LEVITY IN LEVITICUS

All citations in text below are to: The Hebrew Bible, vol. 1, The Five Books of Moses, Torah, A Translation with Commentary, by Robert Alter, WW Norton & Co., 2019

Solid & foursquare in the midst of the first five books of the Old Testament, squats Leviticus, the shortest among them, a feature to be thankful for. According to Professor Robert Alter, whose translation from the Hebrew is cited in what follows, Leviticus is legalistic in character, delivering religious law with “careful specification and dry precision,” devoid of any trace of “rhetorical flair.” That it does so in treating subjects as perennially controversial as sex, incest, adultery, nudity, fashion, diet, & slavery is nothing short of miraculous. In large part, this is achieved through tone of voice, which is consistently one of absolute prohibition, lacking any trace of irony or equivocation. Consequently, whatever humor exists in the text is inadvertent, never intentional. Whether this is related to the heavy emphasis on the sacrifice & consumption of herbivores, primarily bulls, rams, & billy goats, is a subject that will not be touched upon here. Though it must be noted that the exceptional emphasis on burnt offerings and the sprinkling of blood as forms of divine communion tends to stress that nothing is holier than a temple barbecue; in textual terms: smoke from the altar is as a fragrant odor to the LORD. In other words, vegans & vegetarians need not apply. But I digress.

Insulation of the sacred from the profane is of paramount concern. Fire, smoke, & bloodshed are the means to accomplish that end, also the immersion in water (baptism) & the application of olive oil (anointment). Above all, there is the injunction to curb one’s appetites. For example, one may dine only on beasts that have split hooves & that bring up the cud, which excludes camels, hares, pigs, & rock badgers, among others (Lev. 11:1-6). Why exactly is not specified other than to declare that they are “unclean,” not just to taste but to touch (Lev. 11:8). Which means no football games, much less ribs & pork sausage at pre-game tailgate parties.

Indeed, what is unclean can often seem arbitrary. For example, a skin blemish, “a white shiny spot,” as it is referred to in the text (Lev. 13:1-4), if taken note of by a priest, requires seven days of confinement at a minimum. Likewise, for any man who has a “flux from his member” (Lev. 15:1-5). Pity the male teenager who suffers from acne & frequent nocturnal emissions. And the remedy? “And on the eighth day he shall take him two turtledoves or two young pigeons and come before the LORD at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting and give them to the priest. And the priest shall do them, one an offense offering and one a burnt offering, and the priest shall atone for him before the LORD for his flux” (Lev. 15:14-16). Once a male harrows the trials of youth & puberty to reach his majority, other prohibitions lie in wait. Namely, he must neither “round off the edge-growth of” his head “nor ruin the edge of” his beard (Lev. 19:27-28). Forget cleanliness; it’s hairiness that is next to godliness. Furthermore, in that hirsute condition he must not don a garment of different kinds of thread” (Lev. 19:19-20). Which means no nylon-spandex bicycle pants, no imported cotton-polyester outfits. In other words, to hairiness you can add being unfashionable as a requirement for attainment to a state of grace. And there’s no escape clause for public nudity, either. Consult Lev. 18:1-19 for a long list of prohibitions on this item. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

As could be expected, sex opens a Pandora’s Box of further prohibitions. As if the seventh commandment (i.e., “You shall not commit adultery, “ Ex. 20:14) weren’t explicit enough already, the point is driven home in graphic detail: “You shall not put your member into your fellow man’s wife to spill seed, to be defiled through her,” (Lev. 18:20). And in the next sentence comes perhaps the most cited passage of all: “And with a male you shall not lie as one lies with a woman” (Lev. 18:22), which is repeated in more explicit detail shortly thereafter: “And a man who lies with a male as one lies with a woman, the two of them have done an abhorrent thing. They are doomed to die. Their blood guilt is upon them” (Lev. 20:13). In an exegetical footnote, Professor Alter states that the language in the original “suggests that it is a ban on anal intercourse and intercrural intercourse (the latter often practiced by the Greeks). Other forms of homosexual activity do not seem of urgent concern.” Among those other forms is lesbianism, which the professor adds, is nowhere mentioned as a reason for condemnation despite being, as he puts it, “known in the ancient Near East.” One would imagine so, even if one didn’t have an intimate acquaintance with Sappho (c. 620-c. 565 BCE) & her professions of love addressed to those of the female sex. For the sake of argument, one could draw the conclusion, therefore, that in the case of lesbianism, generally, & oral sex, more specifically, silence gives consent.

However that may be, it is obvious from chapters 21 & 25 that whoever penned Leviticus could not have been known for compassion. The first, twenty-one, states that no one with defect “may bring forward the fire offerings of the LORD.” Among the excluded are the following: the blind, the lame, the disfigured or malformed, the hunchback, the midget, anyone with a broken leg or arm, anyone with a cataract in his eye or a scab or a skin flake or a crushed testicle. In other words, those very congregants most in need of communion with the divine are banished & denied comfort. The second, twenty-five, states “And your male slave & your slave girl whom you have from the nations that are around you—from them you may buy a male slave or a slave girl.” This may come as news to our neighbors in Canada & Mexico, but let them be forewarned: their enslavement has Biblical sanction.

Ultimately, with the to-do & the to-don’t lists drawn up into neat contrasting columns, the former for those headed into celestial sunlight, the latter for those headed into bleak outer darkness, Leviticus drones to its well-deserved conclusion. But it does so by making a highly dubious claim to vindication—namely, to The Ten Commandments. The final words are “These are the commands that the LORD charged Moses for the Israelites on Mount Sinai” (Lev. 27:34). This claim calls for a double-take. Nowhere in The Ten Commandments are we exposed to the tedious detail contained in Leviticus. If The Ten Commandments constitutes a contract, then Leviticus constitutes the fine print. And, in Professor Alter’s translation, it’s the fine print writ large: almost one hundred pages of single-spaced type annotated in meticulous detail. Not only that, of course, for Leviticus issues edicts well beyond the scope of the Commandments, all ten of which are succinct, punchy, & forthright (Ex. 20:1-17). Moreover, by not being structured as an appendix to a contract, Leviticus, set apart from chapter twenty of Exodus as it is, clearly succeeds in emulating one of the worst practices of the legal profession, which could be referred to as “hide in plain sight.” Whoever wrote Leviticus may well have sold insurance policies on the side.

Because as many as twenty-seven centuries may set us apart from those who composed the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, of which Leviticus is an essential part, the question of relevance may need to be raised. Though it is not a question that everyone will raise. Those among us who feel that close scriptural study better acquaints them with the word of God, its mysteries to unfold, will spy out relevance in every chapter and verse, indeed, in every comma, period, & semi-colon. Without a doubt, they would counter that God’s word is forever relevant, whatever the topic, and that on must not mince those words. If this leads to real or virtual neighborhood stoning and immolation, so be it, they would assert. After all, purity does have its privileges.