exod. 34:17). ‫אלילים‬, also in 26:1, is a pejorative term for false deities and spirits, often translated “idols” (KJV, NRSV, NJPS) which is a transliteration of LXX’s εἴδωλον “image.” ‫ אלילים‬appears in the Pentateuch only in Leviticus but more often elsewhere in the HB, especially in Isaiah (Pss. 96:5; 97:7; Isa. 2:8, 18, 20; 10:11; 19:1, 3; 31:7; Hab. 2:19). The root refers to something insignificant or powerless (Jer. 14:14; Job 13:4; Sir. 11:3; HAL), but sounds similar to ‫“ אל‬a god,” so I translate “puny gods.” The phrase, ‫“ אלהי מסכה‬moulded gods,” appears alone in the prohibition in Exod. 34:17. Aaron makes a ‫“ עגל מסכה‬moulded calf” in Exod 32:4, 8 (cf. Hos. 13:2). This phrase is often translated “molten gods” (KJV, NJPS) or “cast image of gods” (HAL, NRSV, CEB) by taking the root, ‫“ נסך‬pour,” as referring to pouring molten metal into an image mould. Christoph Dohmen argued, however, that it refers to any kind of metal image, since ancient images were frequently made by hammering metal (as described vividly in Isa. 44:12).9 Its frequent use in parallel with other terms for idols like in this verse (cf. Deut. 27:14 with ‫“ פסל‬image”) led DCH to translate just “image” or “idol.” Since ‫ מסכה‬is used elsewhere for some means of shaping metal into divine images, I translate the phrase as “moulded gods.” Milgrom (1615) suggested that ‫ אלילים‬evokes the Decalogue’s first commandment against worshipping other gods (also Exod. 34:1), while ‫ אלהי מסכה‬evokes the second commandment against making images of Israel’s god. Depictions of gods in anthropomorphic or zoological forms were common in ancient two- and three-dimensional art (Dick in Burge et al. 2010, 807-12). A tendency to avoid representing deities did appear in Phoenician art and, briefly, in Egyptian art under Akhenaton. However, no ban on divine images appears in the extant literatures of other ancient Near Eastern or Mediterranean cultures apart from the HB. Pentateuchal traditions extended the image ban into a mandate to destroy Canaanite images and ritual sites and to kill Israelite idolaters (Exod. 32:26-28; Num. 33:52; Deut. 12:2-3; cf. 27:15; 2 Kgs. 23:4-14).

9

Christoph Dohmen, “‫ ַמ ֵסּ ָכה‬massēḵâ',” TWAT 4:1009-15 = TDOT 8:431-37.

468

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

The Pentateuch’s ban on idols and idolatrous worship has been very influential in subsequent Jewish, Christian, and Muslim cultures in at least three different ways. First, the HB’s ban on images has been cited to justify attacks on the images of foreign cultures as “idolatrous.” Ancient Jews and Christians shared the view that Greco-Roman religions consisted of worshipping idols (Let. Aris. 134-38; Pseudo-Philo, L.A.B. 25, 44; Wis. 13-15; Sib. Or., books. 3 and 5; Acts 17:16, 29; Rev. 9:20; Justin Martyr, 1 Apol. 9; Tertullian, Idol. 1-12, Apol. 10-13; Clement of Alexandria, Protr.). Several Second Temple Jewish texts made this topic a central theme (Epistle of Jeremiah, Bel and the Dragon, Joseph and Aseneth, The Apocalypse of Abraham; see Mason in Burge et al. 2013, 818). Some Jewish and Christian writers blamed idolatry as the root of all evil (Wis. 14:12-27; Rom. 1:18-32). Christians followed Paul in identifying foreign idols as demons (1 Cor. 10:20; Havsteen in Burge et al. 2013, 828). The Pentateuch’s mandates to kill idolaters and destroy their images echo in Qumran’s Temple Scroll (11Q19 2:6-12; 54:856:4) and in rabbinic literature (m. Sanh. 7:6; b. Sanh. 56a, 74a), though the rabbis admitted their impracticality (Pomeranz in Burge et al. 2013, 821). Once Christians gained political power in the Roman Empire, however, mobs of monks as well as Roman soldiers ransacked temples and destroyed or mutilated classical art depicting gods. One thousand years later, European colonial empires destroyed or looted art around the world, especially in the Americas and Africa. Many of the surviving images now populate Western museums where they serve to illustrate the history of art rather than religious practices. Islam inherited the ban on idols from Jews and Christians (e.g. Qur’an 7:138-39; 14:35), including the Jewish story (Jub. 12:12-14; Gen. Rab. 38) of Abraham shattering his father’s idols (Qur’an 21:51-71). Stories in the Hadith about Mohammed smashing idols inspired later imitation (Burge in Burge et al. 2013, 832) including the demolition of the giant Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001.10 This history of iconoclasm is evidence that, contrary to many assertions that the Decalogue expresses a universal moral code, the command against worshipping images clearly enunciates a culturally-specific ideal shared by many Jews, Christians, and Muslims, but not by most other religions. That is explicit here in Lev. 19:4 which appears in a context that calls on the Israelites to distinguish themselves from Canaanites and Egyptians by following YHWH’s mandates (18:3-5, 24-30; 20:22-23), including this one. Second, the HB’s ban on images has been cited to motivate internal attacks on a culture’s own art and rituals. It has fuelled ongoing arguments over 10 Carile, Maria Cristina, Lucy Donkin, Isaac Sassoon, and Thomas F. X. Noble, “Iconoclasm,” EBR 12 (2013), 766-77.

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

469

what kind of images can be utilized in Jewish and Christian places of worship. Ancient synagogues included much representational art, as shown by many surviving floor mosaics and, at Dura Europa, wall paintings. Second millennium synagogues tended to include mostly floral and zoomorphic designs, but not human representations. Christian history has been scarred by violent iconoclastic controversies in Byzantium in the eighth-to-ninth centuries and in Protestant Europe in the sixteenth-to-seventeenth centuries (Havsteen in Burge et al. 2013, 828-29). Many churches were stripped of their art in both periods. These conflicts fuelled the development of theories of art to elucidate the ontological relationship between an image and its referent (Parmenter 2006, 163-64).11 Third, the HB’s ban on images has been spiritualized into a criticism of confusing any part of the created world for the creator. It can therefore motivate rejection of all practices or ideas that divert worship away from God. This criticism already appears in the HB’s ridicule of idol makers (Isa. 44:920; Jer. 10:2-16; Ps. 115:4-8) and has been embellished at length by ancient and modern preachers and theologians, including modern philosophers like Francis Bacon, Friedrich Nietzsche, Herman Cohen, and Jean-Luc Marion (see the surveys by Davis and Havsteen in Burge et al. 2013, 826-30). 19:5

When you (pl) slaughter an amity slaughter (offering) to YHWH, in your favour you slaughter it,

Verses 5-8 reproduce rules from 7:16-18 for eating the meat of amity slaughter offerings. Only this rule of all of the ritual instructions in chaps. 1-7 reappears in chap. 19. (The related rule in 7:12 for thanksgiving offerings reappears in 22:29.) An explanation for its appearance here may be that only the meat of the amity slaughter offerings comes under the complete control of lay people after being offered in the Tabernacle. Milgrom (1615-16) suggested that this holy food is therefore a material representation of this chapter’s call to holiness (v. 2; similarly Schwartz 1999, 292-98). Though the meat of amity slaughter offerings is nowhere designated as “holy” (contra Milgrom 1620), v. 8 describes eating the three-day-old meat as “defiling YHWH’s holiness.” This chapter depicts YHWH quoting selected rules from a wide variety of sources as samples of “all my mandates and all my regulations” (v. 37). To represent all the offering instructions, it selects a rule that depends entirely on lay people to observe for themselves. For ‫“ זבח שׁלמים‬amity slaughter offering,” see Exegesis to 3:1. Leviticus 1-16 uses the verb ‫“ שׁחט‬slaughter” with meat offerings, but chaps. 17-27 prefer the synonym ‫ זבח‬in order to play on the offering name (see Exegesis 11

John Stuart, Ikons (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), 27-31.

470

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

to 17:5). As a result, the root ‫“ זבח‬slaughter” occurs in this verse three times, twice as a verb and once as a noun in the offering name. On ‫“ רצון‬favour” from making offerings, see Exegesis to 1:3-4. This is one of only four rules in this chapter phrased casuistically with an initial ‫“ כי‬when” (vv. 20, 23, 33), but only two state penalties for wrongdoing (vv. 8, 20). The others simply anticipate circumstances in the land with instructions for how to deal with fruit trees and immigrants. The usual casuistic syntax of protasis and apodosis does not work well in this verse, though most translations paraphrase to make it fit: “When you offer a sacrifice of well-being to the LORD, offer it in such a way that it is acceptable in your behalf” (NRSV; similarly NJPS; Milgrom 1594; CEB). The two phrases instead present parallel descriptions of making the offering, arranged in a chiasm. This verse’s syntax works better if we take all of it as the protasis containing two parallel phrases and v. 6a as the apodosis. 19:6

it must be eaten on the day you (pl) slaughter it or on the following day. Whatever remains by the third day must be burned in a fire.

In 7:16-17, this rule is applied specifically to votive and voluntary amity slaughter offerings. Another kind of amity slaughter offering, the thank offering, must be eaten entirely on the day it is offered (7:15; 22:29). ‫“ עד־יום השׁלישׁי‬by the third day” is more precise than 7:17’s ‫ביום השׁלישׁי‬ “on the third day” (Milgrom 1617). 19:7

If nevertheless eaten on the third day, (because) it is putrid it will not count in (your) favour.

SP reads a qal infinitive ‫( ָאכֹל‬see SPCEM) for MT’s niphal infinitive ‫ה ָאכֹל‬. ֵ Both serve to intensify the niphal imperfect that follows, ‫“ יֵ ָא ֵכ ל‬be eaten.” I convey this emphasis in English with “nevertheless eaten.” On ‫“ פגול חוא‬it is putrid,” see Exegesis to 7:18. Wright (1987, 142) argued that ‫ פגול‬must mean “desecrated, profaned sacrifice,” because in this verse ‫ פגול‬describes the offering only after it is eaten, not before. However, the apodosis of this conditional sentence can also be found in the last clause: “If it is eaten ... it will not count.” In that case, ‫ פגול הוא‬provides not the apodosis but an explanation, “(because) it is putrid.” ‫“ לא ירצה‬it will not count in favour” is rendered much more fully in 7:18: “what they present will not count in their favour, it will not be credited to them.” The cryptic abbreviation here therefore presupposes 7:18 and shows that this verse has been composed to be part of the same document as chap. 7 (see the detailed comparison in Milgrom 1617-19; see further in Introduction to Leviticus 21-27).

Leviticus 19 Exegesis 19:8

471

Those (pl) who eat it are liable, because they (ms) defile YHWH’s holiness. That person will be cut off from their (fs) people!

The first phrase again follows 7:18. For ‫“ עונו ישׂא‬they are liable,” see Exegesis to 5:1. The middle phrase of this verse finally deviates from chap. 7 by adding a concern for protecting YHWH’s holiness from defilement. For translating ‫ חלל‬as “to defile,” see Exegesis to 18:21. The phrase, ‫“ קדשׁ יהוה‬YHWH’s holiness” suggests again an abbreviation, because the verb “defile” usually takes YHWH’s name, sanctuary, or priests as its object (13× in Leviticus). It describes offerings in only one other text (22:15) where it designates the priests’ cuts of meat, not those of lay people. The usual translation, “what is holy to YHWH” (e.g. KJV, NRSV, NJPS) suggests that the meat becomes defiled, which then prompts speculation about when the meat of animal slaughter offerings becomes holy and how long its holiness lasts while in lay people’s hands (Milgrom 1622-23). This verse, however, does not say that the meat is holy or defiled, but rather that ‫“ את־קדשׁ יהוה‬YHWH’s holiness” is defiled. In this context, that phrase is most likely an abbreviated reference to YHWH’s name (18:21; 19:12). The threat to “cut off that person” repeats 7:20c verbatim. 19:9

When you (pl) harvest the harvest of your land, you (sg) must not harvest completely to the edge of your field. The gleanings of your field you must not glean.

The prohibitions in vv. 9-10 are both governed by the motive clause in v. 10: “you must leave them for the poor and the immigrant.” This rule about gleaning grain is repeated in 23:22, and Deut. 24:19 requires field owners to leave “forgotten” grain for the poor. Ruth 2:2-9 describes the customary right of poor people to follow grain harvesters and pick up what they leave behind. The switch from second person plural in the first phrase to singular in the rest of vv. 9-10 has been explained as due to the referents of the nouns: ‫“ ארצכם‬your (pl) land” refers to the whole land of Israel, while ‫“ שׂדך‬your (sg) field” focuses on the responsibilities of the individual land owner (Milgrom 1625). However, the writer more likely chose to emphasize collective and individual responsibility rather than being required to do so by using these nouns. The specification of singular “each his associate” does not require a singular verb in v. 11, while v. 12 switches from plural to singular in otherwise parallel phrases. This chapter’s variation of both person and number for rhetorical emphasis seems to be unconstrained by semantic conventions.

472

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

This verse uses the root ‫“ קצר‬harvest” four times both as noun and verb. ‫“ לא תכלה פאת שׂדך לקצר‬you must not harvest completely to the edge of your field“ is literally “you must not complete the edge of your field to harvest it.” ‫“ כלה‬complete” was translated “destroy” by Milgrom (1625) on analogy with “slashing” one’s beard (v. 27). But the meaning “finish, complete” makes more sense for harvesting a field. The last phrase’s verbal play on ‫“ לקט‬gleaning, remainder, left-overs” as both noun and verb is difficult to render into contemporary English. Fox came closest: “the full-gathering of your harvest you are not to gather.” ‫לקט‬ is best rendered by the traditional word, “gleaning,” which means “to strip (a field, vineyard, etc.) of the produce left by the regular gatherers” (OED), a definition shaped by the cultural influence of Lev. 19:9-10. The ancient rabbis specified that the singular ‫“ פאה‬edge” means that only one side of the field must be left uncut (Sifra; b. Sabb. 23a; see Milgrom 1625). However, in 1565 Joseph Caro ruled that Jewish farmers need no longer observe this commandment (Shulchan Aruk, Yoreh De’ah 332:1). In medieval Europe, this biblical rule established the right of people to enter fields to glean after harvest without being accused of trespassing or theft. Gleaning has therefore long served as a parade example of how medieval and early modern peasants asserted communal ownership rights (“a commons”) to land and crops.12 Liana Vardi argued, however, that poor people’s right to glean was created in the sixteenth century on the basis of biblical precedents: Gleaning, although a longstanding practice, had not always been reserved for the poor and certainly not for poor women. Rather, it had been treated as the last phase of the harvest, involving a complex range of labor arrangements. In sixteenth-century France, a more interventionist central government, obsessed with rural taxation, increasingly meddled with the process. Gleaning was separated from harvesting in ways, it was thought, that would secure the crops from potential theft. ... Separating gleaning from harvesting ... delineated a new category of poor, and the help they were to receive, within the rural community. ... Gleaning would thus serve as charity. This would be its essential purpose and would restore it to its original function. This theologically based, learned view of gleaning, drawn primarily from the Bible, supplied the moral underpinnings for many gleaning regulations and subsequent prosecutions.13

Gleaning was widely practised in England into at least the nineteenth century, but became constrained by a landmark court ruling in 1788 (Steel v. Houghton et Uxor) that “no person has, at common law, a right to glean in the harvest 12

E.g. E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (New York: New Press, 1991), 97-184. Liana Vardi, “Construing the Harvest: Gleaners, Farmers, and Officials in Early Modern France,” The American Historical Review 98/5 (1993), 1424-47 [1428]. 13

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

473

field,” which recognized only the rights of property owners.14 Gleaning nevertheless remains a widely known charitable ideal as recognized by recent laws in many U.S. States that protect landowners from liability if gleaners are injured on their land.15 Today, many charitable organizations gain permission from farmers to glean in order to distribute the surplus produce to impoverished people. Citations of Lev. 19:9-10 appear prominently in all these movements and controversies. Gleaning also remains a recurrent motif in popular culture, especially in France, as evidenced by the oft-reproduced 1857 painting, “The Gleaners,” by Jean-François Millet and the acclaimed 2000 documentary film, Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (translated into English as The Gleaners and I) by Agnès Varda. 19:10 Your (sg) vineyard you must not pick clean and your vineyard’s fallen grapes you must not harvest. You must leave them for the poor and the immigrant – I am YHWH your God! This rule appears also in Deut. 24:20-21, which adds the olive harvest. The verb ‫ תעולל‬poel appears in the same prohibition in Deut. 24:21. Context requires that it means a very thorough grape harvest, so “pick bare” (NJPS) or “pick clean” (CEB). The nominal form ‫ עוללות‬refers to grape gleanings (Judg. 8:2; Jer. 49:9; Obad. 5; Mic. 7:1) The noun ‫ פרט‬appears only here. Its verbal form appears only in Amos 6:5, where its meaning is even more uncertain. Here, the context suggests “fallen grapes” (NRSV) or “fallen fruit” (NJPS). The ancient rabbis defined it as “fruit that fell to the ground during picking” (m. Pe᾿ah 7:3; Levine 127). The motive clause, ‫“ לעני ולגר‬for the poor and the immigrant,” applies to both vv. 9 and 10. ‫“ עני‬the poor” appears much more frequently in the Prophets and the Psalms than in legal texts. Priestly texts mention them only here and in the parallel in 23:22, though 25:25-43 describes stages of impoverishment without using the term. The word appears once in the Covenant Code in the rule banning interest on loans (Exod. 22:24 Eng. 22:25) and in Deuteronomy’s commands to practice charity (15:11) and pay wages daily without demanding security deposits (24:12-15). Deuteronomy more commonly characterizes impoverished people as “widows, orphans, and immigrants,” as it does in its gleaning rules (Deut. 24:19-21; also in 10:18; 14:29; 14 Peter King, “Legal Change, Customary Right, and Social Conflict in Late EighteenthCentury England: The Origins of the Great Gleaning Case of 1788,” Law and History Review 10/1 (1992), 1-31; also idem, “Gleaners, Farmers and the Failure of Legal Sanctions in England 1750-1850,” Past and Present 125 (1989), 116-50. 15 “The National Gleaning Project: Guide to the Online Gleaning Resources Hub,” Vermont Law School, online at https://nationalgleaningproject.org, accessed Dec. 3, 2021.

474

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

16:11, 14; 24:17; 26:12-13; 27:19). Here, “immigrants” are classified with the poor, which clashes somewhat with their depiction in Lev. 25:47 as property owners (but cf. 25:6). These biblical rules about gleaning have played a major role in political and legal battles over property rights (see above on v. 9). However, the phrasing of these rules in vv. 9-10 emphasizes instead economic morality, in contradiction to modern free-market doctrines that prioritize profits over all other values. Rather than exempting corporations from moral mandates as some modern economists do,16 the mix of second person plural and singular address in vv. 9-10 establishes feeding the poor as the duty of both communities and individuals (Hieke 720). YHWH threatens both individuals and the nation for ignoring these mandates (18:26-30; 20:22; 26:14-39). These rules can therefore be paraphrased in contemporary English as: “You (sg + pl) must not maximize profits.” 19:11 You (pl) must not steal from or lie to or betray, each his associate. This verse in Hebrew contains three negated verbs in a row. The appearance of “each his associate” at the end is most likely intended to modify all three prohibitions (contra MT’s accentuation). ‫“ לא תגנבו‬you must not steal” appears in the Decalogue (Exod. 20:15; Deut. 5:19) and each of the biblical legal collections (Exod. 21:16; Deut. 24:7), though the latter refer to kidnapping. Here, however, the context indicates theft of goods as in Exod. 21:37-22:3 (b. Sanh. 86a; Milgrom 1630), which implicitly includes kidnapping as well. ‫“ לא־תכחשׁו‬you must not lie” does not appear in other biblical law collections, but is anticipated in Lev. 5:21-22 (Eng. 6:2-3). ‫“ כחשׁ‬lying” can refer to false assertions (1 Kgs. 13:18; Zech. 13:4), false denials (Lev. 5:21-22), and secret misappropriations (Josh. 7:11). Unlike the judicial implications of the Decalogue’s prohibition on “false or lying witness” (Exod. 20:16; Deut. 5:20), the word ‫ כחשׁ‬indicates broader dishonesty. Its context here points to deceptive financial practices. ‫“ לא־תשׁקרו‬you must not betray” is usually also translated “you must not lie” (KJV; NRSV; CEB; cf. NJPS “deal falsely”). The root ‫ שׁקר‬appears very commonly as a noun and adjective meaning “a lie, deception,” as in the next verse. The verb ‫שׁקר‬, however, appears only six times in the HB and invariably refers to betrayal (Gen. 21:23; 1 Sam. 15:29; Isa. 63:8; Pss. 44:18; 89:34). 16 So, explicitly for corporations, Milton Friedman, “A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” New York Times, September 13, 1970.

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

475

Rather than precisely delimiting different kinds of fraud (Milgrom 1631; Hieke 721), it is more likely that the rhetorical goal of these three quick prohibitions using analogous, but not synonymous, vocabulary is to broaden and intensify condemnation of deceptive practices. These apodictic prohibitions mandate no punishments. However, 5:21-24 (Eng. 6:2-5) has already established that the penalty for fraudulent lies requires restoration of 120% of the value as well as presenting a ram guilt offering. For ‫“ עמית‬associate,” see Exegesis to 5:21. In ‫“ אישׁ בעמיתו‬each his associate,” the phrase’s distributive meaning (cf. 7:10; 10:1) overrides agreement in number with the second-person prohibitions, as in the broader prohibitions against ‫“ ינה‬oppressing” associates in 25:14, 17 (cf. 19:33 about immigrants). While “associate” implies a landowner’s peers, v. 13 makes clear that subordinates are included as well. Stated positively, this verse combines with v. 13 to mandate honesty in all economic transactions. Following vv. 9-10 that require businesses to provide charity rather than maximizing profits, the combined effect is to insist that economics provides no excuse for business people and, by extension, the corporate economic entities that they control (which in antiquity were typically a household’s land holdings and dependents, including women, tenants, and enslaved people) to fail to observe these moral standards (Hieke 720). This message has been widely recognized throughout the history of Jewish and Christian interpretive traditions, which regularly included lying and theft in catalogues of human sinful behaviour (ancient examples include Isa. 59:13-14; Hos. 4:1-2; Prov. 11:1; 26:28; Wis. 14:21-27; Sib. Or. 2:253-61; PseudoPhocylides, Sent. 1-8; Mark 7:21-23; Matt. 5:33-37; 15:19-20; Rev. 21:8; Didache 2:1-4, 5:1; 3 Bar. 4:17; see Kugel 1998, 683-86, and Anderson et al. 2018, 504). Augustine was typical in concluding that the Decalogue bans all kinds of lying (On Lying, 5.6, quoted in Lienhard 107; see Mann in Anderson et al. 2018, 509). The Talmud also emphasized the ideal of honesty, but the ancient rabbis debated when white lies are permissible or even required, as did Christian scholastic theologians in the Middle Ages (Avery-Peck and Denery in Anderson et al. 2018, 506-8, 510). Augustine influenced Protestant Reformers and many early modern Catholics to condemn all lying, a position that continued to be debated in modern philosophy (e.g. by Immanuel Kant) and theology (e.g. by Dietrich Bonhoeffer; see Assel and Tollefsen in Anderson et al. 2018, 511-12). Interpreters in all periods have struggled with the fact that biblical stories depict some characters positively who practised deception (e.g. Abraham in Gen. 12:11-13; Jacob in Gen. 30:37-43; Jesus in Luke 24:16).

476

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

19:12 You (pl) must not swear falsely in my name, lest you (sg) defile the name of your God – I am YHWH! ‫ לשׁקר‬... ‫“ לא־תשׁבעו‬you must not swear falsely” is literally “you must not swear ... for a lie.” For ‫“ שׁקר‬falsely, a lie,” see on the previous verse. This command resembles the Decalogue’s prohibition on ‫שׁוא‬/‫“ ענה שׁקר‬false or vain witness” (Exod. 20:16; Deut. 5:20), which indicates deception in judicial proceedings, and also on false oaths which are described as ‫ישׂא‬ ‫“ את־שׁמו לשׁוא‬taking (God’s) name in vain” (Exod. 20:11; Deut. 5:11). The context here (vv. 11, 13) seems to be financial, not judicial, more like the situations described as lying in 5:21-22. There, lying about property is ‫מעל‬ “sacrilege” because ‫“ שׁבע על־שׁקר‬swearing falsely” involved misusing the divine name, as is explicitly stated here. Many lawsuits, in antiquity as well as today, involved financial transactions, so differentiating between judicial and business contexts is a false dichotomy. Oaths in God’s name risk sacrilege in any context because they move the jurisdiction responsible for adjudicating the conflict from the human to the divine realm, an effect attested in many ancient and traditional cultures (Douglas 1999, 127-33; Yoo-Watts 2021, 50-52). On ‫“ חלל‬defile,” see Exegesis to 18:21. Luciani (2005, 103) suggested that the switch to second singular creates a parallel with the prohibition on “defiling” one’s daughter in 19:29. The change in number more likely has a distributive effect to emphasize individual responsibility (cf. on v. 9 above). The danger of ‫“ חלל את־שׁם אלהיך‬defiling the name of your God” is evoked six times in Leviticus (18:21; 19:12; 20:3; 21:6; 22:2, 32) and nine times in Ezekiel, but otherwise only sporadically in other prophetic books (Isa. 48:9-11; Jer. 34:16; Amos 2:76; Mal. 1:11-12). Leviticus emphasizes this danger by inserting into its regulations a story about misusing the divine name that ends with the community stoning the offender to death (Lev. 24:11-23). This emphasis on the threat of misusing God’s name stimulated recommendations in Second Temple and later Jewish and Christian literature to avoid oaths whenever possible (Sir. 23:9-10; Philo, Laws 2:2; 1QS 6:29; Matt. 5:33-37; Jas. 5:12; Test. Gad 6:3-4; 2 Enoch 49:1; Midr. Tanh., Mattot 1; quoted in Kugel 1998, 650; on the tradition of never pronouncing the divine name, YHWH, see Exegesis to 24:16). The fact that Jesus said “do not swear at all ... let your word be ‘yes, yes’ or ‘no, no” (Matt. 5:34, 36 NRSV) led some Christians to refuse to take oaths of any kind. Medieval and early modern jurists affirmed the use of oaths in judicial proceedings (see the review by Elliott 200), but Anabaptists refused. Their refusal has been recognized in British law since 1695, and later in the U.S. Constitution and in many U.S. state constitutions, as a religious right allowing Mennonites,

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

477

Quakers, and others to “affirm” rather than to swear to the truth of their legal testimony or when taking oaths of office.17 19:13 You (sg) must not withhold from your neighbour, you must not rip (them) off, you must not keep for yourself your employee’s wages until morning. The three prohibitions in this verse parallel the three prohibitions of v. 11, but the vocabulary is more specific. ‫“ עשׁק‬withhold from” is often translated more generally as “exploit” (HAL) or “defraud” (NRSV), but literally means to withhold from someone something that is due them. That specific meaning fits this context and the word’s use in similar contexts very well (Lev. 5:21; Deut. 24:14; Mal. 3:5). ‫ גזל‬means both “to tear off” and “to rob,” the same semantic field as the English metaphor for stealing, “to rip off.” For the place of theft in traditional lists of human sins, see on v. 11 above. ‫ ָת ִלין‬has been analyzed either as qal or hiphil. ‫ לין‬in the qal stem is stative, meaning to stay overnight, so “the wages must not remain with you until morning” (LXX; Rashi; KJV; Milgrom 1638; NJPS). Many interpreters take the verb as hiphil second singular and therefore causative: “you must not keep the wages overnight” (Pesh; Nachmanides; HAL; NRSV; CEB). The further specification ‫“ אתך‬with you” makes clear that the employer has the wages but refuses to pay them immediately, an interpretation watered down by reading the verb as qal. The stronger hiphil reading is more likely because all of the Pentateuchal legal collections contain prohibitions on keeping employees’ wages overnight (here and Deut. 24:15; cf. Prov. 3:28) or their cloak overnight as a pledge (Exod. 22:26; Deut. 24:13). This verse describes the ‫ שׂכיר‬as someone who works for daily wages (‫)פעלה‬, hence an “employee,” in contrast to ‫“ רע‬a neighbour” (see below on v. 18) or ‫“ עבד‬an enslaved person” (25:6). The frequent pairing of this word with ‫“ תושׁב‬tenant” is not a hendiadys (see on 22:10), but rather indicates two kinds of workers of roughly equivalent social status. In contrast to the “tenant,” however, ‫“ שׂכיר‬an employee” indicates day labourers who probably resided in their own homes and therefore needed their wages daily to feed themselves and their families (Hartley 315). ‫ עד־בקר‬... ‫לין פעלת‬ “keeping wages ... overnight until morning” would subject them to significant economic stress, perhaps even hunger. This specific example of financially oppressing employees led the ancient rabbis to debate exactly when the wages are owed. They took “until morning” 17 Michael J. DeBoer, “Religious Conscience Protections in American State Constitutions,” in Christianity and the Laws of Conscience: An Introduction (ed. Jeffrey B. Hammond and Helen M. Alvare; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 308, 316-17, 322-23.

478

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

to mean “by morning” (Sifra; m. B. Mes. 9:11; Milgrom 1638) which gives employers half a day “to come up with the money” (Rashi; Nachmanides disagreed). This interpretation ignores the plain meaning of ‫“ לון אתך‬keep for yourself” which suggests that the employer already has the wages but refuses to pay immediately, perhaps in order to force employees to return to work the following day. Withholding wages gets singled out as a crime typical of rich people in Jas. 5:4. For more on the reception history of this ethic of honest business dealings, see above on vv. 10-11. 19:14 You (sg) must not dishonour a deaf person or put an obstacle in front of a blind person. You must revere your God – I am YHWH! ‫“ קלל‬dishonour” is often translated “revile” (NRSV) or “insult” (Milgrom, CEB) here but “curse” or “dishonour” in 20:9 about one’s parents. Efforts to translate consistently in both places use “curse” (KJV, Wenham, NIV, Hartley, Kiuchi), “insult” (NJPS, Fox), or “vilify” (Alter). ‫ קלל‬piel “to make small, belittle” is the antonym of ‫“ כבד‬make heavy, honour.” I translate it with “dishonour” consistently to underscore the equivalence that using this word draws between the fundamental moral ideal of honouring parents’ teaching (see Exegesis to 20:9) and rude behaviour that some might minimize as relatively harmless. Nevertheless, the parallel with placing obstacles before blind people shows that this verse specifically prohibits verbal abuse that deaf people cannot hear. ‫“ מכשׁל‬obstacle” has since Tyndale and KJV been translated “stumbling block,” which represents well the idea in this verse. Deuteronomy 27:18 invokes a curse on those who misdirect blind people on the road. Both verses condemn cruel practical jokes against people who are unable to stop them (Milgrom 1639). Similar concerns are not attested in other ancient legal collections and may be an innovation of biblical law (David Tabb Stewart in Milgrom 1641) because of its inclusion of wisdom exhortations. Interpreters have long generalized this verse’s meaning into a prohibition on humour at the expense of more vulnerable people (e.g. m. Shebu. 4:13; Sifra; Rashi; see Milgrom 1639-40). The phrase, “deaf and blind,” seems to have functioned as a conventional metonymy for helplessness in ancient Near Eastern cultures (Stewart in Milgrom 1640). Traditional interpreters often understood “deaf” and “blind” figuratively for those not present to hear the insult and see the offender (Augustine, Rashi) or for the ignorant (Nicholas of Lyra; see Elliott 196). The book of Ezekiel already used ‫מכשׁל‬ “obstacle” as a metaphor for sin and punishment (Ezek. 3:20; 7:19; etc.). The command, ‫“ יראת מאלהיך‬revere your God,” appears exclusively in Leviticus in the context of moral commands (19:14, 30, 32; 25:17, 36, 43). Some interpreters take this statement as a threat because God sees and hears

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

479

what is said and done even if the victims do not (Hieke 724-25). Therefore, Milgrom (1609) distinguished ‫ ירא מן‬in this phrase as meaning “fear” God from ‫ ירא את־‬in v. 3 as “revere” parents, but the distinction breaks down in ‫“ מקדשׁי תיראו‬fear/revere my sanctuary” in v. 30 that uses neither particle. Rather than two different meanings, it is better to view ‫ ירא‬as indicating a range of meanings, like most words. This chapter plays on that semantic range (as Leviticus often does) to associate reverence for God and the sanctuary with a commitment to basic morality, represented by “mother and father.” 19:15 You (pl) must not judge dishonestly. You (sg) must not privilege poor people and you must not defer to important people. You must judge your associate with righteousness. This verse prohibits bias in legal judgments by showing favouritism. General exhortations to judge honestly and with righteousness bracket more specific prohibitions on favouring either poor or important people. The plural and singular address to “you” emphasizes that it is the responsibility of the community to assure justice in court as well as of the individual who is called upon to give judgment. (SP makes the first verb singular for greater consistency; similarly in vv. 11-12.) ‫“ עול‬dishonesty” describes fraudulent weights and measures in v. 35. Dishonesty, then, is prohibited more broadly than just in judicial settings (cf. Ps. 82:2). ‫“ דל‬poor people” are described in 14:21 as “not having enough in hand” (similarly Jer. 39:10), but the word can more broadly label people deprived of social or political power (2 Sam. 3:1). The prophetic and wisdom books condemn those who take advantage of poor people (Amos 2:7; 4:1; 5:11: 8:8; Isa. 10:2; Prov. 14:31; 21:13; 22:22), while depicting God and just leaders as their champions (Isa. 11:4; 14:30; 25:4; Prov. 19:17; 22:16). ‫“ תשׂא פני־דל‬privileging poor people” is literally “raising the poor’s face” which sounds like a good thing. This prohibition’s point, however, is that legal judgment should not be swayed by the social or economic status of an accuser or witness, whether low or high. Thus Exod. 23:3 prohibits ‫הדר‬ “deferring” to the poor just like this verse prohibits “deferring” to important people, literally to their “face.” Deuteronomy emphasizes three times the need for impartial justice (Deut. 1:17; 16:19-20; 27:19). However, Exodus 23, like the prophets, also acknowledges the legal disadvantages suffered by poor people. It mandates that poor people receive justice (23:6) and it prohibits bribary (23:8). ‫“ גדול‬important people” is sometimes translated “rich people” (NJPS; Milgrom 1643), but the term indicates a person of political as well as economic

480

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

influence (“the mighty” KJV; “the great” NRSV, CEB). The parallel prohibition in Deut. 1:17 contrasts the ‫“ קטן‬small, unimportant” with the ‫גדול‬ “mighty, important.” Translating both terms economically (“poor and rich”) limits the scope of this rule, which has usually been understood more broadly as condemning any kind of judicial favouritism. The frameworks of some ancient Near Eastern legal collections (Ur-Nammu, lines 162-88; Hammurabi, xlviii 59-78; see Roth 1995, 16, 133-34) say that they aim to prevent favouring important people in court, but only biblical law also prohibits favouring the poor in judicial decisions. There are no good explanations for this unusual emphasis in biblical law. Childs (1974, 481) suggested that prohibiting bias in favour of the poor (Exod. 23:3) recognizes “the subtle danger of reverse prejudice.” This prohibition against favouring either poor or important people may propound, according to Gerstenberger (269), “a more abstract, formal principle of equity.” Because of these verses’ influence, the ideal of impartial judgment spread beyond legal settings (Jas. 2:1, 9). For ‫“ עמית‬associate,” see Exegesis to 5:21. ‫“ בצדק‬with righteousness, righteously” (KJV; Alter) can be translated “with justice” (NRSV) or “fairly” (NJPS; CEB). The judicial context supports translating “justice.” However, this verse uses the common word pair, ‫משׁפט‬/‫“ שׁפט‬judge, justice” and ‫צדקה‬/‫“ צדק‬righteous, righteousness” (e.g. Gen. 18:19; Deut. 1:16; 2 Sam. 8:15; 1 Kgs. 10:9; Hos. 2:21; Isa. 1:21, 26; 16:5; 26:9; Pss. 58:1; 89:15; 119:75) which suggests that the terms complement each other but are not synonyms. Judges and rulers must exhibit both right judgment, “justice,” and personal integrity, “righteousness.” Translations should not obscure the appearance here of this famous pair of concepts. This legal ideal has been popularized by the maxim, “justice is (or should be) blind,” represented since the sixteenth century by the popular judicial icon of blindfolded justice holding scales and a sword. This icon developed in deliberate contrast to older and very prominent images of the unblinking open eyes of justice, which were often associated with the absolute authority of Church or State.18 The ideal of impartial justice therefore has political implications, as this verse acknowledges by prohibiting judges from deferring to “important” people.

18 Adriano Prosperi, Justice Blindfolded: The Historical Course of an Image (tr. J. Tedeschi and A.C. Tedeschi; Leiden: Brill, 2018 [Italian 2008]); Marcílio Franca, “The Blindness of Justice: An Iconographic Dialogue between Art and Law,” in SEE (ed. A. Pavoni et al.; London: University of Westminster Press, 2018), 169-84, online at https://doi.org/10.16997/ book12.f.

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

481

19:16 You (sg) must not spread slander among your people. You must not stand on the blood of your neighbour – I am YHWH! Lying and false oaths are already prohibited in vv. 11-12. This verse prohibits slander because it can have severe consequences for the victim. ‫“ הלך רכיל‬spread slander” is the standard idiom for telling malicious lies in prophetic and wisdom literature (Jer. 6:28; 9:3; Ezek. 22:9; Prov. 11:13; 20:19). The Temple Scroll narrowed the wrongdoing to traitorous informants (11QT 64:6-7). Like the English word, “slander,” this verse likely has legal consequences in mind (Philo, Laws 4:183; Sifra), whether the lies are told in court or out of court. MT’s plural, ‫“ בעמיך‬among your peoples,” has been understood to mean relatives (Levine 129, Milgrom 1644), while the more plausible singular, “your people,” in SP, LXX, Pesh, the Targums, and many Hebrew manuscripts (BHS, BHQ) indicates the Israelites (NJPS), as do the parallels in Exod. 23:1,7; Ezek. 22:9. The same disagreement over singular or plural of ‫ עם‬appears in 21:1, 14-15. See further in Exegesis to 21:14. ‫“ לא תעמד על־דם רעך‬you must not stand on the blood of your neighbour” is both shocking and ambiguous. It has been taken as prohibiting conspiracies to commit murder (TgOnq; Ibn Ezra; Nachmanides; Kiuchi 352) or standing by when someone’s life is in danger (Sifra; TgPsJ; Maimonides; Rashi) or profiting from someone’s death (NJPS; Levine 129).19 The whole verse can be understood as prohibiting slander because it might lead to a capital conviction in court. The lack of a copulative ‫ ו‬between MT’s clauses supports connecting them (Milgrom 1645), though the copulative is supplied in many Hebrew manuscripts and Pesh (BHS; SPCEM). Regardless of how this textual issue is resolved, legal consequences were probably intended. Wenham (268) observed that slander would more likely impact judicial judgments (v. 15) when village elders served as judges. The next chapter illustrates how easily slanders about illicit ritual or sexual behaviour might make the victim subject to capital punishment (20:2, 9-16; Hartley 316). Martin Luther inveighed repeatedly against slanderers, especially preachers, and called on rulers to punish repeat offenders (Elliott 199-200). Modern courts still debate whether testimony about a defendant’s reputation and prior behaviour should be allowed to influence decisions in criminal cases. Some NT traditions generalized Pentateuchal rules against court-room bias and slander into bans on ever judging other people (Matt. 7:1; Jas. 4:11-12). Unlike the ancient rabbis, early Christians did not envision themselves as 19 See Johann Maier, “Verleumder oder Verräter. Zur jüdischen Auslegungsgeschichte von Lev 19, 16,” Studien zur jüdischen Bibel und ihrer Geschichte (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004), 277-84.

482

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

courtroom judges, but only as defendants (Mark 13:9; Matt. 10:17-19; Luke 12:11-12) and they resisted filing law suits (1 Cor. 6:1-10). Though most abandoned these positions once Christians gained political power in the fourth century, Mennonites have traditionally refused to serve on juries or as judges or in any other government positions.20 This verse’s provocative phrasing, “do not stand on your neighbour’s blood,” has impacted more than courtroom behaviour. It became the basis for a mandate to save lives whenever possible (b. Sanh. 73a) and is therefore very important to Jewish medical ethics.21 In the sense of “you must not stand idly by while your neighbour bleeds,” it can be understood as prohibiting apathy in the face of any suffering (Fontaine 2013, 113-15). This verse has therefore contributed significantly to moral reasoning not only in Jewish and Christian religious traditions, but also in law, medical ethics, humanitarian aid, and environmentalism. 19:17 You (sg) must not hate your brother in your heart. You must openly rebuke your associate, but you must not bear sin because of them (ms). This command not to ‫“ שׂנא‬hate” is unparalleled in the HB. The Psalms instead provide many positive examples of hating wrongdoing and wrongdoers (e.g. Pss. 26:5; 97:10; 119:13; 139:21-22; also Prov. 8:13; 28:16). This command not to hate seems to be formulated to parallel the command to love in v. 18b. The two commands form a frame around vv. 17b-18a about rebuking but not taking revenge (see Schwartz 1999, 317-19; Goldstone 2018, 11). The meaning of “hate” here is defined by ‫“ בלבבך‬in your heart,” which refers not to emotion (which the HB localizes in the stomach) but to secret thoughts (so LXX τῇ διανοίᾳ), that is, to plotting intentionally against others (Zech. 8:17; Prov. 26:24-25; cf. 10:18; see Kugel 1987, 45-47; Milgrom 1646-47). ‫“ אחיך‬your brother/relative” clearly means your fellow Israelite in Leviticus 25, which nevertheless describes economic situations that are not limited by ethnicity (see Exegesis to 25:25). Economic concerns are part of the context here as well (vv. 9-11, 13). In this verse, “brother” parallels ‫“ עמית‬associate” (see Exegesis to 5:21). Wenham (697) and Hartley (309), who grouped the rules of this chapter by divine self-declarations, observed an intensifying pattern in the use of terms for people in vv. 11-18: “associate” in vv. 11-12; “neighbour” in vv. 13-14; “associate,” “people,” and 20 Michael Hatfield, “The Anabaptist Conscience and Religious Exemption to Jury Service,” NYU Annual Survey of American Law 269 (2009), 269-322. 21 Yechiel Michael Barilan, Jewish Bioethics: Rabbinic Law and Theology in Their Social and Historical Contexts (New York: Cambridge, 2013), 34, 59, 233.

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

483

“neighbour” in vv. 15-16; “brother,” “associate,” “one of your own people,” and “neighbour” in vv. 17-18. ‫ יכח‬hiphil “rebuke” can refer to legal arguments (Hos. 4:4; Job 13:3, 15) and also more generally to reprimands (Prov. 9:8; 27:5; 28:23; Job 6:25-26; see Milgrom 1647-48). Doubling a verb as imperfect and infinitive absolute usually intensifies the verb, but in contrasting phrases it can intensify the contrast (GKC §113p; Walke-O’Conner §§35.3.b, f, h). This usage therefore supports translating ‫ הוכח תוכיח‬as “rebuke openly” in contrast to hating “in your heart” (Hartley 305; Milgrom 1648). Early interpreters understood a causal relationship between the first two phrases: avoid hatred “in your heart” by openly rebuking another. They took this verse’s advice to be that it is better to express anger than to stew over it (Sir. 19:17; T. Gad 6:3; Didache 2:7; see Kugel 1998, 753-54). ‫“ נשׂא חטא‬bear sin” appears also in 20:20 where it means responsibility for wrongdoing, like the Akkadian equivalent in Neo-Babylonian administrative documents (Wells 2004, 73; see Exegesis to 5:1). Leviticus also uses ‫“ נשׂא עון‬bear liability” (5:1; 20:17, 19) with a similar meaning. ‫ עליו‬could mean “against him” or “because of him,” but the other uses of “bearing” sin and liability in Leviticus support “because of him.” The relationship between the second and third phrases is ambiguous, but crucial for understanding their meaning (Hartley 317). Most interpreters understand the blame to fall on those who apathetically do not challenge wrongdoers: “reprove your neighbour or you will incur guilt yourself” (NRSV; also the Targums; NIV; Hartley 303; Milgrom 1648; Fox; CEB). Others take the phrases separately: “reprove your kinsman but incur no guilt because of him” (NJPS; similarly LXX; Vg; KJV; Alter). Another interpretation takes the last phrase of v. 17 and the prohibition against vengeance that opens v. 18 as parallels, so the point of 17b-c is to voice a rebuke rather than taking violent action (Kugel 1987, 45; Schwartz 2004, 254). Interpreters of this verse in the late Second Temple period emphasized using oral rebukes in attempts to limit the social damage from disputes. They differed in finding either a moral or a judicial mandate in this verse (Kugel 1987, 48-61; Goldstone 2018, 15). The moral mandate urged using rebuke to avoid sinning oneself (e.g. Sir. 19:13-17). But at Qumran, this verse came to require personal rebuke as a preliminary step before charging someone legally (1QS 6:1; DD 9:3-8; see also Kugel 1998, 754-55, 766-68; Milgrom 164950). Early Christians also advised taking witnesses to a rebuke in hopes of forestalling expulsion from the community (Matt. 18:15-16). Matthew Goldstone (2018) has traced a widening debate over the value and function of rebuke among later interpreters in the first millennium C.E. Some tannaitic rabbis questioned the possibility and practicality of rebuke (Sifra Qedoshim 4; Sifre Devarim). Both the Babylonian Talmud (b. Arakhin)

484

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

and early Christian monastics (the Desert Fathers) advocated introspection instead of rebuke. But Midrash Tanḥuma reasserted the importance of rebuke, which Goldstone (2018, 24) contextualized historically within “the obligation to ‘forbid wrong’ in early Islam.” 19:18 You (sg) must not take revenge and you must not resent one of your own people. You must love your neighbour like you – I am YHWH! This verse consists of two connected prohibitions of revenge and resentment and then a positive command to love one’s neighbour (Johnson 1982, 397). ‫“ נקם‬avenge, take revenge” usually takes God as subject in the HB (Lev. 26:25; Nah. 1:2). God’s vengeance against evildoers guarantees justice (Deut. 32:35-38, 43; Ps. 99:8) and explains why humans should not take revenge themselves (1 Sam. 24:13; Jer. 20:12) – a theme emphasized at Qumran (CD 9:8) and in the NT (Rom. 12:19; Heb. 10:30; Jas. 5:9). Here, however, the prohibition of revenge is framed by commands to construct better human relationships through honesty (v. 17) and love (v. 18b). The verb ‫ נטר‬is less clear. It appears only nine times in the HB, sometimes with the meaning “keep, guard” but elsewhere referring to God’s anger (DCH). Most therefore translate here “bear a grudge” (KJV, NRSV, NJPS) which sounds too weak to parallel ‫“ נקם‬avenge” (see Milgrom 1651), but English does not offer stronger options. Jeremiah 3:5, 12 uses the verb for long-term anger, so I translate “resent.” These prohibitions of revenge and resentment are united by taking the same object, ‫“ בני עמך‬one of your own people.” Aside from v. 34, the love neighbour commandment is not paralleled elsewhere in the Pentateuch. However, other legal collections do require helping one’s neighbour: Deuteronomy 22:1-4 adds the principle “you must not withhold your help” (v. 3) to Exod. 23:4-5’s specific examples. ‫“ אהב‬love,” like ‫“ שׂנא‬hate” (v. 17), refers not so much to emotions as to actions. The word pair, “love/hate,” was ancient Near Eastern treaty language for political loyalty and disloyalty.22 In the Pentateuch, therefore, “love” describes Israel’s fidelity to God’s covenant (Deut. 11:1) and YHWH’s support for Israel (Deut. 7:8). While including spousal and filial love (Gen. 22:2; 24:67; 25:28; 29:20; Deut. 21:15), it describes loyalty in human relationships (Ruth 4:15), even of enslaved people to their enslavers (Exod. 21:5; Deut. 15:16). Abraham Malamat suggested that the unusual indirect object 22 William L. Moran, “The Ancient Near Eastern Background of the Love of God in Deuteronomy,” CBQ 25 (1963), 77-87; Eckart Otto 1999a, 362; Nathan MacDonald, Deuteronomy and the Meaning of “Monotheism” (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 102-104.

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

485

after the verb ‫( אהב ל־‬also in v. 34) further emphasizes actions to benefit, assist, or otherwise be of service to others.23 Much debate has revolved around the meaning of the term, ‫“ רעך‬your neighbour,” in this verse (also in vv. 13, 16; 20:10; 22:25). Since v. 34 extends the love command to the ‫“ גר‬immigrant,” the ‫“ רעה‬neighbour” seems to be synonymous with “your brother” and “your associate” in the previous verse, so limited here to Israelites (women included; so already Sifra). Many interpreters therefore see these terms as limiting the mandate to care for others to one’s fellow Israelites (e.g. Akiyama 2018, 55). Thomas Hieke (722) argued that this emphasis reflects the text’s origins in the small and defensive Persian-period Judean community, a context that constrained their ability to imagine morally effective action more broadly. However, the parallel in v. 16 between a “neighbour” and a ‫“ שׂכיר‬employee,” who may well be an immigrant (Deut. 24:14-15; see also Exod. 11:2), as well as the parallel command to love immigrants in v. 34 shows that the moral mandate to show concern and care for others does extend beyond the community of Israelites (Schüle 2001, 533; Hieke 724). This point was emphasized by Matt. 5:44, Luke 6:27, 35, and most famously in the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:27-37), and has been central to this verse’s deep history of Christian interpretation and influence. Jewish interpretive traditions and liturgies also generalize the moral duty to care for others (see Exposition above). The interpretive crux of this verse lies in the common particle and pronoun, ‫“ כמוך‬like you.” Should it be translated adjectivally to mean “love your neighbour who is like you” or adverbially to mean “love your neighbour like you (should) love yourself”? The adjectival meaning seems to be supported by the context that refers to your “brother,” “associate,” and “one of your people” (see above on v. 17), all people who are “like you” (Akiyama 2018, 57-63). The parallel in v. 34 specifies how Israelites are like immigrants because they were immigrants in Egypt (cf. also ‫ כמוך‬in Deut. 18:18; 1 Kgs. 3:12; 8:23; Schüle 2001, 525-26). The adverbial meaning of a similar formula, ‫“ אהב כנפשׁך‬love (someone) like your own person,” describes Jonathan’s covenant with David (1 Sam. 18:1, 3; 20:17) and also the loyalty demanded by Assyrian king Esarhaddon’s Succession Treaty for his son, Asshurbanipal (VTE §24:268; COS 4.36 §24). Though Mathys (1986, 14-19) cited these parallels in support of the adverbial meaning, “like you love yourself” (interpreted this way explicitly already in Jub. 36:4; see 23 Abraham Malamat, “‘You Shall Love Your Neighbor as Yourself’: A Case of Misinterpretation?” in Die Hebräische Bibel und ihre zweifache Nachgeschichte: Festschrift für Rolf Rendtorff (eds. E. Blum, C. Macholz, and E. W. Stegemann; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1990), 111-15; see also Mendes-Flohr 2007.

486

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

Milgrom 1655), this treaty language expresses willingness to risk one’s life for another, which seems much narrower than the ethical implications of loving others in Lev. 19:18, 34 and Deut. 10:18-19 (Schüle 2001, 521-22). The Gospels’ parallel with the command to love God “with all your heart (mind), person, and strength” requires an adverbial meaning, “like yourself.” It shows the prevalence of this interpretation in the first century C.E. and, perhaps, much earlier (Collins 2021, 189-91). I translate “like you” to preserve the ambiguity of the Hebrew text for readers to decide for themselves between adjectival and adverbial interpretations (see Leviticus 1-10, 6-8). For the history of the love commandment’s interpretation and influence, see Exposition above. Its prominence in Jewish and Christian ethical teachings, along with the commands for justice and charity that precede it, should be highlighted typographically in published bibles to draw readers’ attention to their importance. I therefore print vv. 9-18 and 33-36 in boldface (see further in the Author’s Preface above). 19:19 My mandates you (pl) must observe. You (sg) must not breed two different kinds of your quadrupeds, you must not seed your field with two different kinds, you must not wear clothing blended of two different kinds. The structure of chap. 19 is best analyzed as consisting of two lists of rules (see Exposition: Structure). The heading here, ‫“ את־חקתי תשׁמרו‬my mandates you must observe,” marks the beginning of the second list and will be repeated and elaborated at the end (v. 37). For ‫“ חקה‬mandate,” see Exegesis to 6:11. “Mandates” is a prominent theme in the structural framework of chaps. 18-20 (18:3-5, 26, 30; 19:19, 37; 20:8, 23). These prohibitions against mixing ‫“ כלאים‬two different kinds” of livestock, crops, and clothing appear also in Deut. 22:9-11, except that Deuteronomy prohibits yoking ox and donkey together rather than interbreeding (unless yoking is a metaphor for breeding). The word ‫“ כלאים‬two different kinds” appears in the HB only in these two texts. ‫“ בהמה‬quadruped” includes both edible and polluting animals (11:2-8). It therefore includes horses and donkeys which were commonly interbred in the Middle East to produce mules. ‫פרד‬/‫“ פרדה‬mule” is mentioned 17 times in the HB, though not in the Pentateuch, and never disparagingly (Hartley 305). ‫ זרע‬means “seed, semen” as a noun in the next verse and “to sow seed” as a verb here. Ezra 9:2 and 4QMMT B 72-83 interpret this verse’s prohibition of mixtures as applying to intermarriage. A sexual implication is possible here, since the next verse and surrounding chapters use ‫“ זרע‬seed, semen” to describe sexual intercourse and Molek worship (18:20-23; 20:2-3; Harrington 2019, 63; see further below).

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

487

‫“ שׁעטנז‬blended” is an Egyptian loan word describing fabric as “false” (HAL) or “blended.” LXX translated κίβδηλος “adulterated, fake.” ‫שׁעטנז‬ appears in the HB only here and in the parallel in Deut. 22:11, where it is described as wool blended with linen. Rabbinic texts labelled the blue and white tassels that every Israelite man must wear as ‫ שׁעטנז‬because they consist of blue-dyed wool and white linen (Num. 15:38-39; b. Men. 40a; Milgrom 1663; cf. Deut. 22:12 which does not specify the blue thread). Commentators are perplexed by these bans on common practices. Mules and polyculture were common in ancient Israel (2 Sam. 13:29; 18:9; 1 Kgs. 1:33; 18:5; Isa. 28:25; Cant. 1:14), and the priests wore vestments of wool and linen (Exod. 39:27-29). Explanations for these rules are therefore very speculative. Perhaps mixtures offend against God’s created order by combining things meant to be kept separated (b. Qid. 39a; Ibn Ezra; Douglas 1966, 53; Gerstenberger 273). Maybe these rules are metaphors prohibiting intermarriage with non-Israelites (4QMMT B 75-82; Wenham; Carmichael 1997, 87-104). Or perhaps mixtures were prohibited in secular life because mixed animals and materials represented holiness (Josephus, Ant. 4.208; Milgrom 1659-61, pointing to cherubim in Ezek. 1:5-11 and the mixed materials in the Tabernacle and the priests’ clothing in Exod. 26:1, 31; 28:6, 15; 39:29; followed by Nihan 2007, 468; Kiuchi 355; Hieke 739). This last interpretation is supported by Deut. 22:9 which describes the produce of mixed plantings as ‫“ קדשׁ‬sanctified” and therefore forfeit to the temple. None of these explanations, however, gains support from this immediate literary context or even from Leviticus as a whole. Instead, this concern for illegitimate mixtures most likely reflects the concern in chaps. 18 and 20 about polluting people and land by sexual intercourse with the wrong Israelite people and animals, which manifests itself here by prohibiting other common mixtures (Brenner 1997, 125-26). Many of the prohibitions of illicit sexual intercourse as well as these against mixing animals, crops, and clothes do not accord with narrative depictions of customary Israelite practices, which Leviticus 18-20 and Deut. 22:9-11 therefore seem intent on changing. The Qumran community restricted the prohibition on interbreeding to only clean animals, probably to allow for mules, and also understood the rule as prohibiting intermarriage between priests and Israelite lay people (4QMMT B 76, 81-82) as well as with foreigners. Christian interpreters have taken the rules against mixing metaphorically as prohibiting mixed beliefs (hypocrisy) or illicit sexual intercourse or mixing with Jews (Elliott 204-6). The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 C.E. cited Lev. 19:19 as a metaphor for insincere Jewish converts to Christianity: In keeping remnants of their former rite, they upset the decorum of the Christian religion by such a mixing. Since it is written, ... a garment that is woven from linen and wool together should not be put on, we therefore decree that such

488

Leviticus 19 Exegesis people shall be wholly prevented by the prelates of churches from observing their old rite, so that those who freely offered themselves to the Christian religion may be kept to its observance by a salutary and necessary coercion.24

Elliott (206) detected in nineteenth-century biblical scholarship on this verse that emphasized everything in its place a premonition of the Nazi slogan, Jedem das Seine “to each their own.” It appeared, among other places, during the twentieth-century Shoah/Holocaust over the gates of the Buchenwald concentration camp. A twenty-first century agrarian reading of Leviticus stumbles on this prohibition of seeding two crops in the same field, because modern environmental thought blames monoculture for eroding soil unsustainably. Thus Ellen Davis, whose agrarian approach elsewhere celebrated Leviticus’s literal focus on land, here followed Origen in turning to symbolic interpretation, in her case a criticism of genetically engineered crops (Davis 2009, 87). Throughout its interpretive history, then, this verse has puzzled readers, but it has also justified persecuting people accused of “mixing” inappropriately. 19:20 When a man lays a layer of semen with a woman who is an enslaved woman engaged to a man but not yet fully released or given her freedom, there must be consequences but they must not die, because she has not been freed. This is the only case of sexual misbehaviour addressed in Leviticus 19, but the chapter is framed by the most extensive lists of sexual prohibitions and sanctions in ancient literature (chaps. 18 and 20). Some interpreters take the casuistic form and sexual contents of this verse as indicating a later insertion into this chapter (Noth 146; Elliger 249), but that does not explain the reason for the insertion. Wenham (270) suggested that the preceding prohibition of mixtures (v. 19) led to thinking about sex with foreign enslaved women, but admitted that this rule is about rape, not marriage. Milgrom (1665, 1676) and Gerstenberger (264, 274) argued that H excerpted this case from P because of H’s interest in the guilt offering. Kiuchi (357) thought that it parallels v. 15 as an example of impartial judgment. However, the fact that in Deut. 22:9-29, rules about virginity tests, adultery, and rape follow immediately after prohibitions of agricultural mixtures indicates that this rule’s placement here follows a pre-existing pattern (Nihan 2007, 470; Hieke 740). Deuteronomy 22:22-29 addresses adultery and rape of married and unmarried women, but not the specific circumstance of an engaged enslaved woman, which in the HB is discussed only here. The 24 Norman P. Tanner, ed. and trans., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols. (London, 1990), 1:267.

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

489

mandate in this verse, “they must not die,” clearly presupposes laws requiring the death penalty for adultery (Lev. 20:10 as well as Deut. 22:22-24). Therefore, Nihan (2007, 471) described vv. 20-22 as “a remarkable illustration of the exegesis of an earlier legal tradition from the specific perspective of the community’s achievement of holiness.” Apart from the chapter heading in v. 2, however, the only possible allusion to holiness in or around this case is the requirement for a ‫“ אשׁם‬guilt offering” in v. 21 (see below). ‫“ ואישׁ כי‬when a man” resembles the beginning of the casuistic rules for illicit sexual intercourse in 20:9-21, except for using ‫ כי‬rather than ‫( אשׁר‬see Leviticus 1-10, 160-61). ‫“ ישׁכב שׁכבת־זרע‬lay a layer of semen” is the priestly writers’ peculiar phrase for sexual intercourse (15:16-18, 32; 18:20-23; 22:4; Num. 5:20; see Exegesis to 15:18 and 18:20). Here ‫“ זרע‬semen/seed” echoes the prohibition of mixing two kinds of seed in the previous verse. That verbal link may account for a sexual rule’s placement here (Kriger 2011, 156 who noted the similar mix of subjects in Deut. 22), but does not explain the choice of this particular rule. See further on the next verse. The meaning of this verse is obscured by technical terms about slavery and marriage (‫בקרת‬, ‫חפשׁה‬, ‫הפדה לא נפדתה‬, ‫ )נחרפת‬that are not well understood. ‫ נחרפת‬is usually translated “engaged, betrothed” here purely on the basis of context, but the usual term for betrothed is ‫( ארשׁ‬Exod. 22:15; Deut. 22:23). The root ‫ חרף‬means “to annoy, taunt.” Rare cognates in other languages may support the meaning “betrothed” or, more generally, “promised, assigned” (Levine 130; Milgrom 1666-67). Sexual intercourse with a woman engaged to another man falls under the prohibition of adultery and its death penalty (Deut. 22:23-24; cf. Lev. 20:10; also the Laws of Eshnunna §26 and Hammurabi §130). This woman, however, is a ‫“ שׁפחה‬enslaved woman,” which reduces the penalty, perhaps because her rape was categorized not as illicit sex but as infringing on her owner’s rights (as in Eshnunna §31; so Kriger 2011, 153). Exodus 21:7-11 requires that a woman enslaved for debt, after seven years of service, be either married by her enslaver or his son, or released to another man for marriage, or else freed outright. This rule here may reflect the second option (Levine 131). However, the slavery rules of Lev. 25:39-43 require up to forty-nine years of service (25:10), which severs any likely connection between an enslaved woman’s future marriage and mandated release periods. Deuteronomy 21:10-14 envisions a different scenario in which a female war prisoner is forcibly married, after which she cannot be sold. An enslaved foreigner has no hope for release after time served (Lev. 25:44-46; Deut. 15:12-17). However, the phrasing of the Deuteronomic law implies that she could be sold to be another man’s wife so long as the enslaver refrains from raping her. Here, vv. 20-22 address the consequences of a third man

490

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

raping an enslaved woman with a liminal status like those described in Exodus and Deuteronomy. This rule, however, is less concerned with the case’s legal intricacies than with the ritual offering necessary to resolve it (vv. 21-22). ‫“ פדה‬release” refers frequently to being redeemed ritually (27:29; Exod. 13:13, 15; 34:20; Num. 18:16), but also to ransoming women enslaved for debt in order to be married here and in Exod. 21:8. The verb doubled as hophal infinitive and niphal imperfect, ‫הפדה לא נפדתה‬, can be translated as usual to intensify its meaning (KJV “not at all redeemed”; Hartley “never been ransomed”). Here it more likely indicates a process begun but not yet completed, so “not yet fully released” (also CEB; for other modal nuances of such constructions, see Waltke-O’Conner §35.3.1g). Many grammarians repoint the infinitive as niphal for consistency (GKC §113w, BHS, Hartley 305), but the fact that both verbs are passive is agreement enough (Milgrom 1667). ‫ חפשׁה‬appears only here in the HB, and is usually translated contextually as “free, freedom.” The woman seems to have been sold to a man to become his wife, when she will no longer be regarded as enslaved. Perhaps the time between her betrothal and freedom gives her betrothed time to gather the funds to pay for her. ‫“ בקרת‬consequences” is another unique noun. The verb, ‫“ בקר‬look for, inquire” appears in 13:36, 27:33. LXX is ambiguous: ἐπισκοπή can mean “oversight,” “inspection,” or “punishment.” English translations include “compensation” (NJPS, Wenham, Levine), “an investigation” (NRSV; Milgrom; Hartley; Kamionkowski), “a distinction” (Schwartz 1999, 332-35; Kiuchi), or “a claim” (Kriger 2011, 155). Others find here a threat of retribution: “she/they must be whipped” (TgPsJ; Sifra; Vg; KJV) or, more generally, “there must be punishment” (CEB). For discussions of all the options and the philological evidence, see Drazin (1994, 175) and Milgrom (166871). In order to represent the Hebrew and Greek texts’ ambiguity, I translate with the general term, “consequences.” To ‫“ בקרת תהיה‬there will be consequences,” the ancient versions added “to him” (SP), “to them” (LXX), or “for her” (TgOnk). BHQ (110) interpreted these variants as different assignments of culpability, but that depends on the meaning of ‫בקרת‬, which is ambiguous in all these sources. Since the death penalty is explicitly ruled out and ritual mitigation is described in the following verses, the “consequences” most likely consist of compensation paid by the rapist either to the enslaver (as in Eshnunna §31) or to her betrothed husband, or both (Wenham 270-71; Levine 130; Hieke 742; contra Milgrom 1665-66). For the death penalty referenced by ‫“ לא יומתו‬they must not die,” see Exegesis to 20:2.

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

491

Diane Kriger (2011, 349) contrasted biblical depictions of enslaved wives with their discussion by ancient rabbis: “The development in slave definition from [the] Bible, where a slave woman was dependent and placed in the family continuum and her reproductive capacity would be utilized, forms a sharp contrast with the Mishnah, where she is marginalized and sexual relations with her are either prohibited or without legal consequence.” Instead, rabbinic literature recorded debates over her ethnic status (Milgrom 1666). Medieval and early modern Christian interpreters seized on this case to illustrate the superiority of Christ’s law which condemns lust of any kind over the laws of Moses (Matt. 5:28; see Elliott 206-207). The assumption behind this rule is that men have ready sexual access to enslaved women, but not to this one because of a sale agreement in preparation for her marriage. As Kriger (2011, 13) put it, “a female slave is incapable of treason (adultery) given the conditions of coercion under which she exists.” Thus debates about whether the enslaved woman was raped or consenting (e.g. Milgrom 1671) were irrelevant in ancient cultures, because her enslaved condition was defined by coercion (Gerstenberger 274; Glancy 2002, 53), in contrast to a free betrothed women whose consent was legally decisive (Deut. 22:23-27). For endorsing this presumption that enslaved people can be sexually abused without moral or legal repercussions, and that abusing even those promised freedom deserves only financial and ritual penalties, vv. 20-22 deserve to be struck through along with all other biblical allowances for slavery to mark their failure to meet the most basic standards of Jewish and Christian ethics (see further in the Author’s Preface above). 19:21 He must bring his guilt (offering or payment) for YHWH to the entrance of the meeting tent, a ram guilt (offering). The contrast between the ambiguities of the case in v. 20 and the precision of the ritual requirements in vv. 21-22 shows that the writer’s interests lie here, in the payment of a guilt offering, not in the legal particulars of the rape of an engaged enslaved woman (Gerstenberger 264). Compare Leviticus 12, which also details a woman’s circumstances just to justify a schedule of offerings (see above). Chapter 19, however, is not otherwise concerned with sanctuary offerings or payments. ‫“ אשׁם‬guilt” can refer to either a ram offering or the value of a ram in silver shekels (see Exegesis to 5:15). The rules for presenting ram guilt offerings are detailed in Lev. 5:15-26 (Eng. 5:15-6:7) and 7:1-7. Guilt offerings are required in cases of “sacrilege ... against YHWH’s holy things” (5:15). The requirement here of a ‫“ אשׁם‬guilt (offering or payment)” suggests therefore that sacrilege has occurred.

492

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

Many interpreters think raping an engaged enslaved woman counts as sacrilege because this rule appears in chap. 19 that begins by requiring Israel to be holy (v. 2; so Milgrom 1666-67, 1672; Nihan 2007, 470-71; Hieke 743). However, this is the only rule in the chapter that requires a guilt offering and one of only two that require punishment of any kind (also v. 8). Milgrom (1672-75) thought adultery was regarded as sacrilegious, but v. 20 seems to define this case precisely as not adultery. Schwartz (2004, 254) suggested that, even though there is no sacrilege, only a guilt offering can atone for this intentional act because sin offerings deal only with unintentional acts (5:1-4), but this distinction is not maintained consistently in Leviticus (see Exegesis to 16:16 and Leviticus 1-10, 309-16). Kline (2008, 58) argued that this liminal case falls entirely outside of social norms, and therefore requires the offender to recommit to them with the guilt offering, but the chapter does not even hint at this distinction. More likely is that the act of promising the enslaved woman to be another man’s bride involved an oath in YHWH’s name, which turned breaking the promise into an act of sacrilege (see Exegesis to 5:22). Milgrom (1673) dismissed this explanation because there is no evidence of marital oaths even in ancient marriage contracts. However, this intricate case about “an enslaved woman engaged to a man but not yet fully released” (v. 20) probably involved her enslaver’s promise to prevent any man’s sexual access to her from the time of betrothal until her marriage. Her rapist has forced her enslaver to break this vow, and he must pay for doing so (cf. on v. 12 and 5:1 which also describes liability for another person’s curse or vow). 19:22 The priest mitigates on his behalf with the ram of the guilt (offering) before YHWH for his sin that he sinned and he is forgiven for the sin that he sinned. On this formula, see Exegesis to 4:20. Outside priestly texts, the verb ‫כפר‬ frequently takes a direct object. But in Leviticus, prepositional phrases describe the effects of ‫( כפר‬see the survey in Sklar 2005, 188-93) and do so more fully here than in any other verse: “The priest mitigates (‫ )כפר‬on his behalf (‫ )עליו‬with (‫ )ב־‬the ram of the guilt offering before (‫ )לפני‬YHWH for (‫ )על‬his sin that he sinned and it is forgiven him (‫ )לו‬from (‫ )מ־‬the sin that he sinned.” Despite the wealth of prepositions in this sentence, each still has a range of possible meanings: for example, ‫ על‬here is both “on behalf of” and “for.” The four-fold repetition of the root ‫“ חטא‬sin” emphasizes that sex with an engaged enslaved woman is very wrong. This emphasis was probably necessary because enslaved women were widely considered sexually available to any man (Milgrom 1676). See further on v. 20 above.

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

493

19:23 When you (pl) come to the land and you plant any edible tree and you foreskin its foreskin with its fruit, for three years it must be foreskinned for you. It must not be eaten. The first phrase of this verse, like vv. 33-34 and 36, explicitly evokes the narrative setting of the Israelites at Mount Sinai expecting to settle soon in Canaan, which is also implicit in vv. 9-10 and 19. This fact provided the ancient rabbis reason to distinguish how the fruit of young fruit trees must be treated in the land of Israel from those outside it (m. Or. 2). ‫“ אל־הארץ‬to the land” is elsewhere in Leviticus and the Pentateuch always qualified (BHQ 110), e.g. “when you come to the land that I am giving you” (23:10). So LXX added here “which the Lord your God is giving to you” (Wevers 304). The strange phrase ‫ ערלתם ערלתו‬uses verb and noun from the same root to say “you foreskin its foreskin.” This cognate accusative probably intensifies the verbal action (Waltke-O’Conner §10.2.f; Hartley 306), but that verbal action is itself ambiguous. An adjective from the same root appears in the following phrase in the plural, ‫ערלים‬. The noun ‫ ערלה‬means “foreskin” (see Exegesis to 12:3). The adjective ‫ ערל‬means “with a foreskin, uncircumcised” (Gen. 17:14; Exod. 12:48; Josh. 5:7; etc.) and in the plural usually indicates “foreskinned/uncircumcised people” (Judg. 15:18; Ezek. 28:10). It can also be used metaphorically to mean “closed” hearts, lips, and ears (Exod. 6:12; Lev. 26:41; Jer. 6:10; Ezek. 44:9). The active verb ‫ ערל‬appears only here in the HB, where most translations take it to mean “leave uncircumcised, uncut” (KJV, Alter) or, at least, unavailable (Rashi “close its closing,” i.e. put away; NRSV and NJPS “regard as forbidden”; CEB “consider off limits”; Fox “considered-foreskinned”). ‫“ ערלה‬foreskin,” however, is not the negative of ‫“ מול‬circumcised” like English “uncircumcised, uncut,” but rather has its own semantic field ranging from “foreskin” to, at least, “covered, closed.” Interpreters debate what action or inaction is commanded here. Rabbinic rules required that any fruit of the tree’s first three years be burned (m. Ter. 7:5; m. Or. 2; TgOnk). This may already be implied by LXX’s περικαθαριεῖτε τήν ἀκαθαρσίαν αὐτοῦ “purify its pollution” which, as Wevers (305) noted, avoids the “revolting figure” of eating foreskin. Philo described farmers nipping the buds so young trees’ energy would be focused on growing strong limbs (Philo, Virtues 157-59). Milgrom (1679, 1684) argued similarly on the basis of modern horticultural practice that the young tree’s buds must be removed before they flower. Levine (131) suggested that the duplication of the root in the noun and verb actually refers to trimming: “you must trim its fruit like foreskin.” MT’s accents as well as the syntax of the consonantal verse, with conjunctions and consecutive verbs introducing the first three phrases, suggest

494

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

that the apodosis does not begin with the third phrase, “you must foreskin its foreskin,” as usually translated. The apodosis begins with the fourth phrase, “for three years, it must be foreskinned,” marked by placing ‫“ שׁלשׁ שׁנים‬three years” first for emphasis. The same syntax governs the casuistic case in v. 20 whose first three phrases are universally recognized as its protasis. Therefore, ‫“ ערלתם ערלתו‬you foreskin its foreskin” is not part of the command. It refers to something that farmers customarily do to young fruit trees, and maybe not just to their fruit since the particle in ‫ את־פריו‬may be a preposition “with its fruit,” not the sign of the direct object (Milgrom 1679). The point of the command appears at the end of the verse, ‫“ לא יאכל‬you must not eat (it).” A customary horticultural activity with young fruit trees must continue for three years to prevent consumption of the fruit. What remains unclear is whether the activity consists of picking immature fruit and/or pruning the fruit tree, or refraining from doing either. Perhaps the foreskin idiom is intentionally vague because the rule applies to all kinds of fruit trees, even though different kinds require different methods of cultivation. In Israel’s ancient horticulture, at least olives, figs, pomegranates, and dates likely fell under this rule about “fruit trees” (Deut. 8:8; the Israelites’ actual diet may not have resembled such idealistic portrayals: see MacDonald 2008, 47-56, 62). Grape vines do not fall under this rule, according to the Mishnah (m. Or. 1:7). Sampling modern advice on pruning young olive trees and date palms reveals warnings against sapping their strength by over-pruning, but young fig trees should be actively pruned to strengthen fruit-bearing branches. This verse may not specify the nature of these activities because different kinds of trees should be cultivated in different ways. The point of this rule is instead to reserve the first mature crop of fruit as an offering for YHWH’s sanctuary (v. 24), like the preceding rule which is concerned with offerings to mitigate for raping an enslaved engaged woman rather than with the woman’s fate (vv. 20-22). This verse employs the evocative but vague metaphor, “foreskin its foreskin,” for tending young fruit trees in the customary manner to prohibit eating their fruit for three years. It is therefore best to translate literally to allow readers to puzzle over this strange phrase for themselves. 19:24 In the fourth year, all its fruit will be (for) a holy celebration for YHWH. Listeners and readers would expect the fruit to be designated ‫קדשׁ ליהוה‬ “holy to YHWH” (as in 21:6; 23:20), but here another word intervenes: ‫“ קדשׁ הלולים ליהוה‬a holy celebration for YHWH.” In its two other appearances in the HB, ‫ הלולים‬refers to celebrations in vineyards at harvest time (Judg. 9:27; 21:20). This verse, therefore, seems to require that the fruit for

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

495

this celebration, or the celebration itself, be devoted to YHWH in the fourth year after the tree’s planting. Though ‫“ קדשׁ‬holy” suggests it (Hieke 745), this rule does not explicitly require bringing the fruit to the sanctuary and may reflect popular festivals in the villages or local shrines (Milgrom 1681). However, Milgrom (1595, 1683) moved MT’s athnach accent to divide the phrases after ‫ קדשׁ‬to translate, “all of its fruit shall be sacred, an offering of rejoicing to YHWH.” That resolves the ambiguity in favour of temple offerings. The Qumran sectarians required presenting the fruit to the temple priests who may eat the fourth-year fruit (11QT 38:1-7). Other legal collections mandate first fruit offerings every season at the sanctuary (Exod. 23:16, 19; 34:22, 26; Lev. 23:10, 16; Num. 18:12-13; Deut. 16:9-10; 26:1-2), but only here is a young tree’s first mature fruit claimed. However, a similar rule requires offering the first-born of domestic livestock (Exod. 13:2, 12; Lev. 27:26; Num. 18:17). SP reads ‫“ חללים‬release, desanctify” as in Deut. 20:6, instead of ‫הלולים‬ “celebration” (see also TgPsJ). The root ‫“ חלל‬defile,” however, has only negative connotations in Leviticus (e.g. vv. 8, 12, 29). This book provides little basis for broad theories about desanctifying crops in ancient Israel (e.g. Milgrom 1680-81). 19:25 In the fifth year, you (pl) may eat its fruit to increase its produce for you – I am YHWH your God! For ‫“ תבואה‬produce,” see Exegesis to 25:15. The motive clause ‫להוסיף לכם‬ ‫“ תבואתו‬to increase its produce for you” would fit better in the previous verses. Jubilees depicts Noah making wine from fourth-year grapes but not drinking it until the beginning of the fifth year in observance of this rule (Jub. 7:1-6; Milgrom 1681-82). 19:26 You (pl) must not eat with the blood. You must not seek omens and you must not read portents. The prohibition on consuming blood is the central theme of Leviticus 17 and is prominent elsewhere in the Pentateuch (Gen. 9:4; Lev. 3:17; 7:26; Deut. 12:23). Leviticus’s rules for ritual offerings require that blood be drained from animal carcasses (chaps. 3-7) before they may be eaten by priests or worshippers. The exact phrase here, ‫ אכל על־הדם‬literally “eat upon the blood,” describes eating improperly butchered meat from which blood has not been drained in the story of Saul’s hungry soldiers (three times in 1 Sam. 14:32-34; cf. Ezek. 33:25). ‫ על‬can also mean “with,” implying “meat with the blood” (so most translations, Elliger, Noth, Levine). Aside from the five appearances

496

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

of this exact phrase, however, ‫“ אכל על‬eat with” is followed by nouns indicating one food eaten with the other (Exod. 12:8; Num. 9:11). The rest of this verse prohibits illicit omens, which suggests the possibility that this phrase describes eating over blood-soaked pits for chthonic divination (Ramban; Hartley 320; Milgrom 1686). A similar interpretation led LXX to translate instead “eat upon the mountain,” which clearly describes illicit rituals in Ezek. 18:6, 11, 15; 22:9. The immediate context, however, is not very determinative in chap. 19 because the chapter samples many different mandates in quick succession. The blood prohibition is a strong theme in Leviticus and the HB, so it is not surprising to find it included here. The meaning of ‫ אכל על־הדם‬as “eat (meat) with the blood” is explicitly clear from its three-fold use in 1 Sam 14:32-34, which suggests that the omission of “meat” was conventional when just referring to the blood prohibition, such as here and in Ezek. 33:25. The verbs, ‫“ נחשׁ‬seek omens” and ‫“ עונן‬read portents,” clearly indicate illicit ritual practices of divination, as their appearance in lists of illicit ritual practices shows (2 Kgs. 17:17; 21:6; 2 Chr. 33:6), often in association with passing one’s children through fire (i.e. Molech worship: Lev. 18:21; 20:2-6). Interpreters since the ancient rabbis have speculated about what kinds of ritual practices these words describe (e.g. Sifra; b. Sanh. 65b-66a; Rashi; Ibn Ezra; Hartley 320; Milgrom 1686-89). Both are also prohibited in Deut. 18:10. Genesis, however, uses ‫ נחשׁ‬separately and positively to describe Joseph divining with a drinking cup (Gen. 45:5, 15; also for a good omen in 1 Kgs. 20:32). As a noun, ‫ נחשׁ‬can mean “omen” (Num. 23:23; 24:1) but usually means “snake,” an animal associated in many ancient cultures with cunning, healing, and magic (Gen. 3:1; Exod. 4:3; 7:9-15; Num. 21:8-9),25 and also with mortal danger (Num. 21:6; Deut. 8:15; Prov. 23:32). ‫“ עונן‬read portents” appears with ‫ נחשׁ‬in lists of illicit rituals and to describe a class of spiritual mediators (Deut. 18:14; Isa. 2:6; 57:3; Jer. 27:9; Mic. 5:11). Since ‫ ענן‬means cloud, ‫ עונן‬may refer to reading portents in the weather. LXX οὐκ οἰωνιεῖσθε οὐδὲ ὀρνισθοσκοπήσεσθε translated both terms as referring to reading omens in birds and their flight patterns (ornisthoskopia; Wevers 216). Prohibitions on communicating with “ghosts and knowing spirits” appear in v. 31 and 20:6-7, 27. The HB prohibits all divination that does not pose its questions and requests to YHWH, either through priests or prophets (Hartley 320). These biblical prohibitions became the justification for Christian persecution of “witches” and other practitioners of illicit rituals (see Exegesis to 20:27 below). 25 For the ancient symbolism of snakes, see Ronald S. Hendel, “Serpent,” DDD (1999), 744-47.

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

497

19:27 You (pl) must not cut the edge of your head and you (sg) must not slash the edge of your beard. Prohibitions on cutting one’s hair or beard appear also in 21:5 and Deut. 14:1. This and the following verse prohibit some common grieving practices (Jer. 16:6; Isa. 15:2; 22:12), as made clear by the phrases ‫“ לנפשׁ‬for a (dead) person” (v. 28; 21:5) and ‫“ למת‬for the dead” (Deut. 14:1). ‫ נקף‬can mean “to cut down” or “to encircle.” Many translations and interpreters choose the latter here to suggest a kind of tonsure (Sifra; b. Mak. 30b; KJV, HAL, NRSV, NJPS, Milgrom 1689), but “cut” fits just as well. Shaven temples seems to have been a distinctive hair style of desert dwellers (Jer. 9:25; 25:23; 49:32). But the custom of cutting hair or shaving for grieving rituals (v. 28) more likely motivated this prohibition on trimming the ‫“ פאה‬edge” of “your head,” which is described like harvesting the ‫“ פאה‬edge” of your field (v. 9). ‫ שׁחת‬hiphil “slash” is a violent term (HAL: “ruin, destroy, annihilate, exterminate”), which is surprising to see applied to one’s own beard. Perhaps, like wearing sackcloth and ashes to express grief and self-humiliation (Lam. 2:4; Job 15:16; 42:6; 1 Kgs. 21:27; Neh. 9:1), cutting hair and beard was intended to look unkept and dishevelled, hence “slashed.” Saul Olyan suggested that “shaving, along with other mourning rites, effects and signals the mourner’s separation from the community; at the same time, shaving and other mourning rites may induce culturally prescribed responses from the mourner and may create or intensify a temporary identification between the mourner and the departed.”26 The singular pronouns of this second phrase are rendered consistently plural by SP and the ancient versions. Why are such grieving rituals prohibited? Perhaps, like gashing one’s body (v. 28), they were associated with invoking other gods or the spirits of the dead (v. 31; 20:6-7, 27). Shaving the body can be part of purification rituals (13:33; 14:8), like the Levites who were required to shave their bodies to prepare for their ordination (Num. 8:7), a practice common in many cultures. Nazirites, however, portrayed their purity by not cutting their hair until the fulfilment of their vow, when their heads were shaved and their hair burned on the altar as they transitioned back to ordinary life (Num. 6:5, 18). Olyan observed that, in both cases, cutting hair and shaving marks liminal ritual transitions. Israelite mourners mark their transitory status by other behaviours that are easily reversed at the end of the mourning period, but cut hair takes much longer to grow back. Olyan therefore argued plausibly that priests (21:5) and then Israelites (here and Deut. 14:1) were prohibited 26 Saul M. Olyan, “What Do Shaving Rites Accomplish and What Do They Signal in Biblical Ritual Contexts?” JBL 117/4 (1998), 611-22 [617].

498

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

from cutting their hair or shaving in grief so that later they would not bring signs of mourning into the joyous rituals of YHWH’s sanctuary (Olyan 2004, 113-23). Rashi defined five ‫“ פאת‬edges” of a man’s hair and beard: “two at each temple; two at the other side of the cheek; and one beneath, under the chin.” Ibn Ezra added that the purpose of this prohibition is to look different from gentiles. This verse and its parallels inspired the Orthodox Jewish practice of leaving men’s sideburns at least one-third of the length of the ear, and the Hasidic practice of growing long side-locks which are called ‫ פאות‬payot “edges.” 19:28 You (pl) must not put a gash in your flesh for a (dead) person or put inscribed marks on yourself – I am YHWH! Gashing one’s flesh in grief is also prohibited in 21:5 and Deut. 14:1. ‫ נפשׁ‬has, to this point in Leviticus, been used generally to refer to a “person” (see Exegesis to 2:1) and more specifically to “personal energy” (see Exegesis to 17:11). Here, ‫“ לנפשׁ‬for a person” names the receiver or purpose of the gashing ritual which is probably funerary (Deut. 14:1), so the word is usually translated contextually “for the dead” (KJV, NRSV, NJPS, CEB). While the word can take a modifier to say explicitly ‫“ נפשׁ מת‬a dead person” (Num. 6:6; 19:13; Lev. 21:11), Numbers also describes corpse pollution with the abbreviated phrases ‫“ טמא לנפשׁ‬polluted for a person” (Num. 5:2, 9:10) or ‫“ טמאים לנפשׁ אדם‬polluted for a human person” (Num. 9:6-7), which parallels the phrasing of ‫“ שׂרט לנפשׁ‬a gash for a person” here. Self-mutilation was featured in some ancient funerary and religious rites. The priests of Baal lacerating themselves to appeal for their god to intervene according to 1 Kgs. 18:28, and the gods El and Anat lacerated themselves in their grief over Baal’s death according to the Ugaritic Baal epic (KTU 1.5 vi 11-22, 1.6 i.1-6; Wyatt 1998, 126-29). Lacerations do not heal quickly and may even leave permanent scars. Therefore, like cutting hair and beard (v. 27), Israelites may have been prohibited from lacerating themselves in grief so that they would not carry marks of mourning on their bodies into YHWH’s sanctuary. ‫ כתבת‬is a unique noun from the common verb meaning “write, inscribe, engrave.” Isaiah 44:5 refers to ‫“ כתב‬engraving” one’s hand with the name of YHWH. ‫ קעקע‬appears only here in the HB, and its etymology is unknown (HAL). The phrase, ‫“ כתבת קעקע‬inscribed marks,” is therefore very unclear. It has usually been understood to refer to tattoos (LXX, Vg, TgOnk, TgPsJ, Elliger 262, NRSV), but tattooing is not associated with mourning elsewhere in the HB or the Middle East (Huehnergard and Liebowitz 2013, 70). Hartley (321) suggested body paint for ritual purposes. The parallel with the

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

499

first phrase would be closer if this refers to scarring one’s flesh, perhaps even writing into it by cutting the flesh. This uncertainty recommends vague translations like “incise any marks” (NJPS). Why is self-laceration and inscribing one’s body prohibited? Rules requiring “perfect” offering animals and priests (21:17-23; 22:21-25) led Mary Douglas (1966, 63-64) to argue that these prohibitions protect holiness by required bodily wholeness. Wenham (272) added that disfigurement would infringe on humanity’s portrayal of the divine image. However, Francesca Stavrakopoulou observed that the HB conveys no clear sense of a “natural” human body and requires at least one form of bodily disfigurement, male circumcision (Gen. 17:9-14; Lev. 12:3).27 In ancient cultures, enslaved people were often tattooed with the names of their enslavers, so perhaps this prohibition on tattoos goes along with circumcising males as signs that the Israelites belong only to YHWH (Lev. 25:55; Huehnergard and Liebowitz 2013, 71-74). This prohibition contradicts rules allowing the ears of enslaved Israelites to be bored through to mark their voluntary permanent enslavement (Exod. 21:6; Deut. 15:17) because Leviticus does not permit Israelites to be permanently enslaved (Lev. 25:39-43, 53-55; Milgrom 1694). The ancient rabbis understood this verse as prohibiting ink tattoos because they associated tattoos with pagan rituals (m. Mak. 3:6). Early modern Christians found here a rule against self-flagellation as penance (Elliott 208-209). Ancient practices of lacerating oneself in grief and of using tattoos to mark enslaved people and religious devotees are very different from modern uses of tattooing for individual self-expression. However, using tattoos to impose an oppressive identity has also occurred in modern times. The Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz, Poland, tattooed Jewish inmates with serial numbers from 1941-1945.28 Antipathy to tattoos because of this verse was reinforced for many Jews by this horrible experience. 19:29 You (sg) must not defile your daughter for lusting (for) her so that the land does not lust and fill with depravity. On the use of ‫“ אל‬not” in parallel with ‫“ לא‬not” (also in vv. 4, 31), see Exegesis to 11:43. For the translation of ‫ חלל‬as “defile,” see Exegesis to 18:21. Compare 21:9, where the illicit sexual behaviour of a priest’s daughter ‫“ חלל‬defiles” both herself and her father. 27 Francesca Stavrakopoulou, “Making Bodies: On Body Modification and Religious Materiality in the Hebrew Bible,” HeBAI 2 (2013), 532-53 [535]. 28 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, “Assignment of Camp Serial Numbers and the Introduction of Tattooing,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia. ushmm.org (accessed Jan. 1, 2022).

500

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

‫“ זנה‬lust” is usually understood to refer to sexual activity here. It is not clear, however, exactly what behaviour is prohibited. The ancient rabbis suggested five different possibilities: raping one’s daughter, pimping one’s daughter to friends, marrying one’s daughter to an old man, delaying her marriage, or allowing a prohibited marriage (Fleishman 2011, 139). Some modern interpreters take the reference to ‫“ חלל‬defiling” the daughter as prohibiting sacred prostitution, but the existence of such practices in ancient Israel or Canaan is very doubtful (Milgrom 1695-96). Hilary Lipka argued that the verb ‫ זנה‬means sexual promiscuity and that here it is used literally: fathers should not allow their unmarried daughters to be sexually promiscuous (also CEB).29 Most translations take this to be a prohibition on pimping one’s daughter by “making her a prostitute” (NRSV; also KJV, NJPS), which suggests that the rule protects the daughter’s status in the family (Fleishman 2011, 166, 222; Hieke 750). The Christian Roman Emperors, Theodosius and Valentinian, decreed in 428 C.E. that fathers who prostitute their daughters lose their parental authority over them.30 The immediate context (vv. 26-31), however, suggests religious polemics, which is how the verb ‫“ זנה‬lust” is usually used in the HB (Lev. 17:7; 20:5-6; Exod. 34:15-16; Ezek. 16:15-17, 26-28; Hos. 1:2; 2:2).31 Even the explicitly sexual prohibitions of 18:6-23 and 20:9-21 are framed within equally explicit ethnic and ritual polemics (18:3-5, 21, 24-30; 20:2-8, 22-27). In Leviticus, only in 21:7 does the noun ‫ זנה‬clearly refer to sexual behaviour. Even the meaning of the verb’s reappearance in 21:9 to describe the behaviour of a priest’s daughter is open to question. The polemical interpretation of the word here is reinforced by its reappearance in the motive clause to describe the land as “lusting.” This has usually been understood as either a metaphor for the land’s agricultural degradation (Sifra Qedoshim 7:3; Rashi; Nahmanides) or as referring to increasing numbers of prostitutes in the land of Israel (Ibn Ezra; Milgrom 1698; Levine 133; Fleishman 2011, 148). The striking image, ‫“ ולא־תזנה הארץ‬so the land does not lust,” can be explained by the fact that farming debts led to enslaving many people, some for prostitution. Ellen Davis (2009, 91-92) observed that commodifying land and people leads to desperate people being trapped in prostitution, today as well as in antiquity. However, the combination of sexual polemic with land pollution appears also 29 Hilary Lipka, “The Offense, its Consequences, and the Meaning of ‫ זנה‬in Leviticus 19:29,” in Lipka-Wells (2020), 159-79 [162-67]. 30 John K. Evans, War, Women and Children in Ancient Rome (New York: Routledge, 1991), 140. 31 See especially Phyllis Bird, “‘To Play the Harlot’: An Inquiry into an Old Testament Metaphor,” in Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel (ed. P. L. Day; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989), 75-94; also Irene E. Riegner, The Vanishing Hebrew Harlot: The Adventures of the Hebrew Stem ZNH (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), who translated the verb ‫ זנה‬as “to participate in non-Yahwistic religious praxis.”

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

501

in Jer. 3:2: “you have polluted the land with your lusting (‫ )זנה‬and wrongdoing.” Wilda Gafney (2017, 119) summarized the effects of the tangled polemics around the word ‫זנה‬: Actual sex-work, metaphorical sex-work, and accusations of sex-work and namecalling based on the low regard for sex-work and sex-workers run together as tangled, nearly inseparable threads in biblical text and its history of translation and interpretation. ... The translation of z-n-h terms reflect the cultural biases of each generation of translators, myself included.

This commentary recommends that translation should convey rather than resolve ambiguities in the Hebrew text (e.g. vv. 18 and 20 above; see also Leviticus 1-10, 6-8). I therefore translate ‫ להזנותה ולא תזנה הארץ‬literally, “for lusting for her so that the land does not lust,” to allow readers to puzzle over the meaning of this sexual imagery for themselves. For ‫“ זמה‬depravity,” see Exegesis to 18:17. 19:30 You (pl) must observe my Sabbaths and revere my sanctuary – I am YHWH! For ‫“ ואת־שׁבתתו תשׁמרו‬my Sabbaths you must observe,” see Exegesis to v. 3 and to 23:3, which contains a more complete statement of the Sabbath commandment. The command ‫“ ירא‬revere” (for this translation, see on v. 3 above) usually takes God as the object (19:14, 32; 25:17, 36, 43), but the sanctuary here and in 26:2. The priestly writers associate Sabbath commandments with Tabernacle construction in Exod. 31:12-17, 35:2-3 which, like this verse, link “sacred time with sacred space” (Milgrom 1700). The appearance of positive commandments to observe the Sabbath and revere YHWH’s sanctuary between prohibitions on illicit sex (maybe) and necromancy (vv. 29, 31) illustrates in a nutshell this chapter’s intentionally composite rhetoric: it summarizes all of YHWH’s mandates by presenting a nearly random sample of them from all kinds of normative traditions and on all kinds of topics. Nevertheless, Schwartz (1998, 18) pointed out that, like this verse, vv. 31-32 also restate vocabulary and themes from vv. 3-4 (‫“ ירא‬revere,” ‫“ אל־תפני‬do not turn,” parents and elderly). These allusions contribute to the larger pattern of the chapter in which the second list (vv. 19-37) echoes the first. “Revere my sanctuary” has meant many things in the histories of Judaism and Christianity. The ancient rabbis detailed specific behaviours that constitute irreverence for the sanctuary, like failing to remove shoes before entering the Temple (m. Ber. 9:5; Sifra; see Milgrom 1700). The Qumran sectarians interpreted the command to “revere my sanctuary” as threatening that illicit sexual intercourse (chaps. 18 and 20) can pollute the sanctuary (4QMMT B49; 11QT 46:11). Another trend in Second Temple Judaism equated reverence

502

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

for the sanctuary with reverence for God in heaven, described as a heavenly temple (1 En. 12-16; Jub. 31:14; Himmelfarb 2006, 20-21, 80). Paul took spiritualizing the temple one step further by describing the Christian community and their individual bodies as temples inhabited by the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 3:16-17; 6:19-20). 19:31 You (pl) must not turn to ghosts and knowing spirits and you must not try to be polluted by them – I am YHWH your God! Like reading omens and portents (v. 26), necromancy seeks supernatural information and help from sources other than YHWH. It is therefore prohibited, like worshipping other gods (v. 4). On using ‫“ אל‬not” instead of ‫“ לא‬not” (also in vv. 4, 29), see Exegesis to 11:43. The verb ‫ פנה‬is also used for “turning” to idols in v. 4 (see above). ‫“ האבת והידענים‬ghosts and knowing spirits” usually appear together in the HB (Lev. 20:6, 27; Deut. 18:11; Isa. 8:19; 19:3). An ‫“ אוב‬ghost” is a spirit of the dead (perhaps derived from ‫“ אב‬father, ancestor”) with whom mediums (‫“ בעלת־אוב‬one who raises a ghost”) try to communicate (1 Sam. 28:7-8) or who seem possessed by them (Lev. 20:27). It may also refer to an image or object that represents the dead (2 Kgs. 23:24).32 A ‫ידעני‬, built on the root ‫“ ידע‬know,” is a “knowing, divining” spirit (20:27) or the medium through whom it communicates (2 Kgs. 21:6). Leviticus uses the word pair to refer to the entities themselves rather than their human conjurors or mediums (so Milgrom 1738, 1768-70; NJPS; CEB; contra NRSV), as shown by the ability to be “polluted by them” (19:31), to “lust after them” (20:6), and to be “possessed by them” (20:27). The difference, if any, between the referents of the two words is now lost on us (Milgrom 1768-72). Milgrom objected to translating ‫ אל־תבקשׁו לטמאה בהם‬literally, “do not try to be polluted by them,” because “no one seeks impurity!” (Milgrom 1702). His reading missed the sarcasm conveyed by denigrating spirit communication or possession as intentionally polluting those who participate in it. At the end of the next chapter, 20:27 declares a death penalty for specialists in such ritual activities. See Exegesis there for the violent history of enforcing these prohibitions. 19:32 You (sg) must rise before the elderly and you must defer to the old. You must revere your God – I am YHWH! A chiastic arch with verbs at the centre unites the first two phrases. They can be understood as parallel commands (so most translations) or the second can 32 Klaas Spronk, Beatific Afterlife in Ancient Israel and in the Ancient Near East (Kevalaer: Butzon and Bercker, 1986), 251-57.

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

503

be read as an illustration of the first (Schwartz 1999, 356; Milgrom 1703). Many interpreters draw a parallel with “revering” one’s parents at the beginning of this chapter (v. 3). This rule, however, requires showing respect to all one’s elders which shows “reverence” for God. There is no parallel to this command to defer to elderly people elsewhere in the Pentateuch, though mandates to honour one’s parents are common (see on v. 3 above). While ‫“ הדר‬to defer, show deference” is prohibited in legal judgments (v. 15), it is demanded in every-day interactions with one’s elders. The ancient rabbis asked, “What constitutes ‘honoring’? Not sitting in his place, not speaking in his place, and not contradicting his words” (Sifra Qedoshim 7:14). Modern interpreters are more likely to find here a mandate to care for the elderly, such as Kamionkowski (220) who observed that this commandment “is especially relevant in the twentyfirst century as people live longer lives,” particularly elderly women who outlive men. “You must revere your God” is repeated from v. 14. 19:33 When immigrants immigrate into your (pl) land with you (sg), you (pl) must not oppress them. On the meaning of ‫“ גר‬immigrant,” see Exegesis to 17:8 above. In a society like ancient Israel in which people’s security and economy depended heavily on their family connections, those without them were inherently more vulnerable (19:10; 23:22). Hence the tendency of the Covenant and Deuteronomic Codes to mandate protections for those without family connections, namely “widows, orphans, and immigrants” (Exod. 22:21-22; Deut. 10:18; 14:29). Leviticus, perhaps reflecting the different society of Judea’s Persian period, also takes into account immigrants who are wealthy and well-connected (25:47). Nevertheless, immigrants still pose a practical test of one’s moral altruism that tends, as this chapter clearly understands, to favour one’s neighbours (vv. 16, 18) and associates (vv. 11, 15, 17). MT’s mix of singular and plural addressees in vv. 33-34 were made consistently plural by SP and the ancient translations. ‫ ינה‬hiphil “oppress” here describes unspecified actions against a ‫גר‬ “immigrant” (also in Exod. 23:9). The word specifically describes unjust real estate deals that “oppress” an ‫“ עמית‬associate” or a ‫“ אח‬brother” in 25:14, 17, and also immigrants in Exod. 22:20 (Eng. 22:21); Deut. 23:17; Jer. 22:3; Ezek. 22:7, 29. This verse defines “loving the immigrant” (v. 34) negatively as not oppressing them, whereas Deut. 10:18-19 describes it positively as “giving them food and clothing” (Milgrom 1605).

504

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

19:34 Immigrants who immigrate with you (pl) are like natives among you. You (sg) must love them like you, because you (pl) were immigrants in the land of Egypt – I am YHWH your God! ‫“ אהבת לו כמוך‬you must love them like you” repeats the love commandment from v. 18, except applied to ‫“ לו‬him/them” which the surrounding phrases make clear means immigrants rather than “your neighbour.” For ‫“ אזרח‬a native,” see Exegesis to 16:29. On the translation of ‫“ כמוך‬like you,” see Exegesis to v. 18 and Exposition above. Unlike v. 18, here ‫“ כמוך‬like you” is explained by remembering that the Israelites were ‫“ גרים‬immigrants” in Egypt. Pentateuchal prohibitions on cheating immigrants often cite Israel’s experience in Egypt (Exod. 22:20; 23:9; Deut. 10:19; 23:8). Exodus 23:9 adds that ‫ואתם ידעתם את־נפשׁ הגר‬ “you yourselves know the immigrant’s personal experience (‫( ”)נפשׁ‬on translating ‫נפשׁ‬, see Exegesis to 17:11 above). Deuteronomy models Israel’s responsibility to immigrants on YHWH who “loves the immigrant and gives them food and clothing. So you must love the immigrant because you were immigrants in the land of Egypt” (Deut. 10:18-19). This command here may be a combination of these other Pentateuchal texts (Nihan 2011, 121). Free immigrants, like Israelites, should be protected from abuse (enslaved foreigners are another matter: see 25:44-46). But Nihan (2011b, 122-25) observed that, despite this verse, they still do not have the same status as natives: immigrants are not included in the addressees of the legislation (19:2), they have no right to buy inherited agricultural land in Israel (25:23-55), and their explicit inclusion in some provisions (16:29; 17:8, 12-13; 18:26; 20:2; 24:16, 22; for a complete Pentateuchal list, see Hieke 754) suggests their omission from the rest. The command to love immigrants then does not yet indicate their equal status with Israelites. Thomas Kazen observed, however, that empathy towards immigrants can combine with disgust at supposedly foreign practices (18:3, 24-30; 20:22-26) into insisting that immigrants assimilate: “in this way empathy is efficiently constrained by strong associations of otherness and feelings of revulsion, and thus restricted to complying immigrants” (Kazen 2011, 124). Nevertheless, these texts mandating care for immigrants demonstrate, as Hieke (755) observed, that the obligation for contemporary societies to support and integrate immigrants is “age-old ... from biblical times.” The move from love of neighbour to love of the immigrant is a step away from ethnic particularism towards a more universal definition of human community and identity (Hieke 756). As a result, chap. 19 joined chaps. 18 and 20 in playing large roles in debates over cultural and religious separatism and universalism in Jewish and Christian, and Jewish-Christian, history (see Exegesis to 20:24 below).

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

505

19:35-36a You must not judge dishonestly amount, weight, or volume. You must have honest scales, honest stones, an honest ephah, and an honest hin. The first phrase repeats v. 15a. The following phrases, however, apply this principle to measurements of economic goods instead of judicial decisions. ‫“ מדה‬amount” often refers to measuring land (Num. 35:5; Jer. 31:39; Zech. 2:5; Ezek. 40:3), hence the common translation “length” (NRSV; NJPS). But the verb ‫ מדה‬also refers to measuring grain (Exod. 16:18; Ruth 3:15) which recent interpreters prefer here since an ‫“ איפה‬ephah” was a dry measure (Schwartz 1999, 362; Milgrom 1708; CEB). The vague translation, “amount,” covers both meanings of ‫מדה‬. ‫“ משׁקל‬weight” is measured by balanced ‫“ מאזנים‬scales” using calibrated weights or ‫“ אבנים‬stones.” ‫ משׂורה‬describes liquid “volume” (CEB) or “capacity” (NJPS) in Ezek. 4:11, 16; 1 Chr. 23:29. A ‫“ הין‬hin” was a liquid measure.33 All must be ‫“ צדק‬accurate” (CEB), which is repeated four times, perhaps to evoke this word’s meaning when applied to people who are “righteous.” That recommends translating with words that can be applied to both people and measurements, such as “just” (KJV) or “honest” (NRSV, NJPS). Fraud was as much a problem in ancient societies as in modern ones: the laws of Hammurabi (§73) condemned fraudulent measures and the negative confession in the Egyptian Book of Dead (spell 125) claimed that the deceased used honest measures (Hieke 757). Deuteronomy 25:13-16 provides a more expansive version of these commandments in order to condemn people who defraud others as ‫תועבת יהוה‬ ‫“ אלהיך‬disgusting YHWH your God.” Interpreters debate whether Deuteronomy used these verses from Leviticus (e.g. Milgrom 1707) or vice-versa (e.g. Nihan 2007, 476). 19:36b-37 I am YHWH your God who brought you from the land of Egypt. You must observe all my mandates and all my regulations and you must do them – I am YHWH! This conclusion evokes Israel’s rescue from Egypt, like v. 34 and 18:3, and echoes the beginning of the Decalogue (Exod. 20:2; Deut. 5:6). The writers of Leviticus liked to evoke the exodus in their concluding formulas, such as to the diet laws (11:45), the priestly purity rules (22:33), and the Jubilee rules (25:55) as well as here in the conclusion to chap. 19’s sampler of all kinds of Israelite normative traditions. Invoking Israel’s experience in Egypt 33

For more details, see Marvin A. Powell, “Weights and Measures,” ABD (1992), 6:903.

506

Leviticus 19 Exegesis

is not only morally compelling, it also reminds listeners and readers of the narrative framework around these long lists of rules, that they were presented to the Israelites at Sinai on their way from Egypt to Canaan. Exhortations to observe all of YHWH’s mandates frame chaps. 18-20 individually and unify them as a group (18:4-5, 26, 30; 19:19, 37; 20:8, 22; Milgrom 1710). In the parallel between ‫“ שׁמר‬observe” and ‫“ עשׂה‬do,” Hieke (760) found a mandate to keep theory and practice together.

LEVITICUS 20:1-27

PENALTIES FOR ILLICIT RITUALS AND SEX

1 2

3

4 5

6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13

14 15

YHWH spoke to Moses: To the children of Israel, you must say: Anyone of the children of Israel or of the immigrants (sg) immigrating in Israel who gives their (ms) semen to Molek must certainly die. The people of the land must stone them with rocks. I myself will face this one and cut them (ms) off from the midst of their people, because they give their semen to Molek which pollutes my sanctuary and defiles my holy name. If the people of the land deliberately close their eyes to this one giving their (ms) semen to Molek, and do not kill them, I myself will face off against this person and their (ms) family, and I will cut them off from the midst of their people and everyone who follows them in lusting for Molek. When a person turns to ghosts and knowing spirits to lust for them, I will face this person and cut them off from the midst of their people. You (pl) must make yourselves holy and be holy, because I am YHWH your God! You (pl) must observe my mandates and do them. I am YHWH who makes you holy! Therefore, anyone who dishonours their (ms) father and their mother must certainly die. They have dishonoured their father and their mother. Their blood is on themselves. A man who commits adultery with his neighbour’s woman must certainly die, both the adulterous man and the adulterous woman. A man who lies with his father’s woman exposes his father’s nudity. Both of them must certainly die. Their blood is on themselves. A man who lies with his daughter-in-law, both of them must certainly die. They do something perverted! Their blood is on themselves. A man who lies with a man the layings of a woman, both of them do something disgusting! They must certainly die. Their blood is on themselves. A man who takes a woman and her mother, it is depravity! They must burn both him and them in fire, so there will be no depravity among you. A man who gives his seed in a quadruped must certainly die. You (pl) must kill the quadruped.

508 16

17

18

19 20 21 22

23 24

25

26 27

Leviticus 20 Essentials A woman who presents herself to any quadruped to copulate with it, you (sg) must kill the woman and the quadruped. They must certainly die. Their blood is on themselves. A man who takes his sister, his father’s daughter or his mother’s daughter, and sees her nudity and she sees his nudity, it is shameful. They will be cut off before the eyes of their people. He has exposed her nudity. They will bear liability. A man who lies with a woman who is uneasy and who exposes her nudity uncovers her fountain, and she exposes the fountain of her blood. Both of them will be cut off from their people. The nudity of your mother’s sister and your father’s sister you (sg) must not expose, for he uncovers his own flesh. They will bear liability. A man who lies with his aunt, he exposes his uncle’s nudity. They will bear their sin. They will die childless. A man who takes his brother’s woman, it is (like) menstruation. He exposes his brother’s nudity. They will be childless. You must observe all my mandates and my regulations and you must do them, so that the land where I am bringing you to live does not vomit you out. You must not follow the mandates of the nations that I am expelling before you, for they do all these things and I detest them. I said to you: you will possess their ground. I will give it to you to possess it, a land flowing milk and honey. I am YHWH your God who separated you from the peoples! You must separate pure quadrupeds from the polluted, and polluted flyers from the pure, so you do not nauseate yourselves with quadrupeds, flyers, and everything that scrambles on the ground which I have separated as polluted for you. You are holy to me because I, YHWH, am holy. I have separated you from the peoples to be mine. When a man or a woman is possessed by a ghost or a knowing spirit, they must certainly die. They must stone them with rocks. Their blood is on themselves. ESSENTIALS

Contents Leviticus 20 contains a casuistic list of punishments for illicit acts that are mostly sexual in nature. It repeats many of the prohibited sexual relationships listed in chap. 18 and arranges them by severity of punishment. Eight offences elicit death sentences (vv. 9-16), while the remaining five result either in

Leviticus 20 Essentials

509

being “cut off” by YHWH (vv. 17-18), in “bearing liability” (v. 19), or in childlessness (vv. 20-21). The list of sexual offences and capital punishments begins, however, with the offence of “dishonouring one’s parents” (v. 9), which is probably a characterization of any offence against the most basic standards of morality. Around this list appear exhortations to become holy by obeying YHWH’s “mandates” (vv. 7-8). The opening exhortation specifically prohibits giving one’s children to Molek, an obscure ritual here denigrated in sexual terms as “giving semen” and “lusting” for Molek (vv. 2-5). It also prohibits consulting the ghosts of ancestors through necromancy (v. 6), behaviour which leads to executing mediums by stoning according to a supplement at the end of the chapter (v. 27). The concluding exhortations, like those in chap. 18, contrast the behaviour required of the Israelites with that of the Canaanites who polluted the land and will be ejected as a result (vv. 23-24). It adds that Israelites must “separate” themselves from other nations by following this chapter’s rules and also by not eating polluted meats (v. 25). This chapter therefore defines YHWH’s people as holy like YHWH (v. 26) in so far as they separate themselves by their diet and behaviour. Contexts Chapter 20 intensifies Leviticus’s punitive rhetoric by adding draconian punishments, most of them death penalties, to the sexual offences of chap. 18. The rest of biblical literature, however, does not record the prosecution of many such cases, much less executions. The death penalty for adultery, for example, became famous in antiquity as well as modernity more for illustrating the stringency of biblical law than for being carried out (see John 8:1-11). Even conviction for adultery in a trial by ordeal led to a “fallen uterus,” probably childlessness, rather than death (Num. 5:27). Leviticus’s strict sexual prohibitions and draconian penalties were used, instead, to supercharge religious polemics. An early example, the book of Ezekiel, employed the imagery of illicit sex to justify the condemnation of the nation of Judah to death by conquest and exile (Ezek. 18:6, 11, 15, 19; 22:10; 33:26; 36:17). This fusion of ritual offences with sexual slurs is modelled by chap. 20. The opening exhortation echoes Deuteronomic and Deuteronomistic texts which describe giving children to Molek as a particularly abhorrent ritual that stirred YHWH’s punishment of the nation (Deut. 12:31; 2 Kgs. 12:10; 16:3; 17:31-32; 23:10; also Jer. 32:35; Ezek. 16:21; 23:39). Leviticus 20:2-5, however, adds sexual innuendo to this ritual motif to create an even more potent rhetorical polemic (see Leviticus 18: Essentials). The chapter’s conclusion repeats and amplifies the ethnic slurs of chap. 18 against the Canaanites.

510

Leviticus 20 Essentials

Its heritage has been devastatingly violent. Despite the efforts of various “reformers” to impose the biblical death penalties, adultery and incest have rarely led courts to issue death sentences. This chapter’s capital penalties have been invoked more often by judges, politicians, conquerors, and vigilantes to justify executions of heretics and conquests of “heathens” by dubious charges of incest, bestiality, and sodomy. This tendency to mix religious and sexual accusations to justify legal and extra-legal violence was particularly evident in early modern witch trials and colonial conquests. It continues today in the regular citation of Lev. 18:22 and 20:13 by polemical opponents of legal rights and protections for people with non-heteronormative sexual orientations and gender identities, and in the rhetoric of abortion opponents who describe abortions as Molek worship (20:2-5). Rhetoric This chapter deploys a list of casuistic penalties for mostly sexual offences to reinforce a rhetoric of pollution avoidance and ethnic differentiation (cf. chap. 18’s similar list of apodictic prohibitions and rhetoric). It mixes common biblical tropes of illicit ritual worship (passing children to Molek and necromancy) with the vocabulary of sexual innuendo (vv. 2-6). As in chap. 18, the list of mostly illicit sexual unions (vv. 9-21) then provides examples of Canaanite behaviour that Israelites must avoid, lest they suffer the Canaanites’ fate (vv. 23-24). Since most of these acts deserve the death penalty according to vv. 9-16, they serve to justify killing or expelling the Canaanites, too. The emphasis on pollution avoidance comes to the fore again in the conclusion (vv. 24b-26) that evokes the diet regulations of chap. 11 as also separating the Israelites from other peoples. It exhorts the Israelites to holiness, which it defines as separation from other nations and especially from the Canaanites who have polluted the land (vv. 22-26). Chapter 20 thus defines the highest religious ideal, imitating YHWH’s “holiness,” with ethnic slurs phrased in sexual and ritual terms. Leviticus 20 joins chap. 18 in combining sexual ethics with pollution avoidance to produce a rhetorical motivation for separating from other nations. Its death penalties justify doing so violently, as the example of the Canaanites shows explicitly. Together, the two chapters have provided later Christians and Jews a potent model for how to use charges of sexual and ritual misbehaviour to polemicize against rival ethnic and religious groups, including colonized peoples, cultural minorities, women, and non-heteronormative people. These polemics have regularly produced deadly violence, sometimes from law courts but more often apart from established legal procedures. In such cases, this biblical rhetoric has frequently protected murderers from being held accountable for their crimes.

Leviticus 20 Exposition

511 EXPOSITION

Additional Bibliography BENJAMIN, KATIE, KNUD HENRIK BOYSEN, GEORGE D. CHRYSSIDES, PETER GEMEINHARDT, MARTIN LOCKSHIN, ANDREAS RUWE, BRIAN B. SCHMIDT, ORI Z. SOLTES, and DAVID V. URBAN. “Molech, Moloch.” EBR 19 (2021), 658-771. BERKOWITZ, BETH A. Execution and Invention: Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. BERKOWITZ, ERIC. Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2012. BLIDSTEIN, GERALD J. Honor Thy Father and Mother: Filial Responsibility in Jewish Law and Ethics. New York: KTAV, 1975. HIEKE, THOMAS. “Das Alte Testament und die Todesstrafe.” Bib 85 (2004), 349-74. HIEKE, THOMAS. “The Prohibition of Transferring an Offspring to ‘the Molech’: No Child Sacrifice in Leviticus 18 and 20.” In Eberhart-Hieke (2019), 171-99. LEFEBVRE, MICHAEL. “Legal Institutions.” OEBL (2015), 1:536-43. LIPKA, MICHAEL. “Some major U.S. religious groups differ from their members on the death penalty.” Pew Research Center (July 13, 2015), at http:// pewrsr.ch/1eVQ1qR (accessed Nov. 5, 2021). MEGIVERN, JAMES J. The Death Penalty: An Historical and Theological Survey. New York: Paulist, 1997. RUETHER, ROSEMARY RADFORD. Faith and Fratricide: the Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism. New York: Seabury Press, 1974. SIMKOVICH, MALKA Z. The Making of Jewish Universalism: From Exile to Alexandria. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. See also the Additional Bibliography in Exposition to Leviticus 18.

Structure of Leviticus 20 Leviticus 20 matches Leviticus 18 by focusing mostly on sexual offences. The two chapters thus form a thematic frame around chap. 19. The three chapters are unified by statements at the beginning and end of each that emphasize how Israel must preserve its holy status by obeying YHWH’s commandments (18:4-5, 26; 19:1, 37; 20:7-8, 22). Like chap. 18, this chapter uses exhortations to holiness and ritual fidelity (vv. 2-8, 22-26) to surround a list of rules constraining sexual behaviour (vv. 9-21). Despite their common subject matter and structure, however, chaps. 18 and 20 differ notably in style and vocabulary. Leviticus 20 states most of its prohibitions in third-person casuistic form (“when ... then ...”) to mandate punishments, while chap. 18 uses second-person apodictic prohibitions and reserves punishments for its conclusion. Leviticus 18 is arranged by kind of prohibition, while chap. 20 is arranged by kind of punishment (Philip 2006, 60; Nihan 2007, 450). Some prohibitions in chap. 18 are not reproduced by chap. 20 and vice-versa. Even similar content takes different forms in each chapter. For example, Tarja Philip observed that the prohibitions on sexual intercourse with a menstruating woman (18:19; 20:18) use different vocabulary for menstruation, ‫“ נדה‬menstrual period” vs. ‫“ דוה‬uneasiness,” though these words appear together in 12:2 and 15:33. Menstrual bleeding is mentioned in 20:18 but not in 18:19. The prohibition on menstrual sex appears

512

Leviticus 20 Exposition

in a different context in each chapter, and only 20:18 depicts the woman in an active role. Chapter 20’s structure falls into three parts. Exhortations against Molek worship (vv. 1-8) and to separate from other nations (vv. 22-26) bracket penalties for illicit sexual behaviour (vv. 9-21). A thematic arch structures the bracketing paragraphs (see Milgrom 1728, and especially Gane 2004, 363 and Luciani 2005, 112): Penalty of stoning (for Molech worship; v. 2) Prohibition of necromancy (v. 6) Be holy because YHWH is holy (v. 7) “Observe my mandates” (v. 8) “Observe all my mandates” (v. 22) Be holy because YHWH is holy (v. 26) Prohibition of necromancy (v. 27) Penalty of stoning (for mediums; v. 27)

This arch is not tight and omits much material in both paragraphs (vv. 3-5, 23-25), but the brackets do unite the chapter thematically. Both bracketing paragraphs contain prohibitions on necromancy (vv. 6, 27). However, v. 27 looks like an addition tacked on to the chapter, which means that the original brackets were not so parallel. Verses 7-8 are transitional: they conclude the opening exhortations and introduce the prohibitions by emphasizing Israel’s holiness. They can therefore be analyzed as a separate unit, as Hartley (330) did in outlining the chapter in an A-B-A’-B’-A’’ structure in which A consists of laws (vv. 2-6, 9-21, 27) and B of parenesis (vv. 7-8, 22-26). Like elsewhere in Leviticus, the structure of this chapter works better aurally than visually: it is meant to be heard more than read. The echoes between exhortations in this chapter and with previous chapters reinforce the religious stakes involved in obeying or disobeying its rules. The list of punishments (vv. 9-21) is distinguished by repetitive introductory formulas and penalties (Wells 2020, 149) that convey the fearsome significance of its prohibitions: ‫ מות‬... ‫ כי־אישׁ אישׁ אשׁר יקלל‬9 ‫ דמיו בו‬... ‫יומת‬

therefore, anyone who dishonours ... they must certainly die ... their blood is on themselves

‫ מות־יומת‬... ‫ ואישׁ אשׁר ינאף‬10 when a man commits adultery ... he must certainly die ‫ מות־יומתו‬... ‫ ואישׁ אשׁר ישׁכב‬11 when a man lies with ... both of them must ‫שׁניהם דמיהם בם‬ certainly die, their blood is on themselves ‫ מות יומתו‬... ‫ ואישׁ אשׁר ישׁכב‬12 when a man lies with ... both of them must ‫ דמיהם בם‬... ‫שׁניהם‬ certainly die ... their blood is on themselves ‫ מות יומתו‬... ‫ ואישׁ אשׁר ישׁכב‬13 when a man lies with ... they must ‫דמיהם בם‬ certainly die, their blood is on themselves

Leviticus 20 Exposition

513

‫ באשׁ ישׂרפו אתו‬... ‫ ואישׁ אשׁר יקח‬14 when a man takes ... they must burn both ‫ואתהן‬ he and them in fire ...‫ מות יומת‬... ‫ ואישׁ אשׁר יתן‬15 when a man gives ... he must certainly die ‫ מות יומת‬... ‫ ואשׁה אשׁר תקרב‬16 when a woman presents herself ... they ‫דמיהם בם‬ must certainly die, their blood is on themselves ‫ עונם‬... ‫ ונכרתו‬... ‫ ואישׁ אשׁר־יקח‬17 when a man takes ... they will be cut off ... ‫ישׂאו‬ will bear liability ‫ ונכרתו שׁניהם‬... ‫ ואישׁ אשׁר־ישׁכב‬18 when a man lies with ... both of them will be cut of ‫ עונם ישׂאו‬... ‫ וערות‬19 the nudity ... they will bear liability ‫ חטאם ישׂאו‬... ‫ ואישׁ אשׁר ישׁכב‬20 when a man lies ... they will bear their sin, ‫ערירים ימתו‬ they will die childless ‫ ערירים יהיו‬... ‫ ואישׁ אשׁר יקח‬21 when a man takes ... they will be childless

The fearsome nature of these penalties is emphasized by the seven-fold repetition of ‫“ מות יומת‬they must certainly die” followed by ‫“ נכרתו‬they will be cut off” twice. The severity of the penalties may decline after v. 18, though “bearing liability” and childlessness can also be interpreted as specifying what “cutting off” means (see Exegesis to v. 20). Nevertheless, the list seems to be organized in descending order of the penalties’ severity, from capital punishment (vv. 9-16, usually ‫“ מות יומת‬they must certainly die” in an unspecified way, but in v. 14 burning) to the indeterminate “cut off” (vv. 17-18) to bearing liability and sin (vv. 19-20) and childlessness (vv. 20-21). Thus the penalties divide the list between those that require the community to execute offenders (vv. 9-16) and those that YHWH promises to enforce by “cutting off” offenders, by childlessness, or by making them “bear liability/sin” (vv. 17-21). “Cut off” penalties appear already in vv. 3, 5-6, and therefore form a thematic bracket (vv. 3-6, 17-21) around the regulations requiring the community’s capital punishment (vv. 9-16), though the community’s enforcement is also demanded by v. 2. Chapter 18’s rhetoric of exposing nudity appears here in vv. 17-21 that threaten divine “cutting off,” but among the capital penalties it appears only in v. 11. Verses 12-14 replace it with emotional characterizations: ‫“ תבל‬perverted” (v. 12), ‫“ תועבה‬disgusting” (v. 13), and ‫“ זמה‬depravity” (v. 14). Two “cut off” offences elicit similar labels as ‫“ חסד‬shameful” (v. 17) and ‫נדה‬ “menstruation” (v. 21) which they add to “exposing nudity,” thus intensifying the emotional rhetoric in the latter part of the list despite the change in penalties. As in chap. 18, these emotional labels seem to have less to do with the individual offences than with increasing the overall rhetorical pathos of the chapter. Finally, the concluding exhortation (vv. 22-27) envisions the land enforcing this chapter’s regulations by “vomiting out” its inhabitants, repeating

514

Leviticus 20 Exposition

themes and phrases from the opening and closing paragraphs of chap. 18 (Hartley 332; Mohrmann 2004, 60-61). Thus the whole chapter is united by an emotional rhetoric about the punitive enforcement of religious and sexual prohibitions by God, by the community, and by the land. Interpreters have been puzzled by why Leviticus includes two separate chapters, both of which list sexual prohibitions along with prohibitions on Molek worship. The obvious observation that chap. 18 lists prohibitions while chap. 20 lists punishments for those prohibitions does not fully satisfy as an explanation for the duplication. Some prohibitions in chap. 18 do not reappear in chap. 20 while this chapter includes punishments for dishonouring parents (v. 9) and necromancy (vv. 6, 27) that do not appear in chap. 18. Also, in 18:29, YHWH threatens to “cut off” all offenders, while this chapter demands capital punishment for many offences (vv. 9-16) and threatens “cutting off” for some others (vv. 17-21). Therefore, many commentators argue that the two chapters were composed separately before both were incorporated into Leviticus, perhaps due to “the reverence ancient authors had for texts that they inherited from earlier bearers of tradition” (Schwartz 2004, 256). Historical critics have suggested that the lists of prohibitions in the two chapters stemmed from different originals (Noth 146; Elliger 265; Schwartz 1999, 135-44; Philip 2006, 60), or that both chapters were written on the basis of a common source and then secondarily placed together here (Feinstein 2014, 169). But these hypotheses are undermined by the fact that chap. 20 interacts with the themes and vocabulary not only of chap. 18 but of all of chaps. 17-19 (Gerstenberger 289; Nihan 2007, 451-54). Others therefore argue that a pre-existing list of apodictic prohibitions was incorporated by the author of chap. 18 which a reviser then turned into casuistic rules by adding chap. 20 (Grünwaldt 1999, 207-208; Milgrom 1766-67; Nihan 2007, 441-42). All of these explanations struggle to explain both the duplications between the lists and their differences. Some list the repeated prohibitions to isolate those not repeated (e.g. Grünwaldt 1999, 17677; Schwartz 2004, 256; Feinstein 2014, 168-69), but miss parallels because they abstract the contents from their rhetorical form. For example, categorizing sexual prohibitions separately from non-sexual ones leads to classifying the prohibitions on incest with one’s mother (18:7) and dishonouring parents (20:9) as unparalleled. This conclusion fails to consider the implications of the fact that rhetoric about “fathers and mothers” introduces both lists (see further in Exegesis to 20:9). Ancient Near Eastern literature has bequeathed to us no examples of separate lists of incest taboos or other sexual rules. Leviticus 18 and 20 are by far the longest and most comprehensive such lists in extant ancient literature. Shorter lists of sexual prohibitions appear elsewhere, but always in the context of larger legal collections, some of which also had narrative introductions and

Leviticus 20 Exposition

515

exhortatory conclusions (Watts 1999). Therefore, despite their unique scope, the appearance of chaps. 18 and 20 in a larger legal context fits what we know about ancient scribal practices, while theories about originally independent lists of incest rules do not. Leviticus also contains other lists of rules about edible meats (chap. 11) and diagnosing infestations (chaps. 13-14) that are uniquely long and complicated. Like chaps. 18 and 20, the rules for infestation first describe the problem in great detail (chap. 13), then separately mandate what actions must be taken in cases of healed infestation (chap. 14). These chapters are contiguous unlike chaps. 18 and 20. The lists of sexual prohibitions and punishments nevertheless reflect the typical compositional practices of the writers of Leviticus more than the slavish incorporation of pre-existing texts. That does not mean that these lists do not incorporate traditional incest prohibitions, but there is also evidence of reforming motives behind the formulation of some of the rules (see Exegesis to 18:9, 11, 16, 17). The motive for listing sexual rules twice in two different forms should therefore be sought in the rhetorical agenda of the writers of Leviticus itself. The duplication could have been motivated by the different addressees. Hartley (332) noted that chap. 18 addresses the male head of household, while the penalties of chap. 20 are addressed to the community which is expected to enforce many of them. The A-B-A’ arch structure of chaps. 18-20 indicates another rationale: the second (A’) leg of this arch creates emphasis by repetition. It also intensifies the rhetoric of sexual and ritual prohibitions by its refrains, “they must certainly die” and “they will be cut off.” In the context of an oral reading of Leviticus, this fearsome rhetoric can be expected to put an audience’s emotions on edge. Stiebert (2016, 62-65, 71-74, 86) called it “shrill” and suggested that it reflects the anxieties of male heads of households. They would feel relieved when the subject turns to priests in chap. 21 and would therefore be less likely to challenge priests’ unique privileges, especially in light of their even more stringent purity obligations. Interpretations of Biblical Death Penalties in their Ancient Contexts Capital punishment was common in ancient societies and in ancient legal collections. The frequent resort to capital punishment in biblical law therefore fits its ancient cultural context. Unlike Mesopotamian codes, biblical rules give less discretion to victims in assigning verdicts. For example, in cases of adultery and murder, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Hittite laws allowed the offended husband or the victim’s family to decide whether to receive financial compensation instead of imposing the death penalty. Biblical rules treat adultery (Lev. 20:10; Deut. 22:22-24) like murder as uniformly requiring execution. That is because Israel’s covenant with YHWH transformed offences against other people into offences against God. Leviticus 20 asserts that the people

516

Leviticus 20 Exposition

of Israel cannot afford to be lenient because the purity of the land and their own residency in the land is threatened by divine penalties for failing to enforce the law (Lev. 20:22-26). When Israel is held to the standard of divine holiness, there can be no compromise (Greenberg 1960/1995, 29-30). At least, that is the rhetoric that this chapter tries to get its listeners and readers to internalize. Comparison with other ancient law codes shows that they could mandate the death penalty also for theft (e.g. Hammurabi §§21, 22, 25), whereas biblical laws require only restitution and financial penalties for property crimes (Exod. 22:1-2; Lev. 5:21-26 Eng. 6:2-7). Thus biblical rules are intransigent about capital punishment for many moral and religious offences but refuse to apply it in property law. Moshe Greenberg (1960/1995, 32) interpreted this distinction as emphasizing the “invaluableness of human life,” and Wenham (282) distinguished biblical law for “the preeminence it accords to human values,” especially human life and the family structure, rather than “economic considerations.” But biblical laws appear bloodthirsty to most modern readers for mandating the death penalty for offensive religious rituals, for illicit sexual behaviour, and even for dishonouring parents. This chapter is a leading example of the Pentateuch’s flagrant disposal of human lives for a bewilderingly wide array of offences, many of which do not qualify as capital offences in any modern legal system. The behaviours subject to the various penalties and even their distribution between penalties seem random. The different punishments for different sexual offences were explained by Susan Rattray (1987, 543): “incest with near affines [was] punished by execution while incest with blood relatives was punished by kārēt and incest with collateral affines by kārēt and barrenness.” This interpretation, however, presses the text into anthropological categories that are not clearly expressed in it (see Exposition to Leviticus 18 and Exegesis to 18:17). Hartley (351) found the list’s unity instead in key words: the verb ‫“ שׁכב‬lie” dominates vv. 11-15 but extends into vv. 18 and 20, while chap. 18’s characteristic description of sexual intercourse, ‫“ גלה ערוה‬expose nudity,” dominates vv. 17-21 but appears first in v. 11. Bruce Wells (2020, 148-50) described v. 9, about children dishonouring their parents, as a heading to the following list. Then illicit sexual intercourse with other persons is divided between hierarchical relationships between parents and children deserving the death penalty (vv. 10-14) and lateral relationships between siblings deserving the penalty of “cutting off” (vv. 17-21). Death penalties for bestiality fall in between (vv. 15-16). Wells’ analysis of vv. 11-14 as dealing with hierarchical relationships within the family supports his interpretation of the prohibition on male-with-male intercourse (v. 13) as applying only to a woman’s husband and sons. But the opening penalty against adultery (v. 10) in this section is not hierarchical which weakens his argument that v. 13 must be hierarchical as well.

Leviticus 20 Exposition

517

The prominent place of polemics against Molek worship in the opening paragraph (see Exegesis to vv. 1-2) has puzzled interpreters, as has its mention in the final paragraph of chap. 18. Interpreters have suggested that the topic of Molek worship and incest belong together as equally horrifying (e.g. Hartley and Dwyer 1996, 92-93), but the rhetoric of disgust in chap. 20 aims to induce such reactions more than to reflect them. John Hartley and Timothy Dwyer (1996, 91-92) argued that incest and giving children to Molek both disrupted clan solidarity. Brian Rainey (2019, 195, 199) observed that both Molek worship and necromancy “involve death and family members” which, like the rest of chap. 20, “show that the former inhabitants of the land of Canaan acted in a way this is antithetical to ... the proper functioning of the patriarchal household.” He also observed that Leviticus does not denounce all illegitimate ritual practices as Canaanite and foreign. Prohibitions on offerings to billy goats (17:7), on divination (19:26, 31; 20:6, 27), and worship at cult icons and standing stones (19:4; 26:1) do not invoke a memory of the land’s previous inhabitants. Even passing children to Molek and necromancy do not get denounced specifically as foreign (18:21; 20:2-6, 27; contra Rainey 2019, 192). The denunciations of the Canaanites in the framework of chapters that consist mostly of sexual rules implicitly make charges of sexual deviance central to this polemic (18:3, 24-30; 20:23). More precisely, by elevating YHWH’s mandates by which anyone (‫ )האדם‬will live (18:5), Leviticus casts the cultures of other peoples as “inherently defective” (Rainey 2019, 197). These chapters therefore seem more interested in using a sweeping polemic to motivate Israelites to “separate” themselves by obeying these rules than in making any actual observations about foreign cultures. Rather than speculating about Canaanite practices, commentators should therefore warn readers against drawing conclusions about any other cultures from such polemical attacks against them (see further in Exegesis to 18:25). The Biblical Death Penalty and Procedural Law Jewish and Christian moral and legal traditions emphasize that only duly authorized courts following established legal procedures and the chain of evidence can enforce legal punishments, and that punishment should be proportionate to the crime. The path to these firm moral positions has been long and arduous. Texts from the end of the Second Temple period describe a central court called the Sanhedrin composed of priests and lay lawyers, which ruled on crucial cases such as a trial of King Herod (Josephus, Ant. 14.163-84) and a trial of Jesus (Matt. 25:57-66 and parallels). The Sanhedrin also appears in the Mishnah which devotes a tractate to it, but its preferred central court is

518

Leviticus 20 Exposition

the rabbinic ‫“ בית דן‬house of judgment” (LeFebvre 2015, 540-42). Synagogues seem to have replaced city gates as the locales for local courts (Levine 2005, 28-44). The Mishnah records that the rabbis wished to avoid executions (m. Mak. 1:10). Rabbinic rules required courts of three judges in property cases, but twenty-three judges in capital cases. They decided verdicts by majority vote (m. Sanh. 1.4, 3.1, 3.6). Relatives and friends of plaintiffs or defendants were excluded because of their conflicts-of-interest, as were their enemies (m. Sanh. 3.4-5). The rabbis also laid out procedural rules for witnesses and evidence (m. Sanh. 3.8-4.1, 4.5-5.1) and detailed instructions for carrying out capital sentences (m. Sanh. 6-9). They tried to avoid inciting mobs by making witnesses responsible for carrying out executions rather than the community (B. Berkowitz 2006, 108-19, citing m. Sanh. 6.4, t. Sanh. 11.7, Sifra on Lev. 24:14, Sifre on Num. 15:35, Sifre on Deut. 21:18 and 22:21; and b. Sanh. 43a). Later Talmudic authorities elaborated the evidentiary and procedural rules around capital cases to the point of making it virtually impossible to produce a capital conviction (b. Sanh. 37b, 161; b. Ketub. 30a-b; see Greenberg 1960/1995, 34; B. Berkowitz 2006, 27-52; Halberstam 2010, 85-91). In contrast to the rabbis’ procedural concerns, Christian theologians writing about courts and justice have tended to emphasize legitimate authority. Only courts and judges duly authorized by rulers and governments may exercise judicial punishments, especially the death penalty. Many emphasized that churches and their officers must not execute people, but leave enforcement to secular authorities (see further below). By contrast, the fragmentary picture of legal punishments in the Pentateuch shows patriarchs ruling their households unfettered by external legal authorities. Judah, for example, pronounces a verdict of capital punishment by burning when he hears that his daughter-in-law, Tamar, has committed adultery (Gen. 38:24). He suffers public humiliation, but no legal penalties, for his own incest with her. This story illustrates clearly the vulnerability of women under a patriarch’s “care,” not to mention people who found themselves outside of the family clan structure, such as widows, orphans, and immigrants (LeFebvre 2015, 536). Leviticus 18 seems to presuppose such a patriarchal context by addressing its prohibitions to male heads-of-household and threatening only divine punishment. Many commentators project the moral emphasis in Jewish and Christian traditions on duly established courts back into the biblical text. For example, Milgrom (1745-46) judged the verdict ‫“ מות יומת‬must certainly die” (vv. 2, 9-13, 15-16, 27) as implicitly dependent on “the decision of the authorized court.” This evaluation accurately reflects the long-standing moral requirements of Jewish and Christian legal traditions, but it encounters two problems as an interpretation of biblical texts.

Leviticus 20 Exposition

519

First, the priestly literature nowhere describes the constitution and functioning of such a court, and the Pentateuch as a whole contains little procedural law (see Hieke 790-93, 800). Appointed judges and community courts are mentioned in Exod. 18:20-26 and Deut. 16:18; 17:2-7. According to Deut. 17:8-13, the priests of the central sanctuary should staff a court of appeal or, more accurately, an oracular court since difficult cases are referred by local judges, not by plaintiffs or defendants (LeFebvre 2015, 539). Deuteronomy does require investigation into the facts of a case (17:4) and requires evidence from at least two witnesses in capital cases (17:6). However, even executing murderers does not explicitly require a court verdict: biblical rules allow the victims’ relatives to avenge their death by killing the murderer without a preceding trial (Num. 35:16-21). The Pentateuch requires that there be cities of refuge to which those guilty of accidental manslaughter can run (Exod. 21:13; Num. 35:9-15; Deut. 4:41-43; 19:1-13). The elders of that city judge whether to admit the fugitive, but do not have any authority to settle the case (Josh. 20:2-6). Then the community in which the person died can stage a trial in order to regain control of murderers (Num. 35:12; LeFebvre 2015, 537-38). A judgment of manslaughter, however, does not lead to a lesser sentence and restoration of the perpetrators. It only allows them to keep living in a city of refuge while the victim’s relatives continue to have the right of execution if the perpetrator is found outside (Num. 35:24-28). Stories outside the Pentateuch depict royally appointed judges, which may reflect the imperial policies of the Second Temple period (2 Chr. 19:4-11; Ezra 7:25-26). Judges are exhorted to be Godfearing (2 Chr. 19:6; Ezra 7:26) and impartial (Exod. 23:3, 6, 8; Lev. 19:15; Deut. 16:19), but they are not constrained by procedural rules. Many served at the pleasure of patriarchs or kings who could dispose of legal charges at will (Gen. 38:24, 26; 2 Sam. 12-13). The capital penalties of Leviticus 20 presuppose some kind of community role by requiring that the community execute offenders: implicitly with the ‫“ מות יומת‬they must certainly die” verdicts (vv. 2, 9-13, 15-16, 27) and explicitly by requiring stoning by “the people of the land” (vv. 2, 27) or burning at the stake (v. 14). The chapter promises executioners that they will bear no blood guilt for carrying out the death penalty on offenders because “their blood is on themselves” (vv. 9, 11, 12, 13, 16, 27). It also threatens the people collectively with divine punishment including exile (vv. 22-24) if they “close their eyes” to offenders in their midst (v. 4). Instead, the community must ensure that “there will be no depravity among you” (v. 14; cf. the phrase “you must eliminate the evil from Israel” in Deut. 17:12; 19:13, 19; 22:22; 24:7). This rhetoric encourages communities to assume the guilt rather than the innocence of anyone charged with incest or Molek worship in order to protect themselves from divine retribution. Apart from requiring two witnesses (Deut. 17:6; 19:5), biblical law provides no procedural safeguards to ensure

520

Leviticus 20 Exposition

the impartiality and fairness of court procedures. Deuteronomy itself mandates summary execution without trial for inciting apostasy from YHWH (Deut. 13:10-12).1 Leviticus 20’s penalties have therefore easily been used to justify show trials that compile charges of incest, witchcraft, bestiality, homosexual intercourse, and/or child sacrifice in order to exonerate communities for killing people. This problem is recognized in the HB itself: the story of King Ahaz’s desire for Naboth’s vineyard illustrates how community assemblies can be manipulated into declaring capital sentences on innocent people (1 Kgs. 21:8-14). Historians of law point out that the few procedural requirements in biblical law are first steps in the long history of developing standards and procedures for independent courts judging impartially on the basis of evidence.2 Indeed, most of the ancient legal collections show some reformist tendencies in trying to restrain the legal and economic abuses that were rampant in society (see further in Exposition to Leviticus 25). Because of the Bible’s unique status in subsequent Jewish and Christian cultures, however, its progressive impulses have often been overwhelmed by appeals to its draconian penalties to undermine due legal progress (see below). The second problem with reading Leviticus 20 as modelling legal procedures involves its broad application of the death penalty. It mandates capital punishment for offences ranging from false worship of Molek that may or may not have involved child sacrifice (vv. 2-5) to necromancy (v. 27) to a variety of illicit sexual offences (vv. 10-16) to dishonouring one’s parents (v. 9). Not even mentioned in this chapter is the usual offence that prompts modern death penalties, murder. This chapter therefore provides a concentrated example of a moral problem affecting verdicts of capital punishment across the Pentateuch: the punishments are not proportionate to the severity of the crimes. The principle that punishment should be proportionate to the crime is taught by all three legal collections of the Pentateuch itself (Exod. 21:23-25; Lev. 24:17-21; Deut. 19:21). They inherited this lex talionis from the laws of Hammurabi (§§196-208) where, however, it is limited by social status. Interpreters have long insisted that the biblical talion rule does not literally require corporeal punishment equivalent to the damage (“an eye for an eye”) but rather that penalties must be proportionate to the severity of the crime 1 For this interpretation, against the long tradition of trying to read procedural safeguards into Deut. 13:10-12, see Bernard M. Levinson, “‘But You Shall Surely Kill Him!’: The TextCritical and Neo-Assyrian Evidence for MT Deuteronomy 13:10,” in “The Right Chorale”: Studies in Biblical Law and Interpretation (FAT 54; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 166-94. 2 E.g. Richard H. Hiers, “The Death Penalty and Due Process in Biblical Law,” University of Detroit Mercy Law Review 81 (2004), 751-843, available at http://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/ facultypub/741.

Leviticus 20 Exposition

521

(e.g. Wenham 283; see further in Exegesis to 24:17-21). Its contexts in Exodus and Leviticus emphasize compensation. Its influence on modern law appears most obviously in that murder is almost the only verdict that can still earn the death penalty. Leviticus 20, however, does not mention murder (unless Molek offerings involved killing children; see Exegesis on v. 2). Its many mandates for capital punishment are therefore not proportionate at all. The most likely explanation for this lack of proportionate punishment is that the threat of divine retribution on the community for allowing the land to be polluted elevated all these offences to the same level of severity (Frymer Kensky 1983, 406-405). That is how pollution language often works: it transfers offences within the human realm to the divine realm by calling on a divine judge to take notice (Yoo-Watts 2021, 51-52). The moral mandate for proportionate punishment is therefore overwhelmed by the divine mandate to maintain the holiness of the land and the people. That is explicitly how Lev. 20:7, 26 and 18:4-5, 30 frame the sexual prohibitions. The bloody history of citing Leviticus 20 to justify executions of sexual and ritual offenders shows the injustice in allowing fear of pollution and aspirations for holiness to trump fair and impartial legal procedures. The history of modern political and legal reforms has been, in part, a campaign to rule pollution and holiness out of court. The stage for this development was set by medieval Christian insistence that only secular authorities may execute convicted criminals, even if convicted by church courts. Modern states have gradually exerted a monopoly over court procedures as well. Marriage laws, however, including rules about illicit sexual activity, are among the last over which religious authorities retain some control (see Exposition to Leviticus 18). Using the Biblical Death Penalty to Suppress Heresy The long history of Christian rulers and governments executing religious dissidents as well as criminals and political enemies is cruelly ironic in a religion whose founder was unjustly executed, as emphasized visually by its ubiquitous icons, the Cross and the Crucifix. Reading the NT leads one to imagine a very different history for the Christian religion. Comparing rabbinic and early Christian texts, Beth Berkowitz (2006, 183) observed, “Legal discourse reflects the rabbinic self-perception as judge, while Christian genres more aptly characterize the judged.” The Gospels emphasize pacifism and non-violence through Jesus’ teachings and his own behaviour. Jesus’ refusal to resist arrest and execution elevated the martyr ideal in explicit denial of the efficacy of violence (Matt. 26:5152: “those who live by the sword die by the sword”; John 18:11, 36). The Sermon on the Mount celebrates mercy and peacemaking, and exhorts disciples not to resist those who persecute them (Matt. 5:7, 9-12, 38-39;

522

Leviticus 20 Exposition

Luke 6:22-23, 27-29; also Rom. 12:14, 17; Heb. 12:14), while explicitly rejecting the law of talion (Exod. 21:23-25). The NT repeatedly warns readers against judging others, twice citing God’s monopoly on vengeance (Deut. 32:35) to justify avoiding it (Rom. 12:19; Heb. 10:30; also Matt. 7:1-5; 13:24-30; Luke 6:37). Jesus refused to support the stoning of a woman accused of adultery (John 8:1-11). Thus, in contrast to the procedural constraints required by the Jewish rabbis, the NT voiced a moral critique of state violence, most luridly in John’s Apocalypse (Rev. 6:10; 11:7-10, 18; 12:17; 13:7; 17:6; 19:15). Many early theologians therefore regarded it as morally impossible for Christians to ever kill another person, either as soldiers or as executioners (Megivern 1997, 19-33). They regarded the Pentateuch’s death penalties, like so many other rules in the HB, as superseded by the law of love, quoting directly from Lev. 19:18. However, the lack of legal procedures in Christian scripture made it easy for later theologians to constrain the NT’s pacifism to only a moral ideal rather than a legal precedent. In the fourth century, the adoption of Catholic Christianity into the ruling ideology of the Roman Empire led theologians to accommodate state violence. For example, before Constantine embraced Christianity, Lactantius argued that Christians may neither kill nor charge anyone with a capital crime. Afterwards, he changed his tune to laud Constantine as “God’s divinely appointed agent to restore justice and exact divine vengeance on the wicked” (Megivern 1997, 26). A few years later, a recent convert writing to Constantine’s sons cited Deuteronomy 13 to insist that “the Law of the Supreme Deity enjoins on you that your severity should be visited in every way on the crime of idolatry” (Megivern 1997, 29). Christian thinkers resolved this contradiction by developing a distinction between religious and secular institutions. They maintained that the Church and its representatives must not kill, but Christian secular rulers must do so to defend the nation and preserve civil order. This distinction was already voiced by Origen, but was elaborated with greater influence by Augustine in his City of God. In individual cases, however, Augustine always urged judges to commute death penalties (Megivern 1997, 23, 41-45; on the later influence of this distinction, see pp. 54, 70-71, 108, 202, 505 n. 16). The secular-sacred distinction has therefore allowed Christian thinkers to voice ambivalence about the morality of killing people even while supporting state and judicial use of the death penalty. The freedom to kill granted to rulers and their agents was legally entrenched by the Theodosian Code (438 C.E.), which recommended capital punishment in 120 laws that represented, according to James Megivern (1997, 45, 27), all the earlier laws of the pagan empire plus the even stricter ones enacted over the previous century for the express purpose of ‘Christianizing’ the empire. ... The lethal combination of the Bible and Roman law provided surprisingly cruel penal codes, invariably viewed as directly willed by God.

Leviticus 20 Exposition

523

This trend continued in Justinian’s Code (books 47-48) and Digest (book 9), and a thousand years later in the teachings of both Tridentine Catholics and their Protestant opponents. As John Calvin pithily summarized the Augustinian distinction, “The sword of the Mosaic theocracy was transferred to the civil government, ... not to the church” (Megivern 1997, 202). The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony therefore reproduced all of the capital penalties of Leviticus 20 and other Pentateuchal codes in their “Laws and Liberties” of 1647, citing the biblical texts explicitly as legal precedents. Megivern observed that suppression of so-called “heretical” movements strengthened Christian support for capital punishment. Opposition to the violent suppression of heretics was voiced by many leading theologians of the first millennium (Megivern 1997, 35, 47, 59). However, execution of Christian dissenters already took place in the Eastern Roman Empire in the fourth and eighth centuries and became common in Western Christianity in the second millennium (Megivern 1997, 30, 49, 55-61, 99-111). The founding of the Roman Catholic Inquisition in the twelfth century institutionalized Church prosecutions of heretics who, if found guilty, were sent to secular authorities for punishment, usually execution (Megivern 1997, 82). Also in the twelfth century, European laws, now based on Roman law as collected in Justinian’s Code, endorsed the death penalty for thieves as well as murderers, sorcerers, and heretics, citing Exod. 22:17 and Deut. 13:6-11 to support the latter charges. Canon law treated capital punishment as a universal natural law that allows the use of force to repel force, constrained only by concern for justice in its application (Megivern 1997, 86-95, 101, 116). Capital punishment had become so ingrained in Christian thought that a scholastic theologian, Peter of Poitiers, dismissed the NT’s teachings of non-violence as a temporary adjustment to early Christianity’s minority status (Megivern 1997, 80). Duns Scotus tried unsuccessfully to limit capital punishment by Christian rulers only to offences specifically described as deserving it in the Hebrew Bible (Megivern 1997, 122). Leviticus 20 not only motivated capital punishment for sexual infractions, but also influenced the kinds of executions carried out in various times and cultures. This chapter mandates stoning for Molek worship and spirit possession (vv. 2, 27) and burning only for sexual intercourse with both a mother and her daughter (v. 14). It does not specify what form of capital punishment should punish bestiality (vv. 15-16), but readers seem to have carried over the burning penalty from v. 14 to the following verses, and then redefined other illicit behaviours as bestiality. In 1224 and 1231 C.E., secular and canon law codes began to mandate burning explicitly as punishment for heretics, most likely due to v. 2 (Megivern 1997, 110). Heresy was a pliable category that over time came to include those suspected of illicit sexual behaviour or ritual misconduct (witches and Jews). In the thirteenth-century cities of Oxford and Paris, for example, Christian men who married Jewish women

524

Leviticus 20 Exposition

were convicted of bestiality and burned at the stake (E. Berkowitz 2012, 159). Christian influence led medieval Swedish law codes to mandate burning or burial alive in cases of bestiality. Both methods of execution were considered means for purifying pollution.3 Throughout early-modern Europe and the American colonies, macabre executions of reputed witches, heretics, and Jews were explicitly believed to eradicate pollution from the community (Megivern 1997, 180, 187, 191-92).4 In sixteenth-to-eighteenth-century Scotland, long after burning was no longer typically used for executions, there were documented cases of execution by burning at the stake, and even burning bodies after execution by hanging, in cases of witchcraft, incest, and bestiality.5 Nevertheless, the NT’s pacifist tendency has inspired condemnations of capital punishment in many back-to-the-Bible movements throughout the second millennium. The Waldensians (12th-13th centuries), the Lollards (15th c.), the Czech Brethren (16th c.), the Mennonites (16th c.), and the Quakers (17th c.) are the most famous of the many popular movements that resisted canon law and church authorities on this and many other issues (Megivern 1997, 99-103, 193-207). Though rooted in the NT’s teachings of non-resistance, dissidents also observed sarcastically that the Church allowed execution for theft, which is not even endorsed by the law of Moses. These remained minority positions, however. The Lutherans and Calvinists, despite being influenced by some of their dissenting predecessors, agreed with Roman Catholics that capital punishment is essential for maintaining social order. They argued only over whether heretics may be killed or not (Megivern 1997, 141-43, 202). As Megivern (1997, 144) summarized the situation, “The practice of capital punishment had found a virtually impregnable position to occupy in the social order of Western Christiandom and was surrounded by protective theory by the best theological minds.” Megivern also observed that “The single most influential factor accounting for the early and widespread Christian acceptance of the death penalty was undoubtedly the Bible” (Megivern 1997, 10). The most cited texts for Christian endorsements of capital punishment have been Genesis 9:6, “Whoever spills the blood of a human will have their blood spilled by a human,” and Rom. 13:3, that rulers “do not bear the sword in vain.” These principles were supported by the Pentateuch’s detailed mandates for capital punishment:

3 Christine Ekholst, A Punishment for Each Criminal: Gender and Crime in Swedish Medieval Law (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 183-89. 4 Also Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 110-11. 5 Rachel E. Bennett, Capital Punishment and the Criminal Corpse in Scotland, 1740–1834 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 138.

Leviticus 20 Exposition

525

If death had not been so strikingly represented as a divinely ordained penalty for dozens of human misdeeds in the Hebrew Bible, the practice of executing wayward fellow human beings would never have gained the kind of central position that it did in Christian history. (Megivern 1997, 10)

Using the Bible to Justify Legal Executions and Vigilante Violence Today Much research in recent decades has chronicled the Bible’s historical and contemporary influence on policies promoting genocide, slavery, and misogyny. Biblical scholars have given less attention to the Bible’s influence on death penalty policies and practices. Over time, national legislation has steadily reduced the number of offences punishable by the death penalty to only first-degree murder and, sometimes, treason. In many countries (including all the countries of the European Union), capital punishment has been abolished entirely. Portugal abolished the death penalty already in 1867. Germany’s abolition of capital punishment in its 1949 Basic Law prompted theological debate of the issue among Protestants and Catholics after the fact. The State of Israel permits capital punishment only for genocide and related crimes, and has not carried out an execution since 1962. The credit for such progress lies more with secular philosophy and legal developments than with religion, whose theologians have either defended capital punishment or played catch-up with their secular counterparts in advocating its abolition (Megivern 1997, 209-333). Only in the last sixty years have denominations begun to formally oppose capital punishment in all circumstances. All three Jewish movements announced opposition to the death penalty around 1960. The trend among American Christians culminated in rejection of the death penalty by the U.S. National Council of Churches in 1966, and by the Roman Catholic Church in a 1995 encyclical by Pope John Paul II (Evangelium vitae). However, independent fundamentalist and evangelical churches and at least two conservative denominations, the Missouri Synod Lutherans and the Southern Baptist Convention, continue to defend the death penalty (Lipka 2015). Fifty-six countries retain the death penalty today. In the U.S.A, the death penalty remains a legal option in thirty states. The U.S. federal government and seventeen states have executed people in the last ten years, and in 2020 there were more than 2,700 people awaiting execution on death row. The movement to abolish the death penalty has many roots, and at least some of these roots are religious in nature: long Jewish and Christian traditions of halakhah, preaching, canon law, and commentary have argued for restricting capital punishment more and more to the point of abolishing it. Nevertheless, endorsements of capital punishment in the Bible continue to fuel political support for judicial executions. In 2015, the Pew Research Center reported

526

Leviticus 20 Exposition

that 66-71% of American Protestants support the death penalty, as do 53% of Catholics (Lipka 2015). Thus the Christian religion continues to play a decisive role in the politics of capital punishment, though other factors (notably race) are important as well. Religiously motivated vigilantes also sometimes cite biblical verses to justify their violence. It is not difficult to find contemporary examples of political and legal speech citing biblical texts to recommend capital punishment, as well as the self-justifications of individuals and groups engaging in vigilante violence. Whereas the former engage biblical texts directly as legal precedents, the latter often use biblical texts to justify violence within a wider rhetoric that demonizes ethnic, religious, and sexual others. Observers of American capital cases have noticed prosecutors and jurors citing the Bible both in support of and in opposition to capital punishment (Santoro 2014).6 There are many examples of biblical citations in political speeches endorsing capital punishment (see Megivern 1997, 13). Despite the tradition of both Popes and American bishops advocating a seamless ethic of life that has no room for capital punishment, conservative Catholics continue to utilize older sources to defend the institution as fundamental to Christian tradition.7 Protestant Christian theorists of the arch-conservative “Reconstructionist” or “Dominion” movements cite biblical death penalty rules as justifying the state’s monopoly not just on coercion, but specifically on enacting vengeance on God’s behalf. In his Leviticus commentary, Gary North (1994, 264, 374) advocated government enforcement of almost all the biblical death penalties. R. J. Rushdooney (1973, 2.3, 2.6) even asserted that law is inherently a form of warfare. Such claims are not marginal in contemporary evangelical politics: Christian Reconstructionist theology informs the thinking of influential American politicians such as Senator Ted Cruz and the 2016 Presidential Candidate, Rev. Michael Huckabee, among others.8 Reconstructionist ideas are also employed by Christian nationalist movements in other nations, such as Zambia.9 The example of the death penalty for adultery, which has rarely been imposed by law courts but has often been exacted by jealous husbands or other family members (see Exegesis to v. 10), shows that the cultural influence of biblical 6 Also Robert L. Young, “Religious Orientation, Race, and Support for the Death Penalty,” in The Leviathan’s Choice: Capital Punishment in the Twenty-First Century (ed. J. Michael Martinez, William D. Richardson, D. Brandon Hornsby; Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 69-79 [69]. 7 E.g. Edward Feser and Joseph Bessette, By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017. 8 Frederick Clarkson, “Dominionism Rising: A Theocratic Movement Hiding in Plain Sight,” The Public Eye (Summer 2016), 12-26 [13]. 9 Naomi Haynes, “Taking Dominion in a Christian Nation,” Pneuma 43/2 (2021), 21432.

Leviticus 20 Exposition

527

death penalties is not limited to legal history. In addition to so-called “honour killings” of women suspected of promiscuity, other kinds of vigilante attacks have also been justified by quoting Leviticus 20. In recent American history, anti-abortion and anti-gay vigilantes have been notable for citing biblical justifications. For example, Eric Rudolph bombed the Olympic Park in Atlanta in 1996 and abortion clinics and gay bars in the following years. After his conviction for multiple murders, Rudolph published a detailed treatise online using Christian traditions of Just War and capital punishment, including Leviticus’s death penalties, to defend vigilante violence under unjust governments and the vigilante’s innocence as a “just executioner.”10 The Army of God website that published Rudolph’s manifesto defends anti-abortion vigilantes by quoting on its home page Lev. 20:1-5, Num. 35:33, and Gen. 9:6 as well as prophetic texts, psalms and NT texts that lament sin and celebrate martyrs.11 A few evangelical ministers have attracted media attention in recent years by preaching sermons calling for killing gays and other non-heteronormative people.12 All denominations and almost all congregations condemn vigilante violence and rhetoric as violating the Jewish and Christian traditions’ emphasis on legitimate courts. This accurate observation, however, does not take into account the long history of using biblical rhetoric to justify quasi-legal and extra-legal violence because biblical law itself fails to provide many procedural safeguards to ensure fair trials. Leviticus provides none at all. Capital punishment remains rooted in a biblical stream of rhetoric that can be activated by whoever reads these verses. Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann have described “stored memories” as cultural repositories or archives of symbols, ideas, rituals, texts, and traditions that may no longer be used regularly but still transfer across generations and can still shape social identity.13 Leviticus 20’s mandates for capital punishment function today, as they always 10 Eric Rudolph, “A Time of War: Is Armed Resistance to Abortion Morally Justified?” 14, 22-23, online at https://www.armyofgod.com/EricRudolphATime_of_War.html (accessed Nov. 6, 2021). 11 Army of God, http://www.armyofgod.com/, accessed Feb 16, 2019. For further examples and analysis, see Daryl Johnson, “Hate in God’s Name,” Southern Poverty Law Center, September 2017: https://www.splcenter.org/20170925/hate-god%E2%80%99s-name; accessed Nov. 6, 2021. 12 Gary David Comstock, Violence Against Lesbians and Gay Men (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 122–24. Recent news stories include: Dubby Henry, “West Auckland pastor preaches gay people should be shot,” The New Zealand Herald, August 15, 2017; Jeffrey Moyo, “Living with HIV and AIDS, and unwelcome in Zimbabwe’s churches,” Religion News Service, November 15, 2017; Gabrielle Karol, “Baptist pastor stands by anti-gay Orlando shooting sermon,” ABC10, June 15, 2016. 13 Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1999), 130-45; Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies (tr. Rodney Livingstone; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 8-9, 21-30.

528

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

have, in exactly that way as latent normative texts justifying legal and extralegal violence. The death penalty verses in Leviticus and the Pentateuch should all be struck through to show in the Bible’s printed text itself that they fail to meet basic Jewish and Christian standards of justice and morality. See further in the Author’s Preface above.

EXEGESIS Polemic against Molek Worship and Necromancy (20:1-8) Like chap. 18, this chapter brackets lists of illicit sexual activities (vv. 9-21) with exhortations (vv. 2-8, 22-26). The opening exhortations prohibit Molek worship (vv. 2-5) and necromancy (v. 6) before calling on the Israelites to imitate YHWH’s holiness (vv. 7-8). Interpreters have been puzzled as to why prohibitions of Molek worship appear so prominently (18:21; 20:2-5) in chapters mostly concerned with illicit sexual behaviour. Older theories that Molek worship involved sexual orgies of some kind have now been largely abandoned as commentators increasingly recognize that these texts use sexual slander for religious polemic. But that does not explain why the religious critique focuses especially on Molek worship (vv. 2-5) along with necromancy (vv. 6, 27). This chapter’s conclusion, like the framework of chap. 18, warns Israelites against imitating Canaanite practices, so perhaps the writers associated Molek and necromancy with the Canaanites (Milgrom 1559). However, polemic against Molek worship elsewhere appears almost exclusively in 2 Kings, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel about the last years of the Judean kingdom, when the Canaanites were long gone. 20:1-2 YHWH spoke to Moses: To the children of Israel, you must say: Anyone of the children of Israel or of the immigrants (sg) immigrating in Israel who gives their (ms) semen to Molek must certainly die. The people of the land must stone them with rocks. The indirect object appears before the verb in only seven introductions to divine speeches (Exod. 30:31; Lev. 9:3; 20:2; 24:15; Num. 11:18; 18:26; 27:8) and everywhere else it marks a change of addressee (Milgrom 1728-29). Here, the Israelites have been addressed since chap. 16 (17:2; 18:2; 19:2). Perhaps ‫“ ואל־בני ישׂראל תאמר‬to the children of Israel you must say” places the Israelite addressees first to emphasize their national identity, because this chapter will call on them to separate themselves from other nations by their behaviour (vv. 22-26).

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

529

This chapter’s focus on penalties for illicit behaviour leads it to phrase most of its prohibitions in third-person casuistic commands like in chaps. 13 and 17, but unlike the second-person address that dominates chaps. 18 and 19. The phrase, ‫“ יתן מזרעו‬gives their (ms) semen,” is a shortened version of ‫“ תתן שׁכבתך לזרע‬you give your layer of semen” (18:20) which is similar to ‫“ תצא ממנו שׁכבת־זרע‬let out a layer of semen” in 15:16 (cf. also 15:17, 18, 32). In chap. 15, the reference is clearly to ejaculating semen, but here interpreters usually think it refers to making offerings of one’s children as in other HB texts about Molek worship. The fact that YHWH’s promise of descendents to the ancestors used the same word (Gen. 12:7; 15:18; 17:7; 24:7)14 leads some commentators to discuss the symbolism inherent in calling children “semen/seed” (Hartley 338). It is likely that the use of the word ‫“ זרע‬seed/ semen,” which among Molek offering texts is unique to Lev. 18:21 and 20:2-5, adjusts the Molek prohibitions to fit into the literary context of sexual prohibitions in 18:20-23 and 20:10-21. References to “Molek” offerings appear in 2 Kgs. 23:10 and Jer. 32:35. Other texts refer to “passing” children (Deut. 12:31; 2 Kgs. 12:10; 16:3; 17:31-32; Ezek. 16:21; 23:39). The Hebrew consonantal phrase reads most naturally as “to/for the king,” which is supported by MT’s dagesh in the mem, ‫למּלך‬, indicating a definite article. ‫“ למלך‬to/for the king” was stamped on many jar handles in the Judean kingdom to designate provisions for the palace. But MT’s vocalization ‫ מ ֶֹלְך‬molek suggests a proper name of a deity or, perhaps, a perjorative twisting of it by using the same vowels as in ‫ב ֶֹשׁת‬ “shame” (see below). LXX in the Pentateuch translated ἄρχῶν “ruler,” which may reflect the usual voweling of ‫“ ֶמ ֶלך‬king” though LXX used ἄρχῶν elsewhere to translate ‫“ נשׂיא‬leader” (BHQ 107; see LXX of Lev. 4:22). However, the Greek translator of Jer. 32:35 and 2 Kgs. 23:10 transliterated it as a name, μολοχ “Moloch,” similar to MT’s vocalization here. The word appears in phrases like “give his semen to pass to Molek” (Lev. 18:21; abbreviated in 20:2-4 by omitting ‫“ להעביר‬to pass”) and “pass his son and his daughter in/by/through fire (‫ )באשׁ‬to Molek” (2 Kgs. 23:10; abbreviated to “pass children through fire” in Deut. 18:10; 2 Kgs. 16:3). A more specific identity for the god(s) ‫ מלך‬Molek/Melek may be provided by 2 Kgs. 17:31-32: “burn (‫ )שׂרף‬their children with fire to Adramelek and Anamelek, the gods of the Sefarvaim” (cf. Deut. 12:31 “to the gods”). Ezekiel makes the ritual explicitly deadly by using ‫“ העביר‬pass” one’s children in conjunction with the synonyms for killing animal offerings, ‫ זבח‬and ‫שׁחט‬ “slaughter” (Ezek. 16:21; less fully in 23:39). Note that Exod. 13:12 uses 14

H. Preuss, “‫ זָ ַר ע‬zāra῾,” TWAT 2:671-79 = TDOT 4:150-56.

530

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

‫“ העביר‬pass” for dedicating first-born male humans and animals to YHWH, though it requires that an animal offering substitute for human boys. In comparison with these others texts, Leviticus is distinctive in using ‫זרע‬ “seed/semen” for offerings to Molek rather than “sons and daughters.” This usage sexualizes the religious polemic, especially in the juxtaposition of ‫זרע‬ meaning “semen” and “children” in 18:20-23, but also by placing the prohibitions on Molek worship into the context of long lists of sexual offences in chaps. 18 and 20. This rhetoric interferes with our understanding of these religious practices, because the HB frequently sexualizes its polemics against worshipping any god other than YHWH just as 20:5 sexualizes the polemic against Molek worship by describing its adherents as “lusting after Molek” (also Ezek. 16:20-22; on sexualized religious polemics, see Bailey 1994). The meaning of these phrases has therefore been the subject of much speculation (for medieval Jewish interpretations, see Lokshin in Benjamin et al. 2021, 664; for early modern interpretations, see Hartley and Dwyer 1996, 84) and remains hotly contested today. There are four major theories (see also the surveys by Hartley 333-37; Albertz 1994, 190-94; Milgrom 155258; Hieke 679-86, or Hieke 2019, 178-85; Schmidt in Benjamin et al. 2021, 658-64). 1) The reference in 2 Kgs. 23:10 to ‫“ תפת‬tophet” suggests that Judeans sacrificed their children to Canaanite deities (so already Ramban), which may be attested archeologically in the Punic graveyards at Carthage and elsewhere.15 But it is not clear that the children buried there were sacrificed (Levine 258-60).16 Many think the rituals invoked Molek as a chthonic deity (e.g. Heider 1984, 223-28; Milgrom 1770-72), and it is possible that the term refers instead to funeral rituals for young children who died naturally (Staubli 164). But the Punic references are found in the context of worshipping Baal and El, who were not chthonic deities (Rainey 2019, 192-93). 2) ‫ למלך‬may name an offering ritual, which was then (deliberately?) misinterpreted by Deuteronomic reformers as a divine name to condemn it as idolatry.17 The Pheonician Incirli stela may use mlk as a reference to a kind of human offering, but its badly eroded text interferes with a clear reading.18 The 15 George C. Heider, The Cult of Molek: A Reassessment (JSOTSup 43, Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1984), 406-407. 16 Also John Day, Molech a God of Human Sacrifice in the Old Testament, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, and the essays in P. Xella (ed.), The Tophet in the Phoenician Mediterranean, a topical issue of Studi Epigrafici e Linguistici sul Vicino Oriente Antico 29-30 (2013). 17 Otto Eissfeldt, Molk als Opferbegriff im Punischen und Hebräischen und das Ende des Gottes, Halle: Niemeyer, 1935; Francesca Stavrakopoulou, King Manasseh and Child Sacrifice: Biblical Distortions of Historical Realities (BZAW 338; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004), 141-321 18 Stephen A. Kaufman, “The Phoenician Inscription of the Incirli Trilingual: A Tentative Reconstruction and Translation,” MAARAV 14/2 (2007), 7-26.

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

531

fact that Leviticus depicts Molek offerings as “polluting YHWH’s sanctuary and defiling YHWH’s name” (20:3; 18:21) suggests that practitioners thought it was a legitimate part of YHWH’s cult (Milgrom 1560-65; Rainey 2019, 194). 3) The vowels of ‫“ ֶמ ֶלך‬king” may have been exchanged for those of ‫ב ֶֹשׁת‬ “shame” to denigrate the traditional epithet of the storm god, Adad, the “king” (Moshe Weinfeld, followed by Milgrom 1556; Albertz 1994, 19293).19 The rituals of Adad’s cult were not child sacrifices but purification rituals that dedicated children to the deity’s service (so t. Sanh. 10 and maybe already SP and LXX of 18:21). 4) Thomas Hieke (682-86; also Hieke 2019, 186-90) has suggested that post-exilic writers aimed their polemic against Molek at imperial collaborators who sent their children to serve their Persian overlords, where they lost their culture and religion (cf. some ancient interpreters who associated Molek worship with marrying foreigners: Jub. 30:9-10; m. Meg. 4:9; b. Meg. 25a). The ‫“ מלך‬king,” then, is the Persian emperor and his local representatives. Hieke suggested that biblical texts disguised this criticism as anti-idolatry polemic to hide its political implications from non-Judean readers. There is, however, no explicit description of such concerns in the HB, which depicts the Persian empire more positively than other imperial overlords (e.g. Isaiah 44-45) and celebrates Judeans who served the Persian Empire faithfully (e.g. Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther). Biblical polemics against Molek worship have fired the imagination of later polemicists, especially in modern centuries (see Boysen and Ruwe in Benjamin et al. 2021, 668-70). They depicted their opponents as offering children to Molek, literally or metaphorically. Molek became a cipher for Satan and his worship for the fires of hell (e.g. in works by Thomas Hobbes and John Milton). In the nineteenth century, Molek came to represent cities, industries, wars, and economic systems that devour people, that is, their own children (e.g. as cited by Karl Marx). Twenty-first-century anti-abortion polemicists regularly cite biblical verses condemning passing one’s children through fire to Molek to oppose legal abortions (see Exposition). Christian Reconstructionist theologians use Molek worship as a cipher for modern governments that regulate children’s education and private property in pluralistic societies (Rushdooney 1973, §i.3; North 1994, 59, 329-30). Our understanding of Molek rituals remains obscured by the ferocity of biblical and later polemics against it (Hieke 681; more generally, see Introduction §2.3.6 in Leviticus 1-10). Furthermore, human sacrifice, despite its popularity as a literary motif, was never widely practised in Near Eastern and Mediterranean antiquity (Watts 2007, 184-92; Albertz 1994, 192). I therefore 19 Moshe Weinfeld, “Worship of Molech and the Queen of Heaven and its Background,” UF 4 (1972), 133-54.

532

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

follow the old tradition of translating ‫ למלך‬as a divine name, “to/for Molek,” and I caution readers that we know very little about what this meant, except that the HB’s writers were against it. The emphatic phrase, ‫“ מות יומת‬must certainly die,” punctuates much of this chapter (vv. 2, 9-13, 15-16, 27). Most interpreters take it to mean execution by human hands (cf. Exod. 21:15-17, 29 and see Milgrom 1746; Levine 136) and translate accordingly with some variation of “must be put to death” (KJV, NRSV, NJPS). However, Thomas Hieke (789-92; also Hieke 2004, 352-53) argued that the phrase does not mandate human execution so much as it declares someone worthy of execution. It is motivational rhetoric rather than a judicial sentence. The next phrase, however, explicitly orders the community to execute Molek worshippers. In other verses, the ‫ מות יומת‬verdict is frequently followed by the assertion that “their blood is on themselves” to exonerate their human executioners (vv. 9, 11-13, 16, 27), which supports the traditional interpretation of the verdict as mandating execution by the community. Hieke correctly emphasized this threat’s rhetorical goal of discouraging Molek worship and the other illicit behaviours listed in vv. 916 (similarly Stiebert 2016, 62-64, 197). However, his sharp differentiation between law and this kind of paranetic material is artificial for ancient Near Eastern legal collections, none of which carried statutory authority. They presented models of legal reasoning and punishments for emulation. That is especially the case with biblical law, which mixes religious, legal, and moral exhortation together as the stipulations of Israel’s covenant with YHWH (Watts 1999, 135-37, 144, 159-61). The other rulings in this chapter usually contain only one threat. Verses 2-3 stand out for containing three: ‫“ מות יומת‬must certainly die,” ‫“ רגם‬stoning,” and ‫“ כרת‬cut off.” That led Milgrom (1730, 1733-34) to identify in this description of Molek worship separate offences against the community (murder) and against God (polluting YHWH’s sanctuary and name, v. 3). However, the rhetorical effect of listing all three punishments for the same offence leads to identifying the community’s execution of offenders with a divine verdict and sentence. The explicit coordination of capital punishment by the community with divine retribution, all under the general verdict “they must certainly die,” has been used by later communities to justify claiming divine sanction for their executions (see Exposition). This violent history warrants striking through this and all other mandates for capital punishment in the HB, because they fail to meet the most basic ethical standards in Jewish and Christian traditions which are based in the Pentateuch’s own requirements of proportionate punishments (see further in Exposition and the Author’s Preface above). ‫“ עם הארץ‬the people of the land” (also in v. 4) refers elsewhere to politically influential groups in the Kingdom of Judah (2 Kgs. 11:14-20; 21:24;

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

533

23:30) and to the inhabitants whom the returning exiles found already in Persian-period Yehud (Ezra 4:4; 9:1-2, 11; 10:2, 11). But it also refers to the religious community around the post-exilic sanctuary (Hag. 2:4; Zech 7:5; Ezek. 45:22), which most resembles its use here.20 This phrase then fits the inclination of many interpreters to date P or H to the Persian period (contra Milgrom 1730-31). Deuteronomy similarly requires that executions be carried out by “all the people” (13:10 Eng. 13:9; 17:7) or “the men of the town” (21:21; 22:21; Wenham 278). The verb ‫“ רגם‬to stone” is always used in the HB to describe execution by the community. The noun ‫“ אבן‬stone, rock” is a different root, so I translate “stone with rocks” to reflect that. This chapter specifies stoning only for Molek worship (v. 2) and spirit possession (v. 27), but most of the death sentences in vv. 9-21 do not specify the means of execution. Blasphemy against the divine name qualifies for stoning in 24:14 as does violating the Sabbath in Num. 15:35-36. Deuteronomy and Ezekiel mandate stoning for adultery (Deut. 22:21, 24; Ezek. 16:40; 23:47) among other, mostly ritual, offences (Deut. 13:11; 17:5; 21:21). Stoning by a crowd embodies the corporate responsibility of communal execution, since an individual executioner cannot be identified (FrymerKensky 1983, 406). Individual responsibility is ameliorated by communal action which is ameliorated by the divine verdict and sentence. This rhetorical effect has allowed many communities throughout history to claim precedent here for executing people with self-righteous impunity. The ancient rabbis tried to counter this effect by limiting stoning to the witnesses to the crime and by mandating that they push the convicts off a cliff rather than pelting them with stones (m. Sanh. 6:2-4; b. Sanh. 45a, 52a; Milgrom 1732-33). They also surrounded capital cases with many procedural hurdles so as to make it almost impossible to carry out the death penalty (see Exposition). Christian interpreters have invoked Rom. 13:4 in support of a government’s monopoly over capital punishment to try to restrain lynchings (Elliott 221). 20:3

I myself will face this one and cut them (ms) off from the midst of their people, because they give their semen to Molek which pollutes my sanctuary and defiles my holy name.

For ‫“ אתן את־פני באישׁ ההוא‬I will face this one,” see Exegesis to 17:10. Using the verb ‫ נתן‬here (literally, “I will give my face to this one”) sets up a contrasting parallel with the previous verse’s “those who give their semen to Molek” (Hartley 333; Milgrom 1733). 20

Jean-Daniel Macchi, “῾Am ha-Arets,” EBR (2009), 1:912-14.

534

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

For the penalty of ‫“ כרת‬cutting off,” see Exegesis to 7:20. Rather than the more common passive form, this verse uses the active hiphil form of ‫כרת‬ which makes the threat sound more violent (Kamionkowski 170; also in vv. 5-6 and 17:10). Divine punishment here reinforces and justifies execution by the community in the previous and following verses. ‫“ טמא את־מקדשׁי וחלל את־שׁם קדשׁי‬pollutes my sanctuary and defiles my holy name” reads ‫ וחלל‬with SP and 11QpaleoLev (also supported by LXX, Vg, and Pesh; so BHQ). MT’s ‫ ולחלל‬establishes a causal connection, “pollute my sanctuary to defile my holy name,” instead of a parallel. In Leviticus 18-22, ‫“ חלל‬defile” frequently takes YHWH’s name as its object and sometimes the sanctuary, but the two objects are juxtaposed only here. The parallelism here equates ‫ חלל‬of the divine name with ‫“ טמא‬polluting” the sanctuary, which recommends translating ‫ חלל‬as “to defile” (KJV, CEB) to combine connotations of pollution and desecration, rather than just “to desecrate” (contra Milgrom 1560, 1800; Lipka 2010). See further on 18:21 above. Pollution of the sanctuary has often been understood as the principal fear motivating all the purity regulations (so especially Milgrom 254-61, followed by many others). However, this is one of only two verses in Leviticus to state that fear explicitly (the other is 15:31). The Tabernacle must be purified from pollution (chap. 9) and the rituals of the Day of Mitigations mitigate the sanctuary and the people of Israel from sin and pollution (16:16, 30, 33-34). But the theme of polluting the land and the people of Israel is much more prominent in the immediate context than is polluting the sanctuary. Leviticus does not explicitly say that land pollution is dangerous because it threatens the sanctuary, but rather because it can lead to the people’s exile (18:27-28; 20:22-23). 20:4

If the people of the land deliberately close their eyes to this one giving their (ms) semen to Molek, and do not kill them,

In the phrase ‫ את־עיניהם מן־‬... ‫“ העלם יעלימו‬deliberately close their eyes to,” the infinitive absolute followed by finite verb of the same root is emphatic, so Milgrom (1736) suggested that it means not just to ignore wrongdoing, but an active cover-up. This verse anticipates resistance to enacting the violent penalties mandated by this chapter, and rightly so. Though a review of Leviticus 20’s influence shows its use in justifying lynchings, show trials, witch hunts, and many executions of people accused of sexual crimes (see Exposition), it also shows major efforts across history to replace its death penalties with moral exhortations (e.g. John 8:1-11), or with procedural rules for capital cases (b. Sanh. 37b,

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

535

161; b. Ketub. 30a-b), or with penance (see Elliott 215-18). Many ancient and medieval readers as well as moderns rejected its sweeping mandates for capital punishments. 20:5

I myself will face off against this person and their (ms) family, and I will cut them off from the midst of their people and everyone who follows them in lusting for Molek.

A community’s refusal to enforce the death penalty leads YHWH to expand the ‫“ כרת‬cut off” threat against offenders to include their families (Milgrom 1733-34). TgOnk added ‫“ ובסעדוהי‬and their collaborators.” This verse’s penalties are nevertheless more limited than its context, which assesses penalties on the Israelites as a group for tolerating wrongdoing in their midst (18:2429; 20:23-24). On “I will face this person” following by the ‫“ כרת‬cut off” penalty, see on v. 3 above and Exegesis to 17:10. This verse uses ‫“ שׂמתי‬I will set” in place of ‫נתתי‬/‫“ אתן‬I will give,” which strengthens the threat even more, so I translate with the English idiom, “face off against.” On ‫“ משׁפחה‬family,” see Exegesis to 25:10. On using the language of ‫“ זנה‬to lust” to denigrate the worship of other gods, see Exegesis to 17:7. Here, the phrase ‫כל־הזנים אחריו לזנות אחרי המלך‬, literally “everyone who lusts for them to lust for Molek,” doubles the verb for derogatory emphasis. 20:6

When a person turns to ghosts and knowing spirits to lust for them, I will face this person and cut them off from the midst of their people.

Chapter 18 contains no prohibition on necromancy, but 19:31 does. The appearance of Molek worship and necromancy together here led Milgrom (1738, 1771) to assume that Molek worship also included necromancy. But the biblical texts about Molek worship are too polemical to convey any information about it reliably (see above on v. 2). They do not explicitly associate necromancy with the worship of Molek (20:5) or of billy goats (17:7), which Leviticus also denigrates as “lusting.” Leviticus denigrates all these ritual practices with sexual innuendo. The duplication in this chapter of punishments for necromancy (20:6, 27) may be because this verse refers to participants who “lust for” knowing spirits, while v. 27 refers to the professional mediums who are “possessed” by them. This chapter claims that participants will be “cut off” by God while mediums must be executed (Milgrom 1739). On translating this casuistic syntax, see on v. 9 below.

536

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

On ‫“ האבת והידענים‬ghosts and knowing spirits,” see Exegesis to 19:31. On “facing this person and cutting them off,” see on v. 5. 20:7-8 You (pl) must make yourselves holy and be holy, because I am YHWH your God! You (pl) must observe my mandates and do them. I am YHWH who makes you holy! These verses that emphasize Israel’s obligation to maintain holiness conclude the opening exhortations and introduce the list of penalties. The phrase, “you must make yourselves holy and be holy,” appeared already in 11:44. Leviticus 19 began with the command to imitate YHWH’s holiness and ended with the command to observe God’s mandates and regulations (19:2, 37). These verses are unusual for directly juxtaposing God’s sanctification of Israel, “I am YHWH who makes you holy,” with Israel’s self-sanctification. Milgrom (1739) viewed self-sanctification as a distinctive idea of H. These verses, however, equate self-sanctification and divine sanctification as reciprocal (Hartley lxi; Milgrom 1742), which lessens the difference between P and H (contra Milgrom 1740-42 and many other interpreters; see the review by Trevaskis 2011, 1-7). The end of the chapter defines Israel’s holiness as a matter of separation: God’s separation of Israel from the rest of the nations and Israel’s selfseparation from them by observing the diet prohibitions (20:24b-26). Verse 8 includes observing all of YHWH’s mandates in self-sanctification, which recalls the samples of Israel’s various normative traditions in the previous chapter and anticipates the following mandates about punishing illicit sexual behaviour (vv. 9-21; cf. 18:1-5; 19:1). ‫“ שׁמרתם את־חקתי ועשׂיתם אתם‬you must observe my mandates and do them” also appears with some variation in the introduction to chap. 18 and the conclusions to chaps. 18, 19, and 20 (18:4-5, 26; 19:37; 20:22). The themes of obedience and holiness unite these three chapters. The participial phrase, ‫“ יהוה מקדשׁ‬YHWH who makes holy” or “YHWH the sanctifier” (Milgrom 1741), is the first announcement of a leit-motif that is repeated six times in the following two chapters (21:8, 15, 23; 22:9, 16, 32; also Exod. 31:13; Ezek. 20:12; 37:28). Penalties for Illicit Sexual Behaviour (20:9-21) Unlike the apodictic prohibitions of illicit sexual behaviour in 18:6-24, this is a list of casuistic rules for punishing mostly sexual offenders. It is organized by penalty, from capital sentences which the community must carry out (vv. 9-16) to offences that YHWH will punish (vv. 17-21). It is not clear why any given offence is placed in one category or the other.

Leviticus 20 Exegesis 20:9

537

Therefore, anyone who dishonours their (ms) father and their mother must certainly die. They have dishonoured their father and their mother. Their blood is on themselves.

‫“ כי אישׁ אישׁ אשׁר‬therefore anyone who” introduces the central list in this chapter (vv. 9-21). It combines in one phrase two different introductory formulas used elsewhere in Leviticus: the common casuistic formula ‫“ כי אישׁ‬when someone” (usually in reverse order: e.g. 1:2; 13:2, 9; 19:20; 20:27; see Exposition to Leviticus 1) and ‫“ אישׁ אישׁ אשׁר‬anyone who” which introduces four of five paragraphs in chap. 17 (17:3, 8, 10, 13; also 15:2, 18, 24; 18:6; 20:2; 22:4, 18; 24:15; see Exegesis to 15:2b). Here in Lev. 20:9, this compound formula functions to mark the introduction of the list of penalties (Paran 1980, 39). LXX omitted ‫“ כי‬therefore,” which led Simeon Chavel to argue that it was a marginal gloss that was mistakenly added to the text.21 Wevers (319), however, judged LXX to have simply conformed its translation to 17:3, etc. ‫ כי אישׁ אישׁ‬without ‫ אשׁר‬appears in Ezek. 14:17 in the middle of a paragraph (where it does not have to mean “because,” contra Chavel). The following mandates begin just ‫“ ואישׁ אשׁר‬a man who” (vv. 10-15, 17-21) or ‫“ ואשׁה אשׁר‬a woman who” (v. 16). It is surprising that a misbehaving child leads off this list of crimes punishable by death (vv. 9-16). Unlike in the rules that follow, this penalty for ‫“ קלל‬dishonouring” one’s parents does not repeat a prohibition from chap. 18. However, similar laws appear in Exod. 21:17 which also uses ‫קלל‬, in Exod. 21:15 about striking one’s parents, and in Deut. 21:18-21 which describes rebellious children. Like this verse, all of them demand the death penalty. Thus all three biblical legal collections attest to the place of this draconian penalty in Israel’s legal traditions. A Sumerian law mandated that a son who repudiates his parents should be sold into slavery (Roth 1995, 44) and Hammurabi’s laws (§§19293, 194) demanded bodily mutilation for repudiating or striking one’s parents, though not the death penalty. Commentators struggle to explain why family strife should elicit the death penalty in biblical traditions. This penalty strikes readers not only as severe but also as very unrealistic, since few parents are likely to demand or enforce it. Exceptions are, today, regarded as the most horrible examples of child abuse. ‫ קלל‬piel “to dishonour” is often translated “curse” here (KJV; NRSV; HAL) in order to give the offence gravity more deserving of the death penalty. Commentators then explain that ancient people believed curses to be very powerful (e.g. Hartley 338; cf. Prov. 30:11 which contrasts ‫ קלל‬with ‫ברך‬ 21 Simeon Chavel, “At the Boundary of Textual and Literary Criticisms: The Case of ‫ כי‬in Lev 20:9,” Textus 20/1 (2000), 61-70; cf. Bernard Levinson (A More Perfect Torah [Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2013], 40-41), who argued that MT’s compound was produced by H’s reformulation of Exod. 21:15.

538

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

“blessing” one’s parents; see also Prov. 20:20). However, Deut. 27:16 curses (‫ )ארור‬those who ‫ קלל‬their father or mother, where the words do not seem to be synonymous. The translation “to curse” is also questionable in Leviticus. Mistreatment of the deaf in 19:14 requires a different translation for ‫ קלל‬piel, “belittle” or “revile” (KJV; NRSV). The verb in the qal stem is stative, “be small, insignificant.” The piel is active, literally “to make small.” So “belittle” or “insult” (NJPS) are appropriate translations, but then one must explain such severe punishment for a child’s insulting statements. This conundrum is clarified by observing that the literal meaning of ‫קלל‬ piel, “to make small,” is the opposite of ‫ כבד‬piel “to honour,” literally “to make large or heavy.” ‫ כבד‬is the verb used in the positive commands to honour one’s parents (Exod. 20:12; Lev. 19:3; Deut. 5:16). Therefore, ‫ קלל‬piel conveys the opposite of these positive commandments, that is, “to dishonour” one’s parents (Cassuto 1967, 271; Wenham 279; Milgrom 1745). A common explanation for why dishonouring parents earns the death penalty points to the importance of family hierarchy for ensuring that grown children care for elderly parents (Prov. 19:26). Its importance may be indicated by the place of the command to honour one’s father and mother at the head of the second tablet of the Decalogue (Exod. 20:12; Deut. 5:16), a command that reappears at the beginning of the rules in chap. 19 (v. 3). Therefore, Lev. 20:9 and the following penalties for illicit sexual intercourse can be understood as mandates to reinforce family cohesion (Wenham 279; Meyers 1988, 135-36; Hartley 339; Gerstenberger 295; Grünwaldt 1999, 203-204; Propp 2006, 214; Hieke 789; Kiuchi 375). Aryeh Amihay added that “it can be viewed as an extension of the law against apostasy, which is specified as a danger that can be enticed by a relative (Deut 13:7).”22 Rhetoric about “your father and your mother” also stands at the beginning of the sexual prohibitions in 18:7. Milgrom (1744) therefore interpreted chap. 20’s list, like chap. 18’s, as expressing “the twin principles of consanguinity and affinity, back to one’s father and mother.” The fact that the lists of rules in chaps. 18, 19, and 20 all begin by invoking fathers and mothers, as does the second table of the Decalogue, points to a broader rhetorical trope than just care and respect for elderly parents and avoiding inner-family conflicts caused by incest. Nobuyoshi Kiuchi (375) suggested that chap. 20 follows the pattern of the Decalogue by listing religious offences (vv. 2-6) before moral ones (vv. 9-21), but this pattern is reversed in chap. 18. Instead, the rhetoric of “honouring/dishonouring father and mother” in the first rules of chaps. 18, 19, and 20 and at the beginning of the Decalogue’s second table suggests that these phrases function as a label for moral teachings generally. That trope appears clearly in Wisdom literature, which cites the advice of both 22

Aryeh Amihay, “Capital Punishment,” OEBL (2015), 1:95.

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

539

father and mother to urge compliance with its advice (Prov. 15:20; 23:22; cf. 31:1-2). Notably, Proverbs begins its long lists of aphorisms by invoking father and mother (Prov. 10:1), just as Leviticus 18, 19, and 20 begin their lists of mandates with rhetoric about one’s father and mother. This rhetoric uses the parents’ teaching to typify the most basic moral standards. Those who reject their parent’s instruction reject moral standards and therefore fall under the most devastating judgment. Modern psychologists might categorize such people as sociopaths. This may explain why biblical law mandates the death penalty for such chronic offenders, whom it describes as “dishonouring” their parents. Invoking father and mother at the start of the list of offences categorizes the following mandates as basic morality too, many of which also draw a capital sentence. Verse 9 emphasizes these thematic connotations around the phrase, “father and mother,” by repeating it to create a memorable chiastic arch: ‫ יקלל‬they (ms) dishonour ‫ואת־אביו ואת־אמו‬ their father and their mother ‫מות יומת‬ they must certainly die ‫אביו ואמו‬ their father and their mother ‫ קלל‬they dishonour

For ‫“ מות יומת‬they must certainly die” (also in vv. 10-13, 15-16), see above on v. 2. ‫“ דמיו בו‬their blood is on themselves” (also in vv. 11-13, 16) claims to exonerate their human executioners from any blame for killing the perpetrator (Hartley 339; Milgrom 1746; Römer 2005, 44). This phrase confirms that ‫“ מות יומת‬they must certainly die” intends for the community to carry out the execution (contra Hieke 2004, 352-53; Hieke 789-92; see on v. 2 above). According to Deut. 21:19-21, the town’s elders should judge the case and the townspeople should stone the child who dishonours their parents. Today, interpreters commonly assume that this rule and its parallels aim at adult children of elderly parents. Biblical texts are blind to the reverse problem: parents who violently abuse their minor children. Though most traditional interpreters endorsed corporeal punishment of minor children, medieval rabbis debated under what conditions the talmudic rule against beating an adult child should be extended to younger children. They also took conflicting positions on whether children of “wicked” parents should be relieved of the duty to honour them (Blidstein 1976, 123-26, 130-36). Pentateuchal law’s condemnation of dishonourable children to death has echoed in subsequent traditions. Philo repeated the death penalty for rebellious children (Spec. Laws 2:248). Jesus quoted it to criticize the Pharisees’ lack of filial support, according to Mark 7:10, Matt. 15:4. The Talmud explained the severity of the death penalty for a child’s rebellion by equating cursing

540

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

parents with cursing YHWH, i.e. blasphemy (b. Kidd. 30b; Blidstein 1975, 4). This equation of parental authority with divine authority has remained a staple of conservative interpretations of the command to honour parents ever since. On the basis of even more stringent precedents in Roman law going back to the Twelve Tables of ca. 450 B.C.E., Justinian’s Institutes (1.ix; 2.ix) granted fathers life-and-death control over their children of any age, as well as their property (Blidstein 1975, 175). This despite early Christian opposition to the Roman practice of infanticide by exposure.23 A medieval English law prohibited fathers from killing their children, but allowed physical violence short of that: “If one beats a child until it bleeds, it will remember, but if one beats it to death, the law applies.” Today, advocates of Christian Dominion Theology still proclaim that “the authorities ordained by God, parents, pastors, civil authorities, and others, have a duty to exercise the justice and vengeance of God” (Rushdooney 1973, §3.5; also North 1994, 264). Minor children continued to be defined legally as their father’s property up until the late nineteenth century. However, contracts governing indenture and apprenticeship frequently included prohibitions of physical mistreatment. Some colonial legislation required authorities to intervene on behalf of mistreated children. Concern for child protection increased in Europe in the later nineteenth century, aided by vivid portrayals of impoverished and abused children in popular novels by Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy, and Charles Dickens. It led to founding orphanages and charitable societies for abused and neglected children. Some local authorities began intervening in families to protect children by the end of the century. However, national legislation requiring social workers to investigate child abuse and intervene in families for childrens’ protection has been in effect only since the 1960s in, for example, the U.K. and the U.S.24 20:10 A man who commits adultery with his neighbour’s woman must certainly die, both the adulterous man and the adulterous woman. Apodictic prohibitions of adultery appear in 18:20 (see above), Exod. 20:14, and Deut. 5:18. The death penalty for adultery is demanded for both partners here and in Deut. 22:22-24. In the case of someone who rapes an enslaved woman engaged to be married, Lev. 19:20-22 demands only financial compensation and offerings. Other ancient legal collections allowed the offended husband to decide whether or not to exact the death penalty on his wife and 23 Yifat Monnickendam, “The Exposed Child: Transplanting Roman Law into Late Antique Jewish and Christian Legal Discourse,” American Journal of Legal History 59/1 (2019), 1-30 [19-20]. 24 John E. B. Myers, Child Protection in America: Past, Present, and Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 12-13, 81.

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

541

her lover. By contrast, Leviticus and Deuteronomy permit no leniency in cases of adultery, just as with murder. P does provide a ritual means for discerning whether a husband’s charge of adultery against his wife is true or not (Num. 5:12-31; see Levine 1993, 200-212).25 However, conviction by the bitter water ordeal leads only to a “fallen womb” and a bad reputation, not to execution (Num. 5:27), perhaps because the woman was not caught in the act (Milgrom 1748). No extant ancient text actually documents execution for adultery (Gafney 2017, 122). John 8:1-11 depicts a first-century debate over whether to enforce it. Only v. 9 begins with a typical casuistic formula, ‫“ כי‬when” (cf. Exposition to Leviticus 1). Instead, this verse, like vv. 11-13, 15-16, precedes the punishment clause with a nominal protasis stating the offence, ‫“ ואישׁ אשׁר‬and a man who.” Though ‫“ אישׁ‬a man” is often gender inclusive in Leviticus (see Exegesis to 15:2), this chapter uses it specifically for men’s sexual offences, in contrast to the gender inclusive necromancy rules that use ‫“ נפשׁ‬person” (v. 6) and “a man or a woman” (v. 27). In the punishments for illicit sex, women are distinguished explicitly as objects of male sexual desire, and only once as agents of sexual behaviour (v. 16). But the draconian penalties fall on them, too. ‫“ נאף‬commit adultery” is the common verb for sexual intercourse with a woman married to another man (Exod. 20:14; Deut. 5:18; Hos. 3:1; Jer. 29:23; Ezek. 16:21). The apodictic prohibition of adultery in 18:20 used an unusual idiom to match its immediate context. ‫“ רעה‬neighbour” (see Exegesis to 19:18) has been understood to mean an Israelite since the ancient rabbis (Sifra; b. Sanh. 52b; Milgrom 1747), thus limiting the death penalty for adultery to offences committed within the community. Chapter 18’s prohibition of adultery (though it does not use that word) with an unrelated woman describes her similarly as the woman of an ‫עמית‬ “associate” (18:20). MT’s redundant text, which here repeats ‫“ אישׁ אשׁר ינאף את־אשׁת‬a man who commits adultery with a woman of” twice, is likely due to dittography – an accidental duplication of the phrase. The ancient versions add a copula ‫ו‬ to make it two phrases, but there is still no reason why an associate should be distinguished from any other man. My translation omits the duplication with BHS. Because the verdict ‫“ מות יומת‬he must certainly die” is singular, ‫הנאף‬ ‫(“ והנאפת‬both) the adulterer and the adulteress” looks like an addition to apply the death penalty to both (Olyan 1994, 187). 25 Also Alice Bach, “Good to the Last Drop: Viewing the Sotah (Numbers 5:11–31) as the Glass Half Empty and Wondering How to View It Half Full,” in Women in the Hebrew Bible: A Reader (ed. A. Bach; New York: Routledge, 1999), 503-22.

542

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

‫“ אשׁת רעהו‬a neighbour’s woman” defines adultery (‫ )נאף‬as sex with a married woman, since sex with another man’s enslaved betrothed is also condemned but earns a lesser penalty (19:20-22). The man’s own marital status does not come into consideration. Israelite men were not prohibited from sexual intercourse with people they enslave (Deut. 20:1-14) or prostitutes, though they were prohibited from pimping Israelite women (Lev. 19:29). However, this verse makes clear that a married woman who has sex with any man other than her husband is guilty of a capital offence, as is her lover. But no HB story about adultery (e.g. 2 Sam. 12:9-10; 16:22) actually narrates the death penalty being carried out. Even John 8:3-11 poses adultery as a test case for capital punishment. Hieke (795) therefore interpreted the death penalty here as motivational rhetoric, “they deserve to die,” rather than as judicial practice. This rhetoric, however, has contributed to extra-judicial violence. Women suspected of adultery have often been beaten or killed by their jealous husbands. But adulterous men have rarely been subject to capital punishment as this rule requires. Christian Roman emperors mandated death for adultery, but medieval theologians followed John 8 in emphasizing penance for illicit sex (Elliott 215-18). Another exception to that historical generalization was produced by the religious enthusiasm of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation that led many to demand the imposition of the biblical death penalty. Pope Pius V tried to mandate death as the standard penalty for adultery (Megivern 1997, 151). The laws of England and some German states also punished adultery with execution, though many courts settled for fines (E. Berkowitz 2012, 176-77, 191). Although the biblical death penalty for adultery has rarely been enforced, widespread knowledge of it has reinforced the tendency of later societies to excuse husbands who kill supposedly adulterous wives. For example, the courts of early modern Castile prosecuted wife murderers, but then pardoned the perpetrators.26 Still today, people often cite suspicion of adultery as a mitigating factor in sentencing wife murderers.27 Despite the news media’s association of “honour killings” with Muslim cultures, it is not the Qur’an but the Bible that explicitly mandates such deadly violence. The violent heritage of these verses justifies striking through death penalties for adultery because of their failure to uphold basic standards of impartial justice and proportionate penalties taught by Jewish and Christian traditions. 26 Scott K. Taylor, Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 197-99. Similarly, in France: Sara McDougall, “The Transformation of Adultery in France at the End of the Middle Ages,” Law and History Review 32/3 (2014), 491-524. 27 For England, see K. J. Kesselring, “No Greater Provocation? Adultery and the Mitigation of Murder in English Law,” Law and History Review 34/1 (2016), 199-225; for Italy, see Steven C. Hughes, “Honourable murder: The delitto d’onore and the Zanardelli code of 1890,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 25/3 (2020), 229-51.

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

543

20:11 A man who lies with his father’s woman exposes his father’s nudity. Both of them must certainly die. Their blood is on themselves. On this prohibition as well as the expression, ‫“ גלה ערות‬expose the nudity of,” see Exegesis to 18:7-8. Verses 17-21 that threaten divine “cutting off” describe sexual behaviour using chap. 18’s rhetoric of exposing nudity, but among the capital penalties it appears only here (see Exposition above). Nihan (2007, 442) thought it appears here to explain that “uncover a man’s nudity” in chap. 18 means “to lie with his woman,” but then one would expect this explanation to appear among the uses of this phrase in vv. 17-21. More likely is that this language cross-references chap. 18 to alert audiences that this list provides the penalties for chap. 18’s apodictic prohibitions. For translating ‫“ אשׁה‬woman” instead of “wife,” see Exegesis to 18:8. This prohibition therefore covers all women with whom the father has sexual intercourse, including a man’s mother. It does not say “his mother” because the incest prohibitions trace prohibited intercourse by each partner’s relationship to a third person, especially to fathers and mothers (see Exegesis to 18:17). For ‫“ דמיהם בם‬their blood is on themselves” (also vv. 12, 13, 16, 27), see above on v. 9. 20:12 A man who lies with his daughter-in-law, both of them must certainly die. They do something perverted! Their blood is on themselves. See Exegesis to 18:15. For ‫“ תבל‬perversion,” see on 18:23 where it is applied to bestiality. This derogatory term does not refer to these specific prohibited relationships so much as it evokes Israel’s shame culture to intensify the persuasive force of all of these prohibitions, just like ‫“ תועבה‬disgusting” and ‫“ זמה‬depravity” in vv. 13-14 and in 18:17, 22-23 (Milgrom 1749). 20:13 A man who lies with a man the layings of a woman, both of them do something disgusting! They must certainly die. Their blood is on themselves. For the meaning of “lay the laying of a woman,” see Exegesis to 18:22 above. Saul Olyan (1994, 187) argued that the focus of the first phrase and of 18:22 on the insertive partner indicates that this rule was expanded to apply the penalty to the receptive partner as well. For ‫“ תועבה‬disgusting,” see Exegesis to 18:22 and 11:10. Though both chaps. 18 and 20 use this adjective to label male-with-male intercourse, pejorative labels (also in vv. 12, 14, and 17) seem to function more to heighten the emotional effect of these lists than to distinguish different sexual offences from each other. All of the behaviours described in chap. 18 are denounced as ‫“ תועבה‬disgusting” in 18:26-30.

544

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

Unlike MT here, ‫“ שׁניהם‬both of them” usually appears after and modifies “they must certainly die” (vv. 11-12), which is where the ancient versions place it in this verse, too. As shown in Exegesis to 18:22, blanket prohibitions on homosexual behaviour were very rare in ancient cultures. The rise of Christianity to political power in the Roman Empire led to increasing, though still sporadic, efforts to enforce this biblical punishment (for a historical survey of cases including most of the following, see E. Berkowitz 2012, 114-16, 120-21, 155-73, 20617, 266-72). Christian Roman emperors threatened the death penalty for male-on-male sexual intercourse already in the fourth century. The arrest of a popular charioteer on sodomy charges in Thessalonica in 390 C.E. led to violent riots and a massacre of thousands to suppress them. This incident allowed the Catholic Church, in the person of Ambrose of Milan, to consolidate control over the empire’s moral legislation. In the sixth century, Emperor Justinian executed gay people, especially among the clergy. Justinian’s Code judged homosexuality as “contrary to nature” and codified its punishment by execution, establishing a legal precedent still cited by modern courts, such as the U.S. Supreme Court as recently as 1986. Later enforcement was very inconsistent. Medieval penitential handbooks promised forgiveness through prayer and fasting. Attitudes became less tolerant in the second millennium C.E. Accusations of sodomy were a frequent libel against Jews, Muslims, and witches. The First Crusade began in 1096 C.E. in response to a forged letter supposedly from the Byzantine emperor that accused Muslims of sodomizing and raping men and polluting the Holy Land. The charge of sodomy was also used to bring down powerful Christians, such as the Knights Templar and King Edward II of England in the early fourteenth century. Sodomy was linked with heresy which might bring divine punishment through plague, draught, and famine, just as Lev. 26:14-20 predicts. In the sixteenth century, civil courts assumed the power to punish “buggery.” They ordered executions for sodomy and rape in England, Germany, and Switzerland, though usually with additional charges of bestiality, heresy, or witchcraft. In the early twenty-first century, the death penalty for homosexual intercourse remained on the books in only five countries, all with Muslim majorities.28 However, gay sex remained illegal in 69 countries in 2020. Evangelicals and Roman Catholics have advocated for legal crack-downs around the world on people with non-heteronormative sexual orientations and gender identities. In several African nations, evangelicals and Pentecostals have 28 Daniel Ottosson, “State-sponsored Homophobia: A world survey of laws prohibiting same sex activity between consenting adults,” ILGA (May, 2009), 49, at https://web.archive. org/web/20110131024344/http://ilga.org/historic/Statehomophobia/ILGA_State_Sponsored_ Homophobia_2009.pdf.

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

545

pushed political campaigns to declare a “Christian nation” and to enforce biblical laws about sex, efforts usually opposed by other Christian denominations.29 Campaigns by evangelicals and Catholics led to legislation being introduced in Uganda to mandate the death penalty for “agressive” homosexual intercourse to protect “the cherished culture of the people of Uganda [and their] legal, religious, and traditional family values.” The bill was invalidated on a legal technicality in 2009, but passed again in 2023.30 Zambia declared itself a Christian nation and then exempted homosexuality from equal protection under its Constitution. Anti-gay legislation in Uganda and elsewhere in Africa is widely supported by local Christian leaders and by evangelical organizations from America.31 These political movements show that many Christians around the world still favour capital punishment for nonheteronormative lifestyles. While the influence of this verse continues to reverberate in national laws about sex, its violent heritage is more apparent today in murders and beatings of non-heteronormative people by perpetrators who expect few repercussions. Annually, hundreds of murders seem to be motivated by such prejudices.32 However, publicity about some prominent cases, such as the lynching of American student Matthew Shepard in Wyoming in 1998 and the gang rape and murder of South African footballer Eudy Simelane in 2008, has prompted new legislation against such hate crimes.33 This verse’s role in justifying both legal and extra-legal violence shows why it deserves to be struck through for failing the most basic standards of impartial justice in Jewish and Christian ethics. 20:14 A man who takes a woman and her mother, it is depravity! They must burn both him and them in fire, so there will be no depravity among you. Compare 18:17, which prohibits sexual intercourse with a woman and her daughter. This verse reverses the relationship, “a woman and her mother.” 29

See M. Christian Green, “Modern Legal Traditions: Africa,” OEBL (2015), 67-69. “Uganda Antigay Bill Draft, April 2009,” at http://www.publiceye.org/publications/ globalizing-the-culture-wars/uganda-antigay-bill.php#april. 31 Jeffrey Gettlemanjan, “Americans’ Role Seen in Uganda Anti-Gay Push,” New York Times (January 3, 2010). On the broader historical and cultural context, see the essays in Adriaan van Klinken and Ezra Chitando (eds.), Public Religion and the Politics of Homosexuality in Africa (London: Routledge, 2016); and Joanna Sadgrove, Robert M. Vanderbeck, Johan Andersson, Gill Valentine, and Kevin Ward, “Morality Plays and Money Matters: Towards a Situated Understanding of the Politics of Homosexuality in Uganda,” Journal of Modern African Studies 50/1 (2012), 103-29. 32 “Violence against LGBT people,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_ against_LGBT_people. 33 Melanie Thernstrom, “The Crucifixion of Matthew Shepard,” Vanity Fair, March 1999; Annie Kelly, “Raped and killed for being a lesbian: South Africa ignores ‘corrective’ attacks,” The Guardian, 12 March 2009. 30

546

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

It also differs by using the verb ‫“ לקח‬to take,” which many interpreters understand as “to marry” (Milgrom 1750). This interpretation, however, has the absurd consequence of suggesting that vv. 14, 17, and 21 intend to permit extra-marital incestuous intercourse (Wenham 280; Hartley 339; see further in Exegesis to 18:17). For ‫“ זמה‬depravity,” see Exegesis to 18:17 where it also describes sexual intercourse with mother and daughter. This distinctive label ‫זמה בתוככם‬ “depravity among you” led Luciani (2005, 116) to identify both verses as the centres of their respective chapters to create a rhetorical parallel between these offences in the middle of these chapters and illicit behaviour in the midst of the people. However, large chiastic arches do not draw the attention of listening audience or even casual readers to their central verse so much as to the repetitive themes of the second leg of the arch (see Leviticus 1-10, 17-18). ‫“ ישׂרפו‬they must burn” is an active verb that leaves its third plural subject unspecified. Presumably the community must enact the burning punishment, but the next line addresses the community in the second person plural. Why does the burning penalty appear in this chapter only here? Hammurabi’s laws mandated burning as the penalty for incest with one’s mother (§157), but also for looting (§25) and for priestesses caught drinking beer in public (§110). Leviticus mentions it only one other time as punishment for a priestly daughter caught in illicit sexual behaviour (21:9). In Genesis, Judah condemns his daughter-in-law Tamar to be burned for adultery (Gen. 38:24). Some interpreters think burning indicates an especially heinous crime (e.g. Lipka 2010, 105), but the list of prohibited sexual liaisons does not clearly indicate such a hierarchy (see Exposition: Structure above). Burning may be a means of purification, since Achan and his family are burned after being stoned (Josh. 7:15, 25), though there is no suggestion of that sequence here. Hartley (339) thought it is implied since burning “deprived these offenders of proper burial and thus increased significantly their punishment.” Perhaps, but the literary context in Leviticus emphasizes purification. Joseph Fleishman’s survey of both biblical and ancient Near Eastern laws mandating burning could not turn up any common denominator (Fleishman 2011, 217-20). In medieval and early modern Europe, burning became the preferred punishment for heresy, which was often equated with witchcraft. Charges of sodomy, bestiality, and incest were frequently added (see Exposition above). Texts from these periods often described burning as purifying both the offender and the community, an interpretation that reflects the rhetorical tendenz of Leviticus 18 and 20 if not the specific language of this verse. Though not mentioned here, the repetition in surrounding verses of the phrases, “they must certainly die” (vv. 9-13, 15-16) and “their blood is on themselves” (vv. 9, 11-13, 16), creates the expectation that both the sentence

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

547

and the executioners’ exemption from blood guilt apply in this case as well (Milgrom 1747). The history of legal violence due to this legal exemption as well as due to this mandate to burn offenders justifies striking through this verse as failing the basic standard of proportionate punishment in Jewish and Christian legal traditions, which derives from the Pentateuch itself (Exod. 21:23-25; Lev. 24:17-21; Deut. 19:21; see Exposition). 20:15-16 A man who gives his seed in a quadruped must certainly die. You (pl) must kill the quadruped. A woman who presents herself to any quadruped to copulate with it, you (sg) must kill the woman and the quadruped. They must certainly die. Their blood is on themselves. On prohibitions of sex with animals (bestiality), see Exegesis to 18:23. Bestiality earns the death penalty also in Exod. 22:18 (Eng. 22:19). Execution of the animal may be intended as a moral warning to witnesses, but may also indicate belief in its guilt and fear that bestiality could produce monstrous offspring (see Milgrom 1752 who summarized rabbinic discussions of this issue). Because the prohibitions of sodomy and bestiality appear in succession in 18:22-23, these accusations were combined and conflated in the laws and prosecutions of the courts of many nations from the fourth to the twentieth centuries. The penalties were often severe and gruesome (see Exposition above). In 1642, the Plymouth Colony of Massachusetts Bay enforced this rule literally against Thomas Granger, who was convicted of “buggery” and executed, as William Bradford reported: “A very sad spectacle it was, for first the mare and then the cow and the rest of the lesser cattle were killed before his [Granger’s] face, according to the law, Leviticus XX.15; and then he himself was executed.”34 In the absence of civil laws on the subject, Scottish courts cited Lev. 18:23 and 20:15 explicitly to justify executing men for bestiality, which they described as “a land-defiling sin” following 18:24-28 and 20:22 (E. Berkowitz 2012, 214-15). This history of excessive legal violence justifies striking through these death penalties for bestiality as failing the most basic standards of proportionate justice in Jewish and Christian ethics. For ‫“ רבעה‬copulate,” see Exegesis to 18:23, also about bestiality by women. Here, there is little difference in meaning between MT’s pointing ‫ א ָֹתהּ‬as a direct object and the Samaritan reading tradition’s ‫“ ִא ָתּהּ‬with it” (SPCEM; BHQ 114), but LXX’s ὑπ’ αὐτοῦ “under it” (also Vg) is more graphic. 34 William Bradford, Of Plymouth Colony (1620-47), ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Knopf, 1959), 320, quoted by Stevens 1997, 453.

548

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

Milgrom (1752) argued that the commands to ‫“ הרג‬kill” human and animal offenders refer to summary executions that bypass judicial processes. These verses, however, conform to vv. 2, 9-13 in providing the sentence, ‫“ מות יומת‬they must certainly die,” and they absolve executioners of blood guilt like vv. 9, 11-13. In fact, any emphasis on legal procedures, much less fair trials, is notably missing from this entire chapter (see Exposition). The command to ‫“ הרג‬kill” is simply a non-specific command to execute the perpetrators with or without a trial that parallels the more specific commands to “stone” and “burn” them (vv. 2, 14, 27). The emphasis in all these plural commands is not on legal procedures but on communal participation in the execution to motivate fearful compliance and complicity with these commandments. 20:17 A man who takes his sister, his father’s daughter or his mother’s daughter, and sees her nudity and she sees his nudity, it is shameful. They will be cut off before the eyes of their people. He has exposed her nudity. They will bear liability. Like 18:9, this verse describes a sister’s relationship to a man’s father or mother, which does not exclude her being the child of both, that is, his full sister (see Exegesis to 18:9). ‫“ והיא־תראה את־ערותו‬and she sees his nudity” is the only phrase in the HB to describe a woman as the subject who exposes or sees a man’s “nudity,” which it emphasizes with the redundant pronoun ‫“ היא‬she” (Ellens 2008, 122; Wells 2020, 144-45). Sifra reasonably concluded that intercourse is desired by both parties (Milgrom 1753), but that is also possible in the other sexual relationships listed in this chapter. ‫“ חסד‬shameful” usually means “faithfulness, loyalty, loving kindness,” but this context requires a negative meaning. It seems to label sexual misbehaviour also in Sir. 41:22 and broader offences in Prov. 14:34 (HAL), but neither verse helps much in understanding its use here. This verse contains the first of two prohibitions punished by the divine threat to ‫“ כרת‬cut off” offenders (vv. 17-18; see Exegesis to 7:20). The following verses threaten to hold them liable (vv. 19) or to render them childless (vv. 20-21), all in contrast to the communal death penalties mandated by vv. 9-16. I therefore do not strike through vv. 17-21, since these penalties are left for God to enforce (see Author’s Preface above). Frymer-Kensky (1983, 405) argued that the threat to “cut off” offenders applies only to cases that threaten sacred places and things, which therefore invokes divine rather than human punishment. Margonet (1996, 151) maintained that capital punishment applies only to cases of adultery, while non-adulterous incest merits cutting off. Neither distinction finds any hint of support in chap. 20. Nor is

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

549

it clear that being “cut off” is a milder punishment than being executed: its vague but divine threat might feel even more ominous. This verse is unique in stipulating that offenders will be cut off ‫לעיני בני‬ ‫“ עמם‬in the eyes of their people.” This may mean that their neighbours will witness that they die prematurely or without descendents or a proper burial (Milgrom 1754). For the meaning of ‫“ לקח‬take,” see on v. 14 and 18:17. For MT ‫“ עונו ישׂא‬he will bear (his) liability,” see Exegesis to 5:1. LXX and Pesh read plural as MT does in v. 19. The plural is therefore more likely here. 20:18 A man who lies with a woman who is uneasy and who exposes her nudity uncovers her fountain, and she exposes the fountain of her blood. Both of them will be cut off from their people. This verse parallels the prohibition on sex during menstruation in 18:19, but with different vocabulary: the noun ‫“ נדה‬menstrual period” does not appear here, though it is used metaphorically in v. 21 below. This verse uses the associated term, ‫“ דוה‬uneasiness” (for this translation, see Exegesis to 15:33), and specifies it further by ‫“ מקור דמיה‬the fountain of her blood” (see on 12:7). This language may evoke puerperal bleeding as well as menses (Milgrom 1754; Nihan 2007, 447 n. 203; Hieke 802). Tamar Kamionkowski (2018, 191) wondered if “uneasiness” refers to women feeling unwell, rather than just menstruating. However, only here and in the previous verse does Leviticus ascribe some agency to a woman as a verbal subject during sexual intercourse with a man: “she exposes the fountain of her blood” (Philip 2006, 60; Wells 2020, 145). In contrast to sparse textual evidence of menstrual taboos in earlier Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures, fear of menstrual pollution seems to have increased in the Hellenistic period (see The History of Sexual and Menstrual Pollution in Exposition to chap. 15). Sometime in the first millennium B.C.E., the Zoroastrian Vendidād 15:7 also threatened capital punishment for sexual intercourse with a menstruant (Kazen 2015, 452). Interpreters have been puzzled by the fact that sex with a menstruating woman leads only to seven days of pollution in 15:24, but here to the draconian penalty of being “cut off” (also in 18:29). For traditional explanations of this discrepancy, see Exegesis to 15:24. Many critical scholars have explained it by distinguishing the Holiness (H) source from P. They then attribute the harsher penalty to H’s concern for polluting the land (v. 22; 18:24-30; so Milgrom 1550), or to changing social situations, such as a reduction in priestly authority and growing “confusion as to common values” (Philip 2006, 72). Such theories do not explain why the editors failed to harmonize the two

550

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

passages. Since ancient written laws were not normative except for ritual instructions, rhetorical analysis suggests instead that the two verses simply use different strategies to persuade listeners and readers to avoid this behaviour. 20:19 The nudity of your mother’s sister and your father’s sister you (sg) must not expose, for he uncovers his own flesh. They will bear liability. Sexual intercourse with sisters of one’s parents is also prohibited by 18:12-13. In this chapter, v. 19 stands out because it is formulated as an apodictic command like the incest rules in chap. 18. It begins ‫“ ערות‬the nudity of” rather than “a man who” like the other penalties in this chapter (see the chart in Exposition: Structure). Person and number are also confused in this verse. The second person ‫“ תגל‬you expose” is typical of chap. 18 but strange in 20:9-21, which otherwise uses the second person only for the obligation to punish wrongdoers (vv. 5-16). Mentioning the mother before the father (but LXX and SP place the father first) may emphasize equal interdiction of the mother’s relatives to counteract the tendency to focus more on the father’s relatives (Hartley 340; similarly 18:7, 17-18). Or it may indicate a reversal of 18:12-13’s sequence to mark an explicit cross-reference. Therefore, many interpreters think that this verse has been modified either to distinguish it emphatically in this list or to evoke its parallel in chap. 18 (Milgrom 1756; Hieke 803; Wells 2020, 149 n. 84). For ‫“ עונם ישׂאו‬they will bear (their) liability,” see Exegesis to 5:1. The nature of the penalty is left unspecified, unlike v. 20’s threat of childlessness. 20:20 A man who lies with his aunt, he exposes his uncle’s nudity. They will bear their sin. They will die childless. Here, one’s ‫“ דדה‬aunt” is the uncle’s women, in contrast to v. 19’s prohibition of the parent’s sisters, just like 18:14 after 18:12-13. ‫“ חטאם ישׂאו‬they will bear their sin” seems to be equivalent to “they will bear their liability (‫ ”)עון‬in vv. 17 and 19. It matches the tendency of chaps. 4-5 to use ‫“ חטאת‬sin” and ‫“ עון‬liability” in parallel, if not as exact synonyms (see Exegesis to 5:1). Only here is the sentence of liability followed by the threat of dying ‫ערירים‬ “childless.” This word appears with this meaning also in Gen. 15:2, and as a metaphor for being stripped of royal heirs in Jer. 22:30 (Milgrom 1757). Infertility is depicted as the penalty for sexual offences also in Gen. 20:17-18 and Num. 5:22, 27. Childlessness is portrayed as a major problem in the HB, which contains prominent stories chronicling the struggles of infertile women and couples (Sarah and Abraham, Rachel, Tamar, Hannah).

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

551

One can interpret “bearing liability” and “childlessness” as different ways of expressing the ‫“ כרת‬cut off” penalty (Levine 135, 139). ‫ כרת‬might, however, indicate a divinely enforced death penalty or banishment or no afterlife. Its sense of threat derives from its ambiguity (see Exegesis to 7:20). After the “cut off” penalties, childlessness sounds less severe, though still extremely negative from an ancient Israelite perspective (Milgrom 1757, 1759). 20:21 A man who takes his brother’s woman, it is (like) menstruation. He exposes his brother’s nudity. They will be childless. Unlike its parallel in 18:16, this verse speaks of “taking” the brother’s wife which many interpreters think means marriage (e.g. Milgrom 1758; Hieke 673). But we have seen that ‫“ לקח‬take” is unlikely to mean “marry” in 18:17-18 and 20:24, which makes its restriction to marriage equally unlikely here. ‫ נדה‬means “menstrual period” (see Exegesis to 15:19) as recently as 18:19, but here it is used metaphorically as a synonym for pollution (anticipated in 15:33). Many therefore translate more generally: “impurity” (NRSV), “indecency” (NJPS, CEB), “repulsive” (Milgrom). These translations obscure the misogynistic nature of the insult. While moderns are very unlikely to equate menstrual sex with incest, biblical rhetoric weaponized ‫“ נדה‬menstrual period” as the paradigmatic bodily pollution (see Exegesis to 15:19, 24, 33 and Exposition to Leviticus 15: The Rhetoric of Sexual and Menstrual Pollution). Ziskind (1996, 128) observed that childlessness is an ironically appropriate penalty if these prohibitions on intercourse with a sister-in-law intentionally contradict the Deuteronomic rule of Levirate marriage which aims to raise an heir for the dead brother (see Exegesis to 18:16). Exhortation to Holiness by Separating from Other Nations (20:22-26) This concluding exhortation repeats many themes and phrases from the opening and closing paragraphs of chap. 18 (Mohrmann 2004, 60-61). There are also echoes of the opening exhortations to this chapter, which Milgrom (1728) analyzed as an introverted arch with exhortations to obedience (vv. 8, 22-25) inside calls for sanctification (vv. 7, 26) surrounded by the themes of Molek worship and necromancy (vv. 2-6, 27). However, the preponderance of verses and emphasis fall quite differently in the conclusion of this chapter: whereas the opening focuses heavily on Molek worship (vv. 2-5), the closing calls for Israel to sanctify itself by separating from other nations (vv. 22-26). The conclusion echoes and elaborates on the conclusion of chap. 18 which depicts the vomiting land expelling the Canaanites. Chapters 18 and 20 therefore form a thematic envelope around the very diverse collection of rules in

552

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

chap. 19. Verse 25 also echoes the diet prohibitions of chap. 11 to connect both moral and ritual prohibitions tightly with Israel’s self-identity. 20:22 You must observe all my mandates and my regulations and you must do them, so that the land where I am bringing you to live does not vomit you out. This verse combines and restates v. 8 and 18:3, 25-26, 28. See Exegesis above. With v. 8, it forms a bracket around the list of penalties in vv. 9-21. 20:23 You must not follow the mandates of the nations that I am expelling before you, for they do all these things and I detest them. This verse combines and restates phrases from 18:3, 23, and 27, except for its last phrase, which is unique. ‫“ אקץ‬I detest” refers to feeling disgust or dread. It is used only here in the HB to describe God’s feelings. By attributing to God such strong negative feelings about the Canaanite nations, this paragraph authorized negative stereotypes about all kinds of foreigners in later Jewish and Christian history (see below). MT ‫“ גוי‬nation” is plural, ‫גוים‬, in many manuscripts and the ancient translations (cf. 18:24, 28; see BHQ 114-15). The contents of chaps. 18 and 20 indicate that the “mandates of the nations” refers primarily to sexual practices, not religious ones as in Deuteronomic traditions (Rainey 2019, 192). Most translations render the participle ‫“ משׁלח‬expelling” with past tense verbs, but in the setting of the Pentateuch’s story, YHWH has not yet expelled the Canaanites. 20:24 I said to you: you will possess their ground. I will give it to you to possess it, a land flowing milk and honey. I am YHWH your God who separated you from the peoples! The first-person consecutive imperfect, ‫“ וָ א ַֹמר‬I said,” also appears in 17:14 to refer back to previous statements. YHWH’s promises to give Canaan to the Israelites span the Pentateuch (Gen. 12:1-3; 15:7; 17:8; 26:2-5; 35:11-12; Exod. 2:24; 6:8; 32:13; 33:1; Num. 32:11; Deut. 34:4). In Leviticus, however, the expectation of displacing the Canaanites plays an explicit role only in the frameworks around the regulations about sexual offences (18:3, 24-25, 27-28; 20:22-23). This paragraph emphasizes YHWH’s role by using the first-person three times. The divine self-proclamation of YHWH’s name has echoed six times in chap. 18 and fifteen times in chap. 19, but appears in this chapter so far only in vv. 7-8 where it emphasizes sanctification. Here, however, “I am YHWH your God” precedes a distinctive claim: “who separated you from the peoples” (also v. 26). Separation is closely tied to

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

553

the Hebrew concept of holiness, but this paragraph stands out for turning religious separation/holiness into an ethnic differentiation based on diet. The phrase, ‫“ ארץ זבת הלב ודבשׁ‬a land flowing milk and honey,” is a traditional description of Canaan in Pentateuchal sources (e.g. Exod. 3:8; 13:5; Num. 13:27; 14:8; Deut. 6:3; 11:9) though Num. 16:13 applies it also to Egypt. As William Propp (1999, 202) observed, “this cliché refers to two of the three bases of the Israelite economy: herding and horticulture.” ‫אדמה‬ “ground,” which appears here parallel to ‫“ ארץ‬land,” refers specifically to agricultural land. For another translation of ‫“ זוב‬flowing” in the context of bodily fluids, see Exegesis to 15:2b. Whereas earlier verses (18:3, 24) have called on the Israelites to distinguish themselves from the Egyptians and Canaanites, here and in v. 26 their separation is generalized as from ‫“ העמים‬the peoples,” that is, from all other groups and nations. This rhetoric aims to create communal identity by drawing explicit contrasts with other groups (Olyan 2000, 63-102). The divine command to separate themselves from the Canaanites will motivate the execution of captives during Israel’s wars of conquest (Num. 31:14-18; 33:55; Deut. 7:16; 20:12-13, 16-18; 25:17-19; Josh. 6:17-21; 8:18-29; 10:22-12:24; 1 Sam. 15) or their subjugation to forced labour (Deut. 20:10-11; Josh. 9:26-27). The origins of this rhetoric of ethnic and religious separation is best explained by the historical context when the Torah first began to be scripturalized in Judah in the fifth to fourth centuries B.C.E. (Collins 2017, 44-61). Judea was then a small province in the Persian Empire trying to defend its borders and interests against neighbouring rivals. Judeans also struggled to gain unity over internal divisions. Local “people of the land” (‫;עם הארץ‬ cf. its more inclusive application in vv. 2, 4) were poor in contrast to the wealthier Judean diaspora in Egypt and Babylon. Some members of this diaspora returned to Judea and installed themselves as a ruling class in Jerusalem. They were represented most prominently in the fifth century by the prince, Zerubabbel, and the high priest, Joshua ben Yehozadak (Ezra 3:2), and in the fourth century by the priest and scribe, Ezra, and the Persian governor, Nehemiah (Ezra 7:1-6; Neh. 2:1-20). The population of the province of Judea also included immigrants (‫ )גרים‬who, unlike native Judeans, could not claim ancestral ties to Israel. Jerusalem’s status as the religious centre of the cult of YHWH, the god of Israel, had to contend with rival claims by Samarians to worship YHWH on Mount Gerizim, to the north. The Samarians/Samaritans also claimed this Torah as their own. Judea’s religious and secular leaders responded to internal and external threats to the community’s cohesion by invoking the Torah’s rhetoric of identification with ancient Israel and of separation from other peoples. They developed it further, castigating foreigners as inherently polluted (Neh. 13:9, 28-30) and intermarriage as polluting the holy people of God (Ezra 9:10-11). We

554

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

can recognize in this rhetoric a common strategy adopted by many small minority groups for community preservation. And, in fact, this strategy of tying Jewish identity to venerating the Torah’s laws, especially a distinctive diet, purification rituals, and male circumcision, did help preserve Jewish identity through millennia of minority status under Christian and Muslim rulers. Bibles containing this separatist rhetoric have also been venerated by those who wielded political power, either as majorities or as ruling minorities in various times and places. Christian rulers have proclaimed religious and moral universalism while simultaneously using Leviticus’s derogatory rhetoric about foreigners to disparage their enemies and colonial subjects (see Exegesis to 18:25 above). To pick just one of many examples, John Calvin observed that the law in Lev. 20:26 “has the rationale of maintaining a separation of God’s people from the nations and their pollutions” (Elliott 2012, 212), a view which was still echoed in the twentieth century by Northern Irish Protestants in their political struggle to stay separate from Catholic Ireland (Stevens 1993, 442). The Hebrew Bible, however, does not consistently advocate separation from foreigners. It also contains texts that voice more universalistic ideals, starting with creation and flood stories that show the ancestors of all humans receiving divine commands and blessings (Genesis 1:28; 9:1-7). Some prophets and psalms hope for all nations to worship God together in Jerusalem (Isa. 66:18-24; Zech. 14:16-21; Ps. 96). The books of Ruth and Daniel affirm the ability of non-Israelites to recognize the one, true God. Legal texts protect the safety and rights of immigrants (‫ )גרים‬living in Israel, to the point of “loving” them “like you” (Lev. 19:33-34; Deut. 10:18-19). Universalistic ideas continued to appear in Second Temple Jewish literature. Malka Simkovitch reviewed this material and concluded that “many Jews embraced universalist ideas, particularly during the last two centuries of the Second Temple era” (Simkovitch 2017, 141). Later rabbinic literature reproduced the biblical bias against the Canaanites and also voiced universalistic impulses. For example, the Talmud reported that God prohibited the angels from celebrating the victory over Egypt at the Reed Sea out of sorrow over all the Egyptian dead (b. Meg. 10b; b. Sanh. 39b; Niditch 1993, 150-51). Christians picked up these universalistic elements in Jewish tradition and claimed them for themselves. Various New Testament texts embrace the prophets’ universalistic proclamations. The Gospels show Jesus quoting the command to love neighbours from Lev. 19:18, and extending that love even to enemies (Matt. 5:44). Christians are directed to preach the Gospel “to all nations” (Matt. 28:19; Rom. 1:16). In order to implement this universal mission, the apostle Paul rejected practices like diet restrictions and circumcision (1 Cor. 10:23-33; Gal. 5:2) that had come to define Jewish identity as a separate people. New Testament

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

555

texts characterize concern for food purity as a “Jewish” concern (Mark 7:3; Acts 10:28) in order to highlight and distinguish Christian universalism: “Thus he [Jesus] declared all foods clean” (Mark 7:19; also Acts 10:14-15). Universalism became a self-described marker for distinguishing Christians from Jews. Christians identified separatist particularism as a defining fault of Judaism. Worries about fellow Christians exhibiting such “judaizing” tendencies continued to be voiced throughout subsequent history.35 The Christian scriptures of Old and New Testaments thus canonized the identity politics of early Christians by describing the separatist practices of Jews in the Pentateuch and then rejecting them in favour of Christian universalism in the New Testament (Ruether 1974, 226-34). This formula obscured the universalistic tendencies in ancient Judaism (Simkovich 2017) as well as the fact that the New Testament actually preserves a variety of views on these subjects. Jon Levenson pointed out that the material in the Hebrew Bible which touches on non-Israelite religion, like the material in the New Testament which touches on Judaism, is born in the white heat of polemic. In both cases, the sarcastic, reductionistic literature of polemic has come to be regarded as sacred Scripture.36

After Christianity received Roman imperial approval and then sponsorship in the fourth century, many Christian theologians fused the universal mission of the church with the empire’s political universalism that celebrated the dominant culture and relegated all others to barbarism. Rosemary Radford Ruether summarized the results: Christianity … took the universalism of the messianic hope and fused it with the ideological universalism of the ecumenical empire. … One God, one faith, and one Church for all mankind invalidated the rights of other people to exist in other ways before God. … Historically, from this time on, the missionary and the conquistador went hand in hand. (Ruether 1974, 234; also 141-43, 233)

The Christian Roman Empire restricted Jewish legal and civil rights, precedents followed by later Christian nations up until Jewish emancipation in the nineteenth century. The results were viciously ironic: criticism of Jewish separatism as intolerant of other peoples led to a Christian universalism that has frequently been violently intolerant of Jews. 35 John Chrysostom, Discourses Against Judaizing Christians, The Fathers of the Church, vol. 68, tr. P. W. Harkins, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010; Sean Eisen Murphy, “Concern about Judaizing in Academic Treatises on the Law, c. 1130-c. 1230,” Speculum 82 (2007), 560-94; Mickey L. Mattox, “Judaizers,” in The New Westminster Dictionary of Church History: The Early, Medieval, and Reformation Eras (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008), 365. 36 Jon D. Levenson, “Is There a Counterpart in the Hebrew Bible to New Testament Antisemitism?” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 22 (1985), 242-60 [254-55].

556

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

Nevertheless, Christian universalism has often proven very attractive as the religion spread to new cultures. R. S. Sugirtharajah observed that many people in India and elsewhere in Asia responded positively to the New Testament, but found the Hebrew Bible perplexing and off-putting. As a result, missionaries found it difficult to preach on Old Testament texts (Sugirtharajah 2005, 145-46, 163). Some missionaries adopted evolutionary models that identified Israelite and post-exilic Jewish religions with stages of religions in India, all leading up to the ultimate Christian revelation (Sugirtharajah 2005, 151-53). The effects of these conflict between and within religious communities have not been confined to these communities. Christian ideas, often from the Bible, set the stage for the development of Western political theories in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Nelson 2010).37 One great accomplishment of such political and ethical universalism came about in 1948 when the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But the religious arguments between separatism and universalism reappeared in a new guise in the late-twentieth-century in international debates between the advocates of universal human rights and the defenders of cultural particularism.38 Ruether suggested that any and all universal claims must be “based on particularisms which accept their own distinctiveness and so leave room for the distinctiveness of others.” They must “come to terms with [themselves] as a particularism among other particularisms, one language among other languages” (Ruether 1974, 235, 237). Enacting Ruether’s ideal would require religious communities to focus on themselves more than on comparisons with other groups. It also requires them to recognize the historically catastrophic effects of claiming that God detests entire ethnic groups on moral grounds. I therefore advocate striking through vv. 23b-24a (see further in the Author’s Preface above). 20:25 You must separate pure quadrupeds from the polluted, and polluted flyers from the pure, so you do not nauseate yourselves with quadrupeds, flyers, and everything that scrambles on the ground which I have separated as polluted for you. For ‫“ בדל‬separate,” see Exegesis to 11:47. This verse presupposes the regulations for polluted and pure meats in chap. 11. It draws an explicit analogy between the Israelites’ regular separation of pure meat from polluted and 37 Graham Hammill, The Mosaic Constitution: Political Theology and Imagination from Machiavelli to Milton, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012. 38 Jack Donnelly, “The Relative Universality of Human Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly 29/2 (2007), 281-306; B. L. Billet, “Introduction: Universal Human Rights versus Cultural Relativism,” in Cultural Relativism in the Face of the West: The Plight of Women and Female Children, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

557

God’s separation of the people of Israel as belonging to YHWH. The act of separation also typifies God’s activity in creating the world in Genesis 1. Thus, Leviticus 20 calls on its listeners and readers to distinguish among food animals to show their status as the people distinguished by God in imitation of God’s acts in creating the world, all activities characterized as “separation.” Milgrom (1761) observed that the prepositions following ‫“ בדל‬separate” in vv. 24-26 modulate the verb’s meaning from “set apart” when followed by ‫“ מן‬from” to “distinguish” when followed by ‫“ בין‬between” (so KJV, NRSV, NIV). However, translating differently based on the preposition as most versions and commentators do obscures the commonality between the divine and human actions that is emphasized by the four-fold use of ‫ בדל‬in vv. 24-26. I therefore translate “separate” consistently so as to let readers distinguish the nature of the separation for themselves, just as the Hebrew text does (and NJPS, CEB). ‫“ בכל אשׁר ירמשׁ האדמה‬everything which scrambles on the ground” is literally “everything with which the ground teems/scrambles” (see Exegesis to 11:44). Observing the Torah’s diet rules became an identifying feature of Jewish identity by at least the second half of the Second Temple period (see Exposition to Leviticus 11). Though different diets and cuisines are typical ethnic markers, observing kosher became an unusually famous and controversial marker of Torah observance in antiquity and remains so today. Placing diet at the heart of Jewish religious identity was promoted by this paragraph’s association of diet distinctions with divine selection through the cosmological echo conveyed by the verb ‫“ בדל‬separation” (Yoo-Watts 2021, 106-9). 20:26 You are holy to me because I, YHWH, am holy. I have separated you from the peoples to be mine. This verse ties the idea of holiness explicitly to someone’s or something’s designation as separated from similar people and things and as set apart for God. Verses 25-26 provide the closest thing to a definition of ‫“ קדושׁ‬holy, sacred” in the HB. It has therefore become a truism for commentators and theologians to define holiness in terms of separation (Hieke 807: “Heiligkeit und Unterscheidung gehören zusammen und bedingen einander”; cf. the more differentiated summary of Hundley 2011, 72; see Exegesis to 19:1-2). Holiness is characteristic of YHWH, and this verse claims that Israel is holy in imitation of YHWH (imitatio Dei). In what, exactly, does this holiness consist? YHWH spoke into being and then “separated” the natural world in creation (Gen. 1:4, etc.) and here chooses Israel by “separating you from the peoples to be mine,” which also means becoming holy (Exod. 19:5-6;

558

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

Deut. 7:6; 14:2). Similarly, Israel’s priests must “separate” the holy from the secular (Lev. 10:10). However, nowhere does the HB describe YHWH as “separated” using either ‫ בדל‬or its synonyms. It is therefore more accurate to describe holiness in the HB as the requisite condition of the divine realm. Through their mutual covenant, YHWH selects Israel to separate from the human realm of the nations and live in the divine realm. YHWH allows some Israelites to come even closer to the divine by separating them from other Israelites to serve as priests. It is not separation per se that makes them “holy,” but rather their relocation into the divine realm (Yoo-Watts 2021, 18, 66-67, 108, 128, correcting Leviticus 1-10, 540). This verse explains the purity regulations, and the food prohibitions in particular, as the basis for separating Israelites from other groups of people. By the last two centuries of the Second Temple period, this command led to sharp differences in practice between different religious parties. The Qumran sectarians boasted of separating themselves from other Jews to maintain their purity (4QMMT 92) while Hillel disavowed such tendencies (m. Avot 2:4). A NT text criticized the food laws because they separated Gentiles from Jews (Acts 10:28; see Tomson 2000, 78-84). See my full discussion on v. 24 above. Supplemental Penalty for Spirit Possession (20:27) Verse 27 seems out of place. Verse 6 and 19:31 anticipate it, and the form of this casuistic mandate of the death penalty for spirit possession matches vv. 6, 9-21 above. Some commentators argue that it was moved here to form an inclusio with stoning (v. 2) and necromancy (v. 6) at the beginning of the chapter (Hartley 331; Milgrom 1765; Nihan 2007, 432). Or it may be a later supplement that was added at the end of the chapter. However, the end of the book is a more likely place for supplements (as, in fact, chap. 27 seems to be). The style and vocabulary of this verse indicate that it belongs with the prohibitions in vv. 6, 9-21, so displacement from earlier in the chapter by intention or mistake seem the most likely explanations for its position here. 20:27 When a man or a woman is possessed by a ghost or a knowing spirit, they must certainly die. They must stone them with rocks. Their blood is on themselves. Both ‫“ אוב‬ghost” and ‫“ ידעני‬knowing spirit” refer to ghosts and spirits (see Exegesis to 19:31; also 20:6). The phrasing here, ‫“ כי יהיה בהם‬who has in them” suggests possession and likely refers to those who communicate with spirits through temporary possession, that is, to mediums. Milgrom (1765) observed that clients of mediums are threatened with being “cut off” by God (v. 6) while the mediums themselves are here condemned to death.

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

559

The death penalty for those who practice occult rituals is also mandated by Exod. 22:18 and Deut. 18:10-11. Mesopotamian legal collections mandate trial by river ordeal by those accused of occult practices, where drowning is taken as proof of the accusation (Ur-Namma §13; Hammurabi §2; NeoBabylonian §7). Fear of being targeted by magical spells is prevalent in ancient laws, prayers, and especially in spells invoked to counter other spells (e.g. COS 4.88J-M). Ancient texts both inside and outside the HB label occult practitioners by lists of terms no longer easily understood (e.g. Deut. 18:10-11). No biblical or other ancient text, however, clearly describes the criteria for distinguishing between prohibited ritual practices and legitimate ones. Legitimate religious leaders perform rituals to purify, heal, and gain God’s favour that could also be categorized as “magical.” Some stories even depict magical contests between approved and disapproved practitioners, such as Moses and Aaron versus Egypt’s magicians (Exod. 7:8-8:19), Aaron versus Korah (Num. 17), Elijah versus the Baal priests (1 Kgs. 18), and Jesus’ disciples versus their competitors (Mark 9:38-40; Acts 8:5-24). Interpreters have filled this gap by suggesting, for example, that legitimate rituals were defensive while illegitimate rituals intended to harm others. Yet biblical heroes can cause considerable harm (e.g. Exod. 14:26-28; Num. 16:28-35). The only obvious distinction drawn by biblical and other ancient texts falls between those rituals that benefit you, and those that do you harm. In other words, the difference between legitimate religion and magic in ancient texts lay not in what was done but in whom it was supposed to benefit (as Jesus admitted according to Mark 9:40). For stoning, see above on v. 2. For ‫“ דמיהם בם‬their blood is on themselves,” see above on v. 11. This verse, along with Exod. 22:18 and Deut. 18:10-11, became the explicit basis for witch hunts and executions in subsequent history. Whereas medieval laws and edicts frequently tried to prevent witch hunting, fourteenth-toseventeenth-century developments in Christian doctrines about the devil led to many accused witches being executed in Europe and its American colonies.39 Charges of witchcraft often included accusations of bestiality, in which the animals were interpreted as demonic (E. Berkowitz 2012, 216-30). Estimates range widely for the number of people, mostly women, tried and executed for witchcraft especially in Spain, England, Scotland, Germany, Sweden, and in the Americas between 1450 and 1750, but 45,000 is a plausible count.40 Today, the rhetoric of “spiritual warfare” in popular forms of 39 Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch Hunts: A Global History (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2004), 18-19, 30-32, 56, 83-164. 40 Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (3rd ed.; New York: Pearson, 2006), 23.

560

Leviticus 20 Exegesis

Pentecostal Christianity still targets indigenous religious practices as “witchcraft” and their practitioners as “witches.”41 The basis for associating sexual offences with witches and demons was laid by this chapter, which begins by condemning Molech worship and necromancy (vv. 1-6), then threatens death for sexual offences (vv. 9-21) before prescribing the death penalty for mediums who associate with supernatural spirits (v. 27). This verse’s well-documented history of deadly application fails the basic moral requirement for fair trials to justify any judicial penalties, especially capital punishment. This moral failure should be marked clearly in the text by striking through the verse.

41 See, for example, the essays in Knut Rio, Michelle MacCarthy, Ruy Blanes, eds., Pentecostalism and Witchcraft: Spiritual Warfare in Africa and Melanesia, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

AUTHOR INDEX OF BIBLIOGRAPHIES AND FOOTNOTES in Leviticus 1-10 (marked 1: below) and Leviticus 11-20 (marked 2:), listing only the full citations of each work by a particular author

Abusch, Tzvi. 1:318 Achenbach, Reinhard. 1:xiii; 2:xv, 55, 349 Adler, Rachel. 2:212 Aitken, Tom. 2:393 Akiyama, Kengo. 2:448 Albertz, Rainer. 2:xv, 349 Albright, W. F. 1:185 Allen, James P. 1:xiii Aloni, J. 2:355 Alter, Robert. 1:xiii Altmann, Peter. 2:xv, 55 Amihay, Aryeh. 2:538 Andersen, Burton R. 2:139 Anderson, Gary A. 1:xiii Anderson, John E. 2:448 Anderson, Robert A. 1:130, 131 Andersson, Johan. 2:545 Angel, Joseph L. 1:331 Angelini, Anna. 2:xv, 55-56, 448 Angenendt, A. 2:16, 393 Anidjar, Gil. 1:320; 2:415 Arie, Eran. 2:314 Arnaud, D. 1:xvi Arndt, W. F. 2:xv Arnold, Matthieu. 2:349 Arnold, Philip P. 2:441 Assel, Heinrich. 2:448 Assmann, Aleida. 2:527 Assmann, Jan. 2:527 Auld, Graeme. 1:20 Aulén, Gustaf. 1:325 Augustine. 1:xiv Austin, J. L. 2:282 Avalos, Hector. 2:xxi, 156 Averbeck, Richard E. 2:24, 156 Avery-Peck, Alan J. 2:448 Bach, Alice. 2:541 Baden, Joel S. 1:40; 2:xv, xix, 138, 259 Bähr, Karl C. W. F. 2:278

Bailey, Randall C. 2:393 Baker, D. W. 1:137 Balentine, Samuel E. 1:xiv Barilan, Yechiel Michael. 2:482 Barkay, Gabriel. 1:499 Barker, Chris. 2:xxvii Bar-Oz, Guy. 2:83 Barr, James. 1:332 Bartor, Assnat. 1:xiv Bauckham, Richard J. 1:187 Bauer, W. 2:xv Baumgarten, Albert I. 1:xiv, 298 Baumgarten, Joseph M. 2:259 Bautch, Richard J. 2:266 Beal, Timothy. 1:33, 36, 72, 507; 2:xxi Beckman, Gary. 1:318; 2:xx, 112 Beckwith, R. T. 1:237 Begg, Christopher T. 1:9, 507; 2:259 Begrich, J. 1:xiv Behringer, Wolfgang. 2:559 Bell, Catherine. 1:xiv, 58 Bellarmine, Robert. 1:461 Benjamin, Katie. 2:511 Bennett, Rachel E. 2:524 Ben-Sasson, Haim Hillel. 1:xxii Benzinger, Immanuel. 2:403 Berkowitz, Beth A. 2:xxi, 393, 511 Berkowitz, Eric. 2:511 Bergen, Wesley J. 1:xiv Berger, John. 2:416 Bergquist, Birgitta. 1:xiv Bernat, David A. 2:110 Berquist, Jon L. 1:64 Berthelot, Katell. 2:56 Bertholet, Alfred. 1:xiv Bessette, Joseph. 2:526 Bibb, Bryan D. 1:xiv, 507-8; 2:xvii Bickerman, Elias. 1:xiv, 111 Bidmead, Julye. 2:272 Bigtree, Sandra L. 2:441

562

Author Index of Bibliographies and Footnotes

Billet, B. L. 2:556 Binkley, Roberta. 1:xiv Bird, Phyllis. 2:500 Bland, Archie. 2:407 Blanes, Ruy. 2:560 Blair, Judit M. 2:276 Blenkinsopp, Joseph. 1:xiv, 41, 116, 152, 214 Blidstein, Gerald J. 2:3 Blidstein, Moshe. 2:511 Blum, Erhard. 1:xiv Boda, Mark J. 2:266 Bodendorfer, Gerhard. 1:75; 2:410 Boecker, Hans Jochen. 1:100 Boer, Roland T. 1:64, 65; 2:394 Böhler, Dieter. 1:114. Boivin, Nicole. 2:3 Borgeaud, Philippe. 2:70 Borger, R. 1:137 Borghouts, J. F. 2:xv Borowski, Oded. 1:xiv Boswell, John. 2:433 Boyarin, Daniel. 1:xiv; 2:212 Boysen, Knud Henrik. 2:511 Bradford, William. 2:547 Braiterman, Zachary J. 1:80 Brattston, David W. T. 1:243 Brenner, Athalya. 1:xiv; 2:169, 393 Brett, Mark G. 2:338 Brichto, Herbert Chanan. 1:xiv, 500 Bright, John. 1:535; 2:103 Brin, Gershon. 2:388 Britt, Brian. 2:349 Brodeur, Emma. 1:16 Brody, N. S. 2:138 Brøns, Cecilie. 2:301 Brooten, Bernadette J. 2:xv Brown, Michelle P. 1:541 Broydé, Isaac. 2:403 Buber, Martin. 1:80; 2:459 Buc, Philippe. 1:xiv Büchner, Dirk. 1:324 Budd, Philip J. 1:74 Burge, Stephen R. 2:139, 448 Burke, Kenneth. 1:xv Burkert, Walter. 1:xv, 58, 59, 196; 2:8 Burnette-Bletsch, Rhonda. 2:448 Burnside, Jonathan. 2:56 Burrus, Virginia. 2:3 Burschel, Peter. 2:xv

Burton, Gideon. 2:xv, 343 Budd, Philip J. 1:xv Busch, Austin. 2:393 Bynum, Caroline Walker. 1:320; 2:349 Calvin, John. 1:xv Camp, Claudia V. 1:121 Carasik, Michael. 1:xv Carbon, Jan-Mathieu. 2:286 Carile, Maria Cristina. 2:468 Carmichael, Calum. 2:xv Carr, David M. 1:xv Carter, Jeffrey. 1:xv Caspers, Charles. 2:110 Cassuto, Umberto. 2:xv, 307 Castelli, Elizabeth A. 2:3 Cave, A. 1:207 Cave, Alfred A. 2:393 Chace, Jessica. 2:138 Chavel, Simeon. 2:379, 537 Chazan, Robert. 1:320 Cherry, Conrad. 2:xxi Childs, Brevard S. 1:305; 2:xv Chilton, Bruce. 1:77 Chitando, Ezra. 2:545 Cholewiński, Alfred. 2:xv Chrysostom, John. 2:555 Chryssides, George D. 2:448, 511 Cicero. 2:xviii Cixous, Hélène. 1:65 Cizek, Paul. 2:139 Clark, Elizabeth. 1:77 Clarkson, Frederick. 2:526 Clayville, Kristel A. 1:65 Clements, R. E. 1:241 Clines, David J. A. 1:47 Clinton, Robert N. 2:xxvi Cohen, Noam. 2:xxvii Cohen, Shaye J. D. 1:xv; 2:110 Cohen, Yoram. 2:150 Cole, Penny J. 2:16, 393 Collins, Billie Jean. 2:3, 56 Collins, C. John. 1:305 Collins, John J. 1:331; 2:xvi, 448 Collins, Richard. 1:247 Coltri, Marzia. 2:360 Comstock, Gary David. 2:527 Conzelmann, Hans. 2:358 Cook, Stephen L. 1:124; 2:xvi Couto-Ferreira, Érica. 2:3

Author Index of Bibliographies and Footnotes Cowley, A. E. 1:xiii Cranz, Isabel. 2:xvi Creehan, Patrick. 2:349 Cressy, David. 2:110 Cross, Frank Moore. 1:xiii; 2:289, 292 Crouch, Carly L. 2:434 Crüsemann, Frank. 1:xv Dahan, Gilbert. 2:349 Dahl, Espen. 2:448 Dahm, Ulrike. 1:xv Daly, Robert J. 1:xvi Damrosch, David. 1:xvi Daniel, Suzanne. 1:xvi Darmesteter, J. 2:408 Darshan, Guy. 2:3 Daube, David. 1:450 David, Joseph E. 2:393 Davies, Philip R. 1:74, 301 Davis, Ellen F. 1:65; 2:56, 349 Davis, Joseph. 2:448 Day, John. 1:xvi; 2:530 DeBoer, Michael J. 2:477 De Troyer, Kristin. 2:xvi, 110 Deissmann, Adolf. 1:210 Demaitre, Luke. 2:138 Denery, Dallas. 2:448 Derrida, Jacque. 2:xxvii Dershowitz, Idan. 2:393 Diamandopoulos, Athanasios. 1:282 Dick, Michael B. 2:448 Dignas, B. 2:286 Dillmann, A. 1:xvi Dine, Ranana. 2:139 Dion, Paul E. 1:223 Dohmen, Christoph. 2:467 Donkin, Lucy. 2:468 Donnelly, Jack. 2:556 Doran, Robert. 1:519; 2:71 Dorman, Anke. 2:266 Douglas, Mary. 1:xvi, 12, 245; 2:259 Dozeman, Thomas B. 1:xvi, 69 Dresen, Grietje. 2:110 Driver, G. R. 1:253 Driver, S. R. 1:xvi, 404 Dube, S. W. D. 1:83 Dulaey, Martine. 2:349 Dumont, Louis. 2:116 Dunn, James D. G. 1:xvi; 2:358 Durey, Jill. 2:405

563

Durkheim, Emile. 1:58 Dwyer, Timothy. 2:394 Eberhart, Christian A. 1:xvi, 298; 2:xvi, xx, 259, 361 Edgecomb, Kevin. 2:456 Edmond, Rod. 2:138 Ego, Beate. 2:3 Ehrensvärd, Martin. 1:xxx Ehrlich, A. 1:xvi Eilberg-Schwartz, Howard. 2:xvi Eisen, Arnold M. 1:80 Eisen, Robert. 2:xxi Eisenstein, Judah David. 2:403 Eissfeldt, Otto. 2:530 Ekholst, Christine. 2:524 Eliasen, Karen C. 1:508 Elior, Rachel. 1:32 Ellens, Deborah L. 2:xvi, 212 Elliger, Karl. 1:xvi, 299 Elliott, Mark W. 1:xvi, 39, 72 Erbele-Küster, Dorothea. 2:3, 110, 448 Erickson, John H. 1:247 Ermidoro, Stefania. 2:56 Eskenazi, Tamara Cohn. 1:114 Evans, John K. 2:500 Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1:58 Ewald, Heinrich. 1:xvii Fabry, Heinz-Josef. 1:xvii, 10, 74, 229 Falk, Daniel K. 2:266 Fander, Monika. 2:213 Fassberg, S. E. 2:165 Fauth, Wolfgang. 2:259 Feder, Yitzhaq. 1:58, 299, 346; 2:3, 138 Feinstein, Eve Levavi. 2:xvi, 3, 394 Feldman, Emanuel. 2:3 Feldman, Liane M. 2:xvi Feldman, Louis H. 2:xxxii Ferzoco, George. 2:448 Feser, Edward. 2:526 Feucht, Christian. 1:xvii; 2:xvi Finkelstein, Israel. 2:83 Firestone, Reuven. 2:xxi Firmage, Edwin. 2:56 Firy, Abigail. 1:77 Fischer, Alexander Achilles. 2:xxii Fischer-Elfert, Hans-Werner. 2:138 Fishbane, Michael. 1:xvii

564

Author Index of Bibliographies and Footnotes

Fitzmyer, Joseph A. 1:181 Fleishman, Joseph. 2:448 Fleming, Daniel E. 1:441 Flint, Peter. 1:10, 74 Fonrobert, Charlotte. 2:213 Fontaine, Carole R. 2:448 Foster, Benjamin. 1:xvii Foster, John L. 1:xvii Foucault, Michel. 2:145 Fox, Everett. 1:xvii Fraade, Stephen D. 1:xvii Franca, Marcílio. 2:480 Frandsen, Paul John. 2:217 Frazer, James George. 1:xvii, 2:274 Freedman, David Noel. 1:xiii Fretheim, Terence. 1:xvii Freud, Sigmund. 1:58 Freund, Richard S. 2:313 Frevel, Christian. 1:xvii; 2:xvi, 3, 203 Fried, Lisbeth S. 1:459 Friedman, Milton. 2:474 Frymer-Kensky, Tikva. 2:xvi, 3 Furstenberg, Yair. 2:213 Gadot, Yuval. 2:83 Gafney, Wilda C. 2:xvi Gahlin, Lucia. 2:11 Gane, Roy. 1:xvii, 58; 2:xvi, 3, 66, 360, 428 Garber, Zev. 1:185 García Martínez, Florentino. 1:xxii, 130 Garcia-Ventura, Agnès. 2:3 Garroway, Kristine Henriksen. 2:110 Gaudet, M. 2:145 Geary, Patrick. 1:118 Geertz, Clifford. 1:58 Geller, M. J. 1:299 Gemeinhardt, Peter. 2:448, 511 Georgourdi, Stella. 1:182 Gerstenberger, Erhard S. 1:xvii; 2:103 Gettlemanjan, Jeffrey. 2:545 Gilders, William K. 1:xvii; 2:259 Giles, Terry. 1:130, 131 Gill, James C. R. 2:146 Gingrich, F. W. 2:xv Girard, René. 1:xvii, 2:274 Gitin, Seymour. 1:240 Glancy, Jennifer A. 2:xxi Glassner, Jean-Jacques. 1:93-94; 2:43

Gnuse, Robert H. 2:xxi Goldberg, P. Selvin. 1:77 Goldberg, Yechiel Shalom. 1:299; 2:259 Goldenberg, David M. 2:xxi Goldstein, Elizabeth W. 2:110, 213 Goldstein, Gabriel M. 1:451 Goldstein, Jonathan A. 1:128, 549 Goldstone, Matthew S. 2:448 Goody, Jack. 1:27, 63-64, 158; 2:394 Gordis, Robert. 1:341 Gordon, Richard. 2:287 Görg, M. 2:259 Gorman, Frank H., Jr. 1:xvii Gotter, Ulrich. 2:287 Grabbe, Lester L. 1:xviii; 2:67, 259 Grabher, Jasonne M. 2:48 Gradwohl, R. 1:508 Graham, William A. 1:28, 89 Grant, Robert M. 2:56 Grätz, Sebastian. 1:115 Gray, George Buchanan. 1:xviii Graybill, Rhiannon. 2:393 Green, M. Christian. 2:545 Green, William Scott. 1:540 Greenberg, Moshe. 2:xvii, 242 Greenfield, Jonas C. 1:424 Greenspoon, Leonard J. 2:xvii Greenstein, Edward L. 1:508 Greer, Jonathan S. 2:56 Grimes, Ronald L. 1:xviii, 58 Grisbrooke, W. Jardine. 1:243 Grossman, Grace. 1:204. Gruber, Mayer I. 1:179; 2:110 Gruenwald, Ithamar. 1:58 Guichard, Michaël. 2:3 Grünwaldt, Klaus. 1:xviii; 2:xvii, 259 Guest, Gerald B. 1:xiv, 39, 247 Gunda, Masiiwa Ragies. 2:438 Gunn, David M. 1:301 Guterman, Mark A. 1:80 Gutman, Joseph. 1:451 Gutzwiller, Kathryn. 1:15 Haas, Volkert. 1:xviii Hachlili, Rachel. 1:541; 2:313 Halbe, Jörn. 2:394 Halberstam, Chaya T. 2:xxi Halbertal, Moshe. 1:57 Hallo, William W. 1:137

Author Index of Bibliographies and Footnotes Halperin, David J. 2:xxi Hämeen-Anttila, Jaakko. 2:448 Hamilton, Bernard. 2:138 Hammill, Graham. 2:556 Handelman, Don. 2:67 Hanneken, Todd R. 2:349 Hanson, R. P. C. 1:305 Haran, Menahem. 1:xviii, 20 Harlow, Jules. 2:456 Harper, G. Geoffrey. 2:56 Harrington, Hannah K. 1:xviii, 74, 75, 116; 2:xvii, 3 Harris, John Richard. 1:239 Hart, Mitchell B. 1:xviii Hartenstein, Friedhelm. 2:xvii Hartley, John H. 1:xviii; 2:394 Harvey, Susan Ashbrook. 1:282 Hatfield, Michael. 2:482 Hausmann, J. 1:346 Havsteen, Sven Rune. 2:448 Hayes, Christine. 1:xviii; 2:74, 403 Hayes, John H. 1:xviii, 54 Haynes, Naomi. 2:526 Haynes, Stephen R. 2:xxi Hays, Nathan. 2:3 Hayward, Robert. 1:xviii, xxvii Heald, Suzette. 2:67 Heger, Paul. 1:xviii Heider, George C. 2:530 Held, Moshe. 1:282 Heller, Richard M. 2:138 Heller, Toni W. 2:138 Helmreich, G. 1:283 Hendel, Ronald S. 2:67, 496 Hengel, Martin. 1:xviii, 115, 517 Henley, Jon. 2:407 Henry, Dubby. 2:527 Hentschke, R. 1:544 Herbert, Judith A. 2:xvi Herner, S. 1:229 Hess, Richard S. 1:508 Heyman, George P. 1:xviii; 2:48 Hieke, Thomas. 2:xvi, xvii, 138, 259, 394, 511 Hiers, Richard H. 2:520 Hill, Andrew E. 2:xxi Hill, Elisabeth. 2:139 Himbaza, Innocent. 1:10; 2:xv Himmelfarb, Martha. 1:xviii, 31-32, 229

565

Hirsch, Emil G. 2:403 Hjelm, Ingrid. 1:130 Hobson, Russell. 1:10 Hoeflich, Michael H. 2:48 Hoffmann, David Z. 1:xviii Hoftijzer, J. 1:210 Hogewood, Jay C. 2:327 Holbein, Hans. 1:35, 204 Holden, Andrew. 2:360 Honoré, Nadine. 2:139 Horowitz, Wayne. 1:441 Horton, Fred L. 2:394 Houston, Walter. 1:508; 2:56 Houtman, Cornelis. 1:xi, xviii Huber, Konrad. 2:448 Huehnergard, John. 2:448 Hughes, Steven C. 2:542 Hultgard, Anders. 1:158 Hulse, E. V. 2:139 Humfress, Caroline. 2:48 Hundley, Michael B. 1:xix, 187, 367 Hurowitz, A. 1:464 Hurowitz, Victor A. 1:441 Hurvitz, Avi. 1:xix, 41 Hutter, Manfred. 2:3 Hutton, Jeremy M. 1:xxi; 2:291 Jackson, Bernard S. 1:xix Jackson, Donald S. 2:461 Jacobs, Joseph. 2:403 James, Edward. 1:xxii Jane, Emma A. 2:xxvii Janowski, Bernd. 1:xix, 270; 2:259, 373 Janzen, David. 1:xix Jay, Nancy. 1:xix Jefferson, Thomas. 2:xxv Jenkins, Philip. 1:83; 2:xvii Jenson, Philip Peter. 1:xix Johnson, Daryl. 2:527 Johnson, Judith Ann. 2:xvi Johnson, Luke Timothy. 2:448 Johnson, Mark. 2:xvii Johnson, Merwyn S. 2:413 Johnson, Sarah Iles. 1:xix; 2:xvii Johnstone, Pauline. 1:451 Johnstone, William. 1:74, 299 Jones, Simon. 2:3 Jonker, Gerdien. 1:445 Joosten, Jan. 1:xix, 41

566

Author Index of Bibliographies and Footnotes

Joselit, Jenna Weissman. 2:65 Josephus. 1:xix Jüngling, Hans-Winfried. 1:xvi, 39 Jürgens, Benedikt. 2:259-60 Kalimi, Isaac. 2:267 Kamionkowski, S. Tamar. 2:xvii Kaplan, David L. 2:139 Karol, Gabrielle. 2:527 Katz, Hayah. 2:3 Kaufman, Stephen A. 2:530 Kaufmann, Yehezkel. 1:xix Kawashima, Robert S. 1:178 Kazen, Thomas. 2:xvii, 3-4 Keel, Othmar. 1:xix, 238 Keene, Bryan C. 2:xxvii Kelly, Annie. 2:545 Kesselring, K. J. 2:542 Kiel, Yishai. 2:393, 403 Kilchör, Benjamin. 2:xvii King, Peter. 2:473 Kirschner, Robert. 1:508 Kiuchi, Nobuyoshi. 1:xix, 299 Klawans, Jonathan. 1:xx Kleinig, John W. 1:486 Klem, Yonah. 2:393 Kline, Moshe. 2:448 Klingbeil, Gerald A. 1:58, 441 Klinken, Adriaan van. 2:545 Klostermann, August. 1:42 Knauf, Ernst Axel. 1:45 Knierim, Rolf P. 1:xx, 152 Knohl, Israel. 1:xx, 177, 299, 498 Knoppers, Gary N. 1:xx, 115 Knust, Jennifer Wright. 2:394 Koch, Klaus. 1:xx, 137; 2:260 Kogan, Leonid. 2:79 Köhler, Ludwig. 1:xx Kohlschein, Franz. 2:213 Kohn, Risa Levitt. 1:xx Koltun-Fromm, Naomi. 2:448 Koorevaar, Hendrik Jacob. 1:20 Koren, Sharon Faye. 2:110, 213 Kornfeld, Walter. 1:xx Korte, Anne-Marie. 2:110, 213 Körting, Corinna. 2:260 Kostlevy, William. 2:464 Kozlovic, Anton Karl. 2:139 Kratz, Reinhard G. 1:40, 98 Kraus, F. R. 1:100

Krauss, Rolf. 2:82, 139 Kriger, Diane. 2:448 Kristéva, Julia. 1:65 Krüger, Thomas. 1:45 Kugel, James L. 1:xx, 72, 116; 2:448 Kugler, Robert A. 1:xx, xxv, 74 Kunin, Seth D. 2:56 Labuschagne, C. J. 1:301, 424 Lakoff, George. 2:xvii Lam, Joseph. 2:29 Lambert, Wilfred G. 1:xx Landy, Francis. 1:65; 2:xvii Lane, D. J. 1:10 Lange, Armin. 1:116 Langston, Scott. 2:448 Larson, Jason T. 1:23; 2:48 Larsson, Göran. 2:3, 393 Lasson, Kenneth. 2:66 Laughlin, John C. 1:508 Lauterbach, Jacob C. 1:328 Lawee, Eric. 2:394 Lawrence, Jonathan D. 2:4 Lebrun, René. 1:xx Lee, Archie Chi Chung. 1:xiv Lee, Bernon P. 1:xxi Leeuwen, J. H. van. 1:404 LeFebvre, Michael. 1:102; 2:511 Lehnardt, Andreas. 2:268 Lemardelé, Christophe. 1:270; 2:56, 191, 260 Lemos, T. M. 2:xvii Lenzo, Giuseppina. 2:70 Leuchter, Mark. 1:xxi; 2:288 Levack, Brian P. 2:559 Levenson, Jon D. 1:174; 2:555 Levine, Baruch A. 1:xxi, 20, 75, 137, 531 Levine, Lee I. 1:xxi Levinson, Bernard M. 1:xx, xxi, 100, 160; 2:xxi, 520, 537 Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1:58 Lewis, Theodore J. 2:328 Lichtheim, Miriam. 1:xxi Lieber, Elinor. 2:139 Liebowitz, Harold. 2:448 Lienhard, Joseph T. 1:xxi, 72 Linafelt, Tod. 1:507 Lindqvist, Pekka. 2:xxxii Lings, K. Renato. 2:394

Author Index of Bibliographies and Footnotes Lipiński, Edward. 1:173, 206, 240 Lipka, Hilary. 2:xvii, 394, 500 Lipka, Michael. 2:511 Lipschits, Oded. 1:xxi Lipson, Carol. 1:xiv, 16, 231 Liss, Hanna. 2:4, 56 Livy. 1:xxi Lloyd Davies, Margaret. 2:139 Loader, William. 2:393 Lockshin, Martin. 2:511 Löhr, Hermut. 2:3 Long, Burke O. 1:36 Longman, Tremper. 1:xxi Lorton, David. 1:165, 445 Lucas, A. 1:239 Luciani, Didier. 1:xxi, 39, 159 Lundberg, Marilyn J. 1:499 Lupu, Eran. 2:10 Lysias. 1: xxi, 29 MacCarthy, Michelle. 2:560 Macchi, Jean-Daniel. 2:533 Maccoby, Hyam. 2:4 MacDonald, Nathan. 1:9; 2:xvii, 66, 291, 484 Mager, Inge. 2:139 Magonet, Jonathan. 2:110-11, 448 Maher, Michael. 1:xxi, xxvii Maier, Johann. 2:481 Malamat, Abraham. 1:xxii; 2:485 Mann, Thomas W. 1:xxii, 47, 132 Mann, William. 2:448 Manseau, Peter. 2:xxv Marchal, Joseph A. 2:409 Marienberg, Evyatar. 2:213 Marriott, Wharton B. 1:451 Marti, Lionel. 2:3 Martin, Dale B. 2:139 Marty, Martin. 1:541 Marx, Alfred. 1:xxii, 229, 299; 2:xviii, 4, 349 Marx, Christoph. 2:xv Mason, Eric F. 2:448 Mathews, K. A. 1:xiii Mathys, Hans-Peter. 2:449 Matthes, J. C. 1:190 Mattox, Mickey L. 2:555 Mazar, Benjamin. 1:181 McCarthy, Dennis J. 1:xxii, 299 McClenney-Sadler, Madeline Gay. 2:394

567

McClymond, Kathryn. 1:xxii McDougall, Sara. 2:542 McEwan, Gilbert J. P. 1:xxii McNamara, Martin. 1:10 Meacham (leBeit Yoreh), Tirzah. 2:213 Meens, Rob. 2:16, 213 Megivern, James J. 2:xxi, 511 Meier, Sam. 2:139 Meier, Samuel A. 1:xxii, 2:197 Meiss, Millard. 1:247 Mendes-Flohr, Paul. 2:449 Merx, A. 1:404 Meshel, Naphtali S. 2:xviii, 4, 56 Metso, Sarianna. 1:10, 74 Meyer, Esias E. 2:56, 464 Meyers, Carol L. 1:126, 241; 2:121 Meyers, Eric M. 1:126, 541 Meyrick, Frederick. 1:247 Michaels, Axel. 2:282 Milgrom, Jacob. 1:xxii, 52, 299, 306, 423, 424, 498 Militarev, Alexander. 2:79 Miller, J. M. 1:xviii Miller, James E. 2:394 Mitchell, Christine. 1:142 Modéus, Martin. 1:xxii, 270 Modrow, Sebastian. 2:47 Moffitt, David M. 2:270 Mohrmann, Doug C. 2:394 Monnickendam, Yifat. 2:540 Monot, Marc. 2:139 Moor, Johannes C. de. 1:xi Moore, Stephen D. 1:65; 2:xxi Moore, Rebecca. 1:xx Moran, William L. 2:484 Morgan, Jonathan. 1:65 Morris, Peter M. K. 1:xxii Morrisroe, Patrick. 1:244 Moslener, Sara. 2:17 Moss, Candida R. 2:138 Moyer, Ian S. 2:287 Moyo, Jeffrey. 2:527 Mtshiselwa, Ndikho. 2:305 Muilenburg, James. 1:69 Muir, Edward. 2:524 Münnich, Maciej. 2:373 Murnane, William J. 1:xxiii Murphy, Sean Eisen. 1:77; 2:555 Myers, John E. B. 2:540 Myrvold, Kristina. 1:xxiii

568

Author Index of Bibliographies and Footnotes

Na’aman, Nadav. 2:308 Naiweld, Ron. 2:349 Namdar, Dvory. 2:314 Nathan, Joan. 2:65 Necker, Gerold. 2:448 Nelson, Eric. 1:83 Nelson, Richard D. 1:xxiii Neudecker, Reinhard. 2:459 Neusner, Jacob. 1:xxiii, 75 Newcomb, Steven T. 2:394, 440 Newhauser, Richard. 2:448 Newsom, Carol A. 1:142 Newton, Richard. 2:xxi Nicklas, Tobias. 2:xvii Niditch, Susan. 1:xxiii Nie, Giselle de. 2:223 Nielson, Kjeld. 1:229 Nihan, Christophe. 1:xxiii, 105; 2:xvi, xviii, 4, 56, 70, 260, 349, 448 Nissinen, Martti. 1:93; 2:394 Noble, Thomas F. X. 2:468 Noblesse-Rocher, Annie. 2:349 Nohrnberg, James. 1:xxiii North, John A. 1:58 North, Gary. 2:xviii Northrop, Henry Davenport. 1:36 Noth, Martin. 1:xxiii Nulman, Macy. 2:269 O’Brien, Julia. 1:36 O’Connor, M. 1:xxviii O’Grady, Kathleen. 2:213 Olanisebe, Samson O. 2:139 Olmo Lete, Gregorio del. 1:xxiii Olson, Dennis T. 2:394 Olyan, Saul M. 1:xxiii; 2:394, 497 Origen. 1:xxiii Orlin, Eric M. 1:26 Orlov, Andrei A. 2:260 Ortiz, Gaye W. 2:448 Ostrer, Boris S. 2:149 Ottenheijm, Eric. 2:4 Otto, Eckart. 1:40, 108, 124; 2:xviii Ottosson, Daniel. 2:544 Pagels, Elaine. 2:407 Paracelsus. 1:459 Paran, Meir. 1:xxiv Pardee, Dennis. 1:xxiv Parker, Robert. 2:4

Parkman, Francis. 2:439 Parmenter, Dorina Miller. 1:xxiii, 541; 2:xxi, 18 Paschen, Wilfried. 2:4 Patrick, Dale. 1:xxiv, 69, 132 Patton, Corrine L. 1:125 Patton, Kimberley C. 2:383 Peacock, Heber F. 1:xxiv Pederson, J. 1:xxiv Penkower, Jordan S. 1:456 Percival, Henry. 1:389 Perrot, Antony. 2:448 Péter or Péter-Contesse, René. 1:xxiv, 137, 190 Petersen, David L. 1:126, 400 Petersen, Nicholas. 1:74 Petersen, Nils Holger. 2:139, 448 Petry, Sven. 2:448 Pfeiffer, Heinrik. 2:260 Philip, Tarja S. 2:111 Philo. 1:xxiv Pietersen, Lloyd. 2:139 Pihlaja, Stephen. 2:439 Pinker, Aron. 2:260 Pirenne-Delforge, Vinciane. 2:286 Pital, Marqués de. 2:439 Plummer, Reinhard. 1:130 Poirer, John C. 1:102 Pola, Thomas. 1:xxiv; 2:xvi Polak-Sahm, Varda. 2:213 Pomeranz, Yoni. 2:448 Poorthuis, M. J. H. M. 2:xviii Porten, Bezalel. 1:xxiv Powell, Marvin A. 2:190, 505 Preuss, H. 2:529 Preuss, J. 2:125 Price, Simon. 2:10 Prior, Michael. 2:394 Propp, William H. C. 1:xxiv Prosperi, Adriano. 2:480 Pseudo-Philo. 1:xxiv Purcell, Nicholas. 2:285 Qimron, E. 1:xiii. Quaegebeur, Jan. 1:xxiv Quack, Joachim Friedrich. 1:xxiv; 2:4, 157 Quintilian. 1:151; 2:xviii Rad, Gerhard von. 1:xxiv Radner, Ephraim. 1:xxiv, 72

Author Index of Bibliographies and Footnotes Rainey, Anson F. 1:xxv, 137 Rainey, Brian. 2:xxi, 394 Rapp, Ursula. 2:213 Rappaport, Roy A. 1:xxv, 58 Rashi. 1:xxv Rattray, Susan. 2:394 Rawlinson, H. C. 1:xxv Razu, Indukuri John Mohan. 2:4 Regev, Eyal. 2:4 Reilich, Martin. 2:67 Reinmuth, Titus. 1:114 Rendsburg, Gary A. 2:56 Rendtorff, Rolf. 1:xxv, 20-21; 2:260, 349 Resetko, Robert. 1:xxx Reventlow, Henning Graf. 2:139 Rex, Richard. 2:423 Rhodes, James N. 2:63 Rhyder, Julia. 2:xviii, 84, 349, 371 Richardson, Peter. 2:439 Riede, Peter. 1:xxv Riegner, Irene E. 2:500 Riess, Richard. 1:xxv Riley, G. J. 2:25 Ringgren, H. 1:544; 2:81 Rio, Knut. 2:560 Ritter, Edith K. 2:156 Robertson, Edward. 1:462 Robinson, Ira. 1:320 Rofé, Alexander. 1:xxv Roll, Susan K. 2:111 Rolle, Alessandra. 2:70 Römer, Thomas. 1:xxv, 39; 2:394 Roo, Jacqueline C. R. de. 2:260 Rooke, Deborah W. 1:xxv; 2:260, 394 Rosen, Baruch. 2:314 Rosenberg, Joel. 1:473 Rosenblum, Jordan D. 2:56 Rosenzweig, Franz. 1:80; 2:459 Rost, Leonhard. 1:159, 282; 2:275 Roth, Jeffrey I. 1:388 Roth, Martha T. 1:xxv Rothenbusch, Ralf. 1:115 Rothstein, David. 2:349 Rouwhorst, Gerard. 2:4 Ruane, Nicole J. 1:xi, xxv; 2:56, 213, 260 Rudman, Dominic. 2:330 Rudolph, Eric. 2:527 Ruether, Rosemary Radford. 2:511

569

Rüger, H. P. 1:224 Rushdoony, Rousas John. 2:xviii Ruwe, Andreas. 1:xxv; 2:xviii, 511 Sabar, Shalom. 1:xxv, 540 Sadgrove, Joanna. 2:545 Saebø, Magne. 1:xxv Sailhammer, John H. 1:xxv, 47 Sakenfeld, Katherine Doob. 1:346 Sallaberger, Walther. 2:4 Salonen, Armas. 2:93 Salvá, Miguel. 2:439 Sanders, Seth. 2:260 Santing, Catrien. 2:349 Santoro, Anthony. 2:xxi Santurri, Edmund N. 2:459 Sapir-Hen, Lidar. 2:83 Saposnik, Arieh. 2:xxi Sasson, Jack M. 2:138 Sassoon, Isaac. 2:468 Satlow, Michael L. 1:119 Savishinsky, Neil J. 1:83 Sawyer, John F. A. 1:xxv, 4; 2:139 Schabas, W. 2:xxi Schaefer, Donovan O. 2:31 Schäfer, Peter. 1:32; 2:56 Schams, Christine. 1:111 Schaper, Joachim. 1:xxvi Schart, Aaron. 2:xvi Schearing, Linda S. 2:111 Schechter, Solomon. 2:403 Schenker, Adrian. 1:xxvi, 77, 299; 2:350, 394 Schiffman, Lawrence H. 1:xxvi, 299, 441; 2:111 Schleicher, Marianne. 1:540 Schmid, Konrad. 1:xvi, xxvi; 2:xvii, 40 Schmidt, Brian B. 2:511 Schmidt, Carl. 1:243 Schmitt, Rainer. 1:177 Schmitt, Rüdiger. 2:139 Schniedewind, William M. 1:xxvi Schofield, Allison. 1:128, 534 Schorch, Stefan. 2:xix Schott, Siegfried. 2:42 Schottroff, W. 1:252 Schüle, Andreas. 2:449 Schwartz, Baruch J. 1:xvi, xxvi; 2:xviii, 350, 449

570

Author Index of Bibliographies and Footnotes

Schwartz, Joshua. 2:xviii, 56 Schwartz, Seth. 1:75 Scofield, C. I. 1:xxvi Scult, Allen. 1:xxiv Scurlock, Jo Ann. 2:139, 394 Seebass, Horst. 2:319 Seidl, Theodor. 2:139, 260 Segal, Alan F. 2:67 Segel, Peretz. 1:508 Sekuras, Michael Leo. 2:464 Sered, Susan Starr. 2:228 Serpico, Margaret. 1:239, 419 Shapiro, Gerald. 2:xvii Sharpe, R. 1:533 Shea, William H. 1:12 Shectman, Sarah. 1:xxvi, 2:xix Sheehan, Michael. 2:394 Sherman, Nosson. 1:320 Sherwood, Yvonne. 1:65; 2:xxi Shinall, Myrick C. 2:139 Shinan, A. 1:508 Shoham-Steiner, Ephraim. 2:139 Siker, Jeffrey S. 2:xxii, 260 Simkovich, Malka Z. 2:511 Simmons, Frederick V. 2:459 Simon, Uriel. 1:77 Simoons, Frederick J. 2:56 Simpkins, Ronald A. 2:xvii Singer, Itamar. 1:xxvi Skarpelos, Andreas. 1:282 Sklar, Jay. 1:xxvi; 2:xix Skousen, Royal. 1:460 Smalley, Beryl. 1:77 Smith, Christopher R. 1:12 Smith, Jonathan Z. 1:xxvii, 58, 458 Smith, Mark S. 1:xxvii Smith, Ralph L. 1:240 Smith, William Robertson. 1:xxvii Snaith, Norman H. 1:xxvii, 195 Snoek, Godefridus J. 1:541 Sokol, Michelle. 2:407 Soltes, Ori Z. 2:511 Sommer, Benjamin D. 1:508; 2:367 Sorge, Elga. 2:213 Sorrells, Brian C. 2:459 Speiser, E. A. 1:310, 368; 2:xix Spencer, John. 1:124 Spiciarich, Abra. 2:xv, 55 Spivak, Gayatri. 2:xxvii Sprinkle, Preston M. 2:394

Spronk, Klaas. 1:xi; 2:502 Staal, Fritz. 1:58 Stackert, Jeffrey. 1:xxvii, 264; 2:xv, xviii, xix Stanley, Keith. 1:15 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. 2:229 Stark, Rodney. 2:xxii Staubli, Thomas. 1:xxvii, 159; 2:139, 394 Stavrakopoulou, Francesca. 2:499, 530 Stemberger, Günter. 2:268 Stephens, Gary Allen. 2:448 Stern, Chaim. 2:456 Stern, David. 1:23, 428 Stevens, Paul. 2:16, 394 Stewart, David Tabb. 2:181, 394, 432, 449 Stiebert, Johanna. 2:394 Stökl Ben Ezra, Daniel. 1:298; 2:259, 260 Stone, Ken. 2:xix Stout, Jeffrey. 1:46 Stowers, Stanley K. 1:64, 299 Strawn, Brent A. 2:xviii, 437 Strenski, Ivan. 1:xxvii Strobel, August. 2:275 Strudwick, Nigel C. 1:xxvii Strugnell, John. 1:xiii Stuart, John. 2:468 Sugirtharajah, R. S. 1:83 Sukenik, E. L. 1:xiii Sundkler, Bengt. 1:84 Surowitz, Hilit. 1:320 Suttampillai, A. N. 2:441 Svebakken, Hans. 2:63 Swartz, Michael D. 1:xxvii, 32, 75, 441, 460, 463; 2:260 Swindell, Anthony. 2:448 Synek, Eva M. 2:111 Taggar-Cohen, Ada. 2:xvi Talmon, S. 1:202 Tambiah, Stanley J. 1:58 Tanner, Norman P. 2:488 Tawil, Hayim. 2:260 Taylor, Scott K. 2:542 Tcherikover, Victor. 1:128, 519 Terragon, J.-M. de. 1:137 Thalmann, W. G. 1:15 Thernstrom, Melanie. 2:545

Author Index of Bibliographies and Footnotes Thiessen, Matthew. 2:111 Thomas, David. 2:394 Thomas, Marcel. 1:247 Thompson, E. P. 2:472 Thompson, Trevor W. 2:139 Thureau-Dangin, F. 1:xxvii Ticak, Marko. 2:xxvii Tieszen, Charles. 2:448 Tigay, Jeffrey H. 2:xix Tishby, Isaiah. 1:243 Tiwald, Markus. 2:297 Toeg, A. 1:342 Tollefsen, Heinrich. 2:448 Tomson, Peter J. 2:4 Tooman, William A. 2:213 Toorn, Karel van der. 1:xxviii Torres-Saillant, Silvio. 2:440 Tosato, Angelo. 2:395 Touati, Francois-Olivier. 2:139 Tov, Emanuel. 1:23 Töyräänvuori, Joanna. 2:433 Trachtenberg, Joshua. 1:328 Trampedach, K. 2:286 Trevaskis, Leigh M. 1:xxviii, 333; 2:xvii, xix Tsedaka, Benyamin. 1:129, 534 Tsiros, Georgios. 1:282 Tsukimoto, Akio. 2:150 Turner, Victor. 1:xxviii Tylor, Edward B. 1:xxviii Ubl, Karl. 2:404 Ulrich, Eugene. 1:xiii, xxviii, 10, 74; 2:370 Unwin, Bruce. 2:407 Urban, David V. 2:511 Utzschneider, Helmut. 1:xxviii, 299 Valentine, Gill. 2:545 Van Dam, Cornelis. 1:441 Van De Mieroop, Marc. 1:xxviii Vanderbeck, Robert M. 2:545 VanderKam, James C. 1:xxviii, 128, 534; 2:xix, 112 Van der Toorn, Karel. 2:4, 112 Van Gennep, Arnold. 1:xxviii Vardi, Liana. 2:472 Vaughn, Andrew G. 1:499 Vaux, Roland de. 1:xxviii Vermes, Geza. 1:128

571

Vermeylen, Jacques. 2:264 Vervenne, M. 2:350 Vickers, Jason E. 2:449 Volokhine, Youri. 2:56 Vriezen, T. C. 1:299 Wagner, Andreas. 2:367 Wagner, Volker. 2:299 Walfish, Barry Dov. 1:75; 2:448 Walkenhorst, K. H. 1:443 Walls, Andrew Finlay. 1:83 Walsh, Jerome T. 2:432 Waltke, Bruce K. 1:xxviii Ward, Kevin. 2:545 Warning, Wilfried. 1:xxviii; 2:56 Warrior, Robert. 2:xxii Wasserfall, Rahel R. 2:213 Waterworth, J. 1:327 Watson, Alan. 1:77 Watts, James W. 1:xxviii-xix, 33, 137, 141, 152, 159, 299; 2:xvii, xix-xx Watts, John D. W. 1:258, 396. Watts, Sheldon. 2:139 Weber, Ines. 2:393 Wegner, Judith Romney. 1:xxix; 2:213 Weinfeld, Moshe. 1:xxix, 229; 2:xx, 531 Weissler, Chava. 2:219 Weissman Joselit, Jenna. 2:65 Weitzman, Steven. 1:xxix Welch, John W. 1:83 Wellhausen, Julius. 1:xxix Wells, Bruce. 1:299; 2:xvii, 395 Wenham, Gordon J. 1:xxix; 2:213 Werman, Cana. 2:350 Wernberg-Møller, P. 1:xiii Werpehowski, William. 2:459 Werrett, Ian. 2:4 Westbrook, Raymond. 1:161; 2:xx, 263, 328 Westenholz, Joan Goodnick. 1:xxix; 2:301 Westermarck, Edward. 2:408 Wevers, John William. 1:xxix Wheeler, Brannon. 2:65 White, H. A. 1:xvi White, Raymond. 1:419 Whitekettle, Richard. 2:56-57, 111, 120, 213, 350 Whybray, R. N. 1:xxix

572

Author Index of Bibliographies and Footnotes

Wiebracht, Ben. 2:405 Wiley, Henrietta L. 2:xx Wilhelm, Gernot. 1:xviii; 2:11, 197, 259 Wilkens, David E. 2:440 Willems, Harco. 2:296 Williams, John. 1:37 Wilson, Robert R. 1:128; 2:291 Wisch, Rebecca F. 2:436 Wiseman, Donald J. 2:xix Wogaman, J. Philip. 2:xxii Wöhrle, Jakob. 2:xv Wolf, Arthur P. 2:408 Woolf, Jeffrey Robert. 2:213 Wright, Christopher J. H. 2:xx Wright, David P. 1:xxix, 58, 159; 2:xviii, 4, 57, 260 Wright, Jacob L. 1:114 Wright, John W. 2:287 Würthwein, Ernst. 2:xxii Wyatt, N. 1:xxx Xella, P.

2:530

Yadin, Yigael. 1:xiii, xxx Yahalom, Joseph. 1:32, 460 Yarchin, William. 1:39 Yoo, Yohan. 1:xxx; 2:xx Young, Frances. 1:xxx Young, Ian. 1:xxx Young, Robert L. 2:526 Yuval, Israel J. 1:299 Zahn, Molly M. 1:160 Zank, Michael. 1:299; 2:259 Zatelli, Ida. 2:260 Zenger, Erich. 1:12, 21, 40; 2:354 Zertal, Adam. 2:78 Zevit, Ziony. 1:xxx, 299 Zimmerman, Johannes. 1:331 Ziolkowski, Eric. 2:139 Ziskind, Jonathan R. 2:395 Zsengellér, József. 2:260 Zuckerman, Bruce. 1:185, 499 Zwickel, W. 1:xxx Zyl, D. C. van. 1:83