Browsing by Subject "Leviticus"

Sacrifice often connotes death or some form of lack within popular discourse. The association of sacrifice with death is assumed in some strains of the Christian tradition that employ sacrifice within a penal substitutionary account of the atonement. In this framework, sacrifice is understood as death for the purposes of punishment. This dissertation challenges the identification of sacrifice with death. It presents a reinterpretation of sacrifice through a canonical and literary reading of Old and New Testament texts. Sacrificial practice displayed in Leviticus and Hebrews suggests that sacrifice is oriented at life rather than at death. Specifically, sacrifice in Leviticus aims toward a reinstatement of the good order of creation displayed in Genesis 1. The telos of the Levitical cult is humanity’s redemption and creation’s restoration. Both are achieved on the Day of Atonement described in Leviticus 16 as a Sabbath. Hebrews expands upon the sacrificial logic of Leviticus in presenting Christ’s resurrection as the perfection of the cult. Christ’s sacrifice is his resurrected body, not his death. Christians are called to participate in Christ’s sacrifice, and discipleship assumes a form that challenges society’s deathly sacrifices.

The life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus are not often read against the backdrop of the sacrificial system of Leviticus, despite the fact that the Letter to the Hebrews and other New Testament texts do exactly this. Until recently, Hebrew Bible scholars had little insight into the function of many of the sacrifices of Leviticus. However, over the last thirty years, Jacob Milgrom has articulated the purgative function of the purification offering of Leviticus, the principal sacrifice offered for wrongdoing. The blood of the purification offering, which contains the animal's ,nefesh, best understood as the animating force of the animal, acts as a ritual cleanser. Milgrom has insisted that the purification offering only cleanses the sanctuary, never the offerer. This conclusion likely has kept many New Testament scholars from seeing the impact this sacrifice had on various New Testament authors. Thus although Milgrom's work has had a profound impact on Hebrew Bible scholarship, it has had little effect on New Testament scholarship on the sacrifice of Jesus.

Using source criticism and a close reading of the relevant Hebrew Bible texts and New Testament texts, this study argues that the purification offering of Leviticus can purge the offerer, as well as the sanctuary. Moreover, the logic of the purification offering of Leviticus informs many New Testament texts on the sacrificial offering of Jesus. Leviticus demonstrates that there is a relationship between the Israelites and the sanctuary. The wrongdoings and impurites of the Israelites can stain the sanctuary and sacrificial procedures done in and to the sanctuary can purge the Israelites. The purgation of the offerer takes place in two stages. In the first stage, described in Lev 4:1-5:13, the offerer moves from being guilt-laden to being forgiven. In the second stage, outlined in Lev 16, the sanctuary is purged of the wrongdoings and impurities of the Israelites. The Israelites shift from being forgiven to being declared pure. The Israelites cannot be pure until the sanctuary is purged and reconsecrated.

The Letter to the Hebrews, along with other New Testament texts, articulates the same process and results for the sacrificial offering of Jesus. The emphasis in Hebrews and elsewhere in the New Testament is on the power (typically the cleansing power) of Jesus' blood. Jesus' death is necessary but insufficient. Hebrews clearly asserts that it was through the offering of Jesus' blood in the heavenly sanctuary that the heavenly things were cleansed, and more importantly, that believers were cleansed. Hebrews also articulates a two-stage process for the transformation of believers. In the first stage, believers are cleansed by Jesus' sacrificial offering in heaven. However, believers anticipate a final rest after Jesus' return when their flesh will be transformed as Jesus' flesh was after his resurrection. This transformation allows believers to dwell in harmony with and in proximity to God. The logic of the purification offering of Leviticus, then, informs the Letter to the Hebrews and other New Testament texts.

The book of Leviticus literarily portrays an encounter between YHWH and Israel that is mediated through discourse. In keeping with the priestly creation account, the book of Leviticus shows the divine discourse at Sinai to be a world- and people-shaping constitutive force: new forms of life are generated that take shape in the daily rhythms of Israel’s cultic and communal life in the wilderness. Although the divine instructions are not directly addressed to the twenty-first century reader, an unconventional use of literary techniques destabilizes a clear sense of grammatical tense or narrative time so that the reader is included in the discourse mediated through the text. This suggests the intriguing notion that the experience of reading Leviticus, maximally understood as the various stages of reading and study that are involved in the process of interpretation, may be analogous to Israel’s experience of encountering the divine discourse at Sinai. This study thus examines the notion of discourse as a way to open up a new understanding of the kind of text that Leviticus is and how it may communicate in the text-reader relationship.

Although recent scholarship has seen a resurgence of interest in Leviticus, the book’s basic character as discourse has largely been overlooked. Scholarly treatments have overwhelmingly focused on what Leviticus may have “said” in its historical context rather than what it may “say” in the contemporary discourse between text and reader. In conversation with Paul Ricoeur and George Steiner, this study argues that the literary presentation of Leviticus asks us to approach the text as a potential conversation partner. It articulates a notion of interpretation as a process of coming to recognize the life-possibilities on offer in the vision of life that a text portrays. This construal of the task and aim of interpretation enables the discourse of Leviticus to generate new ways of thinking and being for contemporary reading communities, as demonstrated through three exegetical probes that seek to connect the function of speech in the priestly writers’ portrayal of life in the wilderness community to the ways that speech is enacted in contemporary discourse. The study concludes that the vision of life that the priestly writers project in the book of Leviticus opens up a number of promising directions of thought that can generate new life-possibilities in and for contemporary reading communities.

The book of Leviticus literarily portrays an encounter between YHWH and Israel that is mediated through discourse. In keeping with the priestly creation account, the book of Leviticus shows the divine discourse at Sinai to be a world- and people-shaping constitutive force: new forms of life are generated that take shape in the daily rhythms of Israel’s cultic and communal life in the wilderness. Although the divine instructions are not directly addressed to the twenty-first century reader, an unconventional use of literary techniques destabilizes a clear sense of grammatical tense or narrative time so that the reader is included in the discourse mediated through the text. This suggests the intriguing notion that the experience of reading Leviticus, maximally understood as the various stages of reading and study that are involved in the process of interpretation, may be analogous to Israel’s experience of encountering the divine discourse at Sinai. This study thus examines the notion of discourse as a way to open up a new understanding of the kind of text that Leviticus is and how it may communicate in the text-reader relationship.

Although recent scholarship has seen a resurgence of interest in Leviticus, the book’s basic character as discourse has largely been overlooked. Scholarly treatments have overwhelmingly focused on what Leviticus may have “said” in its historical context rather than what it may “say” in the contemporary discourse between text and reader. In conversation with Paul Ricoeur and George Steiner, this study argues that the literary presentation of Leviticus asks us to approach the text as a potential conversation partner. It articulates a notion of interpretation as a process of coming to recognize the life-possibilities on offer in the vision of life that a text portrays. This construal of the task and aim of interpretation enables the discourse of Leviticus to generate new ways of thinking and being for contemporary reading communities, as demonstrated through three exegetical probes that seek to connect the function of speech in the priestly writers’ portrayal of life in the wilderness community to the ways that speech is enacted in contemporary discourse. The study concludes that the vision of life that the priestly writers project in the book of Leviticus opens up a number of promising directions of thought that can generate new life-possibilities in and for contemporary reading communities.