How long, O Lord, will you look on and do nothing? Rescue me from their fierce attacks. Protect my life from these lions! Then I will thank you in front of the great assembly. I will praise you before all the people. -- Psalm 35:17-18
Reference links:Here is what Wikipedia has to say about Leviticus:
Leviticus contains laws and priestly rituals, but in a wider sense is about the working out of God's covenant with Israel set out in Genesis and Exodus – what is seen in the Torah as the consequences of entering into a special relationship with God (specifically, Yahweh). These consequences are set out in terms of community relationships and behaviour.It also notes that, like the other books of the Torah, tradition ascribes authorship to Moses but modern scholarship attributes the book to an unknown priest or priests. Overall, Leviticus defines what sets the Israelites apart as the people of God. This puts it in a peculiar relationship with Christian belief. Christians consider some of the laws in Leviticus to be explicitly cancelled by Jesus, some implicitly cancelled, and some to still be valid. Decisions about which laws belong in the second and third categories vary widely. Oddly enough, in my observation, this variation seems to split along contentious contemporary issues.
The end of Exodus described the completion of the Tabernacle. The framing for Leviticus is that God continues to talk to Moses from the Tabernacle. He gives Moses more instructions about God's covenant with Israel.
Today's reading focuses on various types of offerings. Animals given for burnt offering must be males without defect and prepared properly. The smell of their burning pleases the Lord.
_on_branch.jpg)
The priest will take the bird to the altar, wring off its head, and burn it on the altar. But first he must drain its blood against the side of the altar. The priest must also remove the crop and the feathers and throw them in the ashes on the east side of the altar. Then, grasping the bird by its wings, the priest will tear the bird open, but without tearing it apart.Suppose you were to make a movie of a re-enactment of this scene. The priest, spattered with the blood of sacrificial animals, wrings the neck of a turtledove and tears it open, all with his bear hands. He then burns it, exclaiming upon how the scent is pleasing to his God. I wonder if most Christians would believe you if you told them this was part of their religious heritage.
God also accepts grain offerings. Whether raw, baked, or fried, God likes grain offerings to be presented with olive oil but no yeast or honey. The prohibition against yeast in offerings I can understand as hearkening back to the exodus from Egypt, but why no honey?
An animal sacrificed as a burnt offering has its whole body burned. An animal presented as a peace offering may be male or female, but still must have no defects. The priests only burn part of the animal on the altar. All animal sacrifices involve lots of spattering of blood on the altar. It was definitely not a sanitary affair.
Also, the Israelites are not allowed to eat any fat or blood. Is anyone reading knowledgeable enough about Jewish dietary law to provide more enlightenment about the prohibition against eating fat? Does it apply only to large, separable chunks of fat? Does it also apply to marbled fat?
New Testament
It is interesting to compare stories across the gospels. In Matthew, the story of Jesus healing the leper was short (Matthew 8:1-4):
Large crowds followed Jesus as he came down the mountainside. Suddenly, a man with leprosy approached him and knelt before him. “Lord,” the man said, “if you are willing, you can heal me and make me clean.”
In Mark, we get all that, but additionally learn that Jesus sternly warned the man not to tell and that the man went and told people anyway. This caused people to follow Jesus all over,Jesus reached out and touched him. “I am willing,” he said. “Be healed!” And instantly the leprosy disappeared. Then Jesus said to him, “Don’t tell anyone about this. Instead, go to the priest and let him examine you. Take along the offering required in the law of Moses for those who have been healed of leprosy. This will be a public testimony that you have been cleansed.”
and he couldn't publicly enter a town anywhere. He had to stay out in the secluded places, but people from everywhere kept coming to him.We also get more details about the paralyzed man Jesus healed in Matthew 9:2-8. Jesus was being mobbed by a crowd at a home he was visiting. Some clever folks wanted to get a paralyzed man to him, so they lowered the man on a mat through a hole in the ceiling. That makes for a much better story.
Psalms and Proverbs
Apparently, Folly is also a woman. A brash woman.
Blood is definitely forbidden, to the point that you have to drain all the blood from an animal when you slaughter it in order to make it kosher. [1] The fat thing gets trickier. If you look at the Hebrew verse, the word used is חֵלֶב ("chelev"). However, the usual word for fat is שׁוּמָן ("shooman"). So, they're not talking about the fat that we usually think of. A more authoritative source than I says that there are multiple kinds of fats in an animal, and only one of them is forbidden.
ReplyDelete[1] I'm not sure if the part about draining all the blood is actually in the Bible, but it's definitely in the Talmud. Talmudic law was created as a way to "build a fence" around the Torah, so that even if you accidentally break Talmudic law you're still in the clear when it comes to the real commandments. The standard example of this is not eating milk and meat together: this was decreed in the Talmud to protect against accidentally cooking a kid in its mother's milk (which is forbidden in the Torah itself). The logic was that if it's late at night and you go to the meat safe to get some chicken to eat with your milk, you might accidentally grab veal instead of chicken because electricity hasn't been discovered yet and you can't see what you're doing. So, the Talmud says it's better to forbid all mixing of milk and meat than to run this risk (and these days it's tradition, so even though there are technological fixes to avoid the problem entirely, you can't change the laws back).
One of the things that led me to atheism was that the more I learned about Judaism, the less sense any of it made.
In reference to your comment "Christians consider some of the laws in Leviticus to be explicitly cancelled by Jesus, some implicitly cancelled, and some to still be valid," Jesus commented on this back in Matthew 5:17 when he said "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them." Christians are free from the law as it pertains to our relation to God.
ReplyDeleteThis does not imply that a life of licentiousness is allowed. Paul rejects a life of sin for a life of grace (Romans 5).